There Was a Way
There was a way. There was.
The problem was that it could never serve as a way out.
Why warp me? And forcing me, as I am now, shouldn't have been easy.
It was a trap. That much was certain, and so was the fact that whoever had prepared it was no ordinary hand. He had felt the flow of mana and gotten the others clear, but this was no ordinary current. It was a type of energy akin to illusion magic—and yet it wasn't illusion magic either, which only left him more unsettled.
"You know where this is?"
"I do not."
"Can you feel where Asilien is?"
"I know she is nearby... But I cannot tell you precisely where. It feels as though some turbid energy is blocking the link between the two of us."
"There really is something like that."
Yujun surveyed every current in the place and analyzed them. Analyzed made it sound grander than it was. All he was doing was trying to feel, more finely, what his senses already gave him.
"Seems like a warp, at least."
"I believe so as well."
"You said that murky energy is cutting the connection between you two? I'll get rid of it. The moment I do, find Asilien."
"Get rid of it? Is such a thing possible?"
"Wait."
Yujun closed his eyes, singled out the foulest of the three or four currents he could feel around him, and seized hold of it. Then he scattered it and snuffed it out. More precisely, he had brute-forced the thing apart with overwhelming mana. Ever since New-Generation Magic had risen past GX Tier, work like this had become absurdly easy.
"Oh. It truly worked."
"Find her. Fast. It might come back."
"Yes."
Watching Asilien's summon, he couldn't help feeling as if he were looking at the old Paranet.
But when Asilien knew Paranet, he wasn't undead, was he?
Well. There'd be some story or other behind it.
"We must cross that cliff. Beyond the top, she is—"
The summon's words cut off. From the cliff top, a magical bombardment of staggering firepower came pouring down.
KRA-KRA-KRA-KOOM!
KRA-KOOM!
Blast after blast. Magic hammered Yujun's hastily raised shield without a moment's pause.
Hastily raised or not, Yujun's magic stood at a height that scraped the sky. Hundreds of spells struck it dead-on, then thousands, and the shield didn't so much as flinch. Asilien's summon's jaw dropped.
"An item?"
"Magic. Don't you know a shield?"
"It looks like one, but the defense... that is no shield."
"A shield's only as good as the one casting it. Depending on whose hand it is, the power varies wildly."
"That I know, but... this is excessive, is it not?"
"Yeah."
He couldn't exactly blame the thing for reacting that way. Yujun himself hadn't expected to throw up a few shields and then just stand there with his eyes open, watching a festival of magic. He'd thought the shields would crack a little.
Hairline fractures did appear, but only on the outermost layer. The rest held firm, and even the cracked shield regenerated the moment the magic so much as paused.
KRA-KRA-KRA-KOOM!
The explosions were truly deafening. Because the shields refused to break, the roar never stopped either.
"How long must we endure this?"
"There won't be an end. They'll have a rotation set so the casting never stops."
This wasn't the chaos of a war. It was a beating delivered to someone already caged, and with what had to be thousands of mages prepared atop the cliff, the bombardment was never going to stop just because someone's mana ran dry.
"Then what do we do?"
"We crush the ones up top."
"Through all of that?"
"Who said we have to go through it? We can settle this from in here."
Yujun looked so little like a mage that Asilien's summon had failed to grasp just how well he handled magic, even after he had raised that monstrous shield and held. Frankly, the summon had been certain that no mage who came along could ever get out of this.
That certainty changed in an instant.
Yujun drew his mana up.
KRA-KOOM!
BANG! BOOM!
Even as the bombardment went on, another series of blasts rolled in from far away. The explosions were clearly farther off, and yet they sounded louder. Was that only his imagination?
"I-it stopped."
From the moment Yujun raised his mana, the magical barrage ceased. Asilien's summon stared at him, blank.
"How did you do it?"
"I just made it so that the instant they cast, the target became the caster."
"...There is a spell like that?"
"There is. I used it, didn't I?"
Yujun dropped the shields and shot to the top of the cliff on a flight spell in a blink. Seen from above, the cliff was a vast, deep crater, and the view was a spectacle if ever there was one. Stationed all across it were mages.
No. The corpses of mages.
"Almost all of them are dead?"
The survivors amounted to barely two-tenths of the original number, and most of those who lived were in wretched shape. Who could have known their own spells would turn back on them? They hadn't even raised proper shields. They had poured everything into raw firepower, and in a sense Yujun had just used the ultimate assassination spell—while spending hardly any mana at all.
It was possible only because he stood far above the mages on the cliff. Pulling off the same spectacle against a mage of equal rank, or even a step below, would have been difficult. Not that he knew whether such an opponent even existed.
My level... isn't going up?
He had killed thousands of mages. And yet not only had his level failed to rise—he hadn't gained a single point of experience.
"So this is some third space."
Not one of the mages he had killed was a Demon God Worshipper. Every last one of them was simply a player.
Gathering this many players built around magic wouldn't have been easy, either.
Then the corpses began to vanish, one by one, without a trace, as if they had never existed at all. The blood splashed everywhere disappeared with them.
Yujun finished the mages still twitching with life by means of Frozen Field. Half out of their minds, they had no choice but to freeze solid. The problem was that, once again, no experience came.
"One more reason to get out of here."
A battlefield full of enemies who gave nothing when you killed them. To Yujun, that was the worst place imaginable. It wasn't even an event that paid out a separate reward.
What kind of garbage pit is this... The Demon God Worshippers read me well. I feel like absolute shit.
And that was when it happened.
What... is this.
He had no idea what was going on. A glance at Asilien's summon told him the creature hadn't received a single message. Because it wasn't a player, most likely. But then why on earth had a reward been given to him?
Don't tell me the warp led into a trial? Not a trap set by the Demon God Worshippers?
He considered it, then shook his head.
They definitely lured me here using Asilien as bait. That much is certain.
Which left him with a hypothesis. The Demon God Worshippers had found an extremely difficult event, or a trial ground, and meant to draw Yujun into the trial and finish him there. Trap someone beneath an absurdly high cliff and keep a magical bombardment going without end, and there really was no way out. Any ordinary player would have been done for.
If it had been Yenil or Manuela instead of me, this would have been a disaster.
If instinct had sent him running alone, he would have lost two companions.
And if this really was a trap the Demon God Worshippers had prepared, then for Yujun it wasn't even a blessing in disguise. It was simply a blessing. Luck didn't come luckier than this. He had meant only to kill the Worshippers and get out, and it had turned out to be nothing more than a trial of outrageous difficulty.
They had promised an additional reward, and yet all that ended up in his hand was a Dragon Heart.
Did the bonus rewards stack into this?
A Dragon Heart. He had seen the thing in novels and comics, sure enough, but in War of the Gods it was an item that simply did not exist. His level had been too low, or the places he had gone had been limited to the Continent, and so he had never found one. He hadn't even known a trial ground like this existed.
Dragon Heart... let's see what it does.
◈ Upon consumption, raw mana permanently increases by 1,500.
◈ Magic damage permanently increases by 150%.
Contrary to what he had expected, it had no grade. He had thought it would be Transcendence Grade at the very least. Not that grade mattered. The options were simple, and they were monstrous.
What do I do with this...
The options were too good to swallow carelessly. Use it as material for item synthesis, and it might be worth even more. But he didn't know any recipes, and he wasn't sure whom he could even ask. Was there anyone who knew a way to profit more from a Dragon Heart than simply eating it?
Get out of here first.
The thought had barely formed before he was warped straight back to where he had been—not beneath the cliff, but onto a dark underground stair.
Yujun didn't head outside at once. He swept the interior instead. A faint trace of Asilien's energy lingered, and if there was anything to find, he meant to find it.
Nothing. Really.
A place built to send people into the trial ground. Nothing more, and nothing less.
Done searching, Yujun set his lingering regrets aside and stepped outside with Asilien's summon.
"Y-you are unharmed!"
Paranet came hurrying over, his face split in a wide grin.
"How long was I gone?"
"Not so very long. A little over ten minutes?"
"Time doesn't seem to flow any differently, then."
"Wherever did you go?"
"Couldn't tell you where. Looks like the Demon God Worshippers had a trap ready. I got out without much trouble. Still, I'm annoyed enough that I ought to go teach them a lesson."
"Have you not already given them a thorough thrashing? Two whole branches, laid to waste."
Paranet said it with a flourish.
"Now's not the time, and you know it. We need to go save her."
"You are right."
It was a wonder he hadn't been urging them on already.
"Let's go."
"We do not... know where she is, do we?"
"That one said she was nearby. There was nothing up on the cliff."
He had been warped away before he could search, so he hadn't been able to find Asilien—but it was all but certain she hadn't been in that place. Yujun looked at Asilien's summon.
"What's going on?"
"I do not know. Even now, it feels as though she is still nearby."
"Closer than before?"
"Clearer than a moment ago, but the difference is not great."
"Be exact. How close are we talking?"
"Five minutes at a run, at my speed."
"Can I trust it this time?"
"...I cannot promise it."
Paranet shot the summon a thoroughly displeased look. With every second counting, the reaction was hardly strange.
"Lead the way. Now."
"Yes."
It wasn't that Asilien's summon didn't want to find her. The Demon God Worshippers had clearly worked some trick, and because of it even Yujun—let alone the summon—was having a hard time locating her.
I just have to track the faint energy that's left.
It was so faint that it would take a great deal of mana, but that hardly mattered. Fretting over mana after he had just obtained a Dragon Heart would have been foolish.