Can I Come With You?
"Can I come with you?"
Manuela asked it carefully, almost timidly.
Yujun nodded.
"I don't see why not."
Dangerous as the place was, he could have gone alone. That was precisely why he had to take Manuela with him. Demon God Worshippers might already be watching even this far out, and splitting up would only make it more dangerous.
"Like I said earlier, if I find the Synchronization Marble, I'll let you know."
Asilien spoke while stealing glances at Paranet.
"Thank you."
Paranet inclined his head to her in gratitude.
"And, um... would it be all right if I asked after Paranet now and then?"
So that had been the real point.
"As often as you like."
"Yes!"
Asilien's face brightened all at once.
Yujun looked at Ju Donghyeon, standing still as a doll.
"What exactly happened to Mr. Ju Donghyeon? I heard he lost his memory."
"He died once. I brought him back. The resurrection itself succeeded without trouble, but I couldn't stop the loss of his memories."
"Who killed him?"
"The branch head. A man named Ji Gyutae. Human, like you."
"Ji Gyutae?"
It was a name Yujun knew.
"You know him?"
"I've seen him through a vision orb, never face to face. I still know who he is."
He was the one who had killed Marquis Lucas while the man was in contact with Ji Gyutae through that same orb. Small wonder, then, that Ji Gyutae had killed Ju Donghyeon. Donghyeon had been right there, taken hostage alongside his dwarf lover.
Did he kill Donghyeon because he couldn't kill me? Or was Donghyeon always someone who had to die?
Ju Donghyeon possessed Future Sight, an absurdly broken ability, and potential to match. They clearly couldn't bring him over to their side, so they had tried to remove him. Whatever the reason, it was infuriating.
"How did you resurrect him? That's possible?"
"It's a special ability of mine. The price, as you saw, is that his intelligence drops a little... and a blind faith in me takes root deep in his heart. He loses his memories as well."
"Does the ability place any restriction on you, Asilien?"
"Nothing much, aside from temporary fatigue. Oh, and I can't use it back to back."
"I see."
There might come a day when he needed to lean on her. Player or not, resurrection was an irresistibly attractive prospect for any living thing. He would hope, as hard as he could, that the day never came when he needed her help. If it did, he wanted to be able to borrow that power.
I'll have to get a lot closer to her.
Ju Donghyeon, dead and brought back, was hardly in good shape. Even so, it was better than staying dead. Aftermath could be treated later. Death was the end of everything.
"So does Mr. Ju Donghyeon have to go on like that?"
"He might. If my ability develops, who knows."
"By develop, you mean the rank goes up?"
"That's right."
"Would you mind if I asked what rank the skill is now?"
"S-Rank."
"...Ah."
Far too low. The better a skill was, the more you had to invest in it, and for something as broken as resurrection the rank was much lower than he had expected.
"You didn't use a Fruit of Evolution?"
"I did."
"You did...?"
Yujun looked so stunned that Asilien stared back at him as if he were the strange one.
"Fruits of Evolution have limits. Even if luck is on your side, they never go past SS-Rank, and a supreme gem is nice enough, but it isn't the sort of thing that raises a rank dramatically."
"Hold on. You used a supreme gem as well, and it's still S-Rank?"
"Yes. S+ Rank, to be exact."
"...Ah."
Give me that skill.
The words rose all the way to the back of his throat. A Fruit of Evolution was an item heavily swayed by luck. Like most consumables, when the effect wasn't fixed in exact numbers, the higher the user's luck, the more the result was magnified. If he had used it, he could have raised Asilien's resurrection skill to SSS-Rank at the very least. Add a supreme skill gem, and even EX Tier would have been within reach. That only made it feel more wasteful.
If I'd had it, I would have put it to much better use.
Of course, resurrection ran against the order of the world, so the skill's rank would not climb easily. This was not undeath. It restored a person exactly as they had been in life, which made the climb steeper still.
"All right. If we get the chance later, we'll see."
"Yes."
What Asilien wanted to see was not him, but Paranet. It came to the same thing either way. Paranet and Yujun would always be together.
"Oh, people say you travel with an undead. Is that because of Paranet?"
"Something like that. It was an emptiness that wouldn't fade, no matter how much time passed."
Paranet, who had once left her behind, flinched.
Just as Asilien had said, the cult's branch was not far. Of the two branches she knew, this one was the larger, bigger even than the branch on the Continent. There were plenty of Demon God Worshippers, and four tall buildings stood jammed against one another.
Floating in the sky at Yujun's side, Manuela offered her review.
"There are a ridiculous number of players on guard."
"And strangely enough, almost no celestials."
"Because hardly any ordinary celestials become Demon God Worshippers, right?"
"Right."
Obvious as it was, the branch held only Demon God Worshippers. Not a single person there was anything else. Which meant everyone down there could be killed. Start granting the worshippers tragic backstories, and there would be no end to it.
"What are you going to do? Attack from here?"
"Just put a blessing on me. We'll finish it from here."
"Without going in? From here?"
"They'll already know I've come. They'll be ready for an intrusion."
"The barrier looks incredibly tough. Think you can manage?"
Even Manuela, who knew what Yujun could do, said as much. A barrier of tremendous defensive power covered the entire branch.
A barrier that dumped everything into defense.
He couldn't even guess how much money had gone into it. The mages who had raised it were surely skilled, but this was the power of money. Yujun could see at a glance that rare magical items formed its backbone.
"A barrier just has to be removed."
"You can break it?"
"I should be able to. Not that I even need to break it."
Yujun drew closer to the barrier. From far off, he felt the gazes of the Demon God Worshippers watching him.
"They're not coming any closer."
"They know one wrong step and they die."
The number of Demon God Worshippers he had killed was beyond counting. Among them had been powers those below could never hope to approach. Even so, they seemed to be trusting the barrier. They stood there blankly and watched, with almost no sign of preparing to flee.
Good. If they'd panicked and run early, this would have turned into a nuisance.
Yujun tried a new spell built on New-Generation Magic. First, an enormous meteor formed in the sky. It was not so vast as to be beyond comparison with an ordinary Meteor. It was larger, but not so much that the difference was obvious, and that was what Yujun intended. He could have swollen it as much as he liked, but past a point, greater size increased the area more than the power. So, to raise the force, he mixed Hellfire into the meteor.
Laying a new spell over a meteor already plunging at speed from that height was, by the common sense of existing mages, absurd. Meteor was known to be impossible to combine with other magic. It differed greatly from other spells, which took form in mana and were then cast. Many mages had tried something new with Meteor, and not one of them had succeeded, because, as said before, it was impossible. Or rather, because existing magical theory simply did not fit Meteor. The moment the process of fixing a form entered the casting, Meteor could only be used as a single spell.
Yujun's New-Generation Magic was a very different matter. The framework he had newly established made possible everything he imagined.
It works. Of course it does.
The meteor heated far hotter than before. It had already caught fire as it fell, and the addition of Hellfire pushed that heat to its extreme.
Fwoosh!
The weeds around the barrier began to burn. The meteor was still a considerable distance away, and already the air was thick with heat. From that moment, the Demon God Worshippers started to grow uneasy.
"Do not be afraid. The barrier newly installed this time boasts a magic resistance of ninety-five percent. A spell reduced to a mere five percent of its power can never break it. Even if, by some stroke of luck, it leaves a scratch, the barrier will recover at once. Prepare your attack magic, and be quick about it."
A superior of the branch stepped forward, trying to put an end to their unease. In the meantime, the meteor grew visibly larger. It had not actually grown. It was simply drawing closer.
Yujun raised several layers of shields. They were well clear of the expected impact point, and still the heat was too fierce. He might have been fine, but Manuela's cloth clothes could easily have burned, so he cut the heat off with the shields.
"Shouldn't we go farther back?"
Manuela had been startled by the scale of the meteor spell, then startled all over again when Hellfire joined it. Worried about the aftermath once the meteor struck, she couldn't bring herself to stand still.
"I've already calculated the radius. It won't reach this far. And even if it does, we have the shields."
"The shields are what worry me."
"Trust me. I won't let you get hurt."
"U-uh. Okay."
If they waited too far off, they risked letting fleeing Demon God Worshippers slip away. Just then, Paranet thrust his face in front of Yujun's.
"And what of me?"
"What about you?"
"Will you see that I, too, remain unharmed?"
"You can take a few hits. You're too sturdy. That's the problem."
"..."
"Paranet. You know I'm joking, don't you? You may be an undying being, but I'll make sure you're protected."
"My thanks! As expected of Master!"
Ordinarily he would have left it at the joke and been done. But Asilien possessed the power of resurrection, and Paranet had been her lover. It occurred to him that he ought not treat the skeleton carelessly.
That was the moment.
KRA-KOOM!
A piercing, tearing whine.
The roar was immense. At the same instant, the party's hearing went briefly numb. Heat punched through the shields and washed over their whole bodies, but it was bearable, no worse than stepping into a hot bath. The shields had done their work all the same.
This... is worse than I expected.
He had thought the shields would shudder a little and that would be the end of it.
So I wasn't AlphaGo after all.
He had thought his eye for these things was fairly sharp, and yet he had failed to properly measure the power of a spell he himself had cast. Even so, neither Manuela nor Paranet had been harmed. They had only broken into a heavy sweat, as if they had walked into a sauna.
Time passed, and the heat did not cool. The smoke did not thin. The ringing in their ears lingered for quite a while. Yujun opened his eyes wide and peered through toward the branch. There was another spell for moments like this. He moved mana around his eyes, and they narrowed, turning blue.
The barrier's definitely broken...
The branch buildings, half-destroyed, showed through in a blur. The sight was not perfectly clear, so he couldn't tell exactly how things stood. He would have to go and see for himself.