Chapter 105
Chapter 105
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Translator: Ebonarch
Chapter: 105
Chapter Title: The Price of Loss (4)
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1.
Standing motionless in the room, Siwoo stared at the tree he had drawn.
It was his own unique unraveling and interpretation of Gehenna's barrier magic, designed to interfere with dimensions and boundaries.
"........."
His mind endlessly computed magical formulas while he sank into contemplation.
No, it wasn't quite right to call it contemplation anew.
He was always thinking about magic, and as long as he was conscious, nothing else crossed his mind.
Siwoo placed his hand on the trunk of the tree.
Mana began to manifest in his palm and seep into the trunk.
Normally, men couldn't preserve mana, and Siwoo was no exception right now.
But at this point, that wasn't a big issue.
A tiny amount of mana was more than enough.
He forcibly held onto the mana preserved in his mana circuits and amplified it once.
Then he amplified that mana again.
And amplified the amplified mana once more.
This technique was commonly known as 'Repeated Mana Amplification.'
It was one of the methods used to maximize efficiency when drawing magic circles.
However, if this technique were flawless, high-grade mana essence wouldn't sell for exorbitant prices on the market.
The repeated amplification method had two key limitations.
First, while the total amount of mana increased with each amplification, its purity gradually declined.
Second, mana with reduced purity could generate noise at any moment, becoming highly volatile and dissipating before it could even affect the finer circuits.
Usually, even two rounds of repeated amplification drastically reduced the mana's usability, so it was rarely used except in specific situations.
But Siwoo was different.
He had always excelled at absorbing external mana, refining it, and assimilating it into himself.
Now, with 99% of his brain restructured for magic, it went without saying.
The amplified mana maintained nearly constant purity.
That amplified mana seeped into the tree, continuously probing for something.
This tree was connected to Duke Keter's hidden barrier that enveloped all of Gehenna.
What Siwoo sought was a hole pierced through the barrier.
A tiny gap that had been nagging at his senses for a long time.
It wasn't driven by any particular intent.
He had simply felt a sense of incongruity while observing the barrier to improve his magic and obsessively tracked down that spot.
As long as that gap remained, Duke Keter's barrier wasn't 'perfect.'
And Siwoo couldn't tolerate imperfection.
A flaw in such a flawless barrier felt like sleeping with shoes on—a visceral revulsion that made him want to erase it, nothing more.
At that moment.
Like feeling a snag while stroking smooth silk, Siwoo pinpointed the location of the barrier's flaw.
Siwoo didn't hesitate.
He reclaimed all the amplified mana and opened a 'gate.'
A golden circle began to slowly form beneath his feet.
Amid the rippling waves of mana reflux, Siwoo traversed an immense distance in an instant.
And there, he found the error he had been searching for so desperately.
Something was forcibly peeling back the barrier.
Since it was a form of magic he'd never seen before, Siwoo stared at it motionlessly for a while.
Could he analyze it?
Could he replicate it?
Would it aid his magic?
"Perfect timing. I was dying to dissect something."
A commotion and a disruptive mana wave shattered his focus.
Siwoo finally registered the presence of the person before him.
A woman.
Naked.
She was clearly casting hostile magic at him.
Only then did Siwoo look at her face.
And his nose wrinkled instantly.
He couldn't identify who she was exactly.
His eyes, optic nerves, and the brain processing that input—everything was already specialized for magic.
He read mana flows, pierced through principles, and interpreted all things magically just by looking, forming golden fractals in his mind. But as a tradeoff, his ability to perceive objects had regressed significantly.
Thus, Ea's face appeared as a smeared lump of clay, distorted every which way, and even that was obscured by remnants of countless equations and geometric patterns.
After pondering deeply, Siwoo realized something.
The opponent's mana pattern—her unique fingerprint—was incredibly familiar.
His left eye, covered by an eyepatch, began to throb.
A red flame sparked in his chest.
Disgust, anger, irritation.
Unpleasant emotions unrelated to magic flooded his mind.
And Siwoo realized.
Eliminating her came first.
2.
Ea didn't take it easy.
The situation was different from when she leisurely toyed with the twins and the slave using magic.
Ea was furious, and a perfect punching bag stood before her.
"Pierce."
As Siwoo chanted the spell, shadows flowed out over his body.
Ea narrowed her eyes at that.
Last time they clashed, he had guzzled expensive mana essence for an utterly inefficient fight.
It was unavoidable without a stigma, but it had looked ridiculous.
This time, he cast magic without using mana essence.
The shadows that emerged wrapped around his body like snakes.
Inky black armor.
Still no shine.
But Ea could tell.
It was far more refined than before.
If the previous armor had been a crude imitation mimicking only the shape, this one looked convincingly real.
No matter how closely inspected, no one would guess it was formed from shadows—it took the perfect form of plate armor.
Ea no longer hesitated.
She didn't know where he'd picked up such tricks, but he was just a man at best.
She was confident she could crush him in one go, like last time.
"Barrage."
-Kikikik...
Whatever he tried, start by severing his limbs.
Make him regret being born with excruciating pain until his escape window of 30 minutes ran out.
Ten twisted ribbons in the air shot toward Siwoo simultaneously.
-Thud boom!
In the blink of an eye, the ribbons surging at Siwoo blasted him far away.
With a deafening explosion, he flew like a cannonball and only stopped after crashing into a rock crevice.
"What?!"
Ea was the surprised one.
He looked geared up more solidly than before, so she had responded with full force accordingly.
Of course, it was nothing compared to her power before the hierarchy drop, but she had attacked expecting him to at least try blocking. Yet he took it straight to the body.
If he turned into mush without even a chance for venting, that would be a problem.
As Ea stomped in frustration, worrying about Siwoo,
Siwoo, who had smashed through rocks in flight, blankly looked at his own body.
"........."
It happened too fast to properly discern what was what.
His entire body tingled and trembled from the impact.
Blood trickled from his mouth.
However, the armor performed its role admirably, unscathed.
It had sufficiently absorbed the shock.
Testing his limbs, they moved without issue.
Bones, tendons, muscles, mana circuits—all normal.
Siwoo rose to his feet.
Rock fragments piled on the armor rolled off, dust shook clean, leaving it pristine like newly forged.
His gaze turned toward Ea, about 100 meters ahead.
-Fwoosh!
Shadow wings unfurled, and Siwoo's body accelerated toward Ea faster than his previous ejection speed.
"Yes, you can't die yet!"
The woman, gleefully spreading her ribbons and muttering something incomprehensible.
The ribbons twisting and coiling to build momentum signaled another attack prep like before.
A shield materialized in Siwoo's hand.
Leading with a shield large enough to cover half his body, he charged fiercely.
Death ribbons flew at him.
"What...?"
Ea's eyes widened as she intercepted Siwoo with ten ribbons.
The instant before collision, a brilliant golden fractal shimmered on Siwoo's shield.
He seemed prepared with magic for revenge, so up to that point, it wouldn't have surprised Ea much.
-Ping!
-Kwarung!
A thunderous roar like an aerial bombardment shook their ears.
All of Ea's ribbons glanced off Siwoo, striking great trees at random, smashing rocks, or burying into the ground.
It wasn't a misperception.
The moment they touched the shield, she lost control of the Maiden's Loom.
The ten ribbons that should have pierced straight through the enemy ricocheted powerlessly like shells deflected by armor curves, not landing a single effective hit.
"Jamming...?"
Even more astonishing, it wasn't mere physical deflection.
It was jamming—interference causing loss of control over another's magic.
In the fleeting subsonic interval as the ribbons struck the shield.
As the fiercely charging Siwoo closed in, Ea pushed aside her shock and questions for now.
In battle, such sentiments were a luxury.
The jamming Siwoo had just demonstrated was impossible with human reaction speed.
Thus, the reasonable explanation was that he had analyzed the Maiden's Loom's structure during their prior clash and prepared a counter magic circle in advance.
"You came all the way here alone banking on that?"
Ridiculous.
And naive.
The Maiden's Loom Ea wielded was magic specialized in physical attacks, relatively easy to counter.
But after surviving countless bloody battles, hadn't she encountered this before?
Ea wove her ribbons anew.
Twisting mana threads into an entirely different structure and magical form of fabric.
Physically, the shape and attack method looked the same, but magically, they were worlds apart.
If she anticipated a 'rock' fist and prepared a 'paper' counter, then switch to 'scissors' this time.
She was confident in mid-battle magic analysis and matchup battles.
"Tricks won't save you!"
The distance between them was now a mere 30 meters.
The newly woven, spiraling ribbons locked onto Siwoo definitively.
Even if he fled, they would track reliably up to 1 kilometer.
The moment the ribbons sliced through the air, Ea was certain of the killing blow.
"I got a bit rattled, but this is the difference experience makes."
Siwoo glanced at the ribbons, then unhesitatingly tossed aside the shield—his only apparent escape route.
He ducked his head and lowered his stance.
A helmet extended from the armor's nape, encasing his head.
Arms wrapped in gauntlets and vambraces raised into a guard, he shifted to a boxer's charging pose.
Siwoo didn't flee.
He sought no detour, showed no back.
Hot breath grazed his cheeks.
Golden magic circles bloomed over the black armor that seemed to devour all surrounding light.
-Ping!
The same phenomenon occurred.
As if he had known she would respond that way from the start.
The freshly prepared magic circle perfectly parried and deflected the ribbons turned to 'scissors,' without exception.
-Kwarung!
Following the same procedure, like guided missiles fooled by flares, the ribbons lost their path once more and veered off course. Ea watched them with a dazed gaze.
"You... predicted it?"
She had changed her weaving pattern for the attack, and he had anticipated that and prepared in that brief time?
Theoretically possible.
No matter how she varied the weaving pattern, its origin lay in the Maiden's Loom.
If he perfectly understood Ea's self-generating magic, predicting and countering was feasible.
Ea's impression of him effortlessly executing the theoretically optimal response in reality...
"No way! That's cheating!"
But Ea's action wasn't the correct one.
The place she should have watched wasn't where the attack went astray, and what she should have done wasn't trust the autonomous defense's performance but widen the distance from Siwoo.
Her mind knew, but she couldn't execute it because the scene unfolding before her was so unreal, even a battle-hardened veteran like Ea couldn't accept it.
As Ea shrieked in absurd shock at the ridiculous sight, Siwoo's gauntlet slammed into her soft abdomen.
His punch pierced and neutralized even the autonomous defense, folding Ea's naked body in midair.
"Kyaaack!"
With a shrill scream, Ea's nude form tumbled several rolls across the mossy ground.