I Possessed The Worst Character In The Hellish Game Chapter 50

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[ … words ]

Mikael’s vision lurched as the world around him dissolved into a smear of colors before snapping back into its place.

The familiar weightlessness of teleportation settled in his stomach, leaving behind a faint vertigo that made him sway slightly on his feet.

He blinked and oriented himself.

He was no longer in the sunlit corridor of the palace’s guest wing and instead stood in a narrow hallway built of rough grey stone that seemed centuries old.

The air here was cooler, carrying the faint mineral scent of deep earth.

“From here, we travel on foot. This is the furthest we can teleport.”

Headmaster Nicholas said, glancing over his shoulder as his voice echoed slightly in the confined space.

Mikael nodded, still taking in his surroundings.

“Understood.”

They walked in silence for a while, occasionally passing a guard standing at attention in an alcove, each bowing deeply as Headmaster Nicholas passed.

The old man acknowledged them with a slight nod or a brief word.

He navigated the twisting corridors with the confidence of someone who had walked this path a thousand times before.

“So.” Nicholas said, breaking the silence as they rounded a corner. “You taking tomorrow’s Astralspire Entrance Exam?”

“Yes, I plan to attend it.”

“Good, good.” The old man stroked his beard thoughtfully. “The academy has changed a great deal since I first walked its halls, but the entrance exam remains largely the same. Just some assessments, nothing too daunting, I assure you.”

“For someone at my rank, it might be.”

“Perhaps.” Nicholas glanced at him, raising one of his bushy eyebrows. “But I suspect you’ll manage just fine. You seem resourceful.”

The word “resourceful” was probably the politest way the old man could have said “unconventional.”

Mikael accepted the backhanded compliment without comment.

The hallway stretched out before them.

Unlike the guards above, the guards here didn’t bow or call out greetings, and they were wearing full-body armor.

They simply inclined their heads as Nicholas passed while their eyes were tracking Mikael quietly behind their helmets’ visors.

Soon, they reached the end of the corridor as it opened into a wider chamber.

At the far end stood a fairly massive black door etched with intricate patterns and runes.

The door was flanked by two knights wearing full-body armor.

“Halt.”

One of them said in a flat voice as their halberds crossed in front of them, blocking the door.

Nicholas didn’t seem perturbed by it and simply reached into the folds of his robe and produced a rolled parchment, sealed with the royal crest of Valerion.

The knight took it, broke the seal, and read the contents in silence.

After a moment, he nodded to his companions.

The two knights stepped back and lowered their halberds.

The two knights moved in perfect synchronization, each pressing a hand against the metal door.

Runes flared to life across its surface as it spread outward from their palms, and the door began to open with a sound like stone grinding against stone.

Beyond the door….

A circular staircase descended into darkness.

The stairs were made of the same grey stone as the corridor, but they were narrower and steeper. Each step was worn slightly concave in the center from centuries of use.

It was extremely dark, and the only light came from the torches burning with purple flames along the walls.

“Let’s go.”

Nicholas said as he stepped through the doorway.

Mikael followed quietly, his boots echoing against the stone as they began their descent.

The black door closed behind them shortly after.

The temperature dropped with every step as the air grew colder and heavier until his breath began to mist in front of his face.

“That spell you used last night.” Nicholas said, breaking the silence. “The one that halted the aberrant’s movements. I assume you created it yourself?”

Mikael hesitated for a moment, then nodded as there was no point in hiding it.

“Yes, but it’s still incomplete and has a lot of limitations.”

“All great spells start as incomplete ideas.”

Headmaster Nicholas’s voice carried a note of genuine admiration.

“The fact that you designed something like that at your age, without formal training, is remarkable. I can count on one hand the number of people I’ve met who created an entirely new spell from scratch before they turned twenty. Every single one of them went on to accomplish great things. And none of their first spells were as impressive as yours.”

“Thank you, Headmaster. I’m still working on it.”

“I look forward to seeing how it evolves.”

Nicholas’s crimson eyes twinkled with something that might have been excitement.

“Perhaps once you’re enrolled at the academy, we can discuss it in more depth. There are few things I enjoy more than dissecting an interesting piece of spellwork.”

They continued their descent in silence for a while before Mikael asked the question that had been on his mind for a while now.

“If you don’t mind my asking, Headmaster. Shouldn’t you be at the academy? The entrance exam is tomorrow, isn’t it? I would have thought you’d be busy with preparations.”

“Ah.” Nicholas let out a small, knowing chuckle. “The preparations are well in hand. The academy staff is more than capable of managing without me.”

He paused with a hint of amusement creeping into his voice.

“Besides, I’m not the Headmaster anymore.”

“Huh?”

Mikael’s step almost faltered.

“Oh, we’re here.”

Before Mikael could process the revelation, they reached the bottom of the staircase.

The passage opened into a wide chamber that was dominated by a gate even larger than the one above.

It was a massive metallic gate covered in runes, and its surface seemed to wither and shift.

“Capsa Mundi.”

Mikael muttered.

Nicholas glanced back at him with a little surprise.

“You know about that?”

“Um… Princess Elara told me that the Royal Treasury is a Divine Rank artifact called Capsa Mundi when we were little.”

“Ah, that makes sense. But yes, you’re correct. The structure behind this door is a single Divine-rank artifact created from the essence core of a Tier 8 monster. It was a joint operation, back in my younger days. A terrible Monster that had been terrorizing the northern provinces. It took us nearly a month to bring it down, and the battle nearly killed everyone involved.

’Younger days?’

Mikael almost pointed out that even in his younger days, the headmaster would still have been considered an old man by any reasonable standard.

Since he was awakened at the age of sixty-three.

But he somehow held himself back for his own safety and the image of a slightly less wrinkled Nicholas charging into battle against a Tier 8 monster appeared in his mind.

“When it died, its core transformed into this. A living vault, capable of growing and adapting to whatever it contains, called ’Capsa Mundi’ or, in simpler language, ’The Box of the World’. The Church also uses similar artifacts to store their artifacts, though none are quite as sophisticated as this one.”

Mikael nodded.

Artifacts in Eclipsed Realms came in two categories.

The first were crafted items, made by blacksmiths and artisans using materials extracted from monsters.

These were relatively common, and their quality depended on the crafter’s skill and the rarity of the components.

The second category was far rarer—natural artifacts, created when a monster’s essence core spontaneously transformed after death.

The odds of it happening were astronomically low.

It was roughly one in five hundred by the game’s mechanics.

When it did occur, the resulting artifact could be either more or less powerful than the monster it came from, depending on the player’s luck.

’It’s even worse than farming shiny Pokémon.’ Mikael thought warily.

“Before we enter.” Nicholas said. “There’s something you need to understand. We have exactly sixty minutes inside. Once that time elapses, the vault’s defensive protocols will activate, and it will begin treating us as intruders. You don’t want to be inside when that happens.”

“Understood.”

The old man stepped forward and pressed his palm flat against the door.

Mikael watched as Nicholas began to circulate his essence, the flow visible as faint crimson light that spread from his hand into the metal.

The runes on the door reacted instantly as their glow intensified, shifting and rearranging themselves into new patterns.

The vault could only be opened by circulating essence in a specific pattern.

It was a magical password passed down only to the heirs of the Valerion Empire.

Nicholas was one of the few people outside the royal family who knew it, a privilege earned through his close friendship with King Alistar’s great-grandfather and his role in hunting the monster that had created the vault in the first place.

The shifting patterns grew faster and faster before suddenly stopping.

The door let out a deep, resonant groan and began to swing open on its own, revealing the space beyond.

Mikael’s breath caught in his throat.

The vault was enormous…. far larger than the underground structure that contained it should have allowed.

The ceiling stretched upward into darkness, and the floor extended in every direction, broken up by floating platforms and suspended staircases that defied gravity.

Some sections were completely upside down, their stone surfaces facing the wrong way as if the room had been folded in on itself.

Massive pillars stretched from floor to ceiling, rotating and constantly shifting their positions in an endless dance.

“It’s quite a spectacle, isn’t it?”

Nicholas said with his lips stretched into a smile.

Mikael broke from his trance and nodded slowly.

He had seen this place rendered in high-definition graphics, had explored its floating platforms and rotating pillars through the monitor countless times in his past life.

But seeing all this in person… it was something else.

“Come… we have limited time. Let’s find you something useful.”

******