-Failed Specimen
For an instant, a cold wind swept through. It was a wind that cut to the bone.
Everyone shuddered and struggled to keep their balance. The sensation of the ground heaving beneath them was awful. It felt as if the whole world were reeling.
And why had the wind suddenly come howling in on top of that?
But we were mages. We quickly drew up our mana and each dealt with it in our own way.
“Try lifting your body a little with kinetic magic. It’ll be much better.”
Thor said, his arms spread wide to either side like a gymnast balancing on a parallel bar.
“It’s fine if you put up a thick barrier. It seems like some kind of mental magic. It may not be a physical vibration.”
Balder dealt with it using his specialty, barriers and shields.
The other mages also found their own methods.
For simplicity, Thor’s method wasn’t bad. Once I lifted my body slightly with kinetic magic, the heaving sensation definitely lessened.
I didn’t use a barrier because I was spreading out detection magic in detail.
There was no gray energy caught by the detection magic in particular. That meant there was no black mage here.
It wasn’t mental magic. Nor was it a tangible vibration. Then what on earth was this?
“You’re here!”
Just then, Yu Jaeseon came running from over there. He was walking just fine. He wasn’t swaying at all. As if he had no idea what the heaving sensation even was.
“Huh? You’re not dizzy? You can’t feel this vibration?”
Thor asked in fascination. Everyone felt the same.
“Ah, I’m fine. I’ve already adapted.”
Yu Jaeseon answered calmly. I asked again.
“How did you adapt? Did you figure out what this is?”
“It’s a kind of wave. But rather than causing physical vibration, it seems to be causing a disturbance in our human senses.”
“That certainly seems to be the case. But what’s the source? Who’s causing it?”
I asked, looking around the surroundings once. It was also to show that there was no black mage nearby.
“It seems the monsters are causing it. From my analysis, I think it may be something like the monsters’ language. It appears they communicate with one another using this distorted sense. Try moving along with the waves. Then you’ll adapt to some extent.”
“The monsters’ language?”
“You mean that’s how those things communicate? That’s bizarre.”
“Follow the waves? How are we supposed to do that?”
“No, where are the monsters?”
Everyone reacted in surprise at Yu Jaeseon’s words.
Of course I was surprised too, but I thought that if Gil had been here, he might have realized it right away.
So I recalled the way Gil did things and tried imitating him.
Instead of resisting the heaving sensation, I rode the flow and sent out concentric waves to meet it.
And then, truly, I was no longer dizzy.
The vibration that had seemed to shake the whole world stopped. No, I had climbed onto that wave.
But even if it was the monsters’ language, I couldn’t understand its meaning. Regrettably, that was as far as I could go.
The other mages also struggled to do as Yu Jaeseon said. Some couldn’t manage it easily, but after a little while everyone had at least overcome the dizziness.
“And when I estimated the source, it was near Daemosan. Let’s hurry that way.”
The place we reached according to the coordinates Yu Jaeseon gave us was around the edge of an apartment complex, and perhaps because Yu Jaeseon had already cleared the area, there were no passersby at all.
Some of the shops showed signs of destruction, but the monster itself was nowhere to be seen. It seemed to have caused a commotion and moved elsewhere.
“Then let’s hurry.”
“It’s just on the other side.”
“Let’s go.”
Now that they had adapted to the distorted sensation to some extent, the mages set off in search of the monster without delay.
Daemosan began just across the main road.
As we crossed the road, the cold wind swept through again. At the same time, a sound like the earth rumbling reached our ears.
Rumble, rumble!
It was probably the same wave as before, but now it seemed to be heard as sound rather than felt as a sensation.
Had the monster noticed our approach and sent out a signal?
Next, there was movement that looked as if the mountain itself were physically shaking.
No, it wasn’t the mountain itself moving. Something as enormous as a mountain was moving like a fluid while wrapped around the mountain.
“W-what is that?”
“Is the mountain moving?”
“No. The mountain isn’t moving. A monster is wrapped around the mountain and moving.”
When I said what I saw, the mages rubbed their eyes and used vision-enhancement magic to look more closely.
It was night, and on top of that, the monster’s form and movements were so strange that it was difficult to see properly.
“It’s that huge?”
The thing was so large it seemed to surround the entire mountain. The monsters we had seen until now had been quite enormous as well, but compared to this one, they were no different from infants. Perhaps this thing really was the mother of those monsters.
“But what exactly is it? Its form keeps changing…”
Thor said, tilting his head.
It was exactly as he said. The thing’s form was constantly changing. And its transformations were so fast and intermittent that it looked as if a fluid were flowing.
Around the mountain, which appeared as a bluish-gray shadow, a monster like a black shadow was moving here and there.
Then, in an instant, it began charging toward us.
Rumble! Rumble!
A sound like earth tremors shook the air. A whirlwind raged. All of it was being caused by that thing.
“It’s coming!”
“Everyone, prepare to attack!”
“Scatter to the sides and attack over a wide area!”
We hadn’t even reached the foot of the mountain yet, but the thing was already running toward us first.
I couldn’t even guess what the monster’s original form was.
Its transformations seemed to occur at the speed of light, and to the eye, it even seemed to have the forms of multiple animals at the same time.
It looked like a chimera made by stitching together various living creatures. But one that changed from moment to moment…
“I’ll shine a light on it!”
Yantu fired light from his equipment from the rear.
It wasn’t completely pitch-black, but it had still been too dark to see the monster clearly. Only then did its appearance become visible in detail.
A gigantic lion’s face, an elephant’s torso, a zebra’s sturdy lower body, a rhinoceros’s massive body, a crocodile’s tail, a tiger’s face, eagle wings, a bear’s torso, a cobra’s face, the legs of a giant tarantula, a buffalo’s horns…
All of those forms appeared and vanished as if flickering, changing shape as they did.
Everything also looked as though it were thickly melting down like a lump of pitch-black crude oil.
‘What on earth is that? It can’t be a creature of nature, and judging by the lack of gray energy, it isn’t the work of a black mage either… If it was created through an experiment, then it’s a complete failure, isn’t it?’
That was what I felt after a brief analysis.
To my mind, it seemed to be one of Kim Seonho’s experimental subjects. Seeing as its form was unstable, it was definitely a failure.
But it was an extremely huge and powerful failure.
Before we knew it, part of the fluid-like monster had drawn right up to our noses. The thing was rushing at us furiously.
“Concentrated attack!”
At my shout, the mages unleashed wide-area attacks all at once.
Thor struck lightning down like rain, Balder and Heimdall poured out flames, and Yu Jaeseon was using kinetic magic to move the mountain’s rocks and rain them down on the monster.
I actively made use of the raging cold wind and sent ice blades flying in every direction.
The monster’s enormous size and constant transformations allowed it to evade and interfere with our attacks.
“Ah! Everyone, be careful! It’s flowing in along the ground!”
“Watch the outside too! At this rate we’ll be surrounded.”
The monster’s abilities were its endless transformations and the terrifying destructive power born from its massive body, but since it wasn’t a magical life-form, I thought it should be possible to control it with magic.
Its appearance was literally like a disaster, but in truth, it wasn’t that powerful an existence. Thinking that, I confronted it.
That judgment wasn’t wrong, but it wasn’t subdued as easily as I had thought.
The thing was chaos itself, and chaos was also its powerful weapon. The monster transformed madly like a machine whose control system had broken down, sweeping away its surroundings as it approached.
“Balder! Below you!”
The wing of a giant eagle that had swept in like the wind was scything across the area below Balder’s feet.
If Balder hadn’t quickly blocked it with his shield, everything below his legs would have been blown away.
“The monster split in half! Watch both sides and the rear! We’re being surrounded!”
The monster’s thick body transformed without rest, sometimes splitting in two, sometimes branching off into several streams.
A giant zebra had clearly been running toward us, but only its lower body continued to run while the upper body had already transformed into an eagle and soared up.
The eagle quickly transformed again into a cobra and came dropping down over our heads.
Part of the monster turned into the legs of a giant tarantula and encircled us.
“As if! We’ll roast you!”
Heimdall and Balder quickly wreathed us in flame magic as if drawing a circle around us. Hot flames surged upward.
“Try dodging my rain of lightning!”
Thor drew up an enormous amount of mana and poured lightning like rain over the area.
At that moment, I used kinetic magic to leave the circle, made a wide arc around the outside, and poured ice blades horizontally into the monster’s body.
Rather than being surrounded, we had to surround it. We had to leave it with nowhere to escape, no matter how it transformed.
Rumble! Rumble!
The sound like earth tremors shook again, but this time it seemed to be the monster’s scream.
“It’s collapsing!”
“Keep pouring on the attacks!”
The monster’s parts, the monster’s fragments, began to fall one by one, burning and being torn apart by flames, lightning, and ice blades.
Before long, the shape at its center had fixed itself into that of a giant lion. The flames Heimdall had fired caught on that lion’s mane.
The monster thrashed wildly. At that, the whirlwind raged even more fiercely.
Ironically, the whirlwind only strengthened the flames and the ice blades I had unleashed.
“Drive it down to the very end!”
“Burn that lion head completely!”
The mages encouraged one another and drove their magic forward with all their might.
The monster could no longer transform. The lion head was completely engulfed in red flames, blazing fiercely.
The other parts of the monster that had split off and scattered were burned to ash by lightning or pierced through by ice blades, becoming battered beyond recognition.
What had been the lion head now lost its form and flowed down like pitch-black crude oil. I rapidly froze it with ice magic and trapped it inside ice.
“It’s done! We got it.”
I thoroughly searched the surroundings so as not to miss even a single piece of the creature’s body.
The monster’s fragmented pieces gradually broke apart, then turned into black smoke and evaporated into the atmosphere.
“Is there any more now?”
“I don’t think so.”
Judging by the fact that I no longer felt the distorted sensation, it seemed we had gotten rid of all of it.
Only then did everyone let out a deep breath.
“Phew… It really was an utterly bizarre creature.”
“Who on earth made something like that?”
“Don’t tell me there are more things like that.”