Chapter 100: Breaking the Limit

[Translator – Aren]

Even when the world ends, it’s rare for every individual’s daily life to change overnight.

The Supreme Archmages were no expectation.

We had returned to our private barracks and were staring at our smartphone screens with serious expressions.

If I had to pick the strangest pairing among us, it would definitely be Lee Sejun and Go Ryeoha.

The two of them were sitting on the edge of a cot, taking turns looking at each other’s phones while chatting quietly.

"Ryeoha-ssi, you don’t really use filters much, do you?”

"Hm? Ah, I don’t take selfies very often, so I don’t get much use out of them. Even when I do take a selfie, I usually forget and just take it normally~.”

"You’ve got a lot of food pictures too. I see pictures of textbooks.”

"There, there’s a photo of me organizing my bag. Peace! Doesn’t it just feel really good when you clean up your bag nice and neat?”

If you saw them from outside, you'd think Lee Sejun was trying to hit on Go Ryeoha.

If I didn’t know the filthy truth about Lee Sejun, I probably would’ve looked down on him for chasing after women while the world was collapsing.

Part of me actually wished Lee Sejun really was making moves on Go Ryeoha.

But the cold, clear reason of Great Archmage Baek Jemin saw straight through why Lee Sejun was talking to Go Ryeoha, someone he had hated so much before.

The truth was far more horrifying and cruel.

There was a reason Shin Nain had already glued himself to Pastor Park Yohan and was fiddling with a Bible TTS app.

And if I hadn’t been keeping an eye on Lee Sejun in case he suddenly went off the rails, I would’ve started gagging ages ago and found something else to occupy myself with.

"Don’t just look at my phone~ So what are you looking at, Sejun-ssi?”

"Here. These are some stories I’ve been enjoying lately.”

Lee Sejun was studying.

All while carefully hiding that once-obvious inferiority complex and talking to the very Go Ryeoha he had been so jealous of.

"[I Became a Princess, but I’m Deliberately Doing Vtubing Streams]... Pffft, hehehe…Hahahahaha! What kind of title is that? It tells you nothing about the story!”

"It’s mainly about a protagonist who wakes up one day as a beautiful girl and, out of all the possible careers, becomes an internet streamer, specifically a VTubing streamer using a rigged avatar, and all the incidents that happen because of it.”

"Oh? Is it actually more serious than it sounds? Like the protagonist gets confused about their identity between their virtual self and real self and struggles with it?”

"No. I’m reading it because I’m waiting for the part where the protagonist’s real photo gets leaked and all the viewers who assumed the person behind the avatar must look ordinary start freaking out like ‘Wait, what? The person inside is that pretty too?’”

What the actual fuck?

I couldn’t take it anymore and turned my head away.

My gag reflex had hit its limit.

Life was already too short to spend it surrounded only by good thoughts, good scenery, and good words, and now I’d gone and carved something this filthy into my memory.

That said, I didn’t particularly want to join the zealot duo making a scene beside me either.

Pastor Park Yohan lifted his glasses and peeked sideways at the smartphone screen Shin Nain was tapping on.

"Pastor, this app is higher quality than I expected. It couldn’t have been easy finding someone to outsource it to while you were doing your mission work.”

"Hey now, Shin Nain. Where the hell would I get money for that? This is the age of AI. YOu ought to be able to make one Revised Bible TTS app by yourself. If we’re going to drive out the electronic Satan, we have to give our all on the electronic gospel front too!”

That left Hamza as my only option.

And Hamza’s only option was me, Baek Jemin.

Naturally, our eyes met. The two of us gathered at the table we often used for meals and started by letting out a sigh.

As the only two sane people among the Supreme Archmages, Hamza and I had no choice but to lament.

"Hamza, want to watch the news or something?”

"Yeah..."

While everyone was acting like lunatics, Hamza and I alone watched this historic moment unfold with patriotic conviction and our innate humanistic spirit intact.

With the US Congress approving the war, the status of the Korean-US Combined Command had been elevated, and at its very top stood Marshal McKinsey, who had effectively inherited most of the military forces of the now-defunct Korean government and placed them under US generals..

Marshal McKinsey appeared at the press conference with the sturdy, resolute look of a seasoned soldier.

Whenever sharp questions came pouring in from reporters, he politely shut them down with a simple no comment, classified military information, and so on.

But anyone who had actually met him in person would notice something immediately.

Hamza and I saw through it at once. The Marshal McKinsey at the press conference wasn’t the real one. His shoulders were much broader than the real Marshal’s.

"It’s a body double."

"Because of Gangnam Thousand-Miles Eyes?”

Then the AI subtitles finally started doing their job, and we could understand where the press conference was going.

[We’ve received reports that Seongnam is currently facing a large-scale rebellion. Is that true?]

[The soldiers in Seongnam fought bravely and are simply asking for the compensation they deserve. Command intends to respond to their requests for rest by gradually rotating them out and redeploying them to the rear.]

There are broadly two kinds of censorship.

One is to shoot everyone involved, seal everything off, and make sure nobody even mentions it. The other is to hide what actually matters by throwing out a different piece of bait. Apparently The US had chosen the second method this time.

To conceal the truth about the 55 Unit, the private army commanded by the 66-Society, they had thrown out a plausible, realistic, and sensational piece of bait instead. That the soldiers of Seongnam, exhausted from being overworked, were preparing to rebel and demand rotation to the rear.

But Hamza and I knew just how heavy the truth really was.

May 11th, 2028, 11:47 AM.

All of us Supreme Archmages had been ordered onto emergency standby.

Instead of deploying us immediately, Korean-US Combined Command chose to send artillery shells first.

They judged that bombardment could break apart most of the enemy forces, while we Supreme Archmages were included as reserve assets to deal with hostile wizards who might still manage to break through the field of fire.

We couldn’t know everything about what kind of battle was unfolding across northern Seongnam.

But one thing was clear. The army that had once sealed off Seoul had once again stood before a cruel set of scales and made a cold-blooded choice.

There was a reason I wasn’t cursing out the zealot duo for the hymns drifting softly from their side of the barracks, or Go Ryeoha and Lee Sejun for noisily talking about life before the world went to shit.

Anyone could understand why.

To fight something as unprecedented as hostile wizards, you needed information.

And you couldn’t casually expend wizards, who were strategic and tactical assets that were difficult to replace, just to obtain that information.

On top of that, Seongnam had already been breached once. The soldiers stationed there were people who had effectively been ordered to die where they stood in the name of preventing the spread of infection.

So what decision would Command make?

Would everyone somehow pull together, stop everything perfectly, and hold the line without problem?

If the world were that much of a fairy tale, wouldn’t the monsters be cute, fluffy little bunnies instead?

People tend to look at ruthless decisions and say, ‘How could they do that?’ refusing to believe them possible.

But war has always been ruthless.

And now that this had officially been defined as a war, they would avoid meaningless sacrifices, while forcing meaningful ones.

If I were Marshal McKinsey, if I were one of the big shots, I’d make this judgment.

'Even if we have to accept some losses, we absolutely have to learn what kinds of magic those wizards can use.'

Not because we were chasing some incredible form of magic, but because we needed to know the specs of the enemies we would have to fight.

Feeling bile rising up my throat, I pointlessly tapped at the innocent smartphone.

Hamza blinked as well, then spoke in a slightly gloomy voice.

"Jemin-ssi, how about news from Pakistan?”

"Want to look at Jeju Island instead? Apparently there’s an uproar because they’re refusing to accept refugees.”

Sometimes the truth is light, and sometimes it’s heavy.

This time, it was simply heavy.

And a wise person neither lets the truth overwhelm them nor turns away from it, but accepts it with a laugh and moves on.

I was already prepared.

If the soldiers of the Republic of Korea were going to grind away their lives to seize even a single clue about the magic I wanted to understand, I had absolutely no reason to stop them.

Reduce the burden and anger of my own life, gather the information, and obtain magic more safely.

If I happened to run into them along the way, I’d help them out. That was the limit of how far I, Baek Jemin, was willing to stick my neck out.

*t*t*

May 12th, 2028, 8:25 AM.

We were still on emergency standby, but since the job of identifying the enemy and giving them nicknames.

We were still on emergency standby, but since we were currently the strongest wizards outside the blockade line, Command had no choice but to be cautious about deploying us.

We received all kinds of photographs and records provided by Lieutenant General Royce, Brigadier General Thatcher, and Major General Jeon Minho at the Reality Survival Command, then continued the process of putting our heads together, thinking things through, and classifying them..

Cryptic communication records. Inconsistent eyewitness accounts. Fragmentary clues that sounded like the ramblings of lunatics.

It was an unbelievably cruel assignment for someone like me, who would smash every puzzle piece to bits if you told me to solve a puzzle.

"Wow. How the hell are we supposed to connect this trash and turn it into useful information?”

And it wasn’t as though my teammates were always helpful.

"Ahem. Baek Jemin and Shin Nain, you two handle that sort of thing. I need to go pray to the Lord.”

"It’s dangerous. But as for what exactly is dangerous…”

"Ehehe…I can’t really tell who’s who from pictures alone? I mostly stayed around Konkuk University.”

These useless bastards. Paradoxically, though, once an actual crisis hit, the normally useless Lee Sejun awakened.

"They’ll mostly just have regular infantry anyway. There’s no way they’re getting through. No matter how much people underestimate the South Korean military, Korea has one of the most powerful artillery forces in the world, and even with all the accumulated fatigue, the troops stationed in Seongnam have built up some of the harshest real combat experience. Even with the magic we have, breaking through them wouldn’t be easy.”

Fortunately, among us Supreme Archmages was Shin Nain, an Ears-branch, Stage 3 wizard without equal when it came to detection and gathering information.

Shin Nain spent a long while staring down at a photograph of a survivor captured by a drone.

The survivor had the typical appearance of a Seoul wizard.

A thick but highly mobile padded jacket, sweatpants, sneakers, and a bloodstained piece of rebar dragging along behind them.

Shin Nain stared intently at the photograph, took a sip of coffee from his tumbler, and frowned.

"They have laid hands upon the power of devils. And it isn’t true that they have no means of breaking through.”

"Magic? Come on, what’s so amazing about magic? It doesn’t look all that impressive, and no matter how great Gangname Thousand-Miles Eyes is, against an army…”

"There are drones.”

The instant Lee Sejun folded his arms sharply and puffed himself up, Shin Nain answered immediately.

"The tactic is to have highly survivable wizards draw the military’s reconnaissance and firepower toward themselves, then use drones to inflict the actual damage.”

Major General Jeon Minho’s eyebrows twitched, leaning forward with both hands planted on the table..

For the moment, I just listened.

The fact that they had drones was surprising enough, and the idea of using those drones to try and break through the blockade line sounded insane.

As expected of a soldier, Major General Jeon immediately pointed out what was missing from Shin Nain’s explanation.

"But Seoul must be suffering from an extreme shortage of explosives. Chemical munitions have already been dropped over northern Seongnam, and there can’t be many practitioners of Localized Invasive Structural Alteration phenomena capable of Hand-branch, Stage 4 [Material Substitution], like Go Ryeoha-ssi. How do they intend to breach the blockade line with that amount of material?”

But it sounded less like he was denying the possibility and more like he was certain there had to be something else.

Faced with that question, Shin Nain removed his headset and nodded with a cold, hardened expression.

"Drone bombing doesn’t require explosives.”

"What do you—...”

At that moment, I snapped my fingers and drew everyone’s attention.

-Snap!

Exactly as intended.

"Jemin-ssi?”

"Jemin, Nain’s in the middle of saying something important.”

I hadn’t stolen everyone’s attention for no reason.

My brain was spinning like crazy in the face of this perfect opportunity to farm attention.

More than anything, my pride refused to let Shin Nain hog all the spotlight.

An idea flashed through my mind.

The answer lay in our fight with Ski Goggles.

"Monsters."

Shin Nain looked at me with an indescribable expression.

That strange irritation you feel when you can’t stand someone, but they’re also one of the few people who actually understand what you’re saying. I could see it all over his face.

"If you hang monsters from drones and dive-bomb them into people, that’s still bombing.”

The clue connected explosively inside my head.

Ski Goggles coating skewers with Amalgam bodily fluids, and hanging Predator Spines from his own arm to wield them like a segmented whip-sword.

Some Seoul wizards had already shown that they could exploit how lethal monsters were to humans by subduing them and using them as weapons instead.

And these bastards had already been casually stealing and using military radios.

On top of that, special forces had installed wifi along Subway Line 3 for drone operations during their reconnaissance into Seoul, then withdrawn and left it behind…

The infrastructure needed to operate drones was already in place.

But no matter how neatly the clues fit together, there was still one thing, just one thing, missing

That one missing piece was also why Pastor Park Yohan shook his head with an indifferent expression.

"Sounds plausible…and if you factor in Nain’s magic, it’s probably right…but man. Where in the world are they supposed to scrape together that many drones? So those Seoul bastards just magically crank them out? If anything, the people outside the blockade line should be better at manufacturing drones. Sure makes me wonder if the 66-Society is feeding Shin Nain useless information on purpose to throw him off.”

"There are Hand-branch wizards in the 66-Society, but even if they mobilized everyone who knows Incantation-type magic too, they still wouldn’t be able to make enough drone-like machines to meet the numbers they’d need. Of course, they could prepare a few as a trump card.”

Go Ryeoha, who knew the internal workings of the Society better than anyone else backed up Pastor Park Yohan’s opinion.

In the end, no matter how much we went back and forth, we couldn’t find an answer, so we settled for simply giving a nickname to the Seoul wizard who had appeared in the photograph and inadvertently leaked information to us.

"Sports Rebar. He’s dragging that rebar around, so there’s definitely something going on with it.”

"Where did ‘Sports’ come from?”

"He’s wearing sneakers and sweatpants. Sporty.”

Pastor Park Yohan’s naming sense was on full display.

Major General Jeon Minho sweated profusely as he explained our conversation to Lieutenant General Royce and Brigadier General Thatcher. Apparently the drone discussion had stitch with him. It was certainly too unsettling a possibility to ignore, and a risk worth taking seriously.

And then, May 13th, 2028, 2:46 AM.

-Beeeeeeeep—. Beeeeeep.

My eyes snapped open at the emergency-alert tone, bone-chilling enough to wake anyone in the middle of the night.

Any trace of sleep vanished, and I immediately snatched the phone off the locker beside my bunk.

"The world’s already like this and they’re still sending emergency alerts?”

If this wasn’t a disaster serious enough to justify that alarm, I was going to personally find the damn cell tower and shoot…

[2:44 AM. Collapse of Seongnam blockade line imminent.]

[2:45 AM. Namhansanseong Station entrance breached.]

Empty vessels make the most noise. The real thing only needed one sentence.

Half out of my mind, I changed clothes, threw on the full set, poncho, rifle, gas mask, and sprinted toward Command. From all the noise around me, the other Supreme Archmages were clearly awake too.

The instant I ran out of the barracks, I heard sirens shaking the entire camp.

Short, pulsing wails.

An air-raid alarm.

Under a starry sky, lights were blooming all across the darkened camp.

That was when I sensed someone running beside me as I pounded down the road.

I glanced over and saw Lee Sejun rapidly scrolling through his phone. He might have only been a sergeant, but Lee Sejun had still been a military NCO. I figured he might have quietly built up some connections around the camp through his soldier-like attitude and bearing, so I skipped everything else and went straight to the point.

"What…What’s happening…?"

Even with Heart-branch, Stage 1 boosting my stamina, asking questions while sprinting was still fucking hard.

"Drones."

Urgent shouts and pounding footsteps overlapped around us as Lee Sejun narrowed his eyes and showed me the screen bouncing with every stride.

"Apparently, they’re made in China.”

"That’s… so fucking obvious…”

No.

Wait, actually, no.

Sure, circumstantially it was obvious as hell, but if they claimed the drones had simply been part of the stock already circulating before everything went to shit and somehow ended up inside Seoul, there wasn’t much anyone could do about it.

The harder I breathed, the clearer my head became.

I had made one mistake. Even though I knew just how radically the world had changed, there was one thing I had failed to fit into that new reality.

The thing the news had been talking about nonstop.

The Chinese military’s advance into Ganghwa Island and seizure of the Incheon administration, the election of a new administrative head by vote, the creation of the Korea-China Combined Command and absorption of isolated military forces in northern Gyeonggi, the volunteer forces drawn from former Chinese troops holding military inspections in Anyang City, which had become a jointly guarded zone…

I had seriously underestimated all of it because I’d only ever encountered those developments through the news and had never had to deal with them directly.

A new struggle for hegemony.

As I ran, practically foaming at the mouth as I sprinted toward Command, I finally realized it.

Right now, China was acting as the financial backer for the Seoul wizards.

There were more than one or two possible motives that came to mind.

But only one of them really mattered.

Knowledge of magic?

With the main US fleet preparing to station itself here and massive reinforcements scheduled to arrive, was China’s hunger for magical knowledge really strong enough to tolerate its strategic nightmare of an expanding US military government on the Korean Peninsula?

More importantly, there was something China had been demanding over and over since the very beginning of the crisis.

Something it had been forced to give up on when the monsoon winds blocked the way and international opinion turned against it.

Just considering the possibility sent a dizzying sensation through me alongside a thrilling shiver.

It was just so fucking exhilarating that I burst out laughing.

"Hehehe…Hahahahahahahaha!”

"Jemin-ssi? Have you lost your mind?”

"Hahahahaha!!!”

Nukes.

China was just building up a justification because it wanted to launch nukes.

They just wanted to say fuck it and wipe everything away.

The realization that China might want to use nuclear weapons filled me with terror and exhilaration at the same time.

Of course, it was still only speculation, but the mere possibility that it might actually be true felt like it was melting my brain.

Monsters, wizards, nukes.

The trinity of death was complete.

"Sejun, laugh! Our market value just went up!”

There had never been better news than this.

It wasn’t the blockade line that had broke through.

"A massive surge!!!!”

The market value of the Supreme Archamges…

had just broken through the limit.

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