Chapter 61 – #14_Play Ball (4)
#60
1.
A colossal spear.
Magic power, condensed and accelerated to its limit, became a single, sublimely shining line.
A blinding aurora raced through the air.
It was a fleeting moment.
The homunculus, without realizing it, extended its shadow along with its arm.
It wasn’t a deliberate defensive action.
More like a cat chasing the tip of a laser out of curiosity. The arm, extended meaninglessly, was pulverized by the torrent of magic.
Even if magic itself had no offensive capabilities, this level of concentration and compression was akin to a massive weapon.
The fingertips began to boil and disintegrate.
The spear of light chased away the shadows like the dawn dispelling the darkness of night.
The torrent of magic engulfed the three red eyes, which were rolling with curiosity.
It burned everything from the shadow, the monster’s body, to the very tips of its limbs, before vanishing.
2.
Siwoo watched as the homunculus, swallowed by the silent explosion of light, evaporated without a trace.
-Thud
With the feeling of having completed a marathon, he collapsed onto his knees on the grass.
“Ugh… Ugh…!”
As soon as the tension that had barely held his body together loosened, he felt nauseous and acidic fluids surged up his throat.
He had done many crazy things today, but the secret plan Siwoo had used to defeat the homunculus was the craziest of them all.
Not only did he absorb that high-purity magic, but he also provided a ‘path’ through the magic circuits in his body.
If there had been even a small miscalculation, his body would have exploded from the overloaded magic, or he would have been crippled forever.
In fact, even now, after having succeeded in everything, he felt like he was entering the prelude to a qi deviation.
“I’m gonna die.”
Siwoo rolled away from his vomit and lay down on his back.
He could feel the blood vessels all over his body swelling and contracting with his pulse.
Exhaustion, burnout from overworking his brain with mushroom doping, and a body creaking from the massive magic that was still raging within him.
“Heh… Hehehe…”
Even so, Siwoo laughed heartily, feeling like he had returned to his middle school days for the first time in a long while.
How could he not feel good?
He had been diligently researching magic on his own, but there was no way to confirm or prove his skills.
Not with a grand achievement that was visible to the eye, at least.
He had been constantly battling bots, wondering, ‘Am I even good at this?’ but now he felt like he had won every placement match with an overwhelming carry.
He had defeated a homunculus that no one should even dare to try to catch unless they were a 15th-tier witch with autonomous defense.
A terrifying monster that even the twins could only manage to stop for a moment.
Then, from afar, the twins’ voices grew closer.
“Assistant Niiim!”
“Assistant! Assistant! Assistant!”
Barely managing to sit up, Siwoo saw the twins running towards him, climbing the hill.
Odile, who had almost slid to a stop, hugged Siwoo tightly, who was still sitting.
She cupped his cheeks with her hands, asking urgently.
“Are you okay? Is anything wrong?”
“Assistant, how many fingers do you see? Are you alright?”
Not to be outdone, Odette also wrapped an arm around him and dangled three fingers in front of Siwoo.
Siwoo chuckled and signaled that he was fine.
At the same time, the twins let out a sigh of relief and then began to jump up and down.
Their cheeks were flushed red, and they seemed even more excited than Siwoo.
“When I heard the plan, I just thought you were crazy. But you’re even more awesomely crazy than I thought!”
“The assistant defeated it! You really defeated that homunculus!”
Odette couldn’t hide her excitement, stamping her feet in place, and Odile kept stroking Siwoo’s head.
“You did great, you did great, Assistant.”
“We believed in you!”
They were so loud that Siwoo, who had been burning with a sense of accomplishment, began to calm down.
The twins had been happy enough for him.
After a while of self-congratulation, Siwoo took the hands that the twins offered and stood up.
“I thought I was going to die, thanks to you, Assistant.”
“If it weren’t for you, we would have all been in big trouble.”
“It was possible because Odile and Odette drew its attention.”
“That’s right.”
“That’s right! We were the bait while you sniped! Still, you’re amazing!”
He didn’t want to seem too boastful, so he gave a modest reply, but he couldn’t stop the corners of his mouth from turning up.
The three of them, still celebrating, walked towards the clearing where the homunculus had disappeared.
The area where the magic spear had been fired was overturned like it had been hit by a shell, likely due to the intense burst of power.
The reason they had come back here was, of course, to check the spoils of war.
They had worked hard on the raid, so they should get their reward.
Siwoo and the twins jumped into the crater.
Inside, there was an egg that glowed with a faint black light.
It was about the size of a chicken egg.
However, while its shape and size were similar to an egg, its appearance was closer to a cat’s eye.
Inside the egg, which seemed to be made of thin glass, black shadows were constantly shifting.
“Is this the legacy of the Witch of Creation?”
“Yes, it’s the ‘Egg of Gnosis (γνῶσις).'”
“What’s that?”
The three of them, huddled around the egg, admired its mysterious appearance for a long time.
“There are various types of legacies that come from hunting homunculi. Like my music box, an artifact, or like Amelia’s perfume, a potion containing magical principles, or even a piece of paper with a magic circle scribbled on it.”
“What about the Egg of Gnosis?”
“It’s a kind of memory storage device. It’s similar to the ‘Imprint’ system, you could say?”
“I heard it’s a means of directly transferring knowledge or insights about new magic.”
Only then did they realize why some witches were so desperate to hunt homunculi, even at great risk.
In short, wasn’t this small egg a kind of skill book?
Odile reached out and picked up the egg.
The twins looked at each other and slowly nodded, ending their brief discussion.
“Here, this is for you, Assistant.”
“Is that okay?”
He hadn’t really expected it, but it was probably not an ordinary item.
The twins, being apprentice witches, would naturally have a much stronger thirst for exploring and obsessing over new magic. Besides, even if Siwoo was the one who planned and executed it, the twins were the ones who risked their lives to draw the homunculus’s attention.
I never imagined they would hand it over so readily without asking for anything in return.
“I’m tempted to keep it myself… but I think it’s right to give this to our assistant.”
“I think so too. If it weren’t for the assistant, I’d still be trembling in fear.”
“Thank you so much.”
“What are you thanking us for? We’re the ones who should be grateful.”
“That’s right! You were incredibly cool, Assistant!”
Odette gave a thumbs-up with an affectionate look and handed the Gnosis egg to Siwoo. The egg, which felt almost weightless, spun in his palm, the shadows within swirling like a cosmic galaxy.
“How do I do it?”
“They say a strong desire to accept ‘Gnosis’ is enough.”
The desire for new knowledge is a scholar’s innate instinct. Although Siwoo was kidnapped in his prime and had his dreams of being a mathematician crushed, he was pouring his passion into a new field of study: magic.
He was even a little disappointed that he wouldn’t be able to learn higher-level magic if he escaped Gehenna.
In that sense, this opportunity was an event he was greatly looking forward to. Siwoo swallowed hard and gripped the egg tightly.
At the same time, he felt as if his body was being swallowed into darkness. Siwoo squeezed his eyes shut as his consciousness was sucked into a space where even the floor didn’t exist.
“W-what the…”
When he opened his eyes again, all that existed was a black, empty space that seemed to stretch on forever. Siwoo’s body was floating in the middle of that space.
-Kugugugung!
A loud roar came from behind him, and Siwoo turned to see the source of the noise. He had thought he was just floating weightlessly, but his body automatically turned and moved just by thinking about it.
“Wow…”
There, dispelling the darkness of ignorance, was the golden light of wisdom. Even in a space where perspective was blurred, the identity of the structure that stood out without fading was a magic circle made of all sorts of rune characters, straight and curved lines, dots and planes.
Each part of the magic circle, interlocked like a precise mechanical device, slowly rotated, making a loud noise.
Despite seeing it for the first time, he felt a strong sense of déjà vu. Siwoo immediately recognized the identity of the massive structure that was stealing his sense of distance.
It was the large-scale magic circle that Siwoo had been researching and creating for three years. This space was a place where the accumulation of magical knowledge and wisdom that Siwoo had explored and researched was visually manifested.
Perhaps because Siwoo had not yet completed the magic, the structure was not complete either. The ends of the device, which stretched out into the darkness, were obscured by a hazy darkness, and there were also gears here and there that were spinning idly without working properly.
A thrill.
He had never imagined that the magic he had been researching could inspire such awe. It felt like his eyes were opening.
Instead of being trapped in the forest and seeing only the trees, he was spreading his wings and flying up, looking down at the landscape from a macroscopic perspective, which gave Siwoo another inspiration.
Now he could see what parts were lacking and where he had gone in the wrong direction. He felt confident that he could fix it and reach a higher level. The mystery didn’t end there.
A large egg, about a quarter the size of Siwoo’s magic circle, suddenly appeared.
Although the size was different, its shape and appearance were exactly the same as the Gnosis egg in Siwoo’s hand.
The shadows that pulsed within began to rise clearly even in the same darkness, breaking free from the glass membrane.
“Ah…”
It was a strange sensation. Like remembering something he had forgotten a long time ago. New knowledge began to flow in without any resistance.
While the shadows rippling in the space were building a new structure.
His perception expanded.
His thoughts deepened.
New things that might have taken him years to realize on his own,
Mysteries,
Principles,
Laws,
Truths,
penetrated his brainstem.
This was the world that witches saw.
As the Gnosis egg transmitted knowledge to Siwoo, he, who originally had no mark, was invited into a world he could not have entered.
The shadow, which had built another structure in Siwoo’s universe, melted into the darkness as if it had fulfilled its duty.
How the shadow that the homunculus had spewed out could nullify magic.
How so many magic circles could be maintained individually without a proper magic power source.
What was the law that allowed such small magic circles to flow like water without interfering with each other’s composition.
He realized and realized.
Before the shadow’s structure had fully taken shape,
Siwoo felt his consciousness being sucked away again.
“Hah!”
It was the same as when he had entered this space.
He had only blinked once.
His consciousness had returned to reality.
His body, which had been floating freely, felt a resistance to gravity, and his thoughts, which had been endlessly open and expanding, accepted the impurities around him.
The twins, their eyes sparkling, were looking at Siwoo right in front of him.
“……..”
New power had been born.
New knowledge had been born.
Siwoo looked at his hands and murmured to himself.
“Isn’t it beautiful? The place you saw, Assistant, is ‘Ain’. It’s a part of the unmanifested three realms, a world of ‘0’ that ordinary human concepts cannot observe or judge.”
The twins seemed genuinely happy that they had shared the same world as Siwoo. They had a similar look on their faces as when they had shown him the Latifundium.
“Just because it can’t be perceived doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. Ain is dormant in the concepts of everyone who wields magic.”
“No matter how I think about it, it’s such a waste that you were born a man, Assistant. If you had been born a descendant of a witch and inherited a mark, you would have made quite a name for yourself.”
Only then did Siwoo understand why the twins had given up this golden opportunity. They wanted to show Siwoo another world that he didn’t know about.
“Although we didn’t give it to you, welcome to the true ‘world of magic’.”
The twins smiled brightly, showing pure congratulations without any jealousy.
