Former Ranker's Newbie Life

The Light of Ruin and the Light of Creation slammed into each other head-on and erased one another in the same instant. The collision kicked out a violent surge of mana that tore through the surrounding space. That backlash drained both forces at once, and the strain started tearing Nepas apart.

“This is bad. Really fucking bad!”

Nepas realized raw combat power was no longer the real problem. If things kept going like this, something far worse than losing the fight would happen, so he rushed to put Do-Jin down for good.

“You... when the hell did you—”

Nepas never got to finish the sentence. Through Limited Reversion, Do-Jin reversed every bit of damage he had taken. He activated all of his abilities at once and came back swinging instead.

“I don’t give a shit how you fixed yourself. I’ll just smash you again!”

Nepas’ hands and arms swelled grotesquely, flesh bulging as they expanded back into a monstrous shape.

Do-Jin didn’t hesitate. Unleashing his full power, he cast Flash Lance so quickly that even Tier 4 magic no longer seemed to require an incantation. He completed the spell again and again, firing relentlessly.

Multiple points of light slammed into Nepas’ body with only a split-second delay between each hit. They struck the exact junction where the grotesquely swollen flesh connected to what little remained of his human body, then expanded all at once, letting out a high-pitched whine that felt like it could vibrate through skulls.

“Kraaaagh!” The relentless flashes finally ripped a scream out of Nepas.

The damage didn’t come from impact alone. The Power of Creation clung to the attacks, and when the connection point ruptured, massive chunks of mutated flesh were wiped out in a single violent burst.

“You think wounds like this are gonna do a damn thing to me?!”

The injured limb thrashed violently, and new flesh immediately tried to grow back and knit itself together. However, the regrown tissue eventually boiled, blackened, and rotted away.

Executor of Ruin’s trait kept stacking damage while crushing any attempt at healing, colliding directly with Nepas’ regeneration. The two forces locked into a brutal, grinding tug-of-war inside his body. The trait also came with another crucial effect: ignoring immortality statuses outright. In that sense, Do-Jin was the worst possible opponent Nepas could have faced.

Getting torn apart and growing back over and over probably made him feel like a freaking god. If he never felt pain or feared death, of course he’d turn into such a vicious monster.

Do-Jin decided to make Nepas experience something he never had: the pain Anemone felt and the raw terror of facing death head-on. He condensed crackling mana into a Lightning Spear and drove it straight into Nepas’ head. The bolt detonated the instant it struck. In a single blast, flesh charred black and one side of Nepas’ head burst apart with a wet, sickening crack. With part of his brain blown out, Nepas lost control of his body.

“Kghhh!”

With Nepas’ consciousness fading away, his body began to swell out of control and glow violently. Do-Jin already knew about this trait, so the moment he struck Nepas’ head, he had widened the distance between them. By now, using Psychokinesis for bursts of high-speed movement had become second nature to him.

“You filthy spawn of Bella!”

Nepas’ rapidly swelling body finally stabilized. Somehow, he suppressed the damage-over-time effects and healing reduction debuff, then recovered what he had lost within a second or two and let out a roar. He had prioritized repairing his brain, but the bones that should have held his eyes in place had not fully regenerated. His optic nerves were left exposed.

“I’ll kill you, turn you into a zombie, and throw you into a pigsty with a pack of heat-crazed pigs!” Nepas’ skin burst apart all at once as he flew into a frenzy. He plowed forward, tearing up the ground as the monstrous flesh inside his body surged outward.

Do-Jin swept his gaze over the charging monster with Magic Eye. He knew the most stable area would be the weak spot. Even if the surface was buried under monstrous flesh, a portion of a human body still had to remain inside.

“Found you.”

As Nepas’ size increased, the range of his attacks expanded along with it. At the same time, his patterns became simpler and easier to read. The erratic attacks from the multi-jointed spikes erupting across his body were more than dangerous enough, but Do-Jin kept his reasoning clear.

If a human brain’s still controlling all that, there’s a limit to how unpredictable he can be.

Moving those multi-jointed spikes with precision would require intense concentration. There was no way he could manage that while thrashing around so violently. That was even more true now, with his composure completely broken and his emotions running wild.

Do-Jin used high-speed evasive movement through Psychokinetic Artistry to dodge attacks from every direction while unleashing high-powered magic without pause. Fireballs and jagged chunks of ice, blue lightning and white flashes, blood-red spikes and thick pillars of rock erupting from the ground tore Nepas apart again and again.

“Ghk!” Realizing this wouldn’t end well, Nepas forcibly separated his body and charged Do-Jin in human form. “Got you!”

The sudden, irregular attack was difficult even for Do-Jin to handle. It wasn’t easy to anticipate that a human-shaped Nepas would launch straight at him like a projectile.

“Die!”

A sickening crack rang out from Do-Jin’s body. Nepas had only managed to catch part of his left arm, but the force was enough to rip it off below the elbow. Even as the limb was torn away, Do-Jin activated Lightning Release.

At this rate, I’m finished either way.

Transcendence burned through every ounce of the user’s strength. While it remained active, it granted overwhelming power, but the backlash afterward was brutal. Do-Jin was controlling his output as carefully as possible, but he had no room to drag this fight out.

“Ghh—! You fucking bastard!”

Nepas gagged as searing pain ripped through him, along with a curse-like force that disrupted his regeneration. What little reason he had left snapped. Even with electricity still burning through his body, he lunged at Do-Jin with brute force alone, oblivious to the massive opening he was exposing.

Seeing the enemy charge in with his guard completely down, Do-Jin blasted Nepas’ head and chest apart with Fire Cannon. When the flesh immediately tried to regenerate, he reached out and cooked it with lightning.

“Just fucking die already!” Nepas screamed.

Flames and sparks burst from Do-Jin’s hand. Instead of going for a single decisive blow, he kept pouring out steady, controlled power. Whenever flesh regenerated, he burned it away. When it regenerated again, he blasted it apart. The moment new flesh formed, Do-Jin’s magic reduced it to nothing again.

Nepas’ body immediately began to glow as it triggered an instinctive defensive response. That reaction, however, only applied to the monstrous half he had abandoned far away.

I have to end this right now.

What Do-Jin had pinned down and was relentlessly burning at point-blank range was Nepas’ human half. Separating his human body from his monstrous form and charging in blindly in a fit of rage had been Nepas’ greatest mistake. At last, his scorched body could no longer withstand the current and finally exploded. Flesh split apart, and fragments of bone burst outward as the pressure tore through him.

That did it...!

The instant that thought crossed his mind, another explosion detonated inside Nepas’ fully exposed ribcage. The blast hurled chunks of meat and splintered bone everywhere and violently tore Do-Jin away from him.

“Shit!”

The mangled remains of Nepas’ body shot out centipede-like spikes toward the monstrous half he had left behind. He dragged himself forward like an insect, scraping across the ground and smearing blood and gore as he crawled. Once the two halves fused back together, Nepas’ head regenerated partway.

“Uuuugh...”

The damage was far too severe for a clean recovery. Worse still, taking even a little more damage in this state would permanently trap him in a warped, inhuman form. Barely recovered enough to think on raw instinct alone, Nepas felt fear for the first time in his entire existence. Faced with the very real prospect of death, he chose to flee.

“Uuuugh, ugh, aaaargh!”

Leaving behind nothing but broken, wordless screams, Nepas compressed his body into a form built purely for speed and bolted without ever looking back.

“Hey—cough!”

Do-Jin tried to pursue him, but the accumulated damage and the delayed backlash from Transcendence hit him all at once. His legs gave out, and he dropped to one knee. A cold, restrained fury flickered in his eyes, the kind that came from being denied the chance to avenge Anemone himself. Even so, this was not the time to lose control.

I need to deal with that first.

He needed to check what had been loaded into the cargo compartment and shut the device down immediately. After waiting just long enough for his body to respond again, Do-Jin forced himself upright and headed for the wagon’s storage bay.

The sight inside made his stomach drop. Crystals filled with green, blue, and red liquid were tangled together in a grotesque device that was surrounded by a mess of mana conduits pumping power into it. The whole thing looked like a nightmare waiting to happen.

This is a fucking bomb.

More accurately, it was a magically engineered weapon of mass slaughter built to wipe out everything in its path, and it was already on the verge of detonating. Whether it had been shoddily assembled from the start or the battle had saturated the area with unstable mana, the detonator had already been triggered.

Through Silent Night, Do-Jin could see violent mana surges and a runaway overload state screaming toward critical failure.

[Exploding Catastrophe]

Grade: Fate

Objective: Prevent the detonation of the explosive

Reward: Preservation of the altered fate

The explosives prepared to cause large-scale damage will inflict immediate physical destruction across a considerable area. Over a far wider range, they will trigger plague contamination and undead transformation. If this bomb detonates, fate will be forced onto a catastrophic course.

Do-Jin irritably dismissed the window that had popped up. First it told him to change fate, and now it wanted him to keep the fate he had already changed from spiraling into catastrophe again. That was easy to say. It had handed him a bomb that was seconds away from detonating and then told him to make sure it didn’t go off.

Isn’t this a fucking labor law violation or something?

Do-Jin stepped up in front of the bomb’s detonator. The moment he did, multiple Magic Circles and geometric patterns rose into the air in a tangled mess. It was a magical puzzle. If he had enough time, he could solve it even without knowing the cipher or the answer.

As a mage, he could rely on the automatic decryption function, and as long as his magical aptitude was high enough, the puzzle would eventually unravel itself. However, that method required a lot of time, which meant he had to solve it manually.

If I screw up even once, this thing blows immediately.

Faced with a situation where neither option felt viable, Do-Jin spread his right hand. In moments like this, there was only one thing he could trust. He activated the Grimoire of Truth. His physical condition was terrible, but forcing it was his only choice.

As always, the moment it activated, it read Do-Jin’s intent and moved on its own.

[Magical cipher detected. Beginning analysis...]

As Do-Jin had grown as a mage, the Grimoire of Truth had grown alongside him. That made sense, since Do-Jin himself was, at his core, the Grimoire of Truth.

Before the system message could even finish displaying, identical shapes appeared over the components of the magical puzzle and began highlighting the correct answers. Do-Jin moved his hands immediately, manipulating the puzzle according to the solution the Grimoire showed him. He followed its guidance step by step and completed the three-dimensional magic array.

“Got it.”

With control of the bomb finally in his hands, Do-Jin stopped the detonation sequence. The device let out a hollow whine as it stabilized. As he watched it settle, a crushing wave of exhaustion swept through his body. For a moment, he seriously felt like tracking down the labor board and filing a complaint.

At the same time, the livestream Do-Jin had left running for the raid members was unsurprisingly flooded with viewers. Having watched everything from the moment the fight with Nepas began, everyone was too stunned to type.

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