41. The Genuine-Article Appraiser

Magic in this world runs, at its core, on a strict law of equivalent exchange. A mage draws in the mana suspended in the air, refines and banks it in the mana circuits inside the body, then spends it to manifest a spell. Naturally, the ceiling on how much MP those circuits can hold becomes the one absolute yardstick of a mage’s worth.

When I first possessed Arden’s body, I’d held disappointment and expectation in equal measure.

What if this is one of those cheat characters — HP of 1, but a ridiculous, off-the-charts MP pool?

But that expectation was quickly smashed to pieces. The curses caked thick over every inch of him had left a body that couldn’t sense mana at all. Trying to fill it would have been like pouring water into a jar with the bottom shattered clean out. In every sense, this was a flat-broke pauper of a body.

Even so, the reason I’d managed to use skills down in the underground training ground was simple.

While I was sparring, Eve had started reorganizing the skills I held into her own personal style.

“You put this together yourself?”

There was a fair amount of her own editorializing folded in, but it was definitely easy to read.

It’s like a friendly newbie guide.

Having an Eve like this around kept me from getting bored.

I told her to go ahead. There was a genuine fun in reading a skill book with her two cents folded into it.

I’m lonely.

But right now, I was completely alone. Something had gone wrong, and Eve wasn’t at my side.

There was, though, one thing I could be grateful for.

The skill system Eve had built me was still up and running just fine. Thanks to that, every time the cooldown on [Phantom Manifestation] came back around, I’d dive into Lillian’s nightmares.

And whenever I turned young Lillian’s tragedy into a happy ending and climbed back out, the cooldown would have barely begun to tick down.

So I spent whatever time was left polishing the swordsmanship I’d had beaten into me.

Why did they do it that way?

For the first time, I tried to actually understand the ancestral swordsmanship that had been hammered so brainlessly into my body.

And so, staying up through countless days on end, I finally shut the door on the last nightmare.

By my reckoning, two years and more had slipped by, which worried me.

Time out there and time in here must run differently.

This was a space with no physical laws, after all, so I chose to believe as much.

I flailed around in the empty air and looked about, but nothing changed.

What am I supposed to do?

For the first time since I’d possessed my way into this world, I didn’t have the answer.

Huh?

And then, right in the thick of it all, an old, crude iron door I’d never seen before caught my eye.

No Admittance — Authorized Personnel Only

The words looked scrawled across the iron in red lacquer.

People always want a thing more the instant they’re told they can’t have it; forbid them from going in, and they’ll claw their way through come hell or high water.

In a game, a “No Entry” sign means there’s a hidden piece stashed right here.

And so, without a second’s hesitation, I walked up to the iron door and turned the handle.

— Creeeeak.

When the door swung open, the sight on the other side was the last thing I’d expected. The room was utterly ordinary, ordinary in a way that could never have existed in another world. Spread out in front of me was an office, the kind you’d find on any street corner in South Korea.

Is this some anime or webtoon company?

Posters of grotesque monsters plastered the walls, and rows of figures and dolls lined the desks, their faces ones I felt I’d seen somewhere before. I was browsing the figures and the rest of the merch when I stopped dead in my tracks.

Seraphina with her cold smile. Valerian hefting his greatsword. Lucius with his sneer. The three of them stood posed on the desktop like goods on a store shelf.

Why are these guys here?

Just as doubt and confusion were churning up my mind, I felt someone there.

— Clack, clack, clk.

The keystrokes came rough and heavy.

Type like that and it won’t last long.

Maybe it was the gamer still in me, but the first thing I worried about was the keyboard. Carrying that worry with me, I headed toward the one spot giving off any sound.

There, half-buried behind a massive dual-monitor rig, I could make out the back of someone pounding a keyboard at a frankly insane speed. They were so absorbed that I held off calling out and just waited.

It pisses people off when someone talks to them at a time like that.

Today of all days, my old gamer instincts were running hot. A hopeless gaming nerd to the core.

Either way, I waited for the rapid-fire keystrokes to stop.

“Phew.”

When that satisfied-sounding breath came, I figured this was my chance and spoke up.

“Excuse me?”

The chair spun around with a whirl.

Platinum-blond hair. Cold, gleaming sapphire eyes with slivers of starlight caught inside them. Features I was certain I’d seen a great many times. Familiar.

“Ah.”

The instant I saw that familiar face, I froze. How could I possibly not recognize it? This was the custom character I’d agonized over for days on end to build.

“Eve!”

The shout was out of me before I knew it.

At that, the person looked up, and our eyes met.

“Did you go to a salon or something? Your hair got a lot shorter.”

Honestly, short-haired Eve looked fantastic too. Then again, considering who’d built the custom char, the base model was never going to be anything but gorgeous. Anyway, my heart was glad as I spoke.

“What have you been doing in a place like this!?”

Sure, she looked a little different, and I had questions about how she’d ended up so far from me, but…

As long as she’s safe, that’s enough.

That one fact alone set a little relief down in a corner of my chest.

“What? How did you get in here?”

But the moment I heard the voice, it hit me. The thing in front of me was not Eve. It wore Eve’s shell, but whatever was inside was something else entirely. The voice was a man’s, playful and yet somehow unsettling.

“What’s this? How is Arden still alive?”

The thing wearing Eve’s face dragged its gaze up and down me, then spoke.

“Huh? The Abyssal Curse is gone?”

Having looked me over, it raked an irritated hand through its hair and spoke in a peeved tone.

“I don’t know what the hell happened, but you’ve got one disgustingly tenacious grip on life.”

However I looked at it, the man in front of me did not read as anything benign.

Keeping my hand on my scabbard so I could react at any moment, I asked.

“Who are you?”

But instead of answering, the thing just went on muttering to itself.

“If you’re gonna deal with something, deal with it properly. People are busy as hell over here and you make me do the job twice.”

It turned back to its desk and started hammering the keyboard again.

— Thud, thud, thud.

At that, the teddy bear perched on the desk swelled up, grotesque.

Not exactly cute.

Before long it twisted its face into a snarl and bared its claws and talons.

“Hah, deal with it and then I gotta write up another report. Am I the only one who works around here!?”

The thing seemed to have lost all interest in me already, just pounding its fists on the desk over and over in a fury.

It was so ridiculous that I figured I’d put the teddy bear down fast and then settle things with the thing, but…

— KABOOM!

When I glanced behind me, the other dolls from before had swollen up too and were closing in to box me in.

I drew my sword before they could lunge first.

Slash, don’t stab.

In a fight against numbers, a blade lodging fast in a body would be a catastrophe.

So I went for the throat, the thinnest part of them. But…

These things have intelligence.

Reading my intent, the dolls charged in with one hand clamped over their own throats, so I cut the opposite arm instead. Cotton fluff sprayed out, and from between the tufts attacks poured in from every direction.

Rather than block, I chose to dodge, darting back and forth across the desktop like a guerrilla and striking as I went.

The dolls clambered onto the desk after me, trying to chase me down.

“Hey! That’s expensive!”

A stray strike punched into a monitor and shattered the screen.

“That’s a limited edition, impossible to find!”

I ground a limited-edition mouse under my heel, and when I booted the keyboard, the keys scattered off like kernels stripped from a corncob.

“This is the keyboard’s revenge!”

To keep any more casualties from piling up, I used a doll’s belly as a springboard and kicked it off the desk.

“And this is the mouse’s revenge!”

One by one, I sliced through their necks.

In the wake of every cut, more cotton fluff drifted up into the air.

Looks like white magnolia petals scattering.

Little by little, the office filled with the floating stuff.

It thickened until it began to fog my sight, but…

Foul weather is fair to everyone.

The wrecked visibility didn’t apply to me alone.

Once I confirmed the dolls’ movements had gone sluggish, I bored straight into the middle of them. Even the ones still standing had each lost an arm by now. Spinning a full circle, I opened all their throats at once.

“Hoo.”

I blew the cotton fluff off my blade. One stray tuft, carried along on my breath, drifted gently down and settled onto the keyboard the thing was still tapping.

When I saw its hands go still at the sight of the fluff, I spoke.

“Your handiwork’s a total bust. You thought you’d stop me with shoddy dolls like these?”

The thing stared blankly at the fluff resting on its keyboard, then flicked it away in annoyance. Slowly, it turned its head to glare at me, eyes exactly like Eve’s, yet so cold and ugly they made my skin crawl.

And then, at last, a satisfying answer came back.

“…Son of a b—”
“So you can finally hear me?”

But the thing turned its face back to the desk.

Clack, clk! No, not like that. Like a deranged pianist slamming down on the keys, a frenzied bdbdbdbdbd! of pounding filled the office.

The acrylic stands propped up in a corner of the desk began to give off an eerie glow.

Valerian, hefting his heavy greatsword. Seraphina, wreathed in an icy aura. And Lucius, with his baleful smile.

Their eyes were dead and clouded, but the menace rolling off them was enough to fool me into thinking they were the real thing.

“Go tear him apart!!”

The instant the thing screamed it, Valerian came rushing in, hoisting his greatsword high.

— KWAANG!

With a thunderous roar, the desk split clean in half. Hard on its heels, Seraphina’s ice sword came for my neck.

— Clang!

I’d crossed blades with Seraphina before, so I managed to turn the attack aside somehow. The trouble was that this wasn’t a one-on-one duel. While Seraphina kept me busy, Lucius loosed a poison needle from the flank, and behind me Valerian’s greatsword came barreling in. A dead end in every direction.

First I set my feet and heaved a monitor up in front of me.

— Fwababat!

The poison needles buried themselves in the monitor.

From there I scrambled onto a wheeled chair beside the desk.

— Drrrrr!

Skidding along on it, I just barely slipped the linked assault of greatsword and ice sword.

Then the nearer of the two, Valerian, lunged in first.

“You should’ve all come at once.”

I dodged his greatsword and slammed a kick into his belly.

— KWAKWANG!

Thrown off balance, Valerian went tumbling backward off the desk, and before he could get up, I quickly cut his neck.

Down a frontline fighter, the remaining two traded a glance.

“Cowardly, but smart.”

Seraphina shifted her stance too, switching to a ranged barrage of ice spears.

— Clang!

My thin sword had a hard time blocking both of them at range.

“Mind if I borrow this?”

I scooped up the ownerless greatsword and blocked their attacks with that instead.

Ice spears and poison needles rained down. I parried only what I couldn’t avoid and kept my focus on staying out of the way as much as possible.

A drawn-out offensive puts me at a disadvantage.

I had a limit called stamina; they did not. Keep this up, and obviously I’d be the only one to tire out.

That’s it.

I’d noticed that a stray ice spear had frozen the floor around where it landed with its cold.

“Over here! You fake!”

Dodging Seraphina’s ice spears, I pressed in on Lucius as close as I could. Lucius slipped nimbly this way and that, flinging poison needles as he went.

And so we ran one good round of tag across the office.

“Now where are you going to run?”

By then the whole office had frozen over like an ice rink.

Comically, Lucius hung upside down from the air conditioner. I grabbed a random keyboard off a nearby desk and hurled it at him with everything I had.

— Whack!

Lucius swatted the thrown keyboard aside with one hand and dropped. By then I was already gliding in on a chair, pulling up right in front of him.

“Treating a keyboard like it’s worthless — you little bastard.”

I grabbed Lucius by the collar and drove him straight into the floor.

— Crash!

The moment Lucius hit the floor, he shattered into pieces. Now all that remained was the fake Seraphina.

— Shu-shu-shk!

Seraphina’s ice spears came flying in, aiming for my back.

Just like with Lucius, my own movement was hemmed in, so I had no choice but to parry.

— Klang!

One careless slip and the spear would plainly bury itself in me. With no clever trick on hand, I bore down on parrying too.

Now.

The real Seraphina would have rained down a near-endless barrage of ice spears.

This fake couldn’t.

The moment I confirmed her mana had run bone-dry, I flung the greatsword at her. She hurriedly scraped together mana and knocked it aside.

But the greatsword wasn’t the only thing I’d thrown. My own sword, loosed a beat behind it, sank into the fake Seraphina’s forehead.

“Let’s not deal in knockoffs.”