Chapter 587: A Stale Old Connection (6)
Translator: RaidenTL
Chapter 587: A Stale Old Connection (6)
Everyone has at least one area in which they absolutely refuse to be defeated.
It might be a matter of pride, of self-respect, or even their very reason for being.
For Han Ju-hee, that area was magic.
Strictly speaking, it wasn't her reason for being.
No matter how mad she was about magic, she wasn't foolish enough to let her entire existence be consumed by it.
However, it was her pride and her self-respect.
After she surpassed a certain level, magic became a truly honest discipline to her.
One where achievement was directly proportional to how long and how deeply one delved into it.
To climb one step, you had to first solidify the foundation beneath it.
Having built her foundation in this way, she could tell just by watching someone cast a spell.
She could see how well they understood magic, or if they were just mechanically reciting what they had been taught by others.
Most fell into the latter category.
It was unfortunate, but also unavoidable.
The discipline of magic itself had only been researched and put into practical use for a short time.
As such, there were no easy paths, only difficult ones.
People were overwhelmed just trying to learn the magic appropriate for their level.
To add depth, one had to stop while others moved forward and look back, which was just as difficult.
How many people in the world would be okay with running far behind a competitor who started on the same line?
There was only one way to solve this problem.
‘Magic needs to become easier.’
Magic had to become more intuitive than it was now.
When a phenomenon occurred, one shouldn't have to ponder and experiment deeply to understand why it manifested that way. Instead, after observing it a few times, they should be able to easily think, ‘Ah, so that part causes this phenomenon?’ If that were possible, the advancement of magic would be several, no, tens of times faster than it is now.
The problem was that reaching such a state was impossible.
Magic was a discipline discovered not in this world, but beyond the rifts.
Therefore, all newly discovered theories and magic circles were written in the language of that other place.
The world's most renowned scholars were somehow managing to decipher them and make progress, but there was still far more to uncover than what had already been revealed.
So she was always thinking.
Is there no way to simplify magic, even just a little?
Whenever she did, the face of a certain man would invariably come to mind.
“Kim Do-jin…”
Every time she faced him, every time she saw him use magic, she was seized by a fresh sense of shock.
It felt like being an earthling encountering an alien for the first time.
He was that different.
He used magic more easily than anyone else, and he modified it with just as much freedom.
The various spells with names never before reported in academia were surely all his own creations.
And that was proof that he understood magic more deeply than anyone.
‘The reason… is probably in his eyes.’
She knew.
She knew that his eyes could see the mana drifting through this world as a clear, distinct form.
That was why he was capable of a deeper understanding than anyone else.
For a human, there was no act more intuitive than seeing something with one's own eyes and understanding it.
Whenever she saw him, her motivation would boil over.
He was the ideal she aspired to.
She had strived to reach that place somehow, and through her own efforts, she had achieved small successes, making her magic even stronger.
And the very first place she had applied that magic in a practical setting was here, at the Ministry of Land Protection.
It was, in a sense, the best she could currently do—her masterpiece.
And that building had been breached.
Just a few days after she had installed the magic.
They said not a single trace of destruction was left on the building; only the magic she had installed had been disarmed.
And in just a few hours.
“…Interesting.”
She said the words, but a furnace raged within her.
There were dozens of spells set up from the building's exterior all the way to the underground holding cells.
To dismantle all of them in just a few hours?
And with such stealth that no one noticed in the process!
That was why.
That was why she had headed straight for the Ministry of Land Protection the moment she received the call.
“It’s here.”
Heading directly to the scene of the crime, she ran her hand over the wall where she had installed her magic.
She could feel a faint residue.
A slight remnant left behind after the magic had vanished.
Through it, she traced the process of how the magic on the wall had disappeared.
And she was horrified.
“…It vanished?”
There were three general ways to dismantle security-related magic.
One was to disarm it by following a set method or pattern.
The second was to destroy it with force.
And the third was to reverse-engineer the installed magic and remove it entirely.
None of the three were easy.
The first was only possible if one had obtained information about the pattern from the client beforehand.
The second required immense power and would inevitably cause a great deal of noise and destruction.
The last method, the third, was more difficult than the first two combined.
The effectiveness of a Dispel spell depended on how well you understood your opponent and the gap in power between you.
So what about completely removing an opponent's magic?
‘It’s in the realm of the nearly impossible.’
Removal, in the literal sense, was only possible by drawing all the formulas applied to the magic circle in reverse.
It meant you had to see through not only the flow woven into the magic circle but also the exact order in which the opponent drew the lines when creating it.
It might be possible for a simple, straightforward spell with no room for variables.
But the magic applied here was not on that level.
It was a spell of such a caliber that it wouldn't be an exaggeration to call it a new form of magic, created by adding her own interpretation to existing spells.
And she, not some nobody from the Magic Tower, had drawn it herself.
To reverse-engineer such magic and remove it without a trace?
Her magic, which had grown even stronger after her recent enlightenment?
“There’s no way that’s possible…!”
The word impossible never left her lips; she swallowed it back down.
Because one person, just one, came to mind.
The face of someone who could pull off such a feat.
It appeared in her mind, vividly.
“Kim… Do-jin.”
It was that man again.
He was the only person in this world capable of something like this.
She bit her lip, picturing his smirking face.
It was humiliating.
She felt as if she were standing naked before him.
And in truth, it wasn't much different.
For her magic to be so perfectly removed meant that the opponent had seen through its inner workings with equal perfection.
To her, it was no different from having her innermost secrets forcibly exposed.
“How… how on earth could he…”
The words wouldn't come easily.
A torrent of emotions melted and swirled together in a white-hot furnace.
Among them, alongside the humiliation, was a sense of awe.
It was mortifying to have her magic so thoroughly dismantled, but at the same time, it was an admirable feat.
How could someone do something so absurd so nonchalantly?
How much deeper, longer, and further would she have to delve to reach the place where he stood?
A negative thought, one she had never once considered while learning magic, surfaced.
‘Is it even possible…?’
The question of whether she could ever reach that place.
In what could be called the most humiliating moment of her entire life, she barely managed to pull herself together.
She wanted to ponder it longer, more deeply, but that wasn't what was important right now.
‘The culprit… is almost certain.’
It could only be Kim Do-jin.
If it wasn't him, the current situation simply didn't add up.
She was beginning to fear him.
And as she feared him, she came to admire him.
And as she admired him, she thought of him.
It wasn't just because he was close to her magical ideal.
The terror site that Hexagram had meticulously prepared.
There, she had run into him by chance, and he had relentlessly pushed and berated her.
He hadn't said a single thing that was wrong, but he had struck so painfully that she had felt a surge of tears.
That moment…
That moment hadn't felt entirely unfamiliar.
No, it was the opposite. It was familiar.
Things like that used to happen often.
Back when she was still immature.
Back when she was so overflowing with confidence and lacking in thought that she had thrown herself into the Hunter industry just to test the power of her magic.
At the time, with the prestige of a mage, the power of her family, and looks that made hearts tremble, she had it all.
Thanks to that trifecta, no one ever tried to stop her, and she was used to acting recklessly. Then one day…
For the first time in her life, she was viciously cursed out.
—“Hey, you crazy bitch.”
An opening line that was nothing short of intense.
—“Do you even have a brain? Or do our lives look like fucking nothing to you? If not, then please, enlighten me. How did you decide to cast a spell that takes over three minutes when the front line is about to get torn to shreds, huh?”
And following that were sentences even stronger, sharper, and more provocative.
Her mistake was so obvious she should have been groveling, but his words were so blunt they sparked defiance.
That man… who she eventually grew fond of and became inseparable from. Her husband.
“They’re so alike…”
Uncannily so.
Maybe… no, that’s not it.
She pushed aside the ominous thought that suddenly flashed through her mind and left the building.
Maeng Gi-yong, who had been waiting outside, approached and asked her.
“Did you manage to find anything?”
Han Ju-hee hesitated for a moment.
Then she shook her head.
“…No. The culprit seems to be more meticulous than I thought. There’s almost nothing left.”
“Is that so.”
A blatant lie.
She continued.
“It’s too early to be disappointed. There are small traces left, so I’ll need a few more days to look into it.”
He bowed his head.
“Please, do your best.”
“Yes, I will.”
Saying she would return tomorrow, she got into the waiting car.
She debated between two destinations, then finally told the driver her choice.
“…Let’s go to the Dawn Guild.”
Seeing her husband first was the priority. That was her judgment.