Chapter 586: Supplementary Class (4)

Silence filled the research lab.

Lennok, who had been standing with a blank expression, quickly regained his composure and asked again.

“You mean… Professor Aris?”

He had surmised that they weren’t after Evan Vylun’s research, but he never expected to hear Aris’s name here.

Did they have business with Aris Richellen, now that she had returned to Sinclair Magic Tower and her sabbatical was ending?

Perhaps something had happened to Aris while she was at the Sinclair Magic Tower.

However, the elephant-masked sorceress didn’t properly answer Lennok’s question.

Instead, she merely chuckled, looking somewhat surprised.

“Ah, I see. Information about the situation at Sinclair Magic Tower hasn’t been leaked to the outside yet.”

“……”

“You don’t need to know the details. Just gather all the research materials and theses Aris Richellen was working on, and bring them to me right now.”

Considering her sharp tone and physique, the speaker was likely a woman.

She roughly grabbed Lennok’s shoulder and pushed him into the research lab’s storage room, where she had been rummaging around for a long time.

“As an internal staff member of the school, you probably have a general idea of what theses and data your assigned professor left behind.”

The elephant, standing behind Lennok with her arms crossed, muttered in a cold voice.

“I hate lazy people the most. If you slack off even a little, I’ll cut off your limbs one by one and feed them to you. Understand?”

‘Feed them…?’

Lennok acknowledged the subtly ominous nuance in her words but obediently nodded.

“Understood.”

He briefly considered dealing with the elephant here, but Lennok decided to follow her instructions for now.

After all, this lab was used by Bailla, and Aris’s lab was one Lennok used separately.

Since the elephant didn’t seem to know this, he planned to stall for time by pretending to search for theses and materials.

As he didn’t know why they were looking for Aris Richellen’s research materials, he needed to observe the situation further to ascertain their motives.

“Good. Now, I’ll tell you the data and thesis topics we want. Elemental Mana Property Transformation and Elemental Infusion Efficiency Improvement, Correlation between Spirit Power and Mana, Spirituality and Imprints…”

As the sorceress rapidly listed the thesis topics and data, Lennok began to pile up vaguely similar-looking theses from Bailla’s lab in front of the elephant.

‘There’s too little correlation between the requested research materials and data.’

While searching for the theses and research materials the elephant mentioned, Lennok began to surmise her intentions.

‘They want to hide what they’re truly after from me.’

This, in turn, was concrete proof that they had no intention of killing Lennok immediately.

If they planned to silence Lennok by killing him right after this task, they wouldn’t bother with such elaborate trickery; they would simply find the desired materials and then attempt to kill him.

Perhaps they intended to deal with Lennok in a way other than killing him.

That might even be related to why they were searching through Aris Richellen’s research.

Thinking this, Lennok found adequately similar thesis materials and stacked them in front of the elephant.

“I found everything.”

“Good.”

The elephant, who had been perfunctorily glancing through the piled-up theses in front of her, promptly closed them and stared intently at Lennok.

Did she want to know about Aris Richellen’s research, but not let Lennok know that fact?

“You’re sweating. Are you exhausted from just moving a few sheets of paper?”

“Just a few sheets of paper is…”

“Don’t talk back.”

“……”

The elephant, who had cut off Lennok’s reply with a sharp voice, stroked her chin as if intrigued.

“I heard you’re a spirit user, but it seems you’re not interested in physical training. Can I assume your stamina and strength are on par with an average civilian?”

In truth, he was struggling to recover even that civilian-level health, but there was no reason to tell her that.

Staring at the silent Lennok, the elephant suddenly extended her hand towards him.

“You can summon spirits, right? Summon one.”

“…Why?”

Smack!!

“Didn’t I tell you not to talk back?”

The elephant, who had unhesitatingly slapped Lennok’s cheek, spoke.

“Did you think I wouldn’t know you didn’t come with the pig on the way here?”

“……”

“A weak researcher like you couldn’t have killed the pig, so you must have used spirit power to evade it and escape, obviously.”

The elephant muttered mockingly, gripping Lennok’s chin.

“Bring it out. I’m dying to know what kind of spirit you control that allowed you to escape from that idiotic cannibalistic pig without getting a limb torn off.”

“…I see.”

Only then did Lennok realize that the elephant had fully perceived the strangeness of the situation from the beginning, and he chuckled.

He wondered how she knew, but to think she had been suspicious from the moment he hadn’t been torn apart by the pig.

“Look at this. This isn’t the time for you to be laughing like that—!!”

“You seem quite interested in spirits. Was your objective not just one thing from the start?”

The sorceress, who seemed to have little interest in the theses and research materials, was abnormally fixated on Lennok’s spirit.

This was evidence that, separate from obtaining Aris’s research materials, the sorceress’s interest was more focused on spirits.

It was almost as if she had called him here to directly confirm Evan’s spirit.

The disappearance of the dean, also known as a spirit user like Lennok, and the dean’s spirit pleading for Lennok’s help.

The Ghost God Palace’s objective had been deeply related to spirits from the very beginning.

Thump!!

Lennok painstakingly grabbed the elephant’s wrist with his bare hand as she attempted to slap his cheek again.

“If you want to see it, I’ll show you. It’s not a difficult task.”

“You—!!”

The elephant, who had been glaring at Lennok, stopped speaking when she saw the small fox spirit squirming up from behind his back.

The Cybernetic Spirit, Davi, with all four of its tails fluffed up, stared at the sorceress with a chilling gaze.

Sharp lightning surged from Davi’s entire body, aiming at the elephant from all directions.

The elephant, who had been looking at the fox spirit, shook off Lennok’s hand and rapidly surged her spirit power.

“Hmph, so it’s just this level of a lesser spirit? The output it can generate is barely tickl—!!”

Crackle!!

The lightning that burst from Davi’s body instantly struck the elephant’s solar plexus, violently slamming her into the far wall of the lab.

Boom!!

Sheets of paper fluttered throughout the spacious lab, and fragments of shattered discs and data chips scattered.

“Gah…!!”

“How dare a lowly organic being… Uk-keng!!”

Davi, who had been about to deliver a solemn pronouncement, let out a bizarre shriek after getting a light smack on the head.

Lennok took Davi in both hands, brought her down from his head, and scolded her.

“I told you not to use that kind of language.”

“No, Master!! In such a serious situation, you should uphold my dignity!!”

“Did you even have any dignity to uphold?”

“Grrr…!!”

Behind Davi, who was indignantly flapping her tails, the elephant, covered in blood, stumbled to her feet.

“Cough, retch…!!”

The sorceress, unable to suppress the surge of vomit, took off her mask and emptied its contents.

Lennok chuckled, seeing the pale face of the woman throwing up.

“Good resilience. I hit you intending to knock you out completely, but you got back up after taking that?”

The lightning Davi used wasn’t purely the spirit’s power; it was a method where Lennok lent his will-thought and mana.

In other words, it was an attack equivalent to directly taking Lennok’s magic.

The lightning itself was constantly imbued with electrical signals that encouraged paralysis of the nervous system and relaxation of limb muscles.

The very fact that she got up after an attack meant to make her lose consciousness was proof of her strong physique.

It seemed she had enough capability to criticize Lennok for not having physical training.

The elephant, struggling to steady her spinning vision, picked up the discarded mask and gritted her teeth.

Her entire body was tingling, and her senses were confused and numb.

As she gritted her teeth, struggling even to stand upright, blood streamed from her gums.

Wiping her blood-stained lips, the elephant glared at Lennok as if to kill him.

“Damn it, you… you’re not just a researcher—!!”

“You already knew I was a spirit user.”

Lennok chuckled, tickling behind Davi’s ear.

Davi proudly climbed onto Lennok’s forearm, gushing forth Lennok’s mana.

The elephant, seeing Davi, silently wiped the blood flowing from between her gums and smeared it onto the elephant mask she was wearing.

A trigger used by sorcerers to augment their spells.

Among them, ‘self-destruction’ was known as the simplest and most efficient method.

Whoosh!!

As she instantly poured her surging spirit power into her elephant mask, she rapidly retreated, muttering.

“The plan, like this…!! I must inform them—!!”

The elephant quickly concentrated, attempting to cast a spell.

But Lennok, even as he watched her form the hand seals, instead of stopping her, picked up a nearby chair, sat down comfortably, and began to observe.

“You shouldn’t force yourself to draw out more spirit power.”

“Wh-what is this…!! Wh-why am I like this…!!”

Lennok shook his head, watching the elephant spewing blood from her eyes, nose, and mouth.

“If you wanted to fight me, you should have evaded the first attack no matter what. It’s too late now.”

What Lennok destroyed with his first lightning strike wasn’t merely the elephant’s nerves.

It was the pathways through which spirit power flowed in her body, the auxiliary blood vessels, and her senses, all simultaneously damaged, crushing her very ability to use spirit power.

Even if the sorceress herself thought she was casting spells as she remembered, her damaged body was simply uncontrollably extending her spirit power, causing her own body to collapse.

The elephant touched her blood-stained face with trembling hands.

Lennok, watching her, propped his chin on the back of the chair he had turned around and said.

“If you want to live, stop the spell now. And answer my questions.”

“……”

Only then did the elephant seem to understand Lennok’s level as a sorcerer.

She barely clung to life, her breathing ragged, and asked with difficulty.

“The pig, too… like this…?”

“Much faster than you.”

“…Damn it.”

The elephant chuckled.

“I should have checked… when I first arrived…”

Unable to say more, the elephant’s eyes glazed over, and her head hit the ground.

Sticky blood flowed incessantly from where she had fallen.

Lennok slowly rose from his seat, staring at the blood that filled the lab floor, staining the scattered theses.

Just as he was about to quickly finish preparations to administer emergency treatment to the elephant, only enough to keep her from dying, and interrogate her about the Ghost God Palace’s objective and leader—

[Spell Device Declaration]

Rumble!!

The elephant mask she had tightly clutched, even in her unconscious state, began to glow brightly.

Spirit power rapidly converged on the mask, drenched in the sorceress’s own blood, absorbing all the surrounding blood.

Below the elephant mask, which was now only a head, a distinct physical form began to materialize.

[Summon: Insinjuryeong]

Thump-thump-thump!!!

The elephant mask’s head began to grow madly, and the size of the body forming beneath its neck also swelled.

The enormous elephant form filled the research lab, overflowing its confines, and, unable to contain its immense size, burst through the building to rise.

ROAR!!

The elephant, its two blood-red eyes gleaming, rose from its spot, letting out an insane roar and glaring at Lennok.

“Insinjuryeong, huh…”

Lennok gave a bitter smile, confirming that the sorceress’s breath had completely ceased in that brief moment.

“I see. So this was the meaning of the ‘Monstrous God’ [怪神] of the Ghost God Palace?”

The sorcerers of the Ghost God Palace weren’t simply sorcerers akin to a criminal organization.

Their masks and the gigantic spirit form summoned by sacrificing human life.

The place where ‘Monstrous Gods’ gather. The ‘Monstrous God’ they referred to was precisely the spirit summoned through Human Sacrifice Sorcery, the existence of the Insinjuryeong.

“Can you roughly tell what state that spirit is in right now?”

“It’s a spirit summoned after the caster died, so it’s probably running wild, unable to distinguish friend from foe.”

Davi, whose essence was also close to a spirit, understood the state of the summoned spirit.

Among the worst situations, where the caster controlling the spirit died at the moment of summoning.

It would be incapable of reason or judgment, acting solely on pure instinct.

“Since it was summoned by self-sacrifice, it will endlessly wander, searching for a similar sacrifice. It will most likely target other organic beings.”

A monster that, having been summoned by the caster’s own life as a sacrifice, will wander until it perishes, searching for the ‘food’ it tasted at that time.

It was nothing short of a walking natural disaster.

The reason the sorceress summoned the spirit, even knowing she would die if she used any more spells.

It must have been to use the spirit’s rampage to inform her fellow Ghost God Palace members that the situation was going awry.

Lennok nodded, watching the spirit slowly stir and begin to rampage.

“I didn’t realize she was a sorceress capable of sacrificing herself. She was an opponent with as good a sense as she had resilience.”

Attempting human sacrifice to amplify a spell.

Such atrocities were not uncommon in the dark history of the continent, but sacrificing oneself as an offering was far more difficult than using others as a sacrifice.

This was because satisfying both the perspective of the sorcerer attempting human sacrifice and the perspective of the offering, who is oneself, was extremely difficult.

To be resolved to give up one’s life while flawlessly completing the ritual, one would need to be at least a Level 7 sorcerer.

However, this sorceress succeeded in the ritual of self-sacrifice even though she had not yet fully attained that hierarchy.

This was proof of her exceptional talent and intuition in sorcery.

The fact that she proved it with her own self-sacrifice was ironic, but Lennok knew that this very contradiction was the essence of the sorcery spell system.

“Master. What are you going to do?”

Davi turned her head and asked with a puzzled expression from Lennok’s arm.

Her lush, four-pronged tail wagged with the spirit’s movement.

“If we leave it alone, we might be fine, but all the organic beings studying at this university might die, you know.”

“Why, are you worried?”

“No, well, Master’s safety and identity are most important, but…”

Davi subtly averted her gaze as Lennok asked with a chuckle.

Lennok, looking at the Cybernetic Spirit, picked up Davi’s body with both hands and placed her at his feet.

“Master?”

“If the Ghost God Palace has a mastermind, someone is undoubtedly monitoring us right now.”

Lennok slowly loosened his body and muttered.

After quickly injecting stimulant and painkiller ampules unseen beneath his shirt, Lennok rotated his shoulders and continued.

“To maintain Evan’s identity, I can’t use magic directly. I have no choice but to resolve the situation using only the officially known abilities of a spirit user and researcher.”

“Huh? Then… ?”

Just as Davi finally understood the meaning of Lennok’s words and perked up her ears—

Crackle, crackle, crackle!!!

At that moment, dazzling flashes of lightning erupted wildly from the small fox spirit’s body, drawing the elephant’s gaze.

ROAR!!

At that very moment, the house-sized elephant roared, and Davi, flattened at Lennok’s feet, faced it directly.

“Just for today, I’ll make you a superhero, Davi.”

Lennok chuckled, injecting his mana directly into Davi’s body.