Chapter 22: On the First Day of Enrollment, a Status Window Opened (6)
Maximilien had been a possessor. And apparently there were more possessors besides.
Set aside the fact that he had never heard such a thing; then what had become of them?
The Hero vanished. Withdrew into seclusion somewhere deep in the mountains of Tiless. Abandoning his own wife and daughter.
It was a thing no one could understand. But Ivan felt he could understand it. That was, that was……
Did he……go back……?
Ivan bowed his head, face gone pale. Was going back possible? Was the condition killing the Demon King? Then my…… my condition is……
Smack—!
His vision flashed bright and his head snapped aside. The pain came afterward. Ivan felt his stinging cheek and turned his gaze.
Enrique was looking at him with sad eyes.
“Pull yourself together. We aren’t finished talking.”
“……Enrique.”
“Yes. You recognize me. Good.”
Enrique sank deep into the sofa and sighed. This fellow lacks sleep. No, he lacks rest. Only now did she understand why.
It isn’t a matter of mental illness acquired through the war. This fellow is dissociated. He recognizes this place as reality while simultaneously wishing it weren’t.
Accordingly he would have been unable to rest. Alone, through all that long stretch of time. Chewing on solitude every night and tormented by the strangeness of it every day.
Possessors. Wanderers “dragged in” from another world. Enrique pitied this breed. And all the more so in the case of this taciturn, twisted lunatic.
She looked straight at her disciple and slowly opened her mouth.
“They say every one of them came bearing their own story. Only very scant records remain, but in most cases it was so. For one it was a tale, for another a legend or myth, for another a novel, sometimes even a play, and there were cases describing something else entirely.”
“……They each differed……?”
“Yes. Which is to say, each of them had their own story.”
As to which story led them here, there is no commonality.
But all of them are said to have felt they had fallen into a story they had longed for.
By what trigger, in what manner such a thing occurs, cannot be grasped.
“How did they…… how did the possessors meet their endings……?”
This was the gravest question Ivan harbored. What ending is fated.
“Some vanished again, some died, others remained.”
“The Hero, Maximilien?”
“He went into seclusion, as you know. Well, whether he’s since gone back or had some other reason, I couldn’t say. It isn’t as though one can go and ask him directly, and there’s no way to meet him.”
Ivan bowed his head, his mind reeling.
Everyone with a different story, everyone with a different ending…… what is his ending. To be taxidermied eternally within this world? Is there no way back? He wants to believe death is not the only ending……
Bang. Enrique struck the desk roughly. When Ivan raised his head, she was looking at him with sad eyes.
“So then, what are we in your eyes?”
“……What?”
“Mere bystanders inside your world’s novel? Are we, by your own account, no more than ‘characters’ consumed as lines of prose?”
“That’s……”
“No. There’s no way. Isn’t it obvious?”
If in a world where ten thousand stories are mingled, there are ten thousand protagonists—
—must that protagonist regard the other protagonists as supporting cast?
No. It isn’t so. All of them are simply the protagonists of their own stories. In which case—
“Then are your world and this world fundamentally different worlds? Is that place reality and this nothing but a fragment of a story? No. I am alive, I breathe, I hate sunlight, I hate blessings, I drink blood, and I live enjoying my tea. Exactly as you do.”
“Enrique……”
“That you might be nothing but someone’s supporting cast? Don’t talk rubbish! You are the lead of your own life, and I am the whole of mine!”
Her eyes burned as though they would devour Ivan.
Ivan quietly looked at her face.
“You’d rather not be supporting cast? Then how do you think of us? How have you been thinking of me? Ivan. Little Ivan. Have you lived regarding the late king you revere as nothing but a supporting player in a story? Were you inwardly sneering even as you said, Do not mourn those who departed before us?”
“No, I never……”
“Then live. Live your story, and finish your story. What ending that story meets is not something decided by fate or by the world. That is a thing you must decide.”
At the end of each story there is each person’s own ending.
The direction leading to that ending is not necessarily the work of a fixed fate.
Even if the Hero’s Party’s journey remains as legend, its individual members are not heroes within a legend. They are merely individuals living and breathing even now.
Enrique gripped Ivan’s hand tightly and looked at him with steady eyes.
“Do you want to go back? To your hometown?”
“……Yes.”
“Then don’t wait for fate to end your story, disciple. Turn your own pages with your own hand. To the very end. To the ending.”
“At that end, is there anything I can decide?”
“The choice to turn the page belongs wholly to you. Like everyone else. Like every person in this world and in yours.”
The Hero, Maximilien, always smiled. Always smiled and took one more step forward.
Recalling those days when hope had been so viciously scarce, Enrique quietly thought.
That fellow longed for his hometown. Longed for the lover and parents who would be there. Every time she heard about his comfortable life and its mysterious civilization, Enrique pitied him.
Pitiable castaway. Wanderer of dimensions. Outsider.
And yet the Hero smiled. That “ordinary” carries the same meaning in that world and in this one.
And that therefore he was not a castaway or an outsider, but an ordinary person.
Bearing countless burdens on his shoulders, one more step forward. To realize the “matter-of-course” he himself believed in, one more step.
Toward the darkest hell of a continent where hope had vanished, one step at a time.
Willingly becoming a lighthouse for those who lacked the courage to go ahead, one step.
His valor lay within the matter-of-courseness and the ordinariness he believed in. That is why he became a Hero. Regardless of any privilege, talent, or aptitude. By endlessly carrying on the ordinariness he himself believed in.
And to those who called it extraordinary, with a smile: that he was merely a person doing on their behalf what any of them could do.
“If I had met you even a little sooner…… if I had listened to your story a little more seriously, it wouldn’t have come to this…… I’m sorry, disciple.”
“Enrique……”
“I’ll keep the night watch. Get some sleep.”
“Night watch?”
“I can tell from your condition. You couldn’t feel safe anywhere, so you’d have been unable to properly fall asleep. At least 4 years. If longer than that, then for as long as your life.”
Nowhere in this room was there a bedroom.
This fellow had presumably only ever lain on that desk, or that sofa, and dozed.
Worrying what he’d do if the protagonist of this world one day suddenly erased the supporting cast. What he’d do if the story concluded in a situation where he could do nothing. Fretting over such trifles.
Insisting stubbornly that he himself must not be supporting cast, while having regarded others as exactly that. And all the while believing he could never be the protagonist.
“If you need it, I’ll keep the night watch every night.”
Ivan did not refuse. He was far too exhausted.
Kim Seon-woo quietly closed his eyes.
He had misjudged. This world is neither a strategy simulation nor a classic RPG. It may have been someone’s story, but it was not his own.
A soldier in a strategy simulation. Not a scouting party of the Hero’s Party. The story of Ivan Petrovich, of Kim Seon-woo, has not opened even its first chapter.
Thirty years have passed since the prologue.
Now the story’s opening chapter has ended. The name of this story was not “genre,” but “life.”
Perhaps it’s an academy story after all. Ivan reflected on his own situation and snorted.
That sentence no longer angered him.
He was too worn out to be angry, too tired—
—and the hand patting his shoulder was warm—
—and it was a relief.
***
It was a certain day at 16 years old, 2 years into grinding through the battlefield.
Kim Seon-woo gritted his teeth and rolled across the ground. Because the sword he’d been issued had snapped. Rounds were spent, and the demonfolk had finally crossed the defensive line and pushed through.
When a blade broke he scrabbled along the ground and took up a spear; when the spear shaft broke he brought a shield down on them. He seized an axe, swung a greatsword, and endured.
Even he himself had never imagined he could fight this way. He was more skilled at physical work than expected, and did not easily feel fatigue.
Of course, at present he seemed to be forgetting his fatigue thanks to violently surging adrenaline.
Considering his athletic capacity, by now he should normally have collapsed exhausted. Yet Ivan rolled across the ground and picked up a blade. Took up a spear. Swung an axe and shoved with a shield.
How much time passed that way.
His body still moves. His vision was still clear. The only sounds he heard were his own breathing and a heartbeat that felt about to burst, and his nose had long since forgotten every smell but blood.
He simply blocked, drove back, and swung at whatever approached, and lived.
When at some moment silence came, Kim Seon-woo noticed an enormous shadow that had fallen over him.
“You fought well.”
A deep voice rang above his head. When he turned his gaze, he saw a military standard. Krasilov’s standard.
Friendly forces. Kim Seon-woo lowered his shoulders and bowed his head.
Judging by the fact that he was mounted, this was a personage of high rank. Judging by his standing beneath the standard, presumably a captain.
“What is your name?”
“Ivan Petrovich, Captain.”
“Your age?”
“Turning 16.”
“Your post?”
“Conscript.”
The man with the sun at his back had a face that couldn’t be seen. Sunlight draped about him like a halo, dazzling.
“Turn around and look.”
Following the captain’s order, he turned his back. He wondered whether it meant to return to the main camp.
So many corpses that the ground could not be seen entered his vision. Countless bodies, demonfolk and human without distinction.
As Kim Seon-woo moved to knit his brow, a soothing voice reached him.
“Raise your eyes. Look at those still standing.”
Only then did the others enter his sight. Not corpses, but people.
Survivors. The wounded, those barely standing propped on broken spears, those trembling and yet somehow alive.
“This theater was originally destined for defeat. It was a situation requiring that our strength be projected into another theater.”
“……Your Majesty!!”
At the captain’s words the attendant behind him let out a cry. The large man continued without concern.
“Yet these ones survived. Ivan Petrovich. Look at those you saved. Straighten your back. You saved them, and you saved the villages remaining behind their backs, and you saved their families somewhere out there and the residents of those villages.”
The captain swung lightly down from the horse and stroked his head. It was a large hand.
“So straighten your back. ‘Little’ Ivan.”
“……I am not little.”
He exceeded the average height of the era. He was enough that even the enforcement officer took him for an adult.
“The name We earned fighting as you do at your age was ‘Ivan the Great,’ so surely you cannot be called by the same name as Us?”
“Your Majesty……!!”
The attendant shrieked again. The man with large hands clapped Ivan’s back once and mounted his horse.
“Treat that child and instruct him.”
“Do you intend to take him into service?”
“I’d sooner raise a lion in a zoo. Merely make a place for him. If he climbs to a position where he can stand alone, shall we not meet again.”
He faced that man again 5 years after that.
5 years later, he was assigned to the “Royal Guard.”
From then on his name was called “little” Ivan. It was an exceedingly honorable title.
***
Ivan did not have a nightmare that day.
The late king, seen after so long, was as magnificent as ever, and so Ivan was able to fall into a deep sleep.
***
[“???-Rank Quest” The Gardener of St. Yansk University -CANCELLED-] [Miraculous fortune halts your dice. You have survived.] [Objective: Slay St. Yansk University’s gardener, Ivan Petrovich -CANCELLED-] [Optional Objective: Win over Ivan Petrovich -CANCELLED-] [Optional Objective: Conceal information -CANCELLED-] [Additional Objective: Survive -CANCELLED-] [Failure Penalty: Death -CANCELLED-]
“What. What the hell is this……! Give me some explanation!!”
Yevgeny, Yujin, glared at the blue display and shrieked.
Naturally this damned status window offered no answer whatsoever.
***
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