- Conqueror of the Continent
Bruno gazed quietly at my face, then continued.
“Yes. It was because of Samir. I said I would take you in and raise you, but the reason I sent you into the Hall Academy was so you could face Samir. Back then, Samir had not yet built his Magic Tower and was nothing more than a back-alley mage, but I could tell at a glance that he was dangerous.”
At that time, Samir had been no different from a thug who went around using magic recklessly. He had also been gathering back-alley mages with dispositions similar to his own.
Bruno had thought Samir would become someone who caused great trouble in the future, so he had tried to stop him.
As a divine mage, Bruno was an extremely outstanding magician, but he did not live while revealing his existence within the system.
The modern world of magic regarded divine magic as outdated.
It was an age when even the ancient magic passed down through mage families of bloodline was being pushed aside.
It was a world where only mages standardized by the government, and mages gathered around organizations such as the Hall of Magic, were acknowledged.
And so Bruno had been living quietly. He had merely been maintaining the lineage of divine mages in secret.
“There are only a few divine mages left. But we had been given a duty. It was to keep watch for black mages.
“As the peaceful era continued for a long time, mages became accustomed to power, but neglected the task of watching for black mages. It seemed there were no mages who recognized that Samir would develop into a black mage.”
That was why Bruno had no choice but to step forward himself and deal with Samir. He followed Samir around, stopping the bizarre and horrifying acts he committed, and had to fight to keep him from harming people.
“In the end, Samir also discovered that I was the one interfering with his work, and we often ended up fighting. In places neither the government nor the Hall knew about.”
The battles between Samir and Bruno had apparently continued quietly for years.
But as time passed, Samir’s power grew. Countless back-alley mages were following him.
His true nature as a black mage gradually revealed itself, and there were signs that he would build a Magic Tower. Bruno decided he had to stop Samir completely.
“The two of us agreed to have a decisive battle. From Samir’s perspective, I must have been quite the nuisance, so he suggested we meet and settle things once and for all. When I agreed, Samir said we should meet somewhere remote, far from Seoul. It was at the foot of Sobaeksan in Danyang.”
“Ah! Then from back then, that place was…?”
“Danyang? That’s where we went before, isn’t it?”
Cheon Danbi and Gil looked back and forth between Bruno and me.
The place name Danyang had come up again. As expected, Danyang had not been a place that had only appeared incidentally in that previous incident.
Just as it had been in my previous life, Danyang was a place deeply connected to Samir.
“That’s right. It’s the place you all went to last time. Samir caused a crustal shift there. And I stopped it with pure white light. Though I was a little late.”
At Bruno’s words, the team members nodded.
Only now were they properly understanding what had happened during that incident.
“I knew it…”
“So it was you, Mage Bruno, who stopped it then as well.”
“Then was it also you, Mage Bruno, who stopped Yashin with pure white light in Neo Forest?”
“That’s right. I had to protect the sacred forest.”
The team members nodded again.
They realized that the helping hand that had stopped the black mages’ terrorism here and there all this time had been Bruno.
The fact that he had done all of it from another dimension, not even this world, was so incredible that I wanted to ask how, but at that moment, Bruno continued with his story of the past.
“At any rate, when I went to the forest in Danyang back then, to my surprise, your mother was there, Udin. Before meeting Samir, I had been wandering along a forest path and encountered her by chance.”
Bruno watched my reaction as he spoke, but I did not bother asking again, nor was I greatly surprised.
Because the place name Danyang had already allowed me to guess and anticipate this story.
My mother, despite not being a mage, had become a member of the group that followed Samir.
As soon as she saw Bruno, my mother supposedly said it had been a mistake to entrust me to him and told him to take me out of the Hall Academy.
She said she had sent me down the wrong path, and that he had to bring me back at once and make me one of Samir’s subordinates.
“I don’t know how your mother ended up following Samir. She had been someone who feared magical ability and wanted to keep away from it.”
I had been born with magical ability, and because she feared it and wanted to keep away from it, she had entrusted me to Bruno—only to belatedly fall under Samir’s sway and tell him to bring me back. At that, a derisive laugh came out of me on its own.
Bruno was still speaking as if he found it regrettable, but the emotion Bruno felt did not reach me.
‘So that was how it was. In this world as well, Mother once again tried to offer me up as a sacrifice to a band of evil through misguided faith.’
In that instant, emotion suddenly surged up.
The aversion toward my mother that had continued from my previous life rushed in like the tide. My whole body trembled with anger.
I did not say anything, but it seemed the emotions I felt created ripples.
Ren lightly placed a hand on my shoulder. Ren, who had been thoroughly rejected by her mother, must have been able to understand how I felt.
That small gesture, unexpectedly, became a small comfort to me. Perhaps there was comfort in knowing this was not a problem that belonged to me alone.
“Please continue.”
I urged Bruno to tell the rest. Once again, I pulled myself together and listened closely to his story.
“Your mother followed Samir like that, but Samir had no interest in your mother. She wasn’t even in his sights. To him, she must have been no more than a mere human who worshipped him.”
Bruno said that while he was talking with my mother in the forest, Samir appeared there.
Samir immediately began attacking Bruno.
He paid no attention to the fact that there was an ordinary person between the two mages.
Whether she was his devout follower or not, he did not care.
But Bruno could not do the same. He had to protect my mother.
As a divine mage, he could not kill humans carelessly.
That applied not only to my mother, but also to Samir’s minions, who gradually appeared there.
Samir was different. He cared about nothing. He was only focused on winning the battle.
Because of that, the battle proceeded in a way that was disadvantageous to Bruno.
In the end, Bruno lost the battle against Samir.
“I ended up being defeated. Even so, Samir’s magical skill was not so outstanding that it surpassed mine, so he could not kill me. Instead, he borrowed the power of the Demon Realm and threw me into the Abyss.”
“The Abyss of the Demon Realm? Then is that where you are now?”
“No. It’s another dimension. At the last moment when I was being thrown into the Abyss, I was fortunately able to alter the direction of gravity with divine magic. However, I did not have enough time to calculate a circuit precisely enough to choose the dimension. I fell into an unfamiliar dimension I knew nothing about.”
Bruno stopped speaking for a moment and looked at me. He looked at me for a while with apologetic eyes.
I did not ask why. Bruno continued.
“Udin, I’m sorry. Samir threw your mother into the Abyss along with me. But I could not save her. Divine magic would not apply to your mother…”
“That is not something you need to apologize for. The one who sent Mother into the Abyss was not you, Bruno, but Samir.”
My mother had fallen into the Abyss of the Demon Realm. In the end, she had been in a place I could not even go to find.
A terribly complicated feeling swirled in my chest, but this was all I said.
And I decided I would think of it only that way. It was better this way. Now I could focus all my anger on Samir.
No, it had always been that way. All of this had begun with Samir. My target was only Samir.
“Then what kind of place is the dimension you’ve been in all this time? Is there no way for you to return here?”
When I asked in a calm voice, Bruno looked quietly at me once more, then continued his story.
He said that the dimension he had fallen into contained a vast continent, but there were no living beings in sight.
As it turned out, however, it was only that there were no living beings living on land.
The living beings were divided into races that lived underground and races that lived underwater.
The underwater races mostly lived together in peace, but the underground races were extremely ferocious and combative.
They tried to rule the underwater races, but the water was deep, and the environment was different from underground, so it was not an easy task.
It was then that Bruno appeared—a being who could live upon the land.
At first, Bruno had to devote all his strength to survival. After that, he had to fight endlessly against the underground races who challenged him.
Bruno’s magic was alien to the beings of that place, and something they could not possibly overcome.
Before long, Bruno became the conqueror of the continent.
As the sole living being on the surface, he came to rule over the underground races and maintain peace with the underwater races.
After that, Bruno devoted himself solely to training his magic. Amid the varied nature of the broad continent, he was able to train to his heart’s content.
“I wanted to return to Earth. I wanted to come back quickly to this place, where humanity like me lives. So I continued to polish my spatial magic. But Samir had woven the barrier extremely firmly. He had thoroughly blocked me so I could never cross the boundary between dimensions.”
“Ah… It was because of the barrier.”
“Even so, those hundreds of years of training were not entirely in vain. Though I cannot physically return here, I became able to send magic.”
He said that in that dimension, time flowed at a different speed than on Earth.
A day was extremely short, so time flowed that much faster. Because of that, Bruno was already several hundred years old.
Even with hundreds of years of training, he could not open a portal that crossed the dimensional boundary and came to Earth. But he had learned magic that sent the light of divinity.
Bruno became able to observe Earth through the vision of sacred light and send magic.
That was how he had been able to create and manage this magical space, and when black mage terrorism occurred, he had been able to stop it with pure white light.
“Ah, you really are amazing.”
“To spend hundreds of years alone in another dimension…”
“Even so, you found the path of magic in the end. You truly are worthy of being the Great Mage’s teacher.”
The team members, who had been listening with bated breath until now, each let out words of admiration one after another.
But there was something that could not be filled by admiration alone.
Humanity on Earth—and among them, I—had received so much help from Bruno since a time when I knew nothing, but we had not been able to offer any help to him, enduring alone in a distant dimension.
“The barrier… If we defeat Samir, will it break? I will make certain to break that barrier so you can return to Earth, Bruno.”
I spoke.
I had gained another goal. It was no different from my original goal, but the meaning its result would bring me had grown even greater.
Bruno could return.