What Happens When The Second Male Lead Powers Up [EN]: Chapter 700

#700

Do Not Lead Us Into Temptation (2)

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That moment.

“······Oh my. ‘When the war is over someday’?”

Just amazing.

“‘I should study more deeply as a healing priestess’? ‘Even if I have to go back to school’? Oh, really? You graduated from law school in Seoul, and now you’re transferring to medical school in the Imperial Capital?”

Hey, you······.

Jeong Hyun-seo barely swallowed the nagging that was about to pour out.

This time, his partner and faithful functional beverage, Espresso Doppio, helped him.

The dark, bitter liquid went down the man’s stomach like water.

He had been thinking of cutting down on coffee lately, but seeing his brother’s antics, he figured he’d be lucky if he didn’t get acute caffeine poisoning.

Hyun-seo took off his glasses for a moment and rubbed his dry face for what felt like the hundredth time.

It wasn’t because he was tired—at this point, most people wouldn’t even feel fatigue—but because he felt suffocated.

“Ha······. You take after Dad with your big heart. That’s why you’re so······ to those kids.”

······Never mind. What’s the point of saying this now?

The man shut his mouth and rolled his chair with a creak.

One side of the wide desk, where his work desktop was placed, was cluttered with all sorts of books, notebooks, notepads, memos, and scraps.

Soon, his large hand grabbed a pig-shaped ballpoint pen and moved quickly.

He was reading back and forth through the unidentified file being typed in real-time, checking to see if he had missed anything.

His brother’s life was at stake, so he had to be more meticulous and diligent than ever.

“Aurora sound, checked that earlier.”

The corners of his eyes sharpened again.

The sentences copied onto the tablet PC reflected off his rimless glasses, emitting a subtle light.

「-Pzzzzz······!

“Oh, my.”

I was startled again by the sound pouring from the sky.

Everywhere my eyes landed was prettier than any Windows background, except for one thing.

That screech has been eerie and annoying since earlier. It was even more blatant when heard outdoors.

Does noise usually accompany the aurora? I wouldn’t know, being a humanities major.

“What’s wrong?”

“Ah, it’s because of the sound of electricity sparking. Did Ms. Gain wake up because of that too?”」

Northern Venetian Theocracy. It was around the time Yeseo and his friends were stirring things up in the north.

Hyun-seo was mainly pointing out the parts they hadn’t fully grasped.

For example, things about great destinies.

「”Hyung······. He really loves his family. He’s a dad who would do anything for me and my sister.”

-Pzzzz! Fssssss!

Ugh, my ears hurt.

“He’s not the type of person who would create a character with a sad fate based on my name. He’s not someone who would hurt Eun-seo with that either. More than anything—”

-Pappap!

“Ugh!”

I flinched and squeezed my eyes shut.

It was because the sharply honed noise pierced my eardrums and dug into my brain.

My head kept throbbing as if pricked by needles, and I kept frowning. My fingertips and toes were numb, perhaps from the lingering headache. Damn it, why suddenly······.」

Hyun-seo’s face became serious as he mulled over the content.

Any guilt he had for hiding secrets was already obscured by the severity of the situation.

A low voice escaped from his lips.

“It seems like an artificial aurora is occurring as this computer and that world line are connected······. It’s right to see this itself as a harbinger of a warning sign. It becomes clearer when you look at the content that comes after.”

Moreover, it was even making his younger brother sick.

「Damn it, this was definitely the Chief God’s scheme. Trying to stop me from divulging information about the world view······.」

His brother’s inner thoughts were piercing his eyes like thorns.

The man tapped the tablet’s screen and crossed his arms.

In the end, this aurora even caused Yeseo to faint, and as far as Hyun-seo knew, there was no being capable of such an act.

Except for the problematic ‘Three Sisters’.

“······.”

Let’s summarize.

This was clearly a world line constructed ‘to save Prince Yeseo Venetian’ as Jeong Yeseo deduced, and his brother, who was forcibly given that mission—from the perspective of a novelist—wielded virtually absolute power.

One might argue that it’s not true power, considering he died once at the hands of the villain.

However, Hyun-seo thought—emphasizing once again that he was judging with the mind of a writer, not a psychopath—that this was an absolute power only the ‘protagonist’ could enjoy.

The fact that he was nicknamed ‘Maintainer of the World’ showed his destructive influence.

Yeseo was killed there but returned home safe and sound, and according to his own decisions, he demonstrated amazing abilities and returned again.

Of course, his body was not harmed at all during the return process.

Let’s set aside wounded hearts or mental shocks.

(He says for the third time. It’s not that he doesn’t love his brother, but that he’s trying to look at the situation as rationally as possible.)

However, when the development flowed in a specific direction, the second child was always blocked by some kind of flow.

Somewhat unnaturally. Very forcibly.

“The Three Sisters······. He said they are ‘the very essence of plausibility’.”

Hyun-seo looked down at the three anagrams written largely in the center of the notebook.

‘Pacs Becka’, ‘Capes’, ‘Nerte’.

In order, ‘Backspace’ erasing past writings, ‘Space’ describing the present, and ‘Enter’ heading towards future sentences.

Their roles were the same as the three sisters who controlled fate in mythology.

‘Божена (Bozhena) [Bozhena is a Slavic name meaning “divine”]’.

“Plausibility. Plausibility. Plausibility······.”

What kind of plausibility are they protecting for what ending?

It felt like the answer was flickering right in front of him. It really felt like he could grasp it.

Frustrated and anxious, Hyun-seo frowned and turned to the desktop.

Yeseo was too busy dealing with the situation at hand to look back on the past, but he was different.

He could look back and chew it over in this spot, so he had to do what his brother couldn’t.

Jeong Yeseo’s sharp reasoning shook his head once again.

「He said the white lines in the sky are not the result of their creation, and there’s nothing else they can do separately.

Then the reason they blocked my mouth must be because ‘the end is approaching’ and······.

‘「Everything has already been prepared, but there will be a price for the choice.」’

‘Ugh······!’

It must be because ‘I have a choice’. What choice are they talking about?

What’s the point of hiding it when even the person involved doesn’t know?」

His brother’s trembling voice seemed to ring in his ears.

Hyun-seo muttered the three sentences like a madman.

‘The end is approaching.’ And ‘Jeong Yeseo has a choice.’

But it ‘must not be divulged to anyone.’

“This is driving me crazy. What is it really? It feels like it’s about to come to mind······.”

After racking his brain for a long time, he thought this wasn’t right and jumped up.

There was nothing more foolish than sitting still when the development wasn’t breaking through.

Hyun-seo decided to think about something else for a while.

If he didn’t change the subject and refresh his brain, it felt like the tangled thread would explode.

-Tak!

“Wilhelmina Sneider.”

He immediately picked the second most ridiculous topic.

The ballpoint pen that rolled away trembled as if asking, ‘Are you serious?’

Duchess Wilhelmina Sneider had virtually risen to become the main enemy of Yeseo and his friends, but in , she was a character who had not yet begun her full-fledged evil deeds.

Therefore, Hyun-seo—like the other guys, for the most part—couldn’t figure out what she was thinking.

-Dal-ka-dak

He opened the door and stepped into the dark living room, then opened the door to the master bedroom after some thought.

It was because he was worried that he might wake up Eun-seo if he stayed in the living room.

It was his mother’s room, which he usually kept closed and rarely entered.

Moving just a few steps was like exercise, and he could breathe a little easier.

“······There’s no way a human who wants to become a new god could do something like that.”

-Tak!

When he entered the master bedroom and turned on the light, he saw a new-looking king-size bed and a bookshelf that filled one side of the wall.

Hyun-seo wandered blankly in front of the bookshelf, lost in thought.

If she were a power-hungry villain, she would usually indulge in greed as long as her foundation didn’t collapse.

These people pursue the power and system to subjugate others, so they rarely do anything that completely destroys the existing order.

If the foundation of the country collapses, the place where they stand will also disappear.

But Sneider in the recent volumes was somehow strange.

“Making the people suffer, I understand what that means. The Holy Knight creation experiment, I also understand what she’s thinking.”

A sated person does not need faith.

Humans inherently seek God more as they become deficient and hurt.

Sneider’s idea must have been the same.

In order for her to become an object of faith, the people must be appropriately impoverished, and in that context, she creates Holy Knights to gain divine authority.

So far, it’s a logic that can be understood well enough.

“That kind of person suddenly makes it seem like she’s going to hand over the Imperial Capital······.”

It was a strange move. Hyun-seo frowned at the unsettling aftertaste.

It was a natural flow for the Riester Empire army to capture the Imperial Capital, and it was a development that anyone could predict.

But the sight of Sneider turning the Imperial Capital into a mess with her own hands was strange in many ways.

“If the Crown Princess was completely broken after learning the secret of that airship, that’s definitely a good result for Sneider. Because she ruined the mind of the heir to the throne, it’s unconditionally beneficial as a corrupt power holder······. But what’s good about the opposite case?”

The man mumbled and scanned the spines of the books with his dark eyes.

The bookshelf of Choi Seon-ah, the mother of the three siblings who majored in Russian Language and Literature, was filled with various Russian-related books and Russian literature books.

His mother’s university graduation photo and wedding photo, as well as frames of the young three siblings, were placed side by side.

Hyun-seo paid attention to his footsteps so as not to wake up his youngest sibling.

“The Crown Princess is half-crazy and says she’s going to strike the Sneider ducal residence in the Imperial Capital. Sneider seems to be planning to drag such a Crown Princess to the bottom······. Isn’t it abnormal for the Cardinal to create an excuse to attack his own base?”

Why take such a risk?

Even without that, it’s wartime, and the Imperial army is taking advantage of the division to push in.

At this rate, her power and holiness will all fly away. What is she thinking?

‘The Brothers Karamazov Братья Карамазовы [The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky]’

‘Fyodor Dostoevsky Фёдор Достоевский [Fyodor Dostoevsky is a famous Russian novelist]’

“······.”

The tall, wide bookshelf looked down as if embracing him.

Hyun-seo stared at the title that suddenly caught his eye.

It was a work that he couldn’t dare not think of the content of.

Perhaps one of the most famous stories of patricide in the world—

“Wait.”

In an instant, in a short moment as if electrocuted, a sharp intuition like a blade pierced the back of his head and ran away.

The man shuddered at the almost painful hunch.

He himself knew best that it was an absurd idea.

The only information about that his mother had given him was a small notebook, and that was the end of the clue.

Even that was full of incomprehensible sentences, so Hyun-seo had to wage a long and lonely battle.

“······No way. It can’t be.”

Even as he said that, he was sure that his attraction had a clear destination.

His mother was a person who habitually took notes from the first moment Hyun-seo remembered.

On the palm of her hand, receipts, school newsletters. Even on the margins of flyers attached to the front door.

She often forgot where she put the notes, but he thought that was common.

Mom was······.

-Click

The hand that took out the book trembled pathetically.

It was an old book with yellowed sides and a musty smell.

He struggled to keep his pounding heart in place.

When he opened the book wide, the whitish thing stuck in the middle immediately fell to the floor.

-Tak!

“······.”

It was his mother’s memo.

The paper torn from the Toegye Public Notebook was folded in half.

Hyun-seo barely managed to stop himself from sighing.

“What······.”

Sneider’s purpose. The existence of the Three Sisters. And the ‘vessel of the Divine Kingdom’, the Imperial Capital.

The thought occurred to him that perhaps the answers to all those questions were contained in this note.

But if it was the content that Hyun-seo guessed it was······.

“Crazy, no. Jeong Yeseo.”

The man, who was frantically counting something, soon gasped in despair.

He hurriedly grabbed the book and the note and rushed out of the master bedroom.

‘Jeong Hyun-seo. Promise me just one thing.’

‘Ask Mom.’

······Knowing faintly that there was no way for him to do it.

*

-Saaaaa!

“······Huh-huh!”

Werner Venetian woke up drenched in cold sweat.

He seemed to have had a nightmare, but not even a rough scrap of the dream’s memory remained.

The man caught his breath and looked at the woman lying crumpled in the bushes beyond.

He swore that Martier Zeilstra was the most vicious and persistent leech on the continent.

His eyes were filled with deep disgust and contempt.

“Huck, cough. Hooo······.”

Since a hazy fog enveloped them like a curtain, Werner couldn’t even guess what time it was.

So he noticed the presence of someone too late.

-Sreung······!

A black scythe loomed over the man’s white neck.