Chapter 95

How strange. It was chilly today, so why did it feel as though sweat were pouring from my tear ducts?

Still, this was no time to wallow in misery. I was standing at the very heart of the incident.

“Heukh!”

“How did you get in there...?”

“Appraiser! Are you all right?”

The hunters outside the barrier stared at me in astonishment.

“I’m fine. Everyone, please calm down.”

Getting inside had been easy enough. If I truly made up my mind to leave, I could probably get out at any time. There was no reason to panic.

No—if anything, this was a valuable opportunity. It would be much easier to identify the barrier’s weaknesses from within.

“Hmm.”

I let my gaze drift briefly toward the monster standing in the middle of the flower field, then cautiously addressed the employee on the other side of the barrier.

“Hunter Seonwoo Yeon?”

“Yes?”

“Does that monster have any physical means of attack?”

Seonwoo Yeon shook her head.

“No. According to the registered information, the Flower Baron only inflicts psychic damage...”

Well, that settled it.

I pointed behind me with my thumb.

“Since I’m already in here, I’ll take a quick look around before coming back out.”

“What?”

“It’ll be easier to examine the barrier from this side. Its internal structure may have a weakness.”

Seonwoo Yeon reacted with a startled exclamation.

“No, but that’s...”

I could more or less guess what she wanted to say from the look in her eyes. Fortunately, however, the others did not seem particularly opposed to the idea.

“Oh! You’ll really do that?”

“As long as we can break through the barrier...”

“That should be fine, shouldn’t it?”

“Right. You’re already resisting the brainwashing!”

They probably just want this over with as quickly as possible.

Five minutes.

I promised to return within five minutes, then immediately began examining the barrier.

There are so many flowers, yet there isn’t a trace of fragrance.

Rustle.

The lush plants covering the ground brushed against the soles of my shoes. Ignoring the sensation, I focused entirely on the barrier.

Let’s see. Its structure is roughly... Wait. Is that monster directly sustaining a barrier this large?

Seriously.

No, the more I thought about it, the more irritating it became. How could anyone compare a rare genius like me to dust?

Granted, circumstances had trapped me inside this miserable body, but in the past, I had truly been—

“Hmm?”

At that moment, I sensed an unfamiliar current of magic nearby and turned toward it.

Something small, yet packed with a disproportionately large amount of mana.

Wasn’t that the distinctive magical pattern of the stones commonly found inside gates?

A magic stone? In the middle of a flower garden?

I crouched down and inspected the ground.

A blue gemstone was peeking shyly from between the petals of a flower bud.

Oh.

A closer look revealed that it was an exceptionally rare, high-quality magic stone. It was also held in place by unusual metal prongs, much like a gemstone set into a ring. Items with such distinctive craftsmanship generally fetched a good price on the market.

One glance is enough to tell that this is valuable.

I had no idea why something so precious had been left lying around so carelessly. Still, it did not appear to be giving off any dangerous reaction.

I glanced around.

The others were too far away to see what I was doing clearly.

Hehe. What kind of stroke of luck is this?

Without giving it much thought, I reached for the magic stone. I gently parted the petals surrounding it and pulled it free.

***

“Ah!”

“My ears!”

I never imagined that such a trivial action would have such dramatic consequences.

“Ugh!”

A piercing, high-pitched shriek suddenly tore through the air.

Its source was none other than the ruler of the flower garden.

***

The Flower Baron convulsed violently, flailing its limbs as it released a scream so intense that it seemed to shake the air itself.

I’m sorry! I made a mistake, Baron!

Convinced that I had triggered something terrible, I tensed.

But what happened next was even more absurd.

Boom!

What in the world...?

The Flower Baron collapsed into dust in an instant. The flowers surrounding it withered just as suddenly, and finally, the barrier itself began to crumble.

“What?”

It all happened in the span of a single moment.

“Huh?”

At the exact instant I pulled out the magic stone.

***

By then, whether he liked it or not, he understood what had happened.

That magic stone had been the monster’s power source.

An F-Class hunter had suddenly removed it, depriving the Flower Baron of its energy supply.

—Let’s see. Its structure is roughly... Wait. Is that monster directly sustaining a barrier this large?

As Kim Kiryeo had already observed, the monster had been maintaining the barrier directly with its own mana.

In other words, the barrier was draining an enormous amount of mana from its body every second.

Ah...

So, to put it simply—

The barrier the Flower Baron had created sucked every last drop of mana from its body, causing the monster to scream in agony before effectively destroying itself.

What kind of idiot is this thing?

Had this happened on Alphauri, it might have ranked among the three stupidest deaths in history.

[Magic Stone → Flower Baron → Barrier]

Of course an accident would happen with a structure like that.

[Magic Stone → Barrier]

If the magic stone had supplied energy directly to the barrier, the Flower Baron would not have died. That arrangement would have been far simpler as well.

From the Archmage’s perspective, the entire incident was utterly incomprehensible.

What in the world...?

Perhaps the monster had no choice but to use the magic stone inefficiently.

But even then, why had it left such a critical object sitting in the middle of a flower garden?

Does it have no instinct for self-preservation?

Kim Kiryeo was baffled by the creature’s apparent carelessness.

In truth, however, he had misunderstood the situation.

The Flower Baron had taken precautions.

—The flower garden?

To protect its power source, the monster had caused more than ten thousand flowers to bloom within the barrier.

The stone had been concealed beneath petals that blocked magical detection, while its position was constantly shifted from one flower to another.

—Hehe. What kind of stroke of luck is this?

Unfortunately for the Flower Baron, a certain tactless but exceptionally capable Archmage had seen straight through its defenses.

***

The Flower Baron’s final attack had also proved completely useless.

Even after squeezing out every last fragment of its remaining strength, the only weapon available to it was mental magic.

***

Its brainwashing was powerful enough to bring down an A-Class hunter.

Yet it had no effect whatsoever on this man.

Ugh, it’s so loud!

A mere B-Class monster could never have interfered with Kim Kiryeo’s mind in the first place.

His brain was already under the control of a far greater and entirely unknown being.

Boom!

Thus, the Flower Baron met a helpless end, its brainwashing rebounding uselessly as it died.

And with that, everything was over.

“Phew.”

But how could anyone else possibly understand such a complicated chain of events?

Kim Kiryeo dismissed the entire incident as a lucky coincidence. As far as he was concerned, it was nothing worth making a fuss over.

“Well, at least it worked out...”

Then, at that very moment—

“Huh?”

The awakened people who had been waiting outside the barrier came rushing toward him as though possessed.

“Hunter-nim! What in the world did you just do?”

“Y-you defeated the Flower Baron in an instant...”

“Even if all of us had attacked together, we couldn’t have brought it down that quickly!”

A barrage of nearly identical questions followed.

How had he killed the boss?

Why had the barrier disappeared?

What exactly had he done?

Kim Kiryeo blinked as question after question came pouring down on him.

“It just died on its own.”

“What?”

“I didn’t do anything special. It simply died. All I did was pick up the magic stone...”

In the middle of the conversation, however, Kiryeo sensed someone watching him and abruptly fell silent.

Click.

The sharp snap of a camera shutter.

Immediately after his reincarnation, he would not have understood what the sound meant. By now, however, he had learned enough about Earth to recognize it.

A camera!

Someone nearby was taking photographs.

“Hmm?”

Finding the culprit was not particularly difficult.

When Kiryeo turned his head, he spotted an Earthling hurrying toward them from a distance, carrying nothing but an enormous, cannon-like camera.

“It’s a reporter!”

“Seriously? What are they, some kind of hyena? How did they find out the boss was dead and get here so quickly?”

“Have the restrictions outside already been lifted?”

The moment Kiryeo heard the word reporter, his expression stiffened.

I can’t afford to be abducted again...

Had he not already learned that nothing good came from attracting attention as an F-Class?

Of course, he had known that his face might be recognized when he arrived at the reported incident site. Even so, he still lacked the courage to deal with reporters directly.

“H-heukh! Hello, hunters! Could I ask you a few questions?”

Kiryeo waited until the reporters had turned their attention to the A-Class hunters, then quietly completed his preparations.

“So, how did you defeat the Baron?”

“Oh, it wasn’t us. It was the appraiser over there... Huh?”

In simple terms, they had taken their eyes off him for a moment.

And he had used that moment to disappear.

***

That evening.

YTV’s six o’clock news aired a report announcing the extermination of the Flower Baron.

[The subjugation of the Flower Baron, which began this morning, has finally come to an end.]

The response online, however, was lukewarm.

The report merely explained that the incident had been successfully resolved through the efforts of the hunters dispatched to the scene.

There was little reason for the public to take an interest in such an ordinary story.

[Comments: 0]

[Happy: 2] [Sad: 0] [Angry: 0]

In the end, the follow-up report on the Hanshin incident attracted very few views and was quickly buried beneath an endless flood of information.

However...

[Comments: 88]

Another post discussing the same incident received an explosive response.

Both pieces concerned the outcome of the Flower Baron hunt. Why, then, were people so much more interested in this one?

The answer lay within the post itself.

To be precise, the SNS post was correcting the misleading information presented in the news report.

***

Wow, YTV News, seriously;;

I watched them for the first time in ages because I happened to be on the broadcast.

They just said, “The dispatched hunters defeated the boss.”

They almost had me fooled lol

Then they took bits and pieces from my interview

and edited them together like that.

If they broadcast it this way, everyone’s going to think I was the one who killed the boss~~