Chapter 716
Professor Verdus’s “sentries” were infamous among the students of Einroguard.
They looked like wooden dolls or metal dolls, as if somebody had roughly lashed together chunks of wood or bronze and propped them upright, yet they displayed combat power that was hard to believe for small golems.
Of course, it was not some transcendent power that defied common sense.
To begin with, these sentries were artificial summons Professor Verdus had made by roughly gathering leftover materials and odds and ends, then laying enchantment magic on them.
Summons like these could not surpass the quality limits of their materials and reagents.
But Professor Verdus’s magic dragged out the absolute greatest limit possible within those constraints.
“Fire element! It’s a fire-element-immune sentry! I came prepared with fire magic!!”
“Fall back! Fall back!”
“Another sentry has appeared in the rear! Type is… area curse! A curse sentry!!”
“That lunatic professor seriously needs to stop!”
Knowing the limits of materials and reagents, Professor Verdus had not made all-purpose summons.
Instead, Verdus specialized each one in a single thing. The lacking functions could simply be handled by other sentries.
A sentry immune to the fire element, a sentry carrying a magic-reflection shield, and then, after getting carried away because it was fun, a sentry that exhaled poison fog, a sentry that self-destructed if touched and knocked you unconscious until you got dragged to the punishment ward…
The sentries summoned that way created vicious chain effects with one another and tormented the students.
Flexible adaptation to circumstances was originally a mage’s weapon, but Professor Verdus’s sentries were what happened when that weapon was turned around and used against them.
The sentry Sebius had just seen was, if someone were picking the ten worst sentries, definitely one that would make the list: a mana-absorbing sentry.
A vicious enemy with a maw that gulped down most ordinary projectile spells.
If it got hold of you wrong, forget magic—it would just absorb your mana outright.
To deal with that thing, they needed to retreat first, inscribe magic into the terrain, then lure it in…?
“With swordsmanship?!”
“Is that not allowed?”
“It’s not that it isn’t…!”
Sebius hesitated as Sebius answered, watching Lee Han swing a black-violet sword.
Just because someone was a Blue Dragon Tower student did not mean that student could not swing a sword. Of course a Blue Dragon Tower student could swing one.
…Sebius just had not expected a sentry to get cut clean in half by a sword!
“Don’t tell me you’re taking swordsmanship lectures too?”
Trying to ease the suddenly awkward atmosphere, Sebius tossed out a joke.
Sebius was not confident with jokes, but right now, as the upperclassman, Sebius had to loosen the mood.
“How did you know?”
“…Let’s go!”
Reaffirming that it was better not to do things Sebius never normally did, Sebius moved on.
“Professor Verdus’s sentries are connected to each other, so if one is destroyed, the others move in. If a fight breaks out, we have to end it as fast as possible and keep moving.”
“That one coming over there?”
“Yes. It’s already coming.”
Spotting a squeaking tin doll emerging from beyond a pile of junk, Sebius narrowed Sebius’s eyes and glared.
“That one is… Ha. Nothing but troublesome ones today. Slash-defense coating, and even a projectile-refraction device.”
It was the kind that nullified more than half of all cutting attacks and also refracted incoming projectile spells off course, making it troublesome at both close and long range.
Sebius combined the route they had just come through, the routes already mapped out, and the paths Sebius had just identified, all inside Sebius’s head.
If we slip left and head east-west from there…
“Gather, and spin!”
Just as Sebius was considering how to get away, the junior chanted a spell, and Sebius was startled.
“It refracts projectiles! Don’t waste your mana on—!”
A mage was not someone who freely created something from nothing at will. If anything, a mage was closer to a miser who had to distribute the limited resource of mana as efficiently as possible.
Seen from that perspective, what the junior was doing right now was closer to rampaging.
If Lee Han wasted mana like that from the very start…
The water orb spun heavily and shot forward with murderous force. The projectile-refraction field generated by the sentry twisted the water orb’s trajectory and sent it veering aside.
But Lee Han paid it no mind and created the next water orb.
Create and fire.
Create and fire.
Suppressive fire!
Realizing the junior’s strategy, Sebius was horrified.
The enemy was defending itself by twisting the trajectories of the incoming projectiles.
Then what if projectiles were fired nonstop from every direction?
The projectiles would collide with one another, ricochet away, and create irregular diffuse reflections.
It was an ingenious method, far too clever to believe Lee Han had just thought of it on the spot.
…And it was also an incredibly brute-force method!
CRUNCH!
In the end, one of the ricocheting water orbs smashed the sentry apart, and instead of admiring it, Sebius asked the junior:
“Is your mana okay?!”
“Please don’t worry. I’m fine.”
“…You don’t mean to tell me you caught the Rock Drake head-on like this too?”
Up to now Sebius had naturally assumed Lee Han had caught it with schemes and traps, but now sudden suspicion arose.
This bastard didn’t fight it head-on with magic, did he?
The junior asked hesitantly,
“Would catching it head-on disqualify me from club membership?”
“……”
*****
Maybe running into a sentry the moment they came in had served as a ward against bad luck, because after that, things became a little easier.
“<Mage, Do Not Repay the Gold You Received as Investment>. It’s here.”
In the third storehouse, Sebius found one of the books and tucked it away.
Maybe because it was a storehouse for keeping slimy, sludge-like reagents, the place was damp and smelled awful.
“Why in the world would Professor Verdus put a book here?”
“We’ll never understand what goes on inside that professor’s head for as long as we live. Let’s move.”
“I never thought I would start thinking the previous storehouse was better.”
Lee Han spoke as if he found it hard to believe.
Who would have thought he would already miss the junk-filled storehouse where sentries attacked them, and the half-flooded storehouse where they had had to swim.
“The next storehouse should probably be fine. As far as I know, there are no sentries and no special traps. It’s a relatively normal storehouse.”
Professor Verdus’s storehouses were connected to one another.
Students used those connections to open the doors of weakly guarded storehouses, slip inside, and then move into other storehouses. The strategy Lee Han and Sebius had chosen was that very kind of strategy.
Of course, the strategy was not perfect. If they wanted to reach Storehouse A, they might have to go through Storehouses B, C, and D first, and there was no guarantee those storehouses would be normal.
The storehouses they had just crossed were prime examples of abnormal ones.
Does a truly normal storehouse really exist?
Lee Han looked at Sebius with slight suspicion.
A normal storehouse among Professor Verdus’s storehouses?
Was that really…
CREEEAK—
The door opened, and a new storehouse revealed itself.
Inside, it resembled a café or coffeehouse in a major city.
There were several chairs and tables, neatly arranged items, no obvious enemies…
“Isn’t this a trap?”
“…I had the same reaction the first time I came here. This is a storehouse Professor Verdus forgot, but students came to often. That’s why it’s still relatively intact. Let’s rest for a moment.”
Sebius dragged over a chair and handed it to the junior, then sat down, drank a mana recovery potion, and spread out the map.
There were still many storehouses left to visit if they wanted to recover the rest of the books.
“You don’t need a recovery potion?”
“I’m fine. Please drink it yourself, Senior.”
Refusing it, Lee Han felt pleased inside.
From the upperclassman’s perspective, would he not look like a commendably considerate junior looking after Sebius?
Is this bastard a monster?
Sebius stared at Lee Han with a sickened look.
After using that much mana, he still did not need a recovery potion.
Apparently, taking lectures from every school was not something just anybody could do.
“We’ll go into the poisonous mushroom storehouse, borrow the route through the Hellswamp storehouse, then head for the second underground floor of the Hall of Sacred Engravings. We’re not going into the metal storehouse. It’s too dangerous.”
“What are the places marked with X here?”
“The places where nobody has found a way in. Professor Verdus has many storehouses that Verdus forgot about, but also quite a few that Verdus did not forget.”
It was a bitter thing to say, but the students had not been properly looting Professor Verdus’s wealth.
They could only plunder the things Professor Verdus had forgotten or had neglected to maintain. The places Professor Verdus had deliberately locked down were nearly impossible to break through.
And that was exactly why the students were always ablaze with motivation.
“I swear it—before I graduate, I’ll absolutely loot one of the storehouses Professor Verdus sealed off! I’ll find out what’s inside no matter what!”
“Wait. If you can’t loot it, does that mean you have to repeat a year?”
“…Do you want to die?”
“Places like those have no value as passages. Honestly, even though it looks like there are a lot of storehouses on this map, they’re just a corner of the whole thing.”
“……”
Watching Sebius sound disappointed, Lee Han was dumbfounded.
It was ridiculous enough that the upperclassman sounded disappointed after finding this many, but Lee Han could not even begin to imagine just how many storehouses Professor Verdus had built.
Just how many storehouses did this person build and forget?
“If you figure out how to get into one of these later, try raiding it together with the club members.”
“You should come too, Senior!”
“…I’m graduating, you bastard.”
I was talking about this year.
Lee Han grumbled inwardly.
Maybe because Sebius was a fourth-year, there seemed to be certain touchy subjects.
*****
“<Mage, Do Not Repay the Gold You Received as Investment>, <Introduction to Imperial Investment Methods>, <The Genius Enchanter Who Secured One Hundred Investments>, <Introduction to Imperial Artifact Trends>, <Encyclopedia of Imperial Materials>…”
Sebius muttered with a troubled face.
Thanks to their forced march, they had secured all the other [N O V E L I G H T] books, but <General Gemology> alone was nowhere to be seen.
When Sebius took out a silver bookmark artifact, it spun around and pointed in a direction. It was toward a storehouse Sebius had never entered.
“…Looks like it’s in another storehouse.”
“What will you do?”
“We give up and pull back. We’ve taken more than enough today.”
In relocation, there were few enemies more dangerous than greed.
Sebius desperately wanted to grab just one more, but Sebius decided to withdraw rather than make a reckless attempt and send even the junior to the punishment ward.
“Can’t we at least try to find a way?”
“I’m telling you, this isn’t the sort of thing the two of us can solve just by putting our heads together right now. If you don’t believe me, go take a look yourself.”
The direction indicated by the bookmark artifact that pointed toward books was toward a storehouse Sebius had already tried and failed to enter several times.
That was how sturdy and complex the door’s defenses were.
The magic would writhe and shift like a living thing, and of course the place was probably defended so that even if some shock struck from outside and broke it, it would recover immediately.
Sebius hated it, but Sebius had no confidence in breaking through something like that.
BANG! BANG! BANG!
The junior stood in front of the storehouse, swinging a wand several times and knocking on the door. But the door did not budge in the slightest.
Watching that, Sebius unconsciously smiled a little.
Originally, obstacles like that were what frustrated thieves and made them grow.
That junior from House Wardanaz possessed talent several times greater than Sebius’s own.
Since Lee Han was already that good in second year, by the time the junior reached third or fourth year, maybe Lee Han really would be able to break into even Professor Verdus’s treasure vault.
I’ll have graduated and won’t see it. That’s a little unfortunate.
“Senior!”
“What is it?”
“I opened it!”
“…What?! How?! Don’t tell me by force…?!”
When Sebius shouted in a stunned voice, unable to believe it, the junior answered with a slightly embarrassed face.
“Now that I think about it, I had the key to this storehouse.”
“……”
What the hell is this bastard’s real identity???