Chapter 73 - Test Subjects (1)

He sneered at me as I stood there in a daze.

"It's already too late. Heh. There's no point running. The only reason they haven't exploded yet is that I'm still alive... Or go on, run for your life... while you still can."

I wasn't particularly inclined to run. Instead, I asked him a question.

"Those two trusted you. How could you betray them like this?"

Perhaps it was my calm expression that made him scowl. He seemed to hate the look on my face even more than the fact that he was dying.

Still, unlike before, he answered me. I should have tried this sooner.

"I-I kept calling myself their master like a fool, but in the end I was nothing more than a test subject. Me and these kids both. Well, they didn't even know why it was happening to them, so maybe they had it worse than I did... Urgh. B-but I gave them abilities and let them dream of a future, so I'm sure they'll both forgive me."

"Like hell they will."

He looked startled by my reply.

"Ah, that felt good. Come to think of it, I don't have to keep grumbling to myself now."

Leaving him half-dead had gotten me more information than I'd expected. He looked barely capable of answering now, though, so I doubted I could get much more out of him.

Still, I asked one last question.

"Who do you work for? The First Prince? The Second Prince? The duchy? Or the empire? Anything else you feel like telling me?"

He could only stare at me in disbelief.

"Y-you bastard..."

As I thought, he couldn't say much more.

Maybe I should have cut off only one arm. I'd stabbed him just clear of the heart, but he was losing too much blood from both arms. Even for an awakened noble, he'd held on a long time.

COUGH. COUGH.

He tried to say something at the end, but only blood came out of his mouth.

"See you again."

I waved to him as he drew his last breath. His expression remained baffled until he stopped breathing.

SNAP.

At that moment, the mana connecting him to the two students broke. Their bodies shone brightly—the same thing that had happened at the entrance ceremony.

He hadn't been lying.

There had only been one at the entrance ceremony, and that building had been sturdy. With two of them, this whole street might be blown away.

The thought flashed through my mind, but it was pointless when I was caught in the blast myself. Maybe it was because I was about to die, but the light seemed to spread slowly.

Plan B.

The start of a truly depressing plan: die and begin again. I gritted my teeth against the pain to come.

FLASH!

Light filled the world. The next instant, my whole body shattered, and pain slammed into my mind.

Then darkness.

[You have died. Restarting from the autosave point.]

* * *

"That concludes the entrance ceremony."

I opened my eyes inside the ceremony hall, just as the ceremony was ending.

'At least I can bear it this time.'

Unlike when I'd died over and over in the ceremony hall, this time I'd had a few days between deaths. I came to my senses fairly quickly, though the pain was as bad as ever.

I leaned against a wall, panting. A few adults nearby even asked if I was all right as they passed.

In novels I'd read in my previous life, people died hundreds or thousands of times without a problem. Yet dying just once was this hard.

Every time I tried to do something, death came for me. My life really was awful enough to make me sigh.

After that, time passed much as it had in the last life. The female lecturer who had been lying in the infirmary had already killed herself, and once again her suicide was quietly covered up. The entrance ceremony ended without incident, and my meeting with Katrin and the Senior Knight went much the same way.

My final request, however, was different.

"I'd like a room to myself. Near the end of the corridor, please."

Unlike when I'd asked to share with Piar, I didn't need to offer a long explanation. They already thought I needed a room of my own.

That evening, as I reached my dorm room, a student came out of the room next door. I greeted him.

"Oh, you're next door?"

"Ah... Yes..."

Piar flinched as he answered.

Despite my greeting, I'd known he'd be next door. I'd seen that the room beside Piar's was empty in my last life, which was why I'd requested this one.

I kept the greeting brief and went inside. Just as when I'd shared with Piar, my luggage was already there.

Before unpacking, I sat at the desk. I took a pen and some paper from the drawer and laid out my plans.

I hadn't been happy with the few days before my latest death. Maybe the freshmen's chaotic comings and goings had thrown me off, but I'd been scrambling around myself. Then Piar's unexpected trip out had left me facing the enemy unprepared, and I'd ended up dead.

"Honestly, I might have gotten through this one without dying..."

Once I'd realized things had gone wrong, I could probably have just run away.

Then again, by that logic, I didn't need to attend this academy at all. I could drop out, go home, throw myself at His Grace the Duke's feet, then take Mother and flee to the distant countryside.

Tsk. On second thought, that wouldn't be easy either. My brothers and the nobles attached to the ducal house were hardly going to leave me alone.

In any case, those unpleasant days had yielded a few pieces of information. First, the man who called himself their master.

If what he'd said as he died was true, there were people out there creating inherited abilities. Was that even possible? In my previous life, a discovery like that would have made front-page news as the invention of the century and swept the Nobel Prizes.

Hmm. He'd called himself a test subject. Did that mean they were still conducting clinical trials? Given the shitty state of human rights around here, testing on people didn't seem all that unusual.

But blowing up the entrance ceremony hall? Judging by that bastard who called himself a master, this didn't look like the work of scholarly types. That meant some powerful people were working behind the scenes—people capable of carrying out an attack inside the Royal Academy to blow up a princess and a hall full of nobles, and of creating the inherited abilities that upheld this world's class system.

If I got mixed up with them, I'd probably just keep dying.

No, was I already mixed up in it?

The princess and Katrin came to mind. I couldn't help sighing. I pushed them both out of my thoughts and moved on.

Piar and Mirisa's necklaces. Piar's explosion hadn't come from an inherited ability unique to him; the necklace had acted as a conduit.

"Maybe it's an item that overloads mana. I'll have to check that too."

I roughly wrote down my schedule and the people I needed to meet, committed it all to memory, then burned the paper. After a cursory attempt at unpacking, I lay down on the bed. Tomorrow was bound to be busy.

"More than anything, I hope I don't have to unpack again."

Hoping I wouldn't have to relive this day, I hurried to sleep.

* * *

The next morning's two general-education classes, history and Introduction to Inherited Abilities, went just as they had in my last life. I was still more or less an outcast, and the professors' lectures were just as dull. Naturally, I ate lunch alone too.

The afternoon class unfolded the same way. In our knights faculty class, we began sparring with knights, and Katrin called me over to spar with her.

CLANG!

Sword met sword.

THUNK!

A sword knocked a shield aside.

"Good heavens. Don't tell me they're sparring without mana?"

"No way. They couldn't move like that without it!"

"I suppose not..."

"Still, that's impressive. He looks about as good as a decent trainee knight."

The students who had finished their matches whispered as they watched Katrin and me. The knights who were done sparring, along with a student or two, seemed to realize we were fighting without mana.

"I see you haven't neglected your training."

"Of course not."

Katrin and I talked as our swords met. With no mana to use, I had plenty of mental energy to spare, so conversation was easy enough.

Unlike in my last life, I wasn't fighting to cultivate an image this time. I couldn't properly gauge my skill in a match like this anyway, so I figured it would be better to change how people saw me, even a little.

But I wasn't about to fight using mana either. That left me crossing swords with Katrin and working up a sweat.

"Tsk. I don't think I can judge your skill from a match like this, though."

Katrin stepped back, looking disappointed. We'd crossed swords far longer than the others, but neither of us could show our true ability this way. I stepped back too and lowered my sword.

"We'll have to make time for a separate match later. All right?"

"Yes."

I was grateful. Of the people who knew me, she was one of the few with a reasonable grasp of what I could do, and we'd fought back-to-back as comrades. If I wanted to keep improving, I needed proper sparring as well as real combat. I couldn't ask for a better partner than her.

After we exchanged the customary closing greetings, I looked around. The reaction was clearly different from my last life. I saw envy, jealousy, admiration, and disdain, but at least no one seemed able to underestimate my skill now.

I hadn't shown what I could really do, but this was a decent start.

There would be a little more basic instruction before the afternoon class ended. I asked Katrin for permission to leave early.

"I think I've cut myself a little. May I stop by the infirmary and head back ahead of the others?"

I showed her my arm, with blood streaming down it.

"What? When did you hurt yourself that badly?"

"I made a mistake. It's been a while since I sparred without mana."

"Oh, you should've been more careful."

Neither of us had used mana in our match, but we'd still sparred close to full contact. Without mana protecting our bodies, it was entirely possible to get hurt. Of course, neither Katrin nor I was at a level where a match like that should have left us injured.

But if I said I'd made a mistake, what could she say?

"You didn't injure the muscle, did you?"

"No. It's just a cut in the skin. I'll go to the infirmary and get it healed."

A priest's healing arts were unbeatable for simple wounds. Bandages and surgery from my previous life couldn't compare.

"Then you can leave early."

Just as I'd expected, Katrin gave me permission. I said goodbye to her and the knights and left the training ground.

The students seemed a little reassured when they saw the wound on my arm. Once I was out of the training ground and out of sight, I wiped my arm with my hand. Despite all the blood that had run down it, the cut was barely visible. The bleeding had stopped at once because I'd used mana to close off the blood vessels around it.

A cut this small hardly counted as an injury. It certainly wasn't worth showing a priest; it was the sort of thing that would heal with a little spit on it.

Of course it was. Katrin hadn't wounded me. I'd made the cut myself and squeezed it to draw out the blood.