The Heart of the Dragon Vein
"Goddammit."
Cursing under my breath, I was running through the early morning.
There was no helping it.
A vicious sense of wrongness—and the suspicion that had bloomed alongside it. Which meant I had no choice but to question the situation itself.
Because I had reached one conclusion.
They're not after Hayeon.
For starters, the idea that Hayeon had been snatched back or swapped out without any of us noticing... That hadn't happened. Seoa's ability was clairvoyance, and no sleight of hand could slip past those eyes. Besides, Seoa herself understood the situation well enough by now. Novus Ordo Seclorum would come for Hayeon first, above all else—and knowing that, she had kept blatantly, deliberately close watch over Hayeon's safety.
Seoa's mother had been at her side, too. Thanks to that, I could be certain of Hayeon's safety.
"Who needs Park Woochan when I'm here?!"
And that was exactly when Tiamat had appeared.
"Whoa, what the heck?! When did you get here?!"
"Just now!"
No, seriously—what? I wasn't even that out of it...
Of course, it wasn't strange for Seoa to react that way. That woman had projected her avatar directly into the room—to anyone who didn't know better, it would look exactly like teleportation.
"I'm kind of busy right now!"
"I came bearing word from that side regardless!"
"What?!"
And so. I was now running toward the Academy, having left Hayeon and Seoa behind at the boarding house—along with Tiamat's avatar, for that matter.
...We had shared what we knew about the ghouls, at least in broad strokes. Through Tiamat, the Association would be able to get its hands on the same intel soon enough.
Which left the rest.
So the real problem was on this end after all.
The information Tiamat had passed along was anything but ordinary. If something was brewing anywhere, it was there—nine times out of ten, that was the only conclusion the evidence allowed.
First, the gate had opened at dawn, just as expected. And yet even the Association, with all its mana-detection equipment, had failed to catch the faintest precursor. Gates were supposed to work that way, granted—but this was extreme even by those standards. Mana dense enough to tear open a gate had packed itself into a single point in an instant, and then that thing had simply opened.
Second, what came surging out of the open gate, thick as bamboo shoots after the rain, was mostly ghouls. I'd confirmed that much myself, so I could skip it.
And last—third—even amid all that, one location was radiating a distinctly abnormal pattern of mana usage. The very place I was running toward now. The Academy.
With all of that pieced together, I could reconstruct what had happened well enough. Novus Ordo Seclorum had noticed my absence. They had used the opening to activate a secret laboratory built separately from Pyeong So-woon's operation, layered Dr. Pyeong's system on top of it, and generated an artificial gate. Instead of spawning a chaotic swarm of rifts, they had condensed everything into one. The result was the gate hanging over the city at this very moment—a colossal hole glaring down at the streets from high above.
The ghouls had begun pouring out of it. Naturally, considering how the Association would have to respond, it was more than enough to seize every eye. No—seizing eyes was only the beginning. Against numbers like these, our side would inevitably have to answer in kind.
In a simple brawl, a single high-rank hunter could handle a crowd. But this was different. Urban warfare. In a downtown district packed with homes and civilians, a high-rank hunter couldn't cut loose with full firepower—and naturally, there was no clean way to sweep the ghouls away in one stroke, either. Stack the defense granted by the One-Hit Faith on top of that, and simply coping with the ghouls at all would strain every hand available.
The military was in the same boat. In street fighting like this, the army should have been the useful one—but as luck would have it, not this time. Sum up how the military fights monsters in a single word, and it comes down to firepower. And in this kind of urban battle, the ghoul's defensive ability arrives as absolute despair. A monster that shrugs off one bullet and heals back the rest of the magazine's worth? How is an army supposed to fight that? Headshots with a sidearm? Don't make me laugh.
Which was why the ghoul forces were pressing into the city center with an efficiency that went far beyond any mere delaying tactic. Naturally, every gaze had been dragged away from the Academy.
According to Tiamat, the Academy was still unnaturally quiet even now. Yes—unnaturally so. She had found that odd and trained her mana-measuring instruments on the Academy, and only then did the Association confirm the existence of a barrier draped over the building. Of course, confirm was all they had done. Laying a hand on it was out of the question.
Well. Fair enough, I suppose. This might sound a little cold, but the incident had kicked off around six in the morning—a time of day when, apart from the lone guard on night duty, there wasn't a soul to be found. Sure, someone might have used that window to do something at the Academy. Easy to say. In the end, it was a conspiracy theory without a shred of evidence. People were dying right in front of them, and the Association was stretched thin just responding to that. Sparing a single free hand for the Academy was unthinkable. For a bureaucratic organization, the obvious call.
And that was exactly what the enemy had counted on.
The bastards who had opened a gate over the city in our absence were working something at the Academy. Having judged that much, I had thrown myself toward it without a second thought. What they were doing there, what they were planning—I still couldn't say. But I could not leave them be. What the Association, as an organization, could not do, an individual like me could. That judgment was the reason I was here.
And.
Hunches like this are never wrong.
Call it "just as expected," I suppose. The momentum of the ghouls barring my path to the Academy was anything but ordinary. To be precise, the area around the Academy itself was still quiet. Except—beyond the barrier. From inside the Academy, pristine and untouched as it looked from the outside, I could see ghoul bodies sliding smoothly into view. Emerging from within the barrier, presumably.
Two higher-tier ghouls—the kind I hadn't laid eyes on even during the defense of the boarding house. No. Truthfully, three. Two charging from the front. And one more: a bitch disguised as a human, her performance of collapsing in a terrified heap at the sight of them flawless down to the last detail.
"H-help me, please!!"
"Drop dead!!"
"GRAAAAGH!!"
Unlike Seoa, I wasn't about to be taken in by that kind of trick. Before I even got around to checking her feet, the mana alone smelled wrong. The ghoul tumbled out of the path of my descending blade, rolling as she fell—and thanks to that, my sword claimed only one of her arms, far from the result I'd wanted.
The ghoul wore a flicker of panic at the blow. Then, face alight with triumph, she shouted:
"I don't know how you saw through me, but this is the end...!!"
"Allahu akbar!!"
"GYAAAAAH!!"
Of course, it didn't do a damn thing. There was no time to be practicing swordwork or spellwork one move at a time. The defense of the One-Hit Faith. There were roughly three ways to break it. One: genuinely kill the creature in a single strike. Two: draw a different weapon and cut. And three: strike again shouting Allah's name—a blade swung in Allah's name falls entirely outside the One-Hit Faith's protection. And so the higher ghoul that had come charging in so triumphant was split clean in two, right down to the vocal cords it had been so awkwardly putting to use a moment before.
The other ghouls' faces drained at the sight—then they bolted for the far side of the barrier.
"Fuck—stop right there, will you?!"
Naturally, they did not, in fact, stop. I hadn't expected them to. No way in hell was I keen on burning Shukuchi to force my way in here only to walk straight into an ambush by the Ghoul King. So, just as before, I took off running again, eyes sweeping my surroundings.
...I still had no idea what plan they were hatching. But one thing I could guess. They weren't after Hayeon. They had seized the Academy instead. And what did that mean?
I knew. The dragon vein. And in any city a dragon vein runs through, there is a place that could be called its heart—the point where, by the old principles of feng shui, mountains at your back and water before you, the region's energy converges on a single spot. The mana core of the entire area.
And gates are a phenomenon born when concentrated mana detonates. In other words: the Academy is the magical heart of this new city. A gate had existed there even before this whole mess began. And naturally, a mana hub like that matters immensely to mages. Occupy it, hold a large-scale ritual, and you can work magic beyond your own ability—because the place is, quite literally, a massive lump of mana. In short, they had seized the heart of the dragon vein centered on the Academy, and...
Don't know what, but they're planning some kind of ritual!!
No doubt this was outside the Association's expectations as well. They knew ghouls could use magic, but nobody had imagined ghouls presiding over a magical rite. Hence the Association washing its hands of the Academy. Which made sense—because the ones presiding over the ritual now weren't the ghouls. It was the bastards behind them.
So. I didn't know what, but something rotten was guaranteed to happen. Worse, the Academy had been built directly atop that dragon vein's heart. I couldn't speak to the details, but magical architecture might well be woven into the structure. And if so?
The whole place could function as a ritual ground.
The Academy itself would end up amplifying the enemy's magic. Choi Seungjun had surely prepared magical defenses, of course. But physical locks, magical locks—sooner or later, every lock gives way. I couldn't simply trust in that and rest easy.