36. Magic Survival (4)
Magic Survival was the highlight of the interschool competition, but the number of students each school could enter was inevitably limited.
Stella Academy produced an unusually large number of participants every year, with no fewer than five and as many as seven at times.
If things had followed the development of the original game, this year’s participants were supposed to number close to ten……
but because the story had become twisted for one reason or another, Stella’s Magic Survival participants this year had been reduced to only seven.
Of course, even that was still an overwhelmingly high number compared to other schools,
but since the Magic Society hosting the interschool competition conducted internal reviews of the participants, there was no one in particular who raised questions about fairness.
Because Stella was Stella.
For that reason alone, a situation like this was accepted.
Boom-boom-boom!
Rumble….
Shaaah……!
Dark clouds gathered, and a sudden shower came pouring down.
It was a climate change caused by the Stella Dome’s virtual-reality manipulation.
Midway through the match.
The survival match area had steadily shrunk and now only half of it remained.
Second-year S-Class, Dok Cheolgwang.
“Haha, that was an entertaining duel.”
“Urgh… da, mn it……. ”
Looking at the student from another school collapsed before him, he laughed heartily.
With his unusually large, muscular build, he was an expert in magical martial arts—a style that fought with magic circles wrapped around the fists—and as a powerful one-on-one combatant, he was quite famous, so most enemies tended to avoid him.
Well, when they failed to avoid him and ended up facing him, they got eliminated like this.
[KILL! Dok Cheolgwang — Merild]
As the student named Merild was eliminated and driven outside, he left behind one final line.
“Damn Stella bastards……”
Flash!
The moment he vanished into light, Dok Cheolgwang scratched his head awkwardly.
“Well, damn. I didn’t even do anything.”
Every year, Stella had a rather infamous reputation for sending out powerful championship candidates, and for Dok Cheolgwang, who was making his first appearance this year, that was simply unfair.
[57/100]
The match was only around the midpoint, yet a great many students had already been eliminated.
In the early stages, the odds of encountering enemies were high, so skirmishes happened frequently.
But once things entered the middle and later phases, kills no longer happened very often.
That was because the participants had mostly finished farming artifacts by then, settled into positions, and quietly hidden themselves.
“Tch, the boring time’s come.”
For Dok Cheolgwang, it was an incredibly dull stretch of time.
Fight, and then more fighting! If it was called a survival tournament, shouldn’t that be what it was all about?
Hiding while using the terrain and blabbering on about “winning strategies” and whatever else while waiting for a chance at first place was just no fun at all.
For that reason…….
Dok Cheolgwang studied strategy and tactics.
To beat enemies?
No, it wasn’t that.
The reason was much simpler.
‘So I can figure out where the enemies are hiding.’
Inside Dok Cheolgwang’s head, he could already clearly picture exactly where the rat-like bastards were hiding and watching him from.
“Oh-ho, now this looks interesting.”
As if on cue, he sensed signs of combat breaking out in the nearby city district, and Dok Cheolgwang kicked off from the spot without hesitation.
There was nothing more thrilling and enjoyable than jumping into a chaotic melee.
If you truly wanted to win in a battle royale, there was one thing that absolutely had to remain forbidden.
Rampaging too much on your own.
If one overwhelmingly dominant presence stood out too much, they would become the target of the majority’s suppression. Although the rules basically applied solo combat, when a powerful common enemy appeared, the participants would form an unspoken alliance and work together to remove that enemy.
It was also the reason that those who bore the title of “powerful championship candidate” strangely failed to win every year.
Baek Yuseol.
He, in particular, was one of those powerful championship candidates.
To participate in the interschool competition, you had to be at least seventeen years old.
But the average age of participants was usually at least eighteen and often over twenty, because even if you began gaining practical experience at seventeen, it still took at least a year or more before you could face real combat.
That was why Baek Yuseol—participating in the fiercest and most brutal event, Magic Survival, at the mere age of seventeen—naturally had no choice but to become a subject of attention.
“……Isn’t that guy completely insane?”
Hanabonyu, a cadet of Master Descartes Academy, watched Baek Yuseol fighting fiercely in the distance and could not hide his dumbfounded expression.
He was already guaranteed to get heavily targeted in the latter half of the match, yet here he was causing that kind of uproar in an urban district with a high concentration of players.
“And besides…… isn’t that way too blatant of a team-up……?”
Teaming was not only a violation of the rules from the start, but also the behavior spectators hated the most.
Because it made the match boring.
It was true that when a public enemy appeared, there were cases where everyone focused fire to eliminate them first, but openly cooperating to attack like that was absolutely forbidden.
But the even funnier part was……
‘Why can’t three people catch one person?’
Unless you possessed special traits related to magnified vision or had learned Magic Vision, it was impossible to get a full grasp of the situation over there at a glance.
‘No matter what, he’s still alone, isn’t he?’
Boom!!
With an explosive blast, Baek Yuseol shot high into the sky, only to immediately use Blink and plunge back down toward the ground.
“……Still, it is pretty fascinating.”
A mage who controlled Blink.
Not even great archmages could do something like that.
One moment he appeared on the rooftop of a building to the left, the next he suddenly sprang out from a collapsing bridge on the opposite side, then leapt from a window frame below—moving with such mobility that it looked as if not one person but several were moving at once as Baek Yuseol toyed with his enemies.
Whoooosh…!
While he was blankly watching the fight, a sudden gale swept in.
“Ugh, this is……!”
An ominous current.
After confirming that Baek Yuseol and the three Stella cadets fighting him had each hidden themselves in different buildings, Hanabonyu quickly retreated deeper into the cave.
A natural disaster.
Also known as ‘Lailnaje’s Tidal Wave.’
It was one of the magical natural disasters, a strange phenomenon in which a storm of lightning came raging through.
In reality, it happened when magical energy and vital force collided in certain special places, so it did not occur just anytime. But in Magic Survival, natural disasters were set to occur at specific times, so you had to evacuate in advance.
Bzzzt! Crack, bzzzt!
A moment later, an enormous storm of lightning swept through the outside.
It was not large enough to cover the entire field, but it was certainly enough to engulf the urban district where Baek Yuseol had been battling.
Since the standard response during a natural disaster was to hide, then by now they should have stopped fighting and—
[KILL! Baek Yuseol — Kamaren]
“Huh?”
At that moment, a kill log message suddenly appeared.
“W-What? Did they get unlucky and hide in the same building or something……?”
If it came down to one-on-one, they would not be able to beat Baek Yuseol, so that was entirely possible.
And yet.
[KILL! Baek Yuseol — Kizenain]
[KILL! Baek Yuseol — Miron]
Baek Yuseol’s kill logs appeared one after another.
Which meant that he had killed every single one of the enemies who had been attacking him……
‘H-How?’
Something that made absolutely no sense within Hanabonyu’s common sense.
‘Lailnaje’s Tidal Wave is still raging outside though……?’
It was large enough to cover the whole surrounding area, so Baek Yuseol himself should not have been able to move around easily either.
Then how had he found all the enemies hiding in different buildings and killed them all?
Whooooo…….
The moment Lailnaje’s Tidal Wave subsided, Hanabonyu rushed outside.
Even though another fight might break out, his urge to satisfy this burning curiosity mattered far more than any desire to win.
He sprinted quickly and arrived at the city district where Baek Yuseol and the three enemies had been fighting together in fierce combat, but……
“……Nothing.”
There was nothing left there anymore, only the thick traces of battle.
Suddenly, it almost felt as if the cheers from outside the arena were carrying all the way here.
To take down, all at once, the enemies who had irritated the crowd with every kind of foul play and teaming.
By now, the spectators were probably shouting Baek Yuseol’s name at the top of their lungs.
‘Tch, so Stella’s the star again this year too…….’
He disliked those Stella bastards in all kinds of ways.
Come to think of it, even the three boys who had just attacked Baek Yuseol had all been Stella Academy cadets.
Why was it that Stella always seemed to deliberately choose the most irritating things possible?
He had hated them from the very beginning, ever since they put on the title of ‘the world’s greatest magic academy.’
‘…At this rate, instead of aiming for first place, should I just try killing Baek Yuseol?’
No matter how much it was Baek Yuseol, after racking up more than ten kills, he had to be physically exhausted, and his supplies were probably all but depleted too.
On the other hand, Hanabonyu had conserved his stamina while sweeping up equipment and supplies, so even if a battle broke out right now, he could fight in peak condition.
In any case, Baek Yuseol’s flashy one-man show had already rendered victory itself meaningless.
If that was the case, then what if he simply killed Baek Yuseol and monopolized all the attention for himself?
‘No matter how strong Baek Yuseol is, eventually there’ll come a time when he’s exhausted and shows an opening!’
From that point on, Hanabonyu began following Baek Yuseol’s trail.
Since Baek Yuseol moved so noisily and left behind such obvious traces, chasing him was not difficult.
Wherever he went, battles broke out.
And each time, Baek Yuseol got the kill.
He frequented areas with unusually high player density, and because such places were also hard to sneak through unnoticed, it was a serious headache.
“Hm?”
While following Baek Yuseol from a moderate distance.
……He discovered something very strange.
“What is…… that?”
Crackle, crackle…….
Black flames were burning through the field.
And yet, rather than looking like they were simply consuming some material, it felt more as though they were burning space itself.
How strange.
Since the stage in Magic Survival was implemented like reality, the magic used here was also supposed to affect the stage in ways similar to reality.
If fire touched wood, it burned. Water extinguished it. Stone did not catch easily. Lightning conflicted with it.
Interactions identical to reality were what should have happened normally.
And yet those dark crimson flames looked as if they were burning the very magic of this virtual space itself.
If you looked closely…… it even felt as though “reality” was faintly visible beyond the peeled-away space.
‘No way…… did someone peel back the Stella Dome with magic?’
Since it was a space created by none other than the 9-Class mage Eltman Eltwin, flames like that would not destroy it so easily—but the fact that they had burned the virtual space itself filled Hanabonyu’s chest with a strange dread.
Just how powerful a spell did one have to use to burn virtual space itself?
No—there was only one case where something like that was possible in the first place.
‘No way…… a dark mage?’
Weren’t dark mages the only beings who could fully exercise their power even inside virtual space?
But even if that were true, it still did not make sense.
What kind of deranged dark mage would commit an act of terror during an interschool competition, where the eyes of mages from everywhere were focused in one place?
……That was what he thought at first, but then he corrected himself.
The mental state of dark mages had never been something that should be judged by the standards of ordinary people.
There had been a dark mage who blew up and collapsed an entire skyscraper in the middle of a city just to kill one single person, and another who stirred up chaos and then committed suicide, even knowing he would die, just to tarnish the honor of a Magic Tower.
Beings from whom human emotion had been completely stripped away.
Those who would lightly throw away even their own lives if it meant indulging in their immediate pleasure and delight.
Those were dark mages.
‘…Stay calm.’
If a dark mage really had entered Magic Survival, then there was no way Stella’s side would have failed to notice.
They were underhanded, irritating, and insufferable bastards……
but even so, they were still the number one magical institution in the world, weren’t they?
‘F-For now, I have to retreat.’
He did not know who the user of those dark crimson flames was, but he felt that nothing good would come of approaching them.
That was also an instinctive warning from his very core.
At that moment.
“Kyaaaah!!”
From beyond the surging flames came someone’s scream.
Without thinking, he turned to look—and saw a girl crawling across the ground with flames stuck to her body.
And chasing after her was another boy.
He had a unique hairstyle that looked like flames themselves, and he gripped one dark crimson flame in each hand.
“Hahaha, why are you running? Does it hurt? You’re magic warrior cadets, aren’t you? You should be able to endure at least this much, right? Hm?”
“Ughk, aaagh……!”
The girl whose body had been set alight with dark crimson fire was crying and snotting in a way that made it obvious she was truly feeling pain.
‘What the hell is that?’
It was an unbelievable sight.
Feeling pain inside the stage.
That should have been impossible.
Hanabonyu instinctively checked the name tag of the mage manipulating the dark crimson flames.
‘Berunkal.’
It was a name he had never heard before, attached to an unfamiliar uniform.
And…… those alien eyes.
Just from the pressure of the mana he could feel, Hanabonyu understood at once.
‘That thing is a predator.’
At minimum, a 5-Risk.
An enemy no student participating in Magic Survival could possibly fight.
To face a 5-Risk dark mage, several professional magic warriors would have to gather together.
‘I-I have to help…….’
If nobody helped, that girl burning alive might really die.
But.
‘…What would change if I helped?’
Hanabonyu had stepped into 4-Class at the age of nineteen this year, but he was still only barely able to use it. In actual one-on-one combat, it was extremely difficult for him to bring out his true ability.
If he charged that dark mage in this state, it would be nothing but a meaningless dog’s death.
Even while Hanabonyu hesitated and hid behind a rock, Berunkal kept chasing the girl, who was crawling and trying to flee, and shouted at her.
“Hey now, can a warrior really be that cowardly? Hm? You should get up and fight properly. Aren’t you a magic warrior? A magic warrior—the kind that exists to fight dark mages. So why are you acting so pathetic?”
It even sounded like he was speaking to him.
And yet Hanabonyu could do nothing.
“Damn it…….”
To begin with, not everyone who attended a magic warrior academy actually fought dark mages.
Most students were people like Hanabonyu—people who simply wanted to earn a diploma from a prestigious elite magic school and build a career in a safe, good workplace……
He had never thought he would encounter a dark mage in his entire life.
‘W-What am I supposed to do……’
With a trembling hand clamped over his mouth, his mind turning blank white, he desperately tried to think of some solution—
Whoosh—!
Something like a rocket shot past his side.
And immediately afterward, with a thunderous BOOM!!, thick smoke billowed up from the place where the dark mage had been standing.
A moment later, when the smoke cleared, the figure revealed there was……
none other than Stella Academy’s second-year S-Class, Dok Cheolgwang.
Because his supervising instructor had repeatedly told them to memorize the faces of the powerful championship candidates, he had no choice but to recognize him at once.
“Haha, I came over because I felt something suspicious nearby…… and sure enough, there was a suspicious bastard using suspicious magic here, huh?”
Boom! Boom!
As Dok Cheolgwang slammed his fists together and spoke, Berunkal retreated a fair distance, brushing off the dust on his body as he rose.
It looked as though a powerful collision had taken place, but aside from a few small scratches, there were no major injuries on him.
“Ha, this is something. I was planning to hunt Baek Yuseol before some other bastard eliminated him, and instead a delicacy comes to me on its own?”
“Hm! My body is made of muscle, so there won’t be much to chew on!”
The opponent was a dark mage.
And not just any dark mage, but a very strong one.
Anyone with half a brain would have realized that from looking at the situation.
And yet…… Dok Cheolgwang even bared his teeth and grinned leisurely.
‘No way……’
He would lose.
Dok Cheolgwang was one year younger than him, eighteen, but he was said to be a genius who had already reached 4-Class.
There was no doubt he was an outstanding talent.
But alone, he could never defeat Berunkal.
He should know that better than anyone, so how could he possibly act like that?
Dok Cheolgwang looked back at the girl behind him for a moment—
and then threw his fist forward.
Bang!
A sharp spear shot out from his fist and pierced straight through the girl’s chest.
“Ah……”
Because there was no pain in Dok Cheolgwang’s magic, the girl closed her eyes with a peaceful expression, then vanished into light.
[KILL! Dok Cheolgwang — Ban Yurin]
Since her elimination had now been processed, the mages waiting outside would notice her injuries immediately.
There would probably be some lingering aftereffects……
but if she received treatment, she would most likely survive.
“Ha, what the hell do you think you’re doing right now?”
“What else? I just did what a magic warrior ought to do. Now that there’s no obstacle in the way, let’s enjoy ourselves.”
Then, pounding his fists together, he added:
“For the record… not once since the day I was born have I ever fallen.”
— Read only on MugenCodex —
