Chapter 64: Interlude (2) – The Scar of the Spider

A week had passed since I achieved the “honor” of ranking 253rd out of 253 cadets in the Warrior Division, and the buzz that had ignited the academy over the midterm evaluation results had started to die down. It was then that I received a summons from Professor Baldwin.

As I stepped inside her office, I saw Professor Baldwin, dressed in her usual crisp black suit, sitting with one leg crossed over the other.

“You’re here,” she said.

“What is this about?” I asked.

“The investigation results are in.”

“Investigation?”

She took a drag from the cigarette between her fingers, then looked down at the thick stack of documents with an indifferent expression. “The crocodile and wolf-type demonic monsters that appeared during the exam were, as expected, familiars of the Archbishop of Beasts, Jackal.”

“Jackal…”

An Archbishop’s involvement was, of all the possibilities we had considered, the worst-case scenario. I wasn’t sure if the future had changed or if I had simply missed the signs in my previous life, but one thing was clear: once again, an Archbishop-level demon was scheming something within the academy.

“Were you able to figure out what his objective was?” I asked.

Professor Baldwin took a deep inhale from her cigarette and shook her head slightly. “I can’t say for certain. But one strange monster stood out.”

“A strange monster?”

So, there was another creature besides the crocodile and wolf monsters? I thought.

She exhaled slowly, opened a drawer, and pulled something out. “This one.”

In her hands was a bizarre creature that resembled a grotesque leech, with a sucker for draining blood. In the center of the sucker blinked a single eye, no larger than a fingernail.

It surprised me. “This…”

“We found this attached to Yuren’s body,” she explained.

“It was on Yuren’s body?”

That couldn’t be. I had personally cast a barrier around Yuren to repel demonic monsters. Granted, the barrier was ineffective against demonic monsters with multiple eyes, but this leech-like thing had only one eye. There was no way it could’ve bypassed the barrier and latched onto him.

Suddenly, a quiet realization slipped past my lips. “Ah!”

The crocodile monster had shattered the barrier midway through. During the chaos of the ensuing battle that I had with the crocodile monster, this leech-like monster must have latched onto Yuren.

“Fufu! Seems like you have figured it out as well.” Professor Baldwin narrowed her eyes as she continued, “I don’t have concrete evidence, but I suspect the crocodile monster’s sudden rampage was all to allow this leech monster to get close to Yuren.”

So, the crocodile monster’s true goal was to destroy the barrier I had created? Come to think of it, the monster destroyed the barrier immediately after I was thrown away.

Back then, I had assumed it did so to get closer to Yuren. But the crocodile monster was powerful enough to remain unaffected by a barrier that repelled demonic monsters. Yet it had destroyed the barrier surrounding Yuren, as if that had been its primary objective from the start.

Wait! So in my previous life, the crocodile monster never appeared because there was no barrier? I wondered.

The puzzle pieces scattered across my mind finally began to fit together. I narrowed my eyes and pieced it through. The wolf-type monsters Jackal released were also present in my past life. It was one of those very wolves that had torn into my neck and killed me for the first time. In other words, even in my previous life, Jackal had released his familiars inside the exam grounds.

So, what was the purpose of releasing the wolves back then? He was trying to locate Yuren. Wolf-type monsters had a keen sense of smell and remarkable speed. On top of that, they tended to move in packs, which allowed them to carry out coordinated searches, a perfect tool for tracking someone down.

Once they found Yuren in my previous life, Jackal had likely waited for the right moment to attach this leech monster. But this time, a variable had appeared. Someone named Dale Han had come out of nowhere and set up a demonic monster-repelling barrier around Yuren.

That was why Jackal had to send out the crocodile monster, something he hadn’t planned to use originally. The monster’s goal was to break the barrier and allow the leech to get to Yuren.

Now that I had unraveled the chain of events, a dry laugh escaped me. “Ha!”

Jackal had been so desperate to attach the leech monster to Yuren that I became curious about what it was. I peered into the jar to look closer at the squirming leech-like thing. Aside from its grotesque appearance, I didn’t find any clue as to what made it so special. So, I glanced at Professor Baldwin, hoping she might know more.

However, she said, “I have no idea what abilities it possesses either.”

“Not even with your Blessing of Insight?”

“If my blessing could uncover every secret in the world, I wouldn’t need to sneak around investigating things like this.” She let out a wry chuckle and sighed deeply. “In any case, that’s everything I’ve been able to uncover.”

While we had figured out how Jackal had attached the monster to Yuren, the most crucial question—“why Yuren?”—remained unanswered.

“No leads on tracking Jackal himself, I suppose,” I asked.

“None, unfortunately,” Professor Baldwin replied, absentmindedly brushing her fingers over the scar running beneath her left eye, a faintly bitter expression crossing her face.

I looked at her. “That scar, is it related to Jackal?”

“What made you think that?”

“You touch it every time you talk about him.”

She gave a dry laugh, as if she found the notion ridiculous. “Ha. You linked me and Jackal together just because of that?”

The truth was, I had already suspected a connection between them thanks to memories from my previous life. But I didn’t bother explaining that to her.

After a long pause, Professor Baldwin finally spoke, her voice quiet, almost detached. “I was born in a small village tucked away in the far reaches of the Empire.”

She lit a fresh cigarette and took a long draw. “It was such an obscure place, it didn’t even have a name.”

Smoke drifted upward, gray and hazy, and she continued, “The peaceful village was wiped off the map one day by a single demon.”

There was no need to ask who that demon was.

“He said he wanted to test out the power of a new familiar he had just tamed,” she said coldly. The end of her cigarette burned a soft red, like the glow of a memory soaked in blood. “It didn’t take him even ten minutes to slaughter all hundred or so villagers.”

In just ten minutes, her entire life had been shattered, so thoroughly destroyed it could never be restored.

“I was lucky enough to survive.” She traced the scar beneath her left eye, her smile bitter and hollow. “Though I was left with this hideous reminder…”

Professor Baldwin shrugged nonchalantly, as if it were nothing of importance. “Heh. Don’t make such a serious face. It’s a common story, really.”

Suddenly, a memory from my previous life flashed through my mind—the tale of Elisha Baldwin, the Cursed-Eye Spider, who took down the Archbishop of Beasts Jackal and met a tragic end. It was a story I had once brushed off as just another war chronicle. But beyond that tale, I now saw the desperate life of a woman playing out in my mind.

She wasn’t wrong about it being a common story. People whose lives had been trampled by demons were everywhere across the continent. There were no grand twists, no heart-stirring epics, no tear-jerking endings. It was just another tragedy, a senseless calamity, a sorrowful tale so ordinary it could have happened anywhere, to anyone.

However, even though it was common, it still hurt. Just because it was predictable, it didn’t mean there were no scars.

Professor Baldwin, expressionless as always, quietly smoked her cigarette. I didn’t know why, but before I realized it, I reached out toward her.

“What are you?” she asked.

“Hold still.” Ignoring her startled expression, I gently touched the scar that ran across her left eye.

“Dale, do you have any idea what you’re doing right now?”

Professor Baldwin glared at me like she might rip my head off at any moment. I was touching a professor without permission. It was bold, no, downright disrespectful—something worthy of immediate punishment.

I gave her a lopsided smile. “I think it’s beautiful.”

“What?”

“You said earlier that it was a hideous scar. But now that I look at it up close, it suits you. It doesn’t look hideous at all. How should I put this… It gives off a kind of wild charm. Without it, your face might look a bit too plain.”

“You…” She opened her mouth as if to retort, but quickly bit her lip instead. With a hasty cough, she whipped her head to the side. “A-hem!”

Through the strands of her short black hair, I could see her earlobes flushed bright red, like apples in the sun.

“These days… Cadets have no sense of propriety when it comes to professors. It’s disgraceful, truly. A sign of the times. In my day, the idea of laying a hand on a professor? It was unthinkable! And you, you touched me? A professor? And then had the audacity to say it was beautiful? That it suits me? What kind of cadet says that to their professor? Not that I’m saying I was entirely displeased, just the tiniest bit flattered maybe, but still, it’s completely unacceptable,” she muttered under her breath, voice barely audible as she hunched over in embarrassment.

“Professor Baldwin?”

Startled, she sprang out of her seat. “Eep!”

The expression on her face was so animated, so alive, that it was hard to believe this was the same woman who usually looked like a block of stone.

“A-anyway! The investigation into Jackal will continue, so Dale, you’re helping. That’s final!” With that abrupt declaration, Professor Baldwin practically bolted from the office in a flurry.

Left alone in her office, I glanced at the half-smoked cigarette in the ashtray, gently extinguishing it.

“Jackal, huh.”

A fleeting thought crossed my mind: Maybe the people I needed to protect in this life weren’t just the comrades I knew in the last one.

***

From a distance, the creature looked like a mountain made of fur, a massive demonic monster whose sheer size defied logic. Atop the monster, which had no less than eleven eyes, sat an old man.

The old man looked down at the palm of his hand, which was etched with a complex pattern, and let out a sigh. “Haa!

Poor thing. What a shame!”

The markings on his wrinkled skin looked faded, like they had been scraped off.

He clicked his tongue in feigned disappointment. “Tsk. And I was fond of that one, too.”

Despite his words, the look in his eyes was detached, like he was staring at the crushed remains of a dead ant on the roadside. Then, the air around him twisted. Out of the distortion appeared a young man with pure white hair, casually walking through the air as if he were stepping on invisible platforms.

Upon spotting the old man, he offered a polite bow. “There you are.”

“Oh ho, you’ve arrived!” said the old man.

“It’s been a while, Lord Jackal.” The white-haired youth smiled brightly and adjusted his golden monocle. “How did the task I requested go?”

“Hehehe. Who do you think I am? Of course, I succeeded. Though, there was a bit of an unexpected snag.”

“A snag?”

“Crocker is dead,” Jackal said.

“Crocker?” The youth furrowed his brow, trying to recall the name. “Ah, you mean the crocodile-type monster.”

“That’s the one.”

“Hah! Your naming sense is still as… straightforward as ever.”

Jackal blinked in genuine confusion. “Hm? What’s wrong with Crocker?”

The white-haired youth simply shrugged in silence, then said, “Anyway, since an eight-eyed demonic monster died during a cadet exam, a professor must’ve intervened?”

“Hmph. As if cadets could take down Crocker. Of course, it was definitely a professor.”

“Then odds are, it was Elisha Baldwin.”

Jackal said in annoyance, “Yeah. That sly spider caught my scent again.”

“Well, as you said, that is rather troublesome.”

Jackal clicked his tongue, his brow deeply furrowed. “Indeed! That poor girl. She must’ve watched her parents get torn to pieces right before her eyes at such a young age.”

The white-haired youth frowned, visibly displeased as he watched Jackal feign pity. He said, “Let’s get back to the point.”

“Ah, yes. Trouble aside, I did find what you asked for.” Jackal let out a rasping, metallic chuckle as he rubbed a sigil engraved on his forearm. The symbol faded, and blood oozed from it onto his fingertip.

He licked the blood and continued, “Just as you suspected, Yuren Helios doesn’t bear the soul stigmata of the Sun God. It’s the Moon God’s.”

The young man with the golden monocle smiled as he adjusted it again. “I see.”

Jackal tilted his head. “But what does that mean? Even if he bears the Moon God’s soul stigmata, it doesn’t stop him from wielding the Sun Sword Style.”

With a knowing smirk, the youth gave a casual shrug. “Haha. Well, do you think she will see it that way?”

“Mephisto, just what are you planning?” Jackal asked.

The Archbishop of Depravity, Mephisto, turned his eyes toward the distant mansion of House Helios and grinned. “You’ll find out soon enough. For when the sun is swallowed by the moon…”

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