-Putting to Sleep
* * *
It was a morning after a deep, satisfying sleep.
My hours of sleep had been short because of training, but the quality had been excellent. No, perhaps I had slept even better precisely because I had trained all night.
My body and mind felt wonderfully refreshed.
As I walked to the window, I looked at Gil asleep in the next bed. He was still sound asleep.
‘Right. Sleep a little longer. There’s nothing better than sleep for restoring stamina.’
Last night’s training had been a success.
Perhaps because I had already advanced a stage, drawing in mana from the outside world and making it resonate with the mana waves inside my body had become far easier.
I could see even the finest details of the mana waves clearly.
I had also tried spatial magic. Instead of merely regretting the mana space I had left at home, I reminded myself that a mage had to train wherever he was, and had to be capable of magic anywhere.
What I wanted to develop was a fusion of spatial magic and other magic, but since I couldn’t test attack magic in a hotel, I immersed myself in analyzing space itself.
With extreme concentration, I analyzed every mana wave in the surrounding space. After that, I made the mana waves resonate and tried moving space. I turned it inside out, and I bent space as well.
Spatial magic worked far more smoothly than I had expected, enough to keep me excited all night.
It seemed that excitement still hadn’t faded.
‘The weather’s clear and bright, just like my mood.’
As I looked out the window, I suddenly felt like using spatial magic once more.
I decided to try it just a little. Leaving the area around the bed where Gil slept untouched, I twisted the rest of the space like a Möbius strip, connecting the inside and outside.
That was when it happened.
From the outer space that had curved inward, I sensed a faint mana. It was mana containing a gray aura, at that.
‘There’s a black mage in this hotel?’
I sharpened my nerves and carefully extended detection magic along the path created by the spatial magic.
It was very faint, but it was definitely a gray aura. It seemed the black mage had a barrier around them. Or perhaps they were blocking off their mana.
Even when I extended my detection, there was no reaction. Judging by how faint the life signs were as well, they were probably asleep.
‘Is it a coincidence? Or did they follow us? Were they watching us?’
It was the floor directly below. There was no way it was a coincidence. It was reasonable to assume they had been watching us.
I considered rushing downstairs immediately to seize them, but concluded it would be better to handle it quietly rather than cause an unnecessary commotion.
I had to use magic that was both stealthy and powerful.
I decided to combine spatial magic with mental magic. Paralyzing them should be enough.
‘You must be tired from watching us, so take this chance to sleep nice and deeply.’
I cast sleep magic that encroached upon the mind. Along the path created by the spatial magic, I silently sent out mana waves.
Stealthily yet powerfully, in a single stroke before they could even notice, the magic extended precisely to the spot where the gray aura lingered.
Then I activated spatial magic and turned the inside and outside of space back to normal.
It was clean. Not even a trace of magic remained here.
I was satisfied. I hadn’t expected an opportunity to test the magic I had trained last night to arrive so quickly.
“Mage, is something wrong? Did I oversleep?”
Gil woke and sat up as he spoke.
It seemed he had vaguely sensed that something had passed by.
“You’re awake? You didn’t oversleep. There’s still plenty of time for breakfast.”
I answered, brushing off my hands for no reason.
I wondered whether I should tell him what I had just discovered, but decided against it.
At the very least, the black mage wouldn’t be able to move until the hotel staff went over to urge them to check out and rang the bell. Probably sometime in the afternoon.
That gave us more than enough time to get ready and leave.
“Breakfast?”
“Yeah. We came to a luxury hotel, so we should have breakfast before we go.”
Gil quickly forgot his question about whether something was wrong and focused on breakfast instead. It was probably curiosity about something he was experiencing for the first time.
I didn’t know what would happen the moment we left this place, but until then, I didn’t want to ruin the good mood.
The hotel room was safe. The barrier I had set up last night was intact.
“If you’re both up, hurry up and come out. I’m hungry!”
Cheon Danbi’s voice came from the living room.
I chuckled and went out to find Cheon Danbi already finished getting ready to leave, waiting for us.
“You’re diligent. You’re already done getting ready?”
“I said I’m hungry. Let’s hurry and go eat breakfast.”
“You want to go to the breakfast buffet? Instead of that, let’s just order room service and eat here.”
At my words, Cheon Danbi’s face lit up.
“Oh! Room service! Nice. Since we’re staying in a five-star hotel suite, we should enjoy everything there is to enjoy.”
“Then hurry and order.”
“Okay! I’m good at that kind of thing.”
Gil only watched Cheon Danbi and me with a puzzled expression. He probably didn’t even know what room service was.
Then again, there was no way Gil, who had lived on the streets, had ever enjoyed such luxury.
A little while later, when a hotel employee entered with food loaded on a cart, Gil’s eyes went wide.
It seemed Cheon Danbi had ordered plenty of this and that on her own. There was enough food to fill the table.
“This is breakfast? Why is there so much?”
“You both need to eat well. You had a rough time yesterday, and we don’t know what’ll happen today either.”
Cheon Danbi was right.
For some reason, the moment of us all sitting together and eating in a hotel suite felt like the Last Supper.
No, well, that didn’t mean we were going to meet our end the moment we stepped outside. It just felt like I didn’t know when we would ever have such a leisurely moment again.
In any case, whether it was the Last Supper or the first supper, we devoured everything on the table with hearty appetites.
“You packed everything, right?”
“Yes. I only have one bag.”
“I packed everything too. I just have a lot of luggage because of the potions and herbs.”
“Good. Let’s go.”
After finishing breakfast, we didn’t dawdle and moved right away.
When Gil and Cheon Danbi went out ahead, I looked around the room one last time, then dispelled the barrier and left.
Instead, I put up a solid barrier around the three of us.
As we took the elevator down, I cast detection all the way through the lower floors. I didn’t feel any particular movement of mana.
The black mage on the seventeenth floor seemed to be sleeping soundly, just as I had put them to sleep, and there didn’t seem to be anyone else.
“It looks like someone was watching us last night. When I checked this morning, there was a black mage on the floor below.”
Only after we got in the car did I bring it up to the two of them.
“What? A black mage?”
“We were being watched?”
As expected, both of them reacted with surprise. I was glad I had waited to tell them so they could eat breakfast in peace.
“I put them to sleep with sleep magic, so don’t worry. They’ll be asleep in a paralyzed state until the afternoon.”
“But when did you go outside? I didn’t see you leave the room.”
“I didn’t go out. I found them in the inverted space while training spatial magic. So I extended detection to confirm it and used sleep magic through it.”
“Wow! Spatial magic? With our team leader’s skills being so outstanding, I guess we have nothing to worry about.”
Cheon Danbi exclaimed with a playful note in her voice.
“It’s good that you trust me, but from now on, let’s not let our guard down. Yasin could come find us at any time, and there’s no guarantee another black mage won’t latch onto us.”
“Yes, yes. Understood. I will absolutely not let my guard down and will keep my radar running sensitively.”
Cheon Danbi continued answering playfully, then suddenly tilted her head.
“But why would a black mage only watch us and not attack?”
I had already been thinking about that point too.
Had they been waiting for Yasin to join them? Were they a black mage with poor magical ability, and therefore afraid of me?
I thought about it, but I couldn’t know the answer.
“Who knows. In any case, it was fortunate. If a fight had broken out in the hotel, innocent people might have been hurt.”
I answered only roughly like that. Then I started the car.
“We’re leaving now. Everyone fasten your seatbelts.”
“Where are we going? Are we really going to Chungcheongbuk-do?”
Gil asked as he fastened his seatbelt. I could sense a slight excitement from him.
“Yeah. Let’s go to Chungju Lake first. Last time, Mage Jang Jeyeong said something strange had happened there, so let’s go take a look.”
“Oh! Chungju Lake. The scenery there is really amazing.”
Cheon Danbi responded as if we were going on a trip. Gil, too, showed an expectant look.
I didn’t want to break the excited mood, but we couldn’t forget what we had to do.
“Cheon Danbi, brief me on the news while we’re on the way. You checked it yesterday, right?”
“I checked it this morning too. As expected, Yasin turned the Vanaheim chairman’s mansion into a complete mess. He killed all the guards, mages, and elves there, and I don’t know what he did, but they say not even the corpses were left behind. And when he left the mansion this morning, he completely smashed the soldiers guarding the outside too. Ugh…”
Cheon Danbi stopped speaking for a moment, letting out a deep sigh.
The casualties were heavy, but it seemed Yasin had not managed to break through the underground cave. If the magical seal had been undone, countless test subjects would have come outside, and that would have been the biggest news of all.
Thinking that we had held out well, I felt secretly proud.
‘Yasin isn’t so impressive after all.’
I asked Cheon Danbi,
“The photo I asked Mage Jang Jeyeong for was posted online, right?”
“Yeah. The photo and the post both went up. It makes it look like we’re already in Chungcheongbuk-do. But instead of posting a photo with only you in it, he posted one with Gil in it too.”
“What? He posted a photo with Gil in it?”
“Fortunately, it’s from the back. But everyone’s wondering who it is. With yesterday’s incident becoming known, the internet is in an uproar. There were a lot of people directly involved on Jungang-ro too.”
I was curious how the people who had awakened and then lost their mana again to become ordinary people would react. But the fact that a photo of Gil had gone up on the internet bothered me more.
“I’m fine. It’s just my back, after all.”
Gil spoke calmly.
So I decided to let it pass for now too. It wasn’t as if I could do anything about it immediately. I kept the part that bothered me in mind.
Cheon Danbi continued the briefing. She said there was no news about the dwarves. In this case, no news was certainly good news.
The government and the Hall had not come up with any particular countermeasures against Yasin’s terrorism. The damage must have been severe. Quite a few mages had died.
Even so, it made no sense for them to sit around blankly and do nothing.
‘Are they not even thinking of chasing Yasin?’
Either way, I had to be the one to deal with Yasin.
Yasin was coming for me.