Ian nodded in satisfaction as he looked at the community’s reactions.
‘As expected, everyone loves it.’
Not long after he posted the verification thread, new posts exploded onto the community. They were all about Ian and Irene.
[Guys, actually I killed him together with Irene too!]
[NekomimiBest]
(Photo of a stray cat)
I don’t have anything like proof, but please believe me!
[Comments]
-(Get out of the gallery! Mage meme)
-Actually, I caught Eddy with him too, yeah
└NekomimiBest: Really?
└As if, fuuuuck. Practice your magic instead of writing bullshit posts.
└NekomimiBest: No, I’m telling you it’s real!
└(Dumbfounded mage meme)
[The pride of our community, who is this Irene that the crazy bastard cosplaying as a newbie supposedly caught.]
[TamingMaster]
Greetings, this is TamingMaster, everyone’s professor. Today I shall explain about Irene.
This is a photo of Irene taken before someone died. Doesn’t she look more normal than you’d think?
Her real name is unknown. It is assumed that Irene itself is her real name, and no one knows her surname.
Affiliation: Laplace. The alias people have given her is Painter. More often than not, she is called an Artist rather than a Painter.
However, those who have suffered at her hands once, or know of her deeds, simply call her a crazy bitch.
The magic she uses projects the contents drawn in a picture into reality, using paintings as a medium.
Just hearing about it sounds incredibly broken, and it truly is fucking broken. As if those Walpurgis bastards would create magic for no reason?
If you’re looking for the source of excessively grotesque, biased, and cruel magic, Germany is usually the correct answer. Next is England.
Anyway, befitting Walpurgis’s ill fame, the magic she uses is quite grotesque and absurd. But it is not without flaws.
First, she is extremely disadvantaged in head-on combat.
Second, without someone to support her from the side, it is incredibly difficult to meet the conditions for her magic, and even with support, it is not easy.
Because of these conditions, Irene usually avoids head-on fights unconditionally and just spams magic from afar, pew pew.
This is fucking bullshit. If you can’t react, you die on the spot. If you react and rush to beat her up, some bastard using a shadow clone technique suddenly pops out and gangs up on you.
Truly unfair, isn’t it? You should fight fair and square with ambushes and spirit-filled trickery—how dare they go 200 against 1?
Even without a clone ability user, Irene’s magic is basically an instant-death move. If your face is carved into the picture, you die, period. Resistance? Impossible. Unless you have magic that grants an untargetable state, you’ll just die.
But they say our superstar, a lunatic cosplaying as a newbie who hasn’t even sold his veteran account yet, caught her.
I was surprised that Irene was even in Korea, but the newbie who killed her before that became known is even scarier. Setting aside how he does weird concept shit every time, his abilities are nothing short of extraordinary. Honestly, I respect him. Does he really have a Tome of an Outer God or something?
Of course I know he doesn’t, but the very fact that he makes one suspect this is practically proof of how amazing he is. You probably wouldn’t find a mage who grew as fast as that bastard even if you searched through history.
Thus I ask, with both respect and doubt.
How the fuck did you do it, you crazy bastard.
[Upvotes 262][Downvotes 0]
[Comments]
-Kim Ari: Thank you for the lesson, Professor!
└TamingMaster: (Thumbs-up mage meme)
-Irene’s ill fame is pretty high, after all. Wasn’t entry itself blocked in places like Germany, England, and Spain?
└Pretty much all of Europe except Greece and Italy. The moment you enter there, the data gets transferred to the administration bureau, and they immediately come looking with agents. Even the bounty is about twice as high there, yeah.
└Ah, I see.
-Everyone knows Irene is strong and difficult to deal with, but honestly it makes no sense that a mage who started magic less than a year ago caught her. Couldn’t this be some giant hidden camera prank that only I don’t know about?
└TamingMaster: A mage who started magic less than a year ago (Killed Eddy. Caught Marien. Caught Laura.)
└Fucking stats, lol
└This thing is…… a newbie?
[Hey, just be honest. I’ll forgive everything]
(Photo of a raccoon shoving its face in)
The truth is, you’re a fucking amazing mage. The Clock Tower dispatched you, and you happened to find this place and come here every time to relieve stress.
I fucking knew it.
[Comments]
-★Daemo: That’s not it. He really is a mage who started around last November.
└Daemo, hurry up and put on an aluminum hat. Your brainwaves are being controlled!
└★Daemo: (Is it that serious? Mage meme)
└(That’s exactly right! Mage meme)
Ian, having carefully read the posts that had gone up, laughed lowly and pocketed his phone. David, who had also been scrolling through the community, clicked his tongue and set his phone down on the dining table.
“You’ve certainly drawn aggro properly. It’s going to be noisy again for a while.”
“It’s better than being quiet. Sometimes you have to revitalize it like this.”
“……That’s true, but…… Ha, fine. Well, it’s a good thing anyway.”
He leaned back against the chair and turned to look at Ian.
“More importantly, are you okay? You’ve already taken down three mages affiliated with Laplace.”
“…….”
“Eddy, Marien, and Irene. They all died in Korea. At this point, Laplace has no choice but to take some kind of action. They’re not a bunch of idiots either.”
It was a valid point. Ian glanced at Sohee, Amelia, and Woohyeon, who were clearing the table, then took out a cigarette and put it in his mouth.
When he lit it, the smoke was sucked into a pipe installed above the table.
Even so, the room remained slightly hazy. Ian looked up at that hazy ceiling, holding the cigarette between his fingers.
“…….”
Laplace’s intervention.
It was something Ian had naturally already been thinking about. From the moment he caught Eddy until now, he hadn’t forgotten it for a single moment.
‘Marien came looking for Eddy’s corpse, but Eddy and Irene were after the Tome of an Outer God from the start. With those two dead, Walter can’t help but know there’s something in Korea.’
As David said, Laplace wasn’t a group of idiots. With three mages dying in the same place, there was no way they wouldn’t notice something was strange.
However, the problem was.
‘Since I don’t know when those bastards will storm in, all I can do is prepare.’
If Ian had known where those bastards resided, he would have stormed right in and released Outer Sea creatures in massive numbers.
He didn’t know if that would catch them, but it would at least cause some minimal losses to their forces. It would have been worth trying even if he had to accept some losses.
But Ian didn’t know where they were—he didn’t even know where Walter was. Eddy and Marien hadn’t known either, so it was impossible to ask anyone.
Irene? Sadly, there was no longer any organ in her head that could be called a brain. Only a single piece of the Schemer’s flesh remained, floating alone within the cranial fluid.
With the situation as it was, Ian had no proper way to hunt them. He couldn’t exactly ransack the entire world looking for them.
“Hoo…….”
He exhaled a long stream of smoke and racked his brains.
‘He sent three in a short time, and two of them straight-up died, so if Walter has any sense, he won’t send a new executive right away. He’ll probably prepare as much as possible and try to recover the tome. Or hire tome hunters.’
Maybe both.
Neither was a good thing for Ian. He let out a deep sigh and flicked the ash into a portable ashtray.
Just then, Seoah, who had been quiet, stared at Ian and burst into a snicker.
“That’s quite the troubled face?”
“……Well, it can’t be helped. Even if I don’t regret it, it’s true that it’s become a hassle.”
Ian gave a bitter smile. Seoah let out a small hum and rested her chin on her hand. Her hair, grown a bit longer since he last saw it, swayed just below her shoulders.
“If something’s hard on you, tell me. I’ll help you right away.”
“……You?”
“Of course. You think they say friends are good for nothing? Sometimes you help each other without demanding anything in return.”
She laughed softly and stroked Hanako’s head nestled between her legs. Hanako trembled.
“Or what, did you think you were the only one who considered us friends? That’s a bit upsetting?”
“…….”
“Huh? No answer. Don’t tell me it’s true?”
Seoah’s face crumpled slightly. Ian let out a small laugh and shook his head.
“No. That’s not it. It’s just…… mm, to be honest, it was embarrassing. I don’t really like this kind of mood because it’s cringeworthy.”
“Cringeworthy! I was being quite serious!”
“I know. That’s why I’ll endure and answer too.”
Ian smiled gently.
“Thanks. I’ve put my mind at ease thanks to you.”
“……Ahem. Well, that’s good then.”
Seoah answered with a slightly reddened face, then needlessly squished Hanako’s face this way and that. Hanako flailed her limbs at the unexpectedly strong force. Regardless, Seoah pursed her lips and rolled her eyes about.
“Wasn’t that smile just now a little unfair…….”
“I can help too. Since I joined in on this friendship nonsense, I’ll help you once without any price. That is, if you promise to help me once in return.”
David cleanly ignored Seoah’s muttering and spoke up. Ian leaned his body against the backrest.
“Yeah, I’ll help you once too. It’s not a difficult thing.”
“Good. Then since we’ve finished a light meal and had a light conversation…… shall we move on to the next event?”
He sprang up from his seat and took out the mask he had removed, putting it on. Ian tilted his head and stared at him.
“Event?”
“We gathered from all over the country; we can’t just eat and split. That’d be too much of a waste.”
“…….”
“So let’s have a magic duel or something.”
David grinned and loosened his tie. Then tiny bugs hatched and crawled across the back of his hand.
“Ugh!”
Amelia freaked out. Seoah also made a disgusted expression, and Sohee sighed as she touched her sleek hair. Only Woohyeon seemed to have been told beforehand, simply fiddling with his prayer beads with a calm face.
David rolled the strange insects between his fingers and opened his mouth.
“You don’t have to if you don’t want to. I’m not forcing you. But personally, I’d like to have a spell duel with you.”
“…….”
“The spells that took down three Laplace mages. I’d like to see them a little.”
“……A duel, huh.”
Ian sat silently for a moment, then crushed the finished cigarette into the ashtray and grinned.
“You won’t be able to handle it.”