Genus's Eyes Went Wide
Genus's eyes went wide.
"The cause of the problem—you mean the thing erasing the magic?"
"Yeah."
"And how am I supposed to find it? I tried a detection spell my own way. Couldn't sense a thing."
"If any mutt off the street could pull that off, they wouldn't have rated the trial's difficulty as a question mark."
"You don't mean…"
"I'll go."
"…"
Yujun checked his gear. Nothing was damaged; it sat as close to perfect as equipment could. He rolled his shoulders, shifted his weight, and worked through a few loose movements.
Light.
His condition was excellent, too.
"And what is that on your shoulder?"
"Oh, this? Harp. A divine beast."
He answered Genus as if it were hardly worth mentioning.
"A d-divine beast? It was so still I took it for a doll."
"You know what a divine beast is?"
"No. I only know they're creatures out of legend. This is the first I've actually seen."
"You don't look all that impressed."
"Well… it isn't moving."
"Hm."
Since hatching, Harp had done nothing but sleep. Was it the breath attack? Or maybe he was simply a heavy sleeper to begin with.
He only just hatched. I can cut him some slack.
Even if he was no help for the moment, it hardly mattered.
I just have to get stronger.
By Harp's own account, a divine beast's strength came from its master's might. There was no need to force the little one's growth, and once he thought of it that way, his mind settled.
"It can't erase magic forever! Pour it on!"
"Don't spare your mana! His Imperial Majesty said he'll supply mana potions to the limit!"
"M-mana potions? Then there's no reason to hold back!"
Something inexplicable was unfolding, and still the mages refused to quit. The third bombardment crashed down in a rolling thunder of impacts, and if anything it was several times more powerful than the first. The high-ranking mages who had been watching from the sidelines had joined the fight.
A low thrum answered them. Greater force changed nothing. With a single vibration, the magic was extinguished all at once.
"Stagger the casts! Don't fire everything at once! And ease off the power!"
"Yes!"
Frustration had finally gotten the better of Haren, and she snapped the order at the mages. Three times in a row the magic had been canceled, and the Black Legion's advance had only quickened. This time the spells never stopped coming. Boom after boom shook the field. The overall power had dropped, but the barrage held, and Haren's judgment proved exactly right.
"Nothing this time!"
"It worked!"
A few of the beasts took direct hits and went down. Only a few. The Black Legion's numbers were past counting, and the moment the magic grew even a little stronger, every spell on the battlefield died without fail. Weaken it, and they could barely scratch the legion. Neither approach would do. Haren bit down hard on her lip.
I have to kill whatever is canceling the magic…
With magic failing to do any real work, there was nothing she could do.
All I can trust is Conte, and that human.
Her gaze found Yujun of its own accord. He stood at the highest point of the wall, studying the Black Legion below, then set his stance and leapt. He rose high and cast Fly at once, and the speed of that flight was anything but ordinary. He shot forward at a pace on another level entirely from an ordinary mage's Fly.
Wh-what… How much mana does he even have?
Haren was more shaken than she had ever been. A mage of her caliber could tell, at a glance, just how well he handled magic.
"Whoa…"
She had known he was strong. She had not known his magic would be extraordinary too. When he had subdued her and Conte, he hadn't used a single spell.
If he's this good with magic on top of everything else, what am I supposed to do with that?
Players had no separate notion of class. Every skill and trait lay open to them, so people who handled magic and weapons both with some skill were not especially rare.
Even so… reaching the absolute peak in the sword and in magic both. I can see it, and I still hardly believe it.
This was no time to be staring, and still she could not look away. She wanted to know what fresh astonishment he would deliver when he collided with the Black Legion.
From high above, Yujun swept the battlefield with a hawk's eye.
Why does every last one of them look like it reeks?
It wasn't his imagination. The stench of groundwater—badly fouled groundwater—stabbed up from the beasts and into his nose. The worst of it had already gone faint, which meant his sense of smell was going numb.
Nasty things… They've got a biochemical weapon slotted as a default passive.
The smell wasn't coming off the black beasts alone. The fluid leaking from them had soaked into the earth, and the whole battlefield reeked.
Yeah, no. No matter how I look at it, this is not a place to linger.
He hadn't expected hygiene to be what made him reluctant to drop down. He equipped the Eagle Eye Scouter, slipped on the Invisibility Ring, and waited for a large spell to come flying from the imperial side.
I should send a message first.
He wasn't registered on messenger with Haren or Conte. Left with no choice, he sent one to the only person he had exchanged contacts with—the Emperor.
Shin Yujun: Tell them to hit harder with the magic.
The Emperor sent no reply. He answered with action instead. A colossal meteor formed in the sky and began to fall at once.
That should do it.
Yujun spread his senses wide. Sight, touch, smell—those were numb, so he set them aside and focused on every sense that still answered. With the Eagle Eye Scouter on, the vast battlefield seemed to fit into a single glance.
Then the Emperor's meteor was nullified. Yujun's eyes narrowed. A ripple of mana had spread, thin and faint. From a distance it would have been too weak to feel at all, but here, above the Black Legion, he could tell. He chased that ripple. It had come from the heart of the legion, and he moved.
Thousands of long, hard tentacles lanced in, every one of them aimed at his body.
The Invisibility Ring's useless too.
He had thought his Agility was high enough that he wouldn't be spotted easily. Wrong. The difficult option hadn't been difficult for nothing. Once the Black Legion recognized him, it halted its advance and came at him without pause, tentacles packing the air until there was nowhere left to dodge.
If there's no space to dodge, I just make some.
He swung and sheared through dozens of tentacles. There were more of them than he had imagined. Lightning spat and crackled, and the instant one limb was cut away, a new one took its place.
This won't work.
In a situation like this, magic really was the direct answer. No matter how skilled the sword, it was hard to beat magic for sheer area. But his magic was powerful enough that someone out there was likely to nullify it, and large-scale area magic was as good as sealed. So he used Sword Veil.
The blade began to blur, and a transparent membrane took shape around him, mana sheathing the steel. The sound of cutting never stopped. Not one approaching tentacle escaped; every last one was severed.
"Kieeeek!"
"Kak! Kaaak!"
The beasts shrieked in pain. Yujun went a step further and kept the veil up while he moved on Fly. It was several times harder than simply holding the technique in place, and he did it anyway—not because his mind was unusually brilliant, or his talent overwhelming. It was the skill Super Concentration (EX++). For a little while, Super Concentration made him the only genius in the world.
No beast could stop him as he advanced and shut out every attack with the veil at the same time. The small ones that rushed in without fear were carved into dozens of pieces and gone in an instant.
Sword Veil is really something.
It felt like taking a max-level character into a game and sweeping a battlefield with an invincible skill. Inside the veil, a sense of danger couldn't even get started. The Swift Sword trait (SSS) pushed the veil's power higher still.
Swift Sword closed every gap in the veil.
Sword Veil had never been a technique without weaknesses. There were openings to exploit, and an enemy of equal skill had a real chance of reading them. Swift Sword patched even those flaws completely. Rapid Sword hadn't been a bad trait to begin with; then its rank had risen, and it had evolved all the way into Swift Sword. The share that trait claimed inside the veil was larger than he had expected.
Should I have used the Trait Gem on Swift Sword?
The thought flickered, and he shook his head. Equanimity was a trait that would help him whenever it mattered. No—it was supporting him constantly. He didn't regret spending the Trait Gem on it. Even here, walled in by beasts, the fact that he could swing his sword as if he had all the time in the world owed a great deal to Equanimity.
However strong he was, a few months ago he had been an ordinary college student. Spending billions of won on a game already put him some distance from ordinary, but he had unquestionably been a layman when it came to fighting. And yet he had adapted to the Tower of Infinity at an abnormal speed. This moment proved it. Even a seasoned player would have struggled to stay calm here. The beasts were hideous, and every single one of them was strong past imagining. Being surrounded by things like that and still moving around unbothered was the strange part. If this wasn't Equanimity, what was it?
The cutting went on, and his wrists and arms were starting to go numb. His Constitution was very high, but holding a high-difficulty technique like Sword Veil for this long was bound to strain the body. He could still endure it.
A little farther.
He wasn't far from where the mana ripple had spread. He pushed his flight faster. The higher the speed, the harder the veil was to maintain, but his proficiency was climbing in real time, and the skill never dropped.
At his destination he found one beast that looked different from the rest.
That's the one.
The creature with the absurd ability to undo every spell past a certain scale, as if it had never been cast. It was far smaller than he had expected—about the size of an adult man, at most. The head was enormous and the body small. Top-heavy was the only word for it.
Another spell came in from the imperial side. Another thin ripple of mana spread wide, and the beast he had marked erased the magic.
Certain.
The moment he was sure, he didn't hesitate. He dropped Sword Veil and used Flash. In an instant he was behind the beast, and his sword thrust home. The blade punched through the back of its skull as if he were splitting tofu.
"Krrk…"
For all its extraordinary ability, its toughness didn't seem to match. He started to message the Emperor again, then stopped.
Am I an idiot? I can just cast it myself.
He used Meteor, the same spell as the Emperor. A meteor formed in the sky, so much larger than the one the Emperor had summoned that the two could not be compared, and the beasts' eyes turned upward of their own accord. None of them panicked. None of them even looked startled. They simply watched, as if this were only to be expected.
No way…
People said it was the "no way" that got you killed. And not one of the old sayings, it turned out, had ever been wrong.
The colossal meteor falling out of the sky vanished without a trace.