30 Years Have Passed Since the Prologue Chapter 12

Chapter 12: Morning Star (2)

The express train departing Tiless’s Saint Mathilenne and arriving at Krasilov’s Prichenkaya passes through a total of 4 military zones.

Once passing the Tiless 3rd Guards Division, once crossing the northwestern border.

Then once through the Krasilov Border Defense Division, and once passing Prichenkaya Defense Headquarters.

Meaning that, as befit its proximity to the demonfolk front, troops were laid out with vicious thoroughness.

Therefore, applying elimination, the sections where terrorism was possible came down to only 3 stations. Of the 30-odd stations this train passes, only those 3 have no reinforcements within a day’s distance, sparse foot traffic, and rugged terrain.

One.

The train carrying Ivan and Isabelle passed the first ambush point.

There was no assailant seeking to interfere with the rails, nor mounted bandits pouring out magic or artillery from horseback.

Two.

At the second ambush point as well, the train sped swiftly along the rails.

Ivan gazed out the window, sighed, and sat back down.

Several hours later, in silence, the train passed the third ambush point.

What……?

The train had now crossed the Krasilov border. Continuing straight on, it would reach Prichenkaya within a day’s travel.

Past the plain and over just a single mountain lay Prichenkaya. It would pass through a forest along the way, but a division-strength force was garrisoned in that vicinity.

Which meant that from here on, one couldn’t commit an attack even if one tried. Ivan stroked his revolver restlessly.

My prediction was wrong?

Weren’t the tutorials unified as train attacks?

Then had Esidis simply been viciously unlucky? Or was it that in the “original” game, the tutorial was designed differently for each character?

He had at least considered that each would proceed along their own distinct story, but the early design couldn’t work that way. Because this was an “academy story.”

It had to be. It simply had to be.

Ivan bit his lip. If he had misjudged again, what was he supposed to do?

If this wasn’t even an academy story, did this damned other world have an ending at all?

Should he kill himself? Was there any answer besides suicide? If he couldn’t predict the genre, he couldn’t judge the ending either.

The worst possible assumption was……

The case where the ending belongs to the protagonist alone.

If the last war—that is, the Hero’s classic RPG—was the essence of this other world.

Wasn’t the Hero’s seclusion the decisive evidence? Why had the Hero chosen seclusion? Had that been that man’s “ending”?

Then what of the other world left behind.

What of us.

No—of me.

What am I supposed to do?

Ivan’s thoughts twisted into an ever more complicated tangle. I hate this, I hate it. I don’t want to remain in this godforsaken world any longer.

I want to rest. I want to set it all down and leave. I want to lie on a soft bed in a comfortable house with the heating on, wrap myself in a microfiber blanket, and sleep for a solid week.

He wanted to order every single thing he’d been craving and eat until he burst, and talk with people who use Hangul about games, novels, films, dramas, and variety shows.

He didn’t want to go on living any longer in this godforsaken pre-modern fantasy world, rife with death and destitution, famine and terror—

—and where, all the same, the concepts of “welfare” and “leisure” are faint.

“Hiik…… hkk……!”

A man seated beside him went pale and let out a strangled groan.

The sticky killing intent flowing off Ivan’s body was spreading like poison. But Ivan—no, Kim Seon-woo—was in no state of mind to rein himself in.

Sharper and sharper, dense and thick enough to actually harm a person.

And just as Kim Seon-woo’s panic was growing more violent—

—the train, having passed through the tunnel beneath the mountain and crossing the bridge over the valley, shuddered with a ka-thud. It was a portent.

Kabooooom!!! Screeeeech—!! Krrrrumble—!!

Not stopping at blowing the rails, the explosion collapsed the entire bridge, and the train slid helplessly down and fell. The body twisted, and carrying the full momentum of its speed, the whole carriage spun round and round.

Amid a situation in which his body floated up and everything overturned, Ivan reflexively seized the train’s luggage rack to steady himself and surveyed his surroundings on instinct.

Between the space flipping over and over and the scenery sliding past the windows, he grasped the situation precisely.

The train is falling.

The train had been passing through the mountain range in western Prichenkaya.

The train is falling.

A train attack has occurred.

The tutorial is not over.

I was not wrong.

There is still an ending left.

Inside the falling train carriage, a smile spread across Ivan’s gaunt face. Slowly. And deeply.

Forcibly cramming the still-panicking, useless Kim Seon-woo down beneath consciousness. Because it was now time to handle what “must be done.”

Fear, hatred, and confusion are no help to the mission. People generally say keep a cool head and a hot heart, but that saying is wrong.

The Annihilation Corps teaches it this way: keep your head, your heart, and your fingertips all cold.

Like Krasilov’s brutal winter. Like its long night. Cold, silent, meticulous.

The Annihilation Corps officer vanished quietly, presence killed, from within the chaos-stricken carriage.

Stepping off the railing, treading the luggage rack, batting aside tangling heaps of baggage, up, up, up.

***

The last moment Isabelle remembered was a string of fragmentary words.

Her body flung out, her vision shaking wildly, agony surging in.

A shattered window and pouring earth.

And then, the carriage body crumpling and tearing apart.

And one more thing.

“Hah!”

Isabelle opened her eyes in a cold sweat. Darkness enveloped everything. The incident had occurred in the instant she’d been watching Krasilov’s coniferous forest sweep past against the evening glow.

She rose, feeling a stabbing pain.

The compartment was buried in earth. As her eyes gradually adjusted to the dark, she became able to make out the mound of soil that had spilled through the broken window.

And then—drip, drip—the sound of water falling.

Huff, huh. A frail sound of ragged breathing.

“Are you…… hff…… are you awake, my lady?”

“Sir August……?”

A man stood before her.

No. He was pinned in place.

One arm was buried in the earth, and a length of rebar jutted out from his side.

The dripping sound came from droplets of blood falling from his mouth and nose. And from his waist.

“Why……?”

He had thrown himself in to protect her. He had blocked with his whole body the boulder that would have crushed her and taken the falling train fragments on his back.

She looked at the knight with eyes full of shock. The knight was smiling his usual good-natured smile.

“My lady. Flee…… hff……! You must flee……. The culprits will come. This was aimed at my lady…… hff……!” “Stop, stop! A-answer me! Why……? Why did you do such a thing. Are you actually a cretin?”

Isabelle glared at the knight with trembling eyes.

“Don’t tell me you thought my father would be angry if I died? He isn’t! That man has no interest in anyone!!”

“I know.”

The knight laughed weakly. Who in Tiless doesn’t know? About that strange man who abandoned his own wife and child, shut himself deep in the mountains, and permits no one to approach.

At first, people had thought he’d left to convalesce from his wounds after killing the Demon King.

Then they began to whisper that the Hero’s heart had been twisted by the Demon King.

And before 4 years had even passed, they began to forget the Hero.

Because from the moment he killed the Demon King—no, perhaps from before that—the Hero was not an individual.

The man called Maximilien had faded away fruitlessly beneath the name of Hero. Now only the deeds and the myth echo hollowly.

“You hate me.”

“I do.”

“Then why……?”

“Because you are the Hero’s daughter.”

The man’s eyes shone with a strange clarity even as he lay dying.

Isabelle laughed, as though finding it absurd even in a situation like this.

“So what does that have to do with anything. Do you truly think my father would spare one coin’s worth of interest for that ‘daughter’?”

“No, my lady. I never once considered Maximilien’s interest.”

But, the Hero’s daughter.

“Because a single individual was able to plant hope in the hearts of all humanity. Because we spent those days together. And…… because it means that even such a great man is a ‘person’ who leaves descendants and fades away with the years.”

Maximilien is a person too.

A proposition anyone can agree with, yet a sentence no one truly comprehends.

But Isabelle is different. She is a person. A young girl who rages, envies, grieves—who suffers from affection deprivation.

Which is to say, Isabelle’s very existence means that the Hero too was, in the end, human.

And conversely: that a human, so long as they are human, can become a Hero.

That is what he believed. Even loathing the person Isabelle, he could not help but affirm the existence of Isabelle. She was hope.

The last seed the Hero left behind; the very fact of its sprouting symbolizes hope. In this era when the war of days past has ended and those left behind are raising up their ruined homes.

A hope that can bloom even in this ravaged age.

Not the hope of conscripts struggling against the Demon King, but a hope for the single individual living out each day.

If the Hero himself was called the symbol of victory, then the Hero’s blood relative is the symbol of reconstruction. The symbol of an age beginning anew.

And so, while hating Isabelle, he had thrown his body forward.

Because he was a knight of Tiless. Because he was a man who could cast aside the individual beneath a great cause. Because he too was an ordinary citizen who wished for nothing so much as humanity’s reconstruction.

“Admirable.”

When his words ended, with a thump, a forearm burst out from the mound of earth that had spilled into the compartment.

That forearm groped and rummaged through the mound for a while, then slid smoothly back out.

The cold air of the late-winter night cooled the compartment pleasantly.

And through that opened gap, pale blue moonlight seeped in.

“Knight, your name?”

“Dian August. And yours?”

“Ivan Petrovich.”

The mound collapsed and a man stepped into the compartment.

Backlit by the moon, casting a long black shadow.

“Do you want to live?”

“If possible.”