Academy’S Gumiho Is A Magical Genius [EN]: Chapter 352

Academy Gumiho is a Magic Genius 352

Seven Calamities (2)

A wave of despair washed over me.

The storm devoured everything around me, leaving no chance of escape.

Swish.

I swung my sword sideways.

The sword, wielded with the firm intention of bisecting the storm, instantly cleaved it in two. A human, with only a sword, overcame a natural disaster. However, the calamity did not end there.

Rumble!

The sky turned black, filled with dark clouds.

In the suddenly darkened sky, blue electric charges vibrated intensely.

I could instinctively sense it without even thinking.

‘Lightning is about to strike from above.’

Surely, a massive lightning bolt was about to fall.

And the lightning didn’t care about trees acting as lightning rods.

It was as if the lightning was filled with the intent to kill me. As I moved at high speed, I could feel the immense energy being discharged from those dark clouds, following me. Dark clouds and lightning.

I knew who it was.

‘The Fourth Calamity.’

The one I faced on the remote island was a king reigning over pure white clouds.

Possessing a golden crown, a golden throne, and a golden spear, commanding hundreds of Valkyries [female figures in Norse mythology who choose who may die in battle and who may live], that guy might have been closer to a god than a king.

The battle with them, living on clouds as soft as cotton candy, was extremely desperate. It was perhaps the most harrowing moment I had ever experienced in war. Because I lost there.

‘Because I lost my master.’

I lost so many comrades.

The greatest number of casualties in history occurred, so much so that the military couldn’t function for a year. I could roughly estimate the scale.

Immersed in unspeakable pain and sorrow, even as everyone else returned home, I remained on a nearby island for a year, building graves for the dead.

And just when the wounds seemed to be healing, the lightning that guy had unleashed did not diminish in power even after a year of being subdued.

In the end, I lost another precious person.

I lost endlessly. My people were disappearing one by one, and the loneliness and despair I felt when I was the only one left alive plunged me to the depths of hell.

I lived because I couldn’t die.

Really, because I couldn’t die.

I just lived because I was alive.

Perhaps that’s why, after defeating all the calamities and exterminating all the remaining monsters without leaving a trace, the first emotion I felt was not the sense of accomplishment from winning, nor the liberation from finally ending the tiresome war, but a self-destructive despair that I couldn’t understand why only I had survived.

I wanted to die.

I just wanted to die. But every time I was ready to face death, the faces of those who had sacrificed their lives to save someone like me flashed through my mind, and I couldn’t just die. Yes, if I were to die anyway.

‘I should die meaningfully.’

I lived with that mindset.

And now, I had the chance to kill all seven of those beings that seemed to be the same entities that had killed them. If I could take them all down with me, that would be a meaningful death.

‘But why did it absorb the Divine Tree?’

Each calamity possessed power strong enough to threaten the world as a single entity. However, in the case of the Divine Tree, although its inherent power was weaker compared to other calamities, it compensated for that void with numerous subordinates.

And sharpening the ends of its roots, the attack of the roots piercing through the ground, piercing through people’s feet, and penetrating from their legs to their heads in one go was extremely threatening.

The roots, having absorbed all sorts of nutrients from the soil, were so hard that they couldn’t be dealt with by metal weapons or bullets, leaving no way to avoid them, and dropping the fruits that ripened on the high branches onto the ground was like a carpet bombing.

With such powerful means of attack, as well as the regenerative power to regenerate and revive no matter how much it was cut down, thanks to the absorbed nutrients, the reason for absorbing the Divine Tree, leaving only a stump, was incomprehensible.

─Get out of the way.

While lost in deep thought, I was swinging my sword and evading.

‘What?’

─You seem to be sharpening your senses and lost in thought, but look at your feet right now. Don’t you feel something approaching?

‘Approaching?’

Until now, Adam, the Seductress, and the dark clouds were all meant to guide me to where I wanted to be. As I dodged the three’s fierce attacks and webs, sharpening my senses to the limit, I was momentarily lost in thought.

Tamamo left me with meaningful words.

Feeling uneasy, I put strength into my legs.

The moment I kicked off the ground and tried to leap into the air.

Thud!

The ground I was standing on collapsed.

Rumble!

The ground shook violently.

I could see a landslide occurring in the distant mountains in real-time. I could tell that something huge and fast was approaching me with such a massive vibration.

Thud! Thud! Thud!

Right then, I heard the sound of something hitting the ground roughly.

No, it wasn’t hitting the ground.

Something had broken through the ground and appeared.

What I saw in my eyes as I leaped into the air were thousands of tree roots. Roots of the same length and thickness as in my memory. The sight was so similar to my memory that I clapped my hands.

“Well, well. So that’s why you didn’t absorb the roots.”

There was a reason for leaving only the stump.

“It seems you’ve devoured the Divine Tree’s life force, nutrients, and even its authority.”

The most greedy mother. The Divine Tree.

She was the mother of all ecosystems, but ironically, she ruthlessly absorbed all the nutrients belonging to the ecosystem. All plants, animals, and humans were her children.

And the Divine Tree turned her children into fertilizer as needed, absorbing them to fill her belly.

‘That is her first authority.’

It was only later that I realized that the Divine Tree possessed a total of two authorities.

Even I, who had experience felling the monster, never knew this fact throughout my life, but after coming to this world, I learned it by looking at the roots of the Divine Tree. The Divine Tree’s second authority. Her other alias, the authority befitting the World Tree, was none other than the authority to connect the world and the world.

In other words.

“Why are you summoning so many?”

If the system that devoured the Divine Tree’s authority wanted to, it meant that he could bring the world connected to the Divine Tree to this side at any time. One thick root emerged above the ground.

A glass bead formed at the end of the root, larger than the trunk of an average tree, sparkled with black light. That bead was one of the beads I had seen. The world of demons, where I felt the same energy as the Majin [a powerful demonic entity].

And that world was opened by the system’s permission.

“Monster wave. No, should I call it a demon wave?”

A huge rift occurred in the air.

Numerous demons poured out of the rift, which looked like a dungeon. Like pouring out a Halloween bag full of candy, the demons piled up endlessly.

Flap, flap.

The winged system approached this side and examined the rift, peeking its head over the rift like a child checking if there were more candies left in the bag. Just then, all the demons that were pouring out of the rift came out.

“Phew, they’re all out now.”

The system closed the rift with a satisfied expression, then put the Divine Tree’s roots back into the ground.

“Let’s see, roughly 30,000 of them?”

The pupils of the rapidly moving system narrowed as it instantly counted the number of demons and picked them up.

The demons lying on the ground all showed thin bodies and emaciated appearances. Everyone looked like they were suffering from malnutrition, causing me to frown for a moment.

The system threw the demons who showed no signs of life among the thin demons at me like grenades.

Bang!

The head of a small demon exploded.

The demon’s remains, a mixture of black brain fluid and yellow blood, spilled onto the ground.

“……This.”

The state of the blood is slightly strange.

Even I, who had killed countless monsters, had no experience killing demons.

I had only read about demons in books, not actually encountered them.

‘But if their basic physiology is the same as humans…’

The color of the brain fluid and blood is different from humans. However, the viscosity of the blood and the state of the brain fluid, considering these two…

“It was already dead.”

It’s full of demons who were already dead before their heads exploded.

“Hmm? You can even see that?”

The system asked with a puzzled look. It was as if it was sure that I had never seen a demon before.

Thinking about it, what it said to me in that form and…

‘It seems like it knows me well.’

I opened my mouth with an unpleasant expression.

“Well, it’s obvious. How could those emaciated guys be alive?”

The demons’ black skin reveals their organs and bones. Even the appearance of a human who starved to death from hunger wouldn’t be as emaciated as that.

Logically, it’s strange to think that such things are alive.

“Really? Good observation. Well, you always were.”

The system mentioning good observation… Yes, my observation is good.

Then, let’s see.

Swish!

Let’s see how good your observation is.

The sword moved at high speed, cutting through the air.

The quickly drawn sword drew a semicircle, and a huge semicircular slash spread in all directions.

Slash!

Whatever touched the slash was cut in half.

A single sword strike that hammered in an absurd amount of sword energy.

The aftermath.

Thud! Thud!

It cut down the trees that had stubbornly survived all sorts of natural disasters.

The pure white sword energy, not stopping even after cutting down the trees, cut down the corpses of the emaciated demons and the few surviving demons. The sword energy, cleanly cutting their bodies, finally reached the calamities.

Among the Seven Calamities, the growth rings inside the Divine Tree’s stump, the last beast’s eyeballs of the Seductress, the head of the giant god hidden in the dark clouds, and Adam’s two wings were all targeted.

The sword energy, accurately targeting each part, finally carved everything out.

Rumble!!!!

With a tremendous explosion, the ashes that had been sitting on the ground soared high into the sky. The situation was so thick that nothing could be seen. No matter how much I enhanced my eyes with magic, I couldn’t see ahead.

The vision that couldn’t be cleared even with superhuman eyesight.

‘Ugh! First, I need to recover……!’

In that situation, my judgment was to sharpen only my five senses.

The rest of the resources were all invested in recovery.

‘The arm injury is too severe.’

Like people adapt to continuous stimulation, I was particularly insensitive to pain. However, the slash I unleashed in an instant was a concept that even I couldn’t easily bring out.

─Honestly, that technique just now was a bit much.

‘I know. But there’s no other way.’

For example, just as it is necessary to draw and swing a sword to cut an opponent, all the processes that should be equipped as swordsmanship. Omitting all those processes, I projected a lot of thought into the sword energy.

This sword energy cannot be blocked even if defended, because I projected thoughts that even calamities could not defend against into the sword and swung it, my body suffered a great reaction. It would be fine if it was just a broken arm or burning from friction, but…

“……!”

The sensation of the arm turning blackish-red and necrotic and being torn off was hard to endure.

─Your arm is in this state, and there’s no other way! I’ll heal your arm right now. You assist me.

‘No, the healing is done.’

Swish!

Instead of my ruined right hand, I wielded the sword with my left prosthetic hand.

A cleanly cut mark. Like that, my shoulder blade fell to the ground.

Thud!

More flesh and blood than I thought fell.

─What are you doing!

“Forget about me and look ahead.”

The ashes soared high into the sky.

I couldn’t see anything, but I could see blurry shadows.

The shadows that came into view were a total of seven.

Each one was exuding a huge bulk and presence.

“The remaining three are finally looking here now.”

The three hidden ones must have entered the range of that slash just now.

The gazes of the guys who took my sword energy head-on were all directed at me.