episode_0173

I took a moment to collect my memories.

I thought I ran into something on my way home after class in the afternoon. But the time outside the window was afternoon, but the day was different.

Today is the weekend.

It’s not strange for me to lie down all day. The people living in this place don’t touch anything I do.

It was difficult to know the exact time as there were no students at the Royal Academy during the harvest period.

There are two harvesters who commute to and from the Royal Academy.

Victoria and Kanna.

But Kanna is currently busy fighting off the monsters that are creeping up on her hometown, and Victoria often heads out right after class.

If I’m going to mistake the date, then you must have put a lot of effort into planning a trap for me.

Bern City has no weekdays or weekends now, and the harvesters living in Breitschein have no concept of a day off.

This is so dizzying.

Bern City is now centered around the Purple Twilight Society, fighting against soldiers coming from outside Bern City.

Eventually, it got to the point where it had to go. The police were supposed to guard the inside, and the soldiers were supposed to guard the outside, but the soldiers attacked the inside.

And that too to hide a really useless fact.

It’s a good thing I built a bunch of harvesters in the Brightshin slums in advance. From the way things are going right now, there’s a good chance that a lot of the harvesters in Bern City will die.

A powerful and visible target is an easy target for repression. And if they oppose you, they will be dragged out, whether they participated in the protest or not.

That’s a good thing.

If there is anyone who runs away, the hatred will boil over appropriately.

Hehehe.

Anyway, since it was afternoon, I finished all the homework assigned by the Royal Academy, ate, and went to bed.

Tomorrow is another weekday.

***

Morning has come.

I go to the Royal Academy as usual.

But today, Merryweather’s expression is very pale. And there is fear in the expression he is looking at me.

I have a guess, so it’s hard to ask.

Fighting is still going on in Bern City, and it’s gotten worse than yesterday.

No matter how strong the citizens are, if the military aims its weapons at them, they will be annihilated. However, the citizens were able to fight back. In fact, the situation became more serious when they drove out the military.

First things first.

Even if you can use powerful magic, if you can’t use magic, you’re just like a civilian.

This world is a magical civilization, so there are no weapons like gunpowder guns.

The first protests were because they wanted to investigate the incident in Bern City. And from the next protests onwards, the protesters brought up that cause.

A flaw where excessive use of the power unit causes the horsepower to become strangely distorted and accumulate, making it impossible to use any machine that utilizes the horsepower.

Then the powerplant will suck up too much horsepower, and the horsepower itself in the atmosphere will be reduced.

In other words, it means that you can create areas that lack magic power. The protesters who experienced the Bern City incident directly used this.

Bern City is a city where cutting-edge technology is concentrated.

The power plant is overflowing. It’s been used to create a sort of magical vacuum in the city. And the harvester’s superpowers work without magical power.

When a soldier wrapped in a solid clockwork machine enters a city, the clockwork machine immediately stops working.

If that happens, there’s no need to kill them with super powers. They’ll just become moving coffins. They won’t be able to escape and will be stabbed to death by protesters inside the machine.

Of course, the soldiers who noticed this changed their tactics and started using magic to knock enemies down from afar, but most of the magic disappears after it flies, and the technology that fires projectiles cannot penetrate the dense forest of buildings that can be called building grade and completely destroy the center of Bern City.

So even with the military being brought in, Bern City is still fighting.

If Merryweather heard that, it wouldn’t be surprising if she were afraid of me.

For me, creating a harvester means being able to produce supernatural beings who can perform supernatural phenomena without relying on magic.

It’s normal to be afraid of the intelligence agency.

I went into the classroom with that thought in mind. Today, too, Victoria sat in a seat away from me.

Considering that I made a friend right after we broke up, I think it would be okay if we were apart for a little while longer.

There’s just one concern: Victoria doesn’t know what’s going on in her hometown of Bern City.

The media doesn’t seem to talk about what’s happening in Bern City in a suspicious way, so it’s actually a bit strange to know about it.

I hope you don’t know, but after the story of Bern City is over, I hope you won’t be dragged away later on just because you’re from Bern City.

As I was thinking about that, the morning class ended and it was lunch time.

Until two days ago, Merryweather would have been talking about this and that, but today she’s silent. Instead, she’s cautiously watching my every move.

Now I pretend not to notice that you are being so observant.

But I don’t plan on pretending not to know. I’m going to make a new harvester as soon as class is over today.

Then I can see what the Kingdom intends to do with the harvest season. If you don’t want to extend the harvest season too much, Merryweather will stop me.

Otherwise, it would mean that the harvester itself is not the problem.

If we use what’s happening in Bern City now offensively, we can use it to invade other countries, right?

In an age when the world is not organically connected, wars occur frequently.

When the losses from war are much greater than the gains from war, people can barely stop the war.

But only consider the losses of the person leading the country.

This means that if it is a kingdom, the king only considers the loss; if it is a capitalist state, the capitalists only consider the loss; and if it is a dictatorship, the dictator only considers the loss.

If this were a kingdom, war could start easily.

After a long time, I had a quiet lunch and went back to the classroom to attend my afternoon classes.

And I’m going straight out of the Royal Academy to where the people who can make harvesters are gathered. This time, the place I’m going to is also in Brighton.

Like last time, I’m going to go back a bit to get my mind on places I’ve never been to.

After walking for a while, you will realize that I am walking around the capital with some intention, as I am heading almost straight ahead.

Because in any world, there are probably a lot of people smarter than me.

So I head east one day, and west one day.

I think I’m just filling in the map by moving irregularly, but if you’re smart, there’s a non-zero chance that you can read the rules from my actions and figure out my intentions.

So, I walk today as well, wary that I might be caught at any time.

Today I’m walking through a deserted place.

It’s not a place where the poor are as concentrated as Brightshin, but it’s away from the busy streets. You walk along a narrow road lined with shabby buildings.

Merryweather, who really is an escort, is looking at me with fear and hostility.

Of course, it’s not an escort.

Rather, the witch attacked.

A witch named Maleficent. I think I managed to get her out by somehow reaching the area under the water, but you have to be careful.

Since I was a special monster, I was proud in a corner of my heart that no magic could have any special effect on me. Didn’t the Primordial Heavenly Lord say that I was the opposite of magic?

So I thought it would be immune to magic, but I didn’t know it would be weak to mental attacks.

At some point I was under a spell and Belle’s body was lying in bed all day, but she was actually going about her daily life.

Considering that other people’s time had stopped in the afternoon, Belle’s body itself was under a spell.

Objectively speaking, I lay there all day without getting up and woke up in the afternoon.

In Bell’s case, he woke up in the morning, went to class, and on the way back he went to a strange place.

In other harvesters’ subjects, time passed normally until it stopped at some point in the afternoon.

When the perception of a body is distorted, it means that I, riding in that body, share that point in time.

So yesterday. It was the weekend, so Victoria didn’t go to class and was quietly studying Clockwork Knight in her room, but I didn’t feel anything strange.

When I met Victoria in my hallucination, I thought I was seeing Belle from Victoria’s perspective, while I was seeing her from Belle’s perspective.

I didn’t know I was weak in this kind of thing.

In the memories of Daegon and Wonsicheonjon, the part where they laugh in vain shines, but I pretend not to notice.

As I walked along the area where the light did not reach, I arrived at the area where the lower class lived, although not as much as Brightshin.

As soon as I entered, I immediately noticed a person collapsed on the floor.

He is holding a bottle of alcohol in his hand, and his face is flushed red enough that anyone can tell he is drunk. The joints of the fingers holding the bottle are missing, and the bones of his toes, visible through his torn shoes, are white.

He’s a dying man.

He’s a common sight in places like this.

I sat in front of the man.

But before I could say anything, the man raised his furrowed eyebrows and looked at me with cloudy eyes. He immediately got up from his seat and hit me on the head with the bottle of alcohol he was holding.

Clang!

hmm.

It’s a reckless attack. The bottle shatters and glass shards fly everywhere. Plus a little of my blood and brain matter.

“Huh? What? Why aren’t you dead?”

Blood is flowing from my head and one side of my vision is turning red.

“You won’t die.”

“Haha, what the heck. Am I finally losing my taste? I don’t remember seeing a girl like this.”

There is intense hatred and resignation, and despair. It is a light that is barely able to reach me.

This is too far for me to reach.

That means it’s still fluttering.

I put my hand on his cheek. He was startled. Then he reached out and grabbed my hair.

This guy is acting really aggressively.

Kkwaduk.

There was an eerie sound. And the skull was ripped off along with the scalp, with shards of glass embedded in it. The feeling was that the brain was exposed. This.

“If you pull it that hard, it’ll break, right?”

The man holding the skin looks at it indifferently and then turns his gaze back to me.

“Are you a monster?”

“That’s right. You’ve probably heard it before. No, should I say it like this here?”

I straightened my posture and spoke to him.

“I’ll give myself to you, but later, when you’ve finished everything, I’ll take everything you have. How about that?”

A contract that everyone who knows about it now knows.

It’s been on TV and in the newspapers many times. Even people who aren’t interested have probably heard it at least once.

At least, that is if you live in the capital.

The man held the fragments in his hand, looked at my face and wounds, then nodded.

I push myself right in. And while I’m at it, I twist reality into what I think it is.

The skin split open and burst, revealing a blue patch of skin. And in its place stood a rather muscular man.

A disabled soldier who was immediately released and abandoned after his body was destroyed. He was an ordinary human being who was dying, with wounds and diseases he had acquired while fighting monsters at the border of the country, and parasites entangled in his body.

He looks down at his hands, dumbfounded. Then he takes off his shoes and wiggles his toes.

Your breathing will be easy, and you will no longer hear the screams coming from your body. He returned to his prime, stood in the posture of his soldier days, looked at me, and asked.

“What do you want from me?”

“Do what you want to do now. Things you haven’t been able to do before, things you wanted to do. Anything is fine. That’s what I want.”

And while I was turning his body into a harvester, I raised my regenerated body. The man looked at me with complicated eyes, but since he had already become a harvester, he was not interested.

But I was attacked and the escort wasn’t doing his job. So I turned around and looked at the escort.

Merryweather is looking at me with a terrified expression.

If I were a human, I would have died instantly, but I am not a human, so I survived. But an attack is an attack. I have no intention of escorting you at all, but I think I should speak to the king or prince about this.

While I’m at it, I’d also like to report that I was attacked by a witch.

As I was thinking that, I went back to my destination, but a man was chasing me near Merryweather.

Merryweather is still as the harvesters chase after her. What is she thinking?

I took the two of them to the house where a child was dying from boils all over his body due to illness and malnutrition. Then I turned the child into a harvester.

The harvester crying, saying it was a miracle, and the harvester rejoicing at seeing his new body. And the harvester staring at me, and Merryweather staring at me with a gaze close to disgust.

That’s how the day ended.