Chapter 136
Chapter 136
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Translator: penny
Chapter: 136
Chapter Title: No Shipwreck for the Protagonist (6)
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***
The one called Wraith by the desert tribesmen, Dagall, furrowed his brow.
Even amid the swarm of countless sand flies pouring down, the girl's expression holding the hammer was far too calm.
Was she frozen in fear? No, that didn't seem right. She was slowly raising her hammer, after all.
'What the hell?'
Dagall felt a strange sense of foreboding.
Similar to what he'd felt on that very day he'd been unjustly exiled from the city after being chased out by the palace lord... a foreboding bubbling up from the pit of his stomach.
He didn't dismiss the warning of his instincts, but he didn't overestimate it either.
She was a knight who handled mana, sure, but the opponent was just a girl who hadn't even reached adulthood yet.
'Not a mage, and no gun or bomb to speak of...'
Was it just because it had been so long since he'd fought a knight?
To shake off the unease, he began weaving his spell and clenched his fist tight.
The hand seal to activate the insect control magic.
The sand flies launching their assault on command and the girl swinging her hammer happened almost simultaneously.
The girl's hammer was slow. Or at least, it appeared that way.
But her hammer struck the ground before the sand flies could...
And right after.
Lightning crashed.
Light exploded out before the sound, filling the surrounding area.
An intense light that could blind anyone. It was only after Dagall reflexively shut his eyes and turned his head that the sound finally arrived.
Kwaaaaaang!
A deafening roar like a hundred grenades detonating at once shook the desert.
By the time Dagall barely managed to open his eyes...
It was already over.
Not a single trace remained of the sand flies around the girl.
Even the ones at a distance hadn't fared much better. They'd all been scorched by the lightning or torn apart by the shockwave.
"...."
Dagall clamped his mouth shut and stared at the girl responsible for it all.
Haa—
She took a long, deep breath, like a mage who'd just cast a grand spell. A sign it wasn't a technique she could use repeatedly.
Whether from the desert heat or the aftermath of the technique, a single bead of sweat trickled down her forehead.
—Wench... who are you? Who sent you?
After a brief silence, Dagall spoke. A question to buy time to prepare his magic.
Either oblivious to his spell building steadily or unconcerned, the girl answered lightly.
"Hong Seti."
Right after, Dagall unwittingly halted the mana he was weaving for his spell and scowled. Her name was just too ridiculous.
—An Earth-style name? You're from Earth?
"Who knows?"
The girl shrugged infuriatingly. Dagall twisted his lips without thinking.
—For someone with your skill... your tricks are pathetic. Using an Earth name to hide your origins.
Had his words hit the mark? The girl's delicate eyebrows arched.
—And a Korean one at that. You've been hanging around the unseemly victory poems, haven't you?
"...."
—You might fool others... but you're a long way from fooling me.
"Excuse me, what are you even—"
—Seti, Seti? You pathetic con artist, people from Korea beyond the dimensions don't name themselves like that!
As Dagall bellowed, the girl blinked as if at a loss for words. It almost looked like a face of sheer bewilderment.
In the meantime, having finished preparing his spell, Dagall enchanted the giant centipede's body with various magics and shouted.
—Enough games, wench!
Magic resistance, muscle enhancement, acceleration, hardening—countless reinforcement spells enveloped the centipede's body.
Magic so overwhelming that an ordinary human's bones and flesh would separate under the flood of mana.
But the giant centipede, optimized over long years, not only perfectly absorbed the reinforcements but reacted to Dagall's commands in real time.
—Legs don't matter! Leave the torso, we'll get the name later.
The giant centipede obeyed faithfully. It stretched out its writhing body, spread its repulsive maw wide, and lunged at Seti's body.
Kwa-gwang!!
The desert trembled. Sand and stones flew in the heavy vibrations.
An attack that allowed no time even to swing the hammer.
Instead of resisting, Seti went up on her tiptoes and kicked off the ground. Using the ensuing shockwave as a springboard, she leaped atop the giant centipede.
Flying Leg Art's Feather Step.
Like a feather drifting on the wind, she traversed the centipede's body, dodging its sharp legs and flitting through the clouds of dust.
—Pointless struggling.
Watching Seti dart about every which way, Dagall chanted his spell.
No need for a complex one. Binding her feet would end it.
Just once—just one binding on those feet, and the wench's resistance would be over.
The next moment, he unleashed the invisible binding spell with full conviction.
Or he tried to.
But just before he could fire it off.
A flash of light and a falling sword pierced his chest.
***
Dawn, having pierced the Wraith's chest, furrowed her brow.
The sensation traveling up the sword told her everything. The bastard wasn't dead.
Her judgment was swift, her action swifter.
Without hesitation, Dawn yanked the sword from his chest and slashed at his neck.
The wrinkled old man's head separated from his body and fell to the ground, but...
'No blood.'
Sawdust-like powder poured from the severed neck instead of blood.
Just like dry firewood.
The head showed no splatter either.
—...! ...? ...!!!
Severing the head wasn't enough; the fallen head glared at Dawn and worked its jaws.
She couldn't make out the words, but the fury in its eyes suggested they weren't pleasant.
After staring down at it briefly, Dawn stomped on the head.
Crack!
With a sound like crushing an insect shell, the Wraith's head burst.
She thought that might be the end...
But the next moment.
Mana rippled from where the head had burst, and countless insects poured out from the spot.
Maggots, earthworms, beetles, flies...
The repulsive wrigglers scattered in all directions, fleeing from Dawn as if their lives depended on it.
'The insects were the real body?'
Persistent bastard. As Dawn sighed and moved to pursue the fleeing bugs, the giant centipede suddenly began shaking its head violently.
Clearly trying to shake Dawn off its head.
Had the Wraith given a final command in escape? Or just gone berserk?
Dawn jumped down from the centipede's head while gathering mana into her sword.
A size like this wouldn't take deep wounds from ordinary sword aura. She should have beheaded it with Comet Sword from the start.
Decision made, she prepared Comet Sword at once. Planning to sever the neck before landing...
But before she could complete it, Seti watching from below shouted.
"Hold on, Dawn! You don't have to kill it!"
What? Missing the attack timing in that instant, she couldn't fire and landed in the desert instead.
She tensed her muscles fully, bracing for the centipede's follow-up...
But what approached wasn't the centipede—it was Seti.
She came running up, aligned her shoulder with Dawn's, and pointed at the giant centipede.
"When you killed the mage just now, the insect control magic seems to have broken. Look, it's not attacking?"
As she said, the giant centipede wasn't attacking at all. Its antennae and front legs were just trembling.
Anyone could see it was terrified.
But terrified or not, it was still a massive insect whose face you could only see by craning its head back.
Dawn didn't relax her guard, and the centipede kept its eyes fixed on her.
After a brief standoff, the moment the centipede subtly pulled back...
Thud!
Seti slammed her hammer into the ground. The centipede startled and whipped around, burrowing into the sand at full speed.
Anyone could see it was fleeing, so Seti let out a light sigh.
"Ended more anticlimactically than I thought?"
But Dawn shook her head, still tense.
"No, not yet."
"Not yet?"
"That mage from earlier got away. Turned into bugs and fled."
No need to ask where. The tunnel from which it and the centipede had first emerged.
It was the only place nearby for bugs to escape to.
"...If you're going to start something, see it through."
With that, Dawn headed for the hole, and Seti followed without a word.
***
Descending into the tunnel underground, the scorching desert air gave way to comparatively cool air brushing their bodies.
Meaning it was deeper than it looked.
Looking around, it didn't seem like a tunnel dug by the centipede. It felt more artificial, almost machine-excavated, clean and precise.
"...Could this be an underground dungeon?"
Seti's impression after briefly surveying the tunnel interior.
Dawn walked toward where she sensed traces of mana and answered curtly.
"Probably?"
"...There really are mages living in places like this."
Seti looked around with interest, but there were no grand decorations or traces.
No helping it. An unfinished tunnel was fundamentally no different from a dirt cave.
But being a dirt cave had its advantages.
Unlike passages of stone or iron, the earthen corridors bore plenty of traces from the mage whose insect transformation had worn off.
Deep footprints in the dirt floor, handprints on the walls, and faint lingering mana here and there.
Dawn and Seti followed those traces for a good while.
At last, they came upon a wide-open space.
Clearly man-made, with a round ceiling.
So vast a space that the giant centipede could tap-dance in it.
But the only things in that vast space were a worn table and bed clearly used by the Wraith, the corpse of an orc that looked like centipede feed, and...
Glass tanks and metal crates piled in one corner of the wall.
One might ask what's surprising about finding glass tanks and metal crates in a mage's dungeon, but the Korean writing scrawled on them was a whole different story.
"...Handle with Care? Classified?"
Seti approached a tank, read the Korean half-buried in dust, and frowned.
"Why is Korean here...?"
"...Dunno. Either the mage was really into Korea, or Korean military supplies got smuggled all the way here."
"But those don't look that old inside? They seem like stuff from at least decades ago..."
The two chatted like that while prying open tanks to peer inside or checking the contents of metal crates.
But no matter how they searched, they couldn't find why Korean was written there.
Instead—though it wasn't much consolation—they found their original target: the mage.
More precisely, the spot where the mage's transformed insects had gathered.
Dawn stared at an empty metal crate for a moment, then spoke in a cold voice.
"Come out. If you don't want to die like that."
No sooner had the words left her mouth than bugs came pouring out from between the crates.
As Seti startled and raised her hammer at the repulsive sight, the bugs clumped together like ants swarming honey, beginning to form the mage's shape.
Earthworms for the face, beetles for the legs, maggots for the arms and torso...
Regaining human form, the Wraith cried out as if wronged.
—You vicious bastards! Not content with freeing my centipede, you came to kill me too?
"...."
—Whose bidding are you doing this on? The palace lord of Dreit material? Or those disgusting pointy-eared brats?
"No, you struck first—"
As Seti started to retort, Dawn raised a hand to silence her. He leaned slightly toward her and whispered.
'Seems like a misunderstanding. Let's probe him.'
It was a spur-of-the-moment suggestion, but Seti didn't object. She even gave a small nod, as if to say go ahead.
She didn't know what Dawn planned to probe, but...
She could always torture the answers out of him later.
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