Kalian of House Facial!
I've heard that name before, haven't I?
But there was no time to ponder.
SHING!
The moment a sharp metallic ring sounded, sharp daggers were already in both men's hands.
I immediately hurled the junk I'd prepared at them.
The two dodged the projectiles with startling speed and closed in.
Their movements were anything but ordinary.
They kicked off the ground and changed direction.
Even the projectiles flying at their torsos, they dodged every one with the slightest twist of their upper bodies.
But the strange thing was that I was following every one of those movements with my eyes.
My dynamic vision was capable of this?
Regardless.
The two came at me without a shred of hesitation. Light glinting off the blades in their hands stung my eyes.
But I had no intention of taking this lying down.
WHOOSH, WHOOSH!
I threw whatever my hands found.
And the moment the two came within three meters.
THUNK!
The overhead trap I'd rigged rained down on their heads.
As their eyes shot upward in that split second, the real snare sprang.
Nooses scattered across the floor.
Their ankles caught, the two crashed down at once with a tremendous clatter.
And I didn't miss that opening.
CLANG, CLANG!
The shovel I swung with all my might cracked gloriously against the backs of both men's skulls.
"Gack!"
But one of them.
The man on the right let out a death rattle and dropped dead on the spot.
"Hm?"
Dead with the back of his skull split open, blood and brain matter spilling out from the shovel's impact.
Where did this absurd strength come from?
As I stood frozen at the unexpected turn.
SCRITCH!
I turned toward the unfamiliar sound and found the remaining man had sliced through his ankle noose with his dagger.
He seemed to curl up tight like a frog, then stretched out and sprang into the air.
"Gah!"
I stumbled backward in shock.
The dagger he swung cut uselessly through the air.
Immediately after, the man staggered, unable to plant both feet.
It was the shock of being tripped by the noose and then struck by my shovel.
He wasn't dead like the first, but his head had clearly taken a serious blow.
An opening. I didn't hesitate and charged in.
WHOOOM!
The shovel carved a heavy horizontal arc.
THWACK, CRASH!
Struck in the side, the man was sent flying into the wall and collapsed, unconscious.
I rushed over to check his condition.
He wasn't dead, just out cold.
First, I took the cord I'd used to make the nooses, bound him up, and gagged him.
Nothing made a damn bit of sense.......
"Whoa!"
A flustered cry burst from my mouth.
I hadn't even begun to piece things together, and yet another impossible thing had happened.
A magical phenomenon, emanating from the dead man's corpse.
A crimson glow erupted from his body, and just like that, the corpse disintegrated into dust and vanished.
All that remained were the clothes he'd worn and his shoes.
"Ah!"
I know this phenomenon.
I've never seen it myself, but I've heard of it.
From the accursed Tower Master of the Northern Tower.
Chloe Facial, the Mad Mage who had subjected my body to every human experiment imaginable.
Before she died, the witch had spoken about the secret organization I'd been tracking.
Within that account, a phenomenon exactly like this had been described.
Individuals whose corpses glowed crimson at the moment of death, then crumbled to dust.
'And yet, decades ago, during the war with House Renhardt, there were people like that too. No matter how I think about it, something we don't understand was involved.'
The witch's words.
And now, at the very instant of my regression, I'd witnessed that phenomenon with my own eyes.
"Ha!"
I'm going to lose my mind.
"Hooo, hooo!"
I sank to the ground and steadied my breathing.
Long, slow breaths, over and over, until my heartbeat gradually settled.
Let me organize the situation, one thing at a time.
First.
This isn't my body.
A kidnapping I never experienced.
No magic power in my heart.
Instead, there's mana blooming from my Dantian, Internal Energy.
And the clincher: the name they called me.
Kalian Facial.
That fact alone was bad enough, but there was an even bigger problem.
The surname Facial.
As in, one of the Three Great Houses of the continent. The Triarch.
The very House Facial that, in the past, no, the future, that is, in the past before the regression and the future I now have to prevent, will annihilate House Renhardt.
The family of the witch of the Northern Tower, Chloe Facial.
I've regressed into the body of someone from that house.......
"Ah?"
Wait!
I remember now.
Kalian Facial.
I've heard that name before.
It just hit me.
I remember where I heard it.
I heard it from Chloe Facial, the witch.
The name of the witch's younger brother, said to have been kidnapped and killed as a child, was Kalian Facial.
And that kidnapping and death is what I just lived through?
Th-then.
So.
So that means.......
It's not that I just regressed.......
I regressed and possessed someone else's body?
I'm screwed.
This is unbelievable.
On top of that, I ended up in the body of someone who was supposed to die, and I saved it.
Thinking back, if I hadn't used the Sovereign Body Art during the waterboarding, death was a certainty.
"Ha!"
This is insane.
Come to think of it, the witch had a reason for telling me about her brother.
She'd said my date of birth was the same as her brother's.
That was why she'd told me about him.
And that was also why she'd tormented me even more.
She'd absurdly projected her brother onto me.
And seeing how she then subjected my body to every human experiment under the sun, she was clearly a genuine crazy b-tch.
The greatest Mad Mage of the age.
Haah, the witch's younger brother, of all things.......
"Oh!"
I jolted back to my senses.
For a brief moment, my mind had gone completely blank.
When a person encounters something too absurd, thought simply evaporates from the brain.
Get, get a gri.......
Ugh, give me a break!
I'm going to lose my mind.
What the hell is happening?
"Hooo, hoo!"
Calm down. Seriously.
This isn't the time for this.
Why am I like this?
This isn't who I am. No matter how severe the shock, I've always been the rational, logical type.
The very stereotype of a mage.
The kind of person who, no matter the shock, doesn't waver emotionally and judges with cold, rational precision.
That was me.
How could I have endured those long years of slavery, found a way to escape, and finally achieved regression if I weren't that person?
So it's simply strange that someone like me is reacting this emotionally.
But even that mystery had to be shelved for now.
It's certain, at least, that I've both regressed and possessed a body.
Right, next.
The second thing to sort out is those men.
The ones who kidnapped me, this body, Kalian Facial.
According to what Chloe Facial had told me before regression.
According to it, these are the bastards who will annihilate my own family, House Renhardt, and decades later, the remaining two great houses as well.
House Facial is one of the Triarch, and these bastards had the manpower, skill, and intelligence to kidnap its Patriarch's son.
The fact that such an organization had been operating in the shadows since this far back.
A reality so chilling that goosebumps rose on my skin before I knew it.
This needed deeper investigation.
Third and last.
How do I escape?
The dead man had been the thin one. The unconscious one was the big man.
I searched both their pockets and found a key, then unlocked the padlock on the iron collar around my neck.
CLICK!
The instant the collar came off, a ferocious energy surged from my Dantian.
As expected, this was a martial artist's body.
Since it was House Facial, the body was probably being groomed as a knight.
Mana flowed naturally through my body.
Along with it, on top of the raw physical power, a surge of vitality coursed through every fiber.
So this was the power of mana as martial artists used it.
I checked the unconscious man's condition again.
He didn't seem likely to come to anytime soon.
I opened the storeroom door and cautiously climbed the stairs.
At the top was another door.
This one was slightly ajar.
Through the gap, I saw no one. No sign of anyone nearby either.
I carefully pushed the door open and stepped outside into a modest single-story house.
Against one wall stood a hearth with a pot hanging above it.
On the opposite side, a bed made from a rough wooden frame stuffed with straw.
A plain, rundown house.
But.
Nothing was there.
Not a single trace that people would naturally leave behind where they live could be seen.
In other words, a staged space.
Likely a safehouse for these people.
I cautiously peeked out through the small window.
Just as I thought.
They were there.
Men encircling the house in a wide perimeter.
The distance between the house and them was roughly ten meters.
Armed with blades and standing at three-to-four-meter intervals, a masked group.
About twenty of them.
They weren't approaching the house, but slipping between them wouldn't be easy either.
For now, I returned to the underground storeroom.
The easiest way to escape was to wait.
Hearing the name Kalian Facial, the witch's words came back to me clearly.
'When I went to rescue Kai, he was already dead.'
Unpacking that statement, it meant Chloe Facial would come to rescue this body, Kalian Facial.
I'd already survived the near-death from waterboarding.
So all I had to do was wait for Chloe Facial to come.
But.
I shook my head firmly.
I wasn't ready yet.
I'd accepted, at any rate, that I'd regressed and possessed Kalian Facial's body.
But going to that cursed house and pretending to be Kalian Facial? I wasn't ready for that.
More importantly, there was Chloe Facial.
I wasn't ready to meet that damned Mad Mage, no, that plain crazy b-tch.
So I'd escape on my own.
Decisions made, time to act.
I finished my preparations quickly and woke the unconscious man.
SLAP, SLAP!
A couple of firm slaps to the cheek, and the man flinched and opened his eyes.
His eyes darted around in a daze for a moment before he finally stared straight at my face.
"Mmrgh! Rrhnn Prshrl!"
The gag mangled his words into mush.
I asked immediately.
"Who the hell are you people?"
That was all I asked.
But then.
GRRGLK!
The man's eyes rolled back, foam poured from his mouth, and his body seized violently.
Within seconds, he went rigid and still.
"Tch, figures!"
Whether it was a magical restriction or his own will, the man had died.
No time to waste.
I hurriedly slit his throat.
He was dead, but the body hadn't fully stiffened yet, so a small amount of blood seeped out.
I caught the blood and drizzled it on the floor beside him.
HUMMM!
A blue glow rose from the blood.
The light moved as if it had a will of its own, tracing a pattern across the floor.
This was what I'd prepared before waking him.
A Magic Circle of Dark Magic.
Operatives from shadowy organizations like this killing themselves upon capture was practically a cliche.
So I'd planned for it.
Once he died, he'd glow crimson and crumble to dust, so I meant to use him as an offering for Dark Magic before that.
There was a short gap between his death and his disappearance, and I'd activated the Dark Magic in that gap.
Dark Magic with the man's corpse as its offering.
Several concentric circles and geometric patterns drawn around the corpse produced the phenomenon according to a consistent logical system.
Strands of light gathered one by one, finally coalescing into a sphere of luminescence.
Then it flew toward me, where I stood in a ring connected to the Magic Circle.
WHIIIING—!
The light enveloped me and triggered the phenomenon I'd intended.
Invisibility.
Brief, but a spell that rendered my existence completely transparent.
Now then, shall I get out of here?
But that was when it happened.
-Oho, you really are something, aren't you?
A voice. Coming from nowhere.
And it wasn't a physical sound reaching my ears.
A voice drilling directly into my brain.
Is this what I think it is?