Chapter 335
Chapter 335
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Translator: Ace
Chapter: 335
Chapter Title: A Midwinter's Night (6)
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4 AM.
The Ice Queen's Fortress.
A brown liquor bottle shattered against the fortress wall.
"You bastards! Come on out! Let's fight!"
A drunken Jocre roared at the top of his lungs. His pupils were completely dilated, and he staggered in a zigzag.
Rudvance and Vivian supported him from either side.
"Jocre, stop it. What if we get caught? We're not supposed to be here at this hour."
His melancholy, fueled by the alcohol, had twisted into rage.
Jocre needed something to fight, and his belligerence toward the world had driven him to trespass into a restricted area.
"Haha! Who's gonna mess with me? I'm a mage! A certified mage! Let them come! I'll blast away any guard with a single spell!"
Jocre shook his body, shrugging off his friends.
Vivian and Rudvance couldn't stop him. They had drunk so much that they, too, were barely coherent.
Rudvance, the least belligerent of the drunks, clung to Jocre again and guided him into the fortress.
"It's cold. Let's just go inside. If you keep shouting out here, we're going to be in big trouble."
"Drinks! Rudvance! Let's drink! Let's drink our fill!"
"Alright. Just keep it down and follow me."
The hall, now empty of people, felt desolate.
The artifacts they had casually passed by during the day now seemed to have taken on a life of their own, exuding a grotesque aura.
The figure of the Ice Queen, illuminated by the cold moonlight streaming through the window, was particularly eerie.
Vivian rubbed her shoulders and said,
"Some light magic, please."
Jocre was in no state to cast a spell, so Rudvance and Vivian cast the light magic.
But they too were drunk, and it took several tries before they finally succeeded.
With a soft pop, two orbs of light floated to the ceiling, instantly illuminating the hall.
Jocre practically crawled up the slippery ice stairs.
Reaching the mezzanine-level corridor, he started picking a fight with the wax figure of the Ice Queen encased in a massive block of ice.
"Hey, Miss Ice Queen? Are you sleeping? Wanna have a drink with me?"
There was no reply.
"Haha! See! The legendary mage is nothing special. Just sleeping trapped in ice! You call that magic?"
-Magic. A law that twists phenomena. Ice Queen. Mage.
The psychic entity absorbed Jocre's information.
Optrous, materialized by Liria's necromancy, had instinctively fled to a place where the most familiar thoughts were concentrated.
That place was the Ice Queen's Fortress.
This was because the Ice Queen occupied the largest share of the information spewed out by the tourists.
Based on this vast amount of information, Optrous was rapidly adapting to this world.
At a certain point, cognition arose within the psychic entity that had previously only possessed sensation.
As sensation and cognition began to communicate, the mere preservation of knowledge started to transition into the stage of thought.
-I think, therefore I am.
Optrous reached the conclusion that it needed a form to prove its existence. And it found a special vessel capable of materializing its thoughts.
The Ice Queen's eyes snapped open.
Jocre wasn't surprised. He knew that if you stood on the platform of the wax figure, its eyes would open.
The Ice Queen's beautiful appearance made the wound from being carelessly discarded by a woman throb even more painfully.
Jocre knocked on the ice as if it were a door.
"Hey, Your Majesty. How about you and I have a little romance? Hm? Hehehe."
Vivian clicked her tongue, looking at Jocre's drunken antics with disdain.
"He's completely lost it. Hey, snap out of it. If you pass out here, you'll freeze to death."
Jocre rolled up his sleeves and took a fighting stance against the Ice Queen.
"Alright, let's go. A duel between mages. If I win, you have to go out with me."
As the information it had collected so far was categorized as experience, Optrous reached the stage of judging the world by its own standards.
-What is strength? Superiority of a certain characteristic. Control of properties. Alteration, transmutation, transformation of the physical world.
Then, a question suddenly arose.
-In that case... am I strong?
"That's enough. Let's go back. We need to get some sleep, too. How long are we going to stay here?"
Seeing Jocre's eyes were half-closed, Rudvance grabbed him from behind and began to drag him away.
Vivian, who had been sighing with her arms crossed, glanced at the Ice Queen and followed Rudvance.
But the moment she took a step, she snapped her head around, her face filled with horror.
"Huh? Wh-what?"
The eyes of the Ice Queen, which should have been staring straight ahead, were looking at her.
Vivian thought she was still drunk.
But no matter how she tried to clear her head, the Ice Queen's gaze was clearly turned to the side.
Her hair stood on end. Her heart pounded as if it would burst, sending a shock through her system.
"H-hey, guys..."
Jocre's voice faded down the stairs.
"Mmm, go out with me... hm?"
Don't leave me behind!
Vivian was too terrified to scream.
The gaze of the Ice Queen, which was supposed to be made of wax, was now moving freely, looking around.
It seemed to be analyzing the substance that was imprisoning it.
Vivian felt like she was going to die, even though nothing was physically wrong with her.
No, it was even scarier than dying.
As the thought that the distance between her and her friends was growing with each passing moment sank in, the desire to live forced air into her lungs.
Vivian screamed louder than she ever had in her life.
"Aaaaaaah!"
Her scream echoed, reverberating through the hall.
Just as Rudvance, who was heading down the stairs, turned his head in surprise, a flash of light erupted from where the Ice Queen stood.
"What was that?"
Rudvance let go of Jocre and ran up the stairs.
The Ice Queen was engulfed in a radiant light, and a pale-faced Vivian watched, her jaw trembling.
"R-Rudvance... this, this is..."
The wax skin of the Ice Queen was cracking, light seeping through the fissures.
As her body vibrated, the block of ice began to crack, splintering into thousands of fractures as if about to explode.
'I have to get away. I have to...'
The block of ice exploded with a deafening roar. At the same moment, Rudvance grabbed Vivian and threw himself to the side.
Shards of ice scattered to the far end of the hall.
Jocre, still on the stairs, hastily covered his face as the fragments flew toward him. Then he looked up in shock.
Even as she landed hard on her bottom, Vivian couldn't tear her eyes away from the Ice Queen.
Inside the shattered wax figure was a phosphorescent glow, burning with a golden light.
It slowly moved, approaching the railing.
As the light gradually subsided, an Ice Queen emerged, incomparably more vibrant than before.
Vivian muttered in disbelief.
"The Ice Queen... has been resurrected?"
Having witnessed the Ice Queen's return from up close, she had clearly seen the wax skin break apart like a mold, revealing a new Ice Queen forming within.
Jocre, who had reached the opposite corridor, started to run toward Vivian but stopped abruptly.
Like Vivian, his face had turned deathly pale.
"The Ice Queen?"
Could the legend be true?
If this wasn't a dream, he was now facing the mage who had sent countless people to their deaths.
"Haaaaah."
The Ice Queen opened her mouth and exhaled. Frost seeped out, and the air began to freeze, cracking like thin ice.
"This is the phenomenon of freezing."
It was a beautiful voice.
But as Jocre met the Ice Queen's lifeless eyes, he felt the blood freeze in his veins.
The Ice Queen, observing Jocre with an indifferent gaze, spoke.
"Defeat me, and I will grant you this 'romance' you speak of."
"Ugh... Uwaaaah!"
Jocre's nerves screamed with the premonition of death.
Conversely, his desire to live instantly purged the alcohol from his system and deployed the spell he had trained with the longest.
A fireball materialized above his palm.
Jocre's specialty was close-range fire magic.
Its casting speed wasn't fast, but he was confident that its power was second to none.
"Jocre! No!"
Vivian shouted. From a third-party perspective, it was an incredibly reckless act.
But had she been the one to meet the Ice Queen's gaze, she would have done the exact same thing as Jocre.
"D-die!"
The fireball Jocre threw struck the Ice Queen directly in the head.
No, it seemed she had no intention of dodging. With a *whoosh*, everything above her neck burst into flames.
"Kyaaaaaaah!"
Since it had originally been a wax figure, Vivian screamed, imagining a human candle.
In any case, the die was cast.
Rudvance, the more rational one, carefully observed the Ice Queen's condition and muttered,
"Is she dead?"
The Ice Queen didn't even flinch. All her nerves were focused on her brain.
The sensation, experienced for the first time since gaining a form, was interesting.
Having transformed the law into the form of a living being, the pain of her face burning away was excruciating.
But to her, unable to clearly define suffering, the pain was merely an abnormal sensory state.
'Is this heat? I will suppress it by absorbing the energy.'
As she absorbed the energy through the law, the fire vanished in an instant, and the surrounding air froze.
The Ice Queen's grotesquely distorted face was revealed.
Jocre, the one responsible, was so terrified he fell flat on his rear.
"Aahh, s-save me..."
The Ice Queen savored the convulsion of the nervous system concentrated in her face.
Pain was truly an unpleasant sensation.
'The brain...'
As the Ice Queen approached Jocre, her face began to slowly regenerate.
"I almost melted."
If the brain melts, you die.
That is what it is to be a living creature.
"Please spare me! I was wrong!"
Jocre prostrated himself, begging for his life. Fighting a mage who could survive having her face burned off was madness.
"Jocre!"
Vivian and Rudvance ran over and stood in front of Jocre.
They were no match for the Ice Queen, but to Jocre, his friends protecting him felt like saviors.
Vivian knelt and pleaded.
"Please, spare him! My friend was just drunk! He never intended to challenge you, Your Majesty."
"Drunk?"
Alcohol. Brain. A disruptive substance.
"I see."
Realizing that the reason pain was inflicted upon her was due to a disruptive substance in the brain, the Ice Queen lost interest.
"Absorbing this substance called alcohol does not seem very beneficial for a living creature."
"Yes! Yes! We're sorry."
"So, what will you do now?"
The Ice Queen asked with genuine curiosity.
Now in human form, she encountered humans. So, she was curious about what they would do to her.
Purity and madness have something in common, and so the Ice Queen's sincere question struck Jocre with terror.
"I'll do anything you command. So please, just spare our lives."
"You'll do as I command?"
"Yes, anything..."
The Ice Queen tilted her head.
"Why?"
Jocre looked up at the Ice Queen with a bewildered expression.
As he came to his senses, he realized her way of speaking and acting was strange.
But if the legend was true, she had been dormant for 800 years. It was highly likely she had lost her memories.
"O-of course, it's because you are a ruler, Your Majesty. And a great mage. So you must rule again."
"Rule?"
The Ice Queen's head tilted further. Then, as if something displeased her, she furrowed her brow.
She had gained individuality by borrowing a human form, but her information processing speed had dropped significantly.
However, this neural discrepancy was also accepted not as unpleasantness, but as a characteristic of a living being.
"I see. I rule. Because I am strong."
Jocre breathed a sigh of relief.
The Ice Queen was the Ice Queen, after all. If he had tried to be clever, he would have surely lost his life.
"Your words are absolutely right. You are in a different league from weaklings like us."
Jocre groveled endlessly.
He had worked his whole life and had only just achieved his first real accomplishment.
To die a dog's death in some random place before even getting to enjoy life as a mage—he wouldn't be able to rest in peace even as a corpse.