Chapter 338 ·The Villain’s POV in the Academy
Chapter 338: The Villain’s POV in the Academy
“Then we’ll be heading back now~”
“Okay.”
Aaron remained seated as he saw Ciel off when she rose from her seat.
His attitude was so utterly devoid of lingering attachment that even calling it refreshing wouldn’t fully describe it. At this point, one might even wonder whether he had been uncomfortable with their visit in the first place.
But Ciel knew there was absolutely no malice behind Aaron’s attitude.
She responded with a bright smile and stepped out through the front door.
However, Airi was nowhere to be seen. While looking around, Ciel fortunately heard sniffling from a corner of the mansion’s garden, somewhere people’s gazes rarely reached.
Pure white hair swayed gently in the breeze. Ciel slowly approached her from behind.
“Airi~”
“……!”
At Ciel’s voice, Airi hurriedly stood up and wiped her eyes.
She forced herself to smile as if she wanted to insist that nothing had happened. But there was no hiding the rims of her eyes, already flushed red.
“Y-Yeah. Are we leaving?”
“Wouldn’t that be better for you too, Airi~?”
“…….”
“We’re going to come every day from now on anyway~ It’d be better not to push yourself today and just go home~”
At Ciel’s cheerful answer, a single tear streamed down from Airi’s eyes despite her efforts to maintain a poker face.
“S-Sorry. Ahaha…… I’m weird today. Seriously, what’s wrong with me?”
Airi tried to roughly rub her face with her sleeve, but Ciel stopped her. Instead, she took out a handkerchief and carefully dabbed her face with it.
“You even put on makeup because you were coming to see Lord Aaron, but you’ll wipe it all off if you do that~”
“It’s fine. I already rubbed it all off earlier anyway. Besides, the Chairman…….”
Airi fell silent in the middle of speaking.
Then she slowly began again.
“I really wasn’t going to cry today, but it wasn’t easy. I wasn’t like this before, but lately I’ve been bawling like an idiot all the time. I’d already heard everything about the Chairman, and I came here after preparing myself, but the moment I actually saw his face, my mind went blank again. I suddenly got angry, and then started bawling again…….”
“Airi…….”
“You know, Ciel. Why did we fight?”
Airi asked with a hollow laugh.
“This victory came with too many wounds.”
Half the city had collapsed.
Countless people had died and been injured.
They had lost far too much in exchange for escaping the Sky Dragon’s rule.
Was what remained in their hands now truly worth the price they had paid for it?
“Airi, that’s…….”
“I know. The Chairman risked his life fighting because he believed it was worth it. I know that questioning its meaning now would be the same as diminishing the value of what the Chairman did. But…… whenever I look at him like that, I can’t stop thinking about it…… wondering whether it would’ve been better if we’d never fought at all…….”
They had realized something was wrong with Aaron immediately after the battle ended.
After successfully defeating the Sky Dragon in the Red Hunting Ground and barely managing to return to New Valhalla City, what greeted them was a city deeply scarred by the claws of war.
Collapsed buildings and charred-black corpses.
Parents who had lost their children, and children who had lost their parents.
There was no way a catastrophe of this scale would conveniently spare only the people they knew.
Lexus Vane was a prime example.
He had been fighting at the location closest to the Sky Dragon when he was struck by magical lightning unleashed by the Sky Dragon, leaving half his body paralyzed.
The cybernetic device assisting his brain functions had short-circuited inside his head, melted, and fused with his brain.
After a grueling 18-hour surgery, they had managed to remove the mass of plastic fused to it, but he had yet to even regain consciousness. Even if he woke up, it seemed likely that permanent aftereffects would remain.
But the fact that he had survived at all was nothing short of a miracle.
The other Government Special Mission Fixers had all been at the scene, and every one of them died.
Kara, whom Aaron had become acquainted with, was no exception.
Then there were the high-ranking Adaptors affiliated with corporations.
Corporate executives whose workplaces were located in Sector A.
Numerous politicians and legal professionals. The business world and the media.
Even Academy students whose parents belonged to those groups.
The Sky Dragon’s magic had taken lives equally, without regard for affiliation or social rank.
At least the members of the highest social class who had quickly read the situation and hidden themselves in private underground bunkers immediately after the incident, as well as those who had holed themselves up in Elysium without knowing anything, had been fortunate enough to survive.
But Serena Beresford.
She had been among the unlucky ones.
While she hid at home in fear, a massive fireball struck her, leaving her with second-degree burns across her entire body.
Of course, technologically speaking, the injuries were simple to treat, but the psychological shock had been severe, so she was still undergoing treatment.
The Trinity Academy building in Sector B had not escaped disaster either. A stray bombardment spell pierced through it, leaving a massive hole in the western side of the building between the 100th and 150th floors.
Furthermore, one of the five student bunkers had been unlucky enough to suffer a direct hit from magic, killing roughly 30% of the faculty members and Ministry of Science and Technology students sheltering inside.
And Evangeline had been at the Academy.
By extraordinary luck, she had not lost her life, but she had been badly injured after being crushed beneath the collapsing ceiling. The problem was that, because she was a witch, ordinary surgical methods could not be used on her.
They had eventually found a method and treated her, but like Lexus, she remained in a coma.
And.
Aaron’s reaction upon hearing all of that news was.
-I see.
Those were his only words.
The people who heard him at the scene felt an intense sense of incongruity.
The Aaron they knew was not someone who would react so calmly, as though it were someone else’s problem, upon hearing that his people had been hurt.
At first, they thought he was simply exhausted. The battle against the Sky Dragon had been that arduous, and even Aaron couldn’t possibly have emerged without exhaustion.
They assumed he had already been pushed to his mental limits and was simply in no condition to react normally to outside news.
But according to the results of the detailed examination.
There had been another cause.
-Aaron’s Replacement Rate has exceeded 95%.
The cerebral cortex inside his skull had been replaced by machinery, with only about half of it remaining.
Simply put, Aaron had become little different from a cyborg with only 5% of his original body left.
-Have you heard of the Ship of Theseus?
The Ship of Theseus.
After Theseus killed the Minotaur and returned to Athens, the Athenians decided to preserve his ship for many years.
Whenever one of the ship’s planks rotted, they removed the old plank and replaced it with a newer, sturdier one.
As they repeatedly discarded old components and replaced them with new ones, eventually not a single original component of the ship remained.
Then could that ship truly still be called the ‘Ship of Theseus’?
That was the metaphysical conundrum.
Miyu, Aaron’s assigned Moduler, added this explanation.
-It’s the same thing. You cut away the original body and continuously create a new body through modules. Mechanical arms, mechanical legs, a mechanical heart…… How much of a person can you replace before that person’s identity disappears? Unlike the Ship of Theseus, when it comes to humans, there is an answer both legally and technologically. 70%.
A 70% Replacement Rate.
30% of the original body.
That 30% was the minimum condition required to be recognized as human.
Why was that?
-Countless studies have shown that abnormal symptoms begin appearing once the Replacement Rate exceeds 70%.
Of course, some people experience problems at around a 65% Replacement Rate, while others feel absolutely nothing wrong even after exceeding 80%.
Maybe because of that, lately there seem to be people who don’t care about Replacement Rate at all. After all, most Adaptors can’t reach 70% even if they try.
In any case, Aaron has always been naturally very compatible with various modules, so he’d be closer to the latter, while Airi would be closer to the former.
There were many different kinds of abnormal symptoms.
But they shared several common traits, the most important being that module removal became impossible.
When a module was removed, the original body would normally be restored with the help of nanomachines, but once the critical threshold was crossed, the body restoration function would shut down due to errors.
Some also experienced phantom pain in areas replaced by modules, or became unable to move their bodies despite there being no mechanical abnormalities whatsoever.
-Airi was one of those cases. When the Replacement Rate suddenly rises, the mind fails to recognize the new body parts as its own body, so the person becomes unable to move them.
Other symptoms included sudden increases in aggression or, conversely, severe depression. Sometimes, like the early symptoms of schizophrenia, patients felt a sense of incongruity toward perfectly healthy parts of their bodies and engaged in self-harm.
And…….
-Aaron’s symptoms are the mildest among them. His desires and emotions as a human, along with various chemical reactions within his brain, are gradually disappearing. In other words…… his humanity is fading away.
His appetite, need for sleep, and sexual desire disappeared.
Joy, anger, love, and pleasure disappeared.
Everything else gradually disappeared as well.
-At first, the cybernetic devices and other components assigned to handle the brain’s functions will probably copy and imitate his original personality. Most people around him probably won’t even notice what has changed. But from a certain point onward, the abnormalities will gradually begin to show. As long as the brain can no longer perform its original functions, the module parts inside the brain can’t perfectly fill the void.
After hearing Miyu’s explanation, the group asked about a ‘treatment.’
Miyu’s answer was simple.
-I’ll find one somehow.
In other words, there was currently no treatment.
Even so, Miyu repeated the same words several times as though making a vow.
She would find one somehow.
She would restore him somehow.
However…….
“……It’s been three months since Miyu said that.”
Collapsed buildings had been rebuilt, and even the deaths of precious people were gradually growing distant from the emotion called grief. Yet Aaron’s symptoms showed no meaningful improvement.
That was why even Miyu, who had never believed in the power of magic at all, had decided to rely on magic.
And she had asked none other than Ciel, who had received only about an hour of rushed magical instruction from Evangeline.
“Honestly, I wonder what we can possibly do when even Miyu couldn’t do anything. It’d actually be better if we were just wasting our time for nothing. But meeting him like this every day is already painful enough. If we endure that and keep trying, only for the result to actually make things worse…….”
“It’s okay~. Lady Miyu said it too~. Unlike other Overadapted patients, Lord Aaron’s condition is deteriorating at an unbelievably slow rate~. That means his chances of being cured are much higher than everyone else’s too~”
“Even so…….”
“Lord Aaron is just asleep for a little while~. If we keep trying, I’m sure he’ll return to normal~. And who knows? Maybe if Airi, the person Lord Aaron cherished most, gave him a kiss filled with lots of love, he might magically wake up from his sleep~?”
“Hey!! How can you joke around in a situation like this!?”
“I’m not joking. I’m being serious.”
“H-How is a k-k-kiss supposed to be serious!?”
“Your face is completely red~”
“And whose fault is that!?”
“Fufu.”
After letting out a soft laugh, Ciel’s expression turned serious again.
“Airi~”
“……What.”
“I mean it.”
“W-What do you mean?”
“The one who can make Lord Aaron open his eyes-.”
Ciel paused for a moment.
Then, looking deeply into Airi’s eyes, she said.
“-will definitely be you.”