Worse Than a Fiend (1)
What is a mountain?
It is a place of fierce vitality.
And why is a mountain so full of life?
Because a mountain is thick with vegetation.
Where plants grow, insects gather. Where insects gather, herbivores follow. Where herbivores roam, predators come hunting.
Then what is vegetation?
Vegetation is the word that gathers grass and trees into one.
And what are grass and trees?
Grass is a refuge for insects. Trees are a refuge for animals.
Grass grows low. Trees rise high.
And a mountain is a place where such vegetation stands packed so densely it chokes the light.
In a mountain that thick with green, every kind of sound fills the air—the cry of insects, the song of birds, the calls of beasts, the rush of water.
But that mountain trembled in silence.
The insects did not sing.
The animals would not leave their dens.
The birds would not come near.
The only sound left was the soft trickle of water.
Then a new sound rang out across that mountain.
A man's voice.
"The mountain is quiet."
That man was me.
I had come to the mountain.
This mountain, visible from the Academy.
It sat near enough to the Academy grounds that you could always see it, yet not so near that you could reach it in a hurry—an awkward, in-between distance. It loomed large enough to feel close, but the moment you actually set out for it, you discovered it was considerably farther than it looked. And still it showed itself so clearly, flaunting its presence day after day, that it had become a familiar mountain—the kind any Korean would recognize at a glance. An ordinary mountain.
From the outside, it looked perfectly peaceful. No different from usual.
But what you see from the outside is never the whole of a thing.
The moment I stepped into the trees, the silence hit me, along with a tension I could not quite name.
The air is heavy.
It felt as though the air itself had settled to the ground and was pressing down. The sensation only grew worse the higher I climbed toward the mountain's midsection.
This mountain was wrong.
Things that ought to be in any mountain were simply not here.
Grass and trees, yes—those were present. The weather had begun to warm, and the leaves of grass and trees were just starting to unfurl. In that respect the landscape looked no different from any other mountain shaking off winter and opening into spring, and from the outside it seemed full of life.
But nothing else was here.
What other mountains had, this one lacked.
Where there is grass, there should be insects. I saw none.
Where there are trees, there should be animals. There were none.
No squirrels nesting in the branches. No chipmunks. No birds. No wild boars, no raccoon dogs, no weasels.
A wind swept through.
I felt it.
Like a stone already set in place warily watching a stone that has just rolled in, the wind carried a hostile energy toward the intruder who had entered the mountain—and within that hostility, faint but unmistakable, the trace of Black Mana.
"Looks like we found the right place, Miho."
"Kyeng?"
Miho, walking at my side, looked up at me in response.
"Guide me to wherever the mana left in that wind feels strongest."
"Sniff!"
At my word, Miho took the lead as if telling me to follow only her.
Miho was excellent at sensing mana. She was especially sensitive to Black Mana. For pathfinding like this, putting her in front was simply the most efficient choice.
My reason for coming to this mountain was nothing complicated.
There were monsters here.
Said like that, it did not sound particularly ordinary—but I was in no immediate danger, so it was fine.
In the original story, a terrorist attack hits the Academy around this time of year.
A group of dark mages and a demon contractor stage the assault, and it is the first major incident the protagonist faces after entering the Academy.
You know the kind of thing. The protagonist shows up for the entrance ceremony and monsters come pouring in, or some beast invades, or whatever the variation is that week.
In The Reincarnator Wants to Live, the disaster does not strike during the entrance ceremony itself.
It strikes two days later.
Two days after the ceremony, an enormous wave of monsters invades the Academy—a full-scale catastrophe. The entire Academy takes damage. A true disaster.
If it had been last year, the damage would not have been nearly so severe.
The previous third-years and the current third-years were a world apart.
The previous third-year class had been packed with students aiming for combat-related fields, and the combat strength of the whole grade had been considerable. There had been plenty of famous names among them, and in friendly matches against other academies the previous third-years had rarely lost. Last year's third-years had been so fierce people called them a warrior people—and they had been strong.
The current third-years, by contrast, were clearly weaker in combat. Almost no one among them was known for raw fighting power. I had heard that many of the students leaned toward alchemy or magical engineering—fields far removed from direct battle.
Which meant the Academy's overall combat strength had dropped sharply, and that even if hundreds or thousands of monsters came crashing down on it, the Academy would not be able to handle them well.
A terrorist plot that would have stayed a fantasy last year had become genuinely feasible.
In the original, two days from now a swarm of monsters would overrun the Academy.
The ones who planned it were dark mages nursing a grudge against the Academy—and one demon contractor who had taken an interest in the affair.
Their reason for striking at this particular moment was clear.
This was when the Academy was most unsettled, and most vulnerable.
And because of that attack, several people inside the Academy died.
There had simply been too many monsters.
If they had all been weak, it would have been manageable. The problem was that with so many monsters overall, there were plenty of strong ones mixed in as well.
Fortunately, the truly powerful monsters were all caught early by the vice principal and the grade heads, so those particular beasts caused no casualties. The problem was that the monsters the vice principal and grade heads managed to take down were only a tiny fraction of the whole—and the rest kept pouring into the Academy without end.
In the end, everyone at the Academy banded together and wiped the monsters out. But the aftermath of the incident was severe.
The holy casters who had thrown up barriers and poured healing into the students to keep them alive overexerted themselves so badly they spent days in the hospital. Even after the faculty finished protecting the students and clearing the monsters, they still had to keep moving with the police to track down the masterminds. The principal was criticized for failing to prevent the attack, and the Academy had to shut its doors for several days.
If no one had died, it might have been somewhat better—but among the dead students were a few well-known names, which only made the scandal worse.
And it was not as though the Academy's interior and surroundings were filled only with ability users. Plenty of ordinary people lived near the Academy as well. The damage those civilians took from the monsters was considerable. Because the dark mages had focused their monster projection on the Academy itself, the harm to ordinary people was relatively light compared to the scale of the swarm—but even a single monster was not something a civilian could easily face.
In any case, the humiliation the Academy suffered was enormous. So much so that the Academy and the police became obsessed with hunting down every last dark mage involved in the attack.
Among the Academy's students were martial artists, mages, summoners, and contractors with a real talent for search work. With those students, the professors, and the police working together, the dark mages were rounded up quickly enough.
But the demon contractor who had lent the dark mages his power was never found.
No—he was found.
Only much later, deep into the middle of the novel, and already dead. The mention was so brief I had almost missed it; I only learned about it because a commenter on the chapter had caught the reference.
And so the incident was closed.
Now, because of me, that incident was going to change.
I had gone through the trouble of transmigrating into this world. There was no reason to sit back and leave a situation that could be improved alone—especially when people's lives hung on it.
So I had come to the mountain.
What I intended to do was thin out the monsters in advance, so the Academy could weather the crisis more easily. If the terrorists abandoned the attack entirely, even better.
On this mountain, the dark mages had stashed the monsters they had prepared for the attack—put them to sleep and left them waiting. They could not summon that many monsters all at once, so they had called them up ahead of time and stockpiled them across several mountains like grain in a storehouse. Managing the monsters still cost an enormous amount of mana, but their collaborator—the demon contractor—had provided most of that power.
This mountain was one of those stockpiles.
Pinpointing which mountain had not been difficult. In the original, the investigation after the attack had found spaces near the Academy that showed signs of a massive monster garrison, along with traces of large numbers of living things moving through the area. So I had simply picked a nearby mountain at random and come looking—and fortunately, it seemed I had chosen correctly.
"I sense them. Swarming thick as ants."
I could feel it.
The scent of Black Mana that could not be hidden.
I could feel it.
The presence stirring beneath my feet.
"In that case, all of you will have to die."
I muttered to myself and drew my sword.
With a cold rasp of steel, the blade left its scabbard. I drove it into the ground.
I poured mana into the sword. The blade, drinking in the power, turned black and began to spread mana through the earth like a conductor carrying current.
I could feel it.
A vast space hidden beneath the ground.
And the enormous monsters packed into that vast space until it could hold no more.
My mana poured into the underground chamber. Mana that had been compressed almost to the point of taking physical form slowly uncoiled and filled the space like a gas.
"Lord Marbas. I need your help."
"This body shall handle it, so fret not. Thou need only detonate."
Marbas's Black Mana flooded the gaps between monster and monster. Slowly, and yet with startling speed, the mana moved.
And so the vast underground space filled completely with mana.
And then—it detonated.