Disgustingly Incompetent
In the basement of the Academy main building, before the exclusive teleportation gate that led to the Lapellasia Duchy.
Rayzel Lapellacia stood alone, staring at the faintly glowing magic circle.
In the aftermath of the uproar in the principal’s office moments earlier, she had at last succeeded in securing Yeon Bennet.
There had been some friction with the Academy professors, and Yeon Bennet’s own demeanor had been nothing like what she expected, yet in the end things had gone according to her will.
Still, Rayzel could not shake a lingering unease.
The picture that had unfolded was nothing like the one she had drawn in her mind.
She had anticipated a measure of resistance when taking Yeon Bennet from the Academy, but she had been certain she could predict the girl’s own reaction with perfect accuracy.
The infamous title of Tera’s worst villainess. The public declaration of expulsion from her house. Isolation within the Academy itself.
If Yeon Bennet were truly the person the world believed her to be, she should have trembled in terror, wept and clung, or begged for her life with abject humility.
The Yeon Bennet Rayzel actually faced was nothing of the sort.
Without the slightest agitation she had stepped into Rayzel’s path and declared, with unnerving calm, that she would go with her.
What in the world is she thinking?
The sheer obedience of it was more unsettling than any struggle would have been—as if the girl were nursing some private scheme of her own.
Did she intend to cause trouble once she reached Lapellasia territory? Or was she planning to seize upon Rayzel’s weakness and turn it against her?
A dozen possibilities crowded Rayzel’s thoughts. She forced them aside.
This was no time for petty anxieties.
Whatever Yeon Bennet might be plotting, a far more urgent and crushing weight pressed down upon her: the condition of her beloved daughter, Sera.
With every passing hour Sera’s state grew visibly worse. The Lapellacia family had thrown every technique and every scrap of knowledge it possessed into the fight, yet nothing could halt the Contamination that was devouring the girl’s body.
As a last resort they were using a powerful preservation potion, freezing her flesh almost solid in an attempt to slow the cellular monsterization. It was only a stopgap. The potion’s effect would not last forever.
Time was running out.
Yeon Bennet—the sole being who had touched Contamination and remained unharmed—was the final hope.
The moment Rayzel secured the girl’s body she intended to summon the family’s finest researchers, dissect her, and analyze every scrap of tissue. Somehow they would uncover the secret of her resistance and forge from it a cure tailored to Sera. Every second counted. The slightest delay could mean losing her daughter forever.
Experiments on living humans were taboo throughout Tera, yet Rayzel felt not a shred of guilt where Yeon Bennet was concerned. Using the girl for human experimentation would, if anything, repay a fraction of the harm she had inflicted upon the world and serve humanity in the bargain.
Rayzel steeled her resolve and waited for Yeon Bennet to arrive.
That was the precise moment it happened.
Wooooong—!
The teleportation gate at her back roared to life. Blue mana swirled violently, tearing an unstable rift open at its center.
“What is this?!”
Rayzel spun and dropped into a combat stance, eyes locked on the gate.
Beyond the warp, inside the wavering spatial fracture, an overwhelming presence was growing stronger by the second. It was a pure, crushing wave of power unlike any mana she had ever felt—dazzling as the sun itself, yet so profound that every cell in her body trembled.
Sacred power?
Rayzel’s brow furrowed. Beings who radiated sacred power of such purity and magnitude were vanishingly rare even across all of Tera.
An ominous premonition wrapped around her like a shroud. She drew her mana tight and fixed a sharp glare on the brilliantly shining rift.
Transcendents.
Once they had been mortals—born with finite lives, fighting fate in their own ways, growing until at last they shattered the human limit of Level 10.
Their stories were so grand and fierce that the Akashic Records, the cosmic archive where every truth of the universe sleeps, recognized those lives as myth and granted them power to match.
That was what it meant to be a Transcendent.
They had begun as mortals, yet they now possessed strength enough to stand equal against the gods—beings who had existed since the beginning or who had taken form from the concentrated faith of countless souls.
They were the new power of a new age, having stepped beyond mortality itself.
Their rise, however, overturned the old order.
Roughly a thousand years ago, as the number of Transcendents grew and their might swelled, the gods who had long enjoyed eternal dominion felt the threat. No longer willing to watch new rivals eye their thrones, the gods made an extreme decision: erase every mortal so that no further Transcendents could ever be born.
To stop that monstrous plan the Transcendents rose against their own creators—who had become their would-be destroyers.
Thus began the majestic and desperate war between gods and Transcendents, a war fought for the future of all mortals.
The conflict known as Ragnarok swept across countless dimensions and annihilated uncountable beings. In the end the Transcendents claimed victory.
The price was catastrophic.
Behind the glory of triumph lay every dimension shattered and tangled beyond recognition. The age of the gods had ended, yet the wounds they left ran too deep. The twisted dimensions barely managed to fuse into a single form, and from that fusion a new world without gods was born: Tera.
Even the victorious Transcendents had suffered grievous harm. Their authorities weakened, and their mere existence threatened to tear apart the fragile newborn world. Most therefore withdrew into the Spiritual Realm beyond reality, choosing to wait until their wounds healed and the world stabilized.
Only the administrative framework called the System remained, continuing the tedious work of holding Tera together.
And now, here—
In a corner of the Spiritual Realm that had kept long silence, Transcendents gathered once more.
“…So Dorothy got taken down. That means I should be the one to go!”
A sharp, furious woman’s voice shattered the quiet.
Snow-white hair whipping about her, eyes blazing like open flame, she clenched her fists and shouted. Destructive mana rose around her in heat-haze waves—exactly as her title promised.
Anayd, the Witch of Destruction.
Current head of the witch clan and eldest of the three sisters born to the great Archwitch Oz.
She swept the assembly with burning rage, glaring at every Transcendent present. None of them felt the slightest fear. They merely looked bored, or wore the resigned expression of people thinking, Here we go again.
No matter that she was the Witch of Destruction; in this place not a single soul was weaker than she.
“Hmm. Calm down, Anayd.”
A leisurely, teasing voice answered. Its owner was a formless shadow of a being.
“The witch clan already produced Dorothy as Guardian. Now you want another? Isn’t that a little greedy? Give someone else a chance.”
“He’s right.”
A Transcendent clad in massive armor rumbled in agreement.
“And Anayd, your authority is specialized for destruction and offense. The role of Guardian—protecting the world and preserving balance—doesn’t suit you in the slightest.”
“Shut up!!”
Anayd exploded. Crimson-black mana whipped around her like a storm.
“I don’t care whether it suits me or not! I’m going to find the bastard who did that to Dorothy and tear him into shreds. How dare he lay a hand on my little sister?”
The other Transcendents only shook their heads or sighed. Her fiery temper had never changed.
Yet separate from her rage, Dorothy’s absence and the selection of a new Guardian were matters of grave importance to every Transcendent in the Spiritual Realm.
Then a man leaning against a crystal pillar that radiated ethereal light spoke quietly. Golden scales glinted among his dazzling blond hair, marking his extraordinary nature.
“I shall go.”
His voice was low and resonant, stirring instinctive awe in all who heard it.
His name was Aetiones—progenitor of the dragonkin, the Ancestor Dragon, a Transcendent of immense power.
Several heads nodded at his proposal. As the pinnacle of magical creatures, dragons commanded every form of magic with effortless mastery. A quiet consensus formed that he would be well suited to the Guardian’s duty of maintaining Tera’s balance and answering its many threats.
The mood seemed to tilt toward naming him the next Guardian.
But—
“You will not.”
Every gaze snapped toward the source of the voice.
High above the gathering space, upon a dais that held six thrones, a woman’s voice rang out.
Three of the six thrones stood empty: the long-missing Dreamer; the Evil God currently causing havoc in Tera; and the War God, absent for unavoidable reasons.
The speaker was one of the three seated figures—a woman with long, mysterious violet hair. Chin propped on one hand, she looked down at Aetiones with a languid yet razor-sharp gaze.
“May I ask the reason?”
Aetiones kept his courtesy, yet could not fully hide his displeasure.
The violet-haired woman gave a short laugh.
“The reason? It’s simple.”
Her eyes moved from Aetiones to the other Transcendents, then back to her fellow occupants of the dais.
“Dorothy was taken down without leaving so much as a trace. Completely erasing a Transcendent’s presence from Tera… the only ones capable of that are—”
Her voice dropped.
“—us, the Six Heavens.”
She smiled meaningfully and flicked a glance at the two Transcendents sharing the dais with her.
“And it wasn’t me.”
The air of the Spiritual Realm froze solid.
The Six Heavens—the six beings who stood at the absolute apex even among Transcendents. Her implication that the traitor was one of them struck the assembly like a physical blow.
She turned back to Aetiones. This time her gaze was openly contemptuous and mocking.
“So we can hardly send the Martial God’s pet lizard, can we?”
“……!”
Aetiones’s face flushed crimson with fury, yet he could not retort.
“You might be on the traitor’s side. How are we supposed to trust you enough to send you down to Tera? Hmm?”
She asked it like a taunt.
Aetiones only clenched trembling fists and glared, speechless with rage. The other Transcendents began watching the violet-haired woman’s every expression. The word of one of the Six Heavens was as good as law in the Spiritual Realm.
Looking satisfied, she surveyed the gathering once more and declared:
“Fine. Then we’ll do it this way. Any Transcendent directly connected to the Six Heavens is barred from the Guardian seat this time. Anyone object?”
The other two Six Heavens on the dais showed little reaction.
The handsome black-haired man known as the Martial God merely shot the violet-haired woman a look of mild annoyance, then turned his head away as if to say, Do as you like. He had never cared much for such affairs.
Beside him, the Death God—appearing as a young girl with ash-gray hair braided down her back—was different. She simply smiled brightly, as though the whole thing amused her.
“Do whatever you want. It doesn’t matter to me either way.”
Behind that innocent smile drifted the chill of death itself.
The assembly of the Spiritual Realm seemed ready to conclude exactly as the violet-haired woman wished.
Just as discussion of the next Guardian was about to resume—
“Huh?”
Anayd, who moments earlier had been raging, suddenly muttered in puzzlement. She stared at a point in empty air, brow furrowed.
“…That’s weird.”
“What is it, Anayd?”
A Transcendent asked. Anayd tilted her head.
“Just now… I checked Tera… and someone’s already gone down.”
“What?”
“There’s no room left in Tera to hold our full power. It’s already saturated.”
The meeting place erupted in murmurs. Transcendents began examining Tera with their own authorities. One by one their faces filled with shock and confusion.
Anayd was right. Someone had already descended. Dorothy’s vacant seat had already been claimed.
While everyone else scrambled to inspect the world below, only the violet-haired woman on the dais reacted differently. She narrowed her eyes and focused on a single point in Tera.
A low murmur escaped her lips—threaded with deep bewilderment and the faintest edge of displeasure.
“How the hell did that bitch…?”