A Terrifying Talent (3)
The kingdom has fallen.
It was a kingdom that had stood firm against collapsing public order and overflowing anomalies. Yet, that was only because of its capable ministers and loyal subjects.
The moment those true pillars of the state vanished, the kingdom crumbled in vain.
It all began with the king's madness. Ever since the day he indiscriminately slaughtered his own subjects as they looked up at his royal countenance in the capital's plaza, the king fell into an uncontrollable delusion.
The monarch, having lost his sanity, dyed the kingdom in blood, butchering hundreds of thousands of his own people with his own hands.
Paradoxically, the medium for this tragedy was the statues of the king erected throughout the kingdom.
The king, who had turned his empire into a massive slaughterhouse in a single day, locked himself in the darkness of the audience chamber deep within the royal castle. Yet, even then, the hope of reconstruction had not completely flickered out. This was because those who had not looked upon his face before his madness took hold managed to escape death. The civil servants buried under mountains of paperwork, the knights who believed it disloyal to look directly at the king's face, and the mages who were too absorbed in their arrogant research survived.
The survivors believed. They believed that if only that madness would subside, they could reclaim their past glory.
...Until a terrible curse blanketed the castle.
The knights turned into ironclad monsters, and the mages became phantoms of grimoires that had lost their minds. Watching them degenerate into alien entities hostile to humanity, I let go of the very last shred of hope.
A nation cannot exist where its people have vanished. Yet, unable to leave the castle, I remained alone, watching the world outside the isolated kingdom.
The fall of the kingdom shook the balance of the world. From the kingdom, now a pit of despair, endless anomalies poured forth, ravaging neighboring nations like starved beasts. The anomalies that devoured humans grew even more bloated, and the despair they spread became the spark of a vicious cycle, birthing yet more anomalies.
Indeed, the age of great chaos had arrived.
But humanity grew stronger in the face of despair. Halting the ugly wars between nations, humans united solely for survival. The chaos birthed countless heroes, and they did not stop at repelling the swarming anomalies; they began their march to reclaim the stolen territories.
Decades passed in this manner, and the allied forces of humanity finally reclaimed all the lands, setting foot at the entrance of the fallen kingdom. To an army composed of hundreds of thousands of elite soldiers, thousands of knights, and hundreds of archmages, ordinary anomalies were no longer a match. Hardened by years of actual combat, they marched without hesitation, closing in on the heart of the royal castle.
But the despair began when they opened the doors to the audience chamber.
The army of hundreds of thousands, which had never known defeat, was slaughtered in a mere instant.
The spells the mages desperately chanted crumbled before they could even touch the king's body, and though the knights tried to block with their shields, the king's razor-sharp fingers tore through steel armor like paper.
The army that prided itself on being invincible had to retreat that day, tasting a disastrous defeat for the first time in their lives.
The entity sitting there was a calamity itself, far more powerful and mysterious than any anomaly they had ever faced.
Ultimately, unable to find any solution, humanity chose a desperate measure: instead of killing the king, they sealed the entire castle.
Beyond the castle walls, watching the sight of hundreds of mages enveloping the castle in a massive barrier, I let out a deep sigh.
If even this era, called the pinnacle of magic, cannot handle that king, then in what era, and who, could possibly appear to stop that tragic king?
BOOM—!!
The space that had been filled with darkness was flooded by a massive pillar of light. The wave of light, surging relentlessly to the very edge of the domain, clashed with the boundaries of the shadow world, unleashing a deafening roar.
Sssss—
Before the absolute, violent majesty of the light, the shadows filling the surroundings dissolved without even a scream. The foundation of the once-solid domain shook, signaling its imminent collapse.
The shadows could no longer restrict the anomaly's movements.
Yet, despite this, the anomaly's cries had ceased.
'Did I get it?'
Siwoo thought.
Whoosh—
The massive pillar of light that had swallowed the world slowly began to recede like an ebbing tide.
Beyond the white smoke, the silhouette of the anomaly gradually revealed itself. However, as if mocking Siwoo's expectations, it had assumed a bizarre form.
"!"
The anomaly was crouching on the floor. Like a devout monk offering a solemn prayer, it had its hands neatly pressed together, its eyes closed in serene silence.
Siwoo's eyes shook with shock. Not a single scratch remained on its body. Even though the strike had clearly connected, the pillar of light had failed to inflict any damage. He was absolutely certain there had been nothing wrong with his attack.
If so, the only explanation was that the creature had done something.
Just as Siwoo gripped his Golden Book once more, trying to devise his next move in extreme tension—
Behind the anomaly, which still held its hands together in prayer, an ominous shape began to rise, slicing through the empty air.
It was an eye.
Enveloped in a slimy mucous membrane, a monster's eye—grotesque and hideous beyond description—fixed itself in midair.
The eyeball was so chilling that merely looking at it felt like it would corrupt one's soul. It glared down at the collapsing battlefield of the domain, its unfocused pupil flashing.
But there was no time to be paralyzed by fear. He had to figure out what that thing was to counter it.
Just as Siwoo was about to voice his question, the necromancer's triumphant shout rang out.
"Erosion! Bwahahaha!"
The necromancer laughing was never a good sign.
Siwoo frowned and looked at Ju Harin, trusting that she could explain the situation.
"An Erosion phenomenon...?"
But even she, whom he had trusted, was staring at the eye floating behind the anomaly with trembling pupils.
What on earth was that thing to elicit such a reaction?
Unfortunately, there was no time to ask.
"Reload."
Pulling back the Lantern, which was faltering from the aftershocks of the domain's collapse, he thrust the muzzle of the Golden Book forward once more.
Hummm. With a low vibration, highly dense energy gathered. Aiming the Golden Book, now completely dyed in gold, at the crouching anomaly, Siwoo murmured softly:
"Fire."
BOOM—!
Once again, with a roar that tore through space, a massive pillar of light surged toward the anomaly.
Shhhhhk—!
That wasn't all. The other grimoires behind Siwoo, which had been waiting for their turn, hurriedly flipped open their pages and began pouring a colorful array of magic toward the anomaly. Beams of primary-colored light blended together, forming a massive tidal wave of destruction.
CRASH—!
In the split second before all the attacks could erase the anomaly's flesh—
The massive eye flickering eerily behind the anomaly flashed.
Hummmm—
The moment the grotesque eyeball swept across the empty air, a strange wave rippled through the battlefield.
The beams of light rushing in a straight line twisted their trajectories as if pulled by an invisible string. Their target was no longer the crouching anomaly on the ground. Like being sucked into a black hole, the countless magical vortexes began to flow backward toward the massive eyeball floating in the air.
Sluuurp—
There was no explosion, no sound of impact. The beams of light, possessing enough power to carve out mountain ranges, vanished like a lie the moment they touched the surface of the eyeball, sucked into its abyssal pupil. Had it absorbed the attacks? With so little information, there was no way to know.
'...What should I do?'
Siwoo instinctively realized that the same trick would no longer work.
Whirrrr—
As long as the pupil floating behind the anomaly remained, his attacks were meaningless. The only saving grace was that the creature didn't seem to have any intention of attacking yet.
Staring briefly at the anomaly slumped on the floor, Siwoo turned his head to look at Ju Harin.
Shiver, shiver.
She was trembling, having fallen into a panic once again.
"Ju Harin! Can you hear me?!"
Shake, shake.
Even when he placed his hands on her shoulders and called her name, she remained unresponsive.
Slap! Slap!
"Kyaah! Wh-what!"
In the end, it was only after he slapped her cheeks firmly with both hands that she snapped out of it.
"Tell me what we need to do right now!"
"Huh...? Wh-what's going on?"
Was she in denial? She wore a blank expression, as if her brain had completely erased the surreal horror she had just witnessed. But there was no merciful time to explain and soothe her. Siwoo pressed down harder on her shoulders and snapped:
"Erosion! Explain what that is first!"
Overwhelmed by Siwoo's cold, piercing gaze, Ju Harin began to stammer out her knowledge.
According to Ju Harin, just as mages had their ultimate trump card in the form of a domain, anomalies possessed a secret art called Erosion that warped the very world.
"So, how do we break it?"
Ju Harin's reply was long-winded.
"...First, I have to explain domains. While a domain temporarily isolates space to summon one's own world, Erosion doesn't isolate space. Instead, it directly pollutes and dyes reality itself with its own laws."
Siwoo frowned deeply and cut her off.
"Get to the point. How do we fight it?"
"...Only a domain can counter Erosion."
"Then we just have to deploy the domain again...!"
"But deploying a domain back-to-back is impossible, even for an 8th-class mage..."
Ju Harin seemed to have abandoned all hope, staring blankly at the eyeball in the air. Leaving her be, Siwoo picked up the Lantern, which was lying pathetically on the floor.
Tap, tap.
The Lantern was still groveling, unable to recover from the backlash of the domain's destruction.
He tried to infuse it with energy to help it recover, but it wasn't enough. Instead, under the forced stimulation, the Lantern emitted a painful, scream-like vibration. It seemed impossible to deploy the domain again.
As he pondered other options, Ju Harin muttered softly.
"The Erosion isn't complete yet... If we get on the broom now, can we escape...?"
"Not complete? That eyeball is already staring right at us."
"Because we're still alive. If the Erosion were complete, we would already be dead..."
If so, didn't that mean they still had a chance to run? Why was Ju Harin hesitating? Just as Siwoo was about to tell her to fly out of here immediately, he froze.
"Bwahahaha! The castle has already been eroded! You won't be able to escape!!"
The sturdy marble corridors and ornate decorations inverted with a bizarre static noise.
As if the colors of reality had been forcibly extracted, the world lost its saturation, dyed in grotesque shadows.
In that surreal, colorless world, only the massive eyeball floating in the air boasted its presence, emitting a vivid and blasphemous light.
Zzzzt—
Along with a ringing sound that scraped against space, the massive pupil slowly rotated and looked at Siwoo.
Whoooosh—
In that desperate moment, the Golden Book in Siwoo's hand exploded with a golden radiance as if screaming. The mana, erupting in a sweeping arc, instantly formed a massive spherical barrier around Siwoo.
A brilliant golden sanctuary that enveloped Ju Harin and the wildly laughing necromancer in an instant.
Thanks to that, they managed to escape the clutches of the eyeball.
But outside the sanctuary was a living hell.
Sssss—
Exposed to the gaze of the massive eyeball, the dozens of grimoires all lost their color and crumbled. Watching them turn to ash and scatter in the air, Siwoo realized:
If that gaze touches me, I will vanish just like that.
Whoooosh—
The barrier vibrated violently. The gaze of the eyeball outside clawed at the shield like a persistent predator, trying to squeeze through the gaps. Black stains of Erosion began to spread across the golden surface.
"...The barrier is thinning. Siwoo, is there any way...!"
"Bwahaha! What 'way'?! You're going to die here with me! That's only fair!"
Crumble—
The ominous premonition became reality without a single deviation.
The cover of the Golden Book, which had been shining brilliantly in Siwoo's right hand, tore to shreds with a screeching sound. The moment the source of his mana reached its limit—
SHATTER——!
The barrier protecting Siwoo shattered like glass, scattering into the air.
Over Siwoo's completely defenseless body, the sadistic gaze of the massive eyeball poured down like a waterfall.
Thump————
The moment he felt that gaze, Siwoo experienced a powerful sensation of falling, as if the entire world beneath his feet had collapsed. Though his body was bound to reality, his consciousness plummeted into an endless abyss, dragged down by an irresistible gravity.
It felt as though eons had passed, yet also like a mere spark of an instant.
In that void where all signposts of time were erased, Siwoo slowly opened his closed eyes.
And he knew immediately.
A place filled with a heavy silence and dense darkness. This was Siwoo's mental landscape.
"..."
Driven by an instinctive pressure, Siwoo raised his head to look at the sky.
An indescribably grotesque creature, its hideous maw wide open, was plummeting toward Siwoo with a momentum that seemed capable of swallowing an entire galaxy.
The eyeball embedded at the center of that massive predator—the very same giant eye that had appeared behind the anomaly at the start of the Erosion—was staring down at Siwoo.
'That eye... belonged to this monster.'
The monster approached, opening its colossal mouth to devour Siwoo.
Siwoo tried to move out of the way, but his limbs wouldn't budge, as if bound by invisible chains.
Just as that massive death drew right before his nose—
Siwoo's eyes met the monster's.
In that instant, Siwoo realized the creature was peering into his very essence. Its gaze, which had been scanning here and there as if searching for something, stopped at his heart. The place where his soul resided.
Siwoo felt a surge of displeasure that the monster had looked upon his soul. He didn't know why, but for a split second, he viewed the colossal beast as nothing more than an insect.
In that moment, the monster's massive pupil contracted as if convulsing.
A scream that tore through space echoed within his mental landscape.
It was not the roar of a predator, but the shriek of a mere creature encountering an existence it dared not even look up to.
The monster that had tried to encroach upon his soul was instead crushed by a colossal terror the moment it touched Siwoo's essence. Startled out of its wits, it pushed Siwoo away.
The sensation of being swept up by a wave and bounced back to the bright, shallow surface of consciousness rushed through Siwoo's entire body.
Flash. When he snapped his eyes open, the familiar sight of the colorless corridor greeted him once more. Along with it, the chilling presence of the anomaly right in front of him.
The grotesque eyeball that had been floating in the air just moments ago had vanished. But there was no time to celebrate the cessation of the Erosion. The anomaly stood at a distance where it could reach him just by stretching out its hand.
'I'll sacrifice an arm...!'
At this distance, there was no way to dodge its attack. Along with the thought, Siwoo braced himself for the impending pain. However, the anomaly did not reach out to attack him.
"What...?"
Instead, Siwoo was bewildered as he watched the anomaly perform an incomprehensible action.
Thud.
The creature fell to its knees at Siwoo's feet.
"I... will... re... turn... it... to... you..."
With a shining golden crown placed upon its politely gathered hands.