Five Stacks of Sleep
FWOOOOSH!
The black flames of the Jet-Black Flame Field blanketed everything around him. Malcolm panted raggedly behind a pillar. 'Damn it all!'
Ever since the Skull Drones had appeared, he'd been getting pushed back one-sidedly. A single burst of flame from those skulls swept away five or six of his doppelgangers at a time, and any clone that so much as brushed the fire clinging to the floor dissolved on the spot.
Area attacks — the greatest weakness of the Doppelgänger.
Simon's Skull Drones were burning every corner of the fourth floor with black fire, slowly tightening the noose around him.
"Hiding won't save you, Malcolm."
Simon's voice rang out. Malcolm ground his teeth behind the pillar and opened a subspace, pulling out four small potion vials and rolling them across the floor.
'Talk all you want!'
Chk. Chk.
Doppelganger arms sprouted from the floor and began ferrying the potions along. In Simon's blind spot, behind the curtain of black flame, the hands passed the vials down the line, quick and precise.
'Throw!'
At Malcolm's signal, every arm hurled its vial at once.
CRASH!
SHATTER!
The vials burst, and scarlet liquid splattered over every single Skull Drone. Simon, mid-control, flinched and froze.
'How do you like that?'
Malcolm peeked his head out from behind the pillar. 'It's an enhanced version of the Kabara potion! Can't stop the movement itself, but it should at least disrupt his control—'
But Simon simply smiled, calm and unhurried.
Ssss—
Ssssssss—
Without a hint of regret, he withdrew the Cloud. The bones clattered to the floor, and the Skull Drones dissolved.
'...What's he playing at?'
"Found you, Malcolm."
Malcolm whipped his head around, startled. Simon was standing right behind him.
Thwack!
Malcolm hastily raised his elbow and blocked Simon's thrusting right hand.
But it was no mana strike. The magic circle drawn on Simon's right palm activated.
'A curse!'
Malcolm recoiled in alarm. 'What curse did he hit me with?'
Before the thought even finished forming, his head swam and strength poured out of his body like water through open fingers. An overwhelming tide of languor and exhaustion crashed over him from out of nowhere.
'Sleep!'
Malcolm twisted his mouth.
"You little...! You make student council president and now you're doing a Phantasos impression... is that it?!"
Simon merely smiled.
"More importantly, Malcolm — I'm not saying you didn't put in the work."
"What?"
Malcolm quickly began weaving a Cancellation curse behind his back as he answered. He needed to buy time.
"I told you... damn it, not to pity me!"
"I told you it's not pity. At some point you stopped depending on that staff you used to carry everywhere and started producing doppelgangers on your own power alone."
"..."
"And that swarm you showed me earlier, the doppelgangers that moved with nothing but arms, even that high-level Toxicology compound potion."
Simon shrugged.
"The way I see it, you've been working every bit as hard as anyone."
Malcolm swallowed dryly. Blood rushed to his face; he felt as though he'd been stripped bare.
"It's only a matter of timing."
"...What kind of nonsense is that?"
"Doppelgangers that multiply your numbers are overwhelming early in the semester, but weak by the end, once everyone's skills have leveled up across the board. As long as doppelgangers are your main weapon, that problem never goes away."
Simon shrugged again.
"But you're not going to stay weak like this forever, are you? Now that the others have figured out how to counter you, you'll come up with answers of your own. Kizen is a long road. One year down — we've still got two left. Grind it out long enough..."
His voice rolled through the air.
"...and the day you climb back up will come."
Something stirred deep in Malcolm's chest.
I'm not weak. I'm not untalented. It's simply a matter of timing.
He had never once heard anything so absurd.
But he forced himself to deny it, shaking his head hard.
"Bullshit. You're spouting pure bullshit, and what I was listening for was never your bullshit at all!"
He opened his mouth wide and pressed the magic circle hidden behind his back against his own body.
"To complete my Cancellation—!"
But.
"Huh?"
Despite the Cancellation unmistakably taking effect, the curse refused to lift.
'That's impossible?'
Malcolm looked up in a hurry.
"Go ahead and use that Cancellation you were prepping."
Both of Simon's hands, he saw, had already finished weaving the Sleep curse.
"My Sleep isn't the kind Cancellation can dispel."
"Ugh!"
Completely outplayed.
It felt like this guy was standing on top of his own head.
Seeing several moves ahead. And on top of that, Summoning mastery plus a higher-tier curse that Cancellation couldn't unravel.
Just how much stronger was this man going to get?
Whoosh!
His jet-black spent, Malcolm threw a punch. Simon tilted his head lightly to dodge it, slipped past his arm, spun on his heel, and hammered his back with an open right hand.
"Gah!"
Malcolm staggered backward before catching his balance.
The drowsiness had seized his central nervous system — by now even the pain barely registered.
Before he knew it, he was at 3 stacks of Sleep.
"Damn it!"
Malcolm clasped his hands together and called up a doppelganger. But the sleepiness had carved his focus down to almost nothing. Only three came out.
And Simon's mana strikes popped them like soap bubbles.
'Damn it! Damn it, damn it!'
He was disgustingly strong.
It wasn't as if he was pulling out anything spectacular or flashy.
A solid fight built on fundamentals — and from the first exchange to the last, utterly untouchable.
This was the top student of Kizen's second year. The Student Council President.
Simon Polentia.
A completely different person from the freshman of that first semester.
'Me too!'
Malcolm gritted his teeth and lunged.
'I wanted to get stronger!'
But his muscles, slack beyond saving, refused to obey his brain's commands. As he floundered and dropped to one knee, Simon's right hand cracked across his arm.
4 stacks.
"Ghh!"
His eyelids had already slammed shut three times.
'He's holding out better than I expected.'
Even with 4 stacks of Sleep, Malcolm was fighting the drowsiness on sheer hostility alone. Simon stepped in to finish it.
"HRAAAAH!"
Malcolm spun into a kick, but Simon simply swatted it aside with the back of his hand, closed the distance, and laid his palm flat against Malcolm's face.
"Take a nap. Cool that head of yours."
5 stacks of Sleep.
With those words, Malcolm's consciousness went dark.
"Your father is Margel Randolph. A great man, they say — the one who leads the organization."
On his thirteenth birthday, Malcolm learned that his name was not Malcolm Brown, but Malcolm Randolph.
And that the father he'd believed dead was, in fact, alive.
"Welcome, my boy!"
Malcolm went to meet him. A middle-aged man presiding over a room of huge, hard-faced men in suits. A country bumpkin brimming with adolescent inferiority, Malcolm felt his heart soar at the knowledge that his father was alive — and not just alive, but the boss of the entire organization.
Best of all, Margel called him 'son'.
"Showing up out of nowhere and calling yourself the heir? Unacceptable!"
Some of the gang members objected, of course. But Margel simply stroked Malcolm's head and laughed.
"My heir is Malcolm, and no one else."
Then his eyes gleamed, and he met Malcolm's gaze, murmuring in a voice pitched just low enough for his son alone to hear.
"Don't you dare disappoint me. Son."
And so Malcolm — brimming with inferiority and sheer stubborn grit — threw himself into the organization's work like a man possessed. Whatever his father asked, he did. He opened his core through illegal surgery, became a necromancer, and mastered the Randolph family's signature dark magic: the Doppelgänger.
"Father! Look!"
The first time Malcolm completed a single child-sized doppelganger identical to himself, that dignified Margel swept him clean off his feet and roared with laughter.
"Did you all see that?! That's my son!"
Malcolm's heart nearly burst from the feeling. His father Margel became his absolute idol.
He blacked out his old life in the countryside with his mother. All that mattered was surviving inside the organization.
Its people were savage wolves, and he understood that to lead wolves, he would have to become a wolf himself.
He had to grow cruel. Crueler than any of them.
Every time he did something cruel and the gang members bowed their heads to him in awe, Malcolm felt an enormous swell of achievement.
His reputation kept growing. Word spread far and wide of a boy who wielded doppelgangers at a masterful level while barely out of his teens.
"Malcolm. Go to Kizen."
"What? I don't need some school to become a great boss!"
"You're going as a Special Admission student. You're worth it."
The corner of Margel's mouth curled upward.
"Go and kick the asses of the continent's pampered little nobles — in the organization's name."
Malcolm enrolled at Kizen on Margel's orders, as he always did.
But once inside, the noble classmates his own age pointed fingers the moment they heard the surname Randolph.
"Filthy criminal!"
I entered this place representing the gang. Insulting me is insulting the organization — insulting my father.
So thinking, Malcolm committed his cruelties within Kizen as well, until no one dared defy him. And that drew connections — second-year seniors, even royalty. Dreaming of dragging the gang out of the shadows and into the light, Malcolm threw himself into the fight.
But then.
"Winner! Simon Polentia of Class A!"
The notoriety and charisma he had spent years stacking collapsed all at once.
And then came the liquid bomb incident on top of it.
When the first semester ended, too ashamed to face his father, Malcolm did something he hadn't done in ages — he visited his rural hometown, and his mother.
And there.
Something was waiting for him.
"Who the hell are you?!"
A stranger was living in his mother's house.
"Who are you—ughk!"
The moment Malcolm subdued the man and slammed him into the floor—
"That's enough, Malcolm!"
His mother came rushing out.
And he heard the whole story. She had remarried.
"Wh-Why?"
Malcolm's body shook. "Then me — and our father—!"
His mother drew one long, deep breath, and told him the truth.
"I'm so sorry, Malcolm."
Malcolm watched his world cave in on itself.
"I never loved your father. Not for a single moment."
She softened it and rounded it and dressed it up every way she could, but Malcolm knew the organization's nature, and he understood all of it.
In his youth, Margel had pillaged city after city, forcing himself on their innocent women.
His mother had been one of those victims, and Malcolm himself was nothing more than one of the countless seeds Margel had sown.
She hadn't been able to bring herself to abandon the baby in her belly, so she raised him — and later handed him over when Margel came demanding his son. He learned even that.
Only now did Malcolm understand, trembling with rage, the way his mother had looked at him in his childhood — the strange, distant gaze she'd worn the day he beat down the neighborhood boys after a fight.
"Father!"
Malcolm returned to the organization at once and seized Margel by the collar.
"Did you lie to me?! Was everything you ever told me about my mother a lie?! You said you were proud to call me your son!"
And then, for the first time, Malcolm saw the expression behind Margel's mask.
"You would do well to behave — for your mother's sake, if nothing else."
At those words, he felt the rage that had blazed up like a wildfire go cold, as though a bucket of water had been dumped over his head.
Malcolm went back to Kizen. His mind lay in pieces, and his grades kept sliding.
His father had merely used him.
His mother had merely raised an unwanted child because she couldn't abandon it.
'Then what am I?'
Malcolm tormented himself with the question, over and over, inside the dream.
'What am I, exactly?'
Then his eyelids opened, and at last—
He saw a clear blue sky.
"Waaah! Huuueeh! Hic! Hk—!"
A familiar face.
A little kid from his old hometown — his same-age friend — bawling his eyes out. He'd been that small once, too.
This was the past.
The crying kid was covered in bruises. Bruises Malcolm himself had put there.
"Malcolm!"
Malcolm's eyes went wide.
'M-Mother?'
His mother, younger, came running, out of breath. She bowed and bowed to the boy's parents, begging their forgiveness.
And when the boy and his parents had gone—
his mother turned toward him.
'...Gh.'
Malcolm couldn't bring himself to meet her eyes.
The son of a criminal — a child she never asked for — had beaten someone. Surely she would look at him like a horrible monster. Surely, inside, she was thinking like father, like son, with nothing but loathing.
"Malcolm. Look at your mother."
"..."
Malcolm lifted his head with effort.
'Ah.'
Her face was stern, certainly.
But.
"Promise me you'll never hit your friends again."
His mother was crying.
"Come here, Malcolm."
And she wrapped Malcolm in a warm embrace.
His heart went utterly, impossibly still.
This was, unmistakably, a memory of the past.
Seeing it again now, he knew for certain:
His father had abandoned him.
But his mother had never once—
not a single time—
abandoned him.
Clap!
The sound of clapping hands jolted Malcolm awake, and he pried his eyelids apart.
What greeted him was Simon Polentia — crouched in front of him, expressionless, smacking his palms together.
"What the—ghk!"
At some point, Malcolm had been tied to a pillar with rope. A magic circle ran along its middle, and its effect kept his jet-black from surfacing at all.
"Looked like a happy dream."
At Simon's words, Malcolm flinched and his face went red. Only then did he realize he had been crying.
"Y-you bastard!"
"I wanted to just let you sleep, but I don't have much time on my end either."
Simon lowered his hands, his face turning serious.
"Malcolm, tell me. How do we stop the Nagas?"