I'll Take You With Me
As a proud citizen of the Republic of Korea, I had a Korean name — but from the moment I transmigrated into a novel, I went by McDeras. It didn't mean anything special. I simply kept the name of the body I'd possessed.
For all how ridiculous the name might sound, I prided myself on magic that could hold its own against anyone. Among the thousands who had been dropped into novels, not a single one had ever reached the rank of Archmage. That I alone had made it there was no small achievement.
Even with the restrictions this world of The Cruel City Where the Blood of Death Falls had slapped on my mana and spellcasting, the trash-tier magic these people threw around was still something I could dismantle on sight.
"Cancel."
The formula the so-called plunderer chief had woven was painfully crude. He'd clearly tried to tangle a mess of complicated equations together to shore up his security, but that very effort only made it easier to crack. You could see exactly what he was trying to hide.
After breaking his spell, I stepped in front of him and spoke.
"Say that again. Who's killing who?"
I looked down at the man, my voice cold and flat.
"You? Killing me?"
It wasn't bluster. From everything I'd seen of Choi Yebin's fighting so far, the man in front of me — never mind the magicless idiots behind him — had already shown me more than enough of what they were worth.
I reached my conclusion. This was the full extent of whatever power he'd been holding back.
Every variable I could control was already under control. All that remained was a one-sided thrashing.
"What exactly do you think you can pull off against one mage and one assassin that you're strutting around like that? Even if you somehow outclass me in pure magic, you'd still need casting time to put a spell together."
Fair point, from his side of things. If they used their allies as human shields and advanced step by step while he cast, they could close the distance by sacrificing maybe ten men. Killer was at my side, but she was helpless against magic.
Which was exactly why preparation mattered. Even a fight you could never win could be flipped into one you could never lose.
A sealed cave. Natural gas hung thick in the air here.
Their mage would know that, too.
That bastard. He's been sticking to water-attribute magic this whole time.
A small amount of gas and a spark, and you get a roaring blaze. A large amount of gas and a spark, and you get an explosion.
Even outside, where the air is free to dilute, gas and flame together make for a devastating blast. What happens when that explosion goes off inside a space almost completely cut off from the outside, with limited oxygen?
I unfolded a magic formula at once. A seething crimson magic circle bloomed over my hand.
In that instant, the plunderer chief went white and started scrambling backward.
"Y-You insane son of a bitch! Have you lost your mind? You think only we'll die if you set off a fire spell in here? You'll go up with us! Are you trying to kill yourself because you're losing?"
"What makes you think I'd die with you?"
Something clicked for him then. He started screaming at his men like a madman.
"Stop that bastard! Get on him right now — don't let him finish a defensive spell!"
Even as I shaped the fire magic in my right hand, I began casting a barrier with my left.
Killer stared, stunned.
"Double casting…?"
Double casting — something only a vanishingly small number of mages who had reached the absolute peak could manage. It was the foundation of multi-casting, the ability to wield multiple spells at once.
But trying to hold back a vast fireblast detonating in a sealed space with a single barrier was reckless beyond reason. My mana was restricted here. At the very least, I needed to thin out the gas around me first.
The answer was simple.
I focused, and this time a green magic circle formed in the empty air. Without any further prep, it unleashed itself.
FWOOOOOOSH—!
A wind strong enough to throw people off their feet wrapped around the enemies in an instant. The oxygen and gas behind them were sucked in all at once, as if the air itself were being poured into a single point.
Then I completed the second spell I'd been holding — the barrier.
"Ah… r-run…"
Fear flooded the plunderer chief's eyes.
A red light filled the chamber.
It was the last thing he ever saw.
The explosion's impact was enormous. The cave was pushed to the brink of collapse, and in places it actually did. The entrance was completely sealed — no way out — but there was still just enough space for a body to stretch out.
"That was reckless. You could have died with them if anything went wrong."
Killer — Choi Yebin — spoke from where she was curled up beside me. I didn't answer. I didn't have the breath for it.
"An Elixir… and you even saved my life. I don't know how I'm supposed to repay you."
I forced my stumbling body upright and downed the remaining Elixir I'd pocketed earlier, gulping it in one go. Only then could I move properly again.
Yeah. Triple casting under these restrictions really does take a toll.
A powerful gale, fire, and even a barrier — three high-tier elemental spells at once. In my original world it would have been nothing, but here I'd half-expected it to fail. It hadn't.
"Couldn't you have chosen a method with less risk?"
I almost brushed her off with something vague — then remembered she could tell when someone was lying, and answered honestly. Empty words wouldn't get me anywhere with her anyway.
"If I'd left you and gone into hiding for about twenty-three hours, I could have gotten out of here with zero risk. Of course, you'd be dead."
"Isn't that the plan you were going to use? Why did you suddenly decide to help me?"
Killer looked deeply uneasy. Fair enough. A man who seemed vastly stronger than her risking his own life to save hers was, by any measure, bizarre — especially in a wretched novel-world where plunderers outnumbered ordinary people.
She seemed genuinely curious. So I gave her the unvarnished truth.
"I was going to leave you to die and run. Then I saw the post you put up on the community. Reading the comments put me in a foul mood. Don't ask me why."
Not a single lie in it.
Watching a young girl's tragedy get turned into a joke had felt wrong, and for a moment I was just… disgusted. I wasn't some champion of justice. It had nothing to do with righteousness. What right would a guy who spent half his time trolling the boards for attention have to play hero?
If I had to add one more reason: if Killer's posts, which used to go up every day, simply stopped appearing, something about that would have felt off. She was one of the few people who got torn apart in the comments alongside me. In the Extinction Novel Gallery, at least, we'd shared a certain camaraderie.
The situation had allowed for intervention, so I'd shifted my stance from observer to character in the story — and rewritten her ending.
"Anyway. This place is a wreck. What now?"
"From here I'll get myself out. I have a rough idea of where we are relative to the outside, so it shouldn't be too hard."
"Not a chance. I used a detection spell — we're completely buried. The only space left is this roughly one-meter pocket we've jammed ourselves into."
A brief silence settled between us.
In truth, I hadn't been unaware this would happen. Honestly, I'd deliberately overdone the explosion on purpose. If any of the plunderers' stragglers had been waiting elsewhere in the cave and tried a delayed ambush, we could have died to a blind blade.
I'd unleashed enough force to kill every last one of them no matter where they were in this sprawling cave — and at the same time built a fortress no one could physically reach for the next twenty-three hours.
I hadn't gone to the trouble of saving her just to leave her trapped in this hole with no plan.
"Looking at the Admin privileges, it seems you can bring one living being or object of your choice with you each time you warp from another world. Of course, if the target would seriously disrupt either world, the request gets rejected…"
I let the pause hang, then finished.
"But this is McDeras speaking. In a world that already has an Archmage like me, I don't think one assassin is going to be a problem. How about it? Come with me — to the place I transmigrated into."
"…Can I bring my weapons?"
"Doesn't look like it. From what I've seen, a few ordinary clothes with no special properties come along for free, but weapons definitely don't warp with you."
Meaning you wouldn't arrive naked — but you also couldn't smuggle extra loot by strapping it to your body. That wasn't a guess; it was fact. I'd been carrying several magic scrolls and other items inside my robe, and every last one of them had vanished on the warp. Only the robe itself had remained.
"What are you worried about? You're heading into a worldline where an Archmage has your back."
"…Then I'll take you up on that."
Once I had her consent, I grinned.
At McDeras's smile, Killer — Choi Yebin — thought to herself:
A life spent just scraping by day after day. And at this moment, with no way to escape to the outside, she was hardly so stupid that she didn't know she ought to be begging him to take her. The hesitation earlier had only been worry that she might become a burden to him.
This man is thoughtful.
She had misjudged him. She'd looked only at the ridiculous persona he showed in the Extinction Novel Gallery and written him off too lightly. He was a man with the dignity and skill befitting an Archmage — someone worthy of respect. She was just starting to feel a swell of genuine emotion when—
"I put up a post. Leave a comment for me. These bastards keep attacking me."
Killer opened the Extinction Novel Gallery and found a single thread waiting.
That's just because you don't know me. I'm not some beta troll who farms aggro — I'm a fucking alpha male.
The light, attention-seeking behavior he showed on the board was so jarringly different from the man who had just engineered that fight that she almost doubted they were the same person.
Choi Yebin pressed a hand to her throbbing temple and asked quietly,
"What should I write?"
McDeras told her, deadpan, and she typed it out exactly as he said.
Somehow, Choi Yebin found herself thinking the days ahead with him were not going to be peaceful.