-Ashen Aura
“What do you mean, this and that? Isn’t the greatest product of Korea’s Hall of Magic, the top elite mage Oudin, wasting his talent in the wrong place?”
Loki continued the conversation as if he couldn’t feel the vibrations at all. I turned my gaze outside and asked him.
“Loki. This sound, this vibration—don’t you feel it?”
“What sound? Wait a second…”
Loki stopped talking and pricked up his ears. At that moment, my golden field of vision began to ripple violently, as if it were catching fire.
I headed toward the Hall’s front gate. Something was definitely happening outside.
“What is it? I’m coming too!”
Loki followed behind me.
As soon as I stepped through the gate, I extended my detection magic.
I could feel mana writhing deep inside the alley. A sound like a growling beast reached my ears.
I quickly approached in that direction.
“Huh? Aren’t those zombies? But why are they acting like that?”
Loki muttered from behind me.
A horde of zombies came pouring out from inside the alley.
The zombies ran unsteadily, their twisted limbs flailing, their eyes rolled back as they let out beastlike groans.
This was not normal.
They were zombies, so of course they normally looked like rotting corpses, but the zombies of this world did not look as if their souls had been sucked out like that.
Whatever their outward appearance, they opened their eyes properly and could even speak. They were zombies who lived as members of society.
But the zombies charging toward us now looked completely mindless, and they were covered in a strange ashen aura.
‘It’s mana, but it’s incredibly sinister, isn’t it? Were they somehow altered by a black magician?’
Dozens of zombies rushed toward us.
When they had been scattered one or two at a time in the alley as vagrants, they hadn’t posed any threat at all, but when they swarmed in a group like this, the situation was different.
“No, why do they all look like that? Did they go mad as a group? We can’t just leave them alone, can we?”
Loki grumbled as he raised his mana, while I adjusted my detection magic and carefully examined the ashen aura surrounding the zombies.
Then I sensed the energy of a malignant disease. It seemed the zombies had been infected by a virus.
My suspicion that this was bioterrorism caused by a black magician grew even stronger.
In that instant, my heart began to pound rapidly. My trauma had been awakened.
In my previous world, because of one of the disasters Samir had unleashed—a viral epidemic—I had lost the sight in my right eye.
Right now, my right eye’s golden vision was blazing brightly, but my heart reacted as though I had lost that eye all over again, thudding hard in my chest.
‘Who did this?’
In my previous world, the epidemic had not merely made people physically ill.
In order to stop the spread of the virus, which had possessed an incredible infection rate, countries around the world enforced lockdown policies, and as a result, the global economy froze and fell endlessly.
People died from illness, but they also lost their jobs and starved to death.
Riots broke out everywhere. Looting and destruction followed one after another, and human history entered a dark page.
‘Is something like that about to happen in this world too?’
I wanted to stop it. I had to stop the disaster.
Now, I had the power called magic.
The mana energy inside my body stirred in fierce waves. My golden vision shone brilliantly, sharpening all my senses.
Grrr. Grrr.
The zombies, now only a few steps away, let out groans that sounded as if their lungs were boiling. White saliva dribbled from their gaping mouths.
“Looks like they’ve caught some kind of disease. This won’t do. I’ll have to burn them all clean.”
Loki gathered his mana and thrust his hand forward.
“You’re going to burn them all to death just because they’re sick? But zombies are still citizens in their own right.”
I stopped Loki.
If some black magician had planted a virus in the zombies, then I had to find the magic circuit and dismantle it.
This was not something that could be solved by removing only the symptoms without finding the cause.
“There are exceptions in the zombie immigration regulations. If they become a threat to other citizens, a mage is allowed to deal with them.”
“They’re not an immediate threat right now. It’s not like the zombies are attacking us…”
I was still in the middle of detecting the magic circuit. If we rashly burned the zombies to death now, we might lose the black magician’s traces instead.
But Loki didn’t listen to me and acted hastily.
“Whip of Flame!”
Loki swung his arm wide and activated his magic. Mana stretched out from his fingertips.
A blazing red net of flame surged toward the zombies.
It was strange.
As I turned to look at Loki with my detection magic still active, an ashen aura suddenly spread across my vision.
The ashen aura was wavering within the magic circuit Loki had extended toward the zombies.
For a moment, I wondered if I had seen it wrong.
I thought perhaps the sinister mana surrounding the zombies had flowed backward into Loki, so I looked again.
‘Why is there ashen aura mixed into Loki’s magic circuit?’
While my attention was momentarily caught by that ashen aura, screams burst out from the zombies.
“Aaaargh!”
“Kuaak! Kuaak!”
“It’s hot! Please save me!”
Before I knew it, Loki’s flame whip, spread out like a net, had wrapped broadly around the group of zombies and was slowly tightening.
The smell of burning had already begun to rise.
“Please, save me!”
A clear plea rang out.
Among the zombies writhing in agony, I saw a human boy caught between them.
The boy was in the middle of the zombie horde, his arms raised high and waving as he shouted.
I had to move quickly.
The flame whip would keep tightening around the group and burn them. Magical flames would not be extinguished easily.
Loki was a fairly capable mage as well. I had to suppress the flames with magic that surpassed the spell he had activated.
I hurriedly raised my mana and gathered it at my fingertips.
There wasn’t enough time to analyze and dismantle Loki’s magic on the spot. But I thought I could aim for the gaps in the magic circuit.
‘Water attribute and freezing, cross through the gaps of fire and freeze the flames!’
Fortunately, the magic circuit of the flame whip Loki had extended was not dense. Since I already had my detection magic active, I was able to quickly find the openings.
Waves of mana poured from my fingertips. They created a path of magic through the gaps in space and extended toward the zombie horde at the speed of light.
Between the meshes of red flame, bluish sheets of ice formed in an instant. The fire froze rapidly and was suppressed.
“…Huh? What the?”
Loki let out a startled sound and slowly approached the zombies.
The zombies at the edge of the group had already been burned, but those near the center had frozen before the flames could damage them.
Among the zombies, the boy was frozen with both arms raised.
“There was… a person there?”
“You almost burned that child to death too. You didn’t see him?”
At my words, Loki shook his head as if he hadn’t known. Then he looked around at the frozen group of zombies and said,
“Now that I look, you’re right. I didn’t think there’d be a human mixed in among the zombies. That could’ve been bad. But more importantly, this freezing magic… Wow! Seriously, that’s amazing. You froze flames. As expected of Oudin.”
Loki poured out his admiration.
I quietly observed him. Now that Loki had withdrawn his flame magic, the magic circuit no longer remained clearly visible.
The ashen aura was still wavering everywhere, but I couldn’t determine whether it was flowing out from the zombies or from Loki’s magic circuit.
‘I’ll set it aside for now.’
Even if I asked Loki about the ashen aura right now, I doubted he would answer honestly. It would be better to bury it for the moment and keep watching him.
“It must be the work of a black magician, right? I mean, the reason the zombies changed like that.”
Instead, I threw out a simple question.
“Probably. A black magician’s terror attack, I’d say. Things have been insane lately, haven’t they? In America, they say terrorist attacks happen practically every day.”
Loki answered casually.
“It looks like Korea is just getting started too. A few days ago, there was an explosion at Incheon Port.”
“Ah! You mean the incident where those strangely altered orcs smuggled themselves in?”
“You know about it?”
“Of course. They brought those orcs to the Hall of Magic.”
I recalled what the crows had said, that the orcs had been loaded onto a food truck and secretly brought to the Hall of Magic.
But if even Loki, who had come from America a few days ago, knew about it, it apparently wasn’t much of a secret.
“Really? What are they doing after bringing the orcs in? Since it’s an illegal immigration case, shouldn’t the government be investigating it?”
I asked while pretending not to know the circumstances.
“They’re not normal orcs. It’s a case involving a black magician. The explosion itself proves that, doesn’t it? They said it was an explosion caused by magic.”
“They didn’t say anything like that on the news.”
“Look at this guy. You leave the Hall of Magic and suddenly you’re way behind on the news. Don’t be like that—keep in touch with other mages and spend some time with them.”
Loki lightly slapped my shoulder and joked.
Seeing him act like this, he seemed like the usual Loki. The ashen aura felt as though it might have been my imagination.
In any case, it seemed they were not disclosing information about the Incheon Port explosion to the public, while the story was circulating among mages.
“So did they find anything after investigating the orcs? Did they get any information on the black magician?”
I casually asked what I was most curious about. But the answer was disappointing.
“No. Looks like they didn’t find much. It’s certain that a black magician altered the orcs, but they don’t know who did it.”
“I see.”
“Korea had almost no movement from black magicians until recently, so I guess that’s why there’s barely any information either. The Hall doesn’t even have a single analyst specialized in black magicians.”
If Loki was telling the truth, it didn’t seem like I would be able to obtain any useful information by going to the Hall of Magic.
I turned my gaze away from Loki.
The wind blew. A charred smell drifted from the burned zombies. The ice was slowly melting.
Come to think of it, I had frozen the boy to save him, then left him like that while talking with Loki. I had to save the person first.
I reached my hand toward the boy and called forth a gentle wind with waves of mana. As soon as the wind touched him, the ice surrounding the boy immediately evaporated.
“Hoo…”
The boy exhaled deeply and looked around. After checking the still-frozen zombies, he turned toward us.
“Mage-nim, thank you. Thank you for saving me.”
The boy bowed his head over and over in gratitude.
In front of him stood two mages, Loki and me, but the boy was looking at me as he gave thanks.
Even in that urgent situation, surrounded by flames, had he been able to tell who had saved him?
“Are you all right?”
“Yes. I’m all right.”
I approached the boy. But then I faintly sensed waves of mana from him.
It wasn’t the strong mana that flowed from mages.
What should I call this? A seed of mana, perhaps?
Faint, gentle waves were flowing from the boy.
It was not the ashen aura.