Chapter 6
Killing someone is an act that a person instinctively feels repulsed by.
Even if you held a weapon and had a reason to do it, when the moment comes you would still hesitate.
It feels as if invisible restraints press down on your shoulders.
The younger you are, the harder it is.
The first time is always the worst.
Sometimes you shrink back because of the opponent’s size or the pressure they give off.
But among all those restraints, there was one that caused stronger revulsion than anything else.
It’s when you have to cut down someone you know.
“Ahh.”
The zombie kicked open the closed door and came out.
The impact of its charge shattered the window into pieces.
The distance was close.
Up to that moment, Talleon still had not taken a stance and was shaking.
I shoved him aside with all my strength and raised the club.
The zombie swung its arm, but I ducked my waist to evade and swung the club at its right knee.
With a cracking sound like breaking bone, the thing’s body lurched.
Normally it should have collapsed right there.
If your knee was broken and you could still move fine, that meant you were no longer human.
You were either a monster or a superhuman at that point.
As I had suspected, the thing in front of me that still looked like a person was a monster called a zombie.
You really did have to destroy the head or it meant nothing.
[Clever] brought the knowledge I had to the surface again, and [Steady Nerves] urged me to carry it out.
I steadied my breathing.
I had just enough room to glance around, and all three of them wore wretched expressions.
The fear of having to kill a friend.
The fear of facing up close a monster they had only ever watched from afar.
I wanted them to pull themselves together before this fight was over.
They were debuffed it seemed.
In the game, most debuffs were ruled by emotions.
I knew it from experience as I’ve played it multiple times.
Every character I had raised had some flaw somewhere.
Not once had I fought at one hundred percent condition.
Things that would have been understandable if they were real people only made me complain nonstop because it was a game.
These kids would be the same.
Especially Talleon and Brindel, who had taken the biggest shock, probably could not even use twenty percent of their strength.
Only I had cut off the disturbances that emotions stirred up.
“Uuurgh.”
A cold moan flowed out of the thing’s mouth, like a gust of freezing air.
It felt like standing in front of a beast.
It’s coming!
I instinctively knew it would leap at me.
I gathered strength in my toes and kicked off the floor to gain momentum.
It grabbed my shoulders with ease.
Unable to withstand the weight, my upper body was pushed back and slammed into the wall.
I had to pry myself free.
However, the opponent was one hundred eighty centimeters tall with the solid build of someone trained as a knight.
Joshua, who had lived a life of debauchery until now, could not possibly overpower him.
“Shake off your fear. These things are not your friends anymore. Can you not see that with your own eyes? If you stay like this, we will all die.”
I shouted loud enough for everyone nearby to hear.
Even if other zombies heard my shout and gathered, we had to survive the crisis in front of us first.
[Cool] agreed with me and did not object.
Did someone take those words to heart and snap out of it?
I had no time or space to look.
I heard a faint murmur from somewhere, but I could not tell whose voice it was.
“Graaa.”
The zombie bared its teeth, trying to sink its face into my neck as if to end it.
Is this it?
Surprisingly, I felt no fear of death.
All I had were thoughts that tried to squeeze out whatever options remained.
Boom!
In that split second, a red flash shot in and struck the zombie’s head, then exploded.
The glittering light that fell like dust was the trace of magic.
It was Tania’s spell.
Even without checking it with my own eyes, I knew it was her doing.
As the pressure on my shoulders eased, I shoved the thing away and smashed what was left of its head with my club.
It crumpled like straw with all strength gone and showed no sign of getting back up.
Even so, I slammed the club down several more times out of lingering anxiety, and only when its head turned to mush did I step back.
“Aghhhhhh!”
While I was trying to calm my breathing, a man’s scream rang out.
The voice belonged to Brindel.
I remembered that the zombie that had gone off to the left had headed toward the two boys.
By the time I twisted my body to help, I was one step too late.
The zombie bit into Brindel’s shoulder and shook him violently from side to side.
Dark red blood splattered everywhere.
After tearing off one arm, it did not stop there and went for the boy’s chest.
Even then, Talleon still hesitated to swing his sword.
“You fool! If you are going to carry that as decoration, give it here.”
I snatched the sword from Talleon’s hand.
I gripped the hilt tightly and drove the blade into the neck of the careless zombie.
The thing thrashed its upper body wildly, as if dancing.
I dodged its wildly flailing arms and swung the club into its head.
Thud! With a dull cracking sound, it collapsed on the floor.
I went closer to check its condition.
To leave living prey lying untouched was proof enough that it was dead.
“…M-Mom.”
For a moment, everything felt far away, like a dream.
The sound that pinned my mind back to reality was the moan of the dying Brindel.
I examined the fallen boy.
Blood would not stop gushing from the shoulder where his arm had been torn off.
It was a critical injury, and to restore him completely would require alchemy of a very high level or sacred magic.
Neither was something I could handle right now.
[Cool] advised me to give up.
I felt that it was a cruel decision, yet I agreed it was correct.
“…I want to go home. I am so scared.”
I held his remaining hand.
“Is there really nothing we can do to save him?”
Tania hurried over.
She was crying for a boy she had only met today.
“It is unlikely.”
There was a way to send him off quickly through death and mercy, but that choice was not mine to make.
At best, all I could do was help someone close to him comfort him in his last moments.
I helped the collapsed Talleon to his feet.
I did not feel like scolding him.
It was too much to hold him responsible when he had just gone through something a boy his age could hardly bear.
He had let his friend turn into a zombie, and then watched that changed friend kill another.
The guilt in the corner of his heart was already punishment enough.
“You send him off.”
“…Yes.”
Soon after, Gavinu arrived, carrying rice porridge.
He froze at the scene before him.
The bowl in his hands slipped and fell.
The steaming porridge spilled over the floor.
Before he even heard an explanation, he ran to Brindel.
Death.
When I had only been playing the game, it was a world beyond the monitor, so it never really moved me.
In survival adventure stories, sacrifice was such a common event that it almost felt like a stock scene.
Yet now there was a bitter aftertaste.
It was a cliché, but experiencing it firsthand felt completely different.
I looked with pity at the two who must be drowning in loss.
How should I comfort them?
Unfortunately, among Joshua’s personality traits, there was no [Kindness].
[Cool] advised me that at times like this, saying nothing was better than saying something half baked.
In the end, I could only turn away.
* * *
The professors of the Royal Academy always emphasized the importance of real combat, and even the freshmen curriculum always included a class on hunting wild boars and similar beasts.
The students who excelled in that class enjoyed imagining their future success.
Tania was no different.
She had realized she had a talent for magic when she was eight.
Thanks to the early studying she had done since then, no one among her peers grew as fast as she did.
In particular, she earned praise that no one could match her speed in casting spells.
‘I really misunderstood everything.’
They had dressed it up as close to real battle, yet it was only a class.
Every advantage had been prepared for the students, and the professors had been there as a safety net.
She should not have believed that what she showed then was everything she had.
Real combat was unfair.
If she failed, there would be no one to shield her.
She was furious at herself for failing to realize such an obvious truth.
‘Pathetic Tania, how can you be five seconds slower than usual at casting? On top of that, the flame was too small. It was a miracle that it actually exploded. Your aim shook so much that you could have hit senior instead.’
All the skills she had been so proud of had lost their shine.
If her full power was one hundred percent, had she even drawn out forty?
Maybe she had been even more useless than she thought.
For Tania, who had always heard people call her a top student, this was a shame she could not wash away.
‘This will not do. I am just getting in the way, aren’t I? What would the rest of my family say if they saw me like this? They would probably clutch their stomachs and burst out laughing. They are exactly that kind of people.’
They could not just treat it as a stroke of luck that they had survived this time.
She had to review.
She had to make sure she never repeated the same mistake in a similar situation.
Yet every time she replayed the image of herself from before, she covered her face in embarrassment.
She could not take a single step.
The monster wearing human skin right in front of her had filled her with indescribable terror.
‘If senior had not been in front of me, that thing would have come for me. I probably would have died without even putting up a fight.’
The image of the dead boy, Brindel, flickered through her mind.
Her stomach churned so badly she felt like vomiting.
Let’s get up.
Lying on the bed would not bring her sleep.
She grabbed the lantern Talleon had given her and stepped outside.
Joshua had wrapped the three corpses in spare blankets and moved them to an empty room.
He had explained that they would never get back up again.
He seemed to know a lot about these monsters.
But even if the bodies were gone, the oppressive air did not disappear.
‘I don’t think the night explorations were even this bad.’
She remembered a fad from last summer.
Night exploration.
Once darkness fell, they would climb a mountain or visit ruins to test their courage.
Tania had taken part often.
There were times when she had training at night, so the goal had been to grow used to the dark.
The scariest place of all had probably been the abandoned storage shed in the northwest of the Academy.
She had gone inside to look around and had screamed when she found an animal carcass.
Some might have brushed it off as nothing, but to her it was a horrifying memory, enough to leave a trauma.
The sight that spread out before her now was easily twice as frightening as that corpse had been.
‘Is he insane? Or is he just extraordinary.’
In the chilling darkness, without even a single light, Joshua sat reading a book.
Because the surroundings were so silent, the sound of pages turning rang clearly in her ears.
She approached slowly.
Most people would have jumped at unexpected footsteps, yet he did not lift his eyes from the book.
His face already showed that he had predicted the newcomer would not be a monster.
“…Are you not tired, senior?”
Joshua sat on a chair, guarding the main entrance of the dormitory.
He was an impressive person.
He must have been more exhausted than anyone else, yet he had volunteered to stand watch.
“I am tired. But the fight earlier caused too much noise for me to sleep right away. The bastards outside could come in, and the ones upstairs could come down too. I will not feel at ease until we stand watch for a few hours.”
“Then I will take over. You should go in and rest.”
“You do not need to push yourself. You must be just as drained as those boys.”
Tania wondered.
Was he really that infamous flunked student people only whispered about?
Maybe he simply had the same name as someone else.
She wanted to ask him clearly, yet she knew it would be rude, so she held back.
She did not want to make things awkward between them.
“Have you checked the dining hall, senior?”
“Yes. There is enough to last us comfortably for two weeks. If we ration it hard, we can go longer. I plan to manage it myself, you have no complaints, right?”
“None. There is no way I would.”
At the very least, among the survivors in Dormitory Four, there was no one who doubted Joshua.
He was their savior.
If someone refused to acknowledge that, she would personally make that person understand.
“What will happen to us, senior?”
“For now, you do not need to worry. That much I can say for certain.”
“Until the food runs out, right?”
“No. A little longer than that.”
“…I do not know where your confidence comes from, senior, but I am honestly jealous. Or are you just worried that I will have a hard time with the truth? If that is it, do not be. I prefer the truth to pretty lies. So next time, tell me plainly. That we are doomed.”
Joshua gave a faint smirk.
He shrugged his shoulders and went on.
“We are doomed? No. The only reason you can say that so easily is because you have never truly experienced what it is like when things are really doomed.”
This was why newbies were a problem.
They had no idea how generous this starting point actually was.