The Mark of the Cult
“Keep the pressure on it.”
“Kael?”
Ophelia didn’t even have time to stop him. The moment Kael confirmed the golem was targeting only Haley, he charged straight toward it without the slightest hesitation.
Ophelia had no other choice. She took in the sight of his back as he ran toward the massive construct and drew her bowstring once more. The golem didn’t flinch from her arrows, but they weren’t entirely useless. Each impact sent crackling lightning racing across its body, slowing its movements just a little.
All the while, Kael closed the distance without pause. When he brushed right past the golem’s side, her heart plummeted.
Too dangerous.
Soon he vanished behind the giant’s bulk. He had been just as reckless during the first trial. Throwing himself into harm’s way without hesitation to protect others. She hadn’t been able to help him much back then. This time had to be different.
Hoping to buy him every second she could, Ophelia nocked arrow after arrow infused with blue mana and loosed them in a steady rhythm.
Then the anomaly began.
Boom!
A thunderous roar completely unlike the golem’s heavy footsteps—something exploding.
Kwaaaang—!
An blinding white light erupted, so intense it hurt to look at. Ophelia instinctively recognized it as the same power that had felled the troll chieftain last time.
Meanwhile, Blair—who had finished mopping up the other monsters—was watching as well. From the instant Kael had charged the golem like a madman. By the time she turned her head, he was already close enough to be stepped on. And then, moments later, the impossible happened.
A deafening explosion. A brilliant white radiance burst from the golem’s center. At first she couldn’t even tell what had occurred. It looked as if the golem had detonated itself. Then the construct shattered, spraying fragments of every size as it collapsed.
The ice wall blocked a clear view, but all three people on the other side appeared unharmed. Blair remained frozen, eyes wide, completely stunned. The golem that had shrugged off Ophelia’s arrows had been pulverized in a single blow, crumbling like a sandcastle hit by a wave.
Did that guy really just…?
The image of Kael sprinting straight at the golem’s front flashed through her mind. She remembered Ophelia saying he had saved her during the previous trial. At the time Blair had thought Ophelia was exaggerating. Now she wasn’t so sure.
Both Ophelia and Blair stared blankly at the golem’s shattered remains.
I cast 15-stacked Magic Missile while staring the golem down.
15-Stack Magic Missile
Level 11 — Direct hit on the glacier golem. Massive explosive force.
“Just like last time.”
I made sure Haley behind me could hear before launching the missiles. They slammed into the golem at point-blank range, and the instant they struck, the ice wall Haley had prepared surged up in front of us. It was meant to shield us from the blast’s recoil.
The shockwave still sent cracks spiderwebbing across the ice with sharp snapping sounds, but because I’d deliberately aimed for a grazing hit, the explosion wasn’t directed straight at us. We all came through unscathed.
Even a glancing blow from fifteen stacked shells of a level-eleven Magic Missile had blown the glacier golem into scattered debris.
“Haaah…”
Completely drained of mana, I sank to the ground and stared at the wreckage. The ice wall melted away, and Haley hurried over.
“As expected, that was incredible.”
Her face was bright and cheerful, as if the earlier tension had never existed.
“See? If you’d just been in a group with me, none of this would’ve happened.”
She even threw in that pointless remark. After I’d gone through all the trouble to save her, too. Still, the fact that she could chatter so energetically meant she wasn’t hurt. Instead of asking after her health, I pulled a mana potion from my pocket and drank it down.
I’d already emptied several bottles today, so it wouldn’t restore much, but I needed at least a little mana if we were going to get out of here before the professors arrived.
That was when I noticed it.
That mark…?
A large egg entwined by coiling snakes. The unmistakable spell formula the Cult leaves behind when it controls monsters.
It was slowly fading now that the golem had been destroyed, but I had seen it clearly. There was no mistaking that pattern. It was the same one that had appeared multiple times in the game.
One thing was now certain.
I’d suspected it, but this really was the Cult’s handiwork. If someone from the Cult had deliberately manipulated the glacier golem to target Haley, everything made sense. Why the golem had appeared here at all, why it had ignored every other target and fixated solely on her—it all clicked.
In that case, the dungeon explosion that never happened in the original story, along with the ten of us being trapped on the third basement floor, was probably their doing as well.
The problem was—
But why is the Cult moving already? And why target Haley?
Only one small question had been answered, and now even larger ones were piling up. In truth, everything was still unknown. Rather than clearing anything up, the realization only left me more confused.
In the original work, this dungeon practical was supposed to be a peaceful event with no incidents. At this point in the story, the Cult never did anything so overt. I had no clue why they would orchestrate something like this. I wasn’t even sure if Haley really was the intended target.
Causing an explosion to isolate her with the other students, then sending a glacier golem after her? It was far too roundabout. If they could generate a blast strong enough to drop people from the first floor all the way to the third, they could have simply killed her outright from the beginning.
Whether they were truly after Haley, and if so what their reason was—I couldn’t figure out a single thing. I knew she would eventually join the Cult for some ridiculous reason, but that was still far in the future. So why were they acting now?
And above all else, the greatest question was why the original storyline had suddenly begun to twist like this. If my actions differing from the original had provoked the Cult, they should have come after me instead of Haley. Other than her strange fixation on me, she was behaving exactly as she had in the story.
She had gotten entangled with that low-ranking Cult contractor in the Shadow Forest, but I had been there too. And as Lucian confessed, the assassin named Roman had been sent to kill me. If the Cult had moved because of that incident, I should have been the one in danger.
So why had a Cult-controlled glacier golem appeared in front of Haley?
Something was off. No matter the reason, the fact that the Cult was already making such a conspicuous move was definitely a problem. Once we got out safely, I would need to look into it.
Ophelia stood motionless for a while, staring at the golem’s broken remains. Seeing the same power that had destroyed the troll chieftain up close, she couldn’t help but be stunned. It really was incredible. So what she had witnessed before hadn’t been a mistake.
Kael…
She quickly pulled herself together and ran toward him. After using that spell last time, he had collapsed from exhaustion. It might be the same this time.
When she started moving, Blair behind her snapped out of her daze and followed.
“Are you okay?”
As expected, Kael was sitting on the ground, exhaustion written clearly across his face. He had been lost in thought, but at Ophelia’s voice he looked up and gave her a faint smile. That, too, was exactly like last time.
He planted his staff in the ground and tried to stand.
Tap.
His body suddenly swayed. Ophelia, who had just reached him, was closest. She reflexively caught him as he pitched forward. For an instant their bodies pressed together.
The unexpected weight in her arms. The suddenness of the situation made Ophelia’s eyes tremble.
“Sorry, Ophelia. I’ve completely run out of mana right now.”
His voice was as tired as his expression. He was trying to hide it, but she could tell. Yet his words came from right beside her ear, and her own breathing grew unsteady in response.
Because she had caught him from the front to keep him from falling, his face now rested against her shoulder. She had only meant to support him, but somehow it had turned into what looked like an embrace.
It was absolutely not intentional.
Yet for some reason, she could hear her own heartbeat pounding loudly in her ears.