The Basement, Not the Rooftop
Long story short: sneaking into the academy proved a fairly simple affair. It was all thanks to the performance of the barrier currently blanketing the place.
Vision blocking.
As with any so-called barrier, the one wrapped around the academy's buildings was no different. It severed inside from outside, keeping interference from without from ever reaching within. To put it precisely — that was all it did.
Blocking physical intrusion. Intercepting trespassers. Formations to send outsiders wandering in circles. The barrier ringing the academy possessed none of those functions.
……Which meant they, too, were walking a tightrope.
Artificial gate generation, even now, rested entirely and exclusively on Dr. Pyeong So-woon's expertise. So then — what would the Association's hunters think, seeing a barrier unfurled over the academy? Someone's floated an artificial gate into the sky and seized the academy in the meantime — they must be hatching some unspeakable scheme!
No.
Reality read differently. Artificial gate technology had yet to be commercialized. Even within the Association, word of it circulated only among the handful of hunters who'd helped raid the secret research wing back in the day.
Which meant that even a hunter who did witness the barrier would think, first and foremost: Someone activated a barrier from inside the academy! They might even embroider it on their own — probably to hide from the ghouls' eyes.
Gates are acts of God. Two Great Invasions deep into this era, people believe it without knowing they believe it. A gate erupting without warning. A sight-blocking barrier appearing out of nowhere to swallow the academy whole. To anyone who knew the full story, those two facts were suspicious beyond measure — but judged against the common sense of the age, that was simply how they read.
Some capable mage activated the barrier with split-second timing. What exquisite timing. Suspicious…… No one could think that, and no one would. Not while the world was still bleeding steady losses just managing the gates that opened of their own accord. The notion that a gate could be opened at will was, for the overwhelming majority, nothing more than a blind spot.
Which was no doubt why they, too, hadn't bothered adding any real functions to the gate. Even the Hunter Association — which had all but written the academy off for the time being — would otherwise have no choice but to reach out, quite apart from any talk of gates or conspiracy theories. Put simply, the current situation was the limit of even their nerve: a knife's-edge balance that let them seize the academy without once drawing the Association's idle suspicion.
Of course, all of that applied strictly to the barrier itself. In practice, the ghouls packed wall to wall inside it made setting foot within no easy feat. Conversely — that was as far as it went. A barrier whose performance had been dialed back just so. A ghoul breed specialized from the very start in luring prey rather than standing watch. Difficult, unmistakably — but not so difficult I'd call it impossible. At least, not for me.
I was no physical powerhouse, and I couldn't build tactics around raw ability. For someone like me, the hunter's craft was as good as a lifeline — stealth and infiltration included. I slipped over the wall the instant the ghouls' attention strayed, and from there, taking stock of the situation took hardly any time at all.
And what startled me was the number and quality of the ghouls coiled inside the academy. Counted by mana, their strength topped a good five hundred. Of those, close to a hundred were upper-tier variants, give or take.
They scraped together quite the horde.
Perhaps, on top of whatever had crawled out of this gate, there were ghouls who'd been cooperating with the organization from the very beginning. Nothing short of that could explain the numbers. Not that it much mattered to me either way.
Finding allies was the hard part. The Hunter Association was already stretched thin just holding the line against the ghouls swarming the city. Tiamat had already linked up with the Association. Seoa and Hayeon had the boarding house to protect — and Hayeon was the very object of the enemy's designs. Jihee and Yunha were, according to Tiamat's report, cooperating with the Mixed-Blood Society and the Association respectively. As for Lee Joongoo and Choi Seungjun, they'd be pulling out every stop to keep the damage from spreading any further through the city. Which meant the only one who could move, here and now, was me.
Feels familiar.
Well — fitting, at this point. I'd been a solo hunter from the very beginning. There was no need to go hunting for someone to watch my back.
With that thought, I reached out and gently closed the eyes of the guards, who even now lay staring, red-eyed and wide, at nothing.
First stop: the security office. If they'd seized the academy, the security office was the first thing to check — or so I'd thought. After all, academy security currently rested in the hands of the Mixed-Blood Society, once the organization's own underlings.
But. Silly me. It had crossed my mind that the Society might have turned its coat after all. The security office I visited on that hunch sat in the middle of a storm of blood.
Corpses of mixed-bloods. Ghoul corpses scattered sparsely among them. Either way, nobody needed telling that a savage battle had been fought here.
Three mixed-blood dead. Going by the academy's security rotation, that amounted to every guard on duty, killed in the fighting. ……Had the organization simply never intended to forgive or win over a Society that had betrayed it once? Or had the Society refused? Or did they judge that a second betrayal would leave them truly without retreat? Whichever it was, I was the one left embarrassed for having entertained the notion at all. One more reason, then, for wiping them out to the last.
I sorted through my thoughts and pulled my gauntlets back on. Now then — objectives. The immediate goal was, first, the destruction of the strange ritual underway at the academy. Next, the extermination of the ghouls. So: where would they be holding it?
A sweep of my mana sensitivity gave the answer: the densest concentration of enemy force was, sure enough, at the rooftop.
The rooftop, huh.
Not an impossible choice. But considering the tricks they'd pulled so far, I couldn't help wondering whether charging it head-on was truly the wise play. And so, before anything else, I set my steps not for the rooftop, but for the basement. Partly because I was sick of dancing to their tune. But not only for such a petty reason.
Consider what they'd done so far. They opened a gate while I was away and loosed ghouls into the city center. They weaponized the assumption that Hayeon was their target, baiting me into retaking the boarding house. After that, they gathered the upper-tier ghouls and seized the academy, tuning the barrier just low enough to slip beneath the Association's gaze — and now they stood a hair's breadth from their goal. If not for Tiamat, I wouldn't have had the academy in mind in the first place.
So? Had they truly staked everything on a single barrier and massed their entire force on the rooftop? I found that hard to swallow. Everything they'd shown throughout this affair was, in a word, an aversion to open battle. They opened the gate in the window when Tiamat and I were absent. Wary of colliding with the Association, they throttled the barrier's performance down to a safe level. They turned the assumption that they'd go after Hayeon against us, pinning me to the boarding house. Put the other way around: they only opened the door when Tiamat and I weren't there to walk through it. They prepared meticulously to avoid any clash with the Association, and never once committed their main strength against me. And now, at the very end of the very end, they meant to hold the line by force? I couldn't make myself believe it.
There were practical reasons, too. From time immemorial, a magic ritual has demanded ground where the flow of mana lies calm. Why else would wizards across a thousand subcultures all don those heavy robes, as if on cue? Not out of some shared fashion sense — it's because they're conducting rituals in basements and the like, where there's no choice but to bundle up. And they were going to perform a magic ritual on a wide-open rooftop? Even a ritual praying for its own failure wouldn't go that far.
In short, the thing to suspect was, ironically enough, the basement. The basement gate above all — the one place where the ley lines ran densest.
And —
"Well, hello there, kiddies~"
Before long, I had my confirmation that the guess had been right. The ghouls I'd crossed at the main gate must have vaguely registered that I was coming. But right to the last, they'd chosen to steer me toward the rooftop rather than intercept me head-on. The result was right in front of me.
SHLAAAK!!
My preemptive strike sent the heads of two upper-tier ghouls sailing into the air. At the same instant came the sound of frantic footsteps scrambling down from the floors above. If they were truly holding the ritual on the rooftop, there'd have been no need to block me heading for the basement. The ghouls' reflexive call for reinforcements only hardened my certainty. Well — if all of this were an act, then even I would simply have to be taken in…… They were no rigorously drilled army, just a pack of beasts at the end of the day. I couldn't credit them with that much discipline.
Whoops. As it turned out, the real surprise was on their end of the exchange.
FWIP-FWIP-FWIP!!
The corridor sloping down toward the basement. Ghouls tucked into its shadows, hurling spell after spell my way. This had to be terrain they were laying eyes on for the first time in their existence, yet the sight of them putting it to passable use grated on me.
Did they get their hands on a map of the academy's interior?
How? I couldn't begin to guess. Not that it posed much of a problem just then. I swept the coat clutched in one hand around like a cape — and the anti-magic charms etched into it scattered the incoming bolts of mana.
GRUHK?!
Bewildered cries rippled through their ranks. Come now, no need for that much shock. It wasn't as if ghouls were ever famous for attacking with magic in the first place — and an improvised weapon like that was well within my power to answer.
The assaults that followed were more of the same. The moment the ghouls realized their magic wasn't landing, they surged in to pack the corridor solid. Ahead, ghouls guarding the way down. Behind, ghouls streaming in from the upper floors. The sight of them stubbornly corking the passage was thoroughly revolting. Even piled in like that, only a handful could actually fight at once — though I suppose that couldn't be helped so long as none of their kind had ever opened its eyes to human tactics and strategy. From my side of the fence, it was almost a welcome sight. I threw myself at the teeming mass ahead.
In the same breath — KYURAAK?! Shrieks tore out of the ones at the front. The cause was the coat I'd been holding a heartbeat before, now sailing through the air. Naturally, ghouls don't lose their composure over so crude a feint. Any other day, they'd have shredded it with a careless swipe of their claws. But this time was different. The claws swung to rend it snagged on the hem instead. Despite the ghouls' frenzied assault, the coat flew on without a mark, draping itself over their faces and blotting out their vision.
It could hardly have done otherwise. That coat was woven from darksteel and the other legendary minerals of the world — with the products of Atlantis now mixed in besides — the single most expensive piece among all my equipment. A mere B+ rank monster shredding it to ribbons? I'd have to ask them to dream on.
KYAAAAAAK!
The panic lasted an instant. But these were upper-tier ghouls, after all; the time it took them to quell the uproar churning through the pack was a true blink of the eye. For me, a blink was plenty.
Claws flailed through empty air like seizures. Not that I was dim enough to be caught by blind swipes — HAH!! — for the simple reason that I'd never charged them head-on to begin with. Instead of tearing down the corridor, I ran straight up the wall, both hands sealing around my greatsword once more. The instant I leapt, I swung the blade with my whole body behind it.
A cramped corridor is no place to swing a greatsword. And yet, by the same token, the greatsword arts I'd been taught included techniques for requisitioning space in exactly this fashion. Not that I'd learned them all that long ago myself. Airborne, I spun — not across the corridor's narrow width, but around the axis running from ceiling to floor. The whirling sawblade of a cheap horror flick. That was the image. With the surreal feeling of having become the murder prop of a slasher film myself, I condensed the whole rotation into the blade and let it loose.
SHKKRRRAAAK!!
The sound that rang out was less like living flesh parting than like the floor itself being sheared in two. Which was only natural — the ghouls caught on my blade a heartbeat before had been torn in half without so much as a flicker of resistance.
At the same time, claws came swinging at me, my sword-tip still planted in the floor. Idiots, every last one of them. Riding the recoil of the buried greatsword, I coiled my back muscles. Then — the draw. Treating the floor itself as my scabbard, I brought the blade down with the momentum that remained.
KRA-BOOOM!!
The ghoul standing before me was split neatly in two, left from right. With a motion for all the world like a downward cleave, I landed. My own strength got the better of me, every muscle in my body thrumming. But the full-power blow had bought me room — the ghouls around me had scrambled back — and thankfully that left me an opening to absorb the recoil.
And a greatsword already in motion is not something a bare body can stop. With a light thunk, my toe kicked off the planted blade. In the same motion, I showed my back to the ghouls ahead. Not that I intended to die for their convenience. Quite the opposite. The ghouls came charging from behind the instant I lunged forward — I gauged their number and swung. One horizontal slash, my whole body behind it. Just as my rotation began, shorn pieces of ghoul went spinning past me like scraps of cut cloth.
My first objective was the destruction of the magic ritual unfolding in the academy. The second was the ghouls' extermination. And right now, for me, the two were one and the same. Kill every ghoul. Destroy the ritual. To destroy the ritual, I would have to cut down every ghoul standing in my way. Which meant —
You're all dead already, you bastards.
There was no need to kill ghouls and then descend to the ritual chamber. I would descend to the ritual chamber, killing ghouls the whole way down. Greatsword roaring, I bored another hole straight through their ranks.