Helheim

Amid the howling cold wind, the system notification sounded once more.

[Death Realm Discovered—Helheim—Bridge of the Past]

Complete 50% exploration of the realm—you will receive [One-Third Spell Fragment]

(One-Third Spell Fragment: contains strange energy. Collect three to upgrade one of your spell abilities.)

Complete 100% exploration of the realm—you will receive [Madman's Knowledge]

(Madman's Knowledge: treat with caution. Once you possess it, it is destined to stray from your expectations.)

"Madman's Knowledge..." Hoffa stood on the bridge stretching straight into an unknown void, staring at the grotesque, utterly bizarre phantom of a giant eagle in the distance.

He rubbed his forehead and muttered.

"Fuck, this is way too fantastical..."

He was absolutely furious inside!

Life had played another joke on him. Joey had asked him to say something to the Thunderbird. He had thought it would be like visiting a distant relative on their deathbed in his previous life—holding their hand, offering every comfort he could, asking whether they had any unfulfilled wishes, doing his duty as a junior.

Yet such a simple task had somehow gotten him tossed into another world, and into Helheim at that.

This was the legendary realm of the dead!

If he could not get back, would he not be trapped here until he died?

When he turned around, he saw that the enormous eye of flesh behind him was slowly closing.

It was slow, but it was definitely closing.

He looked at the back of his hand again. The eye pattern there was also slowly closing, at exactly the same pace as the giant eyeball.

Remembering what Joey had told him—"Come back before the eye closes. Don't force it."—he finally understood.

This eye was his passage back to Hogwarts.

Hoffa calculated the speed at which it was closing. He estimated that he had only about half an hour here.

No time to waste. He had to move!

Having confirmed his objective, Hoffa braved the gale and began running swiftly across the stone bridge.

Once he started running, his body seemed to be made of dust and sand. The raging wind blew tiny fragments off him as he raced across the colossal bridge. They trailed far behind him in thin streaks.

Come to think of it, this was already the second time he had left his original world. The first had been in the Chamber of Secrets of Hogwarts' Violet Society, where he had entered something called the Book of Spells.

But this time was different from the last.

The system had not given him any notification at all last time, which meant that place either did not exist or had long since vanished. Whether it had been real remained open to question.

But this time, the system had issued a notification. And the reward had changed from Great God's Lore to Madman's Knowledge.

This place truly existed. Hoffa stared at the giant eagle phantom in the far distance, his heart trembling slightly.

He had read some ancient European myths before.

That eagle was Hraesvelgr. Its name meant "Corpse Swallower."

An eagle transformed from a giant. The giant wore a cloak of eagle feathers and sat at the northernmost end of the world. Whenever he swung his arms, which had become eagle wings, cold winds howled across the earth.

Hoffa had thought they were only legends. He had never expected this world to be a hundred times more grotesque and vast than he had imagined.

If gods existed, were they still alive now?

There was no one on the giant bridge. It was utterly empty.

Yet as Hoffa ran forward, the exploration progress in his mind increased surprisingly quickly.

Ten percent.

Fifteen percent.

Twenty percent.

The gigantic bridge seemed boundless, endlessly long.

But no matter how Hoffa ran, the scenery on either side never changed. Snowstorm, void, and the giant eagle phantom that seemed to connect heaven and earth.

After running for about ten minutes, when the eye of flesh behind him had shrunk to the size of a tiny dot,

the system issued a notification.

Ding!

[Helheim—Bridge of the Past] exploration progress has reached 50%.

Spell Fragment obtained (1/3).

He had reached fifty percent exploration and obtained a spell fragment.

Before Hoffa could even feel happy or imagine what Madman's Knowledge would be like,

a strange figure appeared on the road ahead.

It was square-shaped, tall, and moved extremely slowly. Blurred by the gale, fragments were peeling off its body at an alarming rate.

Was it the Thunderbird, Talas?

Hoffa hurried toward it. After traveling so far without encountering anything, this was the first moving thing he had seen.

The closer he got, the clearer the strange silhouette became.

Only then did Hoffa realize that it was a figure carrying a stone stele on its back. It was covered in iron chains, gaunt and skeletal, its body hunched over. The stele on its back stood nearly five meters tall and looked unimaginably heavy.

"Is that you, Talas?"

Hoffa turned toward it uncertainly, wanting to ask, but the instant he faced it, he stumbled back in fright.

Looking at the monster beneath the stele from the front,

it wore no clothes. Its skin was dark and wrinkled. It had no eyes, no nose, no ears—only a mouth. That mouth was crawling with densely packed maggots.

"Hah..."

"Hah..."

"Hah..."

It let out painful, trembling gasps as it hunched over and shuffled past Hoffa bit by bit. It neither looked at him nor acknowledged him, much less answered his question.

It simply clutched its chest in pain and crawled, trembling and struggling, through the cold wind toward some unknown destination.

Hoffa looked at the stone stele on its back.

He could not read a single word of the inscription.

They were not characters from this world.

Once there was one, there came a second.

Soon, Hoffa saw a second figure carrying a stele, then a third, then a fourth.

All of them walked in the same direction. Some, like the first, carried only one stele on their backs.

But some had dozens of steles pressing down on them, packed so densely that they could barely move.

They crawled across the ground, struggling forward like snails.

Most of them were hideously ugly, horrifying beyond description.

Only a very small number carried no steles at all. Their faces were expressionless and indifferent as they walked ahead.

The absurd sight shook Hoffa to his core. He cycled his meditation technique several times, composed himself, and slowly continued forward.

As he walked, more and more strange people appeared.

"Talas?"

Hoffa called softly as he ran.

He tried to find his target.

But everyone here was faceless. Some were too ugly to distinguish their features, while others had nothing but smooth, blank planes where faces should have been.

Hoffa instinctively felt that Talas was not here, and that he certainly would not look like this.

He wanted to try another approach.

Yet at that moment, a frail figure carrying stones and steles finally collapsed under the unbearable weight, toppling to the ground.

When it fell, the chains snapped with a clatter, as though they had been made of plastic.

It had originally been crawling on all fours. Now, after the stele crashed down, it could finally stand a little straighter.

But rather than rising in relief and continuing on its way, it let out an incomparably shrill wail, then frantically pounced on its stele. With its thin arms, it tugged desperately at the chains, trying to pull the stele back up and carry it again.

But it could not move the massive stone stele at all. In that instant, countless maggots poured out from its body, scattering everywhere like monkeys fleeing a fallen tree, crawling all over the ground.

Some fell directly off the high bridge, while others crawled onto the other strange figures and burrowed inside.

Once all the maggots had crawled away, the monster was left with only an empty skin. A gust of Helheim's cold wind blew it into fragments, and it vanished without a trace.

The sight filled Hoffa with terror. He had thought someone was punishing these shadows by weighing them down with heavy objects, but things did not seem to be as he had imagined.

Before he could think about the reason,

another stele-bearing figure collapsed beneath its burden, repeating the same process.

But this one was closer to him. After leaving their former host's body, some maggots fixed their attention on Hoffa.

They had no eyes, yet they were "watching" him. Hoffa could feel it. It was an inexplicable, twisted emotion of wild joy, greed, and jealousy.

That emotion spread across the stone bridge like electricity.

One stone stirred a thousand waves. The maggots inside every strange figure suddenly sensed Hoffa's existence.

They silently crawled down from their former hosts, gathered into a massive clump on the ground, and gradually formed a humanoid creature made of maggots. It slowly crawled toward Hoffa, gradually rising to its feet as it moved.

At first it staggered clumsily, but it soon adapted to walking upright. It became as tall and large as Hoffa, and even looked somewhat like him—a maggot version of himself.

A chill ran through Hoffa as he took a step back.

The moment he retreated, the maggot creature opened its huge mouth and lunged at him with maniacal laughter, its expression filled with desperate yearning.

Watching the figure rush toward him, laughing madly, Hoffa's expression changed. He had never seen such a twisted monster.

At that moment, warmth came from his waist.

Hoffa reached back as he retreated and actually pulled out his wand.

This thing had come with him.

At that moment, the character [Seal] on the end of his wand was an abnormally vivid red, rather than its usual faded color.

The maggot figure roared as it drew closer and closer, its face brimming with jealousy, envy, and madness.

What should he do?

He had his wand, but what magic could he use?

Ghostwalk!

Hoffa tapped his arm.

The first thing that came to mind was Ghostwalk.

Boom!!

The disappearance he had expected did not happen.

Hoffa rolled away awkwardly.

He narrowly dodged the maggot-laced heavy blow.

He had not managed to use Ghostwalk at all. After thinking for a moment, Hoffa understood and cursed himself for being stupid. This was not the material world, and he clearly was not physically present either.

There was no way Ghostwalk could work.

After scrambling to his feet, Hoffa rolled and crawled away from the maggot monsters' attack range, his mind racing.

He had not learned any offensive spells yet and lacked the necessary means to attack.

How was he supposed to handle this awful situation?

On the giant bridge, countless maggots crawled out of the void and gathered together, forming one bizarre creature after another. They were like Cronenberg monsters from later films. Every one of them had Hoffa's face and a yearning expression.

Then Hoffa suddenly thought of those German dark wizards.

Last time in Hogsmeade, he had nearly been killed on the spot by a dark wizard's Transfiguration Spell. It was a very effective method of attack, and that Transfiguration Spell had not looked too complicated.

The moment the thought arose, Hoffa acted. Transfiguration was the magic he was best at.

Just as he had during his first Transfiguration class, he immersed his mind in his wand and tried to alter its form.

The moment he entered, he discovered that the wand was easier to transform than he had imagined. Hoffa could even feel his wand's anticipation.

It was eager to transform!

There were already dozens of monsters on the stone bridge. They surged past the crowd carrying steles and lunged at Hoffa with mad determination.

Magic power flowed through Hoffa's body, draining nearly half of it in an instant.

Then he suddenly opened his eyes. The wand in his hand rapidly changed, stretching, enlarging, and sharpening. At last, a two-meter greatsword appeared in his hand out of thin air.

Though the greatsword looked heavy, it was connected to Hoffa by blood. He could control it with his mind, just as he controlled his wand.

He raised his hand and swung!

The magically transformed blade was incredibly sharp!

One maggot monster was sliced cleanly in half by Hoffa's sword.

But the other monsters charged forward without fear of death.

Hoffa swept the greatsword in a wide arc. As it swung, the blade abruptly extended from two meters to five.

With a flashing, spinning slash!

More than a dozen maggot monsters were cut in half at the waist by that single strike!

They howled and fell to the ground!

Did it work?

Hoffa felt a surge of joy.

Transfiguration was far more useful than he had imagined.

But it did not work.

The halves of the fallen maggot monsters did not die. They wriggled and compressed together densely, transforming back into two separate monsters. With that one slash, he had created more than twice as many monsters as before.

They continued howling as they lunged at him.

"Fuck!"

Hoffa was stunned. Seeing that it would not work, he immediately poured in more magic power. The greatsword began transforming again in an instant, becoming broader, thicker, and heavier before rapidly turning into a massive hammer. The hammer's head was square, covered in spikes, and immensely thick.

Like a weapon from fantasy.

Boom!!

With one hammer blow, Hoffa sent five or six maggot monsters flying, smashing them into tumbling heaps in the cold wind. When they landed, they crashed into a long row of their own kind.

Here, the mind was strength!

But it was not over yet.

Seeing that Hoffa was difficult to handle, the fallen monsters actually exchanged glances before all sticking together. They intended to turn into one enormous maggot monster.

As the tide of maggots churned, Hoffa felt that he would never want to remember this sight for the rest of his life.

But their fusion would still take time.

Talas was not here. Hoffa felt it was time to go back; more than half of the half-hour limit had already passed. If he did not return soon, he feared he would be trapped forever in the land of the dead.

So Hoffa withdrew his magic, and the massive hammer reverted to a wand.

But at that moment, at that very moment, Hoffa's vision suddenly went dark.

Something flew over his head, blotting out the sky and sun and blocking what little light there was.

He looked up and saw a huge flock of creatures passing through the exceedingly high sky.

Their shadows blanketed the bridge.

Looking carefully, Hoffa spotted a six-winged bird among them. It was Talas.

That was right. At that moment, it was soaring through the void alongside a group of unknown creatures, flying toward an unknown distance.

"Talas—"

Hoffa opened his mouth, but before he could call out—

The Thunderbird in the sky lowered its head and glanced down at Hoffa. Then—

It accelerated forward, vanishing beyond the horizon in the blink of an eye.

Uh, it was over...

With his head raised, Hoffa had not managed to shout a single word. He swallowed it all back.

He thought, This is bad.

That guy did not seem to give a damn about him at all.