The Fifth Disciple

"Ding-dong."

A little while later.

The doorbell—no, the sound of a telepathic message plugging straight into my ears—jolted me out of my daze as I browsed through information on magic schools.

Two people approached, each cradled in the arms of a mass-produced golem. Taeho, as always in his work clothes with that messy hair, and a woman with short red hair and a playful, expressionless face.

I checked their faces through the window and gave the order.

Why make someone else open the door?

Because it's a hassle.

Since the zombie outbreak started, the number of times I'd stepped outside this floor probably hadn't even hit double digits. Magical force had gutted the whole floor—pillars freeloaded, everything blown open—so the entire place was basically my room.

"Oh, so this is the survivor from the underground bunker."

From the sound of it, Sejin seemed surprised by the survivor in the unexpectedly clean outdoor-style outfit. When they'd first rescued him, blood had been pouring freely through the tears in his shredded dress shirt, every wound on full display. The fact that someone out here was still maintaining normal clothes and a normal state of health was honestly surprising to me, too.

"Nice building. Hip."

And that was Jihee's opening line.

It's just a one-room apartment, though.

After the second upgrade, the whole building had been magically torn apart and rebuilt, so it had gotten a little prettier, I supposed.

That much, sure.

"Better than my place."

Then she launched into another one of her bizarre lines of reasoning.

"Obviously my place is cooler in terms of pure coolness, though."

She thought her own home was better, sure. Her underground bunker was underground, hidden, sealed behind thick, heavy concrete and steel doors, so it was safe. But this place had none of that—and the fact that a blatantly ordinary-looking building was standing perfectly intact right in the middle of a ruined city was, in her view, what made it cool.

Honestly, I didn't get it either.

Hmm.

"I showed you my place, so now you show me yours."

Well. If you really pushed it, I was the one who owed her.

"Excellent. Since the mage has given permission, humble as it may be, please take your time looking around."

Hadn't he said he used to be in sales? He flipped a full one-eighty on the spot, flashing a salesperson's smile as he nodded to her. Then he launched into a smooth, nonstop stream of patter and started leading her all over my building.

I'd been treating him like odd-job help. Turns out the man had unexpected talents.

"This little guy is called Toshik, and he works tirelessly to keep our Magic Tower's environment sparkling clean..."

"And this is the rooftop garden—care for a bite of fresh vegetables, by any chance?"

While that was going on, I listened to the radio, which had been updated with fresh information.

The Busan defense line is currently in a rather precarious state...

Contact has been lost with the survivor community in Jeongseon County, Gangwon Province, and...

Most of it was depressing stuff. But today's broadcast also had a fair number of hopeful stories—new intel on special entities, reports of zombie hordes being held off here and there.

If we run into other survivor groups later, Sejin's gift of gab is going to come in pretty handy.

The locations of special zombies reported over the radio were mostly to the south. If we poked around that way, we'd probably run into the survivors who'd dug in nearby. He'd make a perfect diplomat for our Magic Tower when that happened.

Somehow, without meaning to, I'd ended up living exactly the way the Tower Masters on the Free Archive did—handing everything off to my disciples.

But still...

I was just scared of zombies, scared of people, and not particularly confident when it came to talking or managing anyone.

Someone out there might grind their disciples into magic materials without a second's hesitation. But reading that made me think—if one of them died in some random accident, it would hurt too much.

And not just the people.

If one of my golems got beaten by zombies and its core was damaged beyond repair...

Just imagining Unit 1—who's been with me since the wooden golem days—going through that would wreck my mental state on the spot...

That was why I was trying to learn stronger magic. And that was why I was dumping all the miscellaneous survival chores on my disciples.

I'd decided to think of it that way.

"...Well then, shall we go meet the Tower Master?"

I was still rolling around on the bed with those thoughts when Sejin and Jihee finished their Magic Tower tour and arrived on my floor. I pulled down the hood I'd been wearing low, gave my long white hair a light tidy-up—

Somehow this hair never seems to get any longer.

—and padded over to gently open the door.

"......???"

And just like every other person before her, the moment Jihee saw me, her face went blank like she'd been smacked upside the head.

"Ah..."

Her eyes darted around rapidly. Me in a white hoodie and jeans. This space—far too real to be a fantasy novel Tower Master's chamber, and far too unreal to be a building in the actual world. The stacked food supplies beyond the open wall section, the three refrigerators strung together along a tangle of wiring.

She took it all in, seemed to wrestle with it for a moment, and then—

"If this were inside a zombie game, I think the Tower Master would be the protagonist."

—she spat out another incomprehensible line.

"Being able to find a place like this is honestly the best. I have no intention of giving up my bunker, but I'd love to keep cooperating as much as possible going forward—exchanging supplies and information."

Then she laughed, looking extremely excited, her tone pure delight.

Why, though? It just looked like a standard zombie-apocalypse setup with a bit more resources and a cleaner space. What exactly about my house—and about me—had ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠she taken such a liking to?

She kept letting out little gasps of admiration. She really did seem to think she'd wandered into some work of fiction.

Well. Whatever.

"So you're going to learn magic from me, then?"

I registered her as a disciple first.

Nice. The conditions for founding a school are met.

I confirmed the message Would you like to establish a school? was glittering now that the requirements had been satisfied, then asked—

"So, what kind of magic do you want to learn?"

After a brief moment of thought, I told her to pick one from magic engineering, alchemy, white magic, elemental magic, or general magic.

Honestly, just the people living in this house were already enough manpower to split every branch of magic I had. Elemental magic and alchemy for Dayeon. General mana-type magic and combat magic for Taeho. White magic for Sejin. And I'd probably teach Seongwoo magic engineering and alchemy.

So I actually wanted to make her an offer.

"Depending on what you need over at your bunker, I'll go ahead and teach you three or four in advance."

"What I need? Hmm... golem-making magic."

She must have coveted my golems—the moment I gave her a choice, that was what she asked for.

"I need someone to co-op with."

The reason was just as absurd. She needed someone to play games with.

"That, and magic for producing Mana Cores. I don't want to go out hunting zombies—it's annoying and dangerous. I'm going to spend the rest of my life sealed underground."

On top of that, she asked me to teach her healing magic so she could self-heal if she got hurt.

Every white mage chimed in with one voice that a personality like hers had a white-magic success rate approaching zero percent, so I told her it wasn't a good fit and moved on.

"That's a shame."

She said she had no interest in elemental magic or offense and defense spells. She asked only for mana detection to use in place of a radar, then left two of the slots empty.

"I've transferred everything. For the detailed mana theory and so on, Dayeon has an excellent magic textbook, so you should refer to that."

Whirr—

The copier plugged into the outlet churned out fresh pages of Dayeon's handwritten notes, and I held the copied sheets out to her.

"They've got everything here, huh..."

I figured I'd send her off to read and study for a bit while I went ahead with founding the school. Rather than shipping her straight back to the bunker, I thought it would be better to establish the school first—and if I could create some decent magic afterward, teach her that too.

"Yes."

So I sent her upstairs for a bit, and when I hit the Yes button on the school-founding message window—

—a flood of message windows appeared, similar to the ones that popped up in front of a disciple when they were accepted, and then—

—a vast array of options unfolded before my eyes, laid out like a survey form or a membership registration.