WeTried Translations
Translator/Editor: Haruto
Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried
◈ A Gacha Addict's Life in Fusionpunk ◈
Chapter 31: Build: Necromancer
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1.
“Wait. Is it because it’s been a while? Something must have gone wrong.”
“Pardon?”
“I’ll show you again.”
Ceres’s long, delicate fingers covered my eyes once more.
The result was not much different.
A brief Twilight Zone death tour, then back to reality.
“Can I use magic now?”
Looking utterly unable to believe it, Ceres lightly bit her nail.
“Do you have a headache? Feel nauseous?”
“No.”
“Do you feel indescribable terror... Any signs that your mind might split apart?”
“Am I supposed to?”
“...”
The ‘death’ Ceres had shown me, that black, vast space.
Was I scared?
Of course I was.
The first time I fell into that place, I swore I’d never again invest, gamble, bet, or do extreme sports.
I was determined to cut out every activity that threatened my safety.
No, it’s hard to describe, but...
It was so disgusting, creepy, and terrifying that I’d rather reenlist in the military.
Of course, it was still terrifying now.
But the death Ceres had briefly shown me...
Hmm. It was about as unpleasant as reserve forces training.
“That’s surprising.”
“What’s it normally like?”
“The weak ones die on the spot.”
“Eek. What about the strong ones?”
“They vomit or go into shell shock. I knew you had aptitude, but I didn’t expect this much.”
“What was it like for you the first time, Ceres?”
Ceres didn’t answer.
Ah, I see.
Understanding of Death.
I understood perfectly what kind of stat this was.
Cedric Montraven, the genius necromancer who mocked even gods.
Had I become death, destroyer of worlds?
“If the aptitude test is over, what do we do now?”
“You need to learn to handle mana.”
Ceres replied, looking somewhat troubled.
Her interest appeared to have completely shifted from Project Z to Cedric, the genius necromancer.
I felt the same.
There were still two weeks until the zombie apocalypse, and a free power-up event was a serious matter.
Power gave you more Choices.
And it helped prevent pointless deaths, too.
“Take my hand.”
“Like this?”
I took her hand with our fingers intertwined.
“Your hands are really pretty.”
Ceres glanced at me with an odd look, then sent mana into my body.
At that moment.
“What?!”
I could feel my mana circuits twitching.
“Stay still. I’m activating the mana dormant in your circuits. Think of it as priming a pump. Don’t open your mouth. Just feel it.”
Before long, I began to feel the true flow of mana.
It felt as though it spread through my body along dense channels stretching like the roots of weeds.
I could really feel this?
For about thirty minutes, I blankly observed that power.
“Did you feel it clearly?”
“Yes. I feel like I can do anything.”
“Don’t get ahead of yourself.”
Ceres flicked a finger and tapped the tip of my nose.
“What you felt just now was only pure mana. If magic is watercolor, it’s colorless water. You can’t paint a picture with this alone.”
“So now I mix in the paint?”
“You catch on quickly. Try it. Draw that space you saw into yourself.”
Ceres explained in a soft, exceptionally kind voice.
So kind that I wondered if she had always had this side to her.
“Death, darkness, the world of nothingness where everything stops. You redefine it. Make your subjectivity itself become a phenomenon.”
What was she even talking about?
I wished she wouldn’t use such difficult words.
I was only a high school graduate.
Yet despite that thought, confidence welled up somewhere inside me.
What should I do? I didn’t think I would fail.
I closed my eyes and recalled that space of death.
So I was supposed to scoop up the darkness inside it and bring it over?
“Ghk...!”
My heart suddenly lurched in pain.
Fuck! My confidence just dropped a little!
“It’s fine if it hurts. It’s supposed to hurt. Slowly guide the flow and bring it out over your hand.”
My circuits tingled and heated up.
The transparent mana seemed to turn into a black, sticky liquid like tar and flow through my body, leaving me with a strange, unpleasant feeling.
But I would endure it.
I would not die helplessly anymore.
Focus!!!!
After struggling for a while.
“Hyahhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”
Pitch-black darkness, as if death itself had been liquefied, gathered over my palm.
“Whew...”
The ball of darkness looked like a drop of oil floating in space.
Hmm, how should I put this?
It was fascinating, and it was very, very surprising that I had such soft, squishy potential within me, but...
“It’s small.”
Wasn’t I supposed to possess incredible talent?
The result of wringing out my mental strength and imagination was kind of pathetic.
I looked at Ceres anxiously.
“...”
Her eyes were wide.
My expression brightened right along with hers.
“Did I do well?”
“...”
Without answering, Ceres crossed her arms and stared at the black droplet of mana I had summoned.
“This is your first time?”
“I didn’t know I had such terrifying talent.”
“Well... I checked your circuits myself.”
“How long does it usually take to get this far in the curriculum?”
“If you have enough talent, one year.”
Hmm. That was a little vague.
“If you don’t, even a lifetime isn’t enough.”
Wow, fuck! This was it!
Was something huge really coming? Was trash-tier Cedric finally escaping?
“Come with me for a moment.”
Ceres grabbed my wrist and led me to one side of the Haeng House.
It was a white room that reminded me of an operating theater.
In other words, Ceres’s workshop, where she had examined Arbel’s corpse.
When she made a light gesture in the air.
“Come out.”
A huge mannequin, at least two and a half meters tall, suddenly appeared.
As if it had been there all along.
It had long limbs, eyelids sewn diagonally shut with wire, and a flat face whose nose seemed to have been ground off with a grinder. Its jagged teeth were like fangs.
What a terrifying face.
It looked like something from a horror game.
Sniff sniff.
The mannequin shuffled toward me and sniffed at me.
“What is this creepy thing?”
“It’s your target. I’ll teach you, so take it step by step.”
Ceres interlaced her fingers with mine again.
“Remember the order and locations where the mana flows. You’ll use your circuits like a magic circle. Since it’s Rank 0, there’s nothing complicated.”
A stronger flow of mana than before circulated through my body once along my circuits.
Was this like the flow of internal energy?
Since I could properly feel it, it wasn’t difficult. I roughly memorized it.
“I memorized the separate movements.”
“Now you need to fire the mana at the target. But there’s one thing to remember. You don’t just fire it.”
“Then what?”
“I told you before, didn’t I? Magic is forcing your world upon the world. You wring out an image and paint a picture.”
“A picture?”
“Think of your opponent’s cause of death and manifest it in your mindscape.”
Mama Ceres...
You’re going too fast.
Was magic normally this abstract?
Couldn’t you just tell me a pinch of salt, a spoonful of soy sauce, that sort of thing?
“So I imagine that thing dying after getting hit by my magic?”
“Yes. Make it as vivid and specific as possible. Death by falling, drowning, electrocution, stabbing, strangulation. The cause of death doesn’t matter. You project the image of death you can picture most clearly.”
The death I could picture most clearly?
Hmm...
I thought about it for a moment.
Falling off the rooftop hurt, and being turned into Cedric tartare hurt too.
They were frightening and painful.
But the death carved most deeply into my mind...
Click.
Footsteps echoed beside my ears like an auditory hallucination.
That chilling sensation of my body being carved apart like soft butter.
The instant memory of my head flying into the sky and spinning around.
Even knowing it had all happened in the past, my skin prickled as a cold feeling sank into my stomach.
No matter how many times I died, I would never forget that sensation.
Yes.
That was absolute death, impossible to resist.
That bitch Kisara’s sword strike was the death I could picture most clearly.
“I’ve got it.”
“From here on, it’s self-suggestion. You paint over the world with your own.”
“How?”
“You can chant, or create your own routine. Consistency is what matters. Anything is fine if you can convince yourself that your stubborn will is reality.”
Perhaps so as not to interrupt my focus, her voice had grown quieter as it tickled my ear.
Self-suggestion...
Put simply, magic was applying my personal made-up lore to reality.
And self-suggestion meant adding my own details so I wouldn’t ruin it by going, “But will this really work?”
If so, something immediately came to mind.
“...Hand seals?”
Before the puzzled Ceres, I quietly pressed my hands together in front of my solar plexus.
One final time, I recalled it.
The shape of the death that had cut me apart. The terror and despair.
I would make that mannequin feel it too.
“Die split in half.”
Shwak!
Something like that sounded.
The round form of mana floating in the air instantly traced a black crescent through the air.
A light breeze brushed my cheek.
Thud.
At the same time, the mannequin was cut apart along a perforation running from the top of its head to its crotch.
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::: Challenges (NEW!) :::
- Use a Rank 0 spell. +5 pt
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I looked down at my trembling hand seals.
“This is... a necromancer’s power...?”
Death was cool as hell!!!
It was different from what I knew, but it was still fucking awesome!!!
Come to think of it, Ceres’s magic had also been rather different from the usual necromancer magic that raised and controlled corpses.
For the first time, I liked this world’s setting.
A corpse collector dragging around zombies and skeletons?
That would obviously look lame in a hyperinflation setting where a Grade 7 was Adam Smasher.
“Ceres! I did it! As a reward, gimme a kiss!”
Ah, we weren’t that close in this run yet, were we?
I had acted like it was the previous run without thinking.
Yet Ceres didn’t seem angry. She was smiling.
She looked dumbfounded, but it was also the smile of someone who had discovered a very amusing toy.
“Interesting. Very interesting. Very... impressive.”
When she lightly clapped, the mannequin split in half snapped back together and disappeared as though sucked into the air.
“What you just used was a basic spell of death-aligned magic. It’s Death Sentence, which broadly defines the cause and draws out the result.”
“Even the name is cool. How strong is this Cedric now?”
Confidence surged through me.
I had not felt this confident even when I had enhanced myself to Level 1 and swung Hero around.
“If you can use only the most basic applications, you’d be around Grade 7.”
“Grade 7!”
“Even if it’s Rank 0, it’s still magic.”
Rank 0 spells were not even considered magic among true mages, but still, this was something.
My heart swelled.
Only one day after the start of this run, I had joined the ranks of the strong, able to stand shoulder to shoulder with Sunming.
“Thank you so much!!!!”
“Thank me, my ass. I never imagined you would learn it in a day. This is ridiculous.”
“What did I even do? It’s all thanks to my excellent teacher!”
Watching Ceres laugh in disbelief, I thought:
This run really was different!
.
.
.
Ceres watched Cedric smile ingratiatingly and replayed the moment from earlier.
More precisely, the moment Cedric used his Sentence.
The amount was pitifully small, but Cedric had perfectly drawn up mana and mixed in its ‘color.’
However, he had completely fumbled the circuit route and the timing of the manifestation.
Mana had leaked out along the wrong route, not the one Ceres had taught him.
That much, she understood.
Death Sentence was simple magic, but Cedric was a beginner.
It was his first time using it, so he could get confused.
But there was one part she could not understand.
‘Die split in half.’
Even so, Death Sentence had struck.
It had precisely bisected one of the Masquerade entities Ceres was proud of.
There was only one circumstance in which such a thing was possible.
A vivid mindscape, clear enough to easily compensate for any lack of technique.
Only someone capable of directly facing a vivid death that would easily crush an ordinary human mind.
“Um... Could I borrow the shower for a bit? As you can see, I look like a beggar.”
“Go ahead.”
Cedric left for the bathroom with a carefree grin.
“What kind of hell have you seen?”
Watching his back, Ceres murmured without realizing it.
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