Chapter 123
The oversized slime, now a mass of tentacles, was wriggling as it grew larger. As she talked with Cassius and calmed her wildly pounding heart, Eki naturally deployed fire magic and headed down to the lower floors.
With his master, a grand archmage, by her side, a low level monster like this wasn’t frightening. The problem was that this thing possessed poisonous slime that melted clothes.
“I told you so many times that you need to adjust the shield’s range properly.”
“I know. I’m sorry.”
Grumbling, she pushed through the mass of slime and reached the basement. What awaited them there was worse than the rampage that had happened upstairs.
“Whoa…”
Transparent slime masses clung without a gap to the ceiling, walls, and floor. Judging by how they contracted and relaxed at a steady rhythm, they were clearly alive, yet they felt strangely unfamiliar. They looked like a container filled to the brim with jelly.
“It looks like someone injected it with a d**g.”
“So it really was the work of an outsider.”
“Yes.”
“…Could it be someone from the Association?”
Eki continued in an anxious voice.
“Only people with the Gailard Association’s seal can come and go from the tower, and they’d also know there are monsters here.”
“It is certainly a strong possibility. But there aren’t many idiots who’d go so far as to do something this pointless.”
However, there was one person Eki knew. A stupid and ugly man who had recently spread malicious rumors about her, gotten thoroughly beaten by Cassius, and would have plenty of reason to hold a grudge.
Following Cassius, she stepped forward while conjuring a large fire. To avoid the fireballs the two of them created, the slime wall filling the basement shrank back.
When the flames they wove outnumbered the darkness, they finally found it within.
“Kuh, cough. Huaaah. P-Please spare me.”
A male Australopithecus type evolved individual, crying with tears and snot streaming down his face.
Eki looked down at Babel, who had popped out of the slime wall and was barely catching his breath. Of course. She let out a sigh.
❖ ❖ ❖
This was how the incident began.
After Cassius told him never to come to the Thousand Tower again, Babel was assigned to some deep mountain backwater region, whether it was called Longhirs or Longhist, he wasn’t even sure. After that, nothing else mattered to him.
It was Cassius who had humiliated him, but Babel was angry at Eki, not Cassius.
‘How dare she reject me?’
Unlike himself, a rising courier of the Gailard Mage Association, Eki was a pitiful woman stuck developing magic alone with her ill-tempered master. She’d been holed up in that tower for seven years without even meeting a man, so he had extended a hand of salvation, yet she didn’t even recognize it and rejected him.
‘I’ll make you regret it.’
Instead of directing his anger at the archmage who had truly ruined him, the stupid man decided to teach a lesson to Eki, who seemed weaker and easier to target.
While searching for her weaknesses, he luckily overheard a conversation between Eki and Milla in Mansandro and spread rumors, but the story that she was involved with her master was something no one believed.
‘What? Tower Master Cassius and his disciple?’
‘Hey, Babel, did you dream that up?’
‘Haha. At least say something that makes sense.’
‘My goodness, there’s no way Lord Cassius would do something like that!’
They laughed as if it were ridiculous. When all thirty people he told reacted the same way, even Babel began to get confused.
Had I been mistaken? Is Cassius really just Cassius after all?
Thinking Eki’s friend Giyote might know something, he approached him, but Giyote reacted the same as everyone else, genuinely seeming unaware. There was no way the great Cassius would give his heart to a disciple.
‘Just how horribly did this damn Cassius treat people?’
Just as he was wondering if he should retreat like this, a flash of idiocy struck Babel’s already idiotic brain.
‘Why don’t I just put Eki in danger myself?’
Couriers carry the Association’s seals that allow access to each magic tower. These are normally issued by the Association only for inspection days or scheduled assignments, but Babel had used his extreme talent for brown nosing to befriend the seal management staff. Thanks to that, he was able to secretly steal an Association seal that granted entry to the Thousand Tower, and he rushed there immediately.
After that, it was simple. He planned to go into the Thousand Tower basement and inject any low level monster with a growth accelerator. Eki would be fast asleep by then, so she’d panic at the sudden commotion. Then he would save her under the pretense of having happened by, and Eki would regret her mistake and cling to him.
What a perfect plan it was.
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