Seo Jiwoo

With a twisted smirk over his face, Felix squinted his eyes and extended his arm forward.

“Why don’t you join me too? My contractor can also form a contract with you and grant you strength, Jiwoo?”

I tucked my lips slightly upwards and politely declined, as I felt a sense of déjà vu.

“Nah, I’m good. I don’t want to become the lap dog of a filthy demon,” I scoffed.

Felix pulled his arm back and with a disappointed look over his face he opened his mouth and spoke, “judging from the speed you displayed earlier, I think you are plenty strong.” He inclined his head as he questioned. “Then why are you hiding your strength?”

“Well, do I need a reason to shout at everyone telling them whether I’m strong or not?” I sarcastically rebuked.

Felix nodded his head a couple of times, as he cocked his head sideways.

I felt a mana signature approaching where we both were.

“I guess your accomplice is coming here,” I commented as I turned my head away from him and towards my right.

“I have a question,” he asked.

I waved my hand forward and spoke, “what do you wanna ask?”

He placed his hand over his chin and asked, “how did you know that I was a contractee? I mean, I have been perfectly concealing the fact at I was a contractee since the start of the term?”

Well it wasn’t a hard question to answer.

“You could say I have a good intuition, and my ability to sense and understand mana is leagues above the others...,” I exclaimed as I crossed my arm. “But if I had to be honest, on the first day of the tournament, I felt demonic energy lingering in the atmosphere when I was strolling around the academy. But it was barely noticeable, like a tiny spark,” I added.

But that wasn’t all.

On the second day of the tournament, when I had met Felix near the bushes, I had activated Mind’s Eye to inspect the area, and I felt the same demonic energy—which I had sensed on the first day—lingering in the area around the park.

So I was suspicious, but all my suspicions were cleared up after my plan had worked out the way I had thought it would.

“Not even the instructors were able to distinguish between my mana, and the demonic energy. So I could you?” He asked.

“What if I told you I have an ability which allows me to see mana signatures or other energy forms?”

His brows knit together, as he complicatedly looked at me. I mean who would believe me if I told them I had a such useful skill, which anyone would love to have. I would only sound delusional to them.

“You really have a way with your jokes, don’t you Jiwoo?” Felix hysterically laughed.

But I looked at him expressionlessly. He stopped laughing a moment later and wiped his left eye.

“Hehe.... you’re not kidding?” he seriously asked. Surprise flashed over his face, but he still had uncertainty laced in his words.

Soon Felix's accomplice arrived and stood beside him. A boy with blond hair and amber eyes.

“Felix you...,” Stephen Mayer said. He looked at Felix’s mutilated face and held back whatever he was about to say.

Jiyoung had sent me the names of the people who had ambushed her—Ryuya, Haris and Karan. So my judgement of Luas approaching Han and Derek and engaging in a fight with them was on spot.

And Me and Felix were not ambushed by anyone from the other team.

So the only person that was out of the question was Stephen Mayer.

But I still didn’t know what was the real purpose of them distracting the others.

“You hold him back, Stephen. I will go and proceed with the plan,” he ordered and Stephen pulled his body into a stance. Bring his daggers forward.

What plan? I was getting a bad feeling from this so called plan of theirs.

“Okay, now go,” Stephen shouted and Felix dashed in the south direction, sequentially grabbing his rapier from the ground.

I tired to pursue him from behind, but Stephen blocked my path and hacked with his dagger near my throat.

With a twist of my wrist, I shifted my sword’s trajectory towards his daggers and stopped there approach.

Then without holding back, I knocked the air out of his lungs, as I shot the pommel of my sword towards his sternum.

With a light groan, Stephen bend down and kicked backwards, creating some distance between us, trying to catch his breath.

But I stepped forth, and kicked with full force towards his tibiofemoral joint—the weight bearing joint of the knee—, soon which followed a loud shattering noise.

Stephen lost his footing and fell face first on the ground. I didn’t have time to waste on him so I went in for the best approach to decapitate him from fighting further.

But a second later, he was about to shot up, but firming my grip over Bleak Star, I propelled it downwards, and soon with a subtle flesh cutting noise, my sword ripped through his suit—destroying the barrier mid thrust—,as the cold blade of my sword pierced through Stephen’s heart.

Stephen looked at me with the last of the energy he could muster, glaring at me with his despair filled eyes.

Blood dripped from his mouth, as the dry ground hurriedly drank Stephen's blood which was pooling beneath him.

I pulled my sword out of his lifeless body, and looked at his sightless eyes, which bore into mine.

[You Have Levelled Up!]

A window popped up in front of me the moment Stephen had taken the last of his breaths.

The author's content has been appropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

But I didn’t give any attention to my sudden level up.

It had to be done!

Why should I show mercy to someone who had sold his humanity, his being, just for some power which wasn’t even his own?

I was already used to killing—be it contractees or normal humans. Because the despair which I had witnessed in the peoples eyes in my past life, when they couldn’t find hope in the times of their desperation, despair and sorrow was dreadful.

So they did everything possible to try to survive like anyone would, even if it meant betraying the others or selling their beliefs.

At this point I didn’t even feel guilty for killing a person. Why should I? He was a demon’ contractee.

Life was a complete set of choices. You choose yourself who you become, or what you want to become.

I turned around and pressed my heel against the hard ground, and dashed in the direction Felix had ran too.

After a two minute run, I finally reached Felix, who stood near the tower of the opposite team.

Inside his hand was held a black cubic shaped object, which was almost the size of his palm. He turned around, clenched the cube in his hand as he furiously looked at me.

Felix took a single step forward, bringing the cube forward for me to look at.

“So you killed Stephen,” He spoke, not asking me rather speaking to himself.

I tightly gripped the hilt, and pulled my sword forward.

“Felix there’s still time, you don’t have to do what that demon has told you too,” I coldly spoke.

But as if my words were a deaf ear to him, he shrugged, as he increased his grip more the black cube.

“Don’t give me that hypocritical talk,” He shouted. “You who killed Stephen—who was in the top forties—,while you being a mere bottom ling. People like you are the reason, why people like me have to struggle,” he cried out.

The emotion which overtook his words was rage, simple rage.

Felix covered the left side of his face, and giggled, as if he had been told a joke.

“Then how are people like me supposed to catch up to monsters like you, Aogiri Ryuya, Park Jiyoung or Han Shu-hui, huh?” His face harboured a mixture of multiple emotions. Fear, despair, rage, desperation and many others.

“Tell me Jiwoo? What should I have done?”

I gritted my teeth as I tried to form an answer, but couldn’t. I was the same as him. I had tried everything in my past life. I had trained even after my body had broken down past its limitations, my bones shattered, my mind blanked.

But in the end it was not enough to defeat the demon king. I was merely a grain of sand compared to the monsters out there.

But that doesn’t justify his actions to form a contract with a demon. I may sound hypocritical, but that justification was wrong.

I know that, forming a contract with a demon had also crossed my mind only once, when I had hit rock bottom, when I didn’t see a path forward, when I had lost everything.

But the voices of those pushing me from behind were always there. Even after dying, they had kept on supporting me, so that I don’t give up.

“Was that a good enough reason to betray the others and yourself? Why don’t you point that question at yourself instead? Did you even try every mean possible to become stronger rather than falling into despair and running to a demon for help?” I snapped at him.

The incoherence in his speech was delusional.

I’m not strong enough because there are other people who are stronger than me. That’s just a load of bull.

“Even if it’s all that, my contractor has promised to give me enough strength to become the strongest.” The look of ecstasy over Felix’s face made me pity him.

He was too far gone. His mind had already been corrupted by the destructive impulse of his demonic energy.

Because demons are the embodiment of desires. So when a human forms a contract with a demon, the strongest desires which confines that human’s mind, takes control of them. And they go into a primal state, where they care about nothing except fulfilling that one desire which has occupied their mind.

And Felix’s mind was already consumed by his impulse of becoming stronger.

“Enough of that... with the success of this plan which my contract has laid out, I will become stronger than the likes of you, or Ryuya.”

His voice came out much hoarse than before.

“Do you want to know what this cube is?” He poked a finger towards the cube and locked his black eyes at him.

“This is a bomb, which can be detonated by a spark from my mana,” he exclaimed. “And there are more of these bombs all around lock, which will detonate once this one explodes and its resonating mana fluctuation reaches the others.”

My brows furrowed as I looked at Felix. He didn’t even care about his own life at this point, in the pursuit of power.

“Do you think the instructors and the associates from the world union and guilds won’t be able to tell if the mana’s fluctuation suddenly changes in the atmosphere?” I calmly spoke.

But there seemed to be a bigger picture which I was missing.

He shook his head and elaborated. “You are right, Jiwoo. We ...had went through the hazal of installing resonation blockers all around this place so that neither the fluctuations of mana nor the resonation reaches outside of this place, until the explosion.

I gulped hard as I imaged the detonation of the bombs. ‘The Lock would be in flames.’

“Once the lock is enveloped by the sea of flames, the final resonation from a bomb will activate a portal through which many demons would cross over, and they will start the massacre once everything and everyone is in mayhem,” he spoke with indefinable joy in his voice.

‘Dam it all,’ I inwardly cursed, as I firmed my grip over my sword.

“Then goodbye Jiwoo,” Felix said as he brought his free hand close to the body of the cube and started channelling his mana towards his hands.

I lunged forward at full speed, with mana circulating through my legs. I covered the short distance in the blink of an eye, and slashed my sword with mana reinforcing the blade, near Felix’s throat.

Steading my grip over the hilt, I horizontally slashed, and soon my sword sliced perfectly through Felix’s throat, decapitating his head from his body.

With a loud thud, both his body and head plummeted on the ground.

[You have Levelled Up!]

Again I saw a window pop in front of me indicating I had levelled up.

I took in a deep breath, but a second later, the hair at the back of my head stood, as I felt the mana in the atmosphere ripple and crack.

I snapped my head backwards and saw a black glow emanating from the body of the cube. The air cracked as the mana in the area went into a frenzied state.

‘Fuck... what should I do now?’ My mind raced as I tried to think of something, anything.

“Convergence and Divergence kid,” the words of that quack-head who had taught me to use mana started reminiscing inside my head.

Yeah, the basic of learning to use mana.

What I needed to do here was to dissipate the mana which was inside the cube, into the atmosphere, to lessen its range of detonation.

But it wasn’t as simple as it seemed. This idea was only an idea at best. Even that quack-head knew that removing a large amount of rampaging mana from an object was nothing less than calling for your own death. So he lost interest in whether it was possible or not.

And this had to been done with a catalyst to store the mana into it or allow the mana to flow through it, into the atmosphere. Allowing the rampaging mana to calm.

But I didn’t have something that could work like a catalyst.

No... I did. I gazed down at my own body.

It was a risky move. I could die if I did something wrong during the process of absorbing the destructive mana from the cube and guiding that mana out of my channels and into the atmosphere.

I tapped over my watch and contacted the others.

“Everyone if you can sense the disturbance of the mana in the air, then run away towards the facility. Felix and Stephen were demons’ contractees, and they have installed many bombs around the lock, one such is about to detonate,” I hurriedly spoke.

Just as I had finished speaking, my watch vibrated and I heard Jiyoung’s voice coming through.

“Jiwoo, what do you mean?” She sounded confused.

“Just do as I said, go and tell the instructors what I have just told you,” I quickly replied.

The stinging sensation in the air increased each passing second, and I felt a heavy pressure starting to bore down on the surrounding area.

“What about you?” Jiyoung asked.

What I was about to do was something even I wasn’t hundred percent sure of. I mean, my teacher didn’t have any results, so I barely had an idea about what I was going to do.

I brought my watch close to my mouth and replied, “I’m making my way towards the facility right now.”

“Okay.”

With that I stepped forward and sat crossed legged in front of the cube. I opened the system interface and went into the shop section of potions.

I scrolled through for a second before finding what I was looking for.

————

|Potions|

■ Instant Regeneration Potion

Description:

After consuming this potion any wound or injury which the host sustains while the consumption of his potion will be regenerated and healed.

Note: The effects of this potion would last only for 10 minutes.

Price: 500 points

————

“Its expensive but its the only option I have,” I said as I looked at the price tag of the potion again.

But without wasting another moment, I bought the potion and chugged it down.

Then I grabbed the cube from the ground and clasped it between my hands.

“Here goes nothing.”