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Chapter 19 - Artificial Gate Massacre IV

Leo had expected the artificial Gate to be trivial.

He would ace the Gate with flying colors, outshining even Gauss and crushing that insolent punk, Mav.

The pain that he was experiencing now did not faze him.

He had died many times before.

But the scenario was still completely shocking.

Why is there an E rank monster in this dungeon?!

Leo clutched the slash that deeply pierced his side. The drider had cut him with the crude scimitar before being thrown backwards by Leo's powerful White Lightning Technique.

The monster had been severely injured but so had Leo.

Gauss was surviving, but he was struggling to hold his own against the monster.

Rebecca was crying as she tried to heal Leo. The green light sputtered and flashed, before dying completely and leaving his wound just as grievous as before.

"I'm out of mana…" Rebecca sobbed, frustrated with her limitations.

Do I really have to waste my hidden card now? Leo thought with anger.

The drider suddenly slammed Gauss into the wall. The whole cave shook from the power.

Rebecca stopped crying. Magic gathered at her fingertips, before dying.

She kept trying.

And trying.

And trying.

But nothing happened.

Leo simply laid on the stone floor, making plans for the future.

"Next time…" he whispered to nobody.

Suddenly, everybody was deafened by an unknown boom. The sound shook the cave harder than when the drider had slammed Gauss into the wall. Even the monster hesitated as dust rained from the ceiling.

The spot where the black haired, first ranked freshmen had been ruthlessly slammed into the wall crumbled as someone stepped into the room.

"Haha… why is my luck so bad?" the gray-eyed boy said as he looked around the room.

Spider silk clung to his torn and burnt armor. Blood dripped onto the web-covered ground.

Green blood dripped from his longsword.

"Get them out of the room, Rebecca," he said, tossing several demonic cores to her. "Regain your mana and use your telekinesis."

"But these have corruption--"

"You can filter the corruption out," the boy said. Then, his gaze sharpened. "Is your talent just for show?"

The blue-haired girl hesitated, before grabbing one of the demonic cores. Her eyes began to glow with crimson light as she absorbed the corrupted mana. Black mist began floating off her skin.

"...Mav," Leo said weakly.

"Don't talk. You'll make your injuries worse," the gray-eyed boy snapped. "Don't waste your potential here."

Leo paused. He sounded like he was saying that he couldn't die here, but the way he worded the sentence… 

Does he know something?

Suddenly, he was roughly lifted into the air by an arcane force. Rebecca staggered out from the room while telekinetically carrying both Leo and Gauss, still clutching one of the demonic cores in her hand.

"Wait…" Leo managed to say, but neither Rebecca nor Mav heard him.

The world turned black for Leo Inazuma.

***

I looked around the room and sighed.

"Guess I'll have to do this again…"

Thankfully, the main characters had survived.

Originally, Gauss, Leo, and Rebecca had easily destroyed the drider.

However, my existence may have caused small shifts in the groupings and which artificial Gate each group was assigned to. This butterfly effect had caused them to nearly die.

And then, I appeared.

The number of conditions and coincidences that had happened to make this possible were inexplicable.

In order to make the artificial Gate activity more predictable, the Academy had opened the Gates relatively near each other in different parts of one large giant spider colony. The artificial Gates that my group and Gauss' group were assigned to were nearby. The nest rooms were next to each other. The drider had weakened the wall before I detonated the firebomb on the other side of the wall.

"There's something strange here," I spoke to myself. The situation was improbable and illogical beyond belief. Sadly, I did not have the time to contemplate the probability-defying occurrences.

I still had to deal with the E rank monster.

The drider that had been attacking me had been warily examining me.

"Yeah, I smell like the blood of your brother," I laughed, rasping from the smoke and dust in my lungs. "You should be afraid."

Before the monster could make up its mind to attack the new prey(?) that had appeared, I threw one of my firebombs into the creature's face.

The explosion was surprisingly large and bright. I had been afraid of using them in a confined space like the tunnels, but a spiders' nest cavern was much more open-- I didn't have to be afraid of being caught in the blast.

The bomb detonated before the monster could react, burning and blinding the drider. The drider's pained screeches echoed throughout the cavern and nearly deafened me.

In its blind pain, the monster slammed against the cave walls causing more dust to fall from the ceiling.

While the half-spider, human-man could recover from the flames, I quickly covered myself with spider silk and threw my last four firebombs into the center of the room.

Fine dust in the air ignited as the explosives triggered, causing the fireball to expand rapidly in size.

Then, I plugged my ears with my finger and closed my eyes.

Once again, the boom was ten times more deafening than the drider's screaming. 

I could feel my bones trembling from the shockwaves.

When the explosion stopped, the spider silk that had been covering me was left tattered and burnt. Blood poured out of my mouth when I staggered onto my feet and stared at the carnage.

Spider silk was surprisingly heat-resistant, I had learned while planning how I would deal with the Artificial Gate Massacre. Spiders, however, were not as heat-resistant.

The drider had been burnt to a crisp, leaving only the smell of burnt flesh and their membrane-covered demonic core.

I grabbed a second E rank demonic core, and stumbled back through the hole in the wall I had come from.

"Still… have to get… the others…"

Perseus, Saffron, and Lucas were waiting for me. 

I hoped that they were okay.