I Became A Flashing Genius At The Magic Academy - Prologue

Prologue

10 years after a game was released, the community was bound to stagnate and rot.

Since no new content came out, players started doing strange things, such as raiding a boss wearing a single pair of pants, breaking the record for clearing a dungeon the fastest, or replaying existing content again and again.

There were even players who touched the so-called ‘characters’ that no one else ever dared to.….

That’s who I was.

The game ‘Aether World’ was originally released as a female-oriented dating simulation game, but thanks to its gorgeous fighting mechanics, its nearly infinite content, and its countless playable characters, this unique game had managed to attract plenty of male players.

Some characters were easy to control and boasted the best performance, while there were others whose performance was the worst, increasing the difficulty to such a level that even 10-year veterans wouldn’t dare to touch them.

That’s right.

I was a pervert who had been playing with the character ‘Baek Yu-Seol’ for 10 years, the one with the highest difficulty, worst performance, and the most disadvantages. I didn’t even understand why.

In the setting of the Aether World where everything was made of magic and everyone could use magic, Baek Yu-Seol, who couldn’t use magic, was not popular at all and was just treated as an extra.

Of course, this didn’t mean that Baek Yu-Seol couldn’t use magic at all.

There was only one magic he could use, ‘Blink’.

Although blinking magic could be learned by any wizard, very few used it. That was because its long cool down, its high magic consumption, and the 2-second stiffness it provoked after use were huge penalties.

Was that all? No.

Blinking moved you ‘randomly’ to a distance ranging between 3m and 10m, and even the direction of movement was ‘random’.

If you were unlucky, you could instantly die by crashing into either the ground, the ceiling, or any nearby wall.

Baek Yu-seol was a character who couldn’t use any magic other than ‘blinking’, a garbage skill no one ever learned or used.

Of course, there were some advantages. As he had trained ‘Blinking’ to the maximum limit, the direction and the range could be adjusted, and the 2-second stiffness disappeared. In addition, he didn’t have any magic, so you didn’t need to worry about mana consumption. Unfortunately, that was the end of it.

In conclusion, you could use Blink, a garbage skill from the beginning, a little better.

Blink was a movement skill that made you extremely fast, so fast that if you smashed against a wall after failing to adjust the distance, you would die instantly due to the tremendous impact.

As such, when fighting enemies in narrow places, Baek Yu-seol usually became completely worthless.

For that reason, being able to control the range of the blink was almost essential, but it was also an extremely difficult task. And, who would raise a trash character who could only use blink in a game where wrap magic was easy to learn and use?

Numerous players took on the challenge, but they all ended up giving up.

While everyone else quit, I continued practicing blink over and over again, and in the end, I was able to completely master it.

Realizing that blink was a skill where you rapidly advanced, I learned how to cancel the skill in the middle, which allowed me to ‘adjust the distance’.

That was easy to say, but in fact, blinking took around 0.1 seconds, so it wasn’t something anyone could easily control.

I fell in love with this flashing one-tool character that had to solve everything with just pure control and I ended up spending most of my time in ‘PVP’ battles against other player-controlled wizard characters.

After 10 years.

[You defeated the final boss, Black Night Thirteen March.]

I ended up killing the final boss I didn’t even know existed.

“What?”

I was just performing a sudden quest to find the ‘female heroine’ who had suddenly disappeared, why did a black dragon with such an imposing name appear out of the blue?

“The final boss?”

No, but in the first place, was there anything worthy of being called the final boss in a female-oriented game? Didn’t these games usually lead to the kind of ending where you get married to one male protagonist?

“It’s the first time something like this has happened, so I don’t know.”

Of course, I have been playing this game for 10 years.

When I saw the boss for the first time, I felt I would need a long time to beat it. I felt shame it took my character so long, despite wearing relic-grade artifacts and having maxed stats.

“What the hell is this dragon doing?”

The Black Dragon.

As he was the final boss, I became curious about what kind of guy he was, so I roughly read his story.

It went like this.

In that world full of wizards, there was a group of people called ‘Black Demons’ who lived in hiding and acted behind the scenes. It was said that their ultimate goal was to cover the world with a hidden world, the ‘Persona Gate’.

And finally, when the Black Demons completely covered the world with the Persona Gate, what appeared was The Black Demon Dragon.

I wasn’t very interested in the story and I didn’t care what the NPCs did or didn’t do. Instead, I just enjoyed alchemy production and magical engineering. As such, I didn’t know such a thing was happening.

“Wow. The setting has just been completely reworked.”

Belatedly looking at the map, 90% of the continent was eroded and destroyed by the Persona Gate, and the background of the game, ‘Stella Academy’, was dyed red, its atmosphere dark and gloomy.

As I had been with other players on the PVP server, I hadn’t realized it until then.

I wondered what the reaction would be if I took a screenshot and uploaded it, so for the first time in a long time I went to the Aether World community.

‘What is this?’

The few remaining players’ posts were exploding for the first time in a long time.

[Title: What a crap game. I lost all my game data because a black dragon suddenly appeared.]

[Title: What’s this dragon thing about? I can’t connect to the game, it says my character is deleted.]

[Title: Wow, it’s hot right now here.]

The community was full of posts saying it was ridiculous that their character had been deleted when they returned after a long time.

“What.”

I guess the final boss hadn’t just appeared for me, has the Black Dragon appeared simultaneously in all game data?

“It’s so amazing.”

But there was one strange thing.

I tried to rummage through the bulletin board for a while, but there was no article anywhere saying that they had defeated the Black Dragon.

No matter how loaded with relic-grade artifacts my character was, it was just a trash character, and there were lots of players who had nurtured characters equal to or stronger than mine.

That said, the Black Dragon should have died dozens of times already.

At that moment, I saw a post by a famous ranked player, and my eyes widened.

[Title: Guys, isn’t this the boss that we originally gave up hunting?]

[Content: Black Dragon] ‘99% magical resistance’ passive without a cooldown, along with infinite ‘Magic absorption’ and ‘Magic release’, is it even possible to beat? We should inquire whether this is a bug]

“Oh, I see…There was something like that.”

Of course, it would be a bit unfair to have the ability to nullify magic in the magical world.

But it was different for me. Blinking was just a movement skill, so I had no choice but to learn an exceptionally rare weapon skill.

As a result, I ended up being the only player in the game who raised physical attack power rather than magic attack power, and consequently I was also the only player who managed to bring down the black dragon.

“Wow. Looks like I’m the only one who has caught it.”

Filled with excitement, I was about to cast a wide-area aggro under the title [Black Dragon Solo Hunt.jpg] to the community.

Beep–

“Uh, uh…?”

At that moment, with a ringing sound that seemed to cover the world, the power drained from my body, and the world began to spin around me.

[With the wrong ending, 90% of the Aether World has been destroyed.]

‘Wha…What…………’

The ceiling became dim.

My vision narrowed.

The world seemed increasingly distant.

[But you are the player closest to the ‘True Ending.’]

‘That dragon… I wanted to brag about it. But I’m feeling strange.’

The bizarre voice seemed extremely far away.

[Please, reach the ‘True Ending’.]

The world had gone dark.

End of Chapter

Translator’s Note:

This chapter has been edited with the help of ‘Sleepy Reader’. Don’t forget to thank him for his efforts.