103. Romantic Dreams and Romance
103. Romantic Dreams and Romance
=============<Liam Walker: The Revealed Threat>=============
<Liam Walker: The Revealed Threat> was unveiled to the world.
Among the public, it had already become an open secret that Bon Voyage Studio tossed out takes like a master potter discarding flawed pieces.
If anything, that master-craftsman spirit was so highly regarded that it posted a higher pre-sale rate than the first film had.
The same gloriously traditional orchestral score played.
This time, the opening was set in the academy training grounds.
On a dark night after all the students had gone home, a lone female student remained in the training grounds, practicing by herself.
Her theoretical knowledge was excellent, but she was vulnerable in real combat, so she trained later into the night than anyone else to overcome that weakness.
After the grueling training, she wiped the sweat trickling down her forehead.
That was when someone spoke to her.
- You've been working hard late into the night, young lady.
When she turned her head, a suspicious figure draped in a robe was gazing at her.
Before she could even take a step in that ominous atmosphere, the space was engulfed in darkness.
And the next day, the film's title rose up alongside the news that a female student had been murdered.
*
The second installment's main plot followed the three leads tracking a mysterious murder case that began at the school.
However, the trio didn't pursue the case from the start.
Because until then, they had been ordinary students.
That was why, in its early portion, the second film, like the first, centered mainly on peaceful theory classes.
- A spell chant is something that flows out unconsciously once you enter a trance state, but at the same time, it can also serve as a powerful form of autosuggestion. For those of you who find it difficult to enter a trance state in practice, developing a personal chant is one possible approach.
The professor giving the lecture was also an actual professor making a special appearance, and the material was a real lecture, so the audience nearly dozed off.
Around the time viewers were starting to wonder whether this was educational broadcasting or an entertainment film, the mood shifted abruptly.
Liam's friend, Colson, was murdered.
- [Sewer 245079. Please... Liam...]
Just before dying, he left a final message only for Liam over the communicator.
Liam interpreted Colson's behavior to mean that the entire school couldn't be trusted, and following the last words, he began searching the academy together with the two friends he could trust most.
In the process, an exit occasionally led out of the women's restroom; at other times, in the sewers, they suffered an alligator attack and used fire magic to fight back, only to trigger a gas explosion that temporarily halted their investigation.
And Liam got an earful from Moore, his mentor.
"You brat. Did you think you were somebody?"
"I'm sorry, sir..."
Then, after sneaking a glance at the window, Moore briefly cast a silencing spell and murmured.
"Whew. I've been suspended today anyway, so I'm already in a foul mood—might as well drink myself into a stupor and pass out. If, hypothetically, someone swiped the three protection-imbued robes in my vault, I certainly wouldn't know a thing about it."
And with that, he dispelled the silencing spell, actually downed an entire bottle of liquor in one go, and promptly fell into a dead sleep.
Liam, watching Moore warily, retrieved the robes from the already-open vault, returned to his group, and continued the investigation.
The trio, taking up the trail again, finally realized the meaning of the dying message Colson had left behind.
The code 245079 was connected to an academy history book with a notebook tucked inside it.
Splitting 245079 into 24, 50, and 79 and opening those pages revealed the locations of past mass-casualty incidents.
And those locations were linked through the sewers to the sites where the current murders had occurred.
When they brought a map of the sewer layout and connected those locations...
"Good heavens..."
A giant magic circle was drawn.
It was the very spell that Professor Dorbann, who taught necromancy, had boasted of developing himself early in the film.
It was a magic that extracted a soul by placing an animal or the like atop the circle and imprisoning it within a gem; the vitality and soul confined this way served as an excellent catalyst when casting other necromancies.
Recalling this, they naturally reached the conclusion that the person behind these incidents was planning to offer countless people as sacrifices and use their life force to accomplish something.
To stop the scheme, they hurried toward the dead center of the magic circle.
There, Professor Dorbann in a draped robe was waiting for them.
The professor aimed his trembling wand at the lead trio.
Even as he aimed at the students, he was murmuring into the empty air.
"Lumia... I will absolutely save you..."
At that moment, Hannah, who had sensed something was wrong, struck the professor with a healing spell.
Enveloped in warm light, Professor Dorbann reverted to his ordinary kindly self.
It seemed the incident would be resolved, just like that.
At that instant, Dorbann, his expression dire, issued a warning to the students.
"Run...! The real mastermind behind this case is Morse—"
Before he could finish, a mysterious figure emerged from the darkness and snatched him away.
The stranger grabbed the professor's face and spoke in a bone-chilling voice.
"You've botched it, Dorbann."
When the stranger's mouth gaped wide open, something resembling the professor's soul was sucked into him.
He tossed aside the professor, who had become an empty husk with his soul ripped out, and turned his gaze to the leads as if to say they were next.
"Morse...! What in the world are you doing here?!"
Sean and Hannah recoiled in horror.
Morse.
His was a name no one at the academy could possibly be unaware of.
A wizard who had graduated early from three magic towers, entered the academy, and was once a promising Hero, but who could never abandon his human-supremacist beliefs and was eventually driven out of both the academic world and the towers.
After that, he had roamed the world, massacring other races, and was a notorious criminal who had been imprisoned.
The face he returned from prison with was ghastly.
The spot where his eyebrows should have been was barren and grotesquely swollen.
His skin had completely lost its elasticity and sagged, and in particular his eyelids drooped down so severely that they formed red crescents beneath his eyes, as though they were dark circles.
No, even saying his skin sagged was too generous.
It was practically melting off.
That hideous appearance, which could truly be likened to a blobfish, was impossible to forget once you'd seen it.
The two of them trembled in terror at having come face-to-face with the worst of criminals.
Setting aside his notoriety, looking at his face alone, not being afraid would've been the strange reaction.
But of the three leads, only Liam didn't understand why Morse was someone to fear.
That was partly because of his own steely mentality that didn't judge people by their looks, and partly because no one had ever told him about Morse's infamy.
And this very point became the key for Liam to defeat Morse.
Morse was a master of body-strengthening, destruction, and necromancy-school magic.
Of those, his necromancy was so vicious that if one harbored even the slightest fear toward him, it could directly attack one's soul.
But put another way, if you weren't afraid of him, it had no effect.
In that sense, Liam was his perfect counter.
Liam genuinely felt no fear of Morse. Before that, he didn't even know who he was.
In the end, with his specialty necromancy sealed off, Morse had to fight Liam with purely physical combat.
Perhaps due to the difference in experience despite the match-up disadvantage, Liam was slowly pushed back.
Eventually, when Liam's left shoulder was dislocated, a swaggering Morse spilled a fact Liam hadn't even asked about.
"Yeah. I remember now. This swordsmanship. This mana. This face. You, boy. You're the spitting image of your father."
And then came the shocking revelation.
The one who had personally murdered Liam's parents on the stormy night in the opening of the first film was Morse.
Morse thought this devastating fact would shatter Liam's spirit.
But it instead gave strength to the enraged Liam.
Liam met Morse's swinging fist with his left shoulder to pop the joint back into place, then picked up the sword that had flown far away.
He opened the sword’s crossguard, loaded a gem into its cylinder, and heated the blade red-hot.
Then he unleashed from the blade’s tip all the flames it had devoured and brought Morse down.
As Morse vanished into the torrent of flame, he recalled a middle-aged man who resembled Liam, and the second film came to an end.
================================================
Following the first film, the second was received with overwhelmingly favorable reviews.
First, plus one point because Jace's signature Dihex Handling had finally made it onto the screen.
Plus one point because a new weapon brimming with romantic ideals, the Gunblade, had appeared.
Plus one point for the concept of connecting the murder scenes and the sewers to complete a gigantic magic circle.
...Minus one point because early on people thought they were watching a video lecture.
The characters' arcs were flawless, and the menace and meticulousness of the mastermind who finally appeared were captured perfectly on screen.
In particular, the performance of Bolar, who played Morse, was universally praised.
Bolar had repeatedly studied how to maximize the terror surrounding Morse, and he conveyed it perfectly on screen.
A compelling work was completed by a compelling villain, as they said.
Critics declared that the second film, with its compelling adversarial dynamic between Morse and Jace, would be remembered as a legend of the series.
But given that we hadn't even reached the introductory phase of the narrative that would unfold from here, such assessments were nothing short of adorable.
Because the third film... was when yours truly would finally appear.
Having gauged public reaction in the office via newspapers and the like, I asked Nikolai about the third film.
"The 'Temporary Peace Zone Generator' is a no-go, right?"
"Boss. Please. Don't go triggering another round of power inflation."
"Then I'll scrap the bombing scene, so just give me the okay on the fight scene."
Still, compared to an explosion scene, a fight scene had less impact on power inflation, so this much was a reasonable compromise.
Of course, I said less impact, not none.
- In that earlier scene, Liam reacted to bullets, so why can't he react here?
That was the classic example of power inflation caused by fight scenes.
Create one spectacular fight scene, and crafting the fight scenes afterward becomes a headache.
But compared to an explosion scene, where once it goes off the power inflation skyrockets like a quadratic curve, this was still within manageable range.
Still, I was starting to get an itch for some adrenaline myself.
"Haah... Fine."
After repeated not-quite-threats that if he kept me off it indefinitely, I might just cause an incident one day, Nikolai finally gave in, albeit reluctantly.
Now that I had the Sage's permission as well, I gleefully began devising the fight-scene direction for my part.
First, explosions were forbidden, so grenade launchers and anti-tank weapons were out.
So, if it was anything without an explosion...
'A minigun or a heavy machine gun should be doable.'
How could a minigun and a heavy machine gun become a fight scene, you ask?
Bayonet technique, obviously.
The greatsword wielded by a student in the classroom next door weighed one hundred kilograms, and Jace's halberd shotgun was a ninety-kilogram cannon.
A heavy machine gun, even with all its shell casings, barely hit about 80 kg, making it a suitable weight to show off bayonet techniques.
Except this was an attempt with no reference points even from my previous life, so conceptualizing it wasn't easy.
'First, reinforce the barrel considerably, then shift the grip and trigger to a position better suited for swinging...'
The completed weapon had a shape similar to the halberd shotgun Jace had brandished.
Next, the action scene.
For the swings, I used a spear of similar length as reference and replaced thrusts with pulling the trigger.
Finally, I finished the combat encounter with a heavy-machine-gun quick-draw technique, swinging while holding down the trigger as an homage to the 360-degree shotgun scene Jace had shown at his audition—and with that, an innovative action scene was complete.
To cool off my head, which had gotten heated from working after so long, I set down my pen and took a short tea break.
While I was sipping my tea, a new newspaper happened to arrive.
Sure enough, page after page of this paper was also filled with reviews relating to Liam Walker.
As I was leafing through, reading people's praise one by one, I came across a sentence I absolutely could not overlook.
- A passable narrative and excellent supporting characters. But an awkward lead, laughable glorification of the supporting cast, and a charmless villain ruin it all. In the end, I set down my utensils at the crude attempt to mask the meat's flavor with sauce.
I quietly folded the newspaper, gazed up at the ceiling, and muttered.
"Why was this world so desperate to mess with someone who's just minding his own business?"