Chapter 13

The corridors on both sides were much the same, lined with rows of cells, but there was a guard office at the end of Mel's corridor. No one was there now, and a guard who had been watching the monitors lay facedown on the floor. Unfortunately, Mel checked and found that the guard was already dead.

Several surveillance feeds had gone dark, and a few monitors had been smashed, their screens filled with static.

"Xipei, be careful. There's a squad of six cyborgs near you, two turns to your right."

Through Mind Link, I could see the surveillance footage myself.

Good. Since I was dealing with a would-be demon king's lackeys, I had to get serious too. I couldn't be some hero who showed up just to get slaughtered. Besides, they had killed the good guys first, so I didn't have to worry about the media kicking up a fuss if I went too far.

Hmm... I probably still needed to be gentle and avoid leaving obvious traces. Otherwise, they'd find out we'd slipped out instead of staying put in our cells and were running around throwing spells, which would be a bit bad too.

Mel had confirmed that these cyborgs had some magic resistance, and a single Lightning Spell barely affected them. So I'd try a different approach-

I teleported behind them, but I didn't rush to attack. The cells in this corridor weren't empty. They weren't full, but I couldn't let even one person see me. These days, being seen by one person was no different from being seen by the whole world.

So I quietly cast a Hypnosis Spell. This wasn't the high-security section yet, and the inmates were all ordinary prisoners. Their magic resistance probably wasn't even as high as a slime's, so they all fell asleep without a sound.

At the same time, a row of ice spikes formed in front of me. The sharp, frost-shrouded cones struck in succession, piercing the first cyborg's chest in an instant. Blood and battery fluid sprayed out together. Even with mechanical parts installed and armor on, he still had a human body. Besides, I was confident these spikes could pierce dragon scales, so a mere cyborg's exoskeleton armor was nothing.

The others were instantly on alert when the first man fell. The trouble was, they really were fast. Worse, they liked flailing around, leaping up and down, and crawling all over the walls instead of walking on the floor, making them hard to aim at. I was a mage, not a sniper; I couldn't shoot that accurately. So I instinctively threw out a blizzard. Snow swirled and icy winds howled through the whole corridor. The moment I cast it, I regretted the reflex. I was worried it was making too much of a commotion, so I promptly dismissed it and switched to frost. Smooth ice spread rapidly from beneath my feet and climbed the walls in the blink of an eye, encasing the feet of two cyborgs who had been slow to jump in shells of ice.

That made aiming much easier. Every ice spike hit its mark.

To cover my tracks, I cleverly had my shadow wrench a magitech gun from a cyborg's hand and spray them with bullets.

Perfectly handled!

Through Mind Link, I saw that Mel had dealt with a squad too. He hadn't forgotten to knock out the prisoners watching the show first, either. Otherwise, casting a spell as famous as Shadow Dance would have been the same as announcing his whereabouts to the world, making his Invisibility Spell a complete waste. Mel was much more skilled with Shadow Dance than I was. Like me, he chose to launch a surprise attack and catch them off guard. Getting the first move was important, after all. History had plenty of accounts of duels between two legendary powerhouses where whoever struck first gained the advantage. This was especially true of mages: the one who cast the first spell faster often won in the end. Mel made the cyborgs' shadows coil around them like snakes, slowing them down, then used invisible wind blades to cut them down even faster than I had.

I hurriedly said, "Mel, remember to cover it up!"

"Oh, right!" Mel saw my shadow shooting wildly at the corpses and immediately understood. He had plenty of shadows on his side, and while the people casting them weren't quite dead yet, they hurriedly picked up guns and opened fire too, turning every cyborg into a bullet-riddled sieve.

An archmage was an archmage, all right. He handled it far more boldly than I did!

"Xipei, you really thought of everything," Mel said through the link.

We dealt with a number of cyborgs along the way, and when we counted them up, there really were a lot. Mel said it would take at least a medium-to-large military enterprise to field that many cyborgs. Private military enterprises these days were far larger than traditional mercenary groups. The Kunlan Rangers weren't even big enough to count as a miniature military enterprise, because traditional mercenary groups didn't take just anyone. They were picky about their members, with extremely strict selection, and there were regular assessments afterward. Anyone who failed was fired. Military enterprises, though, were easy to join and had no assessments. As long as you were an adult, had completed basic education, and had legal identification... that was enough. It didn't matter if you had no martial skills; a few mechanical enhancements could make you a formidable fighter.

"Academia generally agrees that the development of technology is causing humanity itself to regress," Mel said seriously. "The most common example is what we discussed before: forgetting how to write characters when you pick up a pen. How serious that is! In the legendary era, only people with dementia forgot how to write characters!"

"Right!" I nodded. I knew that all too well. Before Moli started writing experiment records for me, she had spent a whole month practicing with copybooks. Back then, the girl couldn't recognize characters without a light screen. If I hadn't told her I'd replace her unless she learned to write properly, she'd still be a half-disabled assistant who could only type and couldn't write.

Compared to that, the temples might have had it even worse. Take priests of light, for example. How respected a priest had been in the legendary era! They wielded holy light, banished evil, and could instantly heal serious injuries. But now, an ambulance took you to the hospital, where you were wheeled into the emergency room and put in a treatment machine. Before long, you'd be up and bouncing around again, and you could even use your health insurance card. So who still went to a priest? (I'd heard that these days, priests of light mainly earned their offerings by taking photos with tourists...) And even without health insurance, public hospitals were very cheap, since treatment machines had long been a mature technology and were inexpensive to manufacture. But priests? No matter how talented they were, from the time they began practicing to producing their first wisp of holy light, then becoming a priest capable of casting Advanced Healing Spell... hmm... with that much time, it would be easier to make money and invest in a treatment machine production line. That was enough time to produce thousands upon thousands of treatment machines.

I wasn't feeling sorry for the priests, because I had no right to—we mages were in much the same tragic position! I practiced for three years before successfully casting my first Fireball Spell. But buy a flamethrower, spend three minutes reading the instructions, and you could shoot flames as powerful as an intermediate Flame Explosion. So there were fewer and fewer mages now. Parents all thought it was a grueling job, mentally and physically exhausting: you practiced so hard, only to graduate unable to beat a flamethrower. That was why even the most prestigious Leinayaro Magic Academy couldn't fill its enrollment quota each year.

Ah, worldly humans.

"That's why I say the fundamental driving force behind the development of technology is people's laziness," Mel remarked bluntly.

I couldn't have agreed more! My assistants were too lazy even to go out for lunch, huddling together in the break room and ordering delivery on their phones. Some of them were covered in flab at such a young age. If I didn't zap their butts with Lightning Spell and make them run laps every day, my laboratory wouldn't have room for so many fat people!

"Mel, be careful! There seem to be more of them on your side!" I suddenly heard a commotion.

"Yeah, I see them. The prison guards are exchanging fire with the cyborgs." Mel pressed himself against the corner of a wall. "I'm going over to help."

Chapter 13

Helping in secret was much harder than taking action directly. Keeping both sides from noticing was a little tricky, but I trusted Mel. With his strength, it definitely wouldn't be a problem.

At the same time, I found it strange. The capital prison's defenses were really terrible. These cyborgs were decent fighters individually, but surely the prison guards had both home-ground and numerical advantages? It was taking them so long to fight just a few squads of cyborgs. The two of us were still wearing anti-magic shackles on our hands. Although we could cast spells with them on, we couldn't possibly be unaffected. If we were, we wouldn't be mages but archmage gods. I was only at about forty percent of my usual strength-surely the prison guards couldn't all rush in together and still be worse than a little mage like me at forty percent?

By then, Mel had reached the firefight. He hid in the rear and quietly assisted the prison guards, choosing to use mental magic. He cast Mental Piercing, and in the chaos, no one would notice whether the cyborg had stumbled on his own or been attacked. With Mel there, the cyborgs who had been so agile moments ago seemed to have all suffered strokes, and the prison guards wiped them out in no time. I had to say, Mel the archmage was practically a cheat code. If the prison guards still couldn't win with cheats enabled, then the Federation might as well forget it, wash up and go to bed-its country would fall tomorrow!