Chapter 85

Chapter 85

I Became the Academy Mafia Chapter 85The Foreigner Area.

A place within the Republic of Korea where the laws of the Republic of Korea could not properly exert their authority.

Yet this was also a place where statistics for violent crime were lower than anywhere else in the Republic of Korea.

The reason was...

“You've got quite the nerve. Robbery in Calione's territory, of all places.”

“Ghk... urgh...!”

Because Calione's laws were not included in the statistics.

“S-sorry! P-please, just give me one chance...!”A dark back alley in Sector C's entertainment district.

There was currently a man there, pinned beneath a maid and desperately begging for his life.

I didn't know his name, but judging by the tattoos on his face, he seemed to be a member of a local gang. He had tried to extort valuables from a passing drunk, only to be caught by us and end up in this state.

“Young Master. What shall we do?”

Alessia asked how we should dispose of him.

In a situation like this, it was Calione's rule, and the law of the Foreigner Area, for me, as the superior, to decide his punishment.

“The hand that held the knife. Break it.”

“Understood.”

Without the slightest hesitation at my answer, Alessia twisted his arm in an instant.

“Aaaaaaagh!!”

With a crunch, a new joint appeared in his arm and his scream echoed through the alley.

Passersby glanced over to see what was happening, but after confirming the sight of me in a black suit and Alessia in a maid uniform, they continued on their way as though nothing had happened.

“Ghk! Ghhhhh...!”

“Judging by your face, you're new around here. Did you come in recently?”

I gestured for Alessia, who was restraining him, to move aside, then crouched in front of him.

“I trust you understand very well why you're in this state.”

“I understand...! I understand...!”

He answered while trembling.

I lightly patted his bald head with my palm and spoke.

“There won't be a next time. Go tell your friends, your companions, your boss, whoever. If you pull this kind of shit one more time in Calione's territory, then next time we'll turn you into a beehive. Make sure they come prepared for that. Understood?”

“...

Yes! I'll tell them! I definitely will!”

That should be enough.

“Go.”

“Thank you! Thank you!”

At my order to leave, he sprang to his feet using his remaining hand, bowed repeatedly, then ran off as though fleeing.

As I watched his back disappear, Alessia's voice came from behind me.

“You're not going to kill him?”

“I don't particularly want to see blood.”

And I also intended to use him as a kind of warning.

If we killed him and cleaned up afterward, no one would know what happened today, but by letting him live and sending him back, we could keep them under tighter control.

At my gesture, several organization members who had been waiting began following him.

“Word that we've arrived should've spread around here, so let's check the other side for a bit before heading back.”

“I'll follow your lead.”

Even so, today was relatively peaceful compared to usual.

When I came out with Parnello last time, a street vendor got caught up in a fight between gangs, so Parnello personally wiped out every single one of them on the spot, then used their money to compensate the merchants for repairs and damages.

After dealing with them, nothing else happened during our night walk.

Just drunks passing by and part-time workers from entertainment establishments stopping to greet us as they went by?‘Still, the atmosphere is more subdued than usual.’There were fewer people walking around than normal.

The place where that robber appeared earlier was usually busy enough that a crime couldn't have happened there.

Considering the influx of unfamiliar faces and various other things, I could somehow feel that the atmosphere had changed.

“Young Master.”

While we were slowly walking through the district as I remained lost in thought.

Alessia, who had been walking ahead, suddenly stopped.

Did something else happen?

But the surroundings were extremely quiet.

When I looked puzzled, Alessia pointed somewhere and spoke with a serious expression.

“...

That.”

That?

Looking where Alessia pointed, I saw a small shop.

The name written on the sign was [Egg Bread].

“Buy me some.”

She... very confidently demanded that I buy her egg bread.

“...

You want me to buy it?”

“Yes. The truth is, I left my wallet behind.”

“You can pay with your phone these days.”

“I left it behind.”

“You had it earlier.”

“It disappeared.”...

Doesn't she just want me to treat her?

Well, it wasn't expensive, and she'd driven me all the way here, so I let out a small sigh and bought her a bag.

She hugged the bag with a bright smile and immediately took a big bite out of one.

“This is nice. Warm too. Ah, Young Master, would you like one?”

Saying that, she handed me a piece of egg bread.

I'm the one who bought it. Was she seriously planning to eat all of it by herself?!

“...

Sure. Thanks.”

Well, she gave me one anyway, so I suppose it doesn't matter.

I took one and bit into it.

The taste of ordinary egg bread.

But Alessia, walking beside me, was chewing away at hers with great enthusiasm as though it were incredibly delicious.

“Did you always like egg bread?”

At my question, Alessia tilted her head.

Gulp.

She swallowed the egg bread.

“Egg bread? Hmm... if you ask whether I like it, I suppose I do. I have good memories associated with it.”

“Good memories?”

“That's a secret. They're precious memories.”

Alessia smiled as she answered my question.

“Now then, I think we've enjoyed enough of a little deviation. The patrol is almost over as well... shall we head back?”

“Yeah, we should head back.”

I said that and turned around.

“Young Master? The motorcycle is this way...”

Alessia looked flustered when I suddenly started walking in the opposite direction and raised my hand toward the roadside.

I turned my head toward Alessia and smiled playfully.

“Taxi.”

Honestly, your motorcycle is a little scary.

____________

The next day.

“Looking at the research conducted thus far, we can say that dungeons are created under the influence of what we call ‘mana.’ Aura and mana only began to be observed in earnest after dungeons appeared, and concepts surrounding them gradually began to form afterward.”

The students of Class A found themselves facing Dungeon Studies, a class known as a sleeping pill from the very first lesson.

The instructor's gentle voice and the utterly boring lesson content were already slowly draining the students' energy.

But what could they do? Dungeon Studies was a required subject for heroes who entered dungeons.

“Nothing has been perfectly established regarding the emergence of dungeons. However, scientists speculate that dungeons are signs that Unification

with external worlds is progressing. In other words, our world is gradually merging with other worlds. The increasing amounts of mana and aura are evidence of that.”

And one of the authorities in Dungeon Studies was the instructor passionately lecturing before us right now, ‘Park Hak-su.’

“Now, if we look at some of the representative papers... hm?”

Park Hak-su, who had been absorbed in his lecture, suddenly noticed how quiet the students were and stopped speaking.

“Good grief... everyone's eyes are dead. Completely dead. Yeah, Dungeon Studies really is boring, isn't it?”

When Park Hak-su muttered that with a gloomy expression, the students shook their heads.

“No? It's interesting?”

But when the ‘Yes~’ Park Hak-su had hoped for failed to come, he shook his head with an expression that said, Of course.

“Right, this isn't some academic seminar, and I've been talking about nothing but the lesson. Then... how about I tell you something that'll wake you up around here? You all saw the news about the prisoners who escaped from Niflheim this time, right?”

The students, who had been slumped over from the boring material until now, slowly raised their heads or began showing interest when the recent issue came up.

“Ha, look at you lot. I change the subject and your eyes immediately clear up? Well, I suppose television and the internet have been going crazy over this story lately.”

Just as Instructor Park Hak-su said, the issue currently heating up the Republic of Korea was the story of the villains who escaped from Niflheim.

Recent investigations by the prosecution and police had revealed that the villains had illegally entered Korea, so naturally the matter was drawing just as much attention in society and at the Academy.

Of course, all the prosecution and police had actually done was announce the information submitted by Dike Law Firm as though they'd investigated it themselves.

“Anyway, among the ones who escaped this time is a fellow called ‘the Miner.’ His ability is ‘Excavation.’ It's an ability that lets him break apart even the hardest ore as easily as sponge cake.”

At the time, Korea had been overflowing with dungeons.

It wasn't a particularly useful ability for clearing them, but if he'd used it properly, it would've undoubtedly been a great help.

But he didn't.

“Instead, he took advantage of the chaos to rob the hardest places around. For example... bank vaults.”

Korea at the time had been miserable enough to be called a dark age.

Compared to other countries, its small territory meant the damage was somewhat limited, but the few heroes available had been deployed en masse to dungeons appearing throughout the country, and the laws were still too poorly established to stop people like him.

“But among the places he robbed was the Korean Mana Stone Repository. The highest-grade facility in the Republic of Korea. It was a place that stored mana stones that were practically considered national treasures. But do you know what happened there...?”

As the story gradually became more interesting, the students began to focus.

Park Hak-su, who had been building the suspense, suddenly clapped his hands and shouted.

“Boom!!”

The students jumped in surprise.

He smiled, looking extremely satisfied with their reactions.

“Hahahaha! Yes, everyone reacted exactly like that. Those expensive mana stones got caught in an explosion. But the surprise didn't last long. Why? Because unlike other minerals, mana stones aren't affected by ordinary explosions.”

They were affected only by attacks using aura or mana, so ordinary impacts couldn't even crack them.

That was why the Miner thought.‘Nothing will happen anyway.’

“The problem was this. At the point of the explosion, signs of a dungeon suddenly began appearing.

And that's how we managed to catch the Miner. He got trapped inside that dungeon.”

He laughed cheerfully. The students also chuckled at the story of the villain's terrible luck.

“Well, that's why the fellow called the Miner is fairly famous in Dungeon Studies. The timing was so perfect that afterward everyone focused on that phenomenon. What if a concentrated mass of pure mana receives a powerful external stimulus, causing a crack in reality and creating a dungeon? That was the idea.”

In other words, people wondered whether it might be possible to create a dungeon artificially.

At that, a student sitting in the front raised a hand and asked.

“Then what happened to that hypothesis? Did they succeed?”

“Haha, succeed? Have you ever heard of anyone creating artificial dungeons that way?”

At those words, Park Hak-su chuckled and gave them the answer.

“Of course it failed. Quite a few people challenged that research, but a hypothesis was only a hypothesis. Nothing like that ever happened. Not even with highly pure, high-grade mana stones. Still, that incident gave us a great deal of research data about mana stones, and those findings eventually led to the development of many modern artifacts. See? Isn't Dungeon Studies pretty interesting when you look at it this way?”

Unlike before, this time a chorus of “Yes” came from the students.

Park Hak-su smiled warmly at them.

“Good, then now that everyone seems a little more awake, shall we continue the lesson? As for what effect shattered mana stones have on the atmosphere, we can look at the paper I was about to discuss earlier...”

The other students sighed as he naturally connected everything he'd just said back into the lesson, as though the whole story had merely been setup.

____________

-Whiiiiir. Thunk. Whiiiiir. Thunk.

A warehouse filled only with the repeated sounds of conveyor belts.

Countless vacuum pistons moved diligently, producing repetitive noises, while pure white steam constantly poured out and spread faintly through the air.

“Haaaa... troublesome. How troublesome.”

And amid that steam, a dark figure began to move.

A man dragging strips of yellowed bandages along the ground suddenly stopped and looked toward the sky.

“One dead and three missing. Do you think that makes sense?”

Whoosh.

He turned, revealing the shape of his face.

An unidentified man whose entire body was wrapped in ancient, worn-out bandages.

At a single word from him, the ground trembled and the steam began to rage.

“Move the schedule forward. So that there can be no further interference. So that everyone will understand our message.”

At his words, everyone around him looked at him with fearful eyes, clenched their fists to stop themselves from trembling, and nodded.

Because before him in his anger, the only freedom permitted to them was to nod.

Amid that cold atmosphere──“Ring around the rosie──”

The bandaged man began humming a song.

Ring around the rosie.(Let's circle around the roses.)A pocket full of posies.(A pocket full of flowers.)Ashes! ashes!(Ashes! Ashes!)We all fall down!(We all ended up falling down!)

Despite the song's unmistakably bright tone, the atmosphere became even colder.

At last, he solemnly declared.

“──Tell them that the Great Plague has begun.”