Vol 7 Chapter 33

The bloodstains that had been there disappeared without a trace, covered by cigarette ash stains. After staring down at the dirtily stained floor for a long while with tightly pressed lips as if it had always been that way, Seung-jo suddenly covered his eyes and broke into mad laughter.

"Hahaha. Hahahaha. Hahaha."

In the end, everything disappears. Getting dirtied like that, no matter how much you clean and wipe, what you originally sought can never be seen again.

He had made it that way himself.

"Hahaha..."

While laughing, Seung-jo kicked away a bottle rolling on the floor. Watching it crash into the piled debris and break again with the sound of scratching glass, he irritably pressed his temples.

"I... won't give up."

The voice that kept repeating in his head since that day they met under the cold sunlight. Those eyes that had been calm but deeply sunken, still shining so black it was hard to see the pupils. That gaunt, pale face. Those chapped, bitten lips. The bandages wrapped between strands of limp hair. That body that had grown in some places and changed in others without his knowledge.

...And that limping leg. That leg.

The leg...

"..."

His head felt like it would split from pain. He wanted to rush out of this house right now and run toward the object of his desperate longing, while at the same time wanting to kill that very same object.

Even as passion surged making him want to hold and embrace them tightly while crying, simultaneously madness-tinged thoughts boiled up suggesting it would be better to devour that body from fingertip to toe right now.

No. Could this really be called just passion and madness? It had been long since Seung-jo could no longer be certain exactly what he was feeling now.

What words in the world could express such emotions?

Seung-jo pushed his fingers through his hair and mercilessly clawed down while swallowing back beast-like groans. He didn't want to think about anything anymore.

Suddenly, his eyes fell on the game capsule abandoned like trash not far away. Though normally in situations like this he would have headed there as always, now even that seemed meaningless. Because he actually already knew that entering there wouldn't make him completely forget all his anguish.

But at that very moment, the image of an unfamiliar person flashed in his mind.

"You really are a strange one."

"You play alone so insipidly because you have no friends."

Who had said those words?

'Who was it?'

The mage whose face had been covered so completely it couldn't be seen properly. The man with the strangely irritating voice whom he had almost forgotten until now.

But...

"You... turned out not to be such a strange person after all."

When that voice which had been the only thing to get on his nerves in his deliberately emptied mind in the game resurfaced again, he finally felt like his blocked breathing was clearing.

After covering his eyes and panting for a long while, Seung-jo staggered to his feet only when his breathing had somewhat calmed. After brief hesitation, where he headed was ultimately toward THE MIST capsule.

Kapros called up the 7th circle skill window that he hadn't looked at since checking it once when he first obtained it, having had no time since then.

"Skill window open."

New names written at the bottom of the magic list were fully revealed.

Looking at five of Superior's magic spells that had all been difficult to master now sorted by attribute, Kapros felt elation, excitement, and an intense sense of challenge at having come this far.

These spells were very different from the start compared to Superior's magic like Inferno or Blizzard that he had learned before. Unlike Inferno and Blizzard whose manifestation he hadn't known, he already knew what results these would show when used from seeing them in Superior's memories.

Because this easily helped with 'imaging' from the start, which was the most basic and important aspect of using magic in MIST, Kapros suspected these spells must have some difficult aspects that couldn't be solved by imaging alone, unlike before.

'Hmm... then shall I try one first?'

Scorpion Fire at the very top. Superior's Scorpion Fire was magic that, the moment it was cast, made flames rise from the ground along the caster's shadow and instantly pierce through enemies like a scorpion's tail, killing them all at once.

'These spells. They each had their own incantations.'

Though not shown in the skill window, the incantations came back to him quickly since Superior's use of these spells had been so impressive. While looking for suitable targets, Kapros spotted trees standing similarly in a line and turned that way after clearing all stray thoughts from his mind.

And just as he was about to chant the spell.

"Ahem..... What are you trying to do? Try 7th circle?"

'Superior?'

Superior, who had been lying in the field just sleeping all this time, suddenly spoke.

"But."

"Hmm.... You might get hurt if you do it now. That's harder to handle than Inferno and Blizzard. At least Inferno would listen, but those ones will never work with your forceful handling method like now."

"Get hurt?"

Though he didn't know what this ghost-whispered nonsense meant, it felt quite ominous coming directly from Superior who had created these spells.

MIST's attack magic basically had almost no effect on the caster. Though he had seen information before on the web about cases where incorrect imaging could sometimes affect the caster, since it had never happened to him, he hadn't paid attention to it.

Superior was now directly denying that common sense.

"Yes. No matter how much you try, it's useless unless you know the Law of Reverse Flow. The 7th circle I created needs to be done with knowledge of that."

'Law of Reverse Flow...?'

Ding!

- You have learned the name of the hidden passive skill, 'Law of Reverse Flow'!