Episode 377

Episode 377

The poison of a dark mage wasn’t an ordinary poison found in nature, but closer to an imaginary poison conjured by the mage’s own power.

A skilled dark mage would link and fuse several such imaginary poisons, creating even more complex and virulent toxins.

The undead mage, of course, was of that caliber.

-To complete the Marking (Takak) Poison, you must start with fifteen basic poisons.

“……”

-First, mix these three poisons…

The undead mage was definitely explaining something, but nothing really registered in Lee Han’s mind.

Such was the advanced level of poison-element magic.

-…You got all that! Try it!

“…Poison, arise and boil up. Flowering poison…”

He didn’t understand even half of it, but in the urgency of the moment, Lee Han chanted the spell anyway.

In midair, poisons formed and clustered together, changing color.

-Shoot it as soon as it’s ready! There’s no time!

“…Move!”

Faster than the spell the undead mage had cast earlier, Lee Han’s poison formed and shot forward.

In terms of raw elemental manipulation, the undead mage couldn’t keep up with Lee Han.

While the undead mage had honed more advanced magics instead of practicing such techniques, Lee Han had trained harshly and relentlessly.

-Excellent!

But the undead mage misunderstood Lee Han’s unusual abilities in a different way.

He assumed only a supremely talented mage could manipulate magic that well.

With expectations high, the undead mage was deeply disappointed when Lee Han’s Marking Poison failed to melt the berserker’s torso entirely and only burned away its flesh.

Sssss—

-Ah… what?! If you’re so slow with undead summoning and can’t even handle poison, why are you a dark mage?!

The undead mage stomped his foot, unable to believe it.

With such broad magic skills, spell-chaining ability, and elemental manipulation, Lee Han seemed a better mage than himself—so why was he making so many mistakes?

“I’m sorry.”

Incomplete or not, accomplishing that much under these circumstances was, in truth, impressive.

It was a situation in which, objectively, he had every right to be angry…

Lee Han apologized.

He was just so used to the unreasonable demands of crazy professors.

Ogoldos, on the other hand, got angry in Lee Han’s stead.

“Don’t apologize! Why should you be sorry! You insane undead bastard!”

-What did you say!?

“I don’t know how many hundreds of years old you are, but is it right to take it out on a young magician because you gave bad instructions? Even Headmaster Skeleton wouldn’t do that!”

-Wh… wh…?

The undead mage was bewildered.

Judging by their words, these two seemed awfully young.

Fwoooosh!

At that moment, flames erupted ahead.

The undead berserker had spewed bodily fluids onto himself and ignited it through friction.

“……”

The berserker’s madness—to burn himself to dispel the cold—shocked Lee Han. Only the undead could use such a brutal tactic.

‘It’s coming!’

The undead berserker, swinging his burning body, pushed the skeleton warriors back once more.

His movements were still sluggish, but anyone could tell he’d break through and charge at any second.

“Senior, do you have any solution?!”

“How would I…!”

Ogoldos felt like his chest would burst from frustration.

He was a second-year himself—would he suddenly come up with a brilliant idea?

Any curses, bone, or poison spells he knew would probably be useless against that berserker.

Hadn’t the berserker just shown its terrifying stamina in the fight before?

The barricade was broken, the cold-element spell dispelled, and ordinary bone or poison magic wouldn’t be enough to slow the thing down.

‘Summon… If I could just set up a summon as a shield for time…’

Sharkan was harrying the creature, but if the berserker just ignored him and charged, there’d be no way to stop him.

A sturdy summon needed to be set as a barrier.

Desperately wracking his brains, Ogoldos blurted out a sudden idea.

“Can’t you reduce the number of skeleton warriors and combine them?!”

“Excuse me?”

“Can’t you shrink and merge them!”

This wasn’t the time to summon lots of weak minions.

He needed a summon that could hold out, even if it meant only having one.

Normally, contracted familiars couldn’t be merged like that, but Lee Han’s necromancy was direct summoning by the mage.

By reducing their number and combining them, their strength would increase and control would become easier.

“Return, and… arise, warriors of bone!”

Lee Han waved his staff as his senior advised.

The skeleton warriors collapsed into their component bone fragments. Those fragments then combined and rose as a single skeleton warrior.

Pouring in more reagent and mana than a normal spell, the cost in energy to cast and maintain the spell was enormous, but the result was clear.

Like a compressed amalgamation of more than ten skeleton warriors, a thick, solid-bodied skeleton warrior was born.

‘It… it really worked?!’

Ogoldos was flustered.

He’d shouted it out in desperation, but merging them wasn’t easy.

Ogoldos knew the implications of overusing reagent and mana for a spell.

And yet, the junior had pulled off a gamble of a magic befitting a prodigy’s reputation. One look at the summoned skeleton’s size told how many had been fused.

Ogoldos let out a sigh of relief without realizing.

“Thank… Wait! If you could do this, why did you summon over ten of them separately in the first place?”

Ogoldos didn’t get it.

If this was possible, why not do it right away?

The undead mage also glanced at Lee Han, clearly curious.

“I forgot.”

“What??”

“I summoned a bunch for practice and got distracted fighting. Sorry!”

“……”

-……

The undead mage and Ogoldos both wanted to scream at that, but couldn’t.

The berserker was already charging.

Crash!

The berserker, battered by piercing, poison, cold, and fire damage, still had terrifying strength.

The skeleton warrior blocking the passage creaked as it was pushed back. Lee Han swung his staff.

“Fire!”

With Lee Han’s spell, bone shards fired from the skeleton warrior’s torso.

Since Lee Han had built it himself and not contracted it, this was possible.

But the berserker pressed on, unconcerned by bone shards sticking in him, and brute-forced the skeleton back.

As a series of crunching sounds echoed, Lee Han gritted his teeth and reinforced the skeleton.

“By the rules of Bible, let mana be released. Cold, dwell within! Poison, arise and boil…!”

Lee Han — using the mana emission enchantment learned from Professor Verdus — enchanted the skeleton’s bone shards with mana, cold, and poison.

Intensified mana, cold, poison.

The collision of these three elements made the skeleton warrior unstable, as if it would break apart any minute. Lee Han poured in even more mana to perform emergency stabilization.

As bone shards imbued with cold and poison fired off repeatedly, the undead berserker, now nervous, mustered all his strength to force his way forward.

Ogoldos had a sudden thought and shouted.

“Hey, you said you can use dark element! Why aren’t you imbuing it?!”

“…I forgot!”

“…Please do it, now!!!”

Unable to bring himself to get angry at a junior who’d learned so many spells already, Ogoldos just screamed.

Imbuing the skeleton warrior with the dark element, its bones turned black—becoming sharper and harder than ever.

“Fire, fire, fire!”

Papapapak!

Bone shards peppered the already battered berserker’s torso like shotgun rounds.

-Can I detonate it?

“Excuse me?”

-The skeleton, I mean!

“Do it!”

With Lee Han’s permission, the undead mage nodded and drew up his last reserves of mana.

The gases inside the bone shards reacted with mana, triggering a chain of explosions.

BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM!

As the reinforced skeleton exploded, the undead mage shoved Lee Han and Ogoldos into a side room. Wild currents of air swept the corridor in the explosion’s wake.

Lee Han was impressed by the undead mage’s skill.

“I had no idea it’d be this powerful…”

-What the hell kind of crazy mana dump did you put in that!!!

The undead mage shouted at Lee Han at the top of his lungs.

He definitely hadn’t meant for it to have that much power.

• * *

There was a mountain of things to ask: about the conditions outside the corridor, the secret to maintaining such a reinforced skeleton, why he didn’t stop them from blowing it up, and so on—but the undead mage went for the most pressing first: Lee Han’s age.

-…Not even twenty?!

“Isn’t it obvious?”

Ogoldos snapped.

-Do you know how many years I’ve been undead?

“…N-no, I don’t?”

-Just as you can’t guess my age, of course I can’t guess yours. You all look the same.

The undead mage shook his head with a groan.

Given the variety of magic used and the surplus of mana, he’d thought Lee Han might be a kingdom’s chief mage, but he was a kid not yet twenty.

No wonder there were so many rough patches here and there.

-Wait a minute, how did you copy the Marking Poison if you’re not even twenty…

Rumble!

The sound of collapsing walls echoed outside, and the undead mage peeked out.

-!!!

Lee Han peeked out with him and spoke.

“Senior, there’s good news and bad news.”

“Wh… what is it?”

“Because of the earlier explosion, the ceiling’s blown away. If we walk over the debris, we can climb up.”

“R-really?! Wait, what’s the bad news?”

-There are more undead berserkers coming.

“……”

Ogoldos was now sure of one thing about Lee Han.

That junior had the worst sense of humor.

-How much mana do you have left?

“None used up.”

-None left, you mean?

“No, none used up.”

-…Wh… what… okay. So can you summon a skeleton warrior again, like before?

“I’m out of bone fragments as reagents…”

“Ask for some! Here, take these!”

Ogoldos, desperate, thrust his reagent pouch into Lee Han’s hand.

Lee Han, touched, gave a grateful look.

“Really, thank you for all your help.”

“That’s help…? Screw it. Just hurry and summon! Before they get closer!”

-But last time was just luck—if you do it again, I can’t guarantee safety.

“Of course it’s risky to fight! That can’t be helped, though!”

Ogoldos yelled, appalled at the undead mage’s words.

But the undead mage shook his head and replied.

-I mean blowing up the reinforced skeleton.

“……”

“…Can’t we just do the same as before and dodge again?”

-We got lucky last time. Can’t you modulate the explosion precisely with your mana?

“I’ve never done it before today—how could I tune it finely?!”

The undead mage clicked his tongue at Lee Han’s logic.

Hard to argue with that.

‘If only you weren’t not even twenty…’

Thunk—

Suddenly, a rock came flying. Thrown by a berserker. The undead mage hurriedly pulled the skeleton back.

“…?”

No more attacks followed, so the undead mage peeked out again.

The berserkers, gathered at the collapsed ceiling, were murmuring and pointing upward.

“What are they saying? Are they offering us a chance to surrender?”

At Lee Han’s question, the undead mage answered, disbelieving.

-They’re saying… we should go up first…?