In the Blink of an Eye (1)
The first thing I did was recall my Shattenmädchen.
For all its unassuming appearance, it was one of my most powerful assets — I couldn't exactly announce my full strength right from the opening move.
As I drew the shadow hand back in, I hurled the lieutenant I'd been holding like a dog on a leash.
"Aaagh—!"
The lieutenant landed with a thud on the metal-plated floor and let out an undignified scream. His shoulder looked dislocated, or maybe a bone was broken — but I had no interest in checking. I could always cast a quick regeneration spell on him later.
He was scrambling across the floor on his belly, trying to put himself somewhere out of my line of sight — using the iron staircase as cover, pressing his back against it. I was certainly aware of his movements, but for the same reason, I made no move to stop him.
The enemy mage appeared at the entrance to the underground space where missiles and aerial bombs were stored. I confirmed the silhouette of a single figure and let a smile cross my face.
"Quite the enthusiastic welcome, isn't it? Though for all this welcoming, you seem a bit short-staffed."
"That's thanks to you turning this entire base into a wasteland with your mind-corruption magic."
"Ah, I'm glad it took well. How was it, having everyone in the base dismiss your words as nonsense?"
"It was... filthy. What kind of bitch are you? Who sent you?"
The few words exchanged between the two mages facing off across the vast underground space served as a kind of probing engagement. It gave us a brief window to gauge what each other knew, and to establish strategy for what would come after the standoff.
Of course, nothing actually changed. Neutralize, then wipe the memories. I'd have loved to tear him apart and kill him, but as I'd said repeatedly, that was getting a bit troublesome.
Before meeting the lieutenant who was in charge of the Pyeongsan nuclear facility, I had already made adjustments to the soldiers responsible for the CCTV during my infiltration, climbing the chain of command in reverse to ensure smooth passage. More precisely, to their minds and memories. Through Charm, I had erased every trace of myself on camera, and deleted all footage before and after to avoid raising suspicion.
Of course, that still wasn't nearly enough. After placing the lieutenant under my control, I had him relay to the field supervisors below him that "there was no problem with the facility." Thanks to that, the mage wouldn't have been able to get any help within the facility. Even if he warned his colleagues about an intruder, they'd all respond with blank expressions and "What the hell are you talking about?"
From the perspective of this mage, who had been dispatched to magically guard the interior of the nuclear facility, the entire installation had suddenly become filled with people aiming to cripple him from behind.
There was only one scenario I needed to guard against.
"Pavel. Just one question — has any communication been sent from inside the facility?"
"— If we're talking about since you entered, my lady, then no."
"Oh? That's a relief to hear."
Namely, the possibility that the mage would somehow report the incident to his superiors. Whether the superiors — represented by this country's ruling class — would accept the mage's report as fact was largely irrelevant. What mattered was the fact itself that contact had been made, however it happened.
But Pavel's reply suggested that the mage had not brought about the very thing I had feared most.
Had my order to cut off all external communications been the deciding factor?
When I had controlled the communications personnel through Charm, I had instructed them to cut off external communications for about an hour. I couldn't deny that it was a remarkably advanced magic, but Charm wasn't some all-powerful hypnosis app. Naturally, the efficiency of the magic increased dramatically when I made the situation sound plausible while giving orders.
What I had presented to them was a situation so close to real combat that they needed to maintain radio silence. A military facility storing nuclear material was, of course, the enemy's top strike target in any emergency. In that regard, the Pyeongsan nuclear facility maintaining radio silence was an extremely "plausible" scenario. External communications were temporarily cut, and they had to push through the "training" on internal judgment alone until the situation ended.
For a mage who knew this was absolutely not training but a real situation, there could be nothing more frustrating. No matter how much he asked the soldiers, he'd only get the answer that radio use was absolutely prohibited — he must have been going crazy. Even if he tried to go find the lieutenant, the senior officer and facility head, that person was already gone from his post. For that mage, it had been entirely reasonable to conclude that an intruder had already penetrated to the deepest part of the facility.
And... that prediction had turned out to be exactly right.
He had been floundering in the swamp of bureaucracy and blame-shifting, and in the process, he'd stepped on all the landmines I had planted throughout with Charm. There was no way he wouldn't have been completely frustrated. He had almost certainly come all the way down to the deepest level of the underground, determined to at least see the face of the intruder mage who had designed such a goddamn situation.
What a shame. He had been the only person in this vast nuclear facility who was still thinking clearly — but he wouldn't be the only one for long. Not in the sense that more people would be thinking clearly, but in the sense that every single person would fall under the dominion of my magic.
"Who am I, and who sent me?"
"Obviously. Do you think I'd forgive those communist bastards who split our nation in two?"
Hmm, I'm not a communist. I really don't understand why everyone I meet makes that mistake. Not exactly something I should be saying as the one who induced the misunderstanding, but anyway.
Instead of correcting the mage's mistaken assumptions, I licked my lips and asked in return.
"I don't think you need to answer. How about we get started?"
I adjusted my clothes and prepared for combat. I drew Baramil from the shadows where I had stored it and gripped it firmly, while preparing all my other magics to be unleashed at a moment's notice. Only Baramil took visible form. But the rest were all on standby, ready to go. If I willed it, dozens of magic bullets could rain down on the mage's position at any moment, and my Shattenmädchen would assist in the engagement, traversing the battlefield in three dimensions.
Surprisingly, it wasn't me who initiated the engagement first.
'Not bad?'
High-speed projectiles flying directly at me. They were most likely the same type I had confirmed earlier — objects based on rifle rounds, enhanced with some kind of magical modification. Magic used by a mage dispatched to a nuclear facility classified as a Grade-A national critical installation — it wouldn't be an ordinary attack.
Of course, there was no need to take a hit. The modified Rosetta Stone also rang a warning bell in my soul, confirming that getting hit would be a bad idea. I closed the considerable distance between us in a single rush.
Each time my heels struck the metal-plated floor, a sharp clatter echoed in rhythm, and the hem of my white dress fluttered. Such regularity would likely give the enemy a clear opening to attack. With the assistance of the modified Rosetta Stone, I dodged every bullet the other side fired while adding my own irregularity through zigzag maneuvers.
And that wasn't all. I realized that now was the perfect moment to use sub-space displacement as an attack.
At full running speed, I summoned a billowing shadow in front of me. The opposing mage realized at a glance that I was up to something strange and hastily tried to do something to stop me, but it was already too late.
'If you were going to do something, you should have done it sooner.'
The moment I passed through the Shattenmädchen, I displaced my body. The time I spent in sub-space was just an instant. Preserving my previous speed, I tore through a shadow dozens of meters away and descended back into reality.
"What—!?"
And the place where the shadow billowed at my arrival point was right in front of the opposing mage's face. Genuine bewilderment showed on the mage's face. I used the momentum to swing Baramil in one fluid motion. The silver trail carved deeply by the Himalayan meteoric iron was stained with human blood after a brief delay.
At the same time, what the mage saw in his eyes was the writhing movement of a soul. From the wound that Baramil had carved with its unique magic, the soul surged forth so violently it could rightly be called a rampage.
"Wha—what is this—!"
He let out a scream bordering on a desperate cry of incomprehension. Leaving his scream behind, I opened the shadows once more, briefly traversed sub-space, and returned to my original position.
*Screech* — I bent my knees and slowly reduced my speed through friction with the floor. Thanks to the Shattenmädchen I had positioned like a knee guard, which materialized as a solid shadow to absorb the friction, there was no risk of my knees being scraped raw. At the same time, the blade of Baramil scraped across the floor, leaving a mark like a skid trail — but infinitely thin.
It was my first-ever experience of "instantaneous movement." More intuitively, I suppose it could be called a Blink.
In strict terms, it was the consecutive execution of two displacements. From the shadow at the departure point into the sub-space within the Shattenmädchen, then from the sub-space within the Shattenmädchen to the shadow at the arrival point. But outwardly, it was no different from instantaneous movement. It wasn't disappearing and reappearing without any warning, and it did require the medium of shadow within a radius of several dozen meters of my line of sight — but otherwise.
Setting aside the excitement that Blink brought me, I observed my opponent's reaction.
'...He's recovering, in his own way.'
There had been quite a few cases where Baramil had been a killing blow. A representative example was during the decisive battle to seize Britain this past Valentine's Day. Benjamin Ashford at that time had been under a constant regeneration magic. Thanks to that, I had been able to finish Benjamin Ashford by inducing cellular over-regeneration with Baramil.
But this time, I didn't have that kind of luck. The Korean mage on the other side immediately noticed the abnormality in his soul — the gradual erosion beginning from the point where Baramil's silver trail had cut through. His response was equally immediate. He pushed aside the question of what had happened to him for the moment, constantly scanning his surroundings in a defensive posture while focusing on recovering his soul.
"You're quite capable. If you hadn't devoted your full strength to soul recovery, my next attack would have landed on you long ago."
"Showing off cheap tricks. It seems you don't have real skill yourself — just magic you can use because you happened to find good artifacts."
"Go ahead and talk nonsense. 'Items' and 'inventory' are also part of skill."
Insisting on fighting bare-handed when you have weapons is something only a fool or an idiot would do. The same goes for deliberately using only magic when there are other excellent weapons like firearms available. In the same vein, making proper use of artifacts at the right time and place is also an important measure of a mage's skill. Even if you gave Baramil or Spiegel to a novice who had just awakened to magic, could they even unleash one-tenth of the artifact's power?
In that regard, the enemy mage's provocation didn't yield much effect. A brief standoff lasting a few breaths. And during this brief moment, the tide turned once more in my favor.
This was entirely because I had begun to grow accustomed to my newly acquired unique magic path.
I had realized it. The core of Blink operation.