The Magic Eye
The moment the thought crossed my mind—‘No way, am I really going to die this pathetically?’—there was no time to dwell on it. The colossal body of the grotesque monster came crashing down toward me.
Crunch—
“·······?”
A sickening sound of something shattering rang out, followed by a shower of blood and bodily fluids raining down. The Hand-Mouth Abomination, Kehol, despite its overwhelming presence, was torn to pieces without even managing a single act of resistance.
“Hehe… hehehe… I-Ian, I found you.”
Bianca, who had leaped into the air and effortlessly slaughtered Kehol, spotted me and cried out in delight. Even as I dodged the various splatters of gore, I couldn’t tear my eyes away from what was behind her.
“I-Ian…? Y-you were here?”
She’s insane.
What shocked me wasn’t that she could fly through the sky or that she had slain the monster in a single blow.
‘What the hell is that…?’
Right behind Bianca floated dozens of massive ‘meteorites.’ Each one was enormous enough to wipe out the entire Forest of Nightmares if it fell. And that wasn’t all—countless other spells hovered behind her as well. Blazing flames that made the air shimmer with heat, ominous black mists that looked like they could devour everything.
‘What the fuck?’
No matter how I looked at it, this scale was far beyond anything a mere ‘archmage’ could manage. And more importantly, surely she hadn’t prepared all these spells just to find me? It felt a bit… no, extremely excessive.
But the way her gaze was locked onto me made it hard to deny. Her eyes, somehow even more hollow than before, burned with a hunger that looked ready to devour me at any second.
‘She is human… right?’
The sheer amount of mana she possessed and her ability to control it were beyond what any ordinary human could achieve. Simply keeping that many spells floating in the air required a constant drain of mana, yet she maintained them all without effort. At this point, she could only be described as a monster.
If archmages in the original story could spam magic like this, the novel would have ended long ago.
‘Just how much did she grow before the regression?’
To exaggerate only slightly, in the original story, there were almost no beings of this caliber except for the protagonist himself.
While I was still reeling in shock, Bianca gracefully descended to the ground. Before I could even react, she began walking straight toward me.
“I-Ian… w-why did you run away?”
“Uh… well, you see…”
I instinctively took a step back as she drew closer, but—
Thud—
‘Oh shit.’
She must have used the same spell as during our first meeting. An opaque wall instantly sealed off my escape route. I was now trapped with nowhere to run.
Bianca asked me in a tearful voice, “I-Ian. You didn’t run away because you hate me… right? Tell me it’s not true?”
Just from the words alone, it sounded like a girlfriend expressing her hurt feelings to her boyfriend. But before answering, I glanced up at the sky. The spells floating overhead were still very much active.
‘…If I say the wrong thing here…’
I might really die without even leaving a corpse behind.
The spells hovering in the air were on the verge of raining down. With an explosive Bianca standing right in front of him, Ian desperately racked his brain for a way out.
Of course, contrary to Ian’s assumptions, Bianca had absolutely no intention of ‘killing’ him. She wasn’t cruel enough to harm the person she loved. At first, feeling somewhat betrayed, she had deployed all those spells. But after burning away nearly half of the Forest of Nightmares, she finally realized Ian might be in danger and quickly stopped her magic.
‘I-I almost hurt I-Ian…’
The tragic deaths of the various abominations didn’t concern her in the slightest.
‘T-that monster earlier… d-did I kill it too easily…?’
Once she returned ‘home’ with Ian, she planned to resurrect the abomination Kehol with her magic and subject it to endless torture.
‘Since it tried to kill I-Ian… I can’t let it die so comfortably…’
Only after making it experience every kind of agony in existence and killing it over and over until she grew sick of it would her heart finally feel at ease.
Now, the only question left was why Ian had run away.
‘W-why did I-Ian run away…?’
Could it be that he hated her?
‘No.’
That could never be the case. She would never allow such a thing to happen.
Bianca, who had been shut away in the Magic Tower since childhood, had a severely distorted sense of normal human emotions compared to others. On the surface, it looked like she was interrogating Ian, but in truth, she was closer to asking what she had done wrong. It was more like the tantrum of a child who didn’t want to be abandoned.
Bianca waited anxiously for Ian’s lips to part. Even if the only thing that came out was a generic ‘I’m sorry,’ she would be overjoyed and forgive him immediately.
But Ian couldn’t afford to think so simply. If he had had time to calm down and think rationally, he might have realized that Bianca wasn’t actually angry. Unfortunately, the meteorites floating above his head clouded his judgment.
Ian spoke with great difficulty.
“The truth is…”
There had been many things to consider before opening his mouth, but there was only one thing he absolutely could not do.
Never apologize.
If he gave Bianca a cliché apology here, those meteorites would undoubtedly smash into his head immediately.
‘Admitting fault here is no different from begging to be killed. In the end, I have to come up with a believable reason for running away.’
A reason that would sound somewhat plausible even to Bianca. And that reason was…
“The truth is, the reason I ran from you earlier wasn’t because of my own will.”
“H-huh…? W-what do you mean?”
When Bianca looked at him in confusion, I clutched my head and pretended to be in pain.
“Ugh, my head still feels…”
“I-Ian…! A-are you okay?”
When I acted like I was about to collapse, Bianca rushed over in a panic.
“Bianca. The reason I left you was because, at some point, a ‘voice’ suddenly started ringing inside my head.”
“A v-voice…?”
‘Sorry about this, fox bastard… but I don’t have a choice.’
Since I didn’t have any other good excuses, I had no choice but to throw that fox under the bus to survive. Besides, it wasn’t as if a voice hadn’t actually spoken to me before, so it made for a decent enough excuse.
“Yeah. At first I thought it was just a hallucination, but the more I heard it, the more my mind grew hazy. Then suddenly, my body started moving on its own…”
A heartbreaking story about being bewitched by some monster’s ability and having no choice but to run away. This should be enough for Bianca to accept.
“A-are you okay now?”
“Yeah… my head hurts a little, but I’m fine otherwise.”
“I-I see…”
At my words, Bianca hung her head low. I couldn’t see her expression clearly, but it seemed like she understood to some extent.
‘Phew. Looks like I managed to get through this somehow.’
Considering it was a crisis, I thought it was a pretty impressive display of quick thinking.
—…
Shiver—
Hm. It feels like a cold gaze is boring into the back of my head, but it must be my imagination, right?
“Binding, Restraint… 13 stacks.”
Bianca muttered something under her breath while touching various parts of my body, as if she were worried about me.
‘Huh?’
It seemed a bit—actually, way too much touching for someone who was just worried. Right as that thought crossed my mind—
Click—
An incomprehensible binding force wrapped around my entire body.
‘Oh shit.’
I couldn’t even twitch a single finger. There was only one culprit.
“I-Ian…”
“Why did you lie to me?”
Unlike her previously hollow eyes, Bianca’s eyes now revealed the shape of a brilliant six-pointed star. An alien gaze that felt dazzling just to look at.
‘Magic Eye…?’
The red-haired vampire looked down at the man with arrogance.
“Kneel and bow your head.”
Leona Phirel, Queen of the Vampires and the True Ancestor, extended her foot toward the man.
“Lick my foot and accept my blood as a sign of submission. If you do, I swear upon my name that I will certainly release all the ‘humans.’”
Behind the queen, thousands of humans were held hostage. Their necks were gripped by vampires, and their eyes were filled with nothing but terror.
A threat holding thousands of lives as collateral. She had perfectly targeted the weakness of a man known for his strong sense of compassion.
One wrong move and thousands of lives would be lost in vain. Even in this extreme situation, the man raised his sword as he always did. His firm resolve to cut down every hardship and trial that came his way.
The queen sneered at the man and immediately gave the order.
“Hah, I commend you for your arrogance. Kill them all.”
The moment the queen’s command was delivered, the man swung his sword with unprecedented concentration. One blade, two cuts. A secret technique that could sever anything in a single strike.
“Hmph, a futile effort.”
But the opponent had no intention of simply watching. The queen lightly raised her hand and seized control of all the ‘blood’ in the vicinity. An authority that was hard to believe coming from a mere vampire.
“Blood Flow Explosion.”
No matter how powerful the defense, there was no way to stop an attack that erupted from inside the body. And for an ordinary human without any regenerative abilities, this attack was even more devastating.
“Die.”