Episode 10
With a sharp crack and a hiss, bubbles rose to the surface.
The moment I drank it down without hesitation, a tingling rush of coolness scraped through my throat and plunged straight into my chest.
The sweetness that followed teased my tongue and left behind a long, deep aftertaste.
"Krrrgh...!"
I couldn’t help it. The sound tore out of me almost by instinct.
Before the afterglow had even faded, I reached for something else. There was a sweet-salty fragrance buried in old memories, along with that familiar crisp bite beneath my fingers.
I took a huge bite of the golden thing, already making my mouth water.
"Ugh!"
For a second, a shiver ran through my whole body.
The golden crust shattered under my sharp canines, and the salty, nutty juices that had been hiding inside burst across my mouth.
Crunch, crack. I tore through the meat in no time, then gnawed through the bones too and swallowed it all with a long, satisfied exhale.
Tears pricked at the corners of my eyes from a satisfaction I’d forgotten for a long time.
But I couldn’t stop here. I still had a long mountain to climb.
"Heehee. You’re next!"
"What exactly are you doing, Cynthia?"
I turned around with another bite halfway to my mouth. Kim Su-hyun had opened the interrogation room door, then stopped dead in the middle of the doorway and stared down at me in disbelief, sitting on the floor.
Shin Hyun-ah came in right behind him, expression as blank as ever.
"Oh, you’re here?"
"What on earth is this?"
"Can’t you see? I’m eating."
I set down the pizza slice, cheese stretching in long strands, and Kim Su-hyun adjusted his glasses with a very put-upon look on his face.
"Why? You said to order whatever I needed."
"...And so you ordered all of this food?"
He asked in utter disbelief, looking over the food piled on the floor with barely any space to step between it. Cola, all kinds of drinks, fried chicken, pizza, and more were spread out in every direction.
Right in the middle of it all, I basked in the wonders of modern civilization and nodded proudly.
"Food tastes best when it’s bought with someone else’s money."
"How many days did you go without eating? Are you planning to finish all of this?"
"Nope. That’d be a stretch. I’ve got a pretty small appetite."
To begin with, I wasn’t even hungry.
After becoming a pureblood, I’d completely lost the idea of hunger, and honestly, I could barely remember what it had felt like.
"Munch."
"Wait. Why are you just taking one bite and putting it down?"
"Didn’t you hear me? I said I have a small appetite."
"So you’re just going to take one bite and throw away all this food?"
"Do whatever you want with it."
Back when I stayed at my master’s mansion, I’d tried something like this once and gotten beaten half to death for it, so I’d just given up on meals after that. But here? There wasn’t anyone to complain at me.
This was exactly the time to enjoy some consequences-free pleasure.
"Oh, this pizza’s pretty good. I should have it again later. Let’s see, the menu name was Pineapple Hawaiian..."
"Let’s stop there."
Just as I was looking at the boxes, Kim Su-hyun suddenly cut in.
With a casual flick of his hand, a vast surge of mana rolled out, and all the food scattered across the floor vanished in an instant.
I blinked at the familiar phenomenon, then looked up at his face.
"Voidification?"
"You know it."
"Wow, you handle some seriously fucked-up magic. More importantly, you’re a mage?"
"Yes, I am a mage. And I’m quite skilled at the fucked-up magic you mentioned."
A mage who used space magic? That was basically the same as “double fucked-up.” No wonder I’d had a bad feeling about him from the start.
"That’s interesting. My magic is rather rare, so to recognize it at a glance..."
"I could’ve gone my whole life without knowing that, you know."
I’d killed countless mages in war, but there were only a few I remembered. Maybe because every one of them had used some deeply annoying magic that refused to leave my memory.
"Anyway, can we go do that test or whatever now?"
I got to my feet as I asked, and Kim Su-hyun nodded.
"The preparations are finished, but before we proceed, there’s something I need your consent for."
"Consent for what?"
"Based on the questionnaire you filled out, we’ve classified you as either a combat type or an all-round type, and prepared a test appropriate for that. The difficulty has been set to the maximum this headquarters can arrange, considering your level."
"You talk too much. Just tell me what I have to do."
As I dug at my ear with a finger and said it, Kim Su-hyun pushed his glasses up again and answered.
"You’ll be facing one thousand villains."
"Oh?"
I’d expected something boring, but that was unexpectedly interesting.
"We have a lot of villains in custody. The prison’s starting to run out of room, so we figured we might as well make use of them."
"How thrifty of you. So that means I can kill them all?"
"Villains are ordinarily sentenced to death sooner or later, unless there are special circumstances."
"Then that means I can kill them all."
"Will you do it?"
Since he’d asked for my consent, I’d assumed there was some catch. Well, damn.
"That sounds insanely fun. Let’s do it right now."
◇◇◇◆◇◇◇
Underground, beneath the headquarters of the Awakened Management Bureau.
There were more than a dozen spaces of varying sizes here, and the largest of them boasted an area ten times that of a soccer field.
It was a kind of virtual training ground created by combining space magic, magical engineering, and the alchemical formations of alchemy.
"Interesting, isn’t it?"
"What is?"
Kim Su-hyun, monitoring Cynthia from outside as she stood alone in the middle of the largest training field, turned to look at Shin Hyun-ah.
"What kind of results a level 724 ability user will show against one thousand villains, of course."
"She won’t have much trouble, if the questionnaire she wrote wasn’t a lie."
Shin Hyun-ah answered calmly, never taking her eyes off Cynthia as she yawned with her mouth hanging open.
"Well, I don’t think it was a lie. This is a matter of her life, so I doubt she’d bother bluffing."
With his hands loosely clasped, Kim Su-hyun also turned his gaze toward the hologram from the large Device.
One thousand villains.
Half of them were 1st Class ability users. The rest were at least 3rd Class.
From the perspective of Kim Su-hyun, a returnee, 1st Class was equivalent to a Sword Master or an 8th-circle mage in the world of Ragnarok.
Looked at simply, that was enough force to rival a small kingdom.
He had explained as much, but Cynthia’s attitude still hadn’t changed from the beginning.
The fact that she still looked so relaxed meant she must have absolute confidence in herself.
"I’ll leave the analysis to you, Guardian."
"If you mean Jusu, don’t worry. I’m already watching."
Under Shin Hyun-ah’s jet-black bob, her green-tinged pupils subtly widened.
Earlier, under the pretense of a test, they had requested that Cynthia use the one thing she had listed as her main specialty: Jusu.
She had agreed without any particular suspicion.
For a returnee who had supposedly gone through more than her share of carnage, she seemed oddly lacking in caution, but perhaps that was just her nature.
Thanks to that, Shin Hyun-ah, herself a returnee, would be able to dig into Cynthia’s level in detail with her own core trait, Analysis.
"And if I judge it possible after the test, I’ll place restrictions on her immediately."
"...You still haven’t given up?"
At Kim Su-hyun’s sidelong glance, Shin Hyun-ah gave a slight shake of her head.
"It isn’t only because of the disappearance case. As I mentioned earlier, my Eyes of Good and Evil have already identified her as a clear evil."
"Is that so?"
"Yes."
"Why are you only saying that now?"
"It took time to determine it."
"Whether she was good or evil?"
"No. It took this long to gauge just how evil she is."
Kim Su-hyun’s face showed a faint flicker of surprise at that.
Then, with his calm eyes settled again, he nodded as if he understood.
"I see. So that’s why you’ve been so fixated on her?"
Shin Hyun-ah nodded in silence.
With the many traits she possessed, the way she saw the world was completely different from ordinary people.
To her eyes, Cynthia was evil itself.
She looked like something so vile that all the villains Shin Hyun-ah had seen until now seemed almost cute by comparison.
"Hmm. From where I’m standing, she just seems like a person whose head’s a little off."
Kim Su-hyun stroked his chin while looking back at Cynthia.
She smiled and asked whether it would be all right to kill villains, so she definitely wasn’t a saint. But he didn’t get the sense she was some monstrously evil person either.
Still, he decided to trust the Guardian’s judgment more than his own instincts.
"Understood. I’ll approve the request. But let me be clear: if you aren’t absolutely certain you can do it, don’t step in."
"Of course. I won’t do anything stupid either."
After hearing that, Kim Su-hyun nodded.
"Good. Then we’ll begin the test now."
He operated the large Device in front of him.
At once, one side of the virtual training ground split open left and right, and from within, a huge mass of people slowly began to appear.
There were one thousand villains.
Each of them wore prison uniforms, but they came armed with weapons of their own, and as they emerged, they looked at Cynthia standing blankly in the center of the training ground and burst into vicious laughter.
Their eyes glinted with savage hunger, the kind you’d see on people looking at a delicious meal.
The reason they behaved that way was simple.
Kim Su-hyun had informed them in advance.
If they killed the white-haired girl in the red cape, they’d be granted a pardon.
"Guardian."
At Kim Su-hyun’s call, Shin Hyun-ah extended her hand forward.
As the light that began there slowly grew brighter, the same glow burst from the foreheads of the villains who had broken into the training ground.
"I’ve just lifted the Restriction imposed by Winner and Hero."
The declaration that the overwhelming suppression created by those three traits had been released.
In practical terms, it meant every restraint that had bound the villains was now gone.
All right. The stage is set. Now let’s see what you show me.
Kim Su-hyun adjusted his glasses and watched Cynthia with a grave expression.
But that expectation.
"Huh?"
"Wh-what the...!?"
As the blade of the first villain who rushed out sliced through Cynthia’s neck, that expectation shook violently.
Thud. Roll, roll.
The head that rolled across the floor spilled bright red blood in wet, jerking pulses.
Such a meaningless death.
The two people monitoring the scene stared at it blankly.
Then Shin Hyun-ah reacted first.
Her pupils, widened just a little, showed that she was rarely caught off guard.
"She didn’t die?"
"Pardon?"
At Kim Su-hyun’s question, another anomaly erupted in the training ground.
Cynthia’s decapitated body suddenly moved.
A pale hand brushed lightly against the chest of the villain who had cut off her head.
And in that instant.
—Poof!
The villain was reduced to a handful of blood and vanished.