The Ancient Missing Link
When the sky returned to its original color, I released the spell and descended to the ground. Well, that phrasing is a bit off. Saying I "released" it makes it sound like I did so of my own volition. More accurately, the spell simply ended. After all, there was no mana left in my circuits, nor any mana I had been "controlling" for the spell.
"Haaah……"
I realized less than ten percent of my maximum mana remained and collapsed spread-eagle on the ground. The physical toll was on par with the first time I'd ever used Beast Regression. My limbs had almost no strength left, so talking about it would only make my mouth hurt.
I forced my heavy arm up and touched my left eye.
—Blink, blink.
The eye was fine. I'd worried some kind of damage had occurred and I'd have to swap from Druid Archmage to Captain Hook, eyepatch and all.
'This doesn't make sense.'
Lying flat on my back, I frowned. Every event has a cause and effect. They are two sides of the same coin; you can't separate them. That unreal battle I'd just fought needed a matching cause. A cause—in other words, a price.
'I didn't sacrifice an eye like Tabula did.'
Tracing the tangled problem brought Tabula to mind. That half-human bastard had been on the verge of death at my hands, so he'd offered up his own eye as a sacrifice and gained the power to transform his body.
—My name is Tabula!! I am an Einheri who serves the great celestial madness, an immortal warrior!!
—O great madness dwelling in the heavens!! Your Einheri offers this tribute, so grant your blessing of immortality upon this lowly bloodline!!
From his words, "celestial madness" was clearly a metaphor for Odin. The magic that had turned Tabula from a half-human into a pure-blooded werewolf must have been power borrowed from Odin. There were a few inconsistencies, but I'd leave it at that. It wasn't important right now.
Anyway, the strange magic I'd just unleashed—whether it even counted as magic—was similar. For starters, black mana had erupted from me. And even though my reason had still been intact, I'd gone berserk like a madman, screaming and raging. That part matched too.
'Still, the type was similar, but the effect was the complete opposite.'
Tabula's magic had been limited to physical enhancement. The buff on me was 100% the reverse. If I had to put it in fitting terms—
'Enhancement of wisdom.'
Enhancement of wisdom. In plain terms, it was an increase in magical talent. A power that boosted mana control, analytical ability, and judgment! Unbelievably, that was the truth of what had happened. Because my ego had remained clear throughout the fight, I could say it with certainty. That barbaric, indescribable destruction and rampage had actually come from wisdom that transcended cognition.
'Every technique I used was something I'd seen or learned before.'
Moving the spear had been Puppetry modified to work like telekinesis. Reattaching the broken spear was a tweak on Dana's healing magic. Enduring attacks with bare skin was mana-based physical reinforcement. The superhuman strength that hurled the spear and shattered the ground was Beast Regression. The threads of mana from my fingers were Puppetry with enhanced object manipulation. Shooting mana from my nails was a combination of Beast Regression and the formula from Summon Cloud. The freezing beam was obviously a fusion of Freezing Hand and Summon Cloud. Chasing after Erna had also been Summon Cloud. The fireworks finale was the rune magic Veronica had used. And the mana supporting all of it had been drawn from the darkness and negative mana spread throughout the ghost city.
The ability to handle natural mana—something even the black mages who came to the ruins couldn't manage—as if it were an extension of my own limbs! Even though I'd done it myself, I still felt dazed and couldn't quite believe it. The spells I'd spammed had been modified and remodified until almost nothing of the originals remained. How the hell did a basic "chilled hands" spell turn into a genuine freezing cannon? Then again, Odin was the one who claimed dozens of runes could explain every phenomenon in the world. Just like how Hangul's twenty-four basic letters and sixteen compound letters can record every kind of speech, maybe with Odin's level of magical IQ, the original form of a spell didn't even matter.
I'd forgotten how to use it the moment the magic ended, but from personally analyzing and modifying spells with my own head, it felt like learning one thing let me understand a hundred. 'My magical talent is, at best, average.' Until now, I'd only been learning the lowest-tier spells that any kid could buy with money. And yet a single buff had changed me this much. It was like the very embodiment of a magic god's dignity. The fact that Odin, the original owner of this power, had died along with the end of the mythic era was chilling. Just what had he been fighting to end up dead? Damn, the primordial ancient otherworld was terrifying. Back then, T-rexes probably flew through space shooting heat rays.
Anyway, I didn't know the reason, but there didn't seem to be any side effects on my body either. The buff had even handled the aftermath properly.
'So then, how the hell did that buff activate?'
That was the biggest question. The odds that Odin or his avatar had just handed out a buff because they "found" me were zero percent. In the dream, that crazy German musclehead had flat-out said he couldn't help because I'd already died. More than that, beating Erna to a pulp had been my own will. The same went for rampaging like a beast. At the time, I'd been like a part-timer who'd snapped after dealing with one too many difficult customers. I'd lost my reason to anger, but it was still something I'd done.
'Besides, if Odin had been playing proxy, he would've used proper magic.'
Would the god of magic really resort to frantically patching together spells stored in someone else's head? And the biggest reason was that I felt déjà vu from the sensation of being consumed by that rage.
—Beast Regression. Beast Regression. Beast Regression.
All my questions started there. I had a hunch. The suspicion I'd been harboring needed to be elevated to a proper hypothesis.
'Beast Regression converts rage into my power.'
I'd become certain of this recently. Odin had also said rage was the driving force that nurtured me, so I could treat it as fact. The level-up condition for Beast Regression was intense anger. But before that, Odin had also said this: don't let madness taint you—tame your rage instead. Considering he'd left that advice while alive, that genuine TS Nick Fury had already predicted what kind of situation I'd end up in. Probably, being consumed by rage and rampaging was only a matter of sooner or later.
'……Now that I think about it, it's been like this ever since I got Beast Regression.'
Ever since I'd acquired Beast Regression while guarding the ruins. No, more precisely, ever since my dick had turned into a one-chuck dick. From that point on, I'd never been able to control my own rage. To be honest, I hadn't felt any sense of wrongness about it. Even when I was furious, my self-awareness had remained clear, so I'd just assumed it was an illusion.
'But looking at the results, yeah. I never managed to suppress my rage to the very end.'
I wasn't trying to blame everything on Beast Regression. Besides, even from an outsider's perspective, the situations that made me snap were ones anyone would get angry about. The urge to go berserk and smash everything when I got pissed off definitely existed in me. It wasn't just me—everyone probably had a similar temperament. Raise your hand if you've never fantasized about punching your boss and quitting. But as civilized people, we were supposed to know how to hold back. And originally, I had been extremely civilized. At least until my thesis got stolen. Probably. I didn't have any way to analyze my own personality beyond an MBTI test, so I couldn't be 100% sure. Most people didn't thoroughly dissect their own character anyway.
Smashing a price-haggling bastard with a rock, or educating a disciple-molesting, thesis-stealing bastard by ripping out his hair—those were definitely things I was "capable" of doing, if I was being honest.
'But damn, there shouldn't be this many suspicious points.'
Besides not thinking rationally and suppressing my rage, there was something else that bothered me. It had been the same on Earth. The berserkers who worshipped Odin, the god of rage, were said to be the archetype of mad warriors who fought bare-chested like lunatics. Those berserkers were also the origin of barbarians who would plant an axe in someone's head in a mohawk shape if they were rude. The original macho who never held back his anger. Damn, that sounded cool as hell. Since myths from the otherworld and Earth had so many similarities, this could count as evidence too.
Come to think of it, the advice to control my rage itself felt like an implicit way of saying I'd have serious trouble controlling my anger from now on. The stronger Beast Regression became, the more it was like that. Every time I got angry, I saw illusions of white flames sparking in my eyes, and I'd even named that illusion Professor Slayer. I couldn't really blame Tirsi, who'd said the magic had no side effects. The magic itself wasn't the problem. Beast Regression wasn't injecting a rage virus into my neck. If it had, I would've felt the wrongness already, and Tirsi would've found the issue in the formula. In other words, Beast Regression made it harder to suppress the rage I felt. It was magic that induced anger management issues.
And combining this hypothesis with my experiences, I could form one more hypothesis. It was also the hypothesis that resolved the question of how I'd been able to enter that rampage mode in the first place. The puzzle pieces had been there from the beginning. I just hadn't noticed them.
'The true purpose of Beast Regression is probably──'
Why had I met Odin's successor in a dream? The answer was—
'──a mana cultivation method.'
Because the ultimate purpose of this magic was a "technique for accumulating the mana of ancient gods." Just as rune mages spent ten years mastering a single rune to comprehend its mana, if I had high compatibility with Beast Regression and had accumulated the ancient gods' mana in an instant, that would explain everything. That was why I'd heard from Tabula that I possessed the mana of ancient gods even though I couldn't use runes. Beast Regression was magic that imitated Odin! I'd realized that after hearing it from Veronica. If accumulating the ancient gods' mana was in the same context, everything lined up. And I could even figure out what that ancient gods' mana was.
'──The white sun in my inner world.'
The illusion of flames I'd seen every time I got angry. That was none other than the mana of the ancient gods. Let me say it again. Every event has a cause and effect. But a result only occurs when there's a cause! Odin's dream, the rampage of black mana, and all the other unknown events weren't happening because I was Odin's successor. The causal relationship was reversed. Before any of that Odin stuff, it was because I could do it—because I was someone who met the conditions—that Odin's avatar had appeared in my dream and called me his successor! Like an NPC programmed to follow a script!
'……No wonder it didn't require any sacrifice or price.'
The activation conditions being set were part of the formula itself. Since activating the magic I'd acquired didn't cost any price. I didn't know exactly what I had to do to get recognized as a successor. Still, this hypothesis seemed highly convincing. That was probably why, even though they were similar magic, there had been such a huge gap between Tabula's transformation magic and my rampage magic. If Tabula's magic added +100 to strength, the magic I'd used felt like adding +10,000 to intelligence. Since that bastard had said I had a ridiculous amount of ancient gods' mana, it made sense that I'd grown several times stronger since then and could use magic like that. Though since it made me lose my reason, I couldn't use it often.
'If my guess is right, the trigger for activation is also rage.'
When Franc got hurt, I'd been overwhelmed by an unbearable amount of rage. That rage had probably reacted with the ancient gods' mana and taken the form of magic.
'……Is this also a kind of test?'
Maybe the true successor of Odin, the god of rage, was the one who could control that fury. If you were going to be the successor to the chief god of an entire mythology, you'd at least need to manage that much.
'Thinking that way, there's something else that keeps bothering me……'
Anyway, the reasons to explore Odin's dream had only increased. It was the only way to find records of the mythic era that had vanished from this world.
'……Damn it. This isn't the time to be thinking about that.'
I thought of the injured Franc and clenched my fist hard enough to crush it. Franc was fine. Dana would be treating her. Going there myself wouldn't help at all. Since I'd even dropped the royal seal there, the other party members would handle it somehow.
'……Handle it, my ass.'
No matter how calmly I tried to think, wanting to be by my injured wife's side was a husband's instinct. How could I mess around when Franc might be fighting for her life? There was no choice. I'd just finish what needed to be done quickly. I forced strength into my exhausted body. While I'd been thinking, my stamina had recovered a little. If my body had been moving properly, I wouldn't have been thinking about anything else and would've run straight to Franc. My mana was still at rock bottom, but with this, I could manage.
'I need to find Erna's soul.'
There were a lot of things I needed to ask that woman. Not just personal things like why she'd stolen my thesis, but a mountain of other questions. What Tabula's organization was, why they were being hunted—I had to ask those too.
"Huuu……"
I took a deep breath to borrow some willpower and activated the runes, intending to use up every last bit of remaining mana.