Retire 523

523 To Remain a Magician (7)

Mana surged violently.

The wind tossed Michelle’s long hair.

At first, it brushed past softly, like a gentle breeze. But it didn’t take long for that delicate wind to become a fierce gale.

The pages of the book fluttered and collided. As the wind grew stronger, the sound of paper striking paper became as harsh as the beating of insect wings.

The wind pressed past the wall of mana and reached us. The mana that had been as solid as a wall was now caught up in the wind, slowly shifting.

“Hn…”

Within it, Michelle laughed. Or perhaps she cried. I couldn’t tell. A sound that was neither quite laughter nor quite sobbing slipped out over her trembling shoulders.

I didn’t know everything that was in the books Michelle had checked so far. Still, as we drew closer, I’d glimpsed quite a few.

Most were less like writing and more like drawings—doodles that, if I’m honest, resembled runes.

Some books looked a little more like actual text. Occasionally, there were real pictures. I saw, if only briefly, a drawing of a star-filled night sky—a scene you might see in a dungeon.

Or sometimes, the pages were simply blank.

Perhaps some of those books were the ones magicians had dreamed of—the miracle that made a five-year-old, barely able to read, into an archmage.

The reason the monster tree that killed so many hunters was called a library.

But if the secret of that miracle—

—was not the “book” itself.

“…Hn, hahaha.”

Michelle threw her head back. In the roughening wind, the book finally tore. Old paper peeled away from the spine.

As if that weren’t enough, Michelle began tearing the book herself. Her trembling hands were clumsy, unable to rip it cleanly, but she fumbled on, stubbornly shredding the book as if determined to leave nothing behind.

The torn pages whirled around her on the wind. The drawings and engravings on the paper danced through the golden dust of mana.

“No!”

Kim Chae-min screamed.

He moved frantically, pressing his hand to the floor and summoning vines. The library floor wasn’t soil, so he couldn’t control a wide area, but at this distance, he could at least try to burrow in.

Especially if Michelle wasn’t paying attention to her feet.

“…Damn it!”

But “archmage” Noah Michelle, of course, was prepared.

Kim Chae-min shouted urgently to us.

“Mana!”

“What?!”

“If those runes touch mana—!”

I didn’t need to hear the rest to understand.

Michelle was tearing up every rune so nothing would remain in the book. Some runes were destroyed in the process, but overwhelmingly, most of them were still on the torn pages.

Dozens, hundreds, maybe even thousands of runes.

And to activate a rune, all you need is a magician’s mana…

“……!”

My father didn’t hesitate any longer; he put all his strength into his spear.

Those runes were the same as the ones on the fairy’s wings—the runes we’d identified with Park Seo-hyun and Choi Jin-woo’s help. We knew, at least, that those runes somehow allowed information about the changed timeline to be accessed, but we still didn’t know exactly how the system worked.

No information had passed to Noah Michelle, but I didn’t want to take any risks. Above all, if that many runes devoured mana, there was no guarantee the dungeon would survive the aftermath.

“I told you not to interfere!!!”

Michelle screamed, her voice cracking.

Her mana grew even wilder. As she tore out the last page of the book, she stood.

She slowly raised both arms toward the air. The torn pages fluttered around her. Michelle’s eyes took in each rune on the paper.

“Noah.”

Then Hope called out to her in a subdued voice.

“You won’t find what you’re looking for there.”

Michelle looked up.

“Even so?”

Slowly, she turned her body.

The golden-haired archmage, the jewel of Nantes who had once given her magic freely for others, still shone like the sun.

“You knew?”

The archmage asked the once-fairy-turned-human.

Hope shook his head.

“No. But by now, it’s obvious.”

“…….”

“You too…”

Michelle smiled.

“That’s right. That’s why I have to become a magician.”

“Why?”

“I promised my dad.”

Her unfocused, dreamy eyes. Michelle whispered in that sweet, sleepwalking voice I’d heard once before.

“I promised to grow up and become a good magician who helps people.”

Even if we broke through the wall of mana, we couldn’t stop this in time. Destroying the wall wouldn’t make the mana disappear, and there was no way to burn all those pages at once.

Even if we could set them alight, Michelle wouldn’t just stand by. If even one page touched mana, the rune would activate.

Even if Michelle died, it would be the same.

But could the guild led by humanity’s so-called savior really just stand by and watch?

Sometimes you have to do what must be done, even knowing it’s futile.

“…Hopeless humans.”

Michelle looked at us and smiled faintly.

The runes touched mana.

One by one. Countless runes.

The world was awash in warm golden light.

---

To be blunt?

Nothing changed.

It was magic we’d already seen. Memories we’d already witnessed.

The only difference was that now they flowed seamlessly, clearly, without being shattered into fragments.

Countless memories flashed by.

There was still no sound. The colors were muted, as if through the faded lens of an old film.

The beginning was always the same.

Hundreds of people shivering in a dark space.

A small group with determined faces talking among themselves—hunters and magicians.

And the little girl who never left the sight of the magician couple.

The memories sped by, like a slideshow.

Most ended with the deaths of all the humans.

Who caused it varied. In some memories, everyone died the moment they moved in the dungeon. Amid the flood of memories, I recalled that the early library floors in Michelle’s story had been safe.

Many died to the tree-shaped monster rooted in place. In a few rare cases, survivors found the gate and escaped. Only once did a magician family succeed.

Sometimes, things unfolded as Michelle had described. Humans did whatever they could to survive. Fights broke out among them. There were many cases of humans killing humans—not a majority, but not rare, either.

Sometimes, instead of going up, people descended to lower floors. But no one ever made it through the maze. In the maze, a fairy beckoned to magicians as they starved to death.

The magician made the child run away. There was no hope. And yet, a parent’s heart always tries to protect their child.

The memories spun dizzyingly. These were not Noah Michelle’s memories.

They were the memories of the “fairy” watching the unlucky humans who entered its dungeon.

I wondered if even these memories had an order.

They must have. I had to admit it. All those memories, through endless trial and error, were moving toward something. The focus was narrowing.

The memories gradually centered on the human magician’s young child… or rather, their offspring.

I didn’t know what had drawn the fairy’s attention. Maybe it was in a memory I hadn’t seen, or maybe it was in a rune Michelle had torn from a book.

Or maybe it was just bad luck. She just happened to catch its eye.

At last, the owner of the memories reached out to the little human. Sometimes it would show off something shiny to attract a child on the verge of awakening.

Michelle didn’t find the book.

The process was slow. Humans still died. The child died, too. Occasionally, a human would make it out alive. There were even a few times the child survived.

But sometimes, the child became a magician.

Gradually, the child became a magician. Sometimes awakened early, sometimes at the brink of death.

Even without knowing the specifics, you could tell from these memories: an experiment was underway.

There were times the lost young magician was lured and captured. The fairy seemed to enjoy this and repeated it many times.

Every memory started the same: confused humans in a changed world. The magician couple and their child.

The final destination was always—

A child, compelled by some unknown urge, taking out a book.

A child looking at the runes inside the book.

The child’s mind could not withstand the memories shown by the runes and broke. At least, the books in these memories didn’t have as many runes as the one Michelle found here. I didn’t know what memories they saw. But the broken child became a magician.

The fairy’s magician.

The magician, following the fairy’s whispered teachings, eliminated all witnesses.

After that, the process repeated, becoming a little more efficient each time.

By then, the memories began to fade.

“……!”

I snapped out of the vision.

It felt like being pulled out of water after not realizing I’d been holding my breath. Only an instant had passed, but the memories left by the runes were etched into my mind.

I looked at the others.

Their half-vacant faces were proof they’d seen the same memories as I had.

The wild wind and mana had all subsided.

Now, not a breath of wind stirred. The rune-covered pages drifted down like petals.

Noah Michelle stood among them.

Like a doll whose soul had left.

The only sign of life was the faint, ragged sound of her breathing.

“……”

My father signaled to me.

I didn’t know how to respond. But we couldn’t just leave her like that.

Just as my father was about to step forward, timing his move—

“Originally.”

Noah Michelle spoke.

Ironically, her voice was much calmer than before.

“No matter how this ended, I was planning to keep you all trapped here.”

Her hair fell over her eyes, making it impossible to read her expression. She didn’t seem about to attack, but…

“If the dungeon broke, you wouldn’t have survived either. At least that way, I thought I’d feel better.”

Crack.

A sinister sound echoed above our heads, as if on cue.

The thick sound of ice splitting. It spread in all directions.

“So I deliberately dragged things out even longer…”

Michelle laughed, hollowly.

“Noah.”

“I don’t care anymore.”

Hope took a step toward Michelle.

At the same time, a crack appeared in the floor between them.

“That’s the gate. The real one. I couldn’t make a fake gate—it must be a safety mechanism.”

Michelle rubbed her face with both hands, then pushed her hair back.

“If you don’t leave now, you’ll die.”

My skin crawled. Michelle wasn’t threatening us. Every hunter’s instinct screamed at me to get out of here right now.

Every hair on my body stood on end. It was like realizing the ground beneath my feet was nothing but a thin sheet of ice.

The eyeball that had hovered persistently above Michelle’s head suddenly burst into flames.

Han Tae-kyung moved first. He grabbed Hope, who was closest.

“Go!!”

Hope tried to shake him off, but Han Tae-kyung didn’t let go.

“Are you crazy?! Can’t you see we have to get out of here?!”

“Wait, wait, Noah! You—just let me go for a second!!”

Michelle, seeing the burning eyeball, pressed her hands together silently.

The floor vanished beneath us.

When I blinked, we were in front of the gate. Noah Michelle still stood where she had been.

I’d seen dungeons with broken cores disappear before. But a dungeon shattering was different.

A snow globe falls. It hits the ground, cracks, and then shatters completely. That can’t be fixed. No matter where you look, cracks are spreading. When they break, who knows what will pour out—inside or out. It all spills forth. It can’t hold its shape.

Noah Michelle did not move.

Hope kept calling her name, as if desperate to do something. Han Tae-kyung, practically choking him, dragged Hope through the gate.

Kim Chae-min hesitated, then followed. My father grabbed me. Before we passed through the gate together—

Michelle spoke.

“Tell them I’m sorry.”

To whom?

No answer came.