Chapter 59
Chapter 59
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Translator: Ebonarch
Chapter: 59
Chapter Title: Play Ball (2)
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"Assistant, take Odette and run. I'll hold it off here."
Odile wrapped Siwoo and Odette in her arms as she stepped forward.
It was no empty bravado or arrogance.
She knew the danger of that homunculus even better than Siwoo did.
The massive cat descended the tree at a leisurely pace.
Blinking its three enormous eyes, it climbed down the trunk with an eerie nonchalance that defied the laws of physics.
When it landed on the ground with movements that felt utterly weightless, any sense of reality evaporated.
"What are you doing? I told you to run!"
Even amid Odile's urgent prodding, which burned with impatience, Siwoo calmly assessed the situation.
Separately from that, he gave Odette precise instructions.
"Odette-nim, is the music box still working?"
"Ah! Y-yes!"
Odette, who had been fidgeting with her skirt hem for a while, quickly pulled out the music box.
She immediately looked up at Siwoo with anxiety.
"Assistant... you should run too. I can't leave my sister behind!"
"No! Odette! You have to send a rescue request while I hold it back!"
"I-I'll do it right now!"
As expected, Odette's judgment was slower than Odile's.
Whether it was because she'd just woken up or due to her more timid nature, she still began murmuring her incantation right after hearing Odile's command.
The silver lining was that the homunculus right in front of them was simply observing the commotion.
Its eyeballs spun round and round in sockets that gleamed with unsettling curiosity.
Beneath that creepy gaze, Odette's magic blossomed.
A massive string of characters shot up toward the sky.
It was a full dimension above the Skyboard spell Siwoo had used.
Piercing through the dense canopy of Ratipundium's trees, it was an emergency rescue signal meant to light up the heavens and call for help.
"It's done, Sister!"
"Good! Now let's bolt! ...Urgh!"
The instant Odette activated her spell, the monster cat reacted—whether to the mana surge or something else.
Its tail sliced through the air like a chain sickle.
The speed was ferocious, too fast for the naked eye to properly track.
As if everything up until now had been mere child's play.
-Boom!
The defensive formation Odile had deployed in advance.
The Song of Repose shattered all too easily.
Amid the scattering remnants of the magic circle, Odile's eyes went wide.
"It... it broke it in one hit?"
She was stunned to see a barrier tough enough to block an anti-tank missile torn apart like tissue paper.
Even then, Siwoo kept staring up at the sky.
Something had felt off to him from earlier.
Odette's rescue signal climbed higher and higher, the characters growing larger—until they collided with the black shadow blanketing Ratipundium.
-Crack!
And then.
The sound of breaking glass rang out.
The moment the radiant purple characters touched the shadow, it interfered with the magic as if it were alive.
The string shattered into thousands of fragments, raining down over Siwoo's head.
"Ah..."
Odette stared blankly at her last hope crumbling.
The rescue signal had fizzled.
Odile's barrier had been bizarrely sliced by the monster's tail.
No attack from their side could touch the enemy.
Their thoughts, which hadn't kept pace with the sudden upending of their peaceful routine, finally caught up.
A little late, but all three shared the same realization.
Death.
The two letters, which had felt like a cruel joke, flashed vividly through their minds.
At that moment, Siwoo's gaze fell on the river of mana essence flowing behind the homunculus—the source supplying Ratipundium with mana.
"Odette-nim, protect Odile-nim. I'll lay down a smokescreen."
While everyone else trembled in chilling dread, Siwoo was the first to spring into action.
It was a strange sensation.
Death was right in front of him, yet it felt like a thin veil had lifted from his mind, sharpening his thoughts.
The adrenaline surging pleasantly through his veins steadied his quivering legs.
He ran.
Siwoo charged toward the monster like a loosed arrow.
"As...sistant!"
Odette's desperate cry faded into the distance behind him in an instant.
"What are you doing?!"
Siwoo blew past even Odile, who had been facing down the homunculus, and kept running straight at it.
"Kyuu?"
Perhaps caught off guard by its prey charging right at it, the homunculus's head snapped around at a right angle.
Even as he ran, Siwoo relentlessly analyzed the homunculus.
Its combat methods, as observed so far.
The shadow spears from the initial lab raid.
From gathering shadows to launch: roughly five seconds.
Max simultaneous shots: three.
Cooldown between attacks: fairly long.
However, judging by its leisurely demeanor, it hadn't been at full power.
The speed was too fast to follow with the eyes, and the power enough to snap trees dozens of meters thick.
Clearly, none of Siwoo's spells could counter them.
Next, the tail.
A sickle-tipped appendage whipped around like a chain sickle, its attack range impossible to gauge easily.
The power might seem underwhelming at first glance, but since it had shattered Odile's barrier in one blow, there was no doubt it would tear a human body to shreds.
Finally, the enigmatic black shadow.
It wasn't simply hardened shadow.
At some point, it had blanketed the air like smog and crushed Odette's rescue incantation.
Which meant no means of communicating with the outside world.
Ratipundium had become that monster's hunting ground.
The distance between the sprinting Siwoo and the homunculus staring blankly at him shrank to under twenty meters.
And, dashing Siwoo's faint hopes, the homunculus began to move.
"Kiiiiii!"
With a grotesque screech like some massive insect, the tail wriggling in midair lashed out like a striking viper targeting its prey.
Siwoo, calmly timing it, thrust his arm into the air.
Ratipundium, richer in ambient mana than anywhere else in Gehenna.
His trump card, usable only here.
Just once.
The key was timing.
"Spread!"
The tail, aimed at Siwoo like a pistol barrel, whipped forward with a ferocious hiss.
And in that instant, Siwoo's body sprang forward diagonally—like a tightly coiled spring unleashed.
-Whoosh!
The tail grazed past his toes by a hair's breadth, churning up the ground in what seemed like excruciating slow motion.
Leaping over the monster's head, which towered more than three meters high, wasn't some superhuman feat born of the moment.
It was the Water Lizard Step Odile had shown him yesterday before leaving.
A footwork technique that concentrated mana at the toes to boost mobility—he'd scraped together every last drop of his mana to fuel a single, limit-breaking leap.
"Ah...!"
He'd jumped three stories high with nothing but his body.
Wind whistled past his ears.
The anxiety of having nothing underfoot was quickly overshadowed by an even greater fear.
The terror of the fall.
Siwoo braced for impact as the ground rushed up in real time.
"Gah!"
He landed by the mana essence riverbank after hurtling over twenty meters in a single bound.
With no mana left for a proper landing in the heat of the moment, he skidded across the surface like a stone skipping on water—and felt agony like his ankle was snapping.
Lucky it was a parabolic arc; a vertical drop would've killed him outright or knocked him out cold, leaving him easy prey for the cat.
The monster cat's sluggish eyes, chasing its vanished meal, quickly locked onto Siwoo again.
-Giiiiing!
Shadows gathered nearby into spears as it prepared to punish the insolent prey that had dared leap over its head.
Siwoo suppressed the pain and thrust his arm toward the river right in front of him.
He ignored the throbbing.
Limping along with his hand dipped in the water, he shouted.
"Spread!"
He'd risked his life to reach the river for this exact moment.
The density of mana essence sucked into his fingertips rivaled the high-grade stuff he used for magic research.
One deployment.
One transformation.
And one synthesis.
Just before the shadow spears could skewer him.
The river swelled up like an explosion.
-Shwaaaaa!
"Kiiiiik?"
The mana rippling across the water's surface surged all at once, transforming into a thick fog so dense it blinded everything within arm's reach.
A perfect smokescreen.
Unable to properly discern the situation, the homunculus launched the three spears it had already prepared at the riverbank where Siwoo had stood.
Sounds of explosions, piles of dirt shooting skyward before crashing back into the river.
"Kik?"
By the time the fog thinned enough in the breeze for visibility, Siwoo and the twins had vanished.
2.
"Assistant, are you okay?"
"Urgh..."
It had been a split-second improvisation, so Siwoo's reunion with the twins was little short of a miracle.
If the twins hadn't come charging blindly through the fog to find him, they might have scattered separately.
Fortunately, once they located him, they immediately used Water Lizard Step to put distance between themselves and the homunculus.
Their hiding spot was a knothole in a tree with a split trunk.
A cluster of mushroom colonies grew there, plump like gourmet champignons.
"Let me see...!"
Odette rolled up Siwoo's pant leg to check the injury.
His ankle was completely wrecked.
Given how it'd swollen to one-and-a-half times its size in that brief moment, it might even be cracked.
"Why'd you do something so reckless?!"
Odile scolded him, eyes brimming with tears.
"If we'd kept confronting it head-on... we'd all be dead."
Siwoo's assessment had been spot-on.
Odette's rescue signal had failed, and their attacks were nullified.
Even if the twins kept up the barrier, it would've only bought time.
The moment their mana ran dry, they'd have been defenseless fodder for the homunculus.
"With the music box blocking mana detection, I figured the smokescreen would be enough."
"Still too dangerous! You scared me half to death."
"Yeah, I really thought you were about to get cleaved in two."
Odile grabbed Siwoo's collar and shook him as she whispered urgently, with Odette chiming in from the side.
Watching from behind as Siwoo ran, the twins understood exactly what razor-thin line he'd crossed.
Dodging that tail swing with a perfectly timed jump...
Easier said than done—if even a fraction too late or too early, he'd have been bisected with no room for complaint. A life-or-death rhythm game.
"But we bought some time like this, at least."
"Hold still. Let me heal you first."
Warm light poured onto Siwoo's swollen ankle.
"You can walk, but no running like before. Honestly, this is my first time healing someone injured, so I'm not totally sure."
"I'll be careful."
Quack talk aside, it should be fine.
Magic healing fundamentally accelerated cell division to exponentially boost natural recovery.
"What now? Do we just stay hidden like this?"
The moment Siwoo's first aid ended, Odette began trembling anxiously.
And then.
-Crunch! Rumble!
A ground-shaking roar echoed from not far away.
Soon, the vibrations from a massive tree toppling hit them right in the butt.
The homunculus, having lost sight of its toys right in front of it, was blindly ravaging the surroundings to flush them out.
"Two options."
Siwoo picked up a twig rolling around in the knothole.
The soft soil piled inside for mushroom cultivation made a decent makeshift blackboard.
"One: stay quiet and pray until another witch notices the anomaly and comes looking."
With the music box, their position wouldn't be exposed until visual confirmation.
Hide-and-seek with their lives on the line.
Prayer meta, basically.
But they couldn't rule out getting hit by one of the homunculus's blind spells amid its indiscriminate barrages.
Prayer meta's downside: bad luck screws you.
Odile's expression was grave; she knew it too.
"The other?"
"We catch that bastard."