No.294 Rainbow Lake (2)

"Caw."

Dimensional crows, true to their nature as neutral monsters and NPCs, hardly looked the part at a glance. There had even been a stretch when a craze for crow hunting swept through the players, though ninety-nine hunts out of every hundred came back failures.

Because they're absurdly strong, that's why.

If I had to pin a grade on them, it would be S-Rank. The Blood Cult Elder whom the graduates and I had pooled every ounce of strength to barely bring down at the Black Market had been A-Rank—and a dimensional crow sat at a level where it could make a casual steamed snack of the likes of him.

In truth, the moment the word 'dimensional' got attached to their name, it was as good as a written warning: these things are insanely strong.

In any game you cared to name, spacetime-category magic was ranked the best of the best, and Dragon Slayer Academy proved no exception. And when these crows handled spacetime magic well enough to slip in and out of isolated dungeons like their own backyard, it would be far stranger if they weren't formidable.

In the eyes of so overwhelming an NPC, even Dang Gyu-young—a third-year club president—would register as ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠a single minnow. And I would be a barely-hatched fry.

That is, if not for [Sovereign].

A Sovereign, whatever the scale of its dominion, was a presence held in awe for the authority of the title alone. Even at C-Rank, a Sovereign was still a Sovereign. The upshot was that the Crow Tailor and I had ended up conversing on nearly level footing.

"Caw. Come to commission some tailoring, have you?"

"Close enough."

"A pity then, Young Lord. I am not making clothes at the moment."

"I'm not here for clothes."

"Caw? Then what brings you?"

To be fair, the Tailor would craft clothing-type equipment for anyone who supplied special materials and a truly enormous fee, but my inventory was on the sparse side for an undertaking like that. Which was why I had come looking for the creature today with a rather different purpose in mind.

"There's a skill I'd like you to use."

"And what skill might that be?"

"[Weaving]."

The Crow Tailor startled so badly its wings sent up a flurry of beats.

[Weaving] was an S-Rank unique skill possessed by one creature alone in the world of Dragon Slayer Academy—the Tailor itself. Its very existence was little known, so my bringing it up out of nowhere was more than enough to justify a fright.

"Young Lord. Where might you have heard tell of that?"

"A Young Lord is still a Lord."

"Caw. True enough."

Evidently deciding that a Sovereign might well manage such a thing, the Crow Tailor accepted the explanation with a perfunctory bob of its head.

The effect of [Weaving] fit on ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠exactly one line.

In plain terms: a fusion skill.

And the cheat-quality detail the description failed to mention was that it could fuse anything whatsoever, free of all restrictions. Item with item went without saying—item with skill, or even the individual options of a single item fused with one another, all of it was fair game.

Of course, that was from the crow's side of the equation, as the holder of the skill.

From the side commissioning the work, the story changed somewhat.

There's a fee, after all.

The higher-ranked and more numerous the materials in play, the steeper the price. Fusing a pair of D-Rank materials cost less than fusing B-Rank ones, and fusing two cost less than fusing three or four. For all these reasons, the materials worth fusing had already more or less picked themselves.

"Caw. And where shall I apply it?"

"Here."

At the crow's question, I held out the Root I'd been carrying.

"You mean for me to merge the options?"

"That's right—[Levitate Zone] and [Memorize]. And this here makes three."

Next out of my inventory came a reagent sealed in a tiny glass vial.

The very one I had obtained with a material exchange voucher. The Mutation Reagent's effect was to amplify the instability of whatever item it touched during crafting. Merge the two options as they stood, and the product would presumably be some creation combining the Levitate Zone's area of influence with the Memorize's spell storage. But fold the Mutation Reagent into the mix on top of that,

and something entirely different might come springing out.

And even that possibility sat comfortably within the range of my expectations.

The crow studied the Root and the Mutation Reagent with keen interest, then bobbed its head up and down.

"Caw. Good. I shall weave them. And how do you mean to pay my fee?"

"On the spot. In kind."

Before I knew it, a generous ruby and emerald were glittering red and green in my open hand.

One look, and the Crow Tailor was so overcome it hopped in place several times over, wings aflutter.

"Caw! Young Lord, you've brought shiny things!"

"You're fond of them, or so I heard—so I came prepared."

"A lord who understands the art of the deal. I shall take special care with this commission."

Before long, the Crow Tailor gave one wing a light flourish, as though beckoning. At that, the Root and the Mutation Reagent drifted up into the air ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠of their own accord.

The two options peeled free of the system window, sentences dissolving into words, words into individual letters. Then the glass vial crumbled apart with a soft crunch, and its contents spilled out to swirl in dizzying tangles among the letters. In the next moment, the satchel the Tailor had set down at one side sprang open by itself, and from within slid out thread and needle spun of pure mana.

The needle pierced the letters hanging in the air one by one, and the mana thread bound them together into a single whole.

Watching it work, I thought to myself: Shame. I'd love to have that one for myself.

There had been another reason I'd come out to meet the dimensional crows. Anything of S-Rank caliber was bound to carry something worth copying off it.

Had it been possible, [Weaving] would naturally have been my first-choice acquisition, but—

Regrettably, that one fell into the category of things that simply could not be copied—for it was a skill perched one tier above copying itself. My own Amplification, Bestow, and Sovereign numbered among the same breed. And even had the copy gone through, I would never have withstood the immense mana drain of an S-Rank spell. Until I built a Core worthy of the task, it would remain a pie in the sky.

Of course, I was hardly the type to give up over a trifle like that.

Then I'll simply take something else.

I cast my mind back to the conversation Dang Gyu-young and I had shared before the Crow Tailor appeared.

"You do know a thing or two about poison, don't you?"

"Naturally. I am a Tang, after all."

Dang Gyu-young was a direct descendant of the Sichuan Tang Clan. She had steered clear of the family's secret arts out of distaste for being leashed to her clan, but she had still learned a respectable measure of its poison craft.

And the reason I had made a point of confirming as much:

"I need you to poison it. Just once."

"It's S-Rank, remember? Would my attacks even land?"

"All that matters is catching the right timing."

Back when the crow-hunting craze had swept the players, ninety-nine out of every hundred had failed.

And the one in a hundred had been me.

Drawing on that experience: for all their S-Rank, the dimensional crows harbored a certain carelessness. As neutral creatures they were strangers to real combat, and more vulnerable still to ambush. And that vulnerability bared itself most nakedly in the middle of casting their signature skill—in other words, in the heart of [Weaving].

"But Kim Ho, the poisoning aside—won't it get furious if we suddenly stab it?"

"It will. It'll strike back, too."

"...It won't flatten me in a single blow, right?"

"Leave the aftermath to me."

"...I trust you."

"Caw."

From the moment of its first appearance to this very second, the Crow Tailor had spared Dang Gyu-young not the slightest flicker of attention. The shadows creeping in deepest secrecy across the ground at its feet went equally unnoticed. It simply gave itself over to the Weaving in progress, threading and binding the letters in the air one at a time with its needle and thread of mana.

And in the very instant it reached for the next letter—

KRAAAAAR—!

Shadow arms erupted from the floor in a single swell, swinging the weapons clenched in their fists. Abrupt as the ambush was, the dimensional crow was S-Rank in name and in truth. Its entire reaction amounted to one idle glance at the incoming shadow weapons—whereupon countless dark-violet hexagons bloomed up before it, linked themselves edge to edge, and formed a broad wall.

The shadow weapons winked out the moment they touched that wall, as though drawn into it. A flawless defense wrought from spatial magic—

but that's only the front of it.

—Thock.

A needle slender as a hair came flying in from behind and buried itself in the Crow Tailor's wing joint. Dang Gyu-young had smuggled it around back beneath her shadows, then loosed it while the frontal assault rained down.

"Caw."

The Tailor gave its wings a single shake, and the poisoned needle vanished without a trace. In the same breath, wind gathered into a cone directly before Dang Gyu-young and came shrieking out. The whole sequence unfolded faster than an eyeblink—had she not been braced for it well in advance, I doubted evasion would have been possible at all.

A spell that skewered its mark with a lance of wind and flung it far away. On paper it belonged to the basic family of wind magic, yet this specimen's rank was a staggering S. Catch it head-on and you wouldn't be knocked back—you might lose whatever body part it struck to outright detonation.

Naturally, I could hardly stand by and let Dang Gyu-young die such a screaming, senseless death.

A heartbeat before the cone of wind could hammer into Dang Gyu-young's stomach, it buckled, warped, and tore off toward some entirely unrelated point in the distance.

KRAKAKAKAKA—!

And it razed every last thing along its new flight path to scorched earth. Deflecting it with Distortion was the right call.

Seeing Dang Gyu-young unscathed, the Crow Tailor moved to weave its next spell—but a step ahead of it, I gave the order.

"Enough. Withdraw."

It was all about making one thing unmistakably clear: that every bit of this had been done at my instruction. Dang Gyu-young bowed her head and fell back, and the Tailor swung its gaze onto me, wings thrashing in agitation.

"Caw! Young Lord, what is the meaning of this?!"

"Curiosity carried my jest a step too far. You have my apology."

"I shall overlook it this once. But there will be no next time."

"I'll bear it well in mind."

I had already gotten everything worth getting, so the games ended here.

[Weaving] had been uncopiable from the outset, and while the [Hexagonal Void] and [Gale Thrust] it had cast were technically copyable, my mana reserves fell far short of using them. It would have been the same with any other spell. Such is the sorrow of a low-ranked Core.

Instead, I had resolved to take a trait that drew little mana—springing the poison on the crow by surprise and copying its [Poison Resistance] in the same stroke. Mastering [Thousand Poisons Immunity] had already let me fend off a fair variety of venoms, but the world was home to poisons beyond counting. Besides, one of the main scenario bosses I was destined to face someday wielded poison as his weapon of choice, and there was nothing to lose in preparing while the opportunity sat right in front of me.

"Caw."

The Crow Tailor sank back into its Weaving, and Dang Gyu-young and I offered no further interference, watching its labor in silence.

‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠

Before long, the letters scattered in dizzying disarray wove themselves into words, and the words bound themselves into a sentence. And the moment the completed sentence was drawn back into the system window—

FLASH!

The Root, steeped in a pale glow, subtly changed form. Where once a golden shamanic dagger had been fastened to a short rod, the two were no longer attached—they had become one outright. A short black spear, steeped in shadow from end to end.

Success.