Chapter 13
“I’m the master of a mage tower.”
Mage tower master.
Pale didn’t understand what he meant.
At first, he thought it might be the name of a megacorp he didn’t know. A hidden research institute, a classified combat division… or perhaps slang used in place of a corporate name.
The young man spoke as though he were joking, yet he uttered that particular word with strange ease. As though it were the most natural way to describe where he belonged.
Kael did not miss that brief opening.
“Isn’t now the time to focus on me?”
Kael lowered his body.
“You seem pretty relaxed.”
The moment he saw him, Pale reflexively brought up a defensive formula, but it was already too late.
Kael’s foot slammed into his side.
“Ghk…!”
Boom!
The impact tore through his protective suit and drove deep inside.
Pale’s body flew sideways and slammed back-first into the wall. It smashed through a broken pipe and bounced across the floor several times before he finally dug his fingers into the ground and managed to slow himself down.
Pale swallowed a breath while kneeling on one knee, but it was difficult with blood streaming from his mouth.
The auxiliary circuits inside his protective suit displayed the damaged areas. Three fractured ribs and a ruptured right shoulder joint. He cleared away the indicators for the countless other damaged areas that followed.
He clenched his teeth and stood, but his body felt too heavy to support itself.
While the strain of overclocking gnawed at his nerves, the backlash from high-tier magic had also arrived.
Yet amid this desperate situation, Pale realized something strange.
Why was he still alive?
If his opponent had decided to kill him, there had been countless opportunities. At least, there would have been if he were in the other man’s position.
Just now, and even before that, Kael had seized several moments when he could have finished him. He could have broken his neck, severed his ACU connection, or slammed his head into the wall and crushed it outright.
But he hadn’t.
No.
‘Could he not?’
Pale’s eyes narrowed.
His opponent was at least seventh-tier.
Judging solely by his instantaneous output and combat instincts, that was the only conclusion. Even while using overclocking, Pale had kept up with his reaction speed, and the man handled the physical-enhancement formula far too naturally.
The opponent did not have the eyes of someone who hesitated to kill.
He was clearly the sort of person accustomed to killing without hesitation when necessary.
The young man before him undoubtedly belonged to the same category.
If so, there was only one answer.
‘A limitation.’
That overwhelming power must come with a condition.
Pale had passed through many battlefields.
Before becoming Seraph’s chief of security, he had been a mercenary. He was a veteran who had experienced every dirty job the corporations had to offer, from conflicts on the outskirts and suppressing the lower levels to recovering unauthorized test subjects. He also knew how to survive when facing someone stronger than himself. After all, Magitera was filled with people stronger than him.
The way to defeat someone strong was simple: identify their weakness. Of course, that assumed they had one.
Pale recalled Kael’s movements.
When they had first encountered each other after reaching Level 15. His movements had certainly been astonishingly well trained, but that was where they ended.
There was a limit to what a pure human body without cyberware could do.
And yet, the gap had suddenly widened dramatically when he used enhancement magic.
If so, when had he used magic?
Immediately after breaking the ACU.
Pale’s eyes widened.
‘No way.’
Kael leisurely walked toward him through the dust and smoke.
An ACU that had not yet been broken remained in his hand.
Watching him, Pale caught his breath and then began to laugh as though he had lost his mind.
“Hahaha.”
“….”
When Kael continued walking, Pale wiped the blood from the corner of his mouth and spoke.
“You have to break an ACU to use magic?”
His red eyes turned toward Kael’s hand.
“What an inefficient mage.”
At those words, Kael paused for a moment and stared at him. The corner of his mouth lifted slightly.
“Oh.”
A mild exclamation.
“You’re clever.”
He had tried to provoke him with mockery, but Pale did not take the bait.
The information he had just obtained was too important to surrender himself to anger.
He counted the ACUs remaining in Kael’s hand and said,
“Four left.”
Pale continued, coughing up a little blood at a time.
“If I just endure, I win.”
The corner of Kael’s mouth rose a little farther.
“Endure?”
He slowly tilted his head.
“You?”
Pale did not bother answering.
Crack, crunch.
Kael stepped across the shattered corridor floor toward him, like death given form.
“Do you really think that’s possible?”
“…Enough.”
When Pale spread his fingers, blue threads of mana stretched out again.
This time, he had no intention of meeting him head-on.
He would pour all his strength into enduring. If he widened the distance and stalled for time, the remaining ACUs would disappear one by one. Then victory would unquestionably be his.
It was a simple and certain method.
But Kael chuckled and clicked his tongue as though he had read his thoughts.
“Look at the state you’re in.”
He continued speaking calmly.
“You’ve got nothing but your mouth left.”
“….”
“Are all sixth-tier types just bluffing bastards like you?”
Tap.
One remark.
Tap.
Another remark.
He said it so casually because he genuinely thought it was true. That fact made Pale even more irritated.
Pale clenched his teeth.
‘Don’t take the bait.’
At that moment, Kael slipped a third ACU between his fingers.
“Well.”
He spoke in a low voice.
“Then shall we start round two?”
***
At the back of Harun’s stall.
Lin was crouched in a corner beneath the workbench.
She had pulled her hood low and had not removed her black mask. Partly because Kael had told her to keep wearing it, but now she also lacked the courage to show her face.
Her fingertips kept trembling. She tried to stop them, but it was futile.
Harun stood near the entrance of the stall, keeping watch in case anything happened.
An old shotgun was held in one hand.
“Don’t move. If anyone tries to come in, I’ll talk to them first. Don’t answer; just breathe.”
Lin gave a small nod.
“Yeah.”
Harun peered outside through a gap in the tent and clicked his tongue.
“This is what the market always looks like after the upper-level bastards sweep through. Even the rats are practically holding in their coughs.”
Lin could not say anything in response.
The surface level was where she had been born and raised.
Clean floors without garbage and fresh air without any smell. Back then, she had thought it was only natural. That was the world she had known.
Lin had followed her grandfather around since she was young. All she knew was that he was a high-ranking executive at Seraph Industries.
People treated him that way, but to Lin, he was simply her grandfather. He was the man who sat her on his knee and showed her meeting materials, explaining each difficult word as it appeared. The man who habitually told her, “To run a corporation, you have to know how to handle people.”
Even at a young age, Lin grew up learning from her grandfather how the company operated.
But that was only the world of those who ran corporations.
The city below, viewed from behind glass walls, and the real people represented as numbers in reports.
She knew nothing of the world beyond that.
More precisely, perhaps she had never had the chance to know.
Then, one day.
Lin happened to hear about a place called the underground levels.
Two executives were speaking in low voices in the corridor outside a meeting room.
Underground levels, illegal residents, organ retrieval, test-subject transport.
They were words she had never heard before. To a girl brimming with curiosity, it seemed like an unknown world that stirred her spirit of adventure.
A place within the same Magitera that she had never seen. A level that existed on the maps, yet one no one ever explained in detail. For an explorer, wasn’t it an alluring place that one simply had to visit?
That evening, Lin asked her grandfather what the underground levels were like.
Her grandfather was silent for a moment before replying that she had no need to know.
It was the first time she had ever heard him say that.
Until then, her grandfather had never avoided one of Lin’s questions. He answered anything she asked, said they could look it up together if he didn’t know, and told her that if something was difficult, she could learn it slowly.
Yet that grandfather would not tell her anything about the underground levels.
So Lin became even more curious.
“Then can’t I go just once?”
When she said that, her grandfather scolded her for the first time.
No. Absolutely not. That was not a place she should go.
Lin never forgot her grandfather’s face that day.
He did not look angry so much as afraid of something.
That only made the matter weigh more heavily on Lin’s mind.
Looking back, it had been foolish curiosity.
But at the time, Lin mistakenly believed she knew quite a lot. She also knew how capable the chief of security assigned to her was, so she thought everything would be fine.
She would take just the chief of security with her, go down for a little while, and come back up.
Pale had smiled and allowed it then.
“If there’s something you’re curious about, I’ll show you.”
She still remembered those words. That smile, too. And the way his expression changed as he rushed at her, swearing at her.
She had barely managed to hold back her fear before jumping into a drainage pipe and, by sheer luck, making it down to the underground levels.
Lin sank into sadness over the image of her grandfather that kept coming to mind and her own foolish actions. All she could do was quietly cover her face with both hands.
“Grandfather….”
Her voice trembled.
She tried to hold it in, but tears leaked out and dampened the inside of her mask.
Then Harun glanced at her and said one thing.
“Don’t cry.”
At his words, Lin raised her head.
“Don’t cry so easily here. The moment you show weakness, you die.”
She bit her lip.
“Okay….”
“Cry later if you want. Lock the door, turn off the lights, and do it when no one can see you.”
Harun continued speaking as he looked outside the tent.
“After you survive.”
Harun hesitated for a moment before pushing the water bottle on the workbench toward her.
“Drink.”
Lin looked at the water bottle.
“Thanks.”
“Don’t mention it.”
Lin carefully drank the water.
It had a lukewarm metallic taste, but it still loosened her throat a little.
She set down the bottle and asked cautiously,
“Will Kael… be okay?”
Harun did not answer. He checked the shotgun’s chamber.
Clack.
An old metallic sound rang out.
“Don’t know.”
Harun spoke while looking through the gap in the tent.
“I still don’t know what that bastard is. A circuit tinkerer, a madman, or a calamity that fell into the underground levels by mistake.”
“….”
“But.”
Harun added,
“I just can’t see him getting killed easily.”
That was when it happened.
Bzzzt.
The magilight on the workbench flickered.
Harun immediately looked up.
“….”
Bzzzt, bzzzt.
The magilight flickered once more.
Lin huddled up, overcome by an inexplicable sense of fear.
“Did the power go out…?”
“No.”
Harun’s expression was grim.
“This isn’t that.”
The next moment.
Boom.
Kuuuuuuuuung————!!!!
The entire stall shook.
The stacks of circuit boards came crashing down, and the tent poles creaked. Lin swallowed a scream and grabbed the leg of the workbench.
Something exploded in the distance.
KRAKABOOM—!
The sound of what seemed like lightning striking contorted Harun’s face.
“Crazy….”
A second sound followed.
Kraaaang!
This time, it was closer. At the enormous sound, unlike anything she normally heard, Lin’s heart began pounding violently.
“Kael…?”
A third.
Kwaaang!
This time, the magilight went completely dark before coming back on. After the brief darkness, a blue afterglow wavered inside the stall.
Harun gripped the shotgun tightly and quietly opened his mouth.
“This is….”
Lin swallowed dryly inside her mask.
Harun looked beyond the tent toward Level 15, where the sound had come from, and muttered,
“Magic.”