Domain of the Mage
KWAAAAAAAANG──!
It had exploded.
The tallest building in the vicinity had been blown apart, and the thunderous roar was more than enough to seize anyone's senses by the throat.
The elf, who had been shouting at me only moments before, froze in place with her small mouth hanging open.
An utterly overwhelming sight.
It would have been pleasant to watch from the safe distance of a bystander, but unfortunately, that luxury wasn't mine.
I had to keep my own wits about me.
The massive chunks of building scattered across the sky by the blast began raining back down toward the earth—
Straight for our heads.
The flame of the southern heaven gathers at the fist.
I planted my feet hard against the ground and thrust out my fist.
My comparatively small fist drove through the air without a moment's hesitation and met the falling debris head-on.
Release.
BOOM-! The debris burst apart.
It was because I had packed the fire energy to its brim in the instant my fist made contact.
The shattered fragments kicked up a haze of dust that swallowed our surroundings whole, and for a moment my vision was blotted out.
I stayed on guard in case another chunk of building or a fresh explosion came crashing in, but no matter how long I waited, no further threat made itself known.
At last, the smoky pall veiling my sight began to thin.
Only then did I realize something had gone terribly wrong.
"……What in the world is that?"
Cheon Yuha, rising from where she'd taken cover, narrowed her eyes and glared up at the heavens.
The sky was no longer merely scarlet; it shimmered with a violet radiance, luminous and ominous all at once.
Strange a district as the Witchcraft Quarter was, the sky at least had always been an ordinary blue—and now even that had turned against us.
Calling that an aurora would be a stretch.
Such a conclusion would be far too complacent.
Only those who kept the worst-case scenario ever in mind lived to see another day.
I immediately launched a wave of qi stealthily down one direction of the street.
Some three hundred jang out—roughly a kilometer—
THUD. The qi wave slammed into something.
It hadn't run out of strength. It had shattered against something invisible hanging in the empty air.
That settled it for me.
This was no ward Seondo had raised for the campus's own defense.
It was a space built not to protect those inside, but to seal off everything within and without.
I knew this kind of place—a caged, isolated environment with properties all its own.
A dungeon.
You have entered the Domain of the Mage.
And not one of those artificially fabricated training dungeons, either—we had been swept bodily into a real one.
The dimensional boundary has collapsed and an Archmage's domain has mutated. Defeat the likewise mutating mage without delay.
An absurdly dangerous special dungeon, at that.
"……There's no one here but us."
The elf, her composure belatedly restored, swept her eyes across the silent street.
The crowds of humans who had always thronged this place amid festival-like din and every manner of outlandish getup were now nowhere to be seen—not so much as the tip of a nose.
No sign of life reached us from any quarter.
In the entire sealed-off space, not just our immediate surroundings, precisely one living presence remained—
Bzzk─!
The upper reaches of the tower, its wall still torn open, still spilling forth that radiant, ominous glow.
"Well, that's just great."
If there was any silver lining, it was that our objective's location was plainly visible, laid out for all to see.
One way or another, we had to choose.
Stand here and quietly wait for rescue—or escape this place on our own two feet.
I turned my head and met Cheon Yuha's eyes beside me.
She gazed at me in silence for a moment, then broke into a grin.
"What think you we ought to do? I shall defer entirely to your judgment."
I then looked across at Eleanor.
Wearing a sullen expression, she appeared to be laboring over what to say.
From the look of her, it would take a while, so I simply decided not to listen.
"No, wait—my opinion is—!"
Overruled.
Her face made it obvious she was about to say the exact same thing as Cheon Yuha, only in a sulky tone of voice.
In any case, as the de facto guide of this little expedition, I weighed the situation from every angle and settled on a course of action.
Sitting idle had never been to my taste, and this was precisely a moment when we couldn't afford it.
'Defeat the mutating mage without delay.'
Time-limited objectives like this one had a nasty habit of snowballing into far worse trouble the longer you let them sit.
And so I declared:
"We take down the boss."
We would kill the mage who appeared to be this dungeon's master.
I had no intention of dying like a dog a second time.
With our course set, we moved out on the spot.
We advanced.
The Witchcraft Quarter.
Since this had unfolded at the very heart of the Sorcery Department's campus, one of Seondo's faculties, rescue was bound to arrive eventually.
Before the dungeon swallowed us, the streets outside had teemed not only with countless cadets but with professors who had reached the 7th or 8th Class, or even the Transformation Realm.
Odds were they were already scrambling to make sense of what on earth was happening, even at this very moment.
But when, exactly, would rescue become possible?
If the question was when their attempts would translate into actual results, the answer was anyone's guess.
High-rank mages and Transformation Realm martial artists were hardly a force to be sneered at—but whether they could forcibly shatter a dungeon was another matter entirely.
…This is a dungeon that pulled in only us. Better to assume the entrance we came through is already sealed.
Far better to take the pessimistic view than to clutch at hollow hope while waiting to die.
If the Ancient Dragon vice-principal or Museon, the island's master, came in person, the story would change—but expecting perpetually busy men like them to drop everything and arrive on the spot was a stretch.
Which meant the answer had been settled from the very beginning.
I chose the path of surviving on my own terms, however treacherous it might be.
If every option was saturated with uncertainty, then I would sooner decide the hour of my own death myself.
And, likewise, how I would live.
"Then what, precisely, is the plan?"
Beneath the sign of a clothier reading Franklin's Fashionista, Cheon Yuha whispered from her hiding place behind a mannequin dressed in a tailcoat.
For the moment, no living presence could be felt anywhere on the surface streets—but there might be someone out there concealing their ki sense.
And given the dungeon's nature, monsters could spawn out of thin air at any instant.
For those reasons, we were closing in on the mage tower with the utmost stealth.
For the record, Eleanor was posted behind the magic-engineering suit, while I spoke in a low voice from beside a monster mask display.
"Some dungeons do come with separate escape methods or gimmicks, but that's the exception, not the rule. In our case, all we have to do is remove the cause."
The seat of the dungeon's manifestation was obvious.
An explosion had gone off right before the incident, and the upper floors of the mage tower—which was still spilling that blinding radiance even now—were overwhelmingly the likeliest source.
The system message had told us to eliminate the mutating mage, too.
There was certainly a chance it lay somewhere else entirely, but only by checking the place right in front of our eyes would we earn the right to discuss what came next.
"……In the end, you are saying we must ascend."
Either way, we had to go before we could know anything.
Watching that convulsing mass of light, it felt as though something might blow at any second.
If another anomaly struck, hoping things would improve from here was a fool's wager.
So it was better for us to climb up and put an end to it before the bomb went off.
'With the members we have now, we might just pull it off.'
It wasn't as though that confidence lacked a foundation.
Cheon Yuha would lead the assault, and I would deflect whatever she found difficult to block.
On top of the positioning we'd used in the demon realm, we now had Eleanor raining powerful arrows from the rear.
Most problems could be handled with that arrangement.
Yes—as long as it wasn't something absurd on the scale of a dragon, it was well worth a fight.
Having steeled ourselves thus, we arrived before the mage tower, which now leaned a degree more than before.
'Monte Cristo.' We shoved open the front door beneath the sign written in flamboyant script.
As the dungeon's core, I half expected it to be warded somehow, but the door creaked open with almost insulting ease.
The lobby revealed beyond was a disaster—the interior strewn and smashed as though an earthquake had struck, dizzying to behold.
Wary of something lunging from a blind angle, I stepped onto the shattered tile floor.
I advanced with care. Cheon Yuha and Eleanor followed at my back.
"No stairs."
Unless some other means of ascent lay hidden within the lobby's concealed spaces, the elevator before us was evidently the only way up.
Eleanor, a deft hand at finding and disarming traps, combed the place thoroughly but turned up nothing amiss.
Once the minimal safety check was done, we boarded the lobby elevator, and despite the devastation all around it, the thing began to move without a hitch.
Hum─ hum─
We passed dozens of floors that way until we reached the level where that mysterious qi could be felt.
We'd been here just last week.
It was also, as it happened, the laboratory of the mage we'd been scheduled to meet today.
With an unpleasant metallic shriek, the elevator doors slid open, revealing a floor cracked from wall to wall as though it might come down at any moment.
A space where the boundaries between lobby, corridor, and laboratory had simply ceased to exist.
The ominously wavering rift in the air—and standing directly before it, the amber-haired mage.
In her hand she held something jewel-like that seemed to answer the rift perfectly.
We can take her.
She was a 7th-Class high mage, yes, but my confidence held.
A 7th-Class mage was stronger than a Super-Peak martial artist, yet markedly weaker than one of the Transformation Realm.
What's more, this amber-haired professor's specialties were not combat magic but the ancient tongue and magic engineering.
I judged her to be only slightly stronger than Zoltrak, whom I'd faced before.
So long as we combined our strength, she was an opponent we could absolutely crush.
That was true—right up until the jewel in the professor's hand began to shine.
Krik.
It gave off an ominous glow.
At the same instant, a system message printed itself at the edge of my vision.
Mage 'Pumpkinson' has partially completed her mutation.
Evolved into Origin-species demon 'Jack O' Lantern'.
Dungeon information has been updated.
The dimensional boundary has collapsed and an Archmage's domain has mutated. Defeat the mage turned demon without delay.
'Damn it—that time limit is way too short.'
It hadn't even been five minutes since we'd entered the dungeon. Was this supposed to make sense?
Just as I was grumbling inwardly, the amber-headed demon lifted its face.
Dark-red blood was streaming from its hollow eyes.
"──Ner."
FWOOSH─! Blue will-o'-wisps flared to life in the demon's eyes and across the empty air.
It extended a finger.
And in the same breath, it chanted:
"──Cyrus."
A spell in the ancient tongue, carrying the meaning of 'sun'.
I instantly thrust out both hands to twist it aside.
But the mana being woven into that incantation far exceeded anything I had estimated.
It burns.
Such heat that merely looking at the magic felt as though my eyes would melt in their sockets.
At the demon's fingertip, a veritable miniature sun took shape.
The Great Shift of Heaven and Earth — reversing the flow of all force under heaven.
As I churned my hands, twisting heaven and earth against each other, instinct seized me: this one could not be fully deflected.
"Get clear!"
The instant I shouted, Cheon Yuha and Eleanor dove aside.
A heartbeat later, I met the oncoming beam of light head-on.
The words tumbled out of me unbidden.
"Oh, sh—"
RRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRMMM──!
The beam of light tore down the road with the speed and weight of a freight train.
Cheon Yuha could only stare, dumbfounded.
Afterward, nothing human remained on the roadside where I had stood.
Nothing at all.