-Smile
The moment I entered the alley in front of the house, I could tell at once that something had gone wrong with the barrier.
Mana was trickling out of the barrier that should have been woven so tightly that not even water could seep through, perfectly protecting the residential building.
But rather than having been broken through by magic, it looked as if it had expanded from within, tearing here and there and letting mana leak out.
‘Why is it in that state?’
In that condition, it had not completely lost its function as a barrier, but since gaps had already formed, anyone determined to intrude could force their way through them.
Perhaps someone already had.
I stopped the car at the end of the alley and looked around.
The front of the house and the alley were both utterly quiet.
There were no pigeons here now, and no sandworms either, so it almost felt relatively peaceful.
There were no traces of a battle nearby.
Just an ordinary residential area in the dead of night, no different from usual. Dark and silent, as though everyone had fallen asleep.
“Ren, wait in the car for now. The car has a barrier on it too, so don’t worry.”
“Understood.”
He must have wanted badly to come with me, but Ren, understanding why I was telling him to stay here, did not insist on following.
“If nothing’s happened to Cheon Danbi and Gil, I’ll let you know right away.”
“Yes. Please hurry.”
Leaving Ren alone, I rushed toward the house.
As I ran up the stairs, I felt a sharp, stinging pain, as if something were piercing my heart.
It was not a physical pain. It was more like a premonition.
Even as I ran, I activated detection magic and scanned above, but I did not sense any particular magic.
All I could detect were faint ripples of mana, like aftershocks, scattered here and there.
I opened Gil’s room on the second floor first. No one was there. There was no trace of anything.
Immediately after, I went up to my room and flung the door wide open. No one was there either.
The sight of my room in complete disarray greeted me.
The few pieces of furniture I owned were broken and strewn about. There had definitely been a fight here.
It felt as though all the blood in my body were flowing backward.
I forced myself to take a deep breath and calm my emotions. I had no time to be swept up in them. I had to grasp the situation quickly.
Then I noticed that the tabletop I had taken from the biohackers was flipped over and charred black.
The tabletop being flipped over meant the portal had opened.
But the portal was nowhere to be seen.
Only when I applied detection magic did I recognize the traces of the portal.
The portal had been destroyed. It was damaged and could no longer function as a portal. It had become impossible to enter the space beyond it.
‘Did they intrude through the portal? But it was only a subspace……?’
With high-dimensional spatial magic, it would not be impossible to open a new path into the inside of a subspace.
But there could not be many black mages capable of using that kind of magic.
‘Who on earth?’
Rather than make blind guesses, I had to find out through detection.
I honed my detection magic even sharper and examined the traces of the portal.
Though distorted and shattered, part of it remained, leaving some room to break through.
I extended my detection magic deep into that place.
Beyond the portal, what had once been a subspace was now empty.
The space itself had been destroyed, to the point that I could not properly sense even its length, width, or height.
Had the goblins inside come out?
“Coo, coo, coo!”
Just then, I suddenly heard a pigeon from behind me.
When I turned around, there really was a pigeon. It was the very mutated pigeon I had put inside the subspace before leaving for the broadcasting station.
The pigeon, still tangled in the magical snare, was poking its head out from under the broken desk, staring at me with those same blank eyes.
“What the hell, you were still here?”
Cheon Danbi and Gil had vanished, and even all the goblins that had been inside the subspace were gone, yet only the pigeon remained.
It seemed the intruder had not been interested in the pigeon. In that case, it was probably not someone connected to Vanaheim.
‘Was it a black mage from the Magic Tower after all?’
Come to think of it, I wondered where my crows had gone.
Whoever the intruder was, judging by the fact that they had not taken the pigeon, I doubted they had taken the crows either. So why were they not here?
It would have been nice if they had stayed behind and explained the situation to me.
Unlike the crows, the pigeon, which could not speak, merely stared at me.
As I absentmindedly met the pigeon’s gaze, I noticed a grimoire lying on the floor beside it.
I quickly picked up the grimoire and immediately rubbed the pattern on it with my fingertips.
A portal opened. My magical space remained there, completely intact.
The intruder clearly had not even known about the magical space in my room. Considering they had not paid the slightest attention to the grimoire.
I strode into the portal and looked around the magical space for a moment.
The inside of the magical space was still peaceful, calm, and abundant.
I had hoped, just in case, that Cheon Danbi and Gil might have hidden inside, but that was not the case.
They, too, had not even known this magical space existed, so there was no way they could have fled there.
I should have told my team members about the magical space long ago. A useless wave of regret surged up.
I also thought that perhaps the crows had hidden inside, but they were nowhere to be seen either.
Having no other choice, I put only the mutated pigeon into the magical space and then came back out.
‘Where did they take Cheon Danbi and Gil?’
By now, I was treating their kidnapping as an established fact.
Given that the barrier had not been completely destroyed, it was more likely that someone had opened a path through the subspace rather than intruded from outside.
Had they used the goblins through remote control?
And when they fled from here, they probably did not go out the door either, but escaped along a path opened by spatial magic.
I focused again on the damaged portal.
When I examined it carefully with detection magic, only then did I find faint traces of an ashen aura remaining beyond the portal.
Detection alone was not enough to trace them using those traces as a clue.
I activated spatial magic at once. It was time to use spatial magic’s restorative power. I had to restore the destroyed subspace and enter it.
‘Wait for me. I’m coming.’
I gritted my molars, forcing down my growing impatience.
* * *
Only after Loki emerged from the gray portal was he finally able to catch his breath.
He had barely managed to escape that room before Oudin arrived. If he had delayed even a little longer, he probably would not have succeeded.
“Whew…… I’m dying here. Nothing ever goes easy, does it?”
After letting out a long sigh, Loki looked around. A disorderly scene entered his eyes.
He was inside an abandoned building in the restricted area behind Yongsan Family Park.
This was the only place that had come to mind in a hurry, so he had opened a transport portal here.
In truth, with Loki’s skill in spatial magic, this distance was about his limit. He would not have been able to reach Gangnam anyway.
The inside of the abandoned building was empty.
After the biohackers had been attacked by Oudin and driven out, the Bureau had taken control of this place, but after searching it once, they had left it abandoned.
“Nice and quiet. You two keep behaving yourselves just like that.”
Loki looked at the two people he had kidnapped, bound in magical snares. A brat mage and a druid.
Now that he had gagged them in addition to binding them with snares, they had finally gone quiet.
Until just a little while ago, they had been shouting noisily and resisting so violently that even the goblins had struggled to subdue them.
The original plan had been to bring only the boy named Gil, but because the two of them had been together, he had no choice but to bring them both.
If not for the goblins, he would not have been able to handle them alone.
He had thought Gil was merely a brat mage who followed Oudin around, but as it turned out, the mana he possessed was considerable, and his magic skills were quite decent as well.
On top of that, the woman named Cheon Danbi was a druid.
She did not seem to know how to use mana-based magic, but she had the ability to manipulate harmony using life force.
Even though Loki had launched a surprise attack, it had taken quite a lot of effort to subdue them completely.
He had been scared out of his wits, worried that the job might not be finished by the time Oudin barged in.
‘If Lord Samir hadn’t helped, kidnapping them would’ve been impossible, wouldn’t it? No matter what he said, in the end, he helped me.’
At the thought of Samir, Loki’s body shuddered on its own. Just calling him to mind was enough to make his immense presence feel palpable.
Cold sweat ran down Loki’s back all over again.
It was Loki who had first proposed kidnapping the boy.
The original plan had been very simple. He had thought all he needed to do was go directly to Oudin’s house and kidnap the boy.
He knew Gil was a mage, but he had not thought at all that the boy would be an opponent he could not defeat one-on-one.
But various factors had arisen that threw the plan off course.
When he actually went to Oudin’s house, it was surrounded by a barrier. A ridiculously powerful barrier. In that state, there was simply no way he could use magic.
There was not enough time to analyze the magic circuits and break the barrier, and it did not look easy either.
‘How do I get in?’
After agonizing over it, he tried combining gravity magic with vibration magic and burrowing up from deep underground, but that did not go well either.
The barrier was meticulously blocking even the underside of the building.
Time kept passing, but no solution appeared.
In the end, Loki had no choice but to request help from the Magic Tower.
[What? You can’t intrude because of the barrier? So what do you want us to do? You were the one who stepped forward saying you’d kidnap him in the first place.]
When he contacted the mid-level manager from the Magic Tower he had been dealing with and asked for help, the response was cold.
It was not wrong.
After all, Loki himself had been the one to say he had a way to seize Oudin’s weakness and propose kidnapping the brat mage.
It had been both an offer to be accepted as a member of the Magic Tower and a plan to secure a certain position within the Magic Tower through his results.
Since the Magic Tower’s biggest obstacle at present was Oudin, the proposal had been accepted.
And now, here he was, whining and asking for help. Even Loki himself found the situation humiliating.
But there was nothing he could do.
The time to carry out the plan was running short, and if it succeeded, it would have a great effect, so he had to pull it off somehow.
“I’m sorry. If you can just somehow break through the barrier, I can definitely handle the rest.”
Even then, Loki had not known that there were two people inside the house, and he had misjudged the boy’s abilities as well.
In any case, at that moment, the most urgent and desperate matter was breaking through the barrier.
Right then, Samir suddenly appeared on the screen of the phone through which Loki had been video-calling the mid-level manager.
[You boasted that you’d kidnap him when you don’t even have the skill to break through a mere barrier? And with that level of ability, you’ve been going around shouting about being anti-Oudin all this time?]
Something like a smile had appeared on Samir’s face.
Since the corners of his lips were raised, it could only be called a smile, but it was a smile that did not resemble a smile at all.
It was an expression that seemed forged by blending contempt with the pleasure of contempt for others.
Just looking at it sent chills crawling over Loki’s entire body.
He thought he never wanted to face that expression again.
Loki shuddered.