This crazy skeleton.
If he knew that Iris had blocked Arghalia’s attack, didn’t that mean he had been watching everything since the moment Iris awakened as the Holy Maiden?
And he had just stood there and watched?
"That is rather difficult to simply let slide, Professor."
With his voice sinking heavily, Dante slowly raised a hand and stepped forward.
He was nothing like his usual self.
This was not the Dante who always laughed so cheerfully.
His eyes had frozen over, as cold and sharp as the frost-like mana he wielded.
"Doesn’t that mean that while we were fighting a Sword Master to the bone, Professor, you were merely standing by and watching?"
Dante had voiced exactly what I wanted to say, without missing a thing.
"Oh, that?"
Even amid the atmosphere that had settled as cold as frost, Professor Luke opened his jaw with a creak as though it were nothing at all.
"When one’s flesh decays and nothing but white bones remain, seeing the flow is quite a common occurrence, Cadet Dante."
And the words spilling from his skull were a sentence littered with incomprehensible proper nouns.
"Of course, at the time, I had escaped the restraints of Me, so I could have helped you. Even accounting for the delay caused by putting Professor Silves somewhere safe, there was ample time."
"Then...!"
Just as Isabella raised her voice to demand an explanation.
He cut her off.
"Did I not say that I could see the flow?"
Professor Luke did not let her continue.
"I saw the flow in which you would defeat those Sword Masters even without my intervention, so I did not see the need to step in."
"Even if stepping in might have prevented anyone else from dying?"
Isabella’s voice lashed out, sharp as a drawn blade that would not let him escape, and the air around us stretched taut enough to burst at any moment.
Isabella was right.
In the end, no one had died, but that was merely the result.
And though he said we would certainly defeat them, if not for the Indestructible Knight’s help, I would have had to restart.
Of course, I would not have obtained Arghalia’s drop item, nor achieved that insane power-leveling jump of ten levels at once.
At the sight of that skeleton speaking so serenely, a vein rose on my forehead before I knew it.
But whether he knew that or not.
"If they would fall whether I intervened or did not intervene..."
He merely opened his jaw.
"I judged it far more beneficial to let them fall by your hands and become rust upon your blades."
Without offering a single excuse, he simply let the blue flames in his eye sockets shine as though that were the correct answer.
Yet those flames were faint, like candlelight on the verge of going out.
"Naturally, you may not understand someone like me, but after becoming this way, I have found that yielding to such flows is not so bad."
As though he were saying he was tired.
Was that his own way of expressing the weariness he kept showing through his jaw?
Or was it because of some experience from his past?
If not, perhaps it had something to do with why he, having reached level 90, had become a low-ranking undead skeleton.
"Like a stone in a gorge worn away by the waves, simply riding the flow..."
"Then..."
The one to cut off Professor Luke’s incomprehensible words was Dolnesia.
"When you went along with that flow, did you also see this incident—the attack on the academy? Did you see that you would be caught by that strange thing you call Me?"
She stood with her arms crossed, blue light gleaming from her eyes.
And to Dolnesia, Professor Luke said:
"It hides itself when it is most needed, and binds me when I try to cast it off."
Holding her gaze with the same blue flames.
"Because that is the flow."
He opened his jaw calmly.
#
Step, step.
With that, Professor Luke left.
The final sentence Professor Luke had spoken.
‘The flow hides itself when it is most needed, and binds me when I try to cast it off.’
It was fucking hard to understand.
This game was not one that threw around proper nouns so recklessly.
Did reaching level 90 and becoming undead drive someone that insane?
"First of all, I have no idea what that professor was trying to say, but..."
Dante, who had kept his lips tightly shut for a while, finally spoke.
"It would be best to keep the matter concerning Iris hidden from Asdel, wouldn’t it?"
As he brought up keeping Iris’s secret, his gaze turned toward me.
The Holy Kingdom-related episode involving Iris originally began when Asdel passed information about Iris to the Holy Kingdom, which then dispatched the Holy Maiden.
Therefore, concealing information about Iris from Asdel was, in a sense, no different from cutting out or postponing an entire branch of the main story.
I did not particularly mind.
No, even if it meant we would no longer follow the original story.
I thought delaying the Holy Kingdom’s intervention would help with what lay ahead.
The reason was simple. The Holy Maiden filled the role of what people called a frustrating obstacle.
Not only did she interfere with Isabella and Iris at every turn.
Even Dolnesia and Angelica, who seemed as though they would have nothing to do with the Holy Maiden, had been nitpicked and harassed by her constantly in the original story.
She branded Dolnesia, who used an irregular spirit, a witch, and condemned Angelica as a Sword Demon for stealing all the spotlight.
And when fighting enemies, she had even pulled the worst sort of random-event trolling by raising the difficulty of boss fights. That said it all.
"I have no objection either."
Isabella also nodded, placing a hand against her forehead.
I did not know whether she thought it was not yet time to face the Holy Maiden or simply did not want to see her face, but the brief flicker of disgust in her red eyes suggested it was probably the latter.
The problem was that we were not the only ones who had witnessed Iris’s awakening.
Someone who was not here right now.
And someone currently closest to Asdel.
"The problem is the Second Prince..."
The Second Prince was there.
That man knew nothing of this, did he?
"You needn’t worry about that."
But Dante lightly shook his head as though there were no problem whatsoever.
A strange curve appeared at the corner of his lips as he answered.
"He would not give away information about a young lady who could become his key card without getting something in return."
"..."
Isabella, on the other hand, looked as though she did not understand in the slightest.
"Then let us go back to the dormitory now."
Angelica, who had not said a word until then, finally spoke.
Perhaps she had yawned just moments ago, because her eyes were moist at the corners.
Starting with her, we began stretching one after another.
I did too.
They said yawns were contagious, did they not?
Perhaps because I had heard her yawn, the fatigue I had forgotten about came rushing in.
I felt as though I had forgotten something.
But should I just sleep first and think about it later?
"Well, shall we get some sleep? By the way, with this whole place such a mess... surely classes will be canceled tomorrow, right?"
"I do not know. With that professor, I feel like he might still tell us to show up tomorrow..."
One by one, we began making our way toward the dormitories.
And just as I was about to head there too.
"Could we talk for a moment, junior?"
Iris called out to me.
More precisely, the Holy Maiden, who had regained control.
#
Was it because all the exhaustion I had accumulated while dancing along the edge of death had struck me at once?
Everyone else hurried toward the dormitory.
I had thought they would have mountains of questions for Iris, who had awakened as the Holy Maiden, but it appeared that for humans, the immediate urge to sleep mattered more than pressing curiosity.
Haede alone seemed deeply uneasy about leaving Iris and me in the room by ourselves. She fidgeted, looking back and forth between us, before firmly clenching her fist.
"I-if you lay a hand on Ris, I really will not let you get away with it!"
Leaving behind a suitably fierce threat with a fist no bigger than a weasel’s, Haede promptly vanished as well.
She need not worry about that.
If I laid a hand on Iris right now, I would be killed in an instant.
That left only me, Iris, and Kafka, my squire.
Bzzz, bzzz.
Beneath a lit streetlamp that flickered overhead, I spoke first.
"So, what is it?"
Why had she suddenly stopped me like this?
I was extremely tired right now.
After dying twenty-eight times and defeating a Sword Master in the twenty-ninth fight.
It would not have been strange if I had collapsed like I did when fighting the lion and ended up in the infirmary for three days.
No, it was stranger that I was still standing this normally.
Perhaps it was thanks to the Holy Maiden’s blessing, or perhaps I had grown in the meantime. I was not rubbing my face into the dirt, but I could not help the overwhelming exhaustion. I was incredibly tired.
"I thought you would be most curious about us, yet you have not asked a single question, junior."
The Holy Maiden rested her hand beneath her chin and looked at me.
Beneath the flickering streetlamp, her gaze deepened as she quietly watched me with her chin propped on her hand.
Was I not curious?
Of course I was.
I was fucking curious.
Who were they? What was the Oath of Chivalry? And was the reason I had ended up stranded here connected to them?
I had more questions than I could count.
But I had read enough web novels to know how this went.
Usually, with matters like this...
"Even if I asked, you would not tell me anyway, would you?"
They never told you first.
Even if I asked, the answer was obvious.
They would evade the question by saying it was not yet time, or claim they could not tell me because some kind of lock was in place.
The Holy Maiden closed her mouth for a moment at my words.
"What a pity. I really wanted to say that, but you beat me to it."
She answered with a low smile.
See? I had not expected anything else.
With a sigh, I silently turned away.
"If that is all you wanted to say, I shall be going first."
So hurry up and return to where you belong too.
Just as I was about to walk away.
"Still, now that we are people in the same situation, should we not at least introduce ourselves?"
The same situation.
My steps halted without my meaning them to.
What the hell did that mean?
I turned back around.
"What do you mean by that...?"
"That is..."
Under my gaze, the Holy Maiden looked up at the sky and scratched her cheek.
"I can no longer go back."
What did she mean, she could not go back?
With a gloomy expression, she sighed, then looked at me and tightly gripped the flag she held.
"In other words, I have become completely trapped in this body. I cannot get out."
...?
Excuse me?
She could not get out.
Those words rode the chilly night air beneath the streetlamp and lodged sharply in my ears.
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