Genius Wizard Takes Medicine Chapter 25

With quick, low steps, they rushed up the stairs in an instant.

Dadadada!

Lenoch also pulled the pistol from his pocket and followed after them, coating it with support magic as he moved.

When they reached the rooftop, the cramped office scenery vanished, replaced by a wide-open view.

A large power machine sat in one corner.

A tall power line stretched high into the sky, countless wires trailing from it.

And beneath it all—

Bright red blood spread across the ground.

“Weian!”

The moment Dray saw Weian collapsed in a pool of blood, he shouted and rushed toward him.

The rest of the second squad was in no better condition.

Each of them had been beaten close to the point of combat incapacity. They were barely alive, their bodies covered in severe wounds, only able to move their eyes in relief at the arrival of their allies.

“Haah… Boss. Sorry…”

Weian forced his eyes open and muttered weakly.

Dray immediately pulled a potion from his waist and poured it over Weian’s wounds.

It was a recovery potion imbued with life-regeneration magic.

A valuable item sold at a high price.

But no matter how expensive it was, it was not worth more than a person’s life.

The other mercenaries also grabbed their fallen comrades and began giving them similar treatment.

Only after Weian’s breathing stabilized did Dray raise his head and quickly scan the rooftop.

The wounds were too precise.

Whoever did this had deliberately avoided finishing them off.

It was a level of control impossible for anyone but a thoroughly trained expert.

If someone this capable had appeared among the Scavengers, there was no reason for them to leave the scene and simply watch things unfold from afar.

They were still here.

They had to be observing the battle.

The other mercenaries seemed to reach the same conclusion.

Their expressions tightened as they sharpened their senses and guarded every direction.

A chilling wind swept across the rooftop.

In the empty space, where no enemy could be seen, only the faint sound of blades slicing through the air lingered.

‘Where are you?’

The mana perception fields of more than a dozen mercenaries spread outward and overlapped.

Then, a low breath emerged from somewhere nearby.

As if they had agreed beforehand, everyone turned their weapons at once.

As Dray rose from his crouched position, the wires hanging from the power machine swayed.

A man was perched among them.

“I thought someone might come up here…”

Gray hair.

A rough, unkempt beard.

A scarred face and cold, sunken eyes.

The elderly man radiated a fierce killing intent, heavy enough to pressure anyone who faced him, as he casually swung the knife in his hand.

“But I didn’t think things would get this bad.”

“…So it was you.”

Seeing the blood dripping from the man’s knife, Dray’s face twisted.

“You bastard… You were sitting here watching my men bleed out?”

The man let out a sharp laugh at Dray’s expression.

His voice was dry and rough.

“Do you have any idea how much we invested into this operation?”

“What?”

“We scraped together resources from three branches just to prepare this. We took over a server connected to the network that manages District 53’s taxes and bribed dozens of officials to reach this point.”

The man spoke slowly and vaguely, but Dray understood his meaning almost immediately.

“…You’re out of your mind. Are you trying to steal the reserve funds managed by Balkan’s city government?”

“No need to aim that high. The money handled by the district office alone reaches tens of billions of Cel. Once we occupy a proper power facility and destabilize the power supply across District 53, the network security naturally loosens. Is it really wrong to exploit the cracks left behind by a corrupt institution?”

“Well, that doesn’t sound like the kind of business a retired soldier should be getting involved in.”

Dray slowly moved his finger toward the trigger.

At his words, the man’s eyes turned colder.

“…It has been more than three years since I left the front lines. I thought I had already stripped away the smell of the military. Looks like I was wrong.”

“Wasn’t it obvious? Someone giving off killing intent that clean and controlled could never be an ordinary criminal.”

“Haha… You understand it well. Were you one too, by any chance?”

Dray did not respond to the man’s mocking question.

The old man never revealed his past directly, but the aura around his every movement could not be hidden.

The precise yet brutal skill that had perfectly subdued the second squad.

The calm but rigid attitude.

The disciplined way he spoke.

They were all things Dray Grimgald had once possessed.

Things he had once longed for.

Things he had already forgotten.

“To be honest, I don’t care about arguing over whether this is right or wrong. What happens to the Scavengers doesn’t interest me.”

Two soldiers who had abandoned duty and justice faced each other.

“This is just work. Think of it that way.”

“I don’t care what excuse you use. I didn’t start this just to stop here.”

The man climbed down from the wires, slipped a hand into his pocket, and spoke.

“…It’s far too early for a mere mercenary group to stop me.”

In the tense silence, Dray’s thoughts began racing.

What could be the most dangerous thing inside that pocket?

A gun.

A grenade.

A smoke bomb or flashbang to cut off their vision.

Whatever it was, the moment the man’s hand came out, the fight would begin again.

But the man betrayed every prediction Dray made.

What he pulled out was far more dangerous than any of those.

A disposable syringe with a long needle.

The instant Dray saw it, a chill ran down his spine.

He raised his gun and shouted sharply to the mercenaries behind him.

“Stop him!”

Ratatatatata!

The shooters opened fire at once.

But the man was faster.

He shifted quickly to the left, avoiding the incoming shots, then stabbed the syringe into his arm without hesitation and pushed the plunger down.

Pook!

“Whew…”

The unknown liquid took effect immediately.

The man’s eyes turned pitch black.

His arms began trembling.

A sinister black mist seeped from his body and slowly crawled across the ground.

The mercenaries kept pulling their triggers.

But the moment the man took a single step, everything collapsed.

Crack!

“Gah!”

In an instant, a fist-sized hole opened in the chest of a mercenary who had been aiming at him from the side of the formation.

“Hansen!”

Ike shouted his name and hurriedly poured a potion over the wound, but it was already too late.

Too much blood was pouring from his chest.

No medicine could stop it now.

His eyes emptied in an instant.

His mouth hung open.

There was no breath.

Only a few faint convulsions remained.

He was dead.

“Do you know why I left the ones who came up here first alive?”

The man spoke while shaking the blood from his hand.

Somehow, Hansen’s still-beating heart was clutched in his grip.

In that brief instant, he had pierced a living man’s chest and ripped out his organ.

“To use this power… I need fresh fuel.”

With those words, the man began eating the heart raw.

“……”

The mercenaries froze at the grotesque sight, unable to speak.

Then, almost instinctively, they raised their weapons.

If what he said was true, then it was obvious whose heart would become the next fuel.

In the cold air, now completely different from the relaxed atmosphere from earlier, Lenoch watched the man without even blinking.

More precisely, he was watching the unknown energy flowing around him.

Sticky yet flexible.

Slow yet swift.

It occupied space without moving along a clear line, rising from below instead of descending from above.

Its nature felt closer to rejecting order than obeying it.

‘Dark magic.’

It was Lenoch’s first time seeing it directly, but the movement itself was familiar.

In WORLD, many player mages had chosen dark magic as their main path, and related NPCs had appeared in considerable numbers.

Because of that, Lenoch quickly guessed the identity of the syringe the man had used.

‘Judging by that craving for human flesh, it might be from the Vampiric Order. But there’s also a chance it’s connected to the Bloodia Scythe. Assuming those systems exist in this world too…’

The Vampiric Order referred to practitioners who borrowed the traits of vampires.

The Bloodia Scythe, on the other hand, was a beast-type technique that strengthened the body by consuming the blood and flesh of others.

Lenoch remembered both of them clearly because they were infamous for their gore among dark magic systems.

‘I know the side effects are severe, but is he trying to finish everything here? This is not something I can take lightly.’

After seeing a mercenary lose his heart without even reacting, Lenoch could not afford to be careless.

He reinforced the mana surrounding his barrier and sharpened his senses.

Meanwhile, the man was single-handedly turning the battle around, rampaging through the mercenaries.

“Hold the line!”

“Don’t let him run wild!”

“Delin, move!”

But the mercenaries had to protect the incapacitated second squad while dealing with the man at the same time.

Their movements were severely restricted.

The man, however, continued his assault without losing speed.

Before long, the formation broke.

Mercenaries began dying one after another.

“Argh!”

In this line of work, everyone knew death could come at any time.

But staying calm while watching comrades fall one after another was not easy.

As blood spread and lives vanished, panic took hold of the mercenaries.

Their limbs stiffened.

Their senses dulled.

At this rate, they would be wiped out without even putting up a proper fight.

Realizing this, Lenoch immediately abandoned the spell he had been preparing to subdue the man.

Instead, he began constructing a new one.

The mana he had gathered scattered into the air, but Lenoch’s powerful control gathered every drifting particle and rebuilt it inside his mind.

A talent that overturned the heavens.

A talent capable of controlling mana at the particle level and producing results beyond ordinary efficiency.

If the mage who had bled to death on the third floor had seen this scene, he would have gone mad with envy and tried to kill Lenoch by any means necessary.

The spell was completed at terrifying speed.

Without an audible chant.

Without visible hand signs.

It descended from the sky.

[Thunder Calling]

A blue bolt of lightning split the dry sky and struck the center of the rooftop of the four-story building.

Boom!

The concrete-supported building shook violently from the impact.

But the damage range of the lightning had been skillfully directed away from the mercenaries and the power facilities.

Lenoch had intentionally controlled the spell’s output by calculating the mana amount and damage range with his transcendent perception.

Before reaching the rooftop, he could not accurately determine the coordinates of the space.

But here, with the open view allowing him to perceive every coordinate clearly, it was not impossible.

That was Lenoch’s judgment.

And he succeeded perfectly.

Even though this was only the second time he had used the spell, Lenoch’s overwhelming talent made such absurd control possible.

Whoooosh!

The mercenaries stared at the lightning strike in front of them with faces like their souls had left their bodies.

But Lenoch did not stop manipulating his mana.

It would be ideal if the man had been incapacitated by the direct hit.

But Lenoch’s mind had already pictured what would happen if he survived.

There was a brief warning before the lightning descended.

If someone could sense it through sight or instinct, then dodging it was possible.

After experiencing the limits of a monster like Crocken, Lenoch could now calculate the movements of ordinary superhumans with ease.

The most likely move was for the man to leap into the mercenaries’ formation to escape the area of effect, or to use them as shields and endure the strike.

And if the man really dodged the lightning that way, then his next target would be—

Thud!

Lenoch himself.

The mage who had cast the spell.

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