Chapter 22

Chapter 22

Reinhart was powerful enough to, with the silent snap of his fingers, cast a spell so strong that three magicians working together could not dispel it. The magicians realized that they had picked a fight with someone they shouldn’t have, and that person was gazing at them now.

“Why isn’t anyone answering me?” Reinhart asked. “If you don’t need your tongue, I can pull it out for you.”

“N-no, my lord!”

A chorus of voices shouted. Reinhart’s age and the circumstances leading up to his awakening no longer mattered. The magicians had witnessed his madness and bloodlust firsthand. Unless they wanted to be speared by an icicle, they had lost all confidence to stand up against him.

“Good. Now, do you interrupt people while they’re eating?”

“N-no, it’s bad manners,” a young magician replied, desperate to live.

“And?”

“We won’t disturb you anymore, my lord!”

Reinhart smiled. Just when he was about to raise his hand, the young magician dropped to his knees and shrieked. The head magician let out a low chuckle at the boy’s sudden reaction.

“Very well. You can bother anyone else, but not me.”

“Yes, I understand.”

“Good.” Reinhart nodded, satisfied. He clenched his fist once before releasing it. There was a dull crack in the air as if something had exploded. A second later, something started raining down to the ground.

As the magicians tilted their heads to look around, the young magician voiced a question.

“Is that... flesh?”

The magicians gaped at what was raining down on them. Their heads turned. Apart from the limbs speared with ice, nothing remained of the gray-robed magician. His head and torso were gone.

“Because a promise is a promise,” Reinhart said, smiling in front of the shocked crowd. But they couldn’t see it—the blood made it impossible to see anything. With a quick wave of his hand, the blood vanished from his body.

“Would it be all right if I heard the report after my meal?”

“What? Oh, yes. Yes...” Merial, the envoy, replied as he sank to the floor, nodding frantically. Reinhart smiled before exclaiming,

“Oh.”

He snapped his fingers three times. The pieces of flesh that had rained down on the crowd rose back into the air, rejoining the limbs still on the wall. Before long, a human body began to take shape and a moment later, the gray-robed man appeared, gasping for breath. The magicians stared in astonishment.

“A time reversal spell?”

“My goodness...”

Awe flashed in the eyes of the horrified men as they witnessed magic they had only heard about in legends. The current head of the Magicians’ Tower was unlike any they had seen before, and everyone in the hall was now realizing this.

“There won’t be a second chance. Do you understand?” Reinhart said before disappearing with Caspelios.

“Who was it? Which bastard said that the new head of the tower was a weakling who knew nothing about the world?” a middle-aged magician asked long after Reinhart had gone.

The young magician shakily raised his head at the older man’s question.

“H-he did...”

The young magician said as he held out his palm, revealing a piece of flesh. “Evil bastard.” The young magician flinched at the sound of someone cursing. Although the whole ordeal was rather unpleasant, nobody had died. Well, someone had died, but they were resurrected now.

The magicians began to clean the hall, pulling their companions down from the wall with great difficulty. Their eyes were blank, unseeing, as if they had lost their minds. The gray-robed man didn’t even scream as he recalled the terrible pain imprinted on his body. The only thing he could do was sit there and shiver.

“I’m alive...”

His mind, too, was now broken. He would never forget that memory for as long as he lived.

* * *

After Reinhart disappeared, Valeta started to enjoy her meal. She frowned when she heard a loud thump against the glass wall. A pretty shabby place for being so high up in the air.

Thump, thump.

The sound of wind knocking against the glass walls continued. Just when she was about to reach for a tantalizing piece of roasted goat leg topped with butter, she turned her head.

“Oh,” she gasped and jumped from her seat, realizing that she’d forgotten something. So preoccupied with playing mental games with Reinhart, the girl had completely forgotten that she had summoned Gene.

“I’m so sorry.”

Valetta walked back toward the glass wall, a puzzled look on her face. The thumping sound she had been hearing must have been from Gene. She pursed her lips, apologetic. She was about to apologize again when the furious hawk flapped his wings, creating another tornado.

Three tornadoes, twice the size of Valeta, formed in the empty air and hit the windows of the tower. The wind was powerful enough to blow away an ordinary house, but the glass walls of the tower shook only slightly.

The tower’s pretty strong, Valeta noted, and she took back what she was thinking earlier about the tower being shabby. She sighed. It was no wonder why Gene was angry. She had summoned him only to ignore him in favor of dinner.

“I’m sorry.”

“Are you looking down on me? First you summon me, only to immediately dismiss me! Now you’re ignoring me! We don’t even have a contract, yet I answer your calls! How can you be so cold and heartless?”

The wind elemental was not one easy to anger. Valeta smiled awkwardly at the furious voice that thundered in her head.

I guess that’s true. I shouldn’t be able to summon Gene since we don’t have a contract. Honestly, she hadn’t thought much of it. She could summon Gene simply by calling his name. Once summoned, all Valeta had to do was make a request and pay the price for it. She smiled in an attempt to appease Gene who was beginning to look upset.

“I’ll be more careful next time, Gene.”

The wind elemental’s anger began to die down when he saw Valeta’s head lowered in a meek apology. Humans tended to keep their backs and shoulders straight. He thought this woman would do the same, but she wasn’t. The hawk stared at Valeta through narrow eyes, now subdued, before snorting heavily.

“Fine. Why did you summon me to this unpleasant place?”

“I want to get out of here. Can you help me?”

“Isn’t this the Magicians’ Tower? There’s a spell that prevents elementals like me from entering. The Magicians’ Tower is a wicked place that sucks the power out of nature. It is impossible, of course.”

Valeta hadn’t realized how feisty Gene really was back when all she had to do was trade a bit of her blood in exchange for his services. But now she saw—he was as rough as sandpaper. Valeta nodded. She didn’t think that he’d actually be able to break in.

“This is just like you. How did you summon me from this isolated place? Then again, it’s unusual how you’re able to summon me at all.”

“Is summoning an elemental that complicated?”

“Certainly. An elemental can only be summoned by their name if the elementalist has a contract with them. They have to draw a magic circle and perform a summoning ceremony in nature for their first contract.”

“Does that mean I have to be in water to summon a water elemental?” Valeta asked casually. She had read something similar in other novels before. Gene looked at Valeta strangely, as if he was seeing her in a new light.

“Indeed! In order to summon an elemental like me, many people would travel to places where typhoons are common or to the highest mountain peaks and then draw a summoning circle!” Gene crowed as he boasted of his own greatness.

Valeta thought that might have been the case. If she were being honest, none of this felt like reality. It all still felt like she was reading a novel. Maybe that was the reason why she never bothered to memorize anyone’s names or why she barely flinched when people died in front of her.

That doesn’t mean I want to go back to my old world, but... Now that her memories of her past life were beginning to fade, she had no desire to go back.

“Is there another way for me to summon you in here?”

“With your ability, it could be possible. That is, if you had a contract.”

“What if I don’t make a contract?”

“Well, who knows? If you’re strong enough to summon an elemental just by calling their name, you could try to formally summon them from inside using a summoning circle,” the hawk said as he tilted his head around. Then he burst out into laughter while shaking his head. “No. That’s impossible. No elemental has ever been summoned inside the Magicians’ Tower before.”

“A summoning circle, hm?”

She remembered seeing an image of it in a book before. Truth was, the first time she’d summoned Gene, too lazy to draw a proper circle, Valeta had simply tried calling out his name for the fun of it, only to be incredibly surprised to find that it actually worked.

I’ll give it a shot. Feeling light-hearted, Valeta began to look around the room for a piece of paper and pen.

“I don’t see anything.”

The only thing in the room was the bed and the food Reinhart had laid out on the table. She frowned. This was the perfect chance to try summoning Gene before Reinhart returned. Suddenly, her eyes fell on the table. She strode toward it, grabbed a knife, and wiped it clean with a napkin. Then, she grabbed the hem of her dress with her other hand and plunged the knife into it.

Soon, the luxurious dress was in shreds. Valeta placed a scrap of fabric on the floor. Using the knife again, this time she made a small cut on her index finger.

Blood started dripping.

“What do you think you’re doing?!”

Valeta, paying no attention to the voice, fell to the floor and started drawing a summoning circle with her blood on the fabric she had sheared off from her dress.

“I’m doing as you said. I’m going to summon you properly with a circle.”

“What barbary!”

The transparent hawk outside the window shook his head.