Genius Wizard Takes Medicine [EN]: Chapter 737

KABOOM!!!

The clown’s terror, which blew up the audience chamber on the top floor of the giant’s citadel, caused the entire citadel to shake violently. A massive mushroom cloud soared into the sky.

The heatwave that swept outwards would have instantly incinerated any ordinary human.

However, at the center of the explosion, Lenox turned to the clown with a displeased look.

“There are far more efficient methods. What is this nonsense?”

“Huh, was it not good?”

The clown, flicking off the embers clinging to his body with his bare hands, shrugged.

“I tried it because you seemed to like the resonance incendiary bombs you showed me before.”

“…….”

“I guess your tastes have changed. Well, it’s not uncommon for manipulators to be fickle.”

It took Lenox a moment to understand what the clown was talking about.

He had used several similar explosives in front of the clown when entering the Well of the Compendium.

Advanced weapons from the mechanical city acquired from Gearsid’s database.

Mana-resonance range-control incendiary bomb (MAPHI). Commonly known as Mafia.

An explosive that detonates with flammable material and then amplifies its power with built-in magic.

Perhaps he was somewhat impressed by the incendiary bombs Lenox had used to deal with those who followed him in the well.

“Well, if you didn’t like this, I have plenty of other methods prepared.”

The clown said, stretching out both arms and yawning.

“Agneta is here too, so we can afford to make some mistakes. Do you see that?”

The clown kicked away the rubble blocking his view and pointed to the mess below.

“The audience is giving us a very enthusiastic welcome.”

“Do those look like an audience to you?”

Thud! Thud! Thud!

Hundreds of knights from all over the citadel were rushing towards them.

It seemed they had taken immediate action after the audience chamber exploded, the superhumans glaring at them while scattering murderous mana.

“The citadel’s audience chamber has been attacked!!”

“From now on, seal all passages within the citadel and begin the encirclement.”

“Raise the drawbridge. Seal all doors leading outside!!”

Several dozen knights patrolling along the outer walls rushed forward, and the outer and inner gates of the citadel, which had been open on all sides, closed simultaneously.

An archer unit emerged from the courtyard, aiming their bows, and dozens of ballistae [large, ancient crossbows] set up on the walls turned towards the audience chamber.

Thump! Thump! Thump!

Even the mana cannons that were supposed to protect the outer citadel reversed their barrels.

Not only were they quickly surrounded, but their escape routes were also quickly cut off and blocked.

“Look at this. These guys haven’t practiced this situation once or twice.”

However, the clown openly chuckled, even as he faced thousands of murderous gazes aimed at them.

He seemed unable to contain his amusement at how quickly things were progressing, rather than the chaotic situation itself.

“Unless they have something terribly shady going on, why would they practice narrowing the encirclement inside the citadel?”

The clown, who pulled out a curved dagger from his waist and held it in reverse, turned to Lenox and said.

“There must be a secret in the citadel or ruins that they absolutely cannot let be discovered. It seems they’ve been practicing very hard to find internal whistleblowers.”

“…….”

Lenox inwardly acknowledged that the clown’s words accurately grasped the essence of the situation.

Until the audience chamber exploded, the security was lax, but conversely, the speed at which they surrounded and pressured the citadel was excessively fast.

Even if the clown had blurred the citadel’s security with illusions beforehand, it was a contradictory reaction.

It was proof that the Cavahim knights stationed in the citadel were protecting something more important than the audience chamber.

However, instead of agreeing with the clown’s words, Lenox slowly turned his gaze to the collapsed citadel corridor and looked at the knights rushing from afar.

The outer walls of the citadel stretched out on both sides of the audience chamber. The figures of the knights approaching along the path on the walls.

He didn’t like the clown’s sudden actions, but now that things had come to this, what he had to do was clear.

“I’ll go to the right.”

“Yep. Then I’ll take the left.”

The clown nodded with a grin, turned his back, and lowered his stance.

“Then, let’s meet again at the top.”

“The top of this citadel is here.”

At Lenox’s indifferent reply, the two figures shot off in different directions from that spot.

The clown, running on all fours with two daggers, and Lenox, gripping the surging mana threads, collided with the knights in an instant.

They began to crush their formation, scattering screams and blood.

Crack! Crack! Crack!

“Kyahhh!!”

He hung sharp mana threads on the rubble of the walls and cleanly sliced through the bodies of the charging knights with their own momentum.

Numerous threads of light intersected and flashed, binding and cutting through blades and human bodies alike.

“Haaap!!”

He hung a mana thread on the waist of a heavily armored knight charging head-on, trusting in his size.

Changing the nature of the mana thread to pull it like a rubber band, the knight’s figure was ejected in the opposite direction like a stone from a slingshot.

The impact of his massive body, used as a projectile, crushed and shattered his fellow knights.

Buzz! Buzz! Buzz!!!

“Dodge, dodge!!”

“Hwaaaak……!!”

While manipulating hundreds of mana threads simultaneously, he interfered with and changed the nature of each one.

Sharpening them to cut through even armor, making them stick to hinder movement, and stretching them like rubber bands to send them flying.

The blood splattering from severed bodies, the armor flying out of the walls, and the corpses stuck like gum on the floor of the ruined corridor.

It was hard to believe that such diverse and complex operations were being performed by manipulating only one medium, the mana threads.

Even Agneta, who was watching with bated breath, couldn’t help but exclaim in admiration at the unwavering precision of his mana manipulation.

[……I’ve never seen a human handle such diverse changes in nature like this. You’re a true genius, aren’t you?]

“Be quiet, I need to concentrate.”

Combat using manipulation techniques was something that even Lenox could not do without extremely precise mana manipulation.

To wield mana threads, whose senses fluctuate depending on the environment and conditions, he had to pay considerable attention each time.

That was why Agneta, also a manipulator, was watching from the sidelines and admiring him rather than participating directly in the battle.

Swish!

He extended his index finger and fired a mana thread like a bullet. The thin thread pierced through a knight’s shoulder and grabbed his body.

He then swung the knight, still in his armor, like a club at the end of the mana thread.

Whoosh!

The physical force, amplified by the centrifugal force of the violent rotation, struck the outer wall as it was.

With an indescribable, gruesome sound, it smashed and crushed all the ballistae installed on the wall.

Crash!

At the same time, he grabbed and bound dozens of arrows fired by the archer unit from below the citadel with a single strand of mana thread.

[Wow, you’re relaxing the middle of a single mana thread to bend it? You could go do a circus right now?]

“I told you to shut up, didn’t I?”

Ignoring the spider’s whispers as she watched comfortably, he destroyed all the ballistae and mana cannons without exception.

Lenox, who had even caught the cannonballs fired from the edge of the citadel and thrown them to the ground, finally turned his gaze to the other side.

Unlike Lenox, who had made his way through the walls in various ways, the clown’s battle was completely different.

“Yippee~ Yip, yip~”

The clown was swinging his daggers with a strange, somewhat weak battle cry.

His face, painted stark white, was covered in blood as he crawled on all fours, weaving through the knights.

The Cavahim knights also raised their mana to the maximum and swung their swords to kill a single person, but conversely, countless mountains of corpses were only piling up on the walls.

Lenox, who was watching from afar, was intrigued by his unusual movements.

‘His combat skills are considerable. Is he this good even without properly using illusions?’

The clown’s combat, which involved daggers, bombs, and card decks, didn’t feel like a straightforward exchange of force.

If anything, it was a performance closer to acrobatics. Relying on instantaneous, impromptu decisions, he avoided direct confrontations with tremendous flexibility and a sense of balance, engaging in psychological warfare.

He was repeating this complex process at an incredible speed against dozens of knights.

Swish!

“Hoo……!!”

The clown, covered in blood, rolled out from the mountain of corpses with a refreshed expression, then looked at Lenox and smiled awkwardly.

“Oops, I thought I arrived pretty quickly. You’re already here?”

“Isn’t this enough?”

“Just a moment. Since we’ve come this far, why don’t we watch the citadel get cleaned up?”

“What?”

“If the Grand Duke still doesn’t plan to crawl out of his nest, we’ll have to force him out.”

The moment the clown snapped his fingers with a smile.

Thump……!!

At the same time as a faint vibration came from below, the sound of water began to be heard in their ears.

KABOOM!!!

It wasn’t just a matter of drawing water from the waterway, but the sound of a waterfall so intense that it felt like a river was overflowing.

“You, don’t tell me…….”

“Citadels located in mountain ranges like this have dams to store water in preparation for emergencies.”

The clown smiled and turned his gaze.

“Now that I’ve closed all the passages in the citadel with my own hands, what do you think will happen if I burst it open?”

Splash!

At that moment, a torrent of water that exploded from under the main hall of the castle instantly began to fill the courtyard.

The flood of water from the underground lost its way and filled the inner space of the citadel, forming a huge lake.

“Huff, huff!!”

“Damn it……!!”

The surviving knights and archers hurriedly abandoned their heavy equipment and swam to cling to the walls.

Meanwhile, they couldn’t easily climb onto the walls and were wary of them from below the water.

They, too, were aware of how absurdly powerful the massacre that Lenox and the clown had shown was.

However, the clown, knowing this, didn’t stop and suddenly reached out into the air.

“Agneta. The mess.”

“…….”

“……Agneta?”

When there was no response, the clown waved his hand awkwardly.

“Come on. We should be in sync with each other in scenes like this!”

[No, what is that…….]

Agneta retorted with a dumbfounded expression.

[Did I leave money with you or something? You have to tell me what you want.]

“You know, the thing I won with the stakes at Talkerpus before. You should know what I mean!”

[……Ah.]

Only then did Agneta seem to remember something, and she opened a subspace and placed something down.

Something long wrapped in thick silver foil. It was quite large, almost the size of an ordinary human.

[Are you talking about this?]

“That’s right. This is it!”

With that, the clown quickly unwrapped the silver foil.

Lenox shook his head in disbelief as he confirmed the identity of the object that was revealed inside.

What the clown had asked Agneta for was a dead body with its eyes rolled back.

“To win something like this as a stake in a gamble-”

Lenox, who was saying that, stopped talking when he saw the intense electric current surging around the corpse.

It was a clear backflow of electricity, with an intensity and thickness that couldn’t be dismissed as mere static electricity.

It was such a powerful electrical thought that it was surrounding a dead body.

“I thought you’d recognize it right away. It’s a very interesting object, isn’t it?”

“……An electric-type mage. And a considerable one at that.”

“It’s the corpse of a Torben Magic Tower mage.”