Chapter 25
After confirming that Heros was alive, I immediately transformed the smoke around me into a fist and slammed it straight into the mage.
BOOOOM.
When the smoke fist struck where the mage was, the building began to reverberate.
If this space hadn't been a workshop set up by the mage, where the impact was halved, that attack would have been enough to collapse the building outright.
"Ah, this is troublesome."
But should I call it expected, or perhaps simply obvious?
Heros was alive.
'No, can this really be called alive?'
My smoke had reduced him to a half-dead state, and even the half of his face that remained after the massive impact had been crushed.
He was in a state that no one could possibly look at and think he was alive.
"You mean that since you couldn't reinforce the building itself, an attack like that just now might make it collapse?"
Yet the voice coming from the only intact mouth in his mangled face was utterly calm.
Gurgle.
Heros's body was spread here and there like slime.
Having checked all the information in this space through the smoke spread in every direction, I noticed that those scraps of flesh were gradually gathering toward Heros.
"Oh, as expected, you checked all the information with your ability! Truly amazing!"
Perhaps he had seen me roll my eyes as I surveyed my surroundings.
Heros exclaimed in a voice filled with delight.
"Even if you know the information, processing it depends on the user's ability! To do that so effortlessly!"
In an instant, the scattered pieces of flesh gathered together, and Heros returned to a complete body.
Watching him quietly, I raised my head and exhaled a long stream of cigar smoke toward the ceiling.
...
I didn't particularly like being praised by an enemy, and I didn't like the current situation either.
I had no desire to relive the experience of walking through that dust-covered lounge bar to enter this damn workshop.
On top of that, I was receiving an obsessive gaze from a middle-aged mage?
...
Calm down.
Rubbing the back of my neck, stiff with stress, I simply raised my head and stared at the ceiling.
!@%^@!
I ignored the mage's incomprehensible babbling in front of me.
Listening seriously to a madman's nonsense wasn't really my style.
'Ariel said they were undead.'
I blankly savored the cigar's aroma, amplified with the scents of cashews and almonds.
The cigar's aroma slowly started to clear my head.
'Is that guy undead?'
No, it wasn't that.
When I first attacked him, his heart had definitely been beating.
The trigger had been when I split him in half and killed him completely.
Swoosh!
Even as I continued thinking, the attacks went on.
Every one of Heros's spells was blocked by the smoke floating around me,
while my attacks destroyed Heros's body in an entirely one-sided exchange.
But no matter how much I sliced, crushed, and destroyed him, Heros's body regenerated like slime.
'He isn't undead.'
This workshop had already been under my control for a long time because of my smoke.
Every bit of information, including information about Heros, was entering my mind.
So I knew.
His resurrection was far too strange to call him undead.
Even after his entire body had been chopped into pieces and those pieces had been crushed, they reunited and brought him back to life.
'...A slime?'
That sort of regeneration resembled a slime, a monster from the legends of this world.
It was especially similar in that he would immediately revive unless his core or nucleus was destroyed.
'Is that even possible?'
Could he transform a human body into slime?
I had met all kinds of people while living in the underworld, but he was the first person I'd seen who could transform his body like that.
Just as I was deeply contemplating Heros's immortality,
the magic circles in the workshop that I had been reading through the smoke began to stop all at once.
Magic circles that benefited the mage who had created this workshop were stopping?
"Hm?"
"Ha! Finally, you're looking this way."
When I lowered my head after blankly staring at the ceiling, Heros had already deployed magic circles around himself, his eyes gleaming.
They were probably magic circles he had cast as the price for stopping the workshop's magic circles.
"But you're too late!"
Woooooooooo.
At Heros's shout, dozens of magic circles began to resonate.
Click, screeeeeech.
A noise like dozens of gears meshing began to ring out, and something started forming in midair.
A giant made of steel, more than twice the size of an ordinary adult man.
An existence I had seen dozens of times across various media in my past lives.
A golem.
"Oh..."
"Not yet!"
Perhaps he still felt that it wasn't enough, because Heros immediately raised his mana and waved his hand.
Dozens of lines of light appeared from his hand and joined with the golem's back.
Woooooooooo.
Before long, the golem's core began to pulse violently.
The atmosphere trembled simply from it operating.
"Now this golem possesses strength comparable to an upper-level Expert Knight!!"
Looking at the golem, Heros began spouting the sort of lines stereotypical villains always said.
Huh? Wait a moment.
A stereotypical villain?
"I'll capture you alive and indulge in everything..."
Without paying the slightest attention to what Heros was saying, I calmly stroked my chin and organized my thoughts.
The undead, and this current drug incident.
Meeting Ariel, the protagonist of a romance-fantasy story, had briefly made me forget something that now came back to me.
'Come to think of it, this world has an academy story mixed in too, doesn't it?'
I had already formed the hypothesis that this world was a blend of two genres: romance fantasy and academy fiction.
Of course, since I still had no solid evidence, it remained only a hypothesis.
Romance fantasy.
Now, let's think. Would a villain like that appear in a romance fantasy?
A villain in his mid-fifties, a mad mage who wanted to use other people as test subjects and even manufacture drugs?
Honestly, that seemed far too hardcore to be called romance.
Of course, there might be a romance fantasy with a villain like that.
I didn't read romance fantasy, so I had no idea what its villains were like.
But what if that villain were from an academy story?
'Wouldn't he fit?'
"Are you... ignoring me again!!!!"
Heros, who had been watching me quietly lost in thought, began to rage.
As though responding to Heros's emotions, the golem began operating violently.
Before long, the golem raised both arms and brought its enormous fists down toward me as I stood quietly lost in thought.
***
Titan.
The masterpiece created by Heros, a mage and alchemist.
This golem was a monster capable of easily taking on the deputy commander of the Empire's knight order.
"How..."
But, but!!!
Why! Why was I able to
"block that golem's attack so easily!!!"
Heros let out a cry of shock at the scene unfolding before his eyes.
Something roughly the same size as his golem, Titan.
Something resembling a giant made of smoke was blocking Titan's attack with one hand.
What was that? What was that thing?!
It had so easily stopped the attack of the golem he had created by sacrificing his workshop?!
He couldn't accept it. He couldn't accept it!
He could understand his ordinary attacks being blocked.
He was fully aware that Abel was that strong.
But for someone to block so easily the attack of Titan, strengthened by sacrificing his entire workshop, was utterly unacceptable.
Woooooooooo.
Heros began pouring even more of his mana into Titan.
Now, the air visibly rippled from nothing more than the mana Titan emitted as it operated.
It had disregarded stability and maximized destructive power alone.
"Ah, you're seriously noisy."
And the next scene Heros registered was this:
Titan being shattered in an instant by an attack from the smoke giant.
"...Huh?"
It was an utterly incomprehensible sight: Titan, struck by the smoke giant's blow, shattered into pieces, with only its components flying in every direction.
Heros turned his stiff neck and blankly stared at his golem, which had been reduced to nothing but wreckage in a single blow.
No matter how much he had overloaded Titan by disregarding stability, it was still a golem.
A sort of shield that a mage had created to protect his frail body.
That shield had been rendered useless in a single blow?
"Hey..."
"..."
As Heros stood dazed, Abel's low voice reached his ears.
But Heros could not show any reaction whatsoever.
His masterpiece, the golem he had created by sacrificing his workshop, had been destroyed in a single attack. It would have been strange if he were still in his right mind.
"You're not running because of that damned immortality of yours, are you?"
"..."
Mages were physically weak.
That was why every mage Abel had fought had prioritized putting distance between them.
Naturally, preparing powerful magic required time to construct its formulas.
In fact, although Abel did not know it, the first spell a mage learned was usually Blink, a short-distance teleportation spell.
"..."
"Well, fine."
As he said that, Abel took another cigar from inside his coat, along with the one he had already taken out.
"If you're still alive after taking this, I can think of something else then."
A technique he had created because it was so damn irritating when mages ran away.
It was an inefficient ability that required an enormous amount of smoke, meaning it could only be activated by using two cigars.
Abel inhaled both cigars and began exhaling smoke thick enough to conceal his face.
"Hey."
"..."
"Didn't the smoke around us disappear?"
As he said that, Abel pointed at the wall with one finger.
The smoke that had continued to control the workshop itself throughout the battle had vanished without a trace before Heros knew it.
The only smoke visible in Heros's field of vision now was the smoke coming from Abel's mouth.
A chill ran through him.
"...What?"
Grin.
Enhancement through providing information.
After confirming the message window that had appeared across his retinas, Abel pointed at the ceiling with a spine-chilling smile.
"And what do you think that is?"
Although his instincts desperately warned him not to look, Heros could not resist his curiosity and turned his gaze toward where Abel was pointing.
'That...? A sphere?'
"Where did the smoke that had taken control of this workshop, this building, go?"
And another thing.
"And where did the smoke from the cigar I just lit go?"
The sphere began to descend slowly.
It was about the size of a human head, with a smooth surface.
But he could feel it. The tremendous power radiating from that sphere was something he could never ignore.
'Dangerous!'
The immortality he had gained by awakening an ability and modifying his body.
The instinct that had never once felt threatened while possessing this immortality was warning him for the first time.
Heros immediately tried to cast Blink to escape the building.
——!!!!
But before Heros could cast Blink,
the sphere, which had settled completely onto the ground, emitted a light bright enough to blind him.
"Kgh!!!"
...
...
...
...?
Heros, who had reflexively used all his mana to construct a defensive spell,
was perfectly fine.
He felt no sensation of his arms or legs—or of his body—being destroyed.
'This is!'
But Heros immediately noticed the anomaly.
It was a change any mana-awakened person, not just a mage, would naturally have been able to sense.
"Kehk!"
The air was as dry as a parched desert.
It was air he had never felt before—or rather, air he had not felt since awakening his mana.
As though mocking Heros, who was coughing dryly, Abel spoke in a voice full of laughter.
"Now then, shall we see whether that damned immortality of yours can hold up without mana?"