First Blood in the Foggy Lecture Hall
Academy. Morning. Overcast skies. The fog hung thick.
The academy streets were humid and cold. Streetlights lining the roads poured out bright light, but it wasn't enough to pierce the milky veil. The weather made the streets feel downright eerie.
I headed east.
I passed by the sleek, massive new humanities buildings without a glance.
At the end of the increasingly foggy path stood an old building overrun with ivy clinging to its walls.
Professor Madro's Introduction to Meteorology.
The academy's most unpopular, fringe lecture held in a rundown spot.
Why was it fringe?
Simple reason. In a world where magic was commonplace, who needed weather changes, barometric pressure, humidity, wind direction? Weather forecasts?
What good was knowing that in advance? Just have the Magic Tower Lord and a few skilled mages form an array and fire off a spell—boom, rain.
Magitech weather satellites crafted by grand archmages floated in the sky. If that great one decided, "Sunny today sounds good," the Imperial Capital stayed clear all day.
In this convenience-obsessed romance-fantasy world, meteorology was a near-extinct subject.
Of course, if you judged purely by efficiency, most humanities courses at the academy were useless trash. But in my view, the real reason this one was despised was different.
Your classic sleepy teacher from school days—advanced age, droning voice that made classes unbearable, impossible to fight off the drowsiness. Professor Madro was the culprit.
Enough chit-chat. Back to reality.
I needed to focus. There was a clear reason I'd signed up for this pointless elective.
The original story's villain faction. The Thousand Hands Society.
A group of extreme heretic seekers who stopped at nothing to explore ancient mysteries and legends from the God Era, forbidden texts banned by the Empire.
Their goal wasn't some cliché villain ambition like world destruction or conquest. It was for each member to achieve their lifelong wish, transcending human limits to true ascension.
They were also the crazies scouring for the hidden pieces Rozalia von Bloomhart had swept up before academy enrollment.
Their reasons for infiltrating the academy varied wildly.
One fanatic tried sacrificing cadets to awaken a deep-sea evil god. Another dreamed of birthing a hydra or reviving a forgotten phantom dragon species. Some lunatic sought glimpses of the Akashic Records, said to hold all truths. One even lusted after heroine Iris Cromwell's vast holy power to open heaven's gates.
These transcendence-obsessed nutjobs had already infiltrated the academy's corners in secret.
The Empire had mobilized knight orders and the Magic Tower with astronomical bounties, but their power and stealth made purges drag on.
"Hoo."
I let out a short breath.
Rozalia was busy indulging my vulgar netorase fetish...
No, maybe it was from jerking off too much last night—sage mode had hit, leaving my head cool and refreshed.
So I'd come to take care of it early.
But I was uneasy too. Canon Rozalia was a scatterbrain who lived utterly in the moment.
She'd always beg to copy my homework, never planned for the future. When I was out working, she'd whine nonstop about wanting to see me right now—that was my girlfriend.
"..."
No. Things were different now.
Thinking of her in netorase mode felt alien. She'd meticulously set the stage to match my tastes, hid her past.
Probably changed completely after I died before her in the original.
Right after possession, she'd prepped the netorase System, monopolized hidden pieces. Masterfully controlled situations to deliver peak arousal.
During play, she'd feign vulnerability to tease me back, slyly taming my reason—like she held my leash, a true mistress.
She was utterly rational and sharp. She grasped my turn-ons, the core of my vulgar tastes, steps ahead of me.
She'd just acted cute and lovesick in front of me, throwing tantrums like a dumb bitch in heat.
All my instincts screamed it.
...Did I come for nothing?
The Thousand Hands member I was hunting was a master at hiding their identity.
A necromancer who'd survived eons without ever being tracked.
Canon plan was to skip hunting this one, wait for them to reveal themselves later and decapitate in one go.
Still, let's at least find them.
With my physical traits—this freakish talent—sniffing out a stealthy necromancer was easy as pie.
I pushed open the fog-shrouded classroom door.
Classical music played inside.
Creeeak.
Inside, gentle classical music flowed. Class hadn't started. About ten cadets sat at old desks—that was it.
"Hey, what's today's cafeteria menu?" "Probably tough chicken breast salad again. Let's just grab bread from the vending machine." "You finish the magitech dynamics homework?" "Crazy? No clue how to solve it. I'm turning in blank."
The clustered cadets bantered idly. Typical pre-class scene. At the podium, old Professor Madro fiddled with a globe, prepping.
In that peaceful vibe, I spotted the red-haired, slender upperclasswoman by the window in the back row.
The senior I'd bumped into with Rozalia in the hall before. The cute one who lived for teasing, trading dumb jokes with me to stoke Rozalia's jealousy.
My eyes gleamed. I flashed a soft smile and approached her side.
My eyes lit up. I smiled and slid into the seat beside her.
"Oh? Senior. Fancy seeing you here."
She turned. Spotting me, she beamed brightly.
"Oh?! My cute freshman? How've you been?" "Great, thanks to you sweating it out with me all night."
Her eyes flickered—just a split-second waver. I caught that suspicious shift.
"Ah, right~ Yeah. At the 3rd training ground. Guided your swordplay all night, sweating buckets."
"Yep. We had a real hot night together... you and me."
The senior grinned mischievously, winking with one eye.
"This kid says whatever to seniors. Enough joking—sit already. Class is starting."
"Wait, Senior. Got a little gift for you first. Accept it?"
"Huh...? A gift?"
She tilted her head curiously. I gave her my brightest, sweetest smile.
"Yeah. As thanks for guiding my swordplay all night..."
Whoosh. I grabbed the empty wooden chair beside me with both hands and hoisted it high.
Then, without hesitation, I smashed it down full-force at her forehead.
-CRASH!!
A burst of rupture. The classical music softly filling the room vanished like an auditory hallucination. The whole space went eerily silent in an instant. No more smooth melodies.
I'd shattered the daily routine of the already-dead.
Lucky break.
Pulling the first prize on the first try.
Just in case, I'd signed up for three more ahead.
Time to drop those.
Silence.
-CRASH!!!Crack, snap.
I raised the chair again. Smashed her face once more. Shards of splintered wood flew to the floor.
Until her slim, pretty senior face was an unrecognizable pulp of gore. Until her torso slumped to the floor with the chair, never to rise.
-CRASH!Split, crunch.
Again.
A broken thin wooden shard stabbed deep into her crushed face. Skull caving sound. Fresh blood spurted splat, splat onto desk and floor. Her slender hand twitched finely on the ground, clawing toward my pant leg.
No mercy. For the finale, I put my full weight into it, twisting every muscle to finish her.
-CRASH!!!!! Crack, crunch.
Her head burst like a watermelon.
Yet even as I brutally ended the senior like this, not a single death rattle escaped her lips.
I looked up. The chattering cadets' voices had all stopped. The classroom was dead silent.
The old professor at the podium, the guys griping about cafeteria food.
All turned to stare at me blankly. Eyes bloodshot, faces expressionless.
Grotesque, animated corpses. Like in a nightmare, the moment you realize it's a dream—every crowd in the dream fixates on you, the intruder. Chilling.
No screams. No shock. Just eerie, cold gazes fixed on me.
"...Hah."
Any normal person would've pissed themselves. I tossed the bloody chair leg from my hand and cracked my neck side to side.
Crack. Stiff joints loosening.
All the built-up stress melted away refreshingly.
Thousand Hands Society. These bastards were villains, right?
Plus, these were corpse puppets.
Necromancer's precious dead toys.
The balding old Professor Madro slowly clapped.
Clap, clap-clap.
"Impressive, you. Empire's hunting dog? Special inspector?"
His claps as signal—the dazed corpse-cadets around erupted in cheers, clapping in unison. Grotesque praise. "Amazing," they gushed, shedding tears like audiences moved by a touching play.
"Never." "Like this." "Before." "Caught by." "Wordplay." "Maybe, but." "In one shot...?"
The corpses' facial muscles twisted. I gave a light chuckle.
My body had warned me the instant I entered. These guys' bodies were 2% short—dead parts already.
"You're Thousand Hands, right? Former Black Magic Tower Lord. 'Chilling Death'."
No answer. I kept going.
"Human brains are complex. Billions of neurons. Neurotransmitter pathways. No matter how perfectly you puppet corpses like humans, the brain bits handling learning and memory never reach full fidelity, huh?"
Hit the mark.
"You've lived eons like that—time to quit the impossible."
My taunt unleashed mad laughter from all sides.
"Kyahaha, hahahaha!!" "Aha, ahahaha...!"
Corpses' mouths split in grotesque arcs, black-red blood oozing. Then they toppled one by one, melting into floor blood pools and vanishing.
Got under their skin?
At the podium, Professor Madro's body split vertically crack.
Thick death aura billowed out. The whole classroom tinted ethereal purple. The necromancer whose true form never appeared in canon.
"Across eons, even as day and night relentlessly swap places in their dance."
"The moon's outline reflected on the lake thins and fills countless times."
"Though cocks crow at dawn, grass rustles, warm sunlight bathes my eyes, and songbirds trill tens of thousands of times."
From the split husk, a woman stepped forth.
"Yeah. Couldn't do it... Impossible. Never was in human reach."
Two-tone hair—outer silver, inner lavender. Pointed ears. Ornate gothic lolita headdress. Beneath a pitch-black bare dress, sleek full-body stockings traced dark contours.
The most beautiful being across fantasy East and West.
A dark elf. Superior, perfect bodily beauty. Cold, aloof.
Pale purple eyes met mine—like pitiful flowers calling death and wraiths. Breasts full enough for one hand with room to spare. Slightly smaller than Rozalia's. But proportions fantastical. From hip curves, everything aimed for pure, austere golden ratio.
Former Black Magic Tower Lord. Pinnacle necromancer mage.
The gender never revealed in canon.
Not he.
She.