Summoner (5)
The next morning.
Gathered in one corner of the empty classroom, with Hong Su-ah in tow, the members present were me, Hong Su-ah, Ban Taewung, Luicia, Riri, and one more unfamiliar girl—six in total.
The only person I had brought was Hong Su-ah, so the girl had to have come from Ban Taewung’s side.
It wasn’t exactly a problem, but one thing bothered me a little: the stark difference in the atmosphere Ban Taewung and that girl were giving off. Opposite, even. Contrasting.
Whether he had failed to sleep properly or not, Ban Taewung’s eyes were slightly bloodshot. The way he kept glancing at me and fidgeting made me wonder just how hard he was being pushed, and why.
The girl, on the other hand, was extremely taciturn. That did not mean she was calm. The sharp aura coiled inside her was so keen that it carried a clear will to cut down anything that so much as brushed against her.
The way she quietly observed her surroundings was not outright hostile, yet it held a merciless readiness to discard anything the moment it became an obstacle.
If I had to choose, I preferred the girl’s reaction. Ban Taewung’s current state was closer to failing the grade.
It wasn’t bad, exactly, but it was a little unreliable.
Even if he couldn’t manage full confidence, situations like this demanded cooler heads.
I nudged Luicia with my foot and shot her a look. Her gaze moved from me to the girl in turn; she let out a short sigh and cleared her throat.
“Taewung.”
“Huh? Yeah? What’s up, Luicia?”
“Please calm down a little. I understand you’re worried about Na-rae, but if you keep this up, even things that could work won’t.”
When Luicia’s hand settled over his own—knuckles white from how tightly he had been clenching—the tension slowly drained from Ban Taewung’s body.
“…Yeah. You’re right. Sorry.”
Once I confirmed he had settled somewhat, I pulled out my device, set it in the center of the table, and switched on the screen.
I had thrown a bit of a fit before bed last night, and the other side—apparently realizing I would notice—had sent over every prepared file. Getting ready had been easy enough.
Even so, I did not open the information right away. I had never been told who the girl was.
“And you are?”
If I stayed quiet, it looked like no one would bother explaining, so I simply asked outright. For the first time an incredulous expression crossed the girl’s face, but I paid it no mind.
Well, I said I didn’t know. What of it?
Faced with my unabashed stare, Hong Su-ah looked thoroughly fed up; she shook her head first and opened her mouth.
“At least remember the faces of your classmates, Cadet Jang Sinwoo. Her name is Sena Bright. She was in the same party as Cadet Ban Taewung when Cadet Shin Na-rae went missing.”
Bright, huh. I had been so uninterested I hadn’t even known she was in our class.
“…Sena Bright.”
I nodded at that. So her reason for joining was solid enough. I looked at her and slowly shook my head.
“What I want to know is whether your goal is rescuing the missing, or fulfilling a crusader’s duty. The top priority changes depending on the answer.”
Bright. I knew nothing about the girl herself, but I had information on the name she claimed.
The current high priest of the Gwangil Church and simultaneous grandmaster of the Holy Knights was a powerhouse named Jeira Bright.
His epithet was the Mace of the Lord God. Even among the Bright family—famous for producing excellent crusaders generation after generation—he was called the strongest crusader in history. His skill needed no further comment, and his standing within the Church itself was considerable.
That was why I asked.
If this girl decided to move not to find the missing but to discharge a crusader’s duty by arbitrarily dealing with the Residue of the Evil God, every operation I had carefully put together would go up in smoke, and things would get troublesome in all sorts of ways.
“…I am not yet a formal Holy Knight.”
“By that logic, Shin Na-rae isn’t a formal Saint either—just one of many candidates.”
One of the pieces of information I had squeezed out of Lee Se-rin. Shin Na-rae was still only one of the undecided Saint candidates.
Of course, “candidate” or not, she had no particularly eye-catching traits compared to the other formidable contenders, nor any distinguished birth.
Put the other way around, that meant she possessed something that let her be chosen as a candidate even after all of that was set aside.
“…You even know that much. As expected, those favored by the monster are different.”
She also knew I was connected to Lee Se-rin. This felt less like information circulating inside the Church itself and more like the Bright family’s own intelligence network.
Well, intelligence or not, Lee Se-rin simply liked to drop by and mess with certain people for fun. Judging by how openly she called her a monster, that fellow must have been thoroughly burned a few times.
I shrugged and spoke at a leisurely pace.
“Don’t try to dodge with other words. Answer clearly. Rescue, or purge. Which is it?”
“…I already told you.”
The girl—Sena Bright—furrowed her brow hard and growled. The way she looked, as if she were forcing anger to cover some private shame… was that just my imagination?
“I am not yet a Holy Knight. Before the name Bright even comes into it, I intend to stand here as Na-rae’s friend.”
“Is that so? Then that’s a relief.”
Snap.
I flicked my fingers, signaling the shadow crows I had kept on standby. They burst out in an instant and distributed the pre-made files they held in their beaks to everyone present.
One of them had originally been mine, but since I already had everything stored via Record, I handed it over to Sena Bright.
“First, before the explanation: no questions until I’m finished. And the moment any information obtained here leaks outside, your future life could become very uninteresting—so take care.”
The tone was calm, yet coercive; no one objected.
Sena Bright, who until a moment ago had been sending me sharp looks, seemed ready to argue, yet she only continued to glare at me in silence and said nothing more.
“Good.”
I operated the device and displayed the information.
It began with the report of my encounter with Nightshade in the Goblin’s Lair during the Academy’s first week, the events leading up to that specimen’s appearance, and continued with intelligence the Confidential Division had handled without my involvement.
The highlight was what Lee Se-rin had done—ripping out roughly half the roots of the “Evil God worshippers” who had been hiding outside without my knowledge.
“First I should explain the ‘Evil God.’”
From the lowest layer of that information I picked out the keyword “Evil God” and opened a new folder.
“The Evil God is, simply put, a ‘fake god.’”
“A fake… god?”
I nodded at Ban Taewung’s echo of my words.
“If we dig deep it gets ridiculously complicated, so just think of it as one of those unknown entities that sometimes appear in dungeon lore.”
In essence it was no different from a story included in a dungeon. Worshippers who cleverly latched onto it started calling it a god and the like, and naturally more followers began to gather.
Looking at their methods, it was hardly different from a cult expanding its influence.
The only difference was that the subject itself was a setting-level existence whose presence in this world was uncertain. If one had to assign it a position, “Demon King” would not be far off.
Subordinates appearing without your knowledge, and those subordinates then running around doing all sorts of nonsense in your name? There was no greater nuisance.
In reality the existence called the Evil God was nothing more than a convenient universal cheat key the worshippers pulled out whenever they felt like causing chaos.
Those lunatics needed no grand reason. “For the great Evil God~” was more than enough.
I would bet that even inside that organization there were people who didn’t give a damn about any Evil God or whatever and had simply seized leadership positions to milk the money offered by the deranged cultists.
“The ones who worship that unknown entity—the Evil God—and go further, spreading the ambition of placing this world under the Evil God’s dominion, are the Evil God worshippers.”
I pulled out photographs. Some men had tattoos on their necks, some women on their thighs.
The design was extremely distinctive: a spiral shell reminiscent of an ammonite gripped by curved bones, with black lines like tree roots or lightning branching out around it.
This was both the crest of the Evil God worshippers and proof that they had received the Evil God’s power.
Yes—these madmen had ultimately discovered a method of accepting the Evil God’s power from within dungeons.
More precisely, they had taken fragments of dungeons whose main theme was the existence of the Evil God, split them, and modified them so they could be acquired in a certain form.
That was the true identity of the Residue of the Evil God.
Think of it as a kind of skill bestowed by the Evil God. True to the name, every residue’s power was uniformly foul… yet they were strong enough to be called authorities.
Of course the backlash and restrictions were severe as well.
“The cause of this incident is that the self-proclaimed foot-wipers of the Evil God planted Residues of the Evil God inside the Academy’s dungeons, and those residues germinated.”
There I displayed the irregular information concerning the Goblin’s Lair and the dungeon the Confidential Unit had handled.
“The residues discovered in advance totaled six. Three of them—Unfair Death, Incomplete Fetters, and Opaque Connection—had been sown in combination.”
For reference, the residue that had seeped into Nightshade was Incomplete Fetters. Each residue had different effects, so explaining them all now would only complicate things; better to focus on the one central to this incident.
“Of those, five residues were completely eliminated. The remaining one—Opaque Connection—survived, swallowed the dungeon, and fully bloomed. That is the truth of this incident.”
I exhaled once and surveyed the gazes around me. Ban Taewung and Luicia looked as if they were wondering whether such a thing was even possible, while Riri simply seemed fascinated by the information on the Evil God.
Sena Bright, thanks to her special circumstances, already knew a fair amount about the Evil God, yet she apparently had no information that something like this had occurred at the Academy.
She stared at the data with an expression of having seen the unbelievable, then bit her lip.
Yes—Lee Se-rin had stepped in and handled this, but originally it was work the Gwangil Church, and by extension the crusaders, should have carried out.
It was their livelihood. Yet the incident had occurred without their knowledge, been resolved without them, and they had been unable to salvage even a scrap of the information afterward. Of course she felt resentment.
She might claim she was not yet a Holy Knight, but as long as she called herself Bright, she remained a member of the Holy Knights in the end.
“For reference, the monster disturbance on the first day was also the worshippers’ doing. The one who planted it was a worshipper hidden among the prosecution personnel who arrived right after.”
Surprisingly, the corrupt individual hidden inside the prosecution had been a genuine lunatic. Thanks to the one who openly fled overseas, the tail had been that much easier to catch.
“What?! You’re saying a worshipper was hiding inside the prosecution…!!”
Hong Su-ah, startled by my words, looked ready to leap from her seat; I hurriedly restrained her with shadows.
“We’ve already caught them all and wrung out everything there was to wring, so please don’t bother with after-the-fact fretting.”
“…No, haah…”
Beyond that, she clearly had many more questions for me. Of course she would. She was the one who had cleaned the dungeon together with the Confidential Unit; she must have firmly believed everything had been settled back then.
But what could I do? A woman even crazier than the Evil God worshippers had stepped in and stopped it.
Did I expect this either?
I had left things alone to catch the worshippers’ connections, yet the actual worshippers had been caught by other means.
Normally the cleanup should have followed, but that madwoman had buried the fact for the sole reason that leaving it alone seemed more entertaining. That was the entire story.
Spelling every detail out here would only make things more bothersome. So I blocked the information at my own discretion.
In the end the villains were the Evil God worshippers. That was enough.
“The remaining residue, Opaque Connection, possesses the power to temporarily link space to space, but depending on the fundamental power it holds, that can change considerably.”
Finally I opened the information on the dungeon Temple Encroached by Madness. Everyone had obtained rough details through upperclassmen, yet I suspected half of what was written here would prove useless.
If the Residue of the Evil God had completely swallowed the dungeon, the dungeon itself would already have begun to mutate from that alone.
“That concludes the preliminary briefing. From here on is the operation explanation.”
At my words everyone flipped to the next page of the materials they had been given. Then, reading what was written there, every face turned blank with disbelief.
“D-dak-dol? You mean the dak-dol I know? Shut up and charge?”
“…What are you scheming?”
Under their collective looks of absurdity I shrugged with perfect composure.
“That’s all the information there is. To resolve this situation we have to take down the irregular nested inside the dungeon, which means we ultimately have to go deep inside. The only difference is whether we enter knowing the enemy or get dragged around without knowing.”
It wasn’t as if I had scouted the place in advance, and I had never set foot in the dungeon—how was I supposed to know anything? Even regarding the Residue of the Evil God, I hadn’t properly understood it until I extracted solid information from Lee Se-rin.
If anything, they should be thanking me.
I had managed to organize this much information in a single day, yet instead of gratitude they were sending me those looks. It was like being asked for money after saving someone from drowning.
“More than anything, in a place like that it’s better to move with on-site discretion than to enter with some meticulous plan.”
If we got hung up on following every detail of an operation, we would only waste time or add to the confusion.
Rescue the missing. As long as that purpose remained firm, it was enough.
That was why I had needed to ascertain Sena Bright’s intentions at the outset. We already had to play a game of facing variables inside a place full of them; if even one of my pieces started moving as a variable, I would be the one suffering.
Personally, I also want to look into the residue a little more…
With Nightshade I had been too startled and shocked, but the biggest factor was simply lacking the leeway to examine it closely. Unlike then, when proper investigation had been impossible, now it was entirely feasible.
I reached that judgment.
Residue of the Evil God, huh…
What was famous among the public were the Evil God worshippers, not the power they used under the name of residue.
Why would a nation take the lead in releasing information that only benefited the worshippers in the first place?
Think about it with common sense: if a country announced that terrorists possessed an extremely powerful force and that things could go to hell, what would the people living in that country think?
This was already a world steeped in the law of the jungle. There was no shortage of people willing to do anything for power; if those bastards voluntarily sought out the Evil God worshippers, the result would be immediate disaster without needing to look far.
From the worshippers’ perspective it would be picking their noses without lifting a finger.
They could spread the prestige of the Evil God far and wide and even stir up chaos—two birds with one stone, no, three. They would welcome it with open arms rather than push it away.
That was why the Residue of the Evil God remained classified.
Which only deepened my question.
Why hadn’t the Evil God worshippers made use of this fact?
Simply using the residue on a person would let them exercise influence, recognition, and power all at once—yet they had gone to the trouble of infiltrating the Academy and planting it deep inside a dungeon. What was the reason for such a bothersome method?
This dungeon infiltration was also meant to grasp that.
“Once we enter the dungeon, you’ll know whether you like it or not. There’ll be some bastard acting like a boss even though he isn’t one.”
So you’d better handle yourselves well, right? I looked at Hong Su-ah, who was staring at me from behind with a dazed expression.
“…Don’t tell me the reason you called me here is so you can enter the dungeon with the Academy’s legal permission?”
“Bingo. And further, you’ll have to come along as our escort. Your adorable students are heading into a dangerous dungeon, after all. You’ll do that for us, won’t you? You’re the teacher, after all.”
I deliberately emphasized and clipped the word “teacher,” and Hong Su-ah’s brow crumpled as she glared at me. If that weren’t the case, there would be no reason to go to the bother of dragging her into this.
Whatever the method, she had already set foot in it and heard the information. Then at the very least she ought to pay the price—wasn’t that only proper?
Think of it as punishment for all the times she had ranted about “infringement of teaching authority” while my head was already aching from education, and accept it gratefully.
Well then—let’s legally skip Academy classes.
“…Haa… haa…”
Inside the dark cave, a blue-haired young woman advanced with difficulty, half-leaning against the wall.
Shin Na-rae.
Only half a day earlier she had been smiling and clearing a dungeon together with Ban Taewung’s party. Compared to then, her present state was beyond words.
She was far too filthy for someone who had merely been missing for half a day.
There was not a single undamaged or clean spot left on her cadet uniform, and a faint layer of grime proved that considerable time had passed since she put it on.
Something sticky kept seeping out of the walls—not mere stone—and transmitted an unpleasant sensation, yet she no longer had the strength to care while moving.
She could not even spare mana to light a lamp.
From the moment she entered this bizarre space, the mana she used strangely refused to recover. Her connection with the Lord God had grown faint, and the output of the divine power that always protected her was now meager.
Some kind of barrier, or a curse, was clearly interfering.
The space itself was so thickly saturated with heretical power that it was nauseating.
Heresy.
Yes—heresy.
The Gwangil Church, which strove to accept all things equally unless the matter was extreme, had branded very few things as heresy. One of them was the wicked Outer Gods.
Things not born of this world, but of external realms, spreading like a contagious plague.
In this space the power of those Outer Gods was thickly felt.
No—beyond thickly felt, it simply filled everything.
To anyone else it might have felt only a little stifling or vaguely repulsive, but she, who had received the warm protection of the Lord God, had known the truth the moment she stepped inside.
This place was far too horrific, and far too defiled.
And that with her own power alone she could never escape it.
Thud-thud-thud…
“…!!”
At the sound of pounding footsteps from behind, Shin Na-rae hurriedly lowered her body and hid in a crevice of rock, clamping a hand over her mouth.
Her breath came short. Even so she desperately soothed her pounding heart and held her breath. She squeezed out what little mana remained and cast a spell to erase her scent.
Against those creatures, concealing one’s body odor was more effective than hiding one’s form. That was the fact the senior who had volunteered as bait and dashed out to draw their attention had taught her.
Remembering that senior’s face again made tears well up.
But she must not. If she were caught here, the meaning of that senior saving her would vanish.
Just a little farther—if she could advance just a little more, she would reach a place where the Lord God’s power still touched.
If she could only arrive there, she could purify both the fatigue of this wretched body and the repulsive air of this place.
And then she would call for everyone. The only thing she could do now—the only possibility of saving even a few of those trapped here—was that method alone.
“Chwik, kree-rik!”
“…!”
At the distinctive breathing that soon reached her ears, Shin Na-rae froze completely, not even breathing. With the single-minded resolve not to let even the sound of her heart be heard, she opened her eyes as wide as possible and held her breath.
“Chwik?”
“Chwek! Koo-ik!”
The pack of Outer God creatures that had been scanning the surroundings for a moment simply passed the place where she hid and continued onward.
“…Huu…”
Even after they vanished, Shin Na-rae remained for a long while, slowly exhaling without haste and tightly hugging her body that trembled reflexively.
She bit her lip hard. If she did not, she felt she would break down and cry.
I have to get up. There’s no time to stay like this. Move. Move…
She soothed herself that way, yet the moisture that had gathered at the corners of her eyes finally rolled down her cheeks.
…I want to see him.
The faceless parents she had often dreamed of as a child?
No.
Or the priest who had noticed her talent while she wandered after growing up in an orphanage and taken her in as a cleric?
…No.
Why, at a time as important as this, did his face—Ban Taewung’s face—keep rising before her eyes?
Because the memories they had shared before coming here had been so happy?
Because the warmth of that time resembled the warmth the Lord God bestowed? Because even after learning she was an orphan he had pretended not to notice while quietly looking after her in countless ways?
Because he had saved her in a moment of crisis…? Was she hoping that, just like then, he would appear with a flourish and help her now?
Like the prince on a white horse from old fairy tales…?
…I don’t know.
She could not explain it in words. She simply… simply wanted to see him.
As if to hide that feeling, Shin Na-rae scrubbed her face hard with the sleeve of her cadet uniform, then staggered to her feet.
In truth she knew.
That in reality there were no miracles of princes on white horses. That if she herself did not act, nothing would change.
She had to do it. If she did not handle this now, something far worse would happen. This was surely a trial sent by the Lord God.
So surely, surely…
Stagger.
Clinging to a slender thread of hope, Shin Na-rae braced herself against the wall, rose unsteadily, and once more began to walk.
Her destination was the place somewhere ahead where she could feel the power of her Lord God.