The Summoner of Rest (62)
With roughly two hours left on the dungeon timer, Shirogane Rui came staggering toward me from the far side.
She had not stopped using fire for even a single moment, and as a result not a single patch of pure white snow remained in the vicinity. In stark contrast, her complexion had gone beyond pale—she looked half-dead. The moment she reached me she collapsed face-first without a word.
An ordinary person might have caught her. I felt no such obligation.
She hit the ground with a dull thud, and the fact that she had already tucked her arm under her forehead to protect her face—as if she never expected me to catch her—was almost funny.
After lying there for a long while she rolled onto her back, let out a heavy sigh, and clamped her mouth shut.
"Ugh... I think I'm gonna throw up..."
"Well, who told you to keep going until you hit mana exhaustion?"
If she actually vomited, the base camp I had finally gotten into decent shape would be ruined. I ordered Hive to shove a CalorieMate bar—one that also replenished moisture—into the mouth of the woman sprawled on the ground, gasping for breath.
Slurp, suck!
Shirogane Rui greedily sucked it down as if it were the water of life, then finally exhaled a long breath that said she might just survive after all.
Anyone watching would have thought she had just finished a marathon.
I did not bother needling her further and simply left her to rest. I still had work of my own.
The Flame of Tranquility she was trying to learn had been custom-built so that only someone with her absurd power as a Descendant of Fire could use it. In short, the tail was wagging the dog.
To bring it down to a level other people could actually use would require a fair amount of fine-tuning. That was why, when I first explained it to her, I had carefully added the words "for now."
I restructured the adjusted formula into academic paper format, then used Observation and Record to burn every last detail into my mind. Only then did I let out a sigh.
The stare fixed on me made any further research impossible.
Still, I can see the path now.
Having been unable to use magic myself, I had half-abandoned the study of formulas. Being able to put them to work thanks to Kallion as a hand-piece was an enormous gain. I had planned to append the seed of that new discovery at the end of the Flame of Tranquility notes, but that woman had shattered my concentration.
So I decided to keep that part for myself.
The material on the Flame of Tranquility alone was more than enough to register with the Great Library. I had done it enough times to know. Those old men would stamp the approval the moment they saw my name.
This neighborhood had a strong tendency to treat magic and science as completely separate fields—even though things like the Five Elements or elemental theory were closer to science than anything else. That was why they marveled at the way I mixed the two. From my perspective they were the ones who had voluntarily sealed off their own creativity and imagination.
To put it simply, they knew that adding wind magic to fire magic made it stronger, but they had no idea why. They were already giving everything just to learn magic; trying to grasp the deeper operating principles on top of that was naturally difficult and obscure. It was like trying to run before you could even crawl—laughable, really.
As a result, the mages who grew quickly were usually the ones with sharp warrior instincts and good feel, while the scholarly types who could not accept a phenomenon without understanding it lagged behind. But that would change with time.
I had already thrown down the gauntlet on the fusion of science and magic. Sooner or later even those stiff-necked mages would start acknowledging science and applying it. A simple shift in perspective could make your magic stronger—no idiot in the world would refuse that.
Having finished sorting my thoughts, I turned a thoroughly unimpressed gaze on Shirogane Rui, who was now staring at me with zero subtlety.
"...Any results?"
"Yep!!"
She answered the instant the words left my mouth, beaming from ear to ear and nodding so hard she looked exactly like a dog that had just been told it was going for a walk.
"Look at this!"
Fwoosh.
Apparently filling her stomach had restored a bit of mana. She kindled a flame in one hand, gathered mana in the other, and brought the two together.
Crackle, crackle.
The pure red fire slowly began to take on a blue hue. It took time and the output was small, but she had clearly succeeded.
I already knew that.
When she had come back there had been no residual heat left in her body. The dungeon’s nature stole warmth quickly, true, but the heat she carried was far too intense to be drained by something so trivial. If she had not expended that heat as attacks during the spar with Hive, she probably would not have felt the cold even until the dungeon closed.
The complete absence of heat meant she had deliberately drawn it out through the Flame of Tranquility. With her exceptional understanding and mastery of fire, failure would have been the surprising outcome.
"Excluding the two hours for the first spar and the one hour spent constructing the formula... yes. You succeeded in nineteen hours. Congratulations."
"More! At times like this you have to put a little more feeling into the praise, Shinwoo-dongsaeng!!"
She hopped in place and practically screamed, yet the smile never left her face. I recoiled and put a little more distance between us.
Well, if you spent nearly twenty hours grinding without proper food or rest, anyone would go a bit crazy. I understood. That understanding simply did not extend to my own emotions.
"Hwaaah..."
After jumping around and making a complete racket by herself, she flopped back onto the ground. A little mana recovery did not erase the symptoms of total exhaustion so easily.
I silently tapped the shadow at my feet twice. Hive immediately stuffed more food into Shirogane Rui’s mouth. She accepted it happily, chewing away.
This was not babysitting. What the hell was I even doing? I let out a quiet sigh and stood. The woman who had been munching on the candy-like bar in her mouth shot upright.
"Where are you going?"
"Even if survival is the main theme of this dungeon, that doesn’t mean there are no enemies."
Life was more tenacious than people realized. Creatures would rewrite their own bodies if they had to, clawing their way through survival and evolution. This dungeon was no exception.
They had simply been terrified of the flames Shirogane Rui had been pouring out and had fled. Now that the fire had quieted, they were starting to creep back into view—and a whole pack of them was heading straight for us.
I calmly counted the number that had entered Haze’s range, nodded, condensed mana into my fingertip, and flicked it.
Snap!
The shadow beneath me stretched long. A lantern flickering with green fire and the nun carrying it climbed out as if the shadow were a staircase. Behind them a pure-white wolf appeared.
Crack!
From behind me a skeleton tore through space itself. The flame in its skull swept the surroundings, then blue fire flooded its entire body.
"Keres, cover fire. Echidna and Growl take the front. Shiz, tear into their ranks."
My summons moved the instant the order left my mouth.
What approached from the far side was a horde of abominations that seemed to spit on common sense. Monsters covered head to toe in white fur with ice horns jutting from their bodies, trees made entirely of ice, golems that were nothing but pure ice—every last one of them was tied to ice.
And behind them all, watching us with leisurely arrogance, stood their leader. True to the pack of screw-loose creatures it commanded, the boss itself looked like it was missing a few screws.
Its pure-white body was roughly humanoid, yet it radiated not a single scrap of humanity. Clutching a massive ice sword as tall as itself, it drifted through the air like a mannequin.
Then it noticed my gaze. The smooth, featureless face split open with a wet crack, and a gigantic eyeball took its place.
Roll, roll...
It slowly moved the eye, then locked onto me. A sinister pupil of mixed purple and yellow, with vivid purple streaks—unpleasant even if you tried to be generous.
Boss [Bewildering Ice Demon] is watching you.
Boss [Bewildering Ice Demon] licks its lips.
I roughly swatted the system messages aside.
"...Ha. What a pathetic piece of trash."
I pulled the shadow mask over my face and steeled my will to fight. I had originally planned to let the summons handle it, but my mind had changed.
Everything else could wait. That boss I would kill with my own hands. How dare it lick its lips at me? It really thought I looked easier than that woman, huh?
"Go."
The moment I raised the shadows, my summons moved. Keres summoned a bow at my side, drew the string, and loosed. Condensed blue flame touched the enemy ranks and burned them as if devouring them whole.
The instant Echidna and Growl’s successive strikes landed, Subjugator activated and my stats climbed rapidly.
I shaped the shadow into a spear, then transformed it into a bow. A faint orange light flickered in my grip and vanished—proof that Versatile Transformation had taken effect.
"Sonic Impact."
The moment I spoke the skill name, an arrow took form. Shadows stretched from the bow and rooted themselves into the earth.
"Keres."
"Kakakat!"
At my call her blue flames layered onto the shadow. Faster, sharper, the finished arrow was nocked and drawn.
I deliberately left Haze’s power out. Adding the strengthened spirit’s force would have punched straight through the boss and kept going.
Mana surged inside me; I poured every drop into the shot without holding back.
The boss began to panic at the concentrated mana. It yanked free the sword it had been resting on so solemnly and rolled its eyeball wildly, scanning the surroundings.
Too late. My attack was already on the verge of release—and the boss knew it. It committed fully and shot toward me. Wings of light unfurled from its back and it accelerated like a bullet.
"Clack..."
Keres kept her arms moving. Compared to my shot her arrows must have felt non-threatening; the boss ignored them and charged straight through, even as the flaming shafts struck true.
It had been far too confident in its body. Most of Keres’s arrows bounced off without piercing the hide.
"?!!?!!"
But it was the first to realize how foolish that choice had been.
Most arrows had been deflected, yet a few had buried themselves deep. Those immediately flared and began to gnaw at its skin.
As a Soul Eater, Keres’s true essence was not bone but flame—the worst possible matchup for any living thing. A fire that burned flesh and then the soul itself for fuel. Even if the body took little damage, a direct assault on the spirit would bring anyone to their knees, no matter how proud of their physique they were.
One brief stagger. That was enough.
Twang!
The fully condensed arrow had already left my hand. Even I felt my arm go numb from the overwhelming shockwave as it tore through the air.
CRACK!!
"---!!!"
The arrow slammed dead-center into the Bewildering Ice Demon and did not stop; it drove the creature backward. The moment it reached its limit—
Click!
The mechanism stored inside the arrow triggered. The storm of mana packed within, swollen further by Keres’s flames that had fed on it, erupted.
FWAAAAASH!!!
The purple storm clouds that had blanketed the sky were punched open in an instant. The sky remained dark—overcast, the kind that precedes rain—yet a faint light finally touched the lifeless ground.
At the end of that light a monster with more than half its body melted and shattered was falling. Keres’s flames still burned it, yet its body was slowly regenerating.
I condensed mana through my entire body and sprinted. The bow transformed into a gauntlet; Keres’s flames layered onto it.
"----...."
The weakly falling boss stretched a hand toward the monsters, buying time, and fired something. The creatures that had been charging aimlessly at my summons immediately swarmed around their master and began to block my path.
I snorted. It did not matter. No amount of small fry could stop me. And now I knew the boss had nothing left—pure profit.
With the monsters closing in I settled into stance, checked the timing, and circulated mana through my whole body.
"Haze."
The moment I spoke the name, the spirit understood my intent perfectly. A vast quantity of mana flooded outward. Target: me.
Space around me warped; perception skewed. A strange weightlessness pulled me from below, and when I came to my senses I was standing directly in front of the boss that had just managed to right itself in mid-air.
My body was already coiled to strike. The boss’s eyeball rolled a beat late at my sudden appearance.
In the stretched time axis of Combat Focus, I watched the pupil slowly contract and drove my fist forward.
CRUNCH, CRACK!!!
My fist sank in. The sensation of shattering the cornea and crushing the lens traveled clearly up my arm and through my entire body. The fist did not stop. It kept going, invading the space where the brain sat. I condensed mana once more.
In that gap the boss’s sword shot toward me. I ignored defense and kept gathering power. After all, I had allies I could trust.
CLANG!!!
"How dare you aim that filthy blade at Master."
Echidna, far sharper than usual, detonated her holy power and smashed the sword aside.
CRACK!
The blade that met her mace shattered from the impact alone. The arm that had held it twisted unnaturally and broke.
Sizzle!!!
Echidna’s follow-up strikes seared the boss’s body with smoke. Clear rejection. The moment the word "Demon" sat in its name, Echidna’s holy power was its natural predator.
Worse, its body dulled by sacred energy, the boss opened holes all over itself in a final thrash and spat tentacles.
But the mana packed into my fist detonated first.
Gurgle, BOOM!!!
The twitching body ballooned like an overfilled balloon and burst.
The tentacles that had been ready to strike immediately lost all strength and flopped to the ground.
Pat-pat-pat—
Belated purple blood rained down. The boss’s upper body, half of it blown away past the face, toppled backward.
You have defeated Boss [Bewildering Ice Demon].
"Haa..."
At the system’s voice I finally released the breath I had been holding.
None of the filthy blood touched me. Right before the body burst, Haze had sealed the space around me with wind.
"Good work."
"You flatter me, Master."
< (ง˙∇˙)ว >
Each summon gave its own response to my brief words, then left to finish the cleanup.
I tapped the ground twice with my foot. Hive appeared at once, dragged the boss’s corpse into the shadows for storage, and vanished. That was the last thing I saw before I transformed the shadow gauntlet into a sword.
I had grown stronger—no question. The coordination between my summons had become smoother. Yet a sense of insufficiency still lingered.
Could this restless thirst ever be quenched? I did not know. All I could do was keep growing stronger.
I raised mana through my entire body once more and thrust my sword toward the remaining enemies.