-Goblins
Flames surged and billowed right up to the tip of my nose.
It seemed X had mounted a flamethrower on his arm this time.
Fire, huh. It looked convincing enough on the surface.
But that was only to an ordinary person’s eyes. Boasting about flames in front of mages was nothing but laughable.
X’s flames couldn’t pierce our barrier, so they were merely rippling there like decoration.
X couldn’t be unaware of that… could he?
The flames were nothing but a diversion. He had to be up to something else.
“Gil, do you want to take X?”
“I will.”
I wanted to give Gil a chance to wash away the humiliation he had suffered at the hands of those biohacker bastards on the street before.
When Gil stepped forward, X finally seemed to recognize him and spoke with a snort.
“Ah, it was you? The homeless brat. So now you’re a mage?”
Gil made no reply. He simply glared at X and sent out concentric circles of mana waves.
X spewed flames again. As if he had drawn them out at maximum output, the blaze was even fiercer this time.
But this time, the flames did not even reach us.
The flames caught in Gil’s concentric mana waves began to whirl. They spiraled and headed straight back toward X.
“Fuck!”
X cursed and staggered backward. He seemed enraged at being attacked by the very flames he had unleashed.
He hurriedly swung both arms down and stopped the fire discharge.
But the flames that had already been released blazed on as if sustaining their own life, tightening around X.
Of course, it was the work of Gil’s concentric mana waves.
“Damn mages!”
X hastily retreated and thrust both arms forward again.
This time, blades poured from his palms and flew at us.
Gil lightly spread a barrier to block the blades, then activated a magic snare and sent it flying toward X.
He intended to capture X with both the flames and the snare.
But at that moment, X, who had somehow reached the end of the corridor, shouted toward the shadows standing in the darkness within.
“Everyone, forward! Attack the mages! Now!”
No sooner had X’s order fallen than the shadows in the dark shade of the corridor all rushed out into the lobby at once.
The magic snare Gil had sent ended up slipping over the first one that leapt out in front.
In the confusion, X had already disappeared somewhere.
“Keeek! Keeeeek!”
The creature caught in the snare let out bizarre screams and jumped up and down, and at the sight, the others became excited too and began shrieking.
“Keeek! Keeek! Keeek!”
“Keeek! Keeek! Keeek!”
“Keeek! Keeek! Keeek!”
Gil craned his neck among the shrieking creatures, trying to find X, but he was nowhere to be seen.
He bit his lip. Because he had hesitated for an instant, he had lost X.
Now we had to deal with the problem right in front of us first. The creatures shrieking those bizarre sounds were approaching us in a group.
Only then did Gil look at them properly.
“Huh? …Mage-nim, what are these?”
They were a race smaller and skinnier than humans. Creatures Gil had never seen before.
Their bodies were green like orcs or lizardmen, but they did not look as sturdy as orcs.
“They’re goblins.”
I answered him.
While Gil was facing X, I had been watching the situation while continuing to press down the small fry collapsed on the floor with wind.
The ambush had to be the shadows standing still in the shade of the corridor, so I had probed what they were.
I could tell just from their shadows that they were a race smaller than humans, and what was peculiar was that their mana felt denser than that of other races.
Then, when X’s order made them rush into the lobby, I immediately recognized their identity.
They were goblins.
“What? Goblins? What are those?”
“A race that hasn’t existed on Earth until now. Judging by how dense their mana feels, it seems a black mage summoned them from another dimension.”
“Ah…!”
They were a race familiar to me from my memories of the previous world, but come to think of it, they had never appeared in this world.
There was no information about them in Oudin’s memories.
In other words, they were a race that had not yet been accepted as immigrants to Earth in this world.
“But it doesn’t seem like they were brought from somewhere civilized.”
The goblins wore nothing that could be called clothes, only a single scrap of cloth each. And, naturally, since they had no language chips, we could not communicate. The sounds they made came across as nothing but monstrous cries.
To Gil, that looked like a lack of civilization.
In any case, the fact that goblins had appeared here was proof that the biohacker group had joined hands with a black mage.
Whose doing was it? Could this be Loki’s doing too?
I was extremely curious as to who had done this and for what purpose they had brought goblins to Earth, but now was not the time to argue over that.
“Keeek! Keeek!”
“Keeek! Keeeeek!”
The goblins, now right in front of us, lunged at us.
Taking advantage of the brief moment we hesitated and talked at the appearance of a new race, they attacked from all sides.
They wildly reached out with claw-like hands, already tugging at the hems of our clothes and trying to tear at our arms.
They had no weapons, only bare hands. They were not especially strong either.
Of course, they were stronger than ordinary humans, but not so strong that it left an impression.
However, their hands were large for their size, and there was quite a bit of grip strength in those claw-like hands. And they were piercing through the barrier, which was probably due to the power of the mana they possessed.
I quickly strengthened the barrier and pushed the goblins away.
“What should we do?”
“I’ll handle them, so stay back.”
“Are you going to kill them?”
“No. I’m going to freeze them.”
Even in that brief moment, the goblins charged at us again like starving demons, and surprisingly, a few of them even pierced through the reinforced barrier.
First, I pushed them farther back with kinetic magic, then immediately activated freezing magic.
‘Freeze them all!’
There were around twenty goblins in total.
As the freezing energy swept through, the goblins froze in place with their arms outstretched, tangled together as they were.
They looked like ice sculptures embodying a scene of wailing.
Though they possessed fairly dense mana, they were helpless before freezing magic.
“We’ll have to take these guys with us later. For now, let’s go do what we came here to do.”
Leaving the frozen goblins there, we stepped into the corridor where X had vanished.
The dark corridor was empty.
We encountered no one until we reached the stairs at the opposite end. There was not the slightest sign of anyone in the rooms on either side of the corridor either.
“Let’s go upstairs.”
The building was about five stories tall, and there was no separate elevator. After carefully checking the area above the stairs, we began to climb.
The stairwell, too, was extremely gloomy.
It was this dark even in the morning because there was not a single window in the corridors or stairwells. It was a rather closed-off building.
The doors to the rooms on both sides of the corridor were all tightly shut as well, so no light entered.
Since we did not know where the fleeing X or the leadership of the biohacker group was, we had no choice but to check each floor as we searched.
There was no sign of anyone on the second floor either.
We opened the doors to each room, but only a musty smell remained; there were no people left.
It seemed to have been the space where the guards and low-ranking members we had first encountered, as well as the goblins, had stayed.
“Let’s go up to the third floor.”
We climbed the stairs at the end of the corridor again.
When we stepped into the third-floor corridor, I felt a grayish energy pushing in from the far side of the dark hallway.
“There’s something here. Be careful.”
“Yes.”
After warning Gil, I had him stand behind me.
It was too dark to see clearly, but there was still no one in the corridor.
When we had walked a few slow steps, the door of a room beside us suddenly flew open, and chimeras burst out from within.
“Kill!”
“Kill the mage!”
“Smash him to pieces!”
There were three chimeras in all.
They were chimeras made by stitching together orcs and zombies, and in the middle of each one was a human glaring with wide-open eyes. It was that human mouth that was shouting.
Overall, they looked cruder than the chimeras Nasanhaegyeong had made, but the fact that a human had become the core of the chimera while maintaining a seemingly intact mind was somehow chilling.
“Kill!”
“Kill the mage!”
“Smash him to pieces!”
The human mouths shouted again.
Then the orc and zombie bodies that made up the chimeras began to move all at once.
The orc legs each tried to charge ahead, while the zombies, excited and hurrying, tangled their limbs together and could not even walk properly.
On top of that, the interior was not very high, so the sight of the large chimeras moving with their bodies hunched over looked terribly clumsy.
They were grotesque, but they did not look threatening at all.
Jang Pildu might have been frightened, but for us, who had already encountered countless chimeras in Incheon, all we felt was, “What’s wrong with them?”
“Gil, you know, right? Attack the cores.”
“What? You want me to annihilate them? But there are humans… Can’t we freeze them like the goblins?”
“You know chimeras that include zombies regenerate.”
“Still…”
“Fine. There are only three of them, so let’s subdue them first.”
In the meantime, the chimeras had come right up to us and swung their arms at us.
I quickly formed an ice wall to block them, and the orcs began pounding it wildly with their arms, breaking it apart.
Their walking looked extremely clumsy, but their arm strength was quite considerable. Cracks were already spreading through the wall as it broke away.
“Kill!”
“Kill the mage!”
“Smash him to pieces!”
The human mouths shouted once more.
But it was strange that they had been repeating the exact same words since earlier.
It occurred to me that perhaps the humans were not actually maintaining sane minds as the cores of the chimeras.
Maybe their souls had already fallen away, leaving behind only a single instinct.
It was then.
X appeared behind the chimeras and burst into laughter.
“Hahaha! You can’t kill them? Why, because they have human faces, does that make you reluctant? As expected of the hero mage. You’re overflowing with love for humanity. Then why is it okay to kill monsters? Isn’t judging by appearance alone a bit too trite?”
I could not understand what he found so funny and enjoyable that he was laughing.
No. In truth, why was he pretending to laugh when he was not enjoying this at all?
Wasn’t the behavior pattern of thugs the tritest thing of all?
“What are you talking about? Are you planning to give me a philosophy lesson right now? Why don’t you stop hiding behind them and come forward? Otherwise, I’ll treat you the same as the chimeras.”
“Go ahead and try! Kill! Kill the mage! Smash him to pieces!”
X screamed hysterically.
Now I saw that the words the human mouths composing the chimeras had been shouting were none other than lines X had programmed into them.
“Kill!”
“Kill the mage!”
“Smash him to pieces!”
The human mouths cried out like parrots.
Meanwhile, the orc arms and legs struck the ice wall and shattered it with a crash.
At that very moment, my freezing magic activated.