108 – Slave to Slave Interview
As I climbed the stairs, I had a thought.
‘Why did this poor graduate student bet on his second year master’s degree?’
Completion is coming soon after 2 years of master’s degree, at least by the standards of the earth, and it’s time to f*cking write a master’s thesis.
At such a time, he made a decision that made his career and the knowledge he had accumulated over two years of rolling less than a dog’s paw.
Think of a sergeant in his later years who asks the company commander to take off his rank and fight.
No one can deny that at least when looking at it from a first-person Korean point of view, ‘why is he doing this’ comes first.
The only advantage you can have when you suddenly visit someone without prior commitment is that you can control the meeting time.
So, to take advantage of that, I naturally sat down in a corner of the stairs.
And as I tucked my head between my knees with a book between my legs, I heard a high-pitched spit as it passed by me.
“That person must be a graduate student too.”
“Wow, how hard is it to sleep over there with the room right in front of you?”
“It’s scary to see graduate students doing that these days. I don’t want to go to graduate school.”
The kid who said last will submit an application sooner or later.
I know because I tried it, but there was no one who said that and didn’t submit a graduate school application.
There is only one conclusion that I thought of while letting future graduate students flow, and that is to listen to his story as much as possible.
After tidying up, I climbed the stairs again and headed for his room.
Thump, boom.
“Mr. Harin?”
Knock on the thin wooden door several times.
Thump, thump, thump.
After a while, the sound of the hammer came closer and closer.
Seeing that the sound is loud and the interval is wide, it seems that a lot of anger has accumulated.
“Who’s the show?”
Knocked up. A tall man came out through the open door.
I looked at him as quickly as I could.
There are dark circles around his innocent-looking eyes, and his shoulders are slightly bent.
The calluses on the first knuckle of his left index finger must have been caused by his gripping the pen holder a lot, and judging by the slightly sunken appearance, it seems that he hasn’t gripped it lately.
The trousers slightly lowered to the left have purple stains on them, and the room smells of grapes, so it must have been drinking.
The very short fingernails were rough as if they had been chewed.
As I was silent, his eyebrows raised slightly.
The way he put his left hand on his waist, as he usually does when dealing with uninvited guests, looked quite awkward.
So a man with the look of a stereotypical graduate student, his face full of tiredness and irritation, asked me about my business.
“What are you doing here?”
For a sincere story, you have to move in a direction that doesn’t irritate him as much as possible.
I said with a sales smile.
“My name is G-House. I want you to go inside and talk, Mr. Harin.”
“Just keep it brief. I’m a bit tired.”
“I heard you had a problem with Professor Jenton.”
As he asked, he briefly talked about the business, and his face showed even more fatigue.
Harin’s face distorted a little more.
“Did Professor Jenton ask you to come? One of the slaves ran away. Bring him back?”
I shook my head.
“I asked. It makes a lot of difference.”
“The difference?”
Harin’s eyes were glaring at me.
“What difference are you talking about?”
“The fact that he hid and tried to cover the paper you gave him. And that I didn’t come here to blindly persuade you. And…”
“And?”
I pretended to look around exaggeratedly.
I could hear the footsteps of passers-by in the hallway, passing behind my back.
After confirming that there was no one behind me, I spoke very quietly, still smiling.
“At least it’s that neither I nor Professor Jenton are the ones to wield the little blade you wear around your left waist. Mr. Ronen Harin.”
For the sake of his pride, of course he wouldn’t say that he would be overpowered before he could properly wield the sword.
“……”
He looked like he was possessed by a ghost. It was the usual expression of rookies who were caught in an ambush.
If you couldn’t cover the left wing flap going backwards, you shouldn’t have covered your expression at least, friend.
‘Or tuck the dagger in the belt instead of the waistband of the trousers. I can see everything sagging.’
Thought so, I took a step forward and at the same time held out the book that Young lady lent me.
After he succeeded in preoccupying the movement line that could be subdued if he wielded a dagger, he opened his mouth.
“I’m here to hear your story, as you’ll see I don’t just knock you down with random punches like other thugs.”
Then Harin guided me inside. It was good to judge the situation pretty quickly.
“Come in.”
***
Harin’s room smelled like alcohol.
It was an ordinary single room with only a bed, a desk, and a stack of books filling one side of the wall.
There was the sound of bottles clinking.
He said, moving the bottles from the table to the side of the wall.
“I didn’t know who was coming. I’m sorry.”
“You must be the type to enjoy drinking, right?”
“No. There was no time for that.”
“Oh.”
After nodding my head in sympathy, I glanced over the desk.
On the other hand, 50,000 magic theories that make you dizzy just by looking at them are written in detail in the stack of papers neatly stacked at the end.
The pretty messy handwriting on the paper with the marks of the bottle in the middle of the desk felt somewhat contradictory.
Judging by the degree to which the ink on the text with the primary color cursing had dried up, it looked like it had been written quite recently.
“Please sit here.”
The Harin offered me a bed and sat down on the desk chair.
I wondered if the seats had been switched, but looking at his face, it seemed that he was tired and his head wasn’t spinning.
“How much do you know about Professor Genton, Mr. Ghouse?”
“You know that I have a fairly unique personality.”
He shook his head.
“Not quite. Just an eccentric professor.”
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And before you start complaining to me,
I said straight-forward.
“Let me first say something. The eccentric professor said that if you cancel the duel, he will make things happen.”
“Are you going to do something that didn’t exist?”
Hearing that, the Harin began to rage. It was such a sudden rage that it was unpredictable.
“Ghouse, do you know what a miserable life graduate students live?”
Oh my God.
I couldn’t speak even though I had a mouth, and the situation I had to face came to me.
It was obvious that I wouldn’t be able to return to the inn today if I listened to all of his complaints, so I turned my back.
“Yes. You must have suffered a lot. By the way, since when did you decide to use the arena?”
“…I only heard about it recently.”
“So you didn’t even think of a dueling arena before that?”
“Yes.”
If it was enough to use the arena, it must have been piled up a long time ago, but I only recently heard the idea of putting it into action.
I thought it was a bit sudden, so I decided to listen to the story a little more.
“If you don’t mind, can you tell me the trigger?”
The trigger he gave was quite simple, yet complex and profound.
Why can’t you do this?
I asked to be more specific about the somewhat vague topic, and immediately regretted it.
“When I asked about the reason why the beta pattern of the fluid flow of mana changes reversibly, using the Haren formula to inverse the coordinates and substituting it into the centrum, it came back simply, but why didn’t you check-“
“What’s a cent?”
Why do these crazy assholes bring up technical terms to someone who isn’t even a graduate student in this neighborhood?
At the moment I thought about whether I had to have a little problem with my personality to become a wizard.
Harin saw my expression and frowned.
“You don’t seem to understand. Let me explain a little more simply. Now, this way-“
I could understand why there were so many psychopaths among high-ranking wizards, in the madness that they even brought paper and pen to explain.
All wizards are psychopaths. Or soon become a psychopath.
I nodded quickly to Harin and said.
“I understood like magic. As expected, people who study magic are different.”
Is there any mental attack type magic, but if you recite one to six magic formulas instead of starter words, all of them will die of a burst of brains.
Only then did he sit back in the chair and ask me.
“You seem to understand why I used the arena, don’t you?”
“Sure.”
I would probably say that I would understand no matter who I brought to this seat.
“That’s good.”
I nodded, and Harin finally smiled as if he felt relieved.
However, it must have been in a different direction from the reason he thought—I opened my mouth thinking that way.
“I think it’s great to see that at least I can understand it in an easy-to-understand way, even for me who didn’t go to college.”
“That’s too much praise.”
That’s too much praise, you bastard.
Inwardly, I began to soothe him gently, spitting out compliments and curses for his lofty skills that made me gauge the limits of my reading comprehension.
The reason I came is to appease him.
“If there is a duel, everything the Harin has accumulated will surely go to waste.”
“……”
“I understand that you presented the arena after much thought. But I think it would be good to calmly think again.”
The reason I did this was simple.
For some reason, in the way he threw the arena, my past image overlapped.
But since I can’t take responsibility for his life, I drew a proper line.
There is still a lot of time left, so think carefully.
If you still feel uncomfortable, why don’t you duel five days later as planned?
After that, I continued to persuade him, but Harin did not immediately give an answer.
“Hmm…”
However, a little bit of regret seemed to be visible in that quiet voice.
***
Of course, the answer didn’t come right away.
I told him the location of the inn, saying that I would come back later.
The prospective mentally ill candidate in front of me, Harin, saw me off to the door.
“Go carefully. I’ll go back and rest.”
It felt like the dark circles in his eyes had gotten even thicker.
Even when he talked with me earlier, he couldn’t hold back his yawning, and for some reason I felt a sense of déjà vu.
“Are you always that tired?”
Then he shook his head.
“Even though I worked a lot of overtime, I wasn’t so tired. I didn’t even go to the lab after I decided to use the arena.”
It was something that made me feel deja vu.