The Night That Shattered Everything
The incident of that day struck without warning amid the most ordinary of days. For the first time in a while, his father came home early, and the whole family shared a warm dinner together. Afterward, they watched TV while snacking on fruit and chatting quietly. When it passed ten o'clock, his mother would gently scold him with a smile whenever he fought to keep his drooping eyelids open, telling him to go to bed. He would fall asleep to the steady rhythm of his father's hand patting his back. Those peaceful, ordinary memories of a happy family.
"Aaaaargh!"
The incident came that very night. He woke with a scream as a searing pain suddenly blazed behind his eyes. Clutching his face with both hands, he thrashed on the bed, tears and snot streaming down his cheeks. The boy opened his eyes, overwhelmed by the agony, and saw something he had never seen before—trails of light glowing brilliantly even in the pitch-black dawn.
"Chris!"
His parents, jolted awake by their son's screams, rushed to his room in a panic. But the boy had no time to acknowledge them. Desperate to escape the pain, he instinctively waved his hand toward the shimmering lights before him.
Whoosh!
The desperate gesture was taken as an invitation to play. The lights dodged his flailing hands and drifted closer to his eyes. The awakening of an ebon inevitably triggered a rampage. Given the boy's talent for mana, the power was at least at the expert level. There was no way a child who had never studied magic could control it.
The mana gathered around him in ever-greater numbers, pressing down as if to crush everything nearby. Windows shattered. The bed collapsed. The floor shook as though an earthquake had struck. Cracks spiderwebbed across the ceiling, and with the pillars splitting apart, the boy's house came crashing down.
His life ended completely that day.
The chaos was eventually quelled by the security forces who responded to the disturbance. After being diagnosed with an ebon awakening and fitted with mana restriction cuffs and other safety measures, he was returned to his family. But his daily life changed completely afterward.
"……"
The incident hadn't stopped at merely destroying his house. The damage spread to the neighbors, leaving his family buried in debt. His father took on extra work until dawn to repay it, and his mother started working as well. They moved into a cramped single room too small for three people, and the boy naturally found himself alone at home more often than not.
That part was bearable. What truly tormented him was the guilt of having driven his parents to such hardship, and the subtle resentment and fear that began to show in their eyes—eyes that had once held nothing but love for him.
'I ruined everything.'
That guilt dragged the boy's life deeper into despair. The happy dreams he once had when he closed his eyes turned into nightmares. Every voice he heard seemed to condemn him. To avoid those glances, to escape those accusations, the boy locked himself away after that day, pulling the blanket over his head and squeezing his eyes shut. Even with the cuffs on, he wanted to get away from the lights that still flickered before him.
And what finally broke him happened several months later.
While he lay buried under the thick blanket, wasting away another meaningless day, a commotion at the front door made him poke his head out. What he saw were debt collectors—and his mother kneeling before them. As a terrifying man raised his hand to strike her, the boy threw off the blanket and stumbled out in a panic.
His legs trembled from lack of use, but he forced himself between his mother and the man, hurling his mana-restricting bracelet at him.
"Get away from my mom!"
Responding to the boy's will, the lights shot toward the man. The invisible force sent him flying backward, rolling across the floor. When the boy turned to his mother, gasping for breath, she slapped him hard across the face.
"……"
Stunned by the burning pain, the boy looked up at her. Tears streamed down her face as she glared at him with unrestrained resentment and fury.
"I told you never to use that power again! Did you think my words were a joke?"
"……"
"Why are you doing this to me?! Wasn't destroying our home enough? If you can't do anything right, then just stay still and don't cause more trouble!"
Years of pent-up frustration finally erupted. Watching his mother collapse to the floor and sob, the boy's heart shattered completely.
"……"
When he came to his senses, he was already running through the streets. He didn't even bother wiping the tears from his eyes as he hid in a deserted back alley. Eventually, his legs gave out and he slumped to the ground. He remained there for days, motionless, like a corpse abandoned on the street.
"Young man. Your eyes are filled with despair."
That was when the boy first met him. The man appeared before the boy who had been waiting only for death. In stark contrast to the boy's emaciated frame, the stranger was plump and well-fed. Without hesitation, he grabbed the boy's filthy arm and took him home. He forced the boy to bathe, changed him into new clothes, and made him eat despite his days of starvation, forcibly keeping alive a life the boy had already given up on. He offered the boy—abandoned even by his parents—unconditional care and affection.
"Your eyes were bad, weren't they? An ebon rampage. The visual information must have been amplified, so you've been suffering from terrible headaches all this time."
Eventually, moved by the man's devotion, the boy slowly opened his heart and told him everything about his past. The man calmly placed a choke-type magic tool he had obtained somewhere around the boy's neck.
"I won't offer false comfort. Young man, what happened was clearly your fault."
Of course, parents abandoning their child first was also terribly wrong. But it was an undeniable fact that the boy had created the catalyst—whether intentionally or by mistake.
"You need to change. First, make it your goal to master that ebon completely. Once you can control it perfectly, go to your parents and apologize sincerely."
"……"
"You're still far too young to give up on life. Mistakes can be undone. Take responsibility for what you've done. When the time comes, I'll go with you and bow my head to your parents as well."
An adult's responsibility was to clean up the mistakes of a child whose life was still immature. Offering to become the boy's guardian in place of the parents who had turned away, the man struck a dramatic pose with a melancholic expression.
"No matter how dark the road ahead seems, don't lose your way. Young man, even in the pitch-black night sky over this city, there are stars that shine brightly."
I will be your new guide.
Those words became a great comfort to the boy who had lost everything. Even now, with his emotions worn thin, he followed and relied on the man's words absolutely.
"……"
After the brief flashback, the boy quietly opened his eyes. The lights that had once flickered endlessly before him were gone. It felt as though he had returned to the time before his ebon had awakened. In that pitch-black darkness, a man's life began replaying in the boy's mind like a film.
It was the life of the man who had saved him. A man who had fought endlessly against hopeless circumstances, achieved his dream, only to be crushed by cruel reality and cry out to God for salvation. After hearing an unknown voice, he was reborn and began living each day in a completely different manner than before. It was the image of the lively, unnecessarily flashy professor the boy knew so well.
That was probably the ideal professor the man had always wanted to be. The salvation that came from the church had clearly changed him. In the church, the boy's parents were praying. After he left, they had regretted what happened and sat collapsed in front of the church. The professor had listened to their story, empathized deeply, and offered comfort. Then he had come to the back alleys to find the boy who had been waiting to die on the streets.
The man's approach had been intentional from the start. He had sought the boy out with a purpose. And now, the boy was watching the man's schemes unfold in real time.
He realized something. This was something the man was deliberately showing him.
"Now, Chris. My star. Shine for me and light up the night sky."
He had been used. Tears welled in the boy's eyes at the realization. Then he thought quietly.
If that's what you want, then just as you became the star of my life, I will light the way for you as well.
The Inner World of the Undead King. One of its Divine Rules was to forcibly impose faith on others. Having already been compelled to believe in Professor Repli over a long period of time, the boy—Chris—silently nodded at the man's words. In his memories, he looked at Professor Repli, who smiled back at him.
＊ ＊ ＊
Whoosh!
Explosive flames engulfed a wide area all at once. Whoosh!
Piercing through those flames came a single beam of light. A laser that found the weakest point in Aaron Dice's spell and shot straight forward struck the ground, flipping the earth over.
He's troublesome.
Aaron frowned as he watched Chris approach without a care. Throughout the entire fight, Chris had never targeted him once. His focus had always been on Togun and Jeon Raydel lying behind Aaron. By forcing Aaron to protect them from death, Chris had been constantly applying pressure.
Attacks came in rapid succession—so fast that even a moment's distraction would mean missing them. Aaron calculated his spells, trying to figure out how to turn the situation around.
"……"
But every move he made, every flow of mana he generated, was reflected in Chris's Eye that Sees Mana. As if targeting Aaron's magic, Chris scattered light into the air.
Bang bang bang bang!
The light Chris fired exploded in midair like fireworks, raining down on the ground like a shower. Aaron wrapped his flames around himself like a curtain, devouring every particle of light and turning the space between them crimson.
Where is he?
With his vision blocked, Chris would surely follow up with another attack. Just as Aaron expected, a single laser shot through the flames toward his side. Its target was Togun Masao. The moment Aaron swung his flames to block it, he felt an inexplicable sense of wrongness.
Whoosh!
The source of that wrongness revealed itself immediately. The light trail that vanished far too easily against the flames—it was an illusion created by refracting light. While the mirage deceived Aaron's eyes by shooting in the wrong direction, a laser fired from the opposite angle passed him and flew toward Jeon Raydel.
Damn it!
He had to stop it. Just as Aaron thought this and frantically recalculated his flame spell, a voice rang out.
"What's all this commotion?"
A whirlwind rose sharply along the reversed airflow, forcibly twisting the light's trajectory. Emerging from behind it was a blonde woman.
"I don't know what's going on, but it looks like we need to protect these juniors, right?"
Baraki Nepiri and Silvia Cristel. Aaron let out a deep sigh of relief as he looked at his teammates who had finally arrived, following after Jeon. Keeping his eyes on Chris, whose expression had slightly soured at the blocked attack, Aaron spoke.
"Take the juniors and fall back."
The moment Aaron finished speaking, a barrage of beams fired by Chris came flying in.
"Not a chance!"
With Silvia and Baraki's arrival, Aaron's mind felt lighter. Leaving the protection of the juniors to them, he focused entirely on his fight with Chris. Whoosh!
Spreading his flames like wings, Aaron charged at Chris for the first time since the battle began.