City ​​of Witches 105

Chapter 105 – #23_The Cost Of Loss (4)

#103
1.
Standing stiffly in the room, Siwoo was looking at the tree he had drawn.
It was his unique interpretation of Gehenna’s barrier magic, designed to interfere with dimensions and boundaries.

“………”

While endlessly calculating magic in his head, he was lost in thought.
No, the expression ‘lost in thought’ didn’t quite fit.
He was always thinking about magic, and while conscious, he didn’t think about anything else.

Siwoo touched the trunk of the tree.
Magic power emanated from his palm and began to seep into the trunk.
Typically, men cannot preserve magic power, and Siwoo was no exception.

But that wasn’t a big problem now.
A very, very small amount of magic power was enough.
He amplified the magic power he had forcibly held onto in his magic circuit, preserving it.
He amplified the amplified magic power again.
He amplified the amplified magic power once more.

This technique is commonly called ‘repeated amplification of magic power.’
It’s one of the methods used to maximize efficiency when creating magic circles.

However, if this technique were flawless, high-grade magic stones wouldn’t be sold at exorbitant prices.
The repeated amplification technique has limitations in two aspects.

First, while the total amount of magic power increases as it is amplified, its purity gradually decreases.
Second, magic power with reduced purity can generate noise at any time, and its high volatility can cause it to dissipate before it even affects the circuit details.
Usually, after just two repeated amplifications, the effectiveness of magic power drops significantly, so it’s rarely used except in specific situations.

But Siwoo was different.
His ability to ‘absorb’ magic power from the outside and ‘refine’ it into his own was already exceptional.
Now that 99% of his brain function was redesigned for magic, it went without saying.

The amplified magic power maintained almost constant purity.
The amplified magic power seeped into the tree and continued to detect something.

This tree was connected to the reverse barrier of Duke Keter, which surrounded the entire Gehenna.
What Siwoo was looking for was a hole in the barrier.
A very small gap that had been bothering his senses for a long time.

He didn’t have a specific purpose.
He was merely observing the barrier to improve his magic, and he was obsessively searching for that part because he felt a sense of incongruity.

As long as that gap remained, Duke Keter’s barrier was not ‘perfect.’
And Siwoo couldn’t tolerate that imperfection.
A flaw in such a perfect barrier.
It was like sleeping in bed with shoes on, a physiological revulsion that made him only think about eliminating it.

Then.
Like a piece of lint felt while stroking smooth silk, Siwoo pinpointed the location where the flaw in the barrier was felt.

Siwoo didn’t hesitate.
He recovered all the amplified magic power and opened a ‘door.’
A golden circle slowly began to form beneath his feet.
In the surging, reversing waves of magic power, Siwoo traversed a vast distance in an instant.

And there, he discovered the error he had been searching for.
Something was forcibly peeling off the barrier.
It was a magical action he had never seen before, so Siwoo stared at it for a while.

Could he analyze it?
Could he imitate it?
Would it be helpful for his magic?

“I was about to die from decomposition. This is perfect.”

A disturbance and a wave of magic power that disrupted his concentration were detected.
Siwoo recognized the presence of the person standing in front of him for the first time.

It was a woman.
She was naked.
She was clearly using hostile magic against Siwoo.
Only then did Siwoo look at her face.

And immediately, his brow furrowed.
It was because he couldn’t recognize exactly who she was.

His eyes, the optic nerves connected to them, and the brain that processed the information from the optic nerves.
They were already specialized for magic.
He could read the flow of magic power, see through the laws, and interpret everything he looked at magically, drawing golden fractals in his head, but in return, his ability to recognize objects had significantly regressed.

Therefore, Edea’s face looked distorted like crushed clay, and even that was blurred by the remnants of numerous formulas and geometric patterns.

After pondering for a while, Siwoo realized something.
The opponent’s magic power pattern, a unique pattern that could be seen as a fingerprint, was very familiar.

His left eye, covered by an eyepatch, throbbed.
A red flame flickered in his chest.
Discomfort, anger, irritation.
Uncomfortable emotions that had nothing to do with magic overwhelmed his mind.

And Siwoo realized.
That eliminating that thing was the priority.

2.
Edea didn’t take it easy.
The situation was different from when she was leisurely playing with the twins and the magic-using slaves.
Edea was very angry, and there was a perfect target for her to vent her anger on right in front of her.

“Bloom.”

At the same time as Siwoo chanted the spell, a shadow flowed out over his body.
Edea frowned at that.
During their previous confrontation, he had consumed expensive magic stones and engaged in a very inefficient battle.
It was inevitable due to his lack of a mark, but it was quite ridiculous.
This time, he used magic without using magic stones.

The flowing shadow wrapped around his body like a snake.
An ink-black armor.
It still had no luster.
But Edea could tell.
Compared to before, the precision was different.

If the previous armor was just a crude piece of armor that roughly imitated the shape, now it looked somewhat plausible.
Even if you looked closely, it was so perfect that you wouldn’t even notice that it was made of shadows. It took the form of a complete plate armor.

Edea didn’t hesitate any longer.
She didn’t know where he had learned to roll around, but he was just a man.
She was confident that she could subdue him in one move, just like before.

“Simultaneous Fire.”

-Kikikikik

Whatever he did, she would start by tearing off his limbs.
In the remaining 30 minutes until she escaped, she would inflict such excruciating pain that he would regret being born.
Ten twisted ribbons in the air were fired at Siwoo simultaneously.

-Thwack!

The ribbons that had rushed at Siwoo in the blink of an eye sent his body flying far away.
With a loud bang, he stopped his sudden flight only after crashing into a rock crevice.

“What!”

It was Edea who was surprised.
He seemed to have come out with a different kind of determination, so she responded with her full power.
Of course, it was nothing compared to her power before her rank was lowered, but she thought he would at least try to block it, so she launched an attack, but he just took it with his body.

It would be a problem if she couldn’t vent her anger and he was instantly reduced to a pulp.
While Edea was stomping her feet and worrying about Siwoo.
Siwoo, who had flown away, smashing through rocks, was staring blankly at his body.

“………”

It was too fast, and he couldn’t properly identify what was going on.
His entire body, which had taken the impact, was tingling and shaking.
Blood was dripping from the corner of his mouth.

However, the armor that had taken the brunt of the attack was perfectly fine.
It had sufficiently reduced the impact as it was originally intended to do.
When he moved his limbs, they moved without any problems.
His bones, tendons, muscles, and magic circuits were all normal.

Siwoo got up.
The rock fragments that had piled up on the armor rolled off, and even the dust was neatly shaken off, making it look as clean as if it were new.
His gaze was directed at Edea, who was about 100 meters away.

-Whoosh!

Shadow wings spread out, and Siwoo’s body rushed towards Edea faster than the speed at which he had been thrown.

“Yeah, you can’t die yet!”

A woman who was spreading out ribbons as if she was having fun and muttering incomprehensible words.
The ribbons, coiling and accumulating elasticity, meant that the previous attack was being prepared again.

A shield appeared in Siwoo’s hand.
He ran forward fiercely, holding the shield in front of him, covering half of his body.
Ribbons of death flew towards him.

“What….?”

Edea’s eyes widened as she intercepted Siwoo with ten ribbons.
At the moment of impact, a brilliant golden fractal appeared on Siwoo’s shield.
It seemed like he had prepared some magic for revenge, but even if that was all, Edea wouldn’t have been so surprised.

-Ping!
-Kwakwakwakwang!

A roar that resembled an explosion pounded her ears.
All the ribbons that Edea had sent were deflected by Siwoo, hitting random giant trees, smashing rocks, or crashing into the ground.

She hadn’t seen it wrong.
The moment they touched the shield, she lost control of the Maiden’s Loom.
The ten ribbons that should have pierced the enemy straight through, like deflected bullets on the curves of the armor, failed to land a single effective hit and bounced off helplessly.

“Jamming…?”

What was even more surprising was that it wasn’t just a physical phenomenon.
A jamming phenomenon occurred, where she lost control due to interference with another’s magic.
In the short moment when the ribbons, flying at subsonic speed, touched the shield.

Seeing Siwoo rushing at her with a fierce momentum, Edea put aside her shock and questions for a moment.
In battle, that was a luxurious sentiment.

The jamming that Siwoo had just shown was not possible with human reaction speed.
Then, it was reasonable to assume that he had read the operating structure of the ‘Maiden’s Loom’ during their previous clash and prepared a magic circle in advance.

“Is that all you’ve got, coming here alone?”

It was ridiculous.
And foolish.
It was clear that the Maiden’s Loom that Edea used was a magic specialized for physical attacks and was relatively easy to counter.
But had she not had this experience while surviving countless bloody battles?

Edea rewove the ribbons.
She wove threads of magic power, creating a fabric with a completely different structure and magical form.

Physically, the shape and attack method were the same, but magically, they were completely different.
If he had prepared a magic circle of ‘paper’ in anticipation of Edea throwing ‘rock’, then she could just change it to ‘scissors’.
She was confident in her ability to analyze magic and fight with compatibility during battle.

“Trying to be clever!”

The remaining distance between the two was only 30 meters.
The newly woven and twisted ribbons were definitely locked onto Siwoo.
Even if he ran away, they would track him down to 1 kilometer away.
The moment the ribbons cut through the air, Edea was confident of a fatal blow.

“I was a little flustered, but this is the difference in experience.”

Siwoo glanced at the ribbons and then threw away the shield, which was his only way out, without any hesitation.
He lowered his head and body.
A helmet that extended from the back of the armor’s neck covered his head.
He changed his posture like a boxer charging forward, raising his guard with his arms covered by gauntlets and wrist guards.

Siwoo didn’t run away.
He didn’t look for a way around or turn his back.
Hot breath brushed past his cheeks.
Golden magic circles bloomed on the black armor, which seemed to swallow all the surrounding light.

-Ping!

The same phenomenon occurred.
As if he knew that Edea would come out like that from the beginning.
The newly woven magic circle parried and deflected the ribbons that had become ‘scissors’ without exception.

-Kwakwakwakwang!

Edea stared blankly at the ribbons that had lost their way again and extended in the wrong direction, like guided missiles caught by flares, following the same procedure as before.

“You… were expecting this?”

He had anticipated that Edea would change her weaving pattern and prepared for it in that short amount of time?
It wasn’t theoretically impossible.
No matter how the weaving pattern was changed, its origin was in the ‘Maiden’s Loom’.

If he had completely understood Edea’s magnetic magic, it was possible to anticipate and prepare for this.
Edea’s impression of him performing the best possible response, which was ‘theoretically’ possible, as if it were natural was…

“There’s no way! That’s cheating!”

But Edea’s actions were not the right answer.
The place she should have been looking at was not the point where the attack went astray, and the action she should have taken was to create distance from Siwoo instead of trusting the self-defense’s protective performance.

She knew it in her head, but she couldn’t execute it because what was happening in front of her was so unrealistic that even Edea, a veteran of reversals, couldn’t accept it.

Siwoo’s gauntlet struck Edea’s soft abdomen as she yelled at the absurd sight.
Siwoo’s punch, which had pierced through and neutralized even the self-defense, folded Edea’s body in mid-air.

“Kyaaaaaaak!”

With a shrill scream, Edea’s naked body rolled several times on the mossy ground and fell away.