Retire 243
by Cristae243 Civil Complaints (2)
You have to admit when you’re wrong. And you have to apologize. The faster you respond, the quicker the troublemaker—no, the other party—loses their will to fight.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t consider that part.”
“What?! No! I wasn’t expecting an apology from you, Mr. Woo!”
Kim Chaemin cried out, startled.
“It’s just that I was a little hurt…! I just want you to explain things properly!”
“Yes. That’s why I’m apologizing. You’re right, Ms. Kim. We were thinking too much from our own perspective. We’ve been too inconsiderate.”
“No! That’s not… well… I mean, we’re supposed to help each other out. We’re, uh, you know, colleagues… or something like that. We should help each other when things get tough.”
“We’re colleagues, but not employees, right?”
My words seemed to fluster her even more.
No matter how you look at it, for a mage, she really is a decent person. There’s a reason she gets along so well with Choi Jinwoo. Maybe thanks to that, even Park Seohyun has brightened up lately. Though sometimes, when things don’t go well, she still lets her hair down and broods.
“So I shouldn’t have made you feel like you had to say something first.”
“Uh…”
Kim Chaemin’s eyes rolled as she processed my apology, clearly flustered and calculating various things.
She was certain that Hong Seok-young and I were hiding something more, but was wondering if we’d actually tell her. At the same time, she looked worried, as if afraid I’d say not to worry about it and promise to be more careful in the future.
I decided to help her out of her dilemma.
Hong Seok-young had said it was all right to tell Kim Chaemin, but… could I really say it so easily? That I was from the lab, or what my birth parents were like, or even that I had a brother—those things I could say lightly. But this was on another level entirely.
“To be honest, Ms. Kim, I’ve been debating for a long time whether I should tell you… the circumstances, I guess you’d call them.”
I could trust Kim Chaemin. Yes. Regardless of her being a mage, her abilities, or whether her confidence was pride or arrogance, there was one thing I was sure of.
If things had gone as they should have, Kim Chaemin would have died.
That, more than anything, is what makes me trust her.
“If you’re all right with it, I can tell you. But.”
“…But?”
“Once you hear this, you’ll never be able to get out.”
“…What do you mean, never get out?”
“It means that once you hear this, you’re in the same boat as us. There’s no getting off.”
“Hmm.”
Since my words might not have gotten through, I made it even clearer.
“You can only get off if you die.”
“……”
“…Does that sound a bit off?”
“Yes…”
“It’s just that important. There’s no backing out. If you quit halfway, it would be a real problem.”
She blinked, then tilted her head.
“That important, huh…”
“It’s about the safety of my family.”
“Family…”
I half expected her to back off, to say she didn’t want to force the issue now that she knew how serious it was.
Even though Hong Seok-young had given his permission, I still didn’t feel comfortable telling someone else. To be honest, I hadn’t even intended to tell Hong Seok-young—he’d just figured it out.
If Kim Chaemin said she was okay with it first, I wouldn’t have to feel guilty about deceiving her. I decided to trust in the decency of a mage like her.
“All right.”
She seemed to have made up her mind, and looked up with a much brighter expression.
…Strange. Why do I feel so uneasy?
“If it’s that important, it’s better to have some safeguards, right?”
“…Excuse me?”
She did the exact opposite of what I’d hoped.
“A week—no, just give me two days. I need to prepare a few things.”
“What?”
“The rune experiment… It’s better to do it quickly, right? I just need to cast a few spells. It won’t take long.”
“W-wait. Safeguards?”
She burst out laughing.
“I can’t just listen to a story that concerns your family’s safety! I’ll bring a confidentiality contract or something.”
“……”
I stared at her, wondering if she was joking. She was laughing, but it didn’t seem like a lie. In fact, her eyes were shining with excitement, almost unnaturally so…
Right. Even if she’s a good person, a mage is still a mage. It was a mistake to think she’d just go along with my wishes.
I nodded.
I had no idea what she planned to prepare, but if I could put a leash on a great mage…
…would that be to my advantage?
This is complicated…
Leaving the unsolved mystery of the mage aside, I started with the rune experiment.
The experiment itself was simple.
All you needed was a well-drawn rune and a mage.
You could use a mana pen and skip the mage, but I hadn’t finished talking things through with Gamble yet. More importantly, for safety’s sake, a mage was essential. If this were a facility like the old Academy, we could run all sorts of magical experiments safely…
But even the Academy wasn’t exactly safe. I remembered how the building would get destroyed every now and then.
The training school building at least had some protective magic on it. Park Seohyun and Choi Jinwoo’s magic wasn’t really suited for breaking things, but you never know what could happen during combat training. Just look at the garden at Dayeon Pension. Sure, Sam Bloom tore it up, but most of the damage was from the kids’ training. Even if you don’t do much, trees get snapped and rocks get broken.
This world is far too fragile for Awakened to live in.
“This should be far enough, right?”
We’d gone to a spot away from the training school. Some kids on the field glanced over with curiosity, but that was it. I deliberately circled around to the back of the building to stay out of sight, and they quickly lost interest.
Kim Chaemin drew a rune on the ground.
“All set!”
At her signal, I channeled mana into my sword.
Blue flames flickered. In the rune Noah Michel had designed, as confirmed by the mana watch, only the function was described, not the method of use.
Still, the rune was activated, so it should work somehow.
Tiny flames crept across the bare earth, cleared of weeds to prevent any accidental fires. Even with Kim Chaemin there, it would be a problem if the fire spread, so I was as careful as possible with the firepower.
“Ah!”
The fire touched the rune drawn on the ground…
Kim Chaemin’s eyes widened.
“It worked?”
The flame vanished instantly.
“Amazing. You really can do anything with runes.”
“You grow plants with runes, too.”
“That’s not the same. Noah Michel must really be a genius, to come up with a rune like this.”
I shook my head.
“It might not have been Noah Michel who made it.”
The amount of flame sucked into the rune wasn’t much. Once the rune had absorbed a certain amount, it stopped responding even when more flame passed over it. In fact, the rune’s mana became unstable.
So that was the limit for a rune of that size.
“If it wasn’t Noah Michel who made it… Ah!”
She stared at the rune in fascination, then turned to me in surprise.
“A monster?”
“We don’t know what’s in Mont-Saint-Michel. Ms. Kim, do you remember the nickname for Mont-Saint-Michel?”
“The Library…”
There was a reason that dungeon had earned such a nickname. And why mages were so desperate to sneak inside.
It’s been concluded that gate occurrences are random, but that doesn’t mean there are no patterns at all. There’s a certain consistency between the environment inside a dungeon and the environment outside.
If the dungeon is a sea, the gate forms near the ocean.
If the dungeon is a mountain, the gate forms somewhere with lots of trees.
You might get a goblin burrow in the middle of a desert, but you’ll never see a dungeon full of water there.
Mont-Saint-Michel’s Library is similar. The dungeon sits at the top floor of an ancient monastery built on a tiny island. According to someone who barely made it out alive, there’s no other dungeon as intricate as that one.
Beautiful stained glass, ornate architecture. Shelves packed with books.
Books.
Books written in unknown languages.
Books that ignite the curiosity of mages.
“You’re saying Noah Michel uses monster runes? Do monsters have that kind of intelligence?”
“Look at Hope. He’s dumb, but he’s cunning.”
“Well, that’s true, but…”
There’s no guarantee monsters can’t use magic. There are plenty of monsters with bizarre abilities, even if it’s not exactly magic.
I really do need to find a way to access Mont-Saint-Michel’s information.
“Then I’ll erase the rune.”
For now, I needed to focus on the task at hand.
Kim Chaemin cast a shield first. Her casting speed was astonishing—fitting for a great mage. Within the shield, a sprout grew. She checked the shield again, then extended the sprout into a thin vine and used it to erase the rune.
And then—
Bang!!
“Wow.”
She whistled in admiration.
“That’s some effect.”
“It’s too much, actually.”
I frowned.
Yes. The effect was too strong. Even more than I’d expected. More precisely, it was stronger than the flame I’d created should have been.
I hadn’t been using this sword for long, but I’d watched my sister use it up close more than anyone. Now that she was gone, there was no one who knew its abilities better than I did.
Given how much flame the rune had absorbed, there was no way it should have exploded with that much force.
What is this? Does the rune have some kind of amplification function?
“That would make setting fires in dungeons really easy. Oh, but the fire goes out quickly.”
“It’s because the flame is made from my mana. Without a mana supply, it goes out right away.”
“Hm… Then if you stored a spell instead of your fire, it wouldn’t go out, right?”
“…You want to burn something? What?”
“Oh, my magic doesn’t go well with fire!”
But she didn’t deny my suspicion.
“Sometimes I wonder if it wouldn’t be easier to just set fire to the dungeon and escape through the gate…”
“……”
That was actually my sister’s go-to method for dealing with low-level but annoying dungeons. It worked best in forests or plains—anywhere with plenty of flammable material.
She glanced at me and shrugged.
“Wouldn’t it be great to clear dungeons quickly and safely?”
“…True.”
“What if you used that rune to make a bunch of bombs and scattered them all over Mont-Saint-Michel?”
That was tempting.
“Right? Sounds good, doesn’t it?”
She grinned, proud of herself.
“Anyway, it’s really fascinating. Mr. Woo, do you know anything about how runes work?”
“How they work?”
Her laughter faded, and she started to look genuinely puzzled.
“Magic is at least somewhat understandable. There are rules. Sure, it depends a lot on the mage’s mana, but there’s a theory: move the mana like this, and you get this effect.”
“Yes.”
“But runes… I just don’t get them. Even when I analyze the runes you’ve shown me, they’re all over the place. There’s some kind of logic, but something that works one way here does the exact opposite over there.”
She fiddled with her hair as she spoke.
“At first, I thought they were based on magical formulas, and that’s not entirely wrong, but it doesn’t fit exactly either…”
“I suppose not.”
“…You know something, don’t you? Are you sure you’re not a mage, too?”
“No. I’m not a mage.”
Once the last embers on the ground had died out, she dropped the shield. I scuffed the ruined rune with my foot until it was completely erased.
“When you’re ready to hear my story, I’ll explain that too.”