Necromancer Academy’s Genius Summoner - Chapter 443

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This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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Necromancer School’s Summoning Genius — Episode 443
Whoooosh!
Black flames from the Dark Flame Arts engulfed the surroundings. Malcolm was gasping for breath behind a pillar.
‘Damn it!’
Ever since the Skull Dragon appeared, he’d been getting pushed back one-sidedly. A single burst of flames from that skull-headed creature swept away five or six Doppelgangers at once, and his copies dissipated the moment they touched the fire clinging to the floor.
The Doppelganger’s greatest weakness: area-of-effect attacks.
Simon’s Skull Dragons were slowly tightening the net of black flames across the fourth floor.
“Hiding won’t help, Malcolm.”
Simon’s voice reached him.
Malcolm gnashed his teeth behind the pillar and opened a Subspace. He pulled out four small potion bottles and rolled them across the floor.
‘Say whatever you want!’
Tap. Tap.
Only a Doppelganger’s arm protruded from the floor, beginning to move the potions.
The blind spot in Simon’s vision—behind the black flames, the Doppelganger’s arms smoothly passed the potion bottles along.
‘Throw them!’
At Malcolm’s signal, the Doppelganger’s arms hurled the potion bottles simultaneously.
Shatter!
Crash!
As the bottles shattered, crimson liquid splattered across all the Skull Dragons. Simon, who had been controlling them, flinched and froze mid-motion.
‘How’s that?’
Malcolm peeked his head out from behind the pillar.
‘It’s an enhanced Cabara Potion! I can’t stop the creatures’ movements entirely, but it should disrupt your control to some degree…!’
But Simon simply laughed without hesitation.
Ssshhh—
Ssshhhhh—
He withdrew the Cloud without regret. The bones fell to the floor, and the Skull Dragon dissipated.
‘…What’s he playing at?’
“Found you, Malcolm.”
Malcolm spun around in alarm. Simon had appeared right behind him.
Slap!
Malcolm quickly raised his elbow, blocking Simon’s extended right hand.
But it wasn’t a Combat Magic attack. The Magic Circle drawn on Simon’s right hand activated instead.
‘A Curse!’
Malcolm recoiled in shock.
‘What kind of Curse did I get hit with?’
The moment that thought crossed his mind, Malcolm’s vision swam and strength drained from his body like water. A sudden wave of drowsiness and exhaustion washed over him.
‘Sleep Curse!’
Malcolm’s lips twisted.
“You bastard…! Just because you became Student Council President, you’re mimicking Phantasus now…?”
Simon simply smiled gently.
“But Malcolm, I’m not going to say your effort fell short.”
“What?”
Malcolm quickly wove a Cancellation Curse behind his back as he listened to Simon.
He needed to buy time.
“I… damn it, didn’t I tell you not to pity me?”
“It’s not pity. At some point, you stopped relying on that staff you always carried around and started creating Doppelgangers with your own strength alone.”
“…”
“And then the mass of Doppelgangers you showed earlier, those Doppelgangers with only their arms moving, and even that high-level Poison Magic potion mixture.”
Simon shrugged.
“I think you’re putting in just as much effort as anyone else.”
Malcolm swallowed hard.
He felt blood rush to his face, as though he’d been stripped bare.
“It’s just a matter of timing.”
“…What nonsense is that?”
“Doppelgangers that multiply your numbers are powerful early in the semester, but weak toward the end when everyone’s abilities level out. That’s an unavoidable problem as long as you stick with Doppelgangers as your main strategy.”
Simon shrugged again.
“But you won’t stay weak forever, will you? Since everyone’s figured out how to counter you, you’ll come up with countermeasures too. Kizen is a long journey. It’s been a year now, and we still have two more years ahead. If you just hold on, keep pushing through…”
His voice rang out.
“The day will come when you rise again.”
Malcolm felt something stir deep in his chest.
It wasn’t that I’m weak. It wasn’t that I lack talent. It was simply a matter of timing.
He’d never entertained such a foolish approach before.
But he shook his head sharply, trying to deny it anyway.
“Damn it. You’re spouting complete nonsense. What I’ve been listening to isn’t something else—!”
He opened his mouth wide and pressed the Magic Circle he’d hidden behind his back against his own body.
“To complete the Cancellation—!”
But.
“What?”
The Cancellation took effect clearly, yet the Curse didn’t break.
‘This can’t be happening.’
Malcolm raised his head sharply.
“That Cancellation you were preparing—I just let you use it as is.”
Somewhere along the way, the Sleep Curse was already complete in Simon’s hands.
“My Sleep can’t be broken by Cancellation.”
“Urgh!”
He’d fallen for it completely.
It felt like this man was always several steps ahead, looking down from above.
Reading moves several turns ahead.
And on top of being so skilled at Summoning Magic, he could cast a high-tier Curse that wouldn’t break with Cancellation.
Just how strong would this man become?
Whoosh!
Malcolm, his Dark Element exhausted, threw a punch. Simon tilted his head lightly to dodge it, brushed past his arm, and spinning, struck his back hard with his right palm.
“Hack!”
Malcolm staggered backward, then steadied his stance.
With sleep seizing his central nervous system, he barely felt the pain anymore.
Sleep stacked to 3 already.
“Damn it!”
Malcolm clasped his hands together and summoned a Doppelganger.
But the drowsiness had sapped his concentration severely. Only 3 Doppelgangers appeared.
And they fell apart instantly under Simon’s Combat Magic.
‘Damn it! Damn it!’
He was brutally strong.
Not relying on some flashy, elaborate technique.
Fighting with solid fundamentals, never once giving his opponent a true opening from start to finish.
This was Kizen’s second-year Valedictorian and Student Council President.
Simon Polentia.
Completely different from who he’d been in the first semester of first year.
‘So do I!’
Malcolm gritted his teeth and charged.
‘I wanted to grow stronger!’
But despite what his mind commanded, his profoundly relaxed muscles wouldn’t obey. Flailing, Malcolm dropped to one knee as Simon’s right hand struck his arm and swept past.
Stack 4.
“Ugh!”
His eyelids were already closing for the third time.
‘He’s holding on better than I expected.’
Even under Sleep Stack 4, Malcolm was resisting the drowsiness with sheer spite alone. Simon now approached to finish it.
“Raaagh!”
Malcolm spun his body and sent a kick, but Simon simply flicked it away with the back of his hand, then drove in and placed his palm against Malcolm’s face.
“Rest your head for a moment.”
Sleep Stack 5.
With those words from Simon, Malcolm lost consciousness.

* * *
-Your father is Margel Randolph. A great man who leads an organization, they say.
On his thirteenth birthday, Malcolm
realized that his name wasn’t ‘Malcolm Brown’—it was ‘Malcolm Randolph.’
And he learned that the father he’d believed dead was actually still alive.
-Welcome home, my son!
Malcolm went to meet his father.
A middle-aged man presiding over well-dressed, rough-looking adults. Malcolm, once a provincial country boy full of adolescent inferiority, felt his heart soar at the realization that his father was alive and was actually the boss of an organization.
Above all, his father Margel had called him “son.”
“Suddenly popping out of nowhere—what heir are you talking about?”
“I cannot accept this!”
Of course, some gang members protested, but Margel simply laughed, ruffling Malcolm’s hair.
“My successor is Malcolm alone.”
His eyes gleamed as he met Malcolm’s gaze, and then he spoke in a voice so quiet only Malcolm could hear.
“Please do not disappoint me, my son.”
And so Malcolm, filled with inferiority and stubborn determination, threw himself into the organization’s work with mad intensity. He did whatever his father commanded.
He underwent an illegal surgery to unlock his Core, became a Necromancer, and mastered the Doppelganger—the Randolph family’s unique Dark Magic.
“Father! Look!”
When Malcolm first completed a perfect Doppelganger—a miniature version of himself—the dignified Margel suddenly lifted him into his arms and laughed.
“Behold, everyone! This is my son!”
Malcolm felt as though his heart would burst with emotion. Father Margel became his absolute ideal.
He forgot the quiet days spent in the Rural Hometown with his mother. He focused only on adapting to the organization with all his might.
The people in the organization were brutal wolves, and to become their leader, he understood, he too had to become a wolf.
He had to become cruel.
More cruel than the wolves themselves.
Each time Malcolm committed a brutal act, the gang members would bow their heads in submission, and he felt a profound sense of achievement.
Malcolm’s reputation grew ever larger. Rumors spread widely that so young, he was already master-level in wielding the Doppelganger.
“Malcolm, go to Kizen.”
“Sir? I don’t need to go to some school like that—I’ll become an excellent boss without it!”
“You’ll go as a Special Admission Student. It has value.”
Father Margel’s lips curled upward.
“Go represent the organization, and kick the arses of those fancy nobles across the continent for me.”
Malcolm, once again, obeyed his father Margel’s command and entered Kizen.
But upon arrival at Kizen, noble peers his own age pointed fingers at him the moment they heard the name “Randolph.”
“Filthy criminal!”
I came in as a representative of the gang. To insult me is to insult the organization and my father.
With that conviction, Malcolm committed cruel acts within Kizen itself, and anyone who opposed him disappeared.
As a result, he even connected with senior students from the second year and members of the royal family. Fired by the vision of lifting the gang from shadow into light, Malcolm struggled toward that goal.
But then.
“The victor—Simon Polentia of Class A!”
The dark reputation and charisma he had built up collapsed all at once.
And on top of that came the liquid bomb incident.
After the first semester ended, Malcolm felt too ashamed to face his father Margel, so he traveled to the Rural Hometown where his mother lived, which he hadn’t seen in some time.
And there.
A problem arose.
“Who are you?”
A strange man had moved into his mother’s house.
“Who are you, I asked!”
“And who might you be… Gah!”
The moment Malcolm pinned the man down and threw him to the ground.
“Stop it, Malcolm!”
His mother rushed out.
And he heard the whole story.
His mother said she had remarried this man.
“Wh-what? Why?”
Malcolm’s body trembled.
“Does that mean you and our father…!”
His mother drew a deep breath and told him the truth.
“I’m truly sorry, Malcolm.”
Malcolm watched his world crumble.
“I never loved your father. Not for a single moment.”
Though she circled the matter before speaking plainly, Malcolm already understood everything, for he knew the organization’s nature.
In his youth, Father Margel had plundered countless cities, and violently assaulted innocent women in those cities.
His mother had been one of those victims, and Malcolm himself was merely one of the countless seeds Margel had scattered.
His mother had not abandoned the baby born of her pain, but merely raised him; and when Margel later demanded Malcolm, she had simply given him over—this too he now learned.
Only now did Malcolm shudder as he recalled how his mother had looked at him in his childhood.
The day he had fought with neighborhood children and beaten them down, he now understood what it meant when his mother had gazed at him with such strange, estranged eyes.
“Father!”
Malcolm rushed back to the organization and seized Margel by the collar.
Did you deceive me? Was everything you told me about my mother a lie? You said you were proud to have me as your son!
Then.
Only then did Malcolm see Margel’s expression behind the mask.
For your mother’s life, you must do well, must you not?
At those words, the rage burning like wildfire was doused as if by a bucket of water, extinguished in an instant.
Malcolm returned to Kizen. His mind shattered completely, his grades continued their downward spiral.
His father had merely used him.
His mother had simply raised an unwilling child out of reluctant obligation.
‘What am I?’
Malcolm continued to agonize even in his dreams.
‘What exactly am I?’
Then his eyelids opened, and at last.
A clear sky came into view.
“Waaah! Hheeeey! Sniff! Hick!”
A familiar face.
A boy his age from his old hometown, someone he’d been close to, was crying pitifully. Malcolm himself had once been so small.
This was a memory from the past.
The boy who was crying had wounds all over him. Malcolm himself had inflicted those wounds.
“Malcolm!”
Malcolm’s eyes widened.
‘Wait, Mother?’
His younger mother came rushing over in a flustered state. She bowed to the boy’s parents again and again, begging their forgiveness.
After the boy and his parents disappeared like that.
His mother looked at him.
‘…Ugh.’
Malcolm could not bring himself to meet his mother’s eyes.
Here was the unwilling mother of a criminal’s son, a son who had struck another child. Surely her gaze was one of disgust toward a terrible monster. In her heart, she must despise him—like father, like son.
“Malcolm. Look at me.”
“…….”
Malcolm lifted his head with great effort.
‘Oh.’
Her expression was stern, certainly.
But.
“Promise me you’ll never strike a friend again.”
His mother was crying.
“Come here. Malcolm.”
His mother embraced Malcolm warmly.
A profound sense of peace filled his heart.
This was undoubtedly a memory from the past.
Seeing this memory again, he finally understood with certainty.
My father abandoned me.
But my mother never.
Never once abandoned me.

* * *
Clap!
At the sound of hands clapping, Malcolm started and opened his eyes.
Standing before him was Simon Polentia.
He crouched in front of Malcolm, his face impassive as he clapped his palms together.
“What is this! Ugh!”
Without warning, Malcolm found himself bound to a pillar with rope. A Magic Circle was drawn across the middle of the rope, and its effect prevented any Darkness from emerging.
“You seemed to be having a happy dream.”
At Simon’s words, Malcolm flinched and his face flushed. Only then did he realize that he had been crying.
“You little bastard!”
“I wanted to let you sleep, but I’m pressed for time on this end.”
Simon lowered his hand and spoke with a serious expression.
“Malcolm, tell me how to stop the outsiders.”

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This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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