I Got a Fake Job at the Academy

Chapter 734 - Side Story 7: The Scent of Water (2)

The official who received the Emperor's decree stepped forward and recited Heathcliff's crimes one after another.

The lengthy list of crimes was something Rudger was well aware of. Of course, crimes he hadn't actually committed were also mixed in. This too was part of the plan.

If he was going to go anyway, it was better to take on more crimes.

"The criminal, Heathcliff van Bretus, is sentenced to death!"

Waaaaaaah!!!

The citizens cheered so loudly the square seemed to shake. The terror by his followers was enough to make even those who had no particular thoughts about the current situation harbor hostile feelings toward the Demon King.

Rudger and Casey silently watched the scene.

-Clunk.

The executioner wearing a pitch-black hood pulled the lever that pronounced death. Then the gallows floor collapsed inward and Heathcliff's body dropped down. That sight looked like a mannequin surviving on just a single thread.

From a distance, Rudger captured that image clearly in his eyes.

Heathcliff van Bretus, once his own identity and the essence of this life. The end of the Demon King who had made the world buzz ended far too emptily.

Yes. An ending is just that empty.

There was no grand finale to a glorious journey. In the flow of the world, someone's end is merely a process stuck in the middle of that flow.

"How do you feel? You're making a new start."

Casey asked, resting her chin on her hand. Her eyes seemed to say that at least for this moment, it was okay to be honest.

"Surprisingly, I don't feel much at all." 

"What kind of reaction is that? Really?" 

"Yes. I didn't actually die, a double died in my place. What disappeared is just traces of my past." 

"But that's still you." 

"Perhaps I'm a little satisfied."

Yes, if he had to choose one emotion dwelling beneath the calm surface of this moment, it was enough to call this satisfaction.

What died was not the Demon King but a double. But people remember him as the Demon King. That man's real name and real face disappeared, covered only by the illusion of the Demon King.

He felt no compassion for that nameless condemned prisoner who had died. Being placed in that position meant that person had also committed crimes worthy of it.

Instead, Rudger watched the people shouting in celebration of the Demon King's death. They rejoiced that complete peace had come to the world. Or felt satisfaction at the eradication of evil.

Those ear-ringing, noisy cheers would eventually subside. What would come then would be desolate silence.

Eventually, the existence called the Demon King would be forgotten, and that memory would remain in the quiet as something called a record. A world where no one speaks and it's only quiet. Wouldn't that be true rest?

"You did well. Rest peacefully."

Rudger murmured quietly to the Demon King Heathcliff, to himself who had now disappeared.

The self that remained must still go on living.

Even with the Demon King's death, time flows. The world moves toward the future. He who exists within it is the same. So there was no need to feel bitterness, compassion, or relief at that sight.

This was not an end but a new beginning. So there was no need to be too attached.

Rudger, who had closed his eyes tightly for a moment, finished organizing his thoughts and opened them. His sapphire-bright blue eyes shone with incomparable calmness.

"You're more sentimental than I thought."

Casey, who had been quietly watching, said. The melancholic appearance was unfamiliar, so unlike Rudger's usual self.

"I've changed over three years too." 

"Ah. I suppose so."

Casey understood. Three years was long if you considered it long, short if you considered it short. Some wouldn't change, but for others it was enough time to change.

Hadn't Rudger experienced many things in particular? Considering that, Rudger actually belonged to the side that had remained consistent.

It wasn't that he hadn't changed. But it looked good. If before he was someone who would see something precarious and rush toward it recklessly, now he had become someone who knew how to rest leisurely.

'He really has changed.'

Casey felt a strange sensation at that sight. She couldn't shake the thought that he had changed, that there was no returning to the past.

Whether that was good or bad, she couldn't answer as her current self.

"The commotion seems to be dying down, so shall we get up?" 

"We should. They seem to have noticed our presence too."

The knights couldn't have been unaware after they subdued the followers so spectacularly. Before things got bigger and more troublesome, the two stood up from their seats without saying who would go first.

"Lady Casey Selmore! Please wait, we need to talk!"

From the first floor, someone climbed the stairs with an urgent cry. The moment Casey felt awkward about having missed the timing to escape, Rudger extended his hand.

"What's this all of a sudden?" 

"I'll escort you at least. Lady."

Casey accepted with a playful smile at those words.

"If you'll go that far, I won't refuse. Sir."

Casey took Rudger's hand. The shadow flowing from Rudger's body swallowed Casey and Rudger's forms and then contracted into a black dot in the air.

After a moment, no one remained in that place. The Empire official who belatedly climbed to the second floor could only stare helplessly at the empty table.

"Anyway, it's so annoying. Wherever I go, people come and beg me to please stay."

A park at a considerable distance from the square. Because of the Demon King's execution, the park was unusually empty of people.

Rudger and Casey walked along the well-maintained park path.

"It's always like this. They try everything to make the Colour Magician stay in their country. Plus some families keep making advances." 

"Sounds like you've been busy in various ways." 

"That's why I just always ran away. What can you do? If I run, they can't catch me anyway. At least the Empire has less of that tendency, but this time I made too flashy an appearance, so I can't help it."

Casey chattered on, pouring out complaints about what she had experienced in the past. Rudger quietly listened to Casey's words.

"So what have you been doing lately?" 

"What, me?" 

"Yes. Didn't I ask earlier too? That you looked tired recently." 

"Uh......"

Casey trailed off, not expecting Rudger to remember.

"Just, you know, magic training?" 

"The Colour Magician is training now? Besides, on that day three years ago, didn't you already surpass the realm?" 

"......You knew all along?" 

"I could feel it." 

"Ah, right. If an 8th Circle Magician says so, then that must be it." 

"So what's the real reason?"

Rudger stared directly at Casey. Facing those unwavering eyes, Casey turned her head with slightly flushed cheeks.

"Well...... I've been in a bit of a slump recently." 

"......A slump?"

It was a word he couldn't understand. Casey Selmore, a Colour Magician, in a slump? As he had just said, for her who had already surpassed the realm of her magic, a slump was impossible.

That meant there was a problem on another front. Could there be a problem for Casey, who was a genius detective, a Colour Magician, and even a daughter of a famous magic family?

Perhaps because of Rudger's incredulous look, Casey said indignantly:

"I'm busy with other things too, you know?" 

"Weren't you doing detective work?" 

"Detective work......I'm taking a bit of a break from that."

Judging by her reaction, that period seemed to have been quite a long time.

"Just, my head has been complicated in various ways. I don't even know if this is right or not. After going through that battle, I wondered what it was all about."

Casey, who had thought evil should be eradicated from the world, became a detective who caught criminals.

Of course, that was also a kind of justification she chose to escape from the stifling confines of the Selmore family.

But Casey took pride in being a detective and always did her best in her activities. However, the foundation of her work as a detective began to shake after meeting Rudger.

James Moriarty. One who became an evildoer himself and chose to sacrifice to reveal the hotbed of crime that no one could uncover.

Casey, who felt a deep sense of defeat from him, obsessively chased Moriarty's traces.

That's how she came to meet Rudger, and through several clashes with him, experienced various incidents.

Casey had no choice but to deeply contemplate good and evil, right and wrong.

With the end of the holy war, Rudger disappeared, and her older sister, the family head, had to rest due to the effects of mind control.

No matter how much she disliked Selmore and left the family, she couldn't continue detective work like a tomboy.

"So I wandered a bit. What I should do in this world, what I could do. Things like that." 

"Rather ordinary concerns that anyone might have." 

"Then Betty told me. How about trying to write?" 

"Write?" 

"Yeah. Like a diary. She said my life was interesting, so it would probably be fun just to write about it. It's just like a childish idea, but I didn't think it was so bad. So I tried it."

So Casey wrote.

"Stories about cases I solved. It's autobiographical, but it would be awkward to feature myself too openly, right?" 

"I didn't know you had shame about that sort of thing. When we first met, you were......Hmm." 

"Back then I was also, you know, in an arrogant phase, so I couldn't help it! Anyway, back to the story, I didn't want to make it too obviously about me, so I gave it a bit of variation." 

"What kind of variation?" 

"Just, I changed the narrator of the story to a man. And well, added various settings......"

In other words, she wrote an autobiographical story, but the actual characters became a novel mixed with fictional elements.

"Did that become a problem?" 

"A problem, maybe it is."

Casey answered with a hollow voice, as if she found it absurd herself.

"It became too popular." 

"......?"

Rudger thought his ears had failed him for a moment. Too popular? Who? No, what?

"I'm having trouble understanding, what popularity are you talking about?" 

"I mean the protagonist of the story I wrote." 

"That's you though." 

"I changed the gender and changed the personality a bit, and well anyway changed various things! Only the story is autobiographical, the character is different!" 

"Anyway, so?" 

"I just shut myself in at home and wrote stories like that. As I did it, I could look back on my past and think 'so I was like this back then,' and my gloomy mood improved. But then my older sister saw it."

Casey's older sister, Marias Selmore saw the story Casey had written and submitted it to a publisher without her permission.

"I guess it looked really interesting to my sister. She did such a thing without my permission. I hurriedly got angry asking why she did such a thing, but it was already too late."

The publisher believed without doubt that this story would be a huge hit, and immediately made it into a book and sold it.

The genre was mystery novels. It was already a somewhat popular genre, but the problem was its popularity.

"The story I wrote became too famous among people." 

"......"

It was an absurd story, but surprisingly it was true.

The story Casey wrote was different from other mystery novels. The story containing the vivid experiences of Casey who had actually done detective work boasted a considerable level just from that alone.

Moreover, magical knowledge was added. The appearance of a new protagonist as a magic detective gave readers a fresh shock.

People gradually became absorbed in the protagonist, and the books that came out sold like hotcakes.

"Even now, if you just go to bookstores in the Empire, the bestseller section is plastered only with the books I wrote." 

"......"

Rudger realized that Casey's words were not meant to tease him.

"Then that slump you mentioned......" 

"Right. It's because of what I write. It became so popular that I can't bring myself to do anything else besides this." 

"......Then wouldn't it be fine to just end the story?" 

"I tried to end it! I did too! But the people from the publishing company came to find me, got on their knees, and begged me to please force myself to write the next work, so what could I do!"

That's right. Because it was so popular, just the scale of book sales had already reached the level of a mid-sized company.

If Casey stopped writing here, that enormous revenue would literally be cut off.

"Then the reason you came here......" 

"Well, I came to see your face since I heard you'd returned, but I also ran away because I didn't want to write. No, more precisely, there's also the fact that I ended the story rather shockingly." 

"Shockingly?" 

"Look at this."

Casey took out a newspaper clipping from a few days ago and showed it to Rudger.

[Shocking! Famous novel's detective protagonist falls off cliff waterfall and dies!]

It was somehow familiar content.