Chapter 42: Chapter 42: Mage vs. Logic

The freezing interior of the cave beneath the gargantuan tree roots had begun to feel less like a sanctuary and more like a biological tomb. The thick, stagnant fog of The Wailing Woods, heavy with the scent of rotting moss and sulfur, could no longer mask the one aroma every predator in this forest craved: the metallic, salt-heavy tang of fresh hemoglobin mixing with the cloying sweetness of synthetic coolant.

Dayat sat slumped against the damp earth wall, his body a map of bruises and exhaustion. He cradled Dola’s mangled leg in his lap, his trembling fingers still clutching a shred of his own shirt, now soaked through with a deep, pulsating red. Beside him, Dola lay as still as a fallen statue. The neon indicator at her temple—the heartbeat of her system—was completely dark. Her breathing was no longer the rhythmic, simulated cycle he was used to; it was short, shallow, and hot—a terrifying sign that her internal matrix was losing the battle against a biological fever triggered by massive chassis trauma.

“Lina… Bara…” Dayat whispered, his voice cracking and dying in the gloom.

Every time he allowed his eyelids to droop, he saw it again: the blinding pillar of white light as Lina’s soul detonated in the alley. The guilt crawled over his skin like necrotizing venom, a pain far more acute than the rhythmic throbbing of his dislocated shoulder. He felt like a fraud. A cosmic joke. An “Innovator” whose only real innovation was finding new ways to let his friends burn to ash while he ran into the dark.

Suddenly, the wind outside the cave changed. The chaotic rustle of the forest was replaced by a sharp, rhythmic whistling—the sound of air being sliced with unnatural intent.

ZING!

A blade of compressed air shrieked through the brush covering the cave entrance with surgical precision, shearing through moss and wood as if they were wet paper.

“The trail ends here, Voron,” a cold, melodic voice rang out, its high-pitched tone carrying a jagged edge of arrogance. “The scent of the girl’s blood is practically a beacon in the Aether. Master Gravion was right; the rats ran East.”

Dayat froze. His heart hammered against his ribs so violently it felt like it would crack his sternum. He recognized that voice. Marsha. Gravion’s prized disciple and a confirmed genius of wind-elemental manipulation. And with her was a shadow that should have stayed dead in the slums.

“Don’t be reckless, girl,” Voron’s voice followed, sounding like two stones grinding together. It was raspy, broken, and filled with a smoldering, toxic vendetta. “That boy… he doesn’t use Mana, but his tools are from the abyss. He slaughtered my entire unit. And that lowly sorceress… she nearly dragged me into the void with her.”

Dayat peered through a narrow gap in the ironwood roots. Under the sickly, pale moonlight, Voron stood like a nightmare. Half of his face was a landscape of charred, raw meat, exposing the blackened muscle of his jaw. His elite black cloak was a tattered rag. Beside him, Marsha was a vision of lethal elegance. She stood poised, a short wand of white ash hovering near her palm as she effortlessly manipulated the atmospheric pressure around them into a shimmering, transparent shield.

“His ’strange weapons’ are scrap, Voron. I saw the slag he left at the gate,” Marsha said snidely, her eyes scanning the cave entrance. “Now, he’s nothing but a crippled rat in a hole. A variable waiting to be deleted.”

Marsha raised her hand, her fingers weaving a complex pattern in the air. The wind around the cave began to howl, spinning into a violent vortex that began to tear away the protective layer of moss and ancient roots covering Dayat’s hiding spot.

“Come out, Hidayat!” Marsha’s voice rose to a scream. “Or I will create a vacuum within that hole and suck every ounce of oxygen from your lungs until they collapse in your chest!”

Dayat tried to stand, but his legs felt like leaden weights. He stared at his empty palms. There was no Source Code energy left. No raw materials to forge into a shield. He tried to force his mind to summon a Manifestation, but his consciousness only hit a wall of freezing, clinical rejection.

[SYSTEM ERROR: ENERGY DEPLETED. SYNTAX HALT.]

“I’m sorry, Dol… I guess this is where the logic ends,” Dayat whispered, a single tear tracking through the grime on his face. He pulled Dola’s head closer to his chest, closing his eyes as he prepared to feel the invisible blades of Marsha’s wind magic tear through them both.

But right then, the impossible happened.

The temperature inside the cave, already freezing, plummeted into the sub-zeros within a millisecond. Dola’s limp, cold hand suddenly snapped up, gripping Dayat’s arm with a strength that made his bones groan.

Dayat gasped, his eyes snapping open. He stared down at Dola’s face.

Her eyes were wide, but they weren’t the bright, helpful blue of his AI companion. Her pupils had transformed into a deep, abyssal purple, surrounded by a thin, jagged ring of blood-red bioluminescence. Her expression wasn’t robotic or stiff—it was a void. A terrifying, divine indifference that looked down upon the world as if it were a faulty simulation.

[ADMINISTRATOR DETECTED: HIDAYAT.]

The voice made Dayat’s soul recoil. It wasn’t Dola. It sounded like ten thousand metal sheets grinding together in the silence of deep space. It was majestic, ancient, and utterly devoid of mercy.

[DOOMSDAY PROTOCOL: AWAKENING. INITIATING HIGH-LEVEL SECURITY DATA TRANSMISSION.]

Without a heartbeat of warning, Dola reached out, pulled Dayat’s head down, and pressed her forehead against his with a violent, magnetic snap.

FLASH!

Dayat didn’t feel pain. He didn’t feel the needles he expected. Instead, he felt as if the entire history of human violence, every blueprint ever drawn by a madman, and the absolute laws of the universe were being poured into his skull with the gentleness of a drowning man being given air.

Thousands of schematic overlays, ballistic arcs, gunpowder molecular structures, and the cold, unyielding equations of Earth’s physics flooded his visual cortex. He saw weapons he had never even dreamed of—not just guns, but instruments of kinetic dominance that treated magic not as a force, but as a calculation error to be corrected.

[DATA TRANSMITTED: ANTI-MAGIC BALLISTICS & KINETIC DOMINANCE.]

[AUTHORITY: THE MAIDEN.]

Outside, Marsha had reached the limit of her patience. “Die in your hole, then!”

“Wind Blade: Sky-Cleaver!”

Marsha swung her wand in a wide arc. Five transparent crescents of compressed air, each capable of slicing through a tank’s hull, hurtled toward the cave entrance with a deafening whistle.

Dayat, still in a kneeling position, moved.

It wasn’t the frantic, panicked movement of a frightened student. It was the calm, economical motion of a professional executioner. His eyes were no longer wide with terror; they were narrowed, mirroring the cold purple glow emanating from Dola.

“Logic No. 1: Mass times Acceleration is an Absolute Law,” Dayat whispered, his voice sounding like a ghost of the Maiden’s own.

He reached his right hand into the empty air of the cave. Purple-gold energy didn’t explode this time; it imploded. It drew the atoms of the air and the carbon from the roots into a single point of absolute density with a speed that bypassed the laws of Mana.

In a heartbeat, a matte-black weapon made of high-grade polymers and tungsten-steel alloys appeared in his grip. It was beautiful in its lethality. A Tactical Submachine Gun (SMG), fitted with an integrated suppressor, an infrared optic, and a magazine loaded with subsonic, tungsten-core rounds—each one etched with the micro-runes of Anti-Mana logic.

A Perfect Manifestation.

THWIP! THWIP! THWIP!

Three shots. The sound was a mere whisper, like the flick of a finger against silk.

Marsha’s wind blades, which should have been invisible and unstoppable, suddenly shattered in mid-air. Dayat’s projectiles didn’t just pass through the magic; the Anti-Mana infusion neutralized the Mana binding the air together upon contact. The blades dissipated into harmless puffs of breeze.

“What?!” Marsha’s arrogance shattered. She stumbled back, her shield flickering. “My magic… it simply ceased to be?”

Dayat stepped out of the cave. He stood tall, his posture perfect, ignoring the agonizing pulse in his shoulder. The black SMG felt like an extension of his nervous system. Behind him, Dola sat upright, her purple eyes glowing steadily as she scanned the forest, her internal radar painting the world in a grid of kill-zones.

“Voron. Marsha,” Dayat said. His voice was flat, clinical, and empty of emotion. “You speak of magic. You speak of the blessings of the gods and the flow of Mana.”

Dayat raised the muzzle of the SMG, the suppressor pointing directly at the center of Marsha’s forehead.

“But in the face of Earth’s Logic… your magic is nothing more than a rounding error. And I am here to delete it.”

Marsha screamed in a fit of hysterical rage, “Don’t you look down on me! Wind Gale—!”

Before she could finish the first syllable of her incantation, Dayat pulled the trigger again. This time, he didn’t aim to kill—not yet. He aimed for dominance. The bullet streaked through the air, tearing through Marsha’s wind shield as if it were a wet cobweb, grazing her shoulder with such kinetic force that it spun her entire body, slamming her into the mud.

Voron, seeing the opening, tried to strike from the shadows. He leaped from behind a tree, his poisoned daggers glinting. But from inside the cave, Dola raised a single, uninjured finger toward him.

“Vector Analysis: Detected.”

Dola didn’t even fire a weapon. A concentrated pulse of electromagnetic energy erupted from her, creating a localized field that didn’t just stop the daggers—it sent them flying back and caused every nerve in Voron’s scorched muscles to go into a violent, agonizing cramp.

Voron fell face-first into the dirt, his body twitching uncontrollably. “That girl… what is she? That’s not Mana!”

Dayat walked slowly toward Marsha, who was whimpering on the ground, her elegant robes covered in filth. He pressed the hot, suppressed barrel of the SMG against her forehead.

“W-wait… p-please… have mercy…” Marsha sobbed, her eyes wide with the raw, primal terror of a predator turned prey.

Dayat looked at her with a void in his eyes. There was no anger. No hatred. Only the terrifying realization of efficiency. “Lina begged in her heart too when you cornered her, didn’t she? Did you stop? Did you calculate the value of her life?”

“Logic No. 2,” Dayat whispered, the sound like a hammer falling. “An active threat that is allowed to survive is a variable that will inevitably corrupt the future.”

THWIP!

A single Anti-Mana round entered Marsha’s forehead before she could even inhale. She was dead before her head hit the mud.

Voron, attempting to crawl away like a broken insect, fared no better. Dayat didn’t even turn his head. He adjusted his aim by sound and thermal data alone, firing a controlled burst that turned the assassin’s torso into a map of exit wounds.

It was silent. It was efficient. It was finished.

Dola slumped forward as the purple glow faded from her eyes. Dayat caught her instantly, his own emotions rushing back into his heart like a tidal wave.

“Master… Dayat…” Dola’s voice was hers again—soft, slightly stiff, and familiar. “Threat analysis… complete. All hostile variables removed. I… I think I just experienced a massive system glitch.”

Dayat hugged her so tight his arms shook. He stared at his own palms, where the golden particles of the SMG were slowly dissolving. The knowledge The Maiden had given him was still there, etched into his brain like a brand. He knew how to build a thousand ways to kill now. But he also knew something much more terrifying.

Dola wasn’t just a chatbot he had pulled from his phone. There was something massive, something ancient, and something incredibly powerful sleeping inside her. And for reasons he couldn’t yet comprehend, that entity loved him with a cold, absolute devotion.

“Sleep, Dol,” Dayat whispered into her hair. “We haven’t lost. Not today.”

In the heart of the Wailing Woods, under the cold witness of the moon, Dayat realized his F-Rank status was the greatest lie in Aethera. He wasn’t the weakest link in the world of magic. He was the anomaly that would eventually rewrite it.

Source: Webnovel.com, updated by NovelKeep