Chapter 30
They ran through the street crowded with employees and entered the tower entrance.
“Welcome, how can I help you.”
At the information desk on the tower’s first floor, a female employee with a cloud in place of her head welcomed the wizards. Ian immediately rushed up to her and slammed both hands hard on the counter.
Bang!
“Where’s the administrator.”
What a brutally rude question. The female employee remained calm, clasped her hands together, and gave a slight bow.
“I’m sorry. I can’t tell you the administrator’s location.”
A direct assault didn’t seem to work. Ian immediately changed tactics.
“No, miss! Don’t you know who I am? It’s me, me. The business partner of your theme park’s administrator!”
“...Pardon?”
“Something urgent came up that needed to be handled, but this administrator won’t take my calls? So I came all the way here in person! On my own dime and on my own time! Right, secretary?!”
Ian shouted as he turned to Yuna. Yuna immediately gripped her staff and nodded.
“Y-yes, that’s right. Our boss is such a busy person... There are dozens of businesses he’s running alone. He dropped everything and came here first.”
“Ah... I see. Then I’ll try contacting the administrator first.”
The employee picked up the receiver and bowed slightly. Ian frantically waved his hands as if to tell her not to.
“No! Don’t do that! That old man showed up at my business without a word when he needed something all of a sudden, so I’m going to do the same!”
“B-but...”
“I said don’t! Ah, never mind. Do it. Just do it. But make sure to tell him our business ends here.”
Ian clicked his tongue and turned around without a shred of hesitation. Yuna also timidly flipped the female employee the middle finger and followed Ian out of the tower.
Then the female employee put down the receiver and shouted in a hurry.
“S-sorry! The administrator is on the top floor of the tower! If you go right now, you can meet him!”
“You should’ve started with that. Tsk tsk, what kind of employee training is this?”
Ian made his displeasure obvious and turned toward the tower’s elevator.
“Just so you know, I’m not a nuisance, okay? I came to talk business—how is that being a nuisance, huh?”
“Y-yes, yes. You’re absolutely right...”
“Yeah, yeah. Work hard.”
Ian waved to the employee as he turned the corner. At the same time, he sprinted toward the elevator. Yuna panted as she followed behind him.
“Y-you really know how to act...!”
“Thanks.”
Click.
When the elevator button was pressed, the doors opened to both sides. The two immediately pressed the button labeled top floor and prepared for battle.
Ian held a lighter in one hand and a revolver in the other, taking a light breath to steady himself. Yuna also gripped her staff and began chanting in advance.
Before long, the elevator opened. The two stepped into the open hallway, yanked open the door at its end, and went inside.
“...Hm?”
Inside the room, a bald one-eyed man sat in a chair. He tilted his head, staring at the unexpected intruders.
“Who are you?”
“We’re here from the Cartel.”
Whoosh.
Ian lit the lighter. The surrounding noise vanished.
In the soundless world, he aimed the gun at the administrator and pulled the trigger.
Bang!
The sound echoed only in Ian’s mind. Through the burst of flames, a bullet flew, shattering the administrator’s eye and punching through his skull.
“...!!”
The bastard let out a silent scream.
Ian immediately riddled his abdomen and lower body with bullets, then put the gun back in the holder and took out the grimoire.
Thud.
Yuna walked up beside the writhing administrator and pressed her staff against his body.
In that instant, his body turned as soft as silken tofu. Yuna immediately swung her staff and smashed his head in.
Blood, brain matter, and crushed fragments scattered across the floor.
Ian stepped over the scattered gore and approached the fallen administrator’s body, then shoved his hand deep into the heart.
His hand went in without resistance and found the heart. He carefully made sure not to crush it and pulled only the heart out.
A pale pink lump of flesh. Though it had lost its body, it was still beating; he stuffed it into Yuna’s guitar case. She was horrified, but Ian left the administrator’s room without hesitation and got back on the elevator.
That took five minutes. Ian extinguished the lighter and reloaded the revolver.
“Once we get outside, we’re running immediately. The moment we killed the administrator, there’s no turning back now.”
“Th-they’ll chase us, right?”
“Probably. Don’t get caught. I’ll help if I can, but if it looks hopeless, I’m leaving you behind.”
“Y-yeah. I’ll do that too.”
“Good.”
While they were having a thoroughly wizardly conversation, the elevator arrived at the first floor. The doors slowly opened to both sides, revealing the female employee who had been sitting at the counter. With her nails sharpened, she opened her maw wide at them.
“You said you were a business partn—!”
Bang!
Ian shot her through the heart. Ignoring her as she staggered backward, the two left the tower and unfolded the brochure.
“The exit is the same place as the entrance! You remember where it is, right?”
“Yeah!”
The moment Yuna answered, a clown suddenly popped out beside her. Yuna activated magic without panicking and hardened her body beyond anything else.
Crack!!
The clown’s teeth shattered and flew apart before they could even pierce Yuna’s skin. She smashed the clown’s bewildered head with her staff and, panting, kept moving after Ian.
“Hwaaek! Just now I lost 300 ml of blood!”
“Conserve your magic!”
Rat-a-tat!
Ian’s revolver spat fire from the muzzle. Two bullets shattered the head of the employee charging straight at them.
“You shoot great!”
Ignoring Yuna’s admiration, Ian placed his hand on the floor.
“Be reborn.”
Crack!
With a grotesque crunch, something was crushed and the floor’s shape warped. Creatures dropped into the floor, which had split open vertically like a beast’s maw, and it sealed shut again. A dreadful cracking sound came from below.
“Ugh.”
Ian’s head spun for a moment as a price for using magic.
It was a side effect of overusing his re-creation magic. He had experienced something like this when dealing with the monkey dream, but back then it had been mild; this time it was throbbing quite a bit.
It would be strange if there were no side effects after doing something insane like remodeling an entire space.
He clicked his tongue hard, frowned, and pulled the revolver’s trigger.
Crack!
The caterpillar-like creature flying in from an angle exploded. Ian got drenched in the bastard’s blood, wiped away the blood blurring his vision, and checked how many rounds he had left.
‘Two rounds left.’
Not many. There wasn’t even time to reload. He could probably jam in one or two rounds in a hurry, but a full reload seemed impossible.
Still, what choice did he have? If he didn’t want to die, he had to make it work somehow.
Ian brought the grimoire down on the face of the creature that sprang up from below, then turned to Yuna.
“Eek! Hek! Hwaaek!”
She was breathing hard, perhaps because her stamina was running low, but she was still keeping up just fine. Besides, most anomalies wouldn’t even be able to pierce her skin, so there was no need to worry.
Then, as they passed right beside the haunted house, it happened.
[On target! On target! 40 degrees front-left! Killing intent and enemy presence detected!]
An alarm blared from the reverse sight attached to the hem of his coat. Ian instinctively yanked Yuna by the collar and pulled her toward the 40-degree direction.
“Eek?!”
For a moment she was startled by the sudden grab, and then a bullet fired from the direction of the haunted house slammed into her forehead.
“Kek!”
With a ping, the bullet bounced off.
Yuna, on the other hand, was fine. She glared at Ian with a resentful face, tears welling in her eyes.
“Y-you used a person as a meat shield...!”
“You’re sturdy. Let me use you for a second. It’s coming again.”
“W-wait! Eek!”
Ratatatata!
The torrents of bullets battered Yuna all over and fell uselessly to the floor or bounced off. Leaving the tearful Yuna behind, Ian poked his head out over her shoulder to see where the bullets were coming from.
“Wizaaard!!”
There stood the Bureau agents who had cleared the haunted house. Every one of them had a vicious look as they sprayed bullets and closed in on Ian and Yuna.
The most outstanding of them was Mir. She closed the distance in an instant, as if she were folding space as she ran, and swung her sword at Ian’s neck. He immediately let go of Yuna and slipped the grimoire into the path of her blade.
Clang!
With a clear ring, her blade shattered. By contrast, the grimoire was perfectly fine. It didn’t even have a single scratch.
Mir discarded the broken blade without hesitation and swung her fist. Ian thrust the grimoire into the path of that punch.
It was a grimoire that had shattered even blades. It was obvious what would happen if flesh made direct contact with it.
“...Damn it.”
Mir retracted the fist she had been swinging and leapt far back. Ian hurled the broken mirror at her.
Mir, who had been about to swat it away normally, rolled on the floor immediately at the creepy feeling crawling up her spine.
Crunch!
The shard that landed exactly where she had been standing turned the floor into glass-like fragments and shattered it.
The shattered floor fragments turned transparent and pattered down onto the ground. Mir immediately tried to get up, but clicked her tongue as fragments brushed past her side and turned her gaze.
Then transparent fragments came into her field of view.
She saw it.
The other side of the mirror.
A pure white being.
Color.
Flesh that twisted and restored itself again and again.
Hands. Arms. Eyes. Mouths, rippling from every direction.
Countless beings.
Yet one being.
Insects. Humans. Gods.
Beyond the unknowable mystery lies the sea and sky of the universe itself—beings who are god, mother, and father, countless in number, lurking there to crush humans like insects and burst them like maggots—ah, God, why do you not save us and instead scatter trials and suffering—
“Agent Mir!”
“Ugh!”
The voice brought Mir back to her senses.
Blood streaming from her nose and eyes covered her face. The metallic smell of blood dragged her back to reality.
Turning her head, she saw Park Sang-cheol holding a shotgun and Kim I-seo chasing after the wizard.
“We have to go! We can’t let the wizard get away here!”
Kim I-seo shouted. Mir looked up at her face for a moment, then wiped away the blood with trembling hands and shook her head.
“...No. No, let’s stop pursuing the wizard here.”
“What?!”
“Huh?”
The agents protested. She could feel the masked wizard looking at her, but Mir did not take back what she said.
“Do not forget our objective. We came here to rescue survivors and investigate and resolve this new anomalous phenomenon. I understand that the sudden appearance of a wizard has you all fogged up, but don’t go beyond that. The countermeasure plan hasn’t been completed yet.”
“...Agent Mir.”
“If we can’t obtain much information, the next investigation team will have to die for it too. So today we focus only on the investigation; we have to let the wizard go.”
“And you want us to let the wizard go when who knows what that bastard will do? Those lunatics bring disaster wherever they go!”
Park Sang-cheol shouted, his face twisted with killing intent. Mir answered immediately.
“I know that too. But as I said, you must not forget the objective. Calm down. I know about your past too, but now is the time to face reality.”
“...”
“Once everyone calms down, let’s move again.”
“...Fuck.”
Park Sang-cheol spat out a curse and glared at the wizards receding into the distance.
Mir also pressed down on her trembling hand and stared at the wizard.
*
Not long after they put distance between themselves and the haunted house, the theme park entrance came into view.
The two quickly ran down the stairs, smashed the heads of the beast-headed employees guarding the exit, and vaulted through the turnstile.
Immediately afterward, the world changed.
The blood-red sky turned blue again, and the dreadful anomalies were gone, replaced by trees stripped bare of leaves.
They had returned to reality. Ian let out a sigh of relief and collapsed onto the ground. Yuna, who had taken bullets all over her body, also sat down beside Ian while bawling her eyes out.
“Hwaaek! It hurts! My whole body hurts!”
“I... sorry. I didn’t mean to.”
“...Hng! If you apologize, is that supposed to be enough? G-give me some kind of compensation...!”
“...I’ll buy you dinner later, at least. Is that okay?”
“...Sure.”
Sniff!
Leaving the sniffling Yuna behind, Ian took out his phone and called the Cartel’s safe ride service.
An alert rang saying it would arrive in three minutes, and he got up from his seat and laid a hand on the Bureau van parked by the roadside.
He used the same spell to compress the van’s shape. With this, even if the Bureau agents came out, they wouldn’t be able to track him immediately.
He roughly crumpled the mask he had been wearing, burned it with the lighter, then put a cigarette in his mouth and lit it.
“Hiss... Hoo...”
As the acrid smoke penetrated his lungs, it felt like his headache eased a little. Ian closed his eyes and quietly cooled his overheated body in the cold breeze blowing past.
“...But what does a cigarette taste like? You smoke it like it tastes really good...”
As he was doing that, Yuna sidled up to him and asked. Ian took one cigarette from his pocket and casually held it out to her.
“Want to try it?”
“Then just a teeny-tiny little bit...”
Yuna took the cigarette in her mouth, her face full of curiosity. Once Ian lit it for her, she inhaled and let the smoke slide down her throat.
“Mmph?!”
Yuna’s eyes went wide.
She hurriedly spat the cigarette out, grabbed her throat, and coughed over and over.
Ian snickered.