Chapter 100
Chapter 100
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Translator: penny
Chapter: 100
Chapter Title: The Fog's Culprit
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100
9
“Hoo….”
Finally, I could see the sun.
Outside the Popuri Forest, where the fog was trapped along the boundary, I laid Merrill down beneath a sturdy tree.
She remained asleep, cold sweat beading on her forehead.
She must be having a terrible nightmare, judging by the occasional groans escaping her lips.
It wasn’t strange.
I had just relived the worst scene from my own illusions.
That meant Merrill had her own tragic past.
“Is Merrill okay?”
“She’s just asleep from exhaustion.”
Cain, who had been gazing at Merrill with uncharacteristically serious eyes, asked.
The hallucinatory magic was definitely dispelled, and I had isolated her on a different dimensional plane, so she couldn’t be seeing illusions again.
Only then did Cain let out a quiet sigh.
“Are you alright, sunbae?”
I had run into Cain while bringing Merrill out.
He was swinging his spear wildly, yelling for everyone to come at him, making it impossible to get close….
I isolated him with dimensional magic first, then threw twigs and small stones from afar to jolt him awake.
Fortunately, Cain was relatively normal.
If he had collapsed too, it would have taken forever to carry them both out of the forest.
“Yeah, I’m fine. The illusions weren’t a big deal for me. What about you, Theo?”
“Me too….”
To be honest, I felt like shit.
That year or so I spent living with my aunt was the absolute worst period of my life.
After that, I escaped her clutches by force and demanded the return of my insurance money.
If she had handed it over willingly, she wouldn’t have stolen it in the first place.
She refused to return it, leading naturally to a lawsuit.
But the lawsuit ended with my uncle pulling every connection he had, and we lost.
Not only did the insurance money vanish entirely, but my aunt cunningly spread malicious rumors about me to relatives and everyone around me as revenge.
My already crumbling mental state shattered like a cookie.
It’s the kind of memory I’d rather bury deep in my subconscious and never dredge up.
I never imagined I’d have to face it like this….
No need to explain it in detail.
“Same here. It wasn’t a big deal.”
“Good. Let’s head back to the nearest village for now.”
“You go first.”
I stood up and stretched.
My head throbbed from using some mana, but the rest was fine.
As I gripped the hilt of my magic sword and turned toward the Popuri Forest, Cain grabbed my shoulder.
Her hand, callused like Leon’s, was hard as rock.
“What are you planning?”
“…The hallucinations we experienced weren’t a natural phenomenon. Someone mixed them into the fog and spread them. We can’t just leave that alone.”
In fact, the fog in Popuri Forest had no hallucinatory effects.
Even back in the game days, it was just ordinary fog, and since coming to this world, I’d never heard a single rumor otherwise.
Which meant there was a culprit behind it.
Judging by the scale and sophistication of the magic, the perpetrator was surely hiding somewhere in that forest.
“…You.”
Cain started to say something but shook her head instead.
Then she patted my shoulder with the hand that had been gripping it.
“Leave Merrill to me. I’ll wait here. Just be careful. If you get hurt, Leon will be sad.”
“Leon would totally do that. Don’t worry. I’ll be careful.”
I deliberately flashed a bright smile to reassure Cain.
Then I reentered the Popuri Forest.
Only when the encroaching fog from all sides enveloped me thickly did I drop the smile.
“What kind of trick is this now?”
I didn’t know who or what scheme it was.
Truth be told, I didn’t care.
The reason I was moving now was far more primal and straightforward.
It had been a long time since I’d felt this shitty.
They had touched my reverse scale, so I’d make them pay thoroughly.
10
The sound of grass crunching underfoot continued steadily.
The fog was eerily silent.
Not even the chirp of insects in the forest.
The occasional rustle of leaves in the wind was all there was.
I used the sound of my footsteps as a guide and kept walking.
I had the entire layout of Popuri Forest memorized.
As long as I accounted for the subtle differences between reality and the game, navigation was easy.
I deliberately avoided using dimensional magic.
Just isolating my dimension from the fog was a significant mana drain.
With unknown numbers of enemies, I wanted to conserve mana as much as possible.
If I were the enemy, where would I be?
Somewhere I could spread the fog most efficiently.
Popuri Forest wasn’t huge, but it wasn’t small either.
The most effective place to disperse fog would be the center of the forest.
I walked for about thirty minutes, following the mental map.
After passing countless landmarks, I arrived at a massive boulder.
The giant rock at the heart of Popuri Forest.
Atop it lay a man with bright yellow hair, idly swinging his legs.
Every time he lazily waved his hand, fog formed and spread outward, as if he were writhing in boredom.
I scanned the immediate area with dimensional magic.
The only enemy nearby was that man.
And I knew exactly who he was.
“Crovanni!”
The man lifted only his head at the call of his name.
He grimaced in disgust, then sluggishly sat up.
“Ah… whoever you are, how did you get here? What a pain. I’m sure I set up the hallucinations properly around…”
Haa, Crovanni let out a heavy sigh.
This guy was a mage from Wifera.
Contrary to his laziness in all things, he was exceptionally skilled in illusions.
“Wifera’s doing?”
“What, you even know that?”
Crovanni twitched his eyebrows.
He sat cross-legged on the boulder and kept sighing.
“If you know, I can’t let you live. What a pain… Well, I wouldn’t have let you go even if you didn’t. This is such a hassle.”
“If it’s that much of a pain, why not just die?”
“That’s a pain too. You know? Everything’s a pain except doing nothing.”
“Speak for yourself.”
I gripped the hilt of Deathwise.
I didn’t draw it right away because Crovanni was affiliated with Wifera.
I hadn’t tangled directly with Wifera until now.
In the case of the Korbus family, the backer wasn’t Wifera but Aniraza.
Though Wifera was technically under the Precursors as well.
To be precise, I hadn’t needed to get involved with Wifera.
While I was hunting Easter eggs and incidentally crossing paths with the Precursors, Leon had been fully blocking Wifera.
Now that the second semester was in full swing, this was the time when Wifera would start appearing in the main story and get completely crushed by Leon.
Originally, Wifera used connections in the political world to blind the nobles while targeting commoners.
They squeezed the common folk dry with booming loan sharking, expanded the kidnapping and human trafficking markets, and flourished the kingdom’s underworld even more.
The peak was drugs.
The drugs Wifera recklessly spread corrupted even the capital.
By the time the problem reached the palace, Leon learned of it, stepped in personally, and annihilated Wifera to resolve it.
That’s how it was supposed to go.
But now, Leon had grown far beyond the original story by getting involved with me.
Not content with obtaining the holy sword early, he’d unlocked its second form and gained reliable allies.
Honestly, to the current Leon, Wifera… was probably small fry.
The benefits of letting Leon take down Wifera were less than expected.
Variables from me crushing Wifera?
Wifera spreading hallucinations in Popuri Forest was already a deviation from the original.
Eliminate the variable and, as a bonus, cut off one of the Precursors’ limbs.
Plus, I had that promise with Kyriakos.
I was planning to tag along subtly when Leon wiped out Wifera originally.
But since they struck first, I couldn’t let it slide—time to revise the plan.
“Stop making it more of a pain and come at me, you damn bastard.”
Crovanni shrugged and waved his hand.
With his gesture, the fog he conjured took the form of a massive tiger.
Krooong! The fog tiger roared powerfully.
I drew Deathwise and charged at the tiger, which boasted a majesty that could easily shatter a human head.
The tiger, twice my size, opened its maw wide.
Its sharp fangs gleamed, but I ducked my upper body forward and evaded effortlessly.
The tiger, missing its strike, landed nimbly behind me.
With the beast’s signature fluid agility, it twisted and swiped with its front paw, but I ignored the attack completely.
The impact hitting my back was negligible.
Just like a firm swat with a cotton bat.
No need to even endure it—I closed the distance to Crovanni in an instant.
“How did you… to my tiger…!”
I slammed Deathwise’s hilt into the solar plexus of the aghast Crovanni.
With a dull thud, Crovanni fainted, and the tiger dissolved into fog and scattered.
The fog tiger Crovanni controlled was purely an illusion—a fake.
It simply had the property of growing stronger the more fear it instilled in the opponent.
In other words, fearing the fog tiger gave it substance to tear me apart, but ignoring it made it just a clump of fog.
Break through the fog tiger, and Crovanni himself was nothing special.
Knocking him out was simple enough without using the magic sword or spells.
-You still know a lot. But it was a tiger more real than the real thing. I’ll praise you for ignoring it completely! Though, why did you dodge at first?
It had such lifelike realism that you couldn’t completely ignore it head-on.
Even knowing it’s just footage, you flinch when a ghost pops out on screen or a car barrels toward you.
-To exclude instinctive fear, you deliberately turned your back. Hmm, you’re not normal, are you?
What’s that supposed to mean.
Haa, I sighed and hoisted the unconscious Crovanni over my shoulder.
When I emerged from Popuri Forest, Cain was wiping the cold sweat from Merrill’s forehead.
“Merrill still hasn’t woken up?”
“Yeah, but she seems more stable now. …That the culprit?”
Cain shot Crovanni a cold glare and asked.
Her usually vibrant red eyes sharpened like a predator’s.
I nodded readily.
Cain bared her killing intent for a moment, but when Merrill groaned, she took a deep breath and resumed wiping her sweat.
“Let’s head to the nearest village first. Doesn’t seem like the right time to pick tea leaves.”
Cain hoisted Merrill onto her back.
I followed, carrying Crovanni.
As expected, an unconscious person is heavy.
I’d slung him over my shoulder for ease, but walking still drained stamina considerably.
At least Crovanni was on the lighter side; if he’d been Ethan’s build, I couldn’t have carried him.
Naturally, I started conserving energy for talk too.
With no mood for chatter, silence hung heavy for a while.
Cain broke the oppressive quiet.
“Merrill… when she was little, bandits raided her hometown, and she nearly lost her life. She must have seen that illusion.”
“Yeah. It’s the kind of hallucination that forcibly shows you the past you don’t want to see.”
“Ahh, yeah.”
Cain, who had forced the words out, seemed deeply somber.
I couldn’t easily imagine how deep a scar a brush with death leaves.
To think Merrill had such a backstory.
It wasn’t mentioned anywhere in Broken World—not even in the setting documents.
And it wasn’t just her.
From Louis and Kyriakos, to the Agrit family, Felt, and Louie.
Even those who were mere passing extras, not leads or supports, each had their own stories and lives.
That was a clear difference from when this world was just a game.
Take me, Theo—even my story would never have been highlighted.
My interest in these tales probably stemmed from living as Theo Agrit.
Whether that was good or bad, I couldn’t say definitively.
As I pondered for a satisfying answer.
We had arrived at the village entrance.