The Calamity Saint and the Puppeteer (4)
Right as the twenty-four-hour mark hit, the students were finally able to pull Seria out.
Her condition was beyond words. Her entire body glistened with a sticky sheen, as if water really were flowing inside that wall.
“Isn’t this enough now? I’ve endured plenty, wouldn’t you say!” Seria finally snapped.
If she hated it that much, there was no helping it.
“Let’s stop here, then.”
“Finally?”
“It’s done. Exactly.”
The students all looked dead on their feet. Of course they did—it had been a full twenty-four hours. I’d made them repeat the process the entire time, exactly like when I trained those three sisters. Whenever they grew tired I healed them and forced them to continue. This was the same regimen, only using mana manipulation instead of simple endurance drills. We had repeated the restraint-melting exercise three times, raising the intensity each round.
The students’ mana control had improved dramatically.
“Are you really a saint?” Seria asked grumpily while fixing her hair.
“Being a saint is my side job. I’m a mage first.” I couldn’t forget my true calling. I was a mage, not a saint. At the very least people should treat me as a magic saint.
“Even mages don’t usually go that far. You’re not a battle mage, so why so brutish about it? Sob, sob. Just look at the blood on my forehead.”
Yes, blood was flowing. It streamed steadily down that pale forehead.
But what did she expect me to do about it?
“That’s a trivial matter, so let’s move on.”
The urgent issue right now was the dungeon.
“Wow, she calls it trivial.”
“You can heal something like that anyway, can’t you?”
“Isn’t this the sort of thing a saint is supposed to handle?”
A saint? Me?
“It would be simple if you just brought out one of your doctor dolls. What’s the problem?”
The magical dolls Seria controlled had a wide range of abilities. Among them, the doctor and nurse dolls could perform real medical treatment. They couldn’t use healing magic, but their physical care was genuinely useful on battlefields or in parties that lacked priests or nuns. I had used them often when supporting the kingdom’s army.
“Or are you going to throw a tantrum and start whining? Is a grown woman going to snivel like some spoiled child? The dungeon master knows what you’re like, right?”
Just imagining it was horrifying. Better to simply heal her.
“I’ll only use Heal.”
I placed my hand on Seria’s forehead. Light poured from my palm and closed the wound in an instant. Last time, when I refused to give her the doll-making materials, she had thrown herself on the floor and whined for hours. Honestly, watching a grown woman lie there sobbing was just unpleasant.
“With my noble sacrifice, the children can finally overcome the miasma, yes?” Seria whispered sweetly—yet somehow unpleasantly—into my ear.
I couldn’t be certain.
“I can’t say for sure yet, but they should at least avoid dying from it. The rest is for us to adjust on our end.”
“All right. Everyone’s mana manipulation has improved.”
“Miss Olivia, when the miasma begins to invade the body, how exactly do we use this mana?” Croissant asked. He was far more docile than before. That was understandable. After twenty-four hours of relentless mana training, he finally carried himself like a proper mage.
I gathered the rest of the students and explained.
“When you step into the miasma, your body will start to be corroded by it, correct?”
“Yes.”
“Since your control has improved considerably, you should feel a stiff, heavy sensation the moment the miasma tries to invade. Spread your mana outward from that spot like a thin film.”
It wasn’t difficult. Just apply it lightly.
Come to think of it, maybe I should have taught the same thing to those three sisters. I hadn’t bothered because I assumed there wouldn’t be any miasma strong enough to harm a human near the imperial capital.
“Can we really do that?”
“You’ll manage when you’re forced to. Besides, you all want to clear this dungeon, don’t you?”
After coming this far, if anyone suggested turning back I would beat them senseless. As long as they survived the miasma, I could handle everything else. No matter how much stronger Jerato had become, he still couldn’t defeat me. Above all, I had Seria. Even if she couldn’t use her dolls on the students directly, she could summon them for defense.
“Then let’s move.”
Once the Hourglass of Habel vanished, we finally set out.
The first floor was empty. Adran had probably arranged for monsters to appear only from the second floor onward.
True to expectation, monsters began spawning properly on the second floor—mainly goblins and orcs.
“Kroooaaar!”
“Graaaagh!”
The goblins and orcs charged straight at the students.
“Goblins and orcs… so we haven’t reached the dangerous part yet.”
Plenty of Adran’s handiwork was still visible. The presence of goblins and orcs proved it. If Jerato had been in control, the lower floors would have been crawling with gloomy undead instead.
The first two floors would have been manageable. From the third floor onward, the monsters might have started mutating under Jerato’s influence.
“Whoa! Goblins!”
“Goblins are nothing!”
The students began slaughtering the goblins one-sidedly. Their level was on a completely different plane. It was refreshing. Unlike the central nobles who only cared about maintaining dignity, these kids actually knew how to fight. Many of them used mana bullets, and quite a few wielded swords as well.
“Wow, the line between the magic department and the sword department has completely vanished,” Seria murmured beside me.
“It’s a dungeon. Everything’s on the line. People usually fight with whatever they’re most comfortable with.”
“Still, they’re magic students~”
If I’d had more time, I would have taught them the same. This was the magic department, after all. I was a mage. I preferred magic over swords. So I would have focused on magic.
“This dungeon is on the verge of a rampage. There’s no time to pick them off one by one with spells.”
“Fortunately it looks like we arrived right before the critical point. Is this what they call the golden time?”
Seria was right. The dungeon was indeed on the brink of exploding. For one thing, although miasma had spread this thickly, the number of monsters was still relatively low. I had seriously debated whether we should have done more training, but this seemed sufficient.
Normally, that would have been the conclusion.
…But this was Jerato’s dungeon. I couldn’t let my guard down.
“This should be enough.”
The students’ movements were still a little crude, but given their backgrounds they all possessed decent skill. If we continued downward like this, we should be fine. Still, the fact that the dungeon was on the verge of a rampage bothered me. Would we even have time to kill the monsters that kept spawning like this?
Maybe I should have told the students about Jerato from the beginning.
“You’re not even a professor. Isn’t your only job to train them on miasma resistance? Why are you worrying so much? Doesn’t it bother you at all that my beautiful hair is now caked in this sticky mud?”
“No, I’m just wondering if I should charge ahead and clear everything myself.”
My hands itched. Still, these students were better than the nobles who had either dropped out or been held back.
“You’re supposed to let them handle things like this on their own. You’re a saint, not a professor. Right?”
“Well, that’s true, but…”
“You don’t have to act like a teacher. Were you planning to teach them basic magic or swordsmanship or something?”
She had been saying strange things for a while now.
“No, I’ve been thinking something strange.”
“Huh?”
“Kids who don’t even have the fundamentals need to be beaten until their arms nearly break before they learn. But these students already have decent posture and form. I’m not some crazy woman dying to teach them.”
If I tried to force my own style on skills they had already learned, it would only make things worse. I usually preferred practical, combat-oriented training anyway, and I had no intention of teaching anything to students who were already handling goblins and orcs reasonably well.
“Then what is it?”
“The dungeon is on the verge of a rampage. I was thinking we should finish this quickly. There are far more monsters than I expected.”
“No way.”
“Yes. It might already be rampaging.”
Otherwise the monster population wouldn’t have increased this sharply.
“You’re saying the dungeon master has already taken full control?”
“I didn’t mention it to the students because I didn’t want to alarm them, but I believe the dungeon master is Jerato.”
Seria would know that much. Information about the Demon King’s army would have reached the Magic Tower as well. At my words, Seria rolled her eyes, then clapped her hands together.
“Jerato? The one who got beaten like a dog by Lord Noah?”
“Uh… yeah.”
“The one who kept getting crushed, clung to the Betrayer Clanice’s skirt for power, then got crushed again until his mana circuits were shattered?”
Put that way, he sounded almost pitiful. Still, it wasn’t wrong, so I nodded.
“Yes.”
“How do you know that?”
“The one who originally created this dungeon was Jerato. The imperial capital dungeon terror incident. It was publicly blamed on a random dark mage, but it was actually Jerato’s doing.”
There was no longer any reason to hide it. Besides, I needed Seria’s cooperation right now.
“That makes sense. If he reclaimed a dungeon he built himself, he would have regained control immediately. But are you certain?”
“I am. Professor Adran is meticulous. He would have been checking the dungeon regularly until right before the practicum.”
Adran had an ironclad personality. He would have inspected the dungeon frequently.
“Then Jerato must have returned right before the practicum began. If the original owner has come back, it’s possible he’s seizing control this quickly. We have no choice.”
Seria snapped her fingers with a crisp click.
In that instant, magic circles bloomed all around us.
Shhhhhk.
Various summoned creatures appeared above the circles. These were different from normal summons. They were neither spirits, undead, nor monsters.
She was calling forth the dolls she kept stored in her personal subspace.
Yes. The moment she snapped her fingers, it looked incredibly cool. It seemed as though knight-type summons would appear and sweep away everything in sight.
But as she had said, she was a puppeteer. And she had a particular fondness for dolls that resembled sewn teddy bears.
Enormous pink teddy bears materialized.
“Wait, before that—where did you learn to snap your fingers like that?”
That was my move.
“Hehe. You noticed, Saintess? This is none other than Lord Noah’s signature finger snap. After months of research, I managed to compress the incantation for doll summoning into a single finger snap.”
“You crazy genius.”
This was exactly why she was a genius. At this rate she might become an archmage before me. This wasn’t the time to stand around. I needed to find the next saint and hammer in the idea that I was a mage far more strongly. The only real benefit I’d gained from becoming a saint was the chance to punish Lily.
By the time the dolls were summoned and we reached the second floor, new monsters had appeared.
“Grrrrk.”
Skeletons—nothing but empty skulls given motion by Jerato’s necromancy—creaked and clattered toward us from every direction.
“Eek? These are a bit scary. Saintess~ I’m scared?”
Seria clung to me.
“Get off. A woman your age clinging to teddy bears is disgusting.”
“Aww, but my teddy bears are cute, aren’t they?”
Pink teddy bears wielding spears, swords, and magic while smashing enemies to pieces were apparently cute.
“Whether the teddy bears are cute has nothing to do with you, Seria. Besides, the teddy bears are going to do all the beating anyway, right?”
“As expected of my rival. You understand me so well.”
The teddy bears armed with what looked like toy swords began butchering the undead.
“W-what are those teddy bears?”
“The number of monsters suddenly increased. It looks like a rampage phenomenon.”
The fact that undead—exactly the kind Jerato would love—had appeared was proof enough.
“Then are we doomed?”
“That’s why Seria summoned the teddy bears. Students, don’t panic and focus on killing the orcs.”
With Seria’s level of skill, she could easily hold these things back. Jerato really was an idiot. Because he kept getting beaten by me, he had no idea what other forces were present. He shouldn’t have underestimated Seria just because she was at Attelina Academy.
“It seems the dungeon master is looking down on me quite a bit?”
“Why?”
“To think he didn’t even recognize me. Especially since I’m at Attelina.”
She shook her head.
“Well, I did slam you into a wall once. That might be part of it.”
Logically, who would recognize a mage who lost to a non-combat saint?
“Anyway, you really are too much, you know?”
Too much? That’s just how the world works.