TBAGM Vol. 2 Chapter 4 Part 3

“Mint. Sorry to keep you waiting.”

“It’s finally my turn! So what am I supposed to do? I’ll do anything!”

Mint looked like she had been looking forward to my guidance.

Her attitude was the complete opposite of the other two, and I ended up laughing.

When I looked down, I saw Char sprawled out at her feet. It seemed he had been keeping her entertained while she waited.

“What’s wrong? Is there something weird about me?”

“I was just thinking you really are a great guildmaster, Mint.”

She was someone who had mastered magic. Among mages, she surely held an especially strong conviction about it.

And yet she was proactively willing to accept guidance from someone like me, who barely seemed to know magic at all.

She was doing it to protect her guild, and also to protect our allied guild, “Veiled Moonrise.”

She had to be worrying and thinking harder than anyone.

Her opponent was Loren. A top-class Gladiator. He would have ranked among the top three in this country.

If you had to fight someone like that and still win, anyone would have felt the pressure ready to crush them.

Even so, she acted bright and tried not to make anyone worry. She truly looked like a model guildmaster.

“W-What!? E-Even if you praise me, nothing’s gonna come out, okay?”

Mint’s face turned bright red as she started poking my side.

“W-Well then, shall we start training…? Though honestly, Mint, you don’t really have any glaring weakness.”

Her status was nearly perfect, even if a few areas still lacked a final polish.

And skills were not something that grew overnight. Improving one might have been possible, but improving all four within a week was impossible.

.

[Name]	Mint (25)
[Title]	Guildmaster of Greenpeak, A-rank Adventurer – The Most Formidable Witch
[Stats]	Vitality: E/B Magic: SS/SS Ambition: E/E (Magical Curiosity: S/S) Leadership: D/B Intelligence: D/A
[Skills]	Magic Encyclopedia: S/S Natural Mana Regeneration: C/B Chantless Casting: B/A Parallel Casting: B/A
[Inherent Trait]	None
[Profession]	Mage
[Attributes]	Strength: E/B Agility: E/A Endurance: D/B

.

Compared to when I had appraised her a few weeks ago, her stats and attributes had grown here and there.

If anything was going to improve in a week, it would have been her attributes, just like the other two.

When it came to magic, she was already close to perfection. In that case, raising her E-class attributes to increase her options in combat was the standard move.

(But something feels off…)

Improving her attributes had to be the right answer.

So why did it snag at me? It felt like a warning in my chest, as if my choice itself was wrong.

(And in the first place, can someone with no ambition really grow?)

Her curiosity was S, but only when it came to magic.

Her fundamental ambition was E-class, which meant she had no interest in almost anything else.

Nobody seriously committed themselves to something they did not care about. She would be the same.

“Mint. Be honest with me. You don’t want to train in anything besides magic, do you?”

“T-That’s not—”

“I’m not angry. I just want to know how you really feel.”

The moment she did not answer right away, I more or less understood.

She could not lie to herself.

Unlike the two executives, I decided to have her pursue magic even further.

“Mint. From here on out, I want you to become a user of Fusion Magic.”

“…Huh? Fusion Magic!?”

It took Mint a few seconds to process what I had said.

She had probably been expecting basic training to improve her fundamentals.

My words went so far beyond what she had imagined that she stood there with her mouth open. As if copying her expression, Char let out a huge yawn.

“Yes. I believe it’s a realm you can reach, Mint.”

To be clear, there was something called Combination Magic, but Fusion Magic did not exist.

Combination Magic was a technique where multiple people created a single massive spell. What I was proposing as Fusion Magic was different: a single person combining multiple spells together.

It sounded like something anyone might think of, but there was a reason nobody did it. If you tried, your brain would normally burn out from the sheer volume of information.

The difficulty was several times higher than Simultaneous Casting.

“Mint, you can do Simultaneous Casting and magic modification, right?”

“Y-Yeah. But only up to intermediate spells, and I can’t cast two at the same time.”

Well, being able to do either one already made her a monster, but still.

If you trained until using magic felt the same as breathing, like Ellis, it would be a different story, but nobody could truly perfect a single spell to that extent.

Not even Mint.

However, she had a skill that could become the hope that made such an outrageous technique possible.

“No, you have potential, Mint.”

“Potential?”

“Yes. You’ll use 【Parallel Casting】.”

Her skill 【Parallel Casting】 was like duplicating the brain itself.

The awakening conditions to obtain it were absurd, and almost nobody possessed it.

But in exchange, it was an incredibly powerful skill.

“I’ve barely ever used 【Parallel Casting】, though?”

“I think you’ve been using it unconsciously. It’s already grown to B-class.”

【Parallel Casting】 was extremely useful even in everyday life.

You could read a newspaper with your eyes while using your other brain to plan your day.

It sounded like something you might manage even without the skill if you tried hard enough, but the precision was completely different. You could separate two trains of thought perfectly.

“Today, I want you to train 【Parallel Casting】.”

Her 【Parallel Casting】 was B-class. With halfhearted training, it would never grow to A-class.

But we were not aiming to improve the skill itself. I just wanted her to learn how to use it consciously. That alone would make her capable of going toe-to-toe with Loren.

“Okay. So what am I supposed to do?”

“Starting now, I want you to do three things at once: with your right hand, study Gladiator’s skills as preparation for Loren; with your left hand, maintain 【Fireball】; and with your mouth, play a word chain game with me.”

“Uh… L-Lloyd? W-What are you even saying?”

Just a moment ago, she had been bursting with motivation, but the sudden, impossible demand left her unable to hide her despair.

Even so, I was still being lenient. She only needed to keep her eyes on the workbook.

I sat her down, pulled an appropriate workbook from the shelf, and handed it to her. After stacking a few more beside it, Char climbed right on top. What an adorable little proctor.

By the time she finished this training, she would be able to use 【Parallel Casting】 consciously.

“All right, let’s begin!”

“E-Eeeeeh!?”

Ignoring her panic, I immediately started the word chain game.

“Banana.”

“N-n-n… nasubi (eggplant).”

Mint stumbled through it, but she still kept the word chain game going while studying Gladiator’s skills and maintaining 【Fireball】 at the same time.

†

Mint started to get the hang of it after about an hour.

(This is 【Parallel Casting】! I can handle two processes easily now.)

Unlike Ellis, Mint could not use magic as naturally as breathing, so while she was maintaining 【Fireball】, she had to keep the formula deployed and continuously adjust the amount of mana. On top of that, she devoted one line of thought to the spell while using the other for word chain game and the workbook.

She understood that if she trained a little more, she could push into the next stage. That was why, even though her brain felt so hot it might burn out, she had no intention of stopping.

“Beer.”

“R-ru, ru, ru… roulette.”

Mint forced the words out, her face twisted in pain.

(As I thought—Lloyd is incredible.)

In her heart, Mint praised his teaching. No one had ever made her heart leap like this before. How far could she climb under his guidance? Just imagining the future made her tremble.

“…Mint! Mint! Your left hand is on fire!”

“Huh? M-My 【Fireball】?!”

“Haha… you’re not worried about your hand at all, are you.”

†

Three days had passed since Mint’s training began. That day, an incident was about to occur in the Volcano Dungeon.

“Tch. What the hell is Edgar thinking?”

“Exactly. Going solo on his own. All he did was increase the work for the rest of us.”

With Edgar gone, the Second Unit had returned to the 19th floor.

For now, the Second Unit’s unit leaders were Linne and Sasha, both A-rank. Because the organization had just changed, they did not immediately challenge the 21st floor at the front line. Instead, they were confirming coordination on the 19th floor, but—

“Seriously… if they’re B-rank, I want them to fight more.”

“At this rate, we won’t survive past the 20th floor.”

Linne and Sasha could only stare at the scene before them in sheer disappointment. The Second Unit had lost Edgar, their highest firepower, and the lack of damage output had become a constant headache.

Even now, the members were fighting monsters right in front of them, but they were not finishing them off smoothly the way they used to.

This unit, made up of roughly a hundred people, operated under A-rank command in groups of a little over thirty each. One of those commanders—Edgar—had dropped out, so Linne and Sasha ended up commanding fifty each.

For the two of them, who lacked command-related skills and aptitude, it was an extremely harsh situation. But, since they believed all responsibility lay with Edgar, they likely would not grow from this either.

One of the members ran up to Linne.

“Lady Linne! Monster suppression is complete!”

“Then once you’ve handled weapon maintenance and recovery, we’re moving straight to the 20th floor. Sasha, you’re up.”

“Under the blessing of healing…”

A massive magic circle unfolded beneath the members’ feet after the battle ended. It was Sasha’s spell, 【All Heal】. Compared to 【Perfect Heal】, its effect was weaker, but it had the advantage of affecting the whole group rather than a single person.

“Heal everyone here! 【All Heal】!”

When Sasha thrust out her arm and cast, the members’ wounds visibly closed at a rapid pace. After only a few seconds, the members who had been unable to move began standing up one after another.

This was the Second Unit’s strength. Behind their reputation as the Indomitable Second Unit lay Sasha’s healing magic.

Once Linne confirmed everyone had recovered, she lined the unit up and prepared to head to the next floor.

“All right, everyone. Form up quickly and head to the twentieth fl—”

A huge explosion cut her off with a thunderous boom.

“…!?”

Everyone snapped their heads toward the source.

By the 19th floor, the monsters were strong enough that only a limited number of guilds could even reach it. And, in a volcanic dungeon, Incarnation of the Sun had been taking it seriously from the very beginning, so other guilds did not bother aiming for a full clear.

There was no way they should have been hearing combat from another party on this floor.

“W-What do we do, Sasha?”

“I… I think we should go check…!”

Cold sweat ran down both of their faces. Nothing was more terrifying in a dungeon than the unknown: sudden monster mutations, abnormal climate shifts. No matter how prepared you were, you could never truly relax.

This booming noise was also too lacking in information to assume another guild had caught up.

“Then we’ll regroup and head to where that explosion came fro—”

Linne started to issue orders to the members who were forming ranks. Eliminating uncertainties was a core rule of dungeon exploration.

But that need vanished almost immediately.

“Hm? They already caught up?”

“Well, they’ve been going nonstop since yesterday. Those two are completely out cold.”

Two people suddenly appeared—Nero and Ellis—walking toward the Second Unit as they chatted casually.

On their backs were Rii and Mii, worn out from the dungeon crawl. Both of them were fast asleep, breathing softly.

The scene looked like a family outing. It was not a sight you should ever have seen on the 19th floor of a dungeon that people called a death zone.

“Let’s just push to the 20th floor.”

“Yeah. Even I’m exhausted.”

Without paying Linne’s Second Unit any special attention, the pair simply walked right past them.

“……”

The shock was so overwhelming that the members could not even speak.

By the time Nero and Ellis had disappeared from view, only Linne and Sasha managed to scream.

“Whaaaaaat!?”

Their shriek echoed off the dungeon walls and boomed through the corridors.

“W-What is going on!? Why is Veiled Moonrise here!?”

“Exactly! This is the 19th floor!”

They replayed the image of those two striding confidently past them, still in disbelief.

“And there were so few of them! Just four!”

“And two of them were kids, weren’t they!?”

Pushing into the lower floors with only four people. Bringing children along. And being adventurers from what should have been a lower-ranked guild.

Every part of it shattered Linne and Sasha’s common sense. They literally clutched their heads.

“I mean… okay, Ellis became A-rank recently by skipping grades, and Nero was A-rank from the start. That part I can sort of accept.”

“Right. But who in the world were those two kids on their backs?”

For them, the biggest shock was Rii and Mii.

Normally, people started adventurering at fifteen, after reaching adulthood in this country. Until then, they trained, or attended school to deepen their knowledge.

“…But more importantly, this situation’s bad, isn’t it?”

“It is. If Veiled Moonrise overtakes us, what is Lord Kyros going to say…?”

Once again, they held their heads.

Because Edgar—the man they had mocked—was gone, the Second Unit had weakened. If things continued like this, they could easily be blamed for it. Just imagining it made them both bristle with irritation.

And, on top of that, they had been overtaken by a guild they considered beneath them. That only inflamed their impatience further.

“Hurry up! We’re chasing them!”

“Everyone! Head to the 20th floor!”

Barreling forward with their anxiety bared, they pursued Ellis and the others.

“Wow… they’re actually coming after us.”

Hearing the massive, ground-shaking footsteps behind them, Nero muttered with obvious annoyance. His mind was full of the full clear, and he didn’t have the bandwidth to plan around Incarnation of the Sun.

Incarnation of the Sun was still ranked first, after all. If they had been overtaken, they would probably get serious for real this time.

“If it turns into a race, it’s going to be a pain…”

It was rare, but sometimes full-clearing a dungeon did turn into a competition.

Normally, dungeons had multiple routes down to the bottom, so direct conflict was uncommon. But when conditions piled up, a race could happen. This time, it felt like old grudges between guilds were the root cause.

Blocking corridors with rubble, luring monsters and deliberately dumping them on another guild; there were countless ways to sabotage progress.

If it became a true race, Nero’s group would be at a disadvantage due to their overwhelmingly small numbers.

“There’s no way they can keep up with us. That A-rank guy named Edgar also left the Second Unit, right?”

“Yeah. If you think about it normally, we’ll be fine… but Lloyd always says you should act while assuming something abnormal can happen. I’ll think of countermeasures, just in case.”

“Right. I’ll stay alert too. But more importantly… shouldn’t we go back once?”

Ellis let her limbs go slack, as if to emphasize how tired she was. Even for those two, pushing through the dungeon day after day seemed brutal.

Maybe sleepiness was catching up with her. Ellis looked unsteady, swaying on her feet.

“Yeah. Even if they pass us, it’s not like they can immediately go below the 23rd floor anyway.”

Following Nero’s call, the four of them returned to the dungeon entrance.

And that was how the battle for the complete conquest of the dungeon between Veiled Moonrise and Incarnation of the Sun began.

†