Elemental Arcana — Frozen

By no stretch of the imagination could the Destroyer be called intact.

Cracks spiderwebbed across its frame where shattered fragments had been forced back together, and every movement wrung metallic screams from its joints.

Screeeech.

Yet it still functioned, lumbering forward under the commands of the girl perched on its shoulder.

“I never expected to get my hands on materials this good so soon.”

Only after hearing Angelina’s muttered remark did Do-yun grasp what had happened.

She used the wreckage that fell down the elevator shaft.

The ability he had witnessed from Angelina on the sixth floor was restoration. Apparently it applied not only to architecture but to machines like this as well.

Still, he could not hide his indignation.

“How the hell did you even think of fixing that thing?”

A few bent steel plates would have been one thing. The last time Do-yun had seen the Destroyer’s remains, they had been little more than scrap metal. And that scrap had been dropped hundreds of meters through empty air; by the time it hit the floor it should have been nothing but a pile of bolts and screws.

“Hmm-hmm~”

Common sense clearly did not apply to the twin-tailed girl humming cheerfully to herself.

Do-yun’s gaze locked onto the Destroyer’s arm.

That attack pattern was definitely familiar.

Astral Photon Cannon—the SS-rank skill the Destroyer had unleashed in its final moments. The torrent of energy that had just scoured the corridor had been cut from the same cloth.

“Guh!”

“Damn it, that nearly killed me.”

Of course the power was nowhere near the original. Where the earlier blast had punched clean through the Magic Tower’s outer walls, this one left even the challengers who took it head-on still breathing.

“Oh my, did that sting a little?”

The real problem was that the attack was not some ultimate technique—just a moderately strong shot.

“Here we go again! Charge rate two hundred percent this time!”

Angelina pulled her goggles down over her eyes and pressed both hands—crackling with leaping arcs of electricity—against the Destroyer’s head.

The instant light began to gather at the Destroyer’s fingertips, Do-yun wrenched open a nearby door and threw himself inside.

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KRAAAAAANG!

Another destructive surge of energy tore down the corridor. The aftershock alone, leaking through the door cracks, whipped his hair wildly about his face. Cold sweat rolled down his temple.

Facing the Destroyer head-on earlier had somehow felt less threatening than this.

“It has to have limits.”

This was a weapon even the original Destroyer had never fully controlled. Pieced back together after being wrecked once, it would still carry the same flaws.

Durability, for instance.

They seemed to have traded the original’s raw power for a higher rate of fire, but even so, only a few more shots would be possible. The battlefield itself favored him as well. Unlike the elevator, where footholds had been scarce, the uppermost floor of the Magic Tower was laid out like a research wing.

“Meaning there are plenty of places to hide.”

At this reduced output, wiping out multiple rooms in a single blast was impossible. He was just settling on a hit-and-run strategy when he realized his plan had a critical hole.

Woom.

Blood-red magic circles began blooming across the walls. Being indoors offered no safety at all.

His head spun; the room tilted. He braced a hand against the wall to keep from falling—and that only made things worse. Clean white plaster suddenly sprouted a magic circle that swallowed his hand whole.

He yanked himself backward in a panic. Countless tooth marks now riddled his forearm. Without the vitality system’s protection, blood would have been pouring freely.

“For fuck’s sake.”

Clinging to a consciousness that threatened to collapse at any moment, Do-yun fumbled at his waist and closed his hand around his sword. Instantly the fog in his mind cleared.

It was the special effect attached to the blade. With clear vision restored, Do-yun took in the room and could only let out a hollow laugh. The space that had been pure white when he entered was now blooming with furious crimson circles.

“This is completely insane.”

Step outside and the Destroyer’s muzzles waited; stay inside and the curses only intensified. The sole consolation was that he was not the only one suffering.

“Aaaaagh! Why are tentacles coming out of the walls?!”

“Begone, thralls of the devil!”

From the sounds leaking through the door, the challengers who had rushed ahead to clear the seventh floor had also failed to reach their goal.

I never thought the snowball would roll this far.

It was hard to believe all of this had started because of a single notebook that had not even been treated as an item. Regretting that he had not stopped Lily sooner, Do-yun pulled out the other objects he had stashed away with it.

Items that had been stored alongside the notebook that had turned everything into this mess. There was a high chance secrets lay hidden in them as well. Careful not to lose his grip on the sword hilt, Do-yun examined the information.

The staff’s performance was frankly disappointing. For him it was essentially useless—he possessed not a single magic-type skill.

The second reward was less a combat tool and more a crafting material. “This can’t be all there is.” Yet Do-yun refused to trust the system notifications alone. He had simply not found the method yet; given the right conditions, hidden secrets would surface here too.

There were always a few functions the system never displayed.

Examining the staff once more with meticulous care, he discovered faint etchings split along the grain of the wood. He might have dismissed them as coincidence, but on a hunch he raised the staff.

“Ciel, is this a rune character?”

“Huh? W-wait just a second.”

The fairy, who had been fluttering anxiously around him, narrowed her eyes and inspected the staff he held out.

“I think so?”

“You’re sure? You don’t know what it does?”

“There are thousands of different runes—how am I supposed to remember them all?!”

“You’re a fairy. You’re supposed to know that much.”

Leaving Ciel thrashing her tiny arms behind him, Do-yun sank into thought. Rune characters—normally inert, yet capable of ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠producing mysterious phenomena when infused with mana. The mark near the tip of the staff was unmistakably one such trace.

“I’m sorry, but… can you even activate a rune?”

Ciel’s expression made it plain: activating a rune was no simple task. Mana had to be used like ink and overlaid precisely upon the characters; the slightest mistake and nothing happened at all.

That’s why people usually need mana-control skills or enchantment skills.

Or they simply needed innate talent. Do-yun, unfortunately, met none of those conditions.

“I don’t necessarily have to pour my own mana into it, do I?”

He refused to give up. His gaze shifted to the remaining unused reward—the Ice Crystal, pure mana compressed into solid form. It looked useless in the present crisis, yet he happened to possess one skill that was perfect for the job.

The skill he had inherited after defeating the Destroyer. At first he had hoped it would let him mass-produce advanced weaponry like the robot itself, but that was not how it worked. It quite literally only changed shape. For him, that meant little more than altering a sword’s form—and with Sun Swordsmanship already in hand, he could not abandon the blade. Until now the skill had been little more than a white elephant.

“But with this, the story changes.”

The moment his hand touched the Ice Crystal, the blue stone melted like liquid.

He reshaped the liquefied mana into the exact form of the rune. The work was not difficult. Though he had only roughly eyeballed the characters, Transformation reflected his intent with perfect fidelity.

Click.

When he pressed the solidified Ice Crystal against the staff, it sank into the wood as though the two had always been one.

Now then… what kind of effect will this have?

He looked down at the staff with tense eyes. There were thousands of rune varieties—so many that memorizing them was essentially impossible. The shape engraved on the staff was one he had never seen before.

Blinding light erupted from the staff in his hand. He turned his head instinctively; when he opened his eyes again, the staff had taken on an entirely different form.

“Eek! That’s amazing—amazing!”

Ciel, who had been watching from the side, let out a triumphant cheer. Do-yun, shaken back and forth by the fairy’s enthusiastic tugging on his shoulder, swallowed a dry laugh. He had expected secrets, but nothing on this scale.

Hooooum.

When he stroked the staff now radiating a soft blue glow, a chill of pure cold flowed along his hand.

An SS-rank piece of equipment…

It was not the first time he had seen the grade—Sun Swordsmanship and the Rune of Immortality shared it—yet that fact did nothing to dilute his awe.

Should I start learning magic skills…?

The thought rose unbidden. Had he not already mastered Sun Swordsmanship, he would have thrown away his sword on the spot and walked the path of a mage. The allure of an SS-rank staff was that intense.

The next alert snapped him back to reality. Unfortunately the staff had not fully reclaimed its original form.

“A time limit…”

The numbers glittered in the place where the Rune of Memory rested. It seemed this appearance could be maintained only while the rune remained active.

Right. A restriction of this size is only natural.

Saying he felt no disappointment would have been a lie, yet he forced the feeling aside. Once he gained the skill to activate the rune permanently, he would be able to wield the staff freely.

At least its performance isn’t degraded the way Sun Swordsmanship’s is.

Unlike Sun Swordsmanship, whose power scaled with understanding, the staff merely carried a time limit; its original functions remained undiminished. The real problem lay elsewhere: he possessed no magic-type skills for the staff to amplify.

“Scorching Sword… yeah, no effect.”

He tried the closest thing he had to an elemental skill, but of course the staff’s enhancement did not apply. Then the next cascade of notifications washed his worries away.

Memorize—essentially a function that could store a skill. It was single-use and consumable, but a skill cast through Memorize cost no mana of its own.

It used the Ice Crystal’s mana to cast the spell itself…

Truly worthy of the SS rank. It even came equipped with the ability to cast magic on its own.

KWAANG!

With the staff’s remaining duration dwindling, Do-yun kicked the door open and strode boldly into the corridor. Scarlet light so intense it hurt the eyes flooded his vision. Not a scrap of white remained. If he delayed any longer there would be nowhere left to stand.

No holding back. Dump everything.

He swept the staff in a wide arc. An overwhelming storm of mana erupted from its tip.

A tempest of freezing cold burst from the staff. Frost settled on clothing; breath turned white and brittle. Spreading outward from Do-yun as its center, the blizzard seized the entire floor. Temperatures plummeted and the Magic Tower’s corridor transformed in an instant into a snowfield.

“Ghhk—what the hell is this now?!”

“Cold enough to rival the freeze of Hazenberg!”

Yet it was not enough to drop every challenger. Some were clearly well-accustomed to cold and kept moving even after taking an S-rank skill head-on.

“Did you think the undead could feel the cold?”

“To a great warrior of the north, this little snowstorm is nothing!”

Blizzard was closer to a wide-area crowd-control spell that altered the environment. Against a skeleton reduced to bare bones and a muscle-bound giant who had stripped his torso bare, it simply failed. Some challengers even seized the blizzard Do-yun had summoned and used it as fuel to amplify their own power.

“Did you think the cold belonged to you alone?”

“Ice, freeze solid!”

A golem of pure snow roared; a wave of reverse cold surged forward to freeze Do-yun solid. Yet his expression never changed. This was the situation he had engineered.

Skill power fluctuates with the surrounding environment.

Flame skills grew stronger in heat; ice skills grew stronger in cold. And right now the corridor was a snowfield of his own making. Ice-attribute skills were packing more than double their usual force. The other challengers would never let such an opportunity pass, and the space was now saturated with the ice-attribute mana of countless casters.

The special ability sealed within the staff drank in the surrounding mana and unleashed a new spell. In the next instant, everything inside the tower froze still.