49. Witch (9)
The Twelve Divine Moons, mysterious beings born inheriting the power of the twelve moons, the seasons, and the elements.
Each of them had been born with different powers, and their temperaments, appearances, and even their individual natures were all so varied that there was not a single trait among them that could truly be called similar.
Some hid in the cracks between dimensions and lived among the spirits.
Some built kingdoms of their own in deep places beyond sight and ruled over their subjects.
Some slept for long ages.
Some suffered by their own hand in order to restrain their own power.
And some hid among humans, pretending to be no different from them.
Grey Sky October was one of the most unremarkable among them.
He simply drifted about at leisure, observing the world and interfering in nothing.
But recently, a very slow crack had begun to form in Grey Sky October’s “individuality.”
He—who had never once interfered in the laws by which the world turned…
…had begun, little by little, to lay his hands upon it.
‘It cannot be helped.’
Grey Sky October moved while thinking that, yet no one knew better than he did that there was no such thing in this world as “something that cannot be helped,” and so he fell into contradiction and confusion.
‘Why?’
The world flows along the course of destiny.
If the owner of the neighborhood bakery is fated to eat bread for breakfast today, then that fate will be fulfilled without fail.
He had observed destiny over and over again, and thus had come to believe with firm conviction that “destiny” was something that never changed.
But lately…
…the world was strange.
No one else would be able to feel it, but Grey Sky October could tell.
The world was no longer flowing according to the proper order of destiny.
The moment in which he realized this most decisively came when he arrived at the Levian Coast of the Adolevit Kingdom.
‘This is…!’
The sea, which had remained frozen for hundreds of years, had completely thawed, and the Levian Coast, having regained its season, no longer suffered beneath glacial cold.
People were out by the shore in swimsuits, enjoying the warmth of summer and surfing in the sea, and the pirate ship Black Cross, which should have remained eternally trapped in the frozen heart of the ocean, had become a tourist attraction.
This was strange.
Far too… strange.
He knew it well, because he had observed destiny hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of times.
The Levian Coast should by now have been swallowed by an icy catastrophe, transformed into a hell where not a single living creature could survive.
And yet it was imitating some sort of holiday tourist destination.
‘While my gaze was elsewhere… what happened here?’
With his gray eyes, he looked up at the sky.
No one would be able to see the stars through a sky flooded with sunlight, but within Grey Sky October’s pupils, the constellations of the night sky shone in perfect clarity.
‘…So this time, you do not intend merely to watch destiny from afar.’
At last, he took his gaze off the constellations and turned to leave.
“H-Hey! Wait! That’s a cliff! It’s dangerous if you go toward the edge—!”
An ordinary man shouted from behind him, but Grey Sky October vanished in an instant into a fissure of gray space.
“Uh, huh…?”
As he disappeared in the blink of an eye, the man who had tried to stop him tilted his head, wondering whether he had imagined the whole thing.
It seemed strange things had been happening quite often these days.
Drip.
The sound of a water droplet falling echoed through the cramped space like a reverberation.
Splash.
Clutching her abdomen, the witch Melisher slowly made her way through Arcanium’s underground sewers. The wound she had suffered from the witch hunter before still had not healed, making it impossible for her to properly unleash her magic power.
The very fact that she had to wander around someplace like a stinking sewer was disgusting and humiliating, but it could not be helped. For the moment, she had to be satisfied with having survived an encounter with a witch hunter at all.
“Haa… still, it’s fine…”
She only needed a little time.
If she recovered just a bit more, she would be able to reopen the Witch Restaurant like before.
At the same time, she could not let too long a gap pass. Students whose addiction remained weak would quickly free themselves from her magic if too much time went by.
Especially students from a prestigious academy, people who had been born with magic power in their very nature—those would break free all the faster.
“Hey there, you look pretty hurt. Why don’t you come by for a visit?”
At the voice from behind her, Melisher flinched and immediately leveled her staff.
There stood a woman, smiling brightly as she looked her way.
“What are you so startled for? There’s nothing strange about someone living in Arcanium’s underground sewers, is there?”
“…The Dark Mage Union?”
“Yep. Sharp, aren’t you? We’re not particularly hostile toward your kind. We could even help you a little, you know?”
“Get lost. You think I wouldn’t know you came for my crystal sphere?”
“Aww〜 well, that’s true too, but shouldn’t people in hiding get along? Ah, maybe you’re a little different? I hear you’ve been running around quite openly up on the surface.”
“At least I’m better than your lot, hiding in filthy sewers every time you crawl into view like cockroaches.”
“Sure, maybe. But you know…”
The dark mage woman looked Melisher slowly up and down, then smiled with a fishy sort of grin.
“Looking at the state you’re in after getting beaten up like that, I’m thinking it might actually be better to hide.”
“You little…”
“Think it over again later〜 Living hidden down here isn’t all that bad, you know?”
“No matter how miserable I become, I’ll never live some vulgar life like yours.”
“Mm-hmm! Then take care〜!”
As soon as the dark mage woman disappeared into the shadows, Melisher collapsed against the wall and sat down.
“Disgusting bitch…”
Magicians, dark mages—they were all the same breed. She had reached the limit of her patience from holding back the urge to rip their limbs off one by one, dissect them, and shove the pieces in front of their faces.
‘If I expand my domain into Arcanium, I’m cleaning out the sewers first…’
She had heard that Arcanium’s overall ruler, the “Magic Governor,” kept a few vermin in the underground for his own purposes, but she had never expected a dark mage from the Dark Mage Union to show herself so openly.
‘The Dark Mage Union…’
When she thought about it, it was laughable.
Dark people, dark mages—
they all had organizations of some sort.
Only witches had no such thing.
By nature, witches had no choice but to live alone, which made the very act of forming a group impossible from the start.
‘Anyway, this city is revolting…’
By now she was sick to death of Arcanium, but it was too late to leave.
She had poured everything she had into this place, so the only thing left for her was to run the Witch Restaurant as best she could until the day she died.
Tak-tak-tak-tak!
“Search over there!”
“Yes, sir!”
“…Ugh!”
At the distant sound of men shouting, Melisher quickly scattered illusion into the air and concealed herself.
If she truly set her mind to it, she could kill them…
…but in her current exhausted state, she had no confidence in handling Stella’s Knights if they kept coming in waves.
‘Of all things, Stella is moving directly…’
Could her luck really be this bad?
But even so, it was fine.
There was no magician capable of piercing illusion and finding her location.
‘My range of movement has only gotten a little narrower. I just need to move carefully, then reopen the restaurant.’
The Witch Restaurant was itself already a being composed of imagination. No matter how much Stella’s Knights struggled, they would never be able to capture her.
Unless an irregularity like a witch hunter interfered…
…she could draw students in as much as she pleased.
‘Besides, I already hunted one witch hunter before, so that problem is gone now.’
Thinking that, she stood up.
Now was the time…
…to make a very small first step toward a brilliant future.
Five days passed after the terror incident at the Witch Restaurant.
During that time, Stella’s magic investigation unit had mobilized every kind of advanced magical device they had to try to find some trace of something here, but unfortunately, they had learned nothing.
Considering that witches were unknown beings, that could only be called natural.
You want to know what I had been doing during that time?
“…Hey, student Baek Yuseol. How long do you plan to keep this up? Shouldn’t you do something by now?”
Nothing.
I did absolutely nothing.
I simply stood there and waited at the crime scene.
If Stella’s Knights were slowly starting to get irritated at the sight of me, that was only natural.
“Once this case is over, I will report your conduct exactly as it is to Commander Arain. Do you think getting a temporary knighthood means you’ve become something special?”
“No.”
Wouldn’t it be nice if I had become something special?
If anything, I had more to say to Arain. He had saddled me with a whole pack of useless morons who were no help at all.
“Yaaawn…”
When I let out an enormous yawn, the knight clicked his tongue and turned away.
Five hours passed after that.
Even by the time the sun was beginning to set, the knights had still found nothing, and in the end they withdrew.
Even after everyone else had gone back, leaving behind only the bare minimum of manpower, I stubbornly remained where I was.
‘Exactly five days.’
The amount of time it takes for a witch hunter to revive from death.
Hissss…
A dark black mist rose from the crime scene, then gradually floated up into the air, beginning to form a shape that resembled a person.
After checking to see whether there was anyone nearby watching, I approached it.
And I immediately knew my guess had been correct.
“…I thought maybe, but just as expected.”
—Yo…u…
“It’s been a while, rookie witch hunter.”
—Haa…
I had met that witch hunter once before, on the train.
The very same witch hunter who, as far as I could tell, did not seem to have much experience yet.
“Did the witch get you?”
—Yeah… I look ridiculous…
If I had to compare it to something, it was like a tiger going to hunt a rabbit and getting eaten instead.
Because this was a fight he could never have lost—and yet he had.
The witch hunter seemed badly discouraged. Even in that pitch-black, shapeless form, his shoulders drooped.
Seeing that, I thought to myself,
‘This witch hunter isn’t the one from the original episode.’
The witch hunter who had appeared in that episode had possessed the trait [Dead Witch’s Breath].
That trait had driven Eizel to the brink of death before Hae Wonryang and Ma Yuseong saved her, if I remembered right.
But the witch hunter in front of me did not possess that trait.
Instead, he had the trait [Only once, five days later, I shall return from death].
And what that meant was—
‘…There’s another witch hunter.’
In other words, the witch hunter who attacked Eizel in the original game was a different person.
That was a very bad sign for me.
I had just started thinking maybe the witch hunter was dead for good, but apparently not.
“Why did you come here?”
—…I came because I heard you were hunting a witch here.
“So you tried to get there first and got your ass handed to you? Pathetic.”
Maybe he had nothing left to say, because the glow in the witch hunter’s eyes began to dim.
“I told you clearly, didn’t I? She’s not an easy witch to hunt. Why do you think I threw away even my honor and took on a lousy human form like this?”
I dragged out the lie I had told before and roughly fitted it into the situation, and because it sounded strangely plausible, the witch hunter became even more speechless.
—I apologize…
“Whatever. It doesn’t matter. You’re not completely dead, are you?”
The only reason this bastard had survived was because of the witch’s misstep.
That witch probably had great power, but she likely did not know that witch hunters could even defy death itself.
—I will leave what happens here to you.
“You’re going back?”
—Yes… shamefully, I have caused you trouble.
“You know that much, huh? But you’re really just going to leave?”
—…?
Did he think I had waited around all this time just to confirm that a witch hunter would revive?
Of course not.
My goal was to borrow the hand of a real witch hunter for an easier witch hunt.
The guy in front of me did not have the power to take that witch down, but every ability he possessed would give me an enormous advantage in hunting witches.
“I’m planning to go take that witch’s head this time, and after she did that to you, it’ll leave a bad taste in your mouth if you just go back, won’t it?”
—That is true, but…
“Besides, you broke the rule of kin-betrayal, something considered an absolute taboo among witch hunters.”
—Wait. Saying I broke the rules just because I went after the same prey is way too much of a stretch!
“What? How old are you, anyway? I know a guy who got executed after stealing another hunter’s prey once. Ever seen that happen?”
—…No.
“Then don’t talk like you know. I’ve seen it.”
I had not.
“Anyway, if you don’t want to die, help me out for a bit. You’ve got a hideout, right? Open the door for me. I’ll go grab the tools I need and come back out.”
—What about your subspace…?
“Oh, come on. I told you last time. I lost it fighting a witch. Are you making me say it twice?”
—…Fine. I’ll open it.
Maybe because he had already had the experience of getting shaken down by me before, he looked very hesitant, but what else could he do?
If the threat worked properly, there was no way he could resist me anymore.
Crunch! Hummmmm—!
Space split cleanly in half, revealing a pitch-black subspace.
I stepped in ahead of him by a single stride, the corners of my lips slowly curling upward.
For some reason, today felt like my lucky day.
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