Summoner (4)
In the end, I burned through time right up to the wire on Keres’s “education.”
It didn’t hurt her, but if I kept hitting her for every screw-up, even she ought to figure out something was wrong. The problem was that I nitpicked every single move like I was looking for an excuse to interfere, so the whole thing dragged on far longer than I’d planned.
I’d already wasted way too much of the day. At this rate the sun would rise tomorrow morning before we finished the dungeon, so I gave Growl the order.
One, two, three.
I counted silently in my head, and—oh, would you look at that—the boss was dead. Even I had to admit it was impressive. Raise one properly and you really don’t need ten.
This can’t go on forever.
Honestly, I was exhausted.
With Kallion I could at least beat that nature into submission through pain. This one? Impossible. I needed a completely different approach.
If I didn’t get a firm grip on her at this stage, she would just keep making the same mistakes later. By then her intelligence would be higher and her sense of self more solid, so she would correct herself immediately—but the fact that she would still make the same mistake was the problem. If we got lucky and it was nothing, fine. If it turned into real danger, I was the only one who lost.
Having steeled myself, I dismissed every summon except Hive and headed for the dorms.
Murmur, murmur.
“...?”
Given the hour, I expected the place to be empty. Instead, a low buzz of voices still drifted from the entrance to the B-rank dungeon.
Right. Something had happened. Of course.
A faint curiosity about what could keep people gathered this late tried to surface, but the fatigue screaming for rest in my brain drowned it out.
...Yeah. Whatever it was had already happened. Finding out a little later wouldn’t change much.
Besides, the moment I walked into class tomorrow morning, people would spill every last detail whether I wanted to hear it or not.
Rumors were a kind of collective intelligence. Surprisingly often they contained grains of truth, and as they grew flesh, plausible deductions got stuck on until they became genuinely useful for piecing together what had gone down.
There was a reason fantasy stories always treated taverns as information exchanges. Adventurers gathered there to wash off the day’s exhaustion, traded stories as side dishes for their drinks, and padded exaggerated war tales with real intel just to earn the next round. That was how the nickname stuck.
You had to filter for that special quality if you wanted the real information.
Telling myself that, I dragged my (mostly mentally) worn-out body toward the dormitory.
I honestly didn’t even have the energy to eat. Anything I forced down right now would taste like chewing tree roots. So I pulled my eternal friend out of the shadows and ate that instead.
“...Gulp.”
Whether it was because I’d been focusing hard on growth and my strength had shot up, or because my raised Endurance skill had simply increased my lung capacity, I drained a CalorieMate that used to take seven pulls in just three.
Whoa. Unexpected side benefit.
Or, looking at it the other way, it just meant my stamina before had been so pathetic it made you want to scream. So maybe it didn’t count as a side benefit at all.
Sucking on the CalorieMate as I walked, I spotted someone lingering in front of my door.
Even half-hidden by the dark, that face was impossible to mistake.
“What are you doing?”
“...! Sinwoo!”
It was none other than Ban Taewung.
He must have knocked several times already; the moment I approached, the visitor-log hologram that announced callers when I was out scrolled his name in a long, unbroken line.
“What? Something wrong?”
“I’m just glad you’re safe... No—uh, there was a problem today.”
Something big enough to make the protagonist react like this? Looking closer, he was soaked in cold sweat like he’d been running all over the place, and his breathing was still rough.
Okay, something really had gone down. I shook my half-slack mind back into focus, raked a hand through my hair, and sighed.
Yeah. An academy wasn’t an academy for nothing. This was more like it. The last two weeks had been way too quiet.
Rest was off the table.
“...Come inside first. We’ll talk.”
“Y-yeah.”
I herded Ban Taewung into the room the way you calm a spooked animal, and from him I got the full story.
Missing persons.
A large number of students who had entered dungeons had simply vanished. Ten victims already, and even the third-years who went looking for them had disappeared in turn.
When a full day passed with no answers and no way to make contact, the academy stopped treating it as student delinquency and admitted something had happened. A full-scale investigation began.
The origin of the incident—spanning every year—was a B-rank dungeon.
The first dungeon where trouble appeared was called the Temple Encroached by Madness.
There were entry records. There were no exit records.
The anomaly was serious enough that they even called in the Dungeon Maker who had been involved in its construction for intensive analysis. Strangely, they found nothing wrong.
Still, they couldn’t just ignore a problem that had already shown itself, so they sealed every B-rank dungeon and decided to keep researching.
That was when identical disappearances started turning up in C-, D-, and E-rank dungeons as well.
Unlike the Temple Encroached by Madness, where every single person who went in vanished, these cases were worse in a different way: only one person from each party would simply... disappear, like a ghost story come to life.
Sealing the B-rank dungeons alone was no longer enough.
“You’ve been going into dungeons a lot lately, Sinwoo. Enough time had passed and you still weren’t answering, so I got worried.”
“...So.”
I looked at him. Even after catching his breath he couldn’t hide the anxiety. His expression looked like he was hunting for the tiniest scrap of hope.
“Is there someone among the missing that you’re looking for?”
“...Ugh!”
He flinched like I’d hit the bullseye, then slowly nodded in surrender.
“I really can’t win against you, Sinwoo.”
“Who?”
Seriously—had one of the heroines gotten mixed into the missing?
It was entirely possible. This insane world would do anything for Ban Taewung’s sake, as long as the end result was that he grew and was happy.
“Na-rae—Shin Na-rae, the one who just moved up to Class S—and Erika...”
One name I barely knew; the other was a confirmed heroine. Right. We’d already gotten past Riri’s crisis, and while handling Cheon Jang-mi’s event I’d reconfirmed Lucia’s affection.
That left Onohara Erika as the natural next one. Different year, so of course the only way to tangle them together was something like this.
The name Shin Na-rae bothered me, so I scrolled back through what I’d left in Record. She was the girl who, during the last flag-capture, had still been valuable as a sacrifice even though she wasn’t Riri—valuable enough that the mind-corrupted Class A had gone after her.
Blue-haired priestess girl, right?
So she had made it into Class S. Come to think of it, I might have seen her once off to the side of the classroom.
But that alone didn’t explain why he was this wound up. Even if a future heroine and a current one had both gone missing, the Ban Taewung I’d trained should still be calmly assessing the situation.
At first I figured he’d half-panicked because the insurance policy who was supposed to hand him answers—me—had entered a dungeon and then vanished from sight while he was trying to investigate on his own.
But even after confirming I was safe, the anxiety never left him. What was driving him this hard?
The answer was simple.
Whatever else he was, Ban Taewung was the type who would absolutely protect anything within arm’s reach—anything standing right beside him.
If someone got kidnapped right under the protagonist’s nose, wouldn’t he throw everything he had into saving them even if he’d only met them that morning?
And when that someone was a heroine candidate—and an actual heroine was included—being anything less than frantic would have been the strange part.
“Don’t tell me they vanished right in front of you?”
“...Yeah. ‘In front of me’... more like right beside me.”
Something like guilt flickered across his face for an instant.
“Right up until we cleared the dungeon they were behind us, chatting together. We waited and waited, but there was no sign of them coming out. When I finally touched the entrance out of curiosity, Na-rae still hadn’t appeared—but the dungeon just... opened for re-entry on its own. Gave me chills.”
He was doing his best to look calm, but his eyes couldn’t hide it. That was rage. Rage at whoever had done this. And rage at himself for standing right there and being able to do nothing.
To atone, Ban Taewung had run himself ragged without rest, hunting for any scrap of information.
Curfew was closing in, shrinking the range he could still move. He had stretched every last second the clock allowed until, exhausted, he finally ended up here.
That was the whole reason he had been pacing in front of a door that wasn’t even occupied, clutching at the last straw.
While I had been educating Keres, this was what had been happening outside.
I cross-checked the information Ban Taewung had given me against what Hive’s shadow crows had already reported, looking for discrepancies, then opened my device.
I have a pretty good idea who the culprit is...
I just needed solid confirmation before I could force the truth. If she realized I was bluffing for information, that woman would never give me a straight answer.
I pulled up the list of dungeons the confidential unit had reported as cleared.
Comparing it against the ones I had separately stored in Record through the shadow crows, the answer jumped out immediately.
“B-rank. One’s missing...”
Between the final completion reports and the progress updates that had come through mid-operation, one dungeon was simply gone from the count.
I didn’t even need to ask who had given the order.
Only a handful of people could command the confidential unit. And among them, only one person in the entire world could bury something this big with a casual verbal order and no formal report.
I had even lent them my name so they could get the job done, and instead of finishing it they had stopped halfway to play some stupid side game?
The reason was obvious. This looked more fun. Or they wanted to root out whoever had planted the Residue of the Evil God in the academy’s dungeons.
That seed of discord had sprouted beautifully and was once again threatening my peace. From start to finish, there was not a single thing I liked about these bastards.
“Huh?! Did you figure something out?!”
Ban Taewung shot to his feet and lunged toward me. I shoved his head back with a push laced with mana, scowled hard enough to crease my brow, and said:
“...Do you know what an Evil God is?”
“Evil... God?”
He blinked at the sudden question and blankly repeated the words.
I couldn’t tell whether he knew nothing or had some vague idea.
Probably both. The most famous god in this world was Astral, the sun god of the near-monotheistic Gwangil Church.
Stories about the Evil God were classified. I didn’t know every detail, but I knew more than these guys, and I was confident of that.
This conversation’s going to get long again.
If I was going to explain it, I should explain it to everyone at once. Better to sleep tonight and do it tomorrow when they were all gathered. I also wanted a full day’s buffer on the information.
“...Let’s meet tomorrow morning and talk then.”
“B-but...!”
“Hey.”
I leveled a flat, cold stare at Ban Taewung, who was fidgeting and whining like a dog told to wait with a treat right in front of its nose.
He flinched and quietly looked away. He probably knew how pathetic he looked right now.
“What do you think you’re going to accomplish in that state? Go sleep. Cool your head while you’re at it.”
“...You’ll definitely tell me tomorrow, right?”
“Yeah. I’ll gather the people involved and explain everything at once.”
While I had been fiddling with the device earlier I had already texted Hong Su-ah: cancel morning self-study tomorrow and assemble everyone. She had started grumbling about infringement of teaching authority, but the second I mentioned I would provide information on this incident she shut right up.
Looked like the faculty were just as lost as everyone else.
“Rest for today. I’m tired.”
“...Ah.”
Only then did Ban Taewung realize I had just come back from a dungeon.
Claiming to care about the people around him while failing to actually look at them was a protagonist specialty. Unless you spelled it out for this dense idiot, he never noticed.
He already had the temperament of a racehorse that locked onto a single goal and charged; without a jockey keeping him in line he was bound to veer off course.
What the hell is Lucia even doing?
I had deliberately fed her information and stuck her at his side for exactly this kind of caretaking, and she couldn’t even handle this much? Seriously?
Of course, if Heroine Number One had been doing her job and he was still like this, there wasn’t much I could say. But since I currently knew nothing, a little internal cursing felt allowed.
First, send Ban Taewung home. Then go squeeze that woman for answers—and while I was at it, pry some Evil God intel out of her. After that, use it tomorrow to drag the protagonist’s whole pack into the mess.
This was the very problem the god had hated so much he tried to use me to solve it.
And once he decided it could no longer be stopped, he had deliberately tangled a heroine into the already-happening disaster so he could turn it into a growth event. That had to be the full picture.
I was starting to see that bastard god’s true intentions more and more clearly, and it felt good. What a complete piece of shit. A pure parasite who only ever caused trouble.
I hope this whole thing finally plants a proper grudge in that protagonist he dotes on so much, you fucking asshole.