Retire 520

520 To Remain a Magician (4)

“Ahahaha!”

Kim Chae-min let out a hearty laugh.

It was the happiest I’d ever seen him since I’d met him.

Aside from laughing louder than usual, he didn’t seem hurt at all, and really, there’s nothing wrong with laughing, is there?

I swear, I wanted to welcome Kim Chae-min back with no reservations.

But when I saw the dead fish-eye floating behind him like a balloon, I couldn’t help but feel a little wary.

…Why on earth is that thing there?

There was no doubt it was the same eyeball that had been behind Noah Michelle. Even though it was now tightly bound in rose vines. If anything, that only made it more certain. I didn’t know the details, but it was clear Kim Chae-min had subdued it.

“Haha, seeing you all alive without me is a relief. At least you can take care of yourselves, huh?”

“Ah, yes…”

I exchanged glances with my father.

Kim Chae-min was never the type to hold back or stay quiet, but something about him now was off.

At first, I thought he was just excited to have rejoined us, but the more he spoke, the more obvious it became that something was wrong.

“Um, Mr. Kim?”

“Oh, you’re not wearing sunglasses anymore? By the way, I was curious—besides your eyes, what else…?”

“Magician! That’s personal information, you can’t just ask that!”

“Oh, right, right!”

Especially his conversation with Han Tae-kyung was veering off in an alarmingly strange direction.

Han Tae-kyung didn’t seem offended by Kim Chae-min’s question. But he blinked in confusion, then looked at me. Hope, who’d been awkwardly stammering through the conversation, also looked at me, waving his hand as if begging me to do something.

But even if you look at me like that…

I didn’t know how Kim Chae-min ended up carrying that eyeball around like a balloon, but I could guess what state he was in. It was something you sometimes saw when exploring dungeons with magicians.

Usually, it happened when a magician used too much magic in a place oversaturated with mana. The pressure in the empty space would build up, and the magician would enter a state of overexcitement.

Alternatively, if you kept using magic in a sealed space where the flow of mana was almost stopped, you could get drunk on your own power. I’d heard it was a bit like being intoxicated.

I’d seen both cases with my own eyes. In this dungeon, aside from Noah Michelle, I hadn’t sensed any other mana, and with the way the space was divided up… and thinking of all the roses we’d seen on the way here, I figured it was probably the latter.

“Okay, Mr. Kim.”

If it wasn’t mana intoxication, you just had to keep him from using any more magic. In Kim Chae-min’s case, he was stable enough that he’d recover soon.

My father had him sit down and focus on his breathing. Kim Chae-min, like a child at an amusement park, swung the vine attached to the eyeball. The way the floating eyeball bobbed and swayed in time…

…I really had no idea what I was doing here.

Maybe I would have been better off just staying at school and leaving this to my father.

The more time passed, the more certain I became: I wasn’t suited for this kind of thing.

“Here, drink some water.”

“……”

“Feeling better?”

“Haha, I’m always calm!”

“Not quite yet. Here, have an energy bar too. Which flavor do you want?”

“Chocolate!”

“Alright… Have some more water, too.”

While Kim Chae-min calmed down, Han Tae-kyung and Hope slowly edged away from him and clung to me.

“What is it?”

“I’m not the only one who can see that eyeball, right?”

Han Tae-kyung asked cautiously.

“The thing Mr. Kim is holding? I can see it.”

“Master seemed so nonchalant, I just had to check.”

“Why is he carrying that thing around?!”

“Maybe he just wanted to show off his hunt.”

Hope looked at me as if I were crazy, then shook his head.

“Now that we’ve found the magician, are we leaving the dungeon?”

“……”

“We’re not?”

“Not sure.”

I frowned, trailing off.

Either way, now was our chance.

Whatever Noah Michelle had planned to do in this dungeon, I doubted she wanted to be seen by others.

She probably hadn’t had as much time as she planned. When she drove out Moby, she must have thought she could finish quickly and leave.

But unfortunately, recreating Mont-Saint-Michel inside the dungeon, she hadn’t found the “book” she wanted… and then we showed up, making her anxious. If she’s letting us wander the dungeon without interference, she must be trying to confirm something before we disrupt her further.

“Are you trying to find Noah?”

“……”

We hadn’t hidden our entry into the dungeon. The manpower had been focused on purifying Moby’s blood, but a backup team was scheduled to arrive soon after we entered. If we didn’t come out after a certain amount of time, the backup team would enter the dungeon.

I didn’t know if Michelle was aware of the backup team, but in a sense, she had no way out now. Even if she left through the gate, she’d run into the backup team, and even if the dungeon quietly disappeared instead of exploding, she’d still encounter them.

Any hunter who worked with the government would know who Noah Michelle was…

“What do you think?”

“Huh?”

“Your opinion. Let’s make use of being a small guild. I want to respect the members’ opinions as much as possible.”

Hope stared blankly at me.

This time, I asked him.

“What? You’re usually so talkative.”

“…I don’t really have any thoughts.”

Hope flinched and avoided my gaze.

I narrowed my eyes.

“For me, well, we need to get out of the dungeon! Who knows when it’ll blow up! I don’t want to be caught in the middle of an explosion.”

“Me neither.”

“So, yeah, that’s it!”

Hope still wouldn’t meet my eyes.

The way he awkwardly pursed his lips made him look just like a kid caught lying.

He was definitely thinking something else…

“Senior, what about you? You must have an opinion.”

While I was wondering how to get Hope to talk, he deflected to Han Tae-kyung.

Han Tae-kyung looked at Hope and me with little interest, then answered.

“I already said.”

He, too, subtly avoided my eyes.

“If you want to avoid trouble…”

He didn’t finish the sentence, but the meaning was obvious.

“What about you, senior? You must have something in mind.”

“I might not. It’s hard to expect anything grand in a situation like this.”

“Oh, come on. You, senior?”

Han Tae-kyung waved off my words with a laugh, as if I’d made a weak joke.

“…Considering the risk of an explosion, it’s safest to look for the gate. We don’t know how bad an explosion might be, and nothing about a dungeon explosion sounds good.”

“So we should look for the gate first?”

“We should hear what Master and Mr. Kim think, but still.”

I hesitated a moment, then said,

“It’s not just about avoiding trouble—I want to know what Michelle is looking for here. If she’s searching for a book, that means its contents must be important.”

“Because that book made Michelle an archmage?”

I nodded.

“Yes. The Mont-Saint-Michel dungeon is off-limits, but we know there are still raiding parties that sneak in. If Michelle wasn’t a special case… there could be another Michelle among other magicians.”

“I never thought of it that way… but I get what you mean. Even if that thing can’t get out, we can’t stop people from going in.”

If this were Korea, maybe we could do something.

But in another country, especially one as far away as France, there was nothing we could do. Even now, the association begged people every year not to go in.

“As Mr. Han said… we need to be sure it’s a walkthrough for Noah Michelle, not for all magicians.”

---

“Ugh… I’m really sorry.”

The hearty laughter stopped. Kim Chae-min buried his face in his hands, looking like he wanted to crawl into a hole.

“I was… a little… not myself.”

“Were you intoxicated by mana?”

“I think… yeah, that’s what happened…”

“It happens. So, can you explain what that eyeball is now?”

Kim Chae-min, still holding a half-eaten energy bar, began to explain.

“So after we all split up, I was in total darkness. Mr. Hong said you all experienced something similar, right?”

Kim Chae-min, too, had sensed Michelle’s mana in the darkness.

Unlike us, who received visual information, as a magician, Kim Chae-min noticed the anomaly in the flow of mana.

“I recognized Michelle’s mana from Marseille. She didn’t even bother to hide it, maybe because she didn’t think anyone would come. Usually, she’s very careful to conceal it.”

“Can magicians recognize mana?”

“I think so? I made a point of remembering Michelle’s mana. Even without that, it was strange.”

“What do you mean, strange?”

“Hmm… It was collapsing.”

That matched what Hope had pointed out.

After hearing Hope’s theory, Kim Chae-min agreed.

“Even if she was drawing on the core’s power, in the end, it’s Michelle’s magic—her mana—that uses it. If it collapses, everything collapses. One can’t fall apart without the other. Besides, she fought me over that eyeball, so it must have been even harder.”

“So that eyeball is…”

“With no core, she made a makeshift core out of a monster’s part. Or rather, a controller, not a core?”

At the most unexpected moment, the research Noah Michelle had been conducting in the Ark’s lab surfaced.

The lab itself had been shut down by my father and Lee Mi-seon, so there shouldn’t have been anywhere for proper research. But maybe it was different if you used monsters instead of people.

Was it possible to do this even at this point, not twenty years in the future?

Or was it just another spell Michelle had taken from the library?

“Basically, only the administrator can touch a dungeon’s core… In our terms, that’s the boss monster. The strongest being in the dungeon.”

“There was only Moby here.”

“I don’t know why she didn’t kill it… Maybe Moby just ran away instead of fighting. But that’s not the point.”

Kim Chae-min seemed about to launch into a complex lecture on magic theory, mana flow, and the intellectual battles between magicians, but he cut himself short.

“Michelle was distracted, so it was easy to take control. Since there’s a pair of controllers, she must have thought it was fine to give up one. Besides, she probably figured I wouldn’t be able to use it properly anyway.”

“…You can’t?”

“Unfortunately, no. But I can still destabilize the dungeon.”

Kim Chae-min shook the vine. The eyeball twitched limply, dragged along by his touch.

Even up close, nothing was visible except Kim Chae-min’s mana. The vine must have been blocking Michelle’s magic.

“Still, Michelle hasn’t completely let go of the controller. Maybe she thought I couldn’t handle it? That’s what happens when you underestimate people.”

“Can’t handle what?”

Kim Chae-min popped the rest of the energy bar into his mouth and chewed with determination.

“I don’t know if I can find the gate, but I can find Noah Michelle.”