Chapter 10

1.

“How does a Skeleton come into being?”

The professor in charge of magical biology closed the book spread open on the lectern.

The gazes of the students in the lecture hall gathered forward.

“Usually, the soul of an Climber who died inside the Tower becomes trapped in their remains. Dying to a Monster, being exposed to a curse, or being left for a long time in a place thick with Death Mana—these are the most common cases.”

The professor tapped the blackboard lightly with a pointer.

On it was drawn a diagram of a human skeleton.

“However, even if the soul remains in the body, the personality from life is not fully preserved. Memories crumble, and reason is lost. What remains afterward is nothing but hatred toward the living.”

In other words, a Skeleton was once an Climber who climbed the Tower.

A warrior who wielded a sword and protected their comrades.

A mage who studied magic for decades.

When they die and become trapped in their own remains, they become Undead that retain some of the skills they mastered in life.

“Next, let’s examine the higher species.”

New letters appeared on the board.

[Warrior Lineage]
Skeleton Warrior
Berserker
Knight
Warlord

[Mage Lineage]
Skeleton Mage
Wizard
Lich
Elder Lich
Mana Lord

“Skeleton Warriors and Mages are commonly found even on the lower floors. But from Liches onward, the story changes.”

The professor drew a line under the word Lich.

“Liches and above can speak human language. They are beings who either restored their broken souls or found a way to maintain their rationality even after death.”

Someone raised a hand.

“From which floor do they appear?”

“Mostly after the 300th floor.”

Low exclamations rippled through the lecture hall.

“Many cases involve Climbers who climbed to at least the 300th floor in life, only to transform into Liches. Since they retain their knowledge and experience with magic, take special caution if you ever encounter one.”

The professor looked around at the students and smiled.

“With your bright futures, you might find yourselves facing one someday.”

Iris looked down at the letters written in her book.

Lich.

A high-ranking Undead that maintains intelligence and magic even after death.

If she kept climbing the Tower, it was an opponent she would eventually face.

From that day on, Iris imagined battles against a Lich over and over again.

So that she wouldn’t panic no matter what situation arose, she fought dozens of times in her mind.

As the top student of the Magic School, she could win.

That’s what Iris thought back then.

2.

And now.

A mere 30th floor, nowhere near the 300th.

In a place she had never once anticipated, a Lich stood before her eyes.

“A Lich?”

Leon still had a face that didn’t understand the situation.

But Iris knew.

The regenerative power that instantly restored a shattered skull.

The thick Death Mana flowing from his entire body.

It matched the characteristics she had learned at the Magic School perfectly.

We need to run.

Somehow contact the Instructor, and quietly hide until the Rescue Team arrives.

She knew that in her head.

And yet Iris did not retreat.

She was the top student of the Magic School.

She had repeated image training countless times, and was someone who would one day reach the top of the Tower.

If she ran away in fear now, what could she ever accomplish going forward?

Iris raised her staff.

“Leon.”

“Yes.”

“I’m sorry for misunderstanding you all this time.”

“Why are you apologizing all of a sudden?”

“In that spirit, let me show you.”

Cold Mana spread from beneath Iris’s feet.

A thin frost settled over the walls and floor.

“What a true elite’s magic really is.”

A violet flame flickered within the Lich’s eye sockets.

“How amusing.”

He raised his staff.

Three Death Spheres flew in from different directions.

“Ice Wall!”

The wall of ice blocked the first projectile.

As the remaining two curved around the wall, an Ice Spear shot from the tip of Iris’s staff.

Boom!

Two Death Spheres were destroyed simultaneously.

While the explosion obscured her vision, a third Ice Spear pierced the Lich’s shoulder.

A Frost Blade followed shortly after, slicing through his waist.

Crunch!

The Lich’s upper body fell to the floor.

“Oh ho.”

Creak— crack, crack—!

The Lich, sprawled on the ground, casually moved his jawbone.

“Not bad.”

Iris didn’t answer.

She maintained the Ice Wall, shifted the coordinates of the Ice Spear, and fed Mana into the Frost Blade.

As the Lich began regenerating, she froze the surrounding bones to block his movement.

In this moment where all these processes flowed simultaneously.

The formulas Iris processed in a single second numbered over ten.

Already beyond the scope of an ordinary mage—a true elite mage.

‘I can do this.’

He was more manageable than she had thought.

With all the battles she had imagined dozens of times, she could win.

That’s what she was thinking.

The current Iris.

“Splendid.”

The Lich, having gathered his scattered bones and restored his body, laughed.

“To possess this level of computational ability at that age.”

Iris aimed her staff again.

“You’ll make an excellent head indeed.”

“…?”

The Lich pressed his palm against the floor.

Kwaaaaah—!

Death Mana on a scale incomparable to anything before exploded outward.

“Guhk…!!”

Iris hastily raised an Ice Wall.

But the wall, pushed by the wave of Mana, slid backward as a whole.

“To think the Mana is this massive…!”

The Lich slowly rose to his feet.

The robe covering his chest fell open to both sides.

“Do you know?”

His emaciated ribcage was revealed beneath the robe.

“I am not some corpse who coincidentally became this after dying.”

“What…”

“I chose this body myself.”

In the past, the Lich had been a mage whose name anyone would recognize.

He had devoted his entire life to researching countless magics and creating numerous formulas.

But a human head was only one.

No matter how much knowledge one accumulated, there was a limit to the formulas one could process simultaneously.

“With a human body, I could not reach the heights I desired.”

The violet flame surged greatly.

“So with that person’s help, I transcended humanity.”

The Lich spread his ribcage.

Rrrrrip—!

An unpleasant sound of bones twisting echoed through the corridor.

“Those are…!”

Iris’s voice trembled.

“Ugh, disgusting.”

Leon scowled.

Inside the ribcage, ten different skulls were densely packed between the bones.

“You carry those around stuffed inside your body? That’s genuinely creepy.”

“Creepy, you say. These are exceptionally fine individuals.”

The Lich spread both arms.

“Did you know? Each and every one of these was a mage who made quite a name for themselves in life.”

The skulls inside the ribcage opened their jaws.

Click.

Click, click.

Ten mouths began moving at different rhythms.

“Now I shall show you. Their abilities.”

The Lich issued a single command.

“Attack.”

Death Mana seeped into all ten skulls inside the ribcage simultaneously.

Each skull divided the received command into ten detailed operations again.

Setting coordinates, adjusting output, calculating range and trajectory.

The operations one head processed numbered ten.

And there were ten such heads in total.

“Kakaka! This is what it means to transcend the human body—the Multiple Incantation Spell!!!”

Dozens of magic circles unfolded above the Lich’s head.

The ceiling, the floor, and both walls became filled with violet sigils.

“I can process a full 100 formulas per second!!!”

“A hundred… per second…?!”

Cold sweat ran down Iris’s forehead.

The most formulas she could process were ten.

The number Leon processed when he used the Continuous Trajectory Formula was fifty per second.

The Lich before her eyes was operating nearly twice that many formulas.

“…Leon.”

“Yes?”

“Run.”

“All of a sudden?”

“You can only use two spells! There’s no way you can block an incantation of this scale!”

Iris stepped in front of Leon.

The number of magic circles the Lich was creating continued to grow.

Whether she could block all of those attacks, she couldn’t know.

Perhaps she would die here.

Even so, Leon had to live.

He had fallen here trying to save her.

She couldn’t let someone like that die in a place like this.

“And…”

Iris bit her lip.

“I’m sorry. For everything I’ve done so far.”

“…”

“I’ll hold him off somehow. So use that time to—”

“It’s a one-way corridor here, so where exactly am I supposed to run?”

“Oh.”

A brief silence settled.

“Now, are you both done with your final words?”

The Lich lowered his hand.

Dozens of magic circles glowed at once.

Death Spheres, Bone Spears, and Black Flames engulfed the corridor all at once.

“Ice Wall!”

Three layers of ice walls rose in front of Iris.

Kwaaang—!

The first wall collapsed immediately.

Cracks like spiderwebs spread across the second,

and a single Death Sphere that broke through even the last wall grazed Iris’s shoulder.

“Guhk…!”

Iris immediately fired an Ice Spear.

But a new barrier was already spread before the Lich.

Boom!

The ice spear shattered feebly.

While Iris blocked one attack and counterattacked, the Lich had already prepared both his defense and his next attack.

Between ten operations per second and a hundred per second, there existed a gap as vast as heaven and earth.

“Did you truly think a single human head could keep pace with my calculations?”

The Lich extended his hand forward.

Beyond the cracked Ice Wall, over ten attack spells revealed themselves.

“I’ll put your head to good use.”

The violet magic circles illuminated the corridor.

“Die.”

The magic poured down.

‘…So this is how I die.’

Iris gripped her staff.

At most, she could block four spells.

The rest she couldn’t stop.

‘…Father. Was I too arrogant about the Tower?’

If she had paid just a little more attention on the stone path, she might not have fallen below.

If she had checked her surroundings once more after destroying the red core, the result might have been different.

She was too arrogant.

Simply because she had graduated at the top of the Magic School, she thought she could accomplish anything.

“…I’m truly sorry, Leon.”

Iris muttered quietly, as if leaving her final words.

“Because of me… if it weren’t for me, you wouldn’t have fallen here either.”

“Yeah. You’re right.”

“…”

It was an answer she hadn’t expected.

“Still, couldn’t you have been a little kinder with your final—”

Iris stopped speaking and looked to the side.

Leon wasn’t even sparing a glance at the magic flying toward them. Instead, he was scanning the magic circles spread across the air one by one.

“Yeah. So that’s how it feels.”

Then, as if understanding something, he gave a small nod.

“…Leon?”

“Ah, I get it now.”

Leon raised his right hand.

“Alright. Let’s start with the Homing Bullet?”

A small light formed above his palm.

“What could you possibly do with a Homing Bullet…”

Before Iris could finish her sentence, a second light appeared.

Three.

Five.

Ten.

The lights didn’t stop growing.

Each projectile hovered at different heights and directions, slowly orbiting around Leon.

The count was no less than.

“…Thirty?”

And there was one more fact Iris had been mistaken about.

The formulas Leon had computed at the Training Grounds were 52.7 per second.

A figure that already far surpassed the computational ability of a Grand Mage.

That was why Iris had assumed Leon’s computational limit was around fifty.

Except, that was never the limit of the AI at all.

It was simply that fifty operations were enough to pierce through eight targets.

A person intuits a formula, imprints it in their mind, and casts magic only after processing it sequentially.

But a Nano AI had no reason to follow human computation methods.

[01110101101010111101101011000101]

It decomposes the observed flow of Mana into the smallest signals.

[10110011101001010110111010011100]

The positions of the magic circles the Lich created.

The different Mana flows for each formula.

The coordinates and velocity of thirty Homing Bullets.

The spacing that must be maintained to avoid collision with one another, and the trajectories needed to move to the next target.

In the blink of an eye, information far exceeding terabytes floods in,

and that information soon swells to the petabyte scale.

[Generating interception paths.]

[Excluding collision-possible paths.]

[Applying real-time variables.]

New calculations updated each time a new magic circle was created.

[Generating interception paths for each Homing Bullet.]

[Excluding paths with mutual collision potential.]

For each Homing Bullet, it created hundreds of thousands of paths, compared the possibilities, and immediately discarded unneeded results.

[Distributing targets across 30 Homing Bullets.]

[Synchronizing individual coordinates and propulsion.]

[Beginning parallel control.]

At last, when input, analysis, decomposition, and Reconstruction were all complete.

[Composing real-time interception formulas.]

[Applying real-time trajectory correction.]

[Interception formula composition complete.]

The Nano AI—the pinnacle of science and technology—

[Computational resources are sufficient.]

[Homing Bullet deployment quantity limited to 30 based on user’s remaining Mana.]

Finally revealed its true performance.

[Current computation rate: 872 per second]

Leon pointed forward with his finger.

“Go.”

Papapapapang—!

Thirty Homing Bullets scattered in all directions.

Death Spheres were pierced, Bone Spears and Black Flames detonated in succession.

Even newly unfolding magic circles had their cores penetrated before they could complete.

A mere few seconds.

The attacks the Lich had unleashed with a hundred formulas per second vanished without a trace.

Thirty Homing Bullets returned to orbit around Leon, rotating slowly.

“Controlling these is easier than I thought. Feels like piloting some drones.”

Iris couldn’t comprehend the scene before her eyes.

“…Thirty Continuous Trajectory Formulas simultaneously?”

It had only been three days since he learned magic.

And yet, this man was casually trampling the very heights the Lich had abandoned his body to achieve.

No—this wasn’t even a level a human organism could reach in the first place.

“So it was true…”

Iris’s gaze fixed on the back of Leon’s head.

“That a god resides in his mind…”

The Lich’s reaction was even more extreme.

“What…”

The skulls inside his ribcage all clamped their jaws shut at once.

The violet flame trembling in his eye sockets froze solid as well.

“What… is that?”

For the first time, the Lich took a step back.

“What in the world is that—!!!!!!!”

Leon looked at the Lich’s face, twisted with shock, and said.

“？ It’s a Homing Bullet.”