Lord Bowery

What even is this world?

The things the Game Master showed him last night, the endless flood of information pouring into his head, it felt like his brain was going to burst. That was when it happened.

Knock knock.

“Excuse me.”

“What is it?”

“Someone wishes to see you in the tea lounge, Mr. Solomon.”

“…Who?”

“Lord Bowery, the Tower Master of the Sewer Mage Tower.”

‘Bowery?’

The very man who had shown ‘sincerity’ with a hefty sum, along with the Black Bird Spirit Bracelet. The Tower Master of the Sewer Mage Tower, the den of the Lowlands’ underground mages.

Solomon thought their business was already over. What did he want now?

“What would you like to do?”

The voice outside the door asked carefully.

“Shall I convey your refusal? Or I can tell him to return at a time you specify.”

“No. I’ll go see him now.”

There was no reason to turn away someone who insisted on seeing him, so Solomon threw on his clothes and left his room at once. It was the Nightweaver Coat, now riddled with holes thanks to the Alfheim Typewriter.

‘Either I fix it… or I start looking for new gear.’

By the time Solomon finished getting dressed and stepped out into the corridor, the voice outside had already passed room 117 and was knocking on room 120. It belonged to a zombie neatly dressed in the hotel’s uniform.

“Excuse me, Mr. Bellucci.”

Knock knock.

“You have exceeded the number of days you can remain biologically alive in your room without nutritional intake. Are you alive?”

“……”

The zombie hotelier spoke while reeking of rotting flesh. So checking whether guests were still alive was part of hotel operations too. That was information Solomon could have happily lived without.

Solomon paused and watched. No matter how long he waited, there was no answer. He hadn’t really died, had he?

“If there is no confirmation of survival by midnight tonight, the room will be forcibly opened in accordance with hotel policy.”

With that said, the zombie hotelier moved on at once, stopping in front of the next room, then the next after that. It looked like this was the time for a batch room sweep.

“Excuse me.”

“Quit jinxing me and fuck off, you walking corpse bastard!”

“Understood, Mr. Louis.”

The moment it knocked, a torrent of curses came back. This really was a hotel where every kind of person gathered. Solomon finally started walking after seeing that much.

To meet the visitor who had come looking for him the moment he’d finished a contract last night.

Solomon went straight down to the central lobby and headed for the tea lounge, crossing corridors lined with antique reddish-brown carpet and gloomy oil paintings.

Before long, amid the hotel’s signature stench of rotting corpses, another smell with an unmistakable presence stabbed into his nostrils.

The smell of the sewers. Unpleasant and nauseating, it was like shoving your face into a drain.

The man was there, commanding that stench like an entourage.

“Yo, yo, yo, ma bro!”

A man with black skin and a closely shaved head, covered head to toe in all kinds of piercings dangling everywhere.

Eyes, nose, mouth, ears, tongue, even bead piercings studded above his eyeballs, clustered like barnacles on a shoreline.

Lord Bowery, the Tower Master of the Sewer Mage Tower, whose weirdness couldn’t be fully captured even by the word grotesque.

“…I heard you were looking for me.”

“I’ve got this feeling you and I are gonna be ‘good friends’!”

“Cut the bullshit. Why did you call for me?”

When Solomon spoke as if he couldn’t care less, Lord Bowery answered.

“What else would someone have to seek out a guest of Hotel Snark for?”

“……”

Solomon fell silent. Was he trying to commission a job?

“A Tower Master like you, to a mere first-floor guest?”

“Oh, a first-floor guest! Adults love numbers. Right?”

“What?”

“Numbers, man, numbers! The number!”

Lord Bowery cackled. Solomon shut his mouth, thinking, What bullshit is he on about now?

“Adults never ask about the essence of a new assassin! What floor do they live on? What room number? What’s their contract success rate? They think those shitty questions mean they understand a Snark contractor inside and out!”

“……”

“That’s not the essence! What matters is, ‘Do they handle the job professionally?’ ‘Do they keep their cool even in danger?’ That’s what’s important!”

Solomon asked back, dumbfounded.

“Thanks for the compliment, but did you really come all the way here reeking like the sewer just to say that?”

“Ah-ah.”

Lord Bowery shrugged.

“As you can—no, as you can smell, I stink a little. It’s been a while since I washed… like, a real damn long while….”

He was talking like it was someone else’s problem, then suddenly started pounding the table, veins bulging.

“Goddamn it to hell! This fucking sewer stink! It’s vibrating through!! everything!!”

“Did you get some curse that won’t let you wash?”

“Oh, that’s exactly it. Damn shit! Exactly! That’s how you’re supposed to ask! I’ve been waiting for someone to say that!”

“……?”

“Because nobody fucking asks!!”

Lord Bowery shouted, veins bulging in his neck.

“Everyone thinks I stink because I’m just some sewer-ass piece of shit!!”

“……”

“All the bastards under me think that too, and they don’t dare ask because they’re watching my mood! So they end up becoming the same sewer-trash bastards!”

His face flushed red and blue like he might explode any second.

“Oh, but you’re different! You ask me straight up why a Tower Master smells like peace of shit! That’s a real man!! That’s what a real man does! I mean, like, real, seriously real, the realest kind of real man!!”

“So what kind of curse do you have to get to end up like that?”

“I was cursed by the Spirit King of Water.”

Lord Bowery barked, veins standing out even on his shoulders.

“A curse where any water that touches me turns into shitwater!!”

Solomon went silent, too stunned to respond.

[Lord Bowery, Tower Master of the Sewer Mage Tower, once belonged to Uptown’s Five Great Houses, and he was such a rising mage that he was on quite close terms with the Spirit King of Water……. up until he ended up shoved into the bottom of the sewers by his own just deserts.]

‘!’

A mage of the Five Great Houses.

At the narrator’s continued voice, Solomon swallowed without a word, forcing himself to keep up a calm front.

“So why are you telling me that?”

“Because you asked!”

A curse where you want to wash but can’t. In some ways, it looked worse than dying.

“And because nobody fucking asks!!”

Lord Bowery shouted again, veins bulging.

“I can’t bring this curse up first with my own mouth! That damn bitch shoved a fucking gag in my mouth! You know how horrifying that feels? It’s like walking around all day with expired sausage shoved in your mouth!”

“…That’s a truly shitty metaphor.”

Setting the unexpected information aside, Solomon kept his composure.

“I’d like to hear the business part now.”

“Oh, sure. Business! But hey, how about we talk while we walk?”

After saying that, Lord Bowery rose to his feet.

“There’s somewhere I want to introduce you to.”

Lord Bowery immediately used one of Hotel Snark’s ‘door rooms’ to come out into the streets of Downtown.

Since no one stopped him despite being an outsider, it seemed the door rooms themselves could be used freely even if you weren’t a guest. Though who knew how it worked when coming in.

The street the two of them emerged onto was a place where no one could possibly not recognize, even among Downtown’s twenty districts.

The peak of Downtown’s twenty districts, District 1—Megacorp Street.

Here, unlike the other districts, there was no specific theme. It was the district where colossal guilds, too huge to be captured by the word gigantic, gathered, the so-called megacorps.

In a sense, ‘colossal’ itself was the only theme that ran through this street.

Skyscrapers rose endlessly beyond the horizon. They didn’t have gears, and they didn’t belch steam through brass pipes. A colorless modernist world that had long since left the era of steampunk behind.

“Isn’t it amazing?”

“Amazing, what?”

“This street! Megacorp Street!”

“Am I supposed to be amazed?”

“I like you even more!”

Lord Bowery said.

“See, my eye’s sharp. I’ve got a feeling you and I will be good friends. Since we’re both shadow mages!”

Both shadow mages. At those words, Solomon swallowed.

“…How do you know I’m a shadow mage?”

“Oh, I don’t know. I just see. And the bigger the talent, like yours, the harder it is to hide.”

“……”

Only then did Solomon feel the puzzle pieces in his head start fitting together.

All the magic Solomon used was shadow magic. No matter how Lord Bowery knew it, a mage as high as a tower master wouldn’t fail to notice something like that in the first place.

On top of that, the narrator said he had once belonged to Uptown’s Five Great Houses.

‘And he said both shadow mages. No way….’

Among the Five Great Houses, there was only one house that used shadow magic.

This wasn’t some convenient coincidence. There was a clear, undeniable intention and current at work here.

‘…No, more importantly, how much does he know about me?’

The blood of the Bale Family, masters of shadow magic, the Shadow Binders, flowing in Solomon’s body.

‘No, he can’t know that much so easily. Even if he did find out, the odds of him telling the Bale Family are low.’

Solomon calmly weighed the situation in his head. Shadow magic itself was not particularly rare to begin with, even setting aside the Bale family. In a city where everyone was always looking for a chance to stab someone in the back, that was even more true.

For now, he had no choice but to believe that.

“I’m not a mage.”

So he answered.

“I wasn’t born a mage, and I wasn’t trained at a mage tower.”

“Nothing comes to mind?”

“No.”

“It happens sometimes.”

Lord Bowery shrugged like it was nothing special.

“Cases where someone opens their eyes to an unexpected talent down at the bottom of the city.”

───
Rare Archetype 「Spell Assassin」

Description: A Spell Assassin is a contractor who awakened to an unexpected talent at the bottom of the city.

: A Spell Assassin is not a mage with formal training. Learning magic through normal routes is impossible, and new spells can be learned upon reaching certain levels.
───

“It’s not like it’s a rare thing for noble bastards to screw around below the belt.”

“……”

“Think it through. For all you know, the blood of some noble house that would faint in shock might be running through your veins!”

Lord Bowery shrugged and cackled meaningfully.

Nobles. Even in this world where everything moved with steam and gears, nobles existed.

In Uptown, the peak of Guild City, led by the Five Great Houses, a place even Megacorp Street couldn’t touch.

The two of them crossed District 1’s streets, where colorless buildings rose as if to devour the sky.

Even more surprising was that despite the stench pouring off him, no one dared frown at him or turn their head away.

Not even the automated machines that obsessively guarded District 1 were an exception.

Everyone passing by acted as if they knew exactly who the man was. Or… as if they saw nothing and felt nothing at all.

“So where are you taking me?”

“We’re almost there, bro.”

Lord Bowery said. Solomon stopped and looked where he pointed.

A narrow alley running between endlessly rising buildings.

“This street has everything. There’s nothing it doesn’t have. High-flying suit types, automated machines that run without steam, financial magic bound by legal constraints….”

When they deliberately followed the outer edge of the buildings into the darker rear side, the stink of mold and rust stabbed his nose.

“And you can’t forget a vomit-worthy sewer too!”

Even Megacorp Street had an underground.

An emergency drainage outlet.

Under a sign marked in red, there was a rusted ladder leading down. A passage into the city’s deep, dark sewer bottom, too deep to even estimate the drop. Looking down into it, Lord Bowery spoke.

“Welcome to this shitty ‘tower’ of mine, young and talented shadow mage.”

With the full dignity of a tower master, without a trace of his usual flippancy.