The Academy’s Deceased Ate It All

— Mother? Hm… now that you mention it, I haven't heard from her in a while. But that's not unusual. There were always stretches when she didn't get in touch, and the gaps were never consistent.

I nodded slowly at Ivan's answer.

"Got it. Sorry for calling when you're busy."

— Busy with what? Anyway, I'll try reaching out to her myself. If I get through, I'll just tell her you need to talk to her urgently—that's it, right?

"Yeah, that's right. Thanks for understanding."

— You keep thanking me for everything. More importantly… anything else you need my help with?

At Ivan's question, I glanced sideways.

There was Choi Hyun-woo, head half-bowed, wearing a dazed expression—clearly hit hard by what he'd heard. And beside him was Han Su-yeong, comforting him.

I lowered my voice to a whisper.

I hung up on that, then immediately tried calling Alice Blesbuck and Kath Ryle.

Neither of them was picking up no matter how many times I tried. As I left them texts, Sbeungali murmured, almost teasing.

[They say the day you visit is the day of the market, and that's about right.]

His words jogged loose something I'd forgotten.

Sbeungali.

Every time he'd talked about the Seven Calamities up till now, he'd grouped himself together with Milited.

And I clearly remembered him saying he'd allied with Milited at one point.

Which meant he'd know something about Milited, at the very least.

'Sbeungali.'

[Hm? What is it?]

'Tell me about Milited… anything you know. Everything.'

[Everything, just like that?]

'Hurry up. I'm being serious.'

Sbeungali sounded a little caught off guard at that, and I heard a soft rustling, as if he were sorting through his thoughts.

In the middle of all this, I noticed Choi Hyun-woo, beside me, gripping the sword in his hands tightly without a word.

"Hyun-woo, oh, our Hyun-woo, what are we going to do…"

Han Su-yeong, as if she understood exactly what he was feeling, was holding him, her own voice wavering like she was about to burst into tears at any moment.

She carefully patted his back, soothing him.

She knew his heart, and even though she'd been shaken just as badly herself, she was putting Choi Hyun-woo's grief first. Watching her, I quietly let out a sigh.

I couldn't exactly tell them, in this situation, that the young swordswoman they'd known by the name Hyun-ah was, in fact, their own master—Nam Hyun-hwa.

How on earth was I supposed to untangle this? And as I sat there, hating my own pathetic self for having left her nothing but a vague warning to be careful—

[…Milited was a strange one, truly.]

Sbeungali launched into it without warning.

[I've told you before that we Seven Calamities each fear our own deaths, haven't I? But to be more precise, what we feared wasn't so much death itself as dying without achieving what we wanted. …Well, Margo was the one who truly feared death itself.]

Even now he was getting his digs in at Margo, and his beak gave a sharp click.

[For me, it was creating a world I could control. For Minerva, it was… hm? Yes, she says in the past she wanted to meet a worthy rival and pour her strength out against them. But haven't you already faced Juno and Venus—ah, fine, I understand! Forgive me, I apologize! Sincerely. Yes, yes. Those two don't count as worthy rivals…]

Sbeungali kept muttering to himself, apparently in some kind of conversation with Minerva.

[Ahem, I've gotten off track. Returning to the point… yes, Milited was unique. Similar to me, yet different. Where I wanted to create a world I could control, Milited wanted to control the world. To be specific, Milited wanted to control the principles and truths of the world that applied to itself.]

When I asked what he meant by that, Sbeungali paused for a moment.

[Let me put it simply. There are only two ways to kill us: attacking with the power of another Seven Calamity, or attacking with an object that grants the right to kill us—in other words, an object that exploits our weaknesses. Beyond those, you might wound us, but you can't kill us. Milited despised this conditional immortality to the extreme. It wasn't, like Margo's, a fear of death—it was rage at the very fact that it could die at all.]

"……."

Did this guy not know what "simply" meant?

I was thinking that when I heard him grunt, as if puzzling something out.

[Yes… to explain further, even the natural flow of time was something it raged against. That a creature whose lifespan had run out should die, that being cut by a blade should leave a wound, that an object dropped from a height should fall to the ground—all of it. Anything like that, it'd grumble about as if it couldn't accept it. An exhausting sort. When its madness settled, it could be calm, but most of the time it carried on like a lunatic.]

After saying that much, Sbeungali clicked his beak again.

[And its subordinates were lunatics in the same way.]

The rustling sound seemed to echo inside my ear.

[The ones that stand out in my memory were the lich, the vampire, the dragon… ah, yes, and the spirit and the werewolf. There were more of them, of course, but I hear it's just those first three now? Since the spirit betrayed it and the werewolf died.]

Click.

The sound of his beak striking together.

[Wait, hold on—]

He muttered something to himself in a low, considering voice, as if something had just dawned on him, then suddenly addressed me with urgency.

[Listen, you. Hear me out and think this through!]

"Wh-what is it?"

I was so startled the answer slipped out aloud before I could stop it.

But Sbeungali didn't even react to that. He just kept going.

[If you were one of Milited's children, what would you be working on besides eliminating you—the biggest obstacle in your way?]

'Besides eliminating me?'

[Yes. Besides eliminating you.]

'They'd be working to fulfill Milited's great wish.'

[Yes, they would. But to fulfill that wish, they'd have to eliminate you and take the pendant and Minerva's heart from you. There's plenty more they'd need to do besides, of course. So, then—to accomplish all of that, what other approach besides weakening your forces would they choose?]

He murmured quietly.

[Think back to what that unsettling girl, Jin Ye-seul, said. They'd been trying to make contact with Big Watch and join forces. Why, exactly?]

At his words, I felt something cold trickling down my spine, and I murmured.

"…To bolster their numbers."

[Yes….]

"Huh?"

Sbeungali let out the sound like a sigh in response to what I'd murmured without thinking.

In the middle of it, Han Su-yeong turned and looked at me curiously, but I didn't even have the bandwidth to worry about that.

[Right—and even if it's unrelated, those people have always preferred to steamroll opponents with overwhelming numbers. And right now their forces are reduced to nothing compared to what they once were. When the day comes that they meet their master again—for their own dignity, and for their master's mood, and just to make fulfilling its wish easier—they'd want to build their forces up. So which of them is best equipped to do that?]

"The lich. The necromancer—!"

As I said that much, a string of words shot through my head.

The lich.

The necromancer.

The art of resurrecting the dead.

A world where everyone was dead.

Another world.

Han Su-yeong.

A building turned into a dungeon.

Yeouido.

"…Margo."

There was a click.

It sounded almost like he was telling me I'd gotten the right answer.

As if to prove my conclusion was correct, Han Su-yeong, who'd heard me say it from right beside me, had her own face going pale with shock.

I had to move on a dozen fronts in the span of a few short moments.

I asked Esmeralda Lisnerger to contact Lydia immediately and check whether the intel she'd gathered included anything about the building in Yeouido that had been transformed into a dungeon by Margo's ability. At the same time, I asked her to arrange clearance to enter the area.

Even though Margo's dungeon was gone, the building it had half-turned-into had been designated a danger zone, and access to the surrounding area was still being controlled.

After that, I called Lee Myung-jun, gave him a quick rundown of the situation, and asked him to urgently send people who could go up against a necromancer.

In other words—a small team led by the holy knight Laura Hartmann.

I also asked that if he managed to reach Alice Blesbuck, he pass the same information along to her.

…Honestly, I'd expected the other Powerhouses, if not him, to refuse. But it seemed I'd quietly built up a fair amount of trust with them through the Minerva subjugation without even realizing it.

When they said they'd head to the location I'd named as soon as they finished preparing, I felt the tightness in my chest loosen, just a little.

Right now, we were speeding along the road in a car Shin Woo-seok had been called in to drive, on Lee Ye-eun's urgent orders.

Our destination, of course, was Yeouido.

On the way out of the Academy, I'd shoved the certificate Lev Dunkinson had drawn up for me at the gate and pretty much forced my way out, so word had probably already reached him too.

"Phew…"

I knew acting this way was going to come back to bite me later, but right now wasn't the time to be weighing that.

Jin Ye-seul and Choi Hyun-woo, who'd both pushed through Margo's dungeon with me in the past, had picked up on the gravity of the situation and were taking it seriously.

Even in the car, the two of them were each running maintenance checks on their gear and weapons.

In Choi Hyun-woo's case, especially, he'd flipped the grief of just a moment ago into something like fighting spirit. There was almost an eerie edge to the way he carried himself now.

Lee Ye-eun and Yu-na, on the other hand, didn't actually know anything—they had every reason to be confused—and yet they were going along with what we said without a word.

They both looked pretty shaken by the way the rest of us, especially Han Su-yeong, were anxious and unable to settle.

"Sorry, but is there any way we can get there faster?"

In response to Han Su-yeong's pressing, Shin Woo-seok answered as he drove with practiced ease.

"My apologies, miss. This is the best I can do. I'll try harder."

At his words, Han Su-yeong made an unhappy face and started chewing at her lower lip.

[While I was rummaging through your memories, I saw what that girl looked like after she'd grown—the one who destroyed that other world.]

That was when Sbeungali spoke up quietly.

The girl who'd destroyed that other world, the one he was talking about—that was Han Su-yeong.

[The undead of you and those close to you, the corpses of the Ten Powerhouses… and legions upon legions, more than I could count….]

Sbeungali stirred quietly in my right hand, as if telling me to calm down.

Only then did I realize I'd been trembling, just a little.

[They all crumbled to dust and disappeared. That woman's corpse included. Margo's dungeon was, at its core, an ability that created a kind of alternate world—so anyone who died inside it would vanish as well. Milited's children won't be able to make use of those bodies.]

'But the death-energy and the residue of that power would still be there.'

I knew that much from playing as a necromancer before.

If anything… I was more curious why I'd let myself forget that until now.

Sbeungali didn't seem inclined to argue the point.

[True. But the version of her in your memories was… well, to put it plainly, she could have been called a Seven Calamity in her own right. She'd have been able to pick a fight with Minerva, Juno, or Venus. There's no way some run-of-the-mill being could handle the death-energy and residue left behind by a necromancer of that caliber. That's true even for a lich.]

I let out a small dry chuckle and nodded at what he'd offered up, almost like reassurance.

He was right. Getting wound up beyond reason just turned things that could've worked out into things that didn't.

More than anything, I'd grown in ways the version of me from back then couldn't even compare to—hadn't I?

Reassuring myself like that, I quietly patted Han Su-yeong's hand, as if telling her to settle down.

"…Ah."

Her hand, which had been trembling lightly just like mine, twitched for a second, then went still.

A moment later, her hand started patting mine back instead.

"……."

"……."

The two of us sat there for a while, wordlessly patting each other's hands.

…It stings.

She didn't let it show, but Han Su-yeong felt a single spot on her forehead burning, as if it had been scorched.

It was the exact same spot where, in the past, another version of herself had kissed her—telling her she might find it unpleasant, since it was a necromancer's blessing.

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