Chapter 125

Just after sunset.

The fog thickened as if on cue.

I had been going around reminding the students not to wander outside, but what drew me into the mist was a surge of magical energy that pierced straight through my mind.

It was a signal from one of the alarm spell circles I had drawn earlier in the day.

There was no need to think twice about what it meant.

The demon worshippers had begun their activities.

Out of the eighty or so magic circles scattered throughout the harbor town, the first to react were three. Now, twelve were sending signals.

The cultists had emerged from the sewer entrance in the southern part of the port and were steadily advancing north, triggering more spell circles along the way.

To come rushing out the moment the sun sets…

They’re nothing if not shameless.

I headed toward the spot where the signal was the strongest.

That’s where their main group was bound to be.

Blink. Blink.

Streetlights flickered to life one by one, but visibility was still less than ten meters.

The thick fog obscured even the sky, and the faint glow of the streetlights formed hazy halos in the distance.

Like death shrouds thrown over everything in sight, the fog was eerie and still.

Normally, sound travels farther when the air is heavy with moisture, but the harbor was unnervingly silent.

Step. Step.

The only sound echoing in my ears was the clear rhythm of my own footsteps.

That’s why fog always shows up in horror movies.

Not that I’m scared or anything.

Seriously.

Pushing through the faint glow in the mist, I reached the magic circle that had sent the latest signal.

The circle drawn on the ground had gone inactive.

But it hadn’t deactivated simply because there was nothing nearby.

If that were the case, it would’ve responded to my presence.

I crouched down to examine it and saw signs that someone had tampered with the drawing.

And the moment I realized that—

Splash.

The sound of a foot stepping into a puddle behind me.

I spun around instantly, thrusting my arm forward.

[Casting Burning Touch.]

Fwoosh!

Flames burst from my fingertips, blazing outward.

The crimson fire stretched out five meters like a giant fan.

I swept that fan from the ground upward.

A hazy figure leaping toward me let out a shrill scream as it was scorched by the heat.

Screeeeech!

The burning figure flew past my shoulder and crashed to the ground with a wet thud.

It didn’t move again.

Seemed like it was dead.

I walked over to inspect the body.

Just as I suspected—

It was a Shadow Hound.

They’re one of the demonic creatures controlled by the cultists.

As the name suggests, Shadow Hounds resemble emaciated dogs, but they’re grotesque lifeforms without skin.

Roughly waist-high to an adult man.

They have abnormally developed bones overlaid with black muscle tissue.

Shadow Hounds aren’t especially intelligent, but they boast terrifying jaw strength that can bite through metal, along with keen reflexes and hypersensitive senses.

Their smashed-in faces lack eyes, noses, or ears. They only have a mouth.

Unlike ordinary creatures, their entire bodies are covered in mucous membrane, which functions as their sensory organ.

They smell through it and use echolocation to perceive their surroundings.

On a day like today with no wind and thick fog scents wouldn’t carry well.

So they likely relied on sound to track me down.

And that meant only one thing:

This one’s dying scream would have echoed through the fog and alerted its pack.

Sure enough, footsteps soon approached.

Splash, splash.

Light, four-legged steps.

They circled me, keeping me at the center. It was the behavior of predators sizing up their prey.

Which meant it was time to correct their mistake.

Because in this place, I’m not the prey.

They are.

[Casting War Drums of Thessaloniki.]

This spell was originally designed for signalling charges or retreats on the battlefield. It unleashed a level of noise pollution that could only be described as monstrous.

Doom, Doom, Doom, Doom!

Magical percussion instruments positioned in four directions around me began to throb in sequence, each one releasing a heavy vibration.

Thump! Thump!

With every beat of the drum, the hounds that had been tracking me writhed and staggered in sensory overload.

Some lunged toward where the drumbeat originated, mistaking it for my location, while others foamed at the mouth, unable to endure the overwhelming stimulation on their hypersensitive senses.

In the original game Candela of Judgment, they were the kind of enemies that could be easily tricked just by tossing a brick or a glass bottle to make noise.

I almost started reminiscing about the mission where I smeared myself in mud and infiltrated a cultist den. But the memory of that damp, stinking cave made me recoil in disgust.

Have I been spending too much time with Winter Winslet?

[Casting Suffocation Arrow.]

I began to take down the disoriented hounds one by one, their guard lowered by the drumbeat.

Suffocation Arrow is an offensive spell that forcibly combusts the oxygen in a given area, inducing respiratory failure.

And since combustion means burning, of course, it comes with fire.

Their weakness was fire.

The magically conjured flames didn’t go out even on their slimy bodies and kept burning until the end.

Screeeeech!

That’s how I incinerated five or six of them in a row.

But the footsteps around me didn’t stop.

In fact, they seemed to be increasing.

It looked like the noise from the War Drums spell had drawn in even more of them from far away.

In that case, all the better.

Trash is easier to clean up when it’s in one pile.

[Casting Belladonna’s Vision – Six-Finger Lightning Spell.]

This vision-based spell could intercept every hostile entity within the mana field, even in fog-limited visibility.

Perfect for weather like today.

Wheeeeennng!

A rotating ring of violet plasma rose above my head, intermittently discharging lightning.

Crackle, crackle! Zzzzap!

The dense fog split the lightning like a spiderweb, and the fine droplets scattered the light, causing the surroundings to flash in dazzling bursts with each strike.

Within that storm, the shadow hounds started to fry…literally.

As the lightning-scorched mist particles evaporated in an instant, my field of vision widened briefly, allowing me to count the hounds that had fallen.

Roughly forty.

There were no living hounds left around me now.

An easy victory.

Not that impressive.

Shadow hounds are among the weakest of the demon worshipers’ creations, and this number could easily be mass-produced again with enough time.

To inflict meaningful damage just as Keith d’Alembert demanded I had to go beyond mere demonic constructs. At minimum, I needed to eliminate someone from their priestly ranks.

One of them had to be nearby.

Shadow hounds have almost no intelligence, so there was certainly someone close by controlling them.

To avoid detection, I had kept my mana field suppressed until now, but I began to expand it little by little.

Though the fog reduced the field’s resolution, the energy signature of a demon worshiper was so alien that it would be easy to pinpoint.

Demon worshipers used demonic arts.

Demonic arts were techniques that manipulated power borrowed from demons.

It resembled black magic in that it defied the laws of nature, destroyed the living, and created contradictions from what had already been destroyed. But the two belonged to entirely different lineages.

It was like the difference between magic and sorcery.

Magic fell within the realm of skills that could be mastered through study and training, and in terms of orthodoxy, black magic also belonged to the magical lineage.

In fact, in the past, black magic was even referred to as black arts, not black magic.

However, the idea of converting life force into magical power was considered ominous, and the historical incidents caused by black mages became the subject of condemnation within magical circles.

That’s how the practice came to be referred to by the derogatory name “black magic”.

In contrast, sorcery was a power one was born with. Demonic arts, which fell under this category, involved borrowing power from a contracting entity through a pact with a demon.

As a result, practitioners of demonic arts possessed no magical aptitude and had no mana fields of their own.

Instead, they bore a brand left behind by a transcendent being as proof of the contract.

The brand was a wound upon the soul, a small and ominous rift that opened to another dimension.

From that rift, the presence of the transcendent being would leak out, and that presence was the source of the power used by the demonic sorcerers.

From a mage’s perspective, that rift was like an active volcano.

The presence flowing out through the brand burned as hot as lava. Coming too close would scorch one’s mana field, and if touched, it would consume the magical power.

That was why sorcerers could finally be considered worthy adversaries of mages.

Just as mages could not encroach upon each other’s mana fields, sorcerers too possessed a domain of their own.

Technically, a mage’s mana field could intrude upon a sorcerer’s domain but it came at the cost of severe magical backlash.

With my eyes closed in the mist, I focused my mind for just over a minute.

I finally spotted the demonic sorcerer commanding the shadow hounds. He was 50 meters out in the 7 o’clock direction.

Judging by the aura he gave off, he was clearly a priest among the demon worshipers.

He was in the process of recalling the shadow hounds he had scattered around in order to make up for the pieces he had lost to me.

Since demonic sorcerers lacked mana fields, their detection abilities were also inferior.

He wouldn’t be able to pinpoint my location until he sent another hound to check.

But I knew exactly where he was.

This was the advantage a mage had over a sorcerer.

Now then, the question was how I should take him down.

There was no need to throw away my advantage by approaching first.

Neutralizing the enemy from a distance was the best strategy.

However, the mist that had evaporated from the lightning strike had already begun to return, and I was once again trapped in a white veil.

The overwhelming majority of mages relied heavily on sight when casting spells.

When the target wasn’t visible, the success rate of spells dropped significantly.

Even if I created a projectile like the Suffocating Arrow spell and hurled it, there was still a high chance it would miss.

Which meant my next move was obvious.

I just had to fire off something big enough that even a slight miss wouldn’t matter.

[Casting Quichiel’s Secret Spell – Starfall.]