Chapter 123
#123. Demon Sword Forte (25) - Pina's Legend
“…Haaah. As expected, reading and writing are different in all sorts of ways.”
The library of Celestial Academy.
Because it was used so rarely, the place had effectively become something resembling her private space, and the orange-haired girl let out a quiet sigh.
Several sheets of manuscript paper and pens were scattered across the girl's desk, the results of the ‘work’ she had recently been engrossed in.
The girl quietly approached the window and looked outside.
Since the library was located rather far out on the grounds of Celestial Academy, looking outside from here would normally reveal a vast expanse of sky.
But all she could see now was a wide-open grassland.
Of course, following a literary convention, one could say that both the sky and the grassland were ‘blue,’ but the impression made on someone actually taking in the sight with their own eyes was another matter.
It had been two weeks since the inexplicable mass-sleeping incident at Celestial Academy.
The chaos that had unfolded at the academy during that time could truly be called a complete disaster.
Those who awoke from their sudden sleep were horrified when they saw the traces of destruction left throughout the academy, and were even more terrified by the fact that they had slept like the dead while it was happening.
After all, they had nearly had their lives snuffed out without even knowing why. How could they not be shocked?
The professors and some others who quickly grasped the situation rushed straight to the scene. At the center of the destruction, they found Pina Valestia embracing a broken sword and shedding tears.
Though flustered, they asked Pina what had happened, but she collapsed from the aftereffects of the battle and various kinds of exhaustion, making any proper conversation impossible.
The people grew even more confused, and more than a few of them looked at Pina with suspicion.
【Please calm yourselves, everyone. I will explain everything.】
According to the system—or rather, according to its own explanation—that was how things stood until the ‘Sage's will’ appeared.
The circumstances explained by the Sage were as follows.
The remains of the Demon King that the Sage had sealed during his lifetime had eroded the system over a long period of time.
The moment that erosion exceeded its limit, the Demon King used the system's authority against it to incapacitate the entire academy, then attempted to use its members as sacrifices to achieve a complete resurrection.
However, that scheme did not work on Pina, ‘the descendant of the Hero who defeated the Demon King,’ and thanks to Pina defeating the Demon King's avatar, the system was able to regain control.
However, the harmful effects of the erosion could not be ignored, so the system itself would also disappear before long.
Putting everything else aside, it would first land the island in order to conserve its strength, and so on.
The people's reactions were truly something to behold.
Everything about it was shocking: the fact that the system they had believed was something like the artificial intelligence used in golems was actually the Sage's own will, the fact that that will had been eroded by the Demon King, and the fact that the system would soon disappear.
Some voices praised Pina for saving their lives, calling her the birth of a new Hero; others protested to Celestial Academy about the incident; some prepared for the repercussions that would follow if the academy disappeared, while others asked the living history book known as the Sage all sorts of questions.
Panic, chaos, or a scene straight from hell.
Whatever word one used, it would still have fallen somewhat short of expressing the utter disaster of that time.
“This is how bad it is even with a fake story. If the truth had come out… it would have been horrible.”
As for the orange-haired girl, she was one of the few people who knew that the story revealed by the system was covered in more than a few lies.
【Watch your tongue, child. What do you think will happen if someone hears you? Why are you letting it run so freely?】
Without any warning, the translucent figure of a man appeared before the girl's eyes.
He had a remarkably gruff, eccentric appearance, with a face that radiated a foul personality at merely a cursory glance.
The girl calmly replied to the man whose appearance was so different from the publicly known image of the ‘Sage.’
“I always put up a barrier while I'm working, so there's no need to worry about information leaking out, whether visually or audibly.”
【You are far too proud of those paltry skills of yours.】
“Isn't that still better than some old man who has tremendous skill but can't even control himself properly, leaving trouble for his successors?”
【Good grief. Why did that girl Pina have to make such a foul-tempered woman her friend? If not for that, I would have buried you long ago.】
At the Sage's lament, the girl, Eris, snorted.
“If I hadn't evacuated the people, things would have become even more tangled, wouldn't they? Is this how you repay a favor?”
That was exactly what had happened.
While nearly everyone in the academy had fallen into a deep sleep, Eris had remained fully conscious and roamed throughout the academy.
It was not because she possessed greater skill than the academy's professors, but simply because she had continued to ignore the quests from the time she enrolled until the incident occurred.
The system's suppressive power acted more strongly on those who had benefited greatly from the system, which conversely meant that Eris, who had received almost none of its benefits, was treated as an exception.
【If you intended to ignore them from the start, shouldn't you have stayed out of the academy?】
“I only intended to accept them after analyzing how those ‘rewards’ affected the body. I know that blindly using power given to you by someone else rarely ends well. This incident proved it again, didn't it?”
【Tsk.】
Apparently unable to think of anything with which to refute her, the Sage quietly clicked his tongue.
While everyone else devoted themselves to quests to accumulate points and raise their stats, Eris had focused solely on analyzing the system, and had accomplished something utterly absurd when the incident occurred: she had partially hacked the system and used it to understand what was happening inside the academy.
Of course, it had been the result of various factors overlapping—the struggle for control between the Sage and the Demon King, the fact that most of the Demon King's resources had been concentrated on Pina and her companions, and the fact that Eris had devoted herself to literally ‘peeking’ rather than overextending herself by trying to seize control—but considering that Eris was only fifth-tier, it was an astonishing achievement in itself.
The fact that she had realized the battle was far beyond anything she could participate in and devoted herself to indirect assistance, such as evacuating the unconscious people, was also worthy of high praise.
It was true that the evacuation would have been somewhat difficult with only Divana and Kailen's abilities, so without Eris, it would have been difficult to prevent casualties.
If there had been casualties, the cleanup afterward would have been an even bigger disaster than it was now.
That was the second reason the Sage could not treat Eris carelessly despite grumbling at her this way and that. The first was, of course, that Eris had become close to Pina.
【In any case, a mage must always prepare for contingencies, so I should be even more thorough—ugh.】
Suddenly, the Sage's illusion vanished completely.
With her sharp mind, Eris immediately understood what that meant and slightly loosened the barrier.
Sure enough, the library door flew open, and Pina Valestia rushed inside.
“E-Eris! Hide! Hide!”
At the sight of Pina flusteredly hurrying about with her black ponytail streaming behind her like a tail, Eris merely shrugged in silence.
Immediately afterward, the library door opened again, and several people burst inside.
They swept their sharp eyes around the library, but even though Eris and Pina were right nearby, they failed to perceive them at all.
“They're not here! Search somewhere else!”
After the pursuers left, the library grew quiet once more.
“Phew….”
Eris watched with an exasperated look as Pina slumped over the desk in relief, though her brows twitched faintly as she looked at Pina's chest pressed flat.
It had become an almost daily routine, with only a slight exaggeration: unable to bear the excessive attention surrounding Pina—the savior of the entire academy, and therefore Eris's own lifesaver as well—Eris had taken pity on her and helped her.
“So, what is it this time? Another offer to become someone's personal knight?”
“Um, no. They said they were planning to establish a new educational institution on behalf of Celestial Academy and asked if I would come there as a student.”
“What do they mean, a student? Who could possibly teach a genius who reached the sixth tier before even turning twenty?”
“I-I'm not a genius. The Demonic Sword did everything for me… And I reached it through various shortcuts, so my basic abilities are still far too lacking… Honestly, I feel like I would lose even against a proper fifth-tier mage, let alone a sixth-tier one… Everyone's just overestimating me….”
For someone publicly known as the future Hero who had single-handedly cut down the Demon King's avatar, her painfully timid appearance was so incongruous that Eris shook her head in disbelief.
In truth, Pina seemed to feel more than a little burdened by the fame she had gained.
She kept saying that the one who should have received this fame was the Demonic Sword, and that she had stolen all of its credit.
This was because the ‘truth’ revealed by the Sage differed from reality in many ways, but after hearing the various circumstances from Pina, Eris could understand the Sage's judgment.
‘Because it's far too suspicious.’
According to Pina, the entity known as the ‘Demonic Sword’ had appeared before she even enrolled at Celestial Academy and crushed the attacks of demons targeting Pina one after another.
In other words, it had approached her knowing that demons somewhere would target Pina, yet Pina apparently had never thought deeply about that point and merely kept repeating that she did not know.
The Sage's memories from the period when he was being eroded had holes in them, while Kailen and Divana—the two people who seemed likely to know the circumstances—had disappeared amid the academy's chaos.
According to Eris's investigation, they had not even returned to their families, meaning that they had vanished without a trace.
With Pina herself not fully understanding how everything had come together, what would happen if she simply revealed the entire truth about the demons targeting her and the other events exactly as they had occurred?
Not only would it arouse suspicion around her, but there was also a considerable risk that Pina herself would end up bearing the blame.
The Sage's silence regarding the questionable aspects of Pina's bloodline and the sordid backroom deals made during the Demon King's defeat was likely for the same reason.
Once it became known that the Hero's legend was not as beautiful as people believed but sordid, and once it became known that the Valestia family might not actually be the Hero's true descendants, even Pina, who was protected by that prestige, would be blamed along with them.
On top of that, it was impossible to predict how the rulers of the various nations—who would be branded the descendants of villains in an instant—would react.
The ‘Demonic Sword’ seemed to have anticipated such a situation as well and told Pina to hide the truth, but Pina appeared to feel deeply guilty about doing so.
The Sage, for his part, seemed uneasy about attempting to distort history once again under the pretext of protecting Pina. He sent Pina only messages in the system's stiff, mechanical manner and never revealed an illusion before her as he did before Eris.
In the end, Eris alone had learned the various circumstances by hacking the system and found herself in the strange position of being caught between the two sides.
‘The funny thing is that I don't know much more than a plot summary myself, as if this were a book.’
For example, she knew only that ‘Pina experienced the events of her time as the Hero through a kind of illusion.’ She had no idea what Pina had actually experienced within it, what she had thought, or what conversations she had shared.
And, in truth, she had no intention of learning more than that.
Just as there were memories she wished to keep secretly in her heart—like her memories of a certain librarian—she believed that people had memories they wanted to cherish in private.
The problem was that Pina's way of cherishing memories differed somewhat from Eris's.
“By the way, how is the, um, work going?”
Glancing repeatedly at the manuscripts on the desk, Pina asked cautiously.
Eris answered curtly.
“Not at all.”
“Whiiine.”
“The idea that reading a lot means you'll be good at writing is crude to begin with. I'm not a writer, you know?”
“B-But you're still much better than I am!”
─I want to leave my story with the Demonic Sword in a book.
That was the ‘request’ Pina had made of Eris.
Right now, she was small and weak, so it was impossible for her to openly reveal the story she had shared with the Demonic Sword.
But someday, if she became strong.
If she became capable of facing the world's suspicious gazes and complicated political relationships head-on.
Then she wanted to reveal the real truth—the Demonic Sword's deeds.
And Eris had decided to grant that request.
The first motive.
The Sage had offered a deal: during the little time remaining before he disappeared, he would transfer into Eris's ‘book’ every kind of data he had acquired during his lifetime and collected while transforming into the system.
The second motive.
Even if she had initially helped simply because living in someone else's debt did not suit her temperament, Eris had come to like Pina quite a bit by now.
The third motive.
Honestly, she was not entirely uninterested in writing, either.
“Hmm.”
Eris fell into thought for a moment.
She had told Pina that it was not going well, but to be honest, the writing itself was progressing rather smoothly.
She was not creating the content from nothing; she was merely editing events that had actually happened.
However, as far as Eris's personal tastes were concerned, it was not a story she liked very much.
And the reason was simple.
“If I'm going to write it, I'd rather write a happy ending.”
“Huh?”
“You don't plan to leave that ‘Demonic Sword’ like this forever, do you?”
At Eris's pointed remark, Pina's breath stopped for a moment.
Pina's waist.
A sword hilt hanging there like a kind of talisman, a cord tied around its handle because it was impossible to insert and secure the blade in an ordinary scabbard.
Pina's ‘Demonic Sword,’ which no longer gave any answer at all.
“You're planning to get it fixed, right? That's why you keep turning down the new swords other people offer you.”
“…Yes.”
Quietly, as usual.
But with none of her usual hesitation, Pina nodded firmly.
“If we're going to turn it into a story anyway, I think it would be better to finish writing it after the happy ending is certain. Like the scene where the Hero and the Demonic Sword reunite.”
“I would be happier with that too, but we haven't decided when it can be fixed or where we need to go yet.”
“You said it was a sword mixed in with a pile of gifts sent by the Brown Merchant Company, right? If we investigate them, we'll find something.”
The academy's collapse had caused some disruption to her original plan to transcend into an Archmage, but she had received all the knowledge possessed by the Sage of the Firmament, so it was not a loss.
No—in the eyes of the thoroughly theory-minded Eris, this was a far more valuable achievement than a sloppy boost to her stats.
So helping a friend reclaim her lost bond, at least to some extent, should not be a problem.
Unlike before, Eris now knew that rest was just as important as effort.
‘The true identity is probably something else, but we might at least find information on a certain librarian who is officially listed as an employee of that merchant company. Well, even without using shortcuts, we'll get there someday through books, but a wise mage prepares a variety of methods.’
Swallowing an excuse whose intended recipient was unclear, Eris opened her mouth.
“What do you think?”
“Yes, I'll do it! Let's try!”
Perhaps she was happy that her vague goal had gained a clear path, because Pina's face brightened as she smiled.
The old Sage silently watched the two girls—the Hero and Sage of a new era.
【It would be even better if the Saint joined you as well. Is thinking that way merely an old man's futile lingering attachment? What do you think?】
In a blind spot of the academy untouched by anyone's gaze.
The words he murmured toward his old comrades received no answer.
At that obvious consequence, just as the Sage was about to disappear with a wry smile,
a single blue petal drifted past the Sage's eyes, and a ray of light shone down through the clouds.
It was nothing more than a coincidence.
It was merely confirmation bias—the unconscious desire to assign a plausible meaning to an insignificant natural phenomenon.
Even knowing that, the Sage felt inexplicably happy, and burst out laughing.
Laughing, laughing, laughing.
Until even that final shadow was scattered by the wind that blew in.