I Have No Intention Of Training The Male Leads - Chapter 14 Part 8

14. If You Want to Use… (8)

Translated by: ???

“At first, I thought it was strange. When I first heard the aide’s explanation, I thought he was a good-for-nothing who was driven away to a remote territory without anything, but his foundation was quite solid. Didn’t you think it was strange too?”

“……So?”

“Haha. That ?brother?, he’s really a terrifying person. All that raging and pretending to be crazy, slashing around, it was all an act.”

Even though the subject was not clear, and the flow of the speech was not logical, Eve quickly grasped what he meant.

“The prince, no, um, that gentleman?”

“He’s not insane. He’s completely sane. He’s capriciously frantic in front of others, but behind the scenes, he manipulates his people sinisterly. He also prepared the foundation of the ?Grand Duke?.”

“Ha. Somehow, I felt that he was too skillful to be a crazy person, especially when he made his daughter the successor. Anyway, what about the aide?”

“Cedric was ?brother’s? man, so he was kept apart. Some people under me know. The contents have completely changed.”

“……Do you usually call that person ‘brother’?”

“Sometimes.”

“So that’s why you misspoke before.”

Then silence settled again between the two. Eve hesitated and then began to ask the questions she had been wondering about.

“You said you didn’t know what happened. Do you remember… dying at the end?”

“……I remember being pierced in the stomach by the dungeon boss. You were on an outside mission that day. I vaguely remember Hyeseon crying.”

“Ah, right, yes. Hyeseon was the one who took you in for training. It was true sibling love.”

“……I was really scared, thinking I was going to die. I wanted to see my sister the most.”

William, or perhaps Sunho. Unsure what to call him, the man’s hand reached over and covered Eve’s hand, which had been resting on the table with her fist clenched.

People like Hyeseon or Sunho and some juniors from directly under her generation followed the immediate senior Ju-yeong well. Despite no particular memories of being treated well, they had adorably followed her around calling her “Senior, Senior,” and she had even taught them some small skills.

Especially Sunho, the man in front of her, was one of the few juniors who treated her comfortably outside of work hours. In the dungeon, he would always call her “team leader,” using honorifics, but the moment the mission was over, he would affectionately call her “senior” or “sister” and coax her into having a drink with a gentle smile. It was a fond memory.

‘He got so comfortable and even confessed his feelings. The brat fell for me.’

Eve sighed lightly and brushed aside the large hand that had been covering the back of her hand. The man, seemingly accustomed to her gentle rejection, asked her with an unruffled expression.

“When did you end up like that, senior?”

“Not long after you left like that… I don’t know exactly when, but I fell into the water.”

“Water?”

“Water dungeons are my weakness. But the guild leader, that bastard.”

“He forced you into it again, didn’t he?”

“On top of that, it turned out to be a water dungeon that changed ranks. It was a total mess. The C-ranked dungeon suddenly turned into an A-ranked one, the boss was a Hydra, the base camp was utterly destroyed, and the fire-type Esper fainted after taking a wrong hit. In the midst of that, I saw the youngest member being dragged away, lost my mind, and without thinking ahead, I aggroed and couldn’t dodge. So, I was dragged through the water.”

Eve hurriedly mumbled the rest, her expression indifferent as she watched the man’s face pale.

“Setting aside the cause, why this happened is the more important question.”

Seeing Eve’s expression grow gradually more serious after saying that, William cautiously spoke.

“What about the possibility of mental manipulation?”

“I have a passive resistance to special skills, don’t I?”

“But it works on S-ranked or higher, doesn’t it?”

“But there’s no benefit for someone with that level of skill to put this much effort into us. If something bothered them, they would have just killed us cleanly.”

The man clamped his mouth shut, grunting in agreement. She wasn’t wrong, so he made a sound of discomfort. The two of them racked their brains for quite some time, but it was difficult to pinpoint anyone with the ability to create such an implausible situation.

Judging from the past experiences the two had undergone, this phenomenon had far surpassed the realm of illusions that a human could create with a skill. Although it was hard to believe, they had to accept that this situation was not brought about by human intervention.

“……I really thought I had gone mad. I thought I was seeing some kind of hallucination as I was dying, and I lived in a deranged state for over half a year with my eyes open. Throwing things around, screaming. Then I had seizures and almost stopped breathing a few times.”

“……I see. You’ve been through a lot.”

“To be honest, I still don’t know. I wonder if this might be a real hallucination. Maybe my brain is showing me what I want to see as it dies.”

“Hey, what are you saying? Wanting to see your boss’s face when you die?”

“……You’re not just my boss, but my sister.”

“What are you saying? That’s disgusting.”

Eve took the man’s words lightly, as if it were a joke, and took a sip of tea from her cup.

After listening to William’s story about how he had resisted the changed environment for a long time even after waking up in a new body, Eve did not want to confuse the man any further, who seemed to have only just forced himself to come to terms with the situation he was in.

Eve decided to hide the story about ?For Eve?. After sorting out a few pieces of information to share with him in her mind, she finally took her lips away from the teacup.

“First of all, there is something to point out.”

Eve brought to mind the results of her own conjectures, based on the information she had encountered so far.

“Maybe I was more remarkable than I thought.”

“A remarkable person?”

“Do you remember my awakening skill?”

“Vaguely. You didn’t have many combat skills, mostly passives.”

“Right. Thanks to that, as long as the level matched, it was good that I could participate in special attribute dungeons without being restricted by the attributes.”

“But why bring that up all of a sudden?”

“I’ve been investigating something recently. It’s an old story about a goddess or something.”

Soon after, Eve pulled out an old notebook from the pocket of her shabby coat. She calmly read the contents from a page marked with a small scrap of paper that she had spread open.

“The avatars of the gods each excelled in different fields, but regardless of the era, they had certain characteristics. They were not susceptible to any poison, their wounds healed quickly, and their mental strength was so strong that they were not invaded by any curse accompanied by magic. They also had the power to attract the sick and tired, and the misguided beings consumed by anger, and the power to heal the seeds of darkness by blessing them in the name of the goddess.”

“……Wait a moment.”

“Isn’t that a setting we’ve heard a lot before?”

“I’m not sure about the last part, but until then……”

“Poison resistance, special recovery, curse resistance, brainwashing resistance, charm resistance, enchantment. These were all passives I had before. And among the skills I never told others about, there was one I couldn’t use properly because the description part was broken no matter how much I felt it, and that skill’s name was ?Blessing of the Goddess?.”

“……What on earth is that? A fantasy movie? ?Lord of the R*ngs??”

“I don’t know either. What on earth is happening? What the hell is Edward doing, throwing something like this and making people’s heads hurt?”

Eve spat out a light curse without hiding her irritated expression. William reacted sensitively to the familiar name.

“……Come to think of it, it seems like the emperor’s eldest son is bothering you. Can I ask what’s going on between you two?”

“It’s nothing special. There are some kids who strangely cling to me, and he’s one of them.”

“Kid?s?, you say……”

“Yeah. Well, there are a few. Men who are strangely obsessed, to the point where you’d wonder why. It’s not a significant relationship or anything.”

Anyway, muttering that Edward was the craziest of them all, Eve glanced at the face of a man who was originally destined to be one of those crazies.

The impression was distinctly different, whether it was because the contents had changed or not, from what she had seen in the game. Especially when he looked at Eve and seemed to think of ?Ju-yeong?, making an innocent expression, he really looked like some naive puppy.

Eve poured her thoughts out, resting her chin and sitting down, pouring lukewarm tea that had cooled down a bit but still retained some warmth into a teacup.

“That’s not really something to worry about.”

“Hmm. That’s true, probably?”

“……What’s with that ‘probably’?”

“Well, the thing is, I’ve already caused some trouble.”

“Don’t tell me you’ve already taken the initiative and handled it, with the idea that the best defense is a good offense?”