Retire 507

507 In a Dream (2)

“What did you say?”

“Let’s set a fire.”

Father offered no further explanation. With those words, he truly began preparing to set the place ablaze.

No… Wait, what?

I saw Han Taekyung dash beneath the bookshelf at Father’s command, heading toward Kim Chaemin.

“……”

I followed after Father, sword in hand, with a dumbfounded look on my face.

Soon, a signal came from Kim Chaemin through the vines, perhaps after Han Taekyung had spoken to him. Kim Chaemin was already familiar with my mana; we’d pulled a similar trick when we took down Henry Lehmann.

Wasn’t it the same principle?

What did I know? I wasn’t a magician. If Kim Chaemin said it was fine, then it was fine.

Though the abrupt order to set a fire had thrown me off, it wasn’t as if I’d become a hunter with nothing to my name. Dungeon raids weren’t my main job, but how many times had I gone in on Han Taekyung’s behalf? Even if that weren’t the case, I’d worked with Father for years; it was obvious what he was planning.

And above all, it was Father who had taught me about dungeons. I quickly realized what he was aiming for.

In urgent situations, a glance can say more than a thousand words.

By the time the signal came from Kim Chaemin, my confusion had faded, and I took my position with Father.

Kim Chaemin’s vines were already woven tightly between the bookshelves. They hadn’t been meant for this, but… the goal was the same: to capture Michel.

Thoom…

At that moment.

“Ugh!”

The timing was off. Not for me, but for Hope, who was leaping about over there.

At last, even he made a mistake. Judging by his sweat-soaked face, it was bound to happen.

Hope failed his jump and slipped from the edge of a bookshelf. The dust, thick and red from Michel’s rage, looked as if it would dissolve anything it touched. It was so dark that, even though the swirling motes clumped together, it resembled sewage being dumped down a drain.

Just before Hope was swallowed by that filth, Father intervened.

“Argh!”

Father hoisted Hope onto his shoulder and put distance between them and Michel.

Michel’s eyes went wide, as if only now recalling that there were other hunters in the dungeon besides Hope. The fish eyes floating behind Michel’s back stopped spinning.

Just what time was Michel seeing?

It left a bad taste in my mouth to have to face someone so clearly out of their mind. But that didn’t mean I could show mercy.

I remembered something Father had said before. It must have been after I returned to the past, not long after I started working at the demonstration high school.

I’d once asked if it wouldn’t be better to have the kids get proper counseling, since the incident in Myeong-dong might have left them shaken.

Father had told me then: when an awakened person panics and goes on a rampage, it’s not easy to stop them. There had been attempts, but after someone died, both sides avoided each other.

Just look at Seo Hanseong, who broke the counseling room table.

Kang Taewoo, too, had trouble controlling his strength when he first awakened. Even Yoo Jieun broke a fair amount of school property before she got used to it.

It wasn’t quite the same as the instability right after awakening.

Still, the enhanced bodies of awakened people could easily harm others, regardless of their will.

And if that awakened person was half out of their mind…

“……”

I coated my sword with mana.

At least Michel wasn’t wandering the city streets like Lehmann.

Lehmann had caused deaths. But Michel, fortunately, had holed up in the dungeon. If we stopped him here, there would be no casualties. At worst, a city would have to evacuate because a monster had broken in.

Whoosh.

Blue flames caught easily on Kim Chaemin’s vines. It was like lighting a fuse. The blue fire bloomed along the rose vines, which were woven densely like a spiderweb between the bookshelves. If the fire followed the vines, it would, of course, spread to the shelves as well.

What would Michel do now, after all his efforts to preserve this fake library?

…Maybe, information aside, it would be better to deal with Michel quickly.

I swallowed the words that kept threatening to spill out. I decided to leave this part to Father. It wasn’t the sort of thing a father should ask his son to do.

“No!!!!”

Michel’s voice grew distant, then close again. It felt as if the space itself was stretching. The tremors, which had been dying down, now shook violently once more. Thud, thud, thud, thud. The rhythm quickened. The sound was so strong it made my body tremble, and before I knew it, even my heart was beating in time with it.

Thud. Thud. Thud.

“No, no! I can’t, I can’t! I haven’t seen it all yet!!”

The bookshelves didn’t burn easily. But the books caught fire at once. In the blink of an eye, every book on the shelf that had first caught fire was reduced to ash.

Even accounting for the sword’s power, it was too fast. Were dungeon books made of especially flammable material? Or did they react to the mana in the flames?

“I have to check!!!”

Michel’s face twisted as if he might burst into tears at any moment. The fish eyes, which had stopped, began spinning again. The bloodshot eyes were grotesque beyond words. Blood dripped from the irises, pooling at Michel’s feet.

…Moby’s blood had a hint of gold, like other fairies. But that blood was as red as human blood.

“……!”

Instead of watching further, I shielded my eyes.

An explosive surge of mana erupted from the eyes. Maybe it really did explode.

What came after the mana was a light so bright I could barely keep my eyes open.

I couldn’t predict how Michel would react, but, honestly, it didn’t feel all that dangerous. Hope’s mistake was only natural, since he’d been drawing all of Michel’s attention alone.

If Hope had seriously attacked Michel, things might have gone differently. Hope never looked serious, but his skills were real. Honestly, even if it would be hard for him to take down Han Taekyung as he was now, it didn’t seem impossible. As for Kim Chaemin… maybe he could pull it off.

Michel wasn’t an archmage in name only. If he’d used the same magic he’d used to burn the egg in Marseille, Hope wouldn’t have been able to buy us this much time, and we wouldn’t have been able to just stand back and watch.

It was all because Michel was trying to preserve the library’s form.

Whether that was a blessing or not, I couldn’t say.

The blinding light slowly faded.

“……This is…”

If the library had simply reappeared, I would have expected it.

But it was so far from what I’d anticipated that even Father couldn’t help but voice his confusion.

Before my vision cleared, what I noticed first was the scent of grass. It was the fresh air I’d breathed in when I climbed the mountain with Father at dawn.

Next came the subtle fragrance of roses. I didn’t know other flowers, but at least I could distinguish roses now. The presence of this scent meant, at the very least, that Kim Chaemin was safe. That was a relief.

My vision returned just after that.

As expected, I saw the field conjured by Kim Chaemin’s unique magic. Roses were there, too. The rose petals fluttered gently, though there was no wind.

“This isn’t… the library.”

“Wasn’t the fourth floor of Mont Saint Michel just such a maze?”

“…Yes. A maze the size of a city.”

Father set Hope down from his arms.

“Alex. What do you think?”

“Even if you ask me…”

Hope frowned, following Father’s lead.

It was a narrow corridor, just wide enough that you could touch both walls with outstretched arms. The walls were high, but covered in Kim Chaemin’s rose vines, so instead of the bleak, chilling look I’d heard about from Funes, it looked more like the extravagant, useless garden of a splendid castle.

“It’s too narrow.”

“Narrow?”

“It’s just like that library floor. The real maze isn’t this small. And it doesn’t have a ceiling.”

Hope pointed upward.

“And there’s nothing weird floating up there, either.”

As Hope said, the real maze wasn’t covered overhead. You could climb the walls and look down on the whole thing. A maze like this couldn’t really be called a maze.

But the reason none of us dared climb the walls was, just as Hope said, because of the strange thing on the ceiling.

It made sense that there was space instead of a ceiling. It was a dungeon, after all. In the real Mont Saint Michel, you couldn’t see space except from the lobby floor, but here, you could. That endless, star-studded void.

And then, something I’d never seen in any dungeon.

It was different from the starlight I’d seen before. It almost looked like the cheap graphics you’d see in an SF movie or a space documentary. Maybe this was what it would feel like to see a burning star up close.

It was certainly bright enough to hurt your eyes, but there was no pain. Just as the dungeon hadn’t grown dark, even though it was night outside.

A massive, glowing sphere floated on the ceiling. A star. Or a sun. Or a moon. The sphere drifting through the space that looked like a night sky could have been called any of those.

If only it hadn’t spun around to reveal a golden iris.

“…Moby had two eye sockets, right?”

“Unless it’s grown or lost an eye.”

There had been two wounds, both oozing thick blood.

“Aren’t they different sizes? The one behind Michel was small! No bigger than Michel himself!”

“Maybe it was compressed.”

“Is that even possible?”

“Noah’s a magician. Isn’t that the sort of thing a magician can do?”

I had no idea what Hope thought magicians were capable of.

But I nodded. It made sense.

“So, what is that thing supposed to do? It’s not going to suddenly fire a beam or something, is it?”

“……”

With a magician, you could never say for sure.

“Maybe we should have just caught Noah when we had the chance.”

Hope voiced the question I hadn’t been able to bring myself to ask.

Father hesitated for a moment, then shook his head.

“We still need to talk to him.”

“What could you possibly talk about with him…? You saw it. He’s in no state for a conversation.”

“I don’t think so.”

Father pressed down on Alex’s head and gestured for me to follow. The rose vines were moving slightly. Kim Chaemin’s mana stretched ahead. I followed the places where the mana was thickest.

Father walked behind me and spoke.

“Heejae, if you’re right, then Noah Michel handed his parents over to monsters with his own hands. No matter how young he was, could he really not have known what he was doing?”

“…What if Michel was deceived by that fairy?”

“That’s possible. But does that erase over twenty years of what he’s done? Outside the dungeon, it’s hard for a monster’s influence to persist. Especially since he was so young, the magicians must have protected him. In that situation, it would have been hard for Michel to sneak into Mont Saint Michel. It must have taken at least ten years before he could move freely. Until then, Noah Michel had time.”

Father continued in a calm voice.

“Those ten years. Whatever Michel agonized over, he made his decision. And then he was active for another ten years. It’s hard to believe that a magician like that would lose his mind just because his dead parents’ will was discovered.”

“Then what do you think Michel’s goal is?”

“Well…”

The eye in the sky spun round and round. It was a maddening sight. What was I hoping to gain by being here?

…Well, it was because I wanted everyone to survive.

“Maybe, just as he said, he wants to see for himself.”