Chapter 95
Whatever the field, wouldn't it be the same? Serialized novelists, too, have forbidden demonic arts of their own.
Of course, that varied depending on the era and when you were serializing.
For instance.
In modern web novels, the cheat code called ‘regression, possession, and reincarnation’ has the useful power to make stories more accessible to readers, since it lets them view the world from a modern person's perspective.
No matter how rotten the personality of a female character you create, or how much of a walking nuisance everything she does is.
The moment you prepend the magical words ‘TS loli,’ the natural response is ‘Now that's damn hot.’
That's simply how the world works.
But Kim Yul did not rename Napoleon ‘Napoleona’ and genderbend him merely because he was short.
However.
He had arranged the first half of the novel with truly vicious intent.
First, in the prologue, he showed the protagonist's memories.
Then, across Episodes 1 and 2, after being exiled to Elba, escaping, and going on to—
- Soldiers! Your emperor is here! If any of you wish to shoot me, here is my chest, so shoot!
- Long live His Majesty the Emperor!
He made his presence powerfully known to the French people suffering under foreign pressure through a violent move that showed them he was their true emperor.
But that was all.
After that, he launched into an especially malicious development, transitioning into the childhood memories of a sleeping Napoleon.
It was much like the so-called ‘regret-misery-obsession’ genre, where a powerful development is thrown out at the beginning and the rest is left to work itself out somehow.
An emperor who had voluntarily relinquished power and cast himself as an exile.
And France rapidly collapsing, while its people, unable to accept their situation, were consumed by regret, misery, and obsession.
At the end, he had dramatically portrayed Napoleon's return, almost like a hero.
In other words.
It was an act of giving readers hope: ‘What if another insanely awesome scene appears as I keep reading?’
Even though Napoleon had occasionally appeared in the author's previous work, ‘Beethoven,’ the details of his story had never been properly described.
People who had become fixated on the story's connection to the previous work.
People who had sampled the opening and then given up in disgust.
They began to howl.
Still, there was one fortunate point.
Although author Ulysses had always tended to finish his novels within a fairly short number of chapters and occasionally slammed down a misery-stew ending, he had always brought them to a clean conclusion.
And Kim Yul, the ‘Life-Translator,’ had nothing to do with one of the most representative problems that caused the four-drone rush cliché of regret-misery-obsession stories to collapse: the absence of a middle act.
Therefore.
The novel ‘Napoleon’ was able to seize the readers' attention with a bang from the very beginning.
* * *
Afterward, in a situation where my life didn't seem to be in much danger, I checked over the skills I possessed.
“Oh my? You've gotten rather strong, haven't you? Is it thanks to becoming a hero? I suppose the holy sword has an effect like that!”
It was rather unfortunate, but Hector was no match for the saintess.
Rather, it seemed my odds of winning would be a little better if I designated him as the target of the skill and fought him head-on before summoning the Stand.
But this wasn't Hector's fault.
It was simply because Rozelyn was an utterly abnormal monster.
“Graaagh!”
“Easy.”
It was more than enough to beat down the third son of Duke Vertus, whose name I couldn't remember—the third one or whatever—when he came swaggering over to challenge me again after apparently feeling he hadn't gotten hit properly with the bat last time.
And so, as a hero, I properly disciplined someone who wasn't a hero.
As for Cicero and Cao Zhi.
Aside from gaining literary talent enough to make my rhetoric majestic, extraordinary, and exceptional, I didn't notice any particular difference.
“I'm just Kim Yul as usual. Ah, my vocabulary does seem a little more erudite.”
“Ahem.”
Strange.
Cicero was supposed to be a master of running his mouth, wasn't he?
That was why these civil-official-type skills weren't suitable for Oversoul purposes either. In fact, Cao Zhi deserved the top spot on the list of skills I least wanted to summon.
Throwing away an invincible evasion technique to put a motor on my tongue? What possible use could that have?
With the savage feeling that Hercules's soul, ground up in a blender, was screaming, I summoned the soul of Mr. Lemes of the He clan, a fellow native.
“Aah! Gently……!”
“How did your legs end up like this?”
“Ahk, ugh.”
As the price for enjoying enough speed to slap the fastest racer in the Joseon Peninsula, the swiftest monarch, Yi Yeon, back and forth, I had to suffer muscle pain in my lower body for two days.
If not for the cutting-edge products Mentholatum and Historié's massages, I might have been bedridden for a week rather than merely two days.
Hercules was a pity, but Pygmalion wasn't.
My best choice was still our Tin Can.
.
.
.
On the other hand, the elf was so lacking in culture that I wondered whether she was really my publisher's president and editor. Hmm.
“Why does it already look like you're about to graduate from the academy, desuwa? With it this popular, I could easily write a hundred chapters in the academy arc, sawayo.”
“How could I write a hundred chapters about studying at a military academy?”
“Napoleon's success is already a foregone conclusion, isn't it? So naturally, we should throw in lots and lots of nasty villains to bully him, include some proper comeuppance, and have evil pirates invade during midterms!”
An invasion by evil pirates, huh.
If it had been those savage English bastards—the most powerful axis of evil in Earth's history—it would have been entirely possible, but unfortunately, that would have been a historical inaccuracy.
The worst and most evil mastermind, England, was the ultimate boss incarnate, boasting enough tenacity to withstand Napoleon's onslaught and later even the mustached grand dictator's national transmutation circle.
To deal with them, I would have to bring out the ultimate weapon, Rosenbaumism, but unfortunately, that world line was rather different from the real world I wanted to portray.
So, as payment for making such an impertinent suggestion, I took advantage of the gap in the elf's earplugs and slid them off.
“Agyagyagyagyak!”
And I made her pay the price she deserved.
As though she had never imagined that I would remove her earplugs and pull on her ears, Chloe's voice sounded a little stranger than usual today.
Something about it.
It almost made me wonder if she was enjoying it a little.
“Come to think of it, why are you wearing earplugs indoors?”
“Uut, ut…… It’s because Kim Yul keeps pulling on themmm……!”
“What futile resistance, elf.”
But where else could I pull, if not her ears?
Grabbing her by the hair would be too barbaric.
Pulling her cheeks would feel too much like physical affection.
Wasn't it simply the sin of being born with handles as a racial trait?
“What the elf……! What an elvenophobic statement……!”
Chloe once again tried to brand me a speciesist, but my conscience was clear.
Why would I discriminate against good elves?
Because this one was a thoroughly wicked elf who had some sort of communication with the elves protesting outside from time to time.
In fact, whenever I was dragged to social gatherings more or less by force.
- A new hero-darong! So cool-darong!
- Why do you use dayo speech-dayo? It's the traditional dialect of the northern elves-dayo!
I could run into deranged elves who went around saying darong and dayo, rather than using the ladylike desuwa and sawayo speech.
What kind of elven dialect was that?
Who made this rootless Fantasy Land?
If I ever got the chance to meet whoever was supposed to be the goddess, I definitely wanted to ask her.
No matter how I thought about it.
This world was strange.
* * *
Kim Yul was qualified to be a hero simply by not adopting Chloe's short-sighted monetization technique.
At the moment when the most delicious bait seemed sure to appear—the scene where Napoleon would reclaim the throne after his downfall—readers had their bowl snatched away and were furious at first.
But that lasted only a moment.
Napoleon began to stand out at the military preparatory academy (which the readers' minds automatically converted into a Hero Academy).
And when the fast-paced story showed him completing the entire three-year curriculum and graduating in a single year, then seizing the rank of second lieutenant at the age of sixteen, the readers gradually began to smile with satisfaction.
And then.
In truth, this was one of the parts Kim Yul least wanted to cover, but perhaps one of the sections readers who had come over from the previous work were most curious about.
The French Revolution arrived swiftly.
## ====== ##
“Bonaparte!”
The door burst open, and Alexandre des Mazis entered.
Napoleon closed the work of Rousseau he had been reading moments ago and stared at him with nothing more than a dry gaze.
“Something tremendous has happened in Paris!”
Napoleon's eyes narrowed.
For several days, rumors had been circulating that the atmosphere in Paris was ominous.
Prices were running wild like a horse without reins.
The Estates-General, which was supposed to gather the will of the people, had finally ended in deadlock, and there was even news that troops were being assembled.
“Has His Majesty the King finally moved the army?”
Alexandre swallowed dryly.
“It's the opposite. It's a riot—the citizens of Paris have stormed the Bastille!”
“The Bastille……? But that's a fortress. What of Commander de Launay? Didn't he bombard them and sweep them away?”
“It fell. De Launay's head is being paraded through the streets of Paris on the end of a spear……!”
A heavy silence filled the room.
Napoleon slowly rose from his seat and approached the window.
The parade ground was still peaceful, but just as Alexandre had reported, that peace was merely a momentary illusion.
Even if it was nothing more than a riot by a disorganized rabble.
The mob had finally dragged down the authority of their beloved king, Louis XVI, flung it onto the ground, and trampled it beneath their boots.
Then.
Would the enraged monarch sweep away the mob in a single stroke?
Or would the furious roar of the crowd drag down the monarch?
“Bonaparte, what are you thinking about?”
As Napoleon pondered.
“The monarchy is going to end.”
“Watch your tongue! If anyone hears you……!”
“I'm stating a fact. Can a monarch who failed to protect even one fortress in his own capital, and allowed his commander's head to end up on a spear, be called a monarch?”
Alexandre's face turned ashen, but Napoleon paid him no mind as he stared down at the map on the desk.
A crack was forming in the vast kingdom.
The old era, the old world, was collapsing.
And then.
“Prepare yourself, Alexandre. The real war will begin soon.”
War could not be called righteous.
But war could change many things.
And.
For people like himself—low-ranking officers brimming with talent—war would be.
A festival.
## ====== ##
On the day Kim Yul's manuscript was serialized.
A Buster Call from the Second Prince, who still hadn't given up on appointing him as an aide, came through.
Kim Yul stood up to that outrage reminiscent of the Ancien Régime with righteous fury and—
Forged Cicero, Cao Zhi, and Kim Yul's tongues into a trinity.
Unfortunately, the Second Prince couldn't withstand that eloquence.
But the repercussions also spread to an unexpected place.
“An interesting story.”
Although the Emperor had not spoken a single word directly to Kim Yul even during the previous Saintess Boob-Slap live show.
He began paying a little more attention to the question of how ‘the sky in the novel’ would be dragged down to earth and trampled, by subscribing to Novelpia every morning (for free, of course).
It was not particularly welcome attention for Kim Yul.