Chapter 7
Chapter 7:
"Anti-Gravity Field."
Violet magical energy rippled across the floor. Thud—at the same moment, Leon stomped the ground once with his foot.
"…!!"
"No—!"
"What is this…."
Boom—
The gravity vanished, and every Dark Sorcerer who had lost their legs was flung upward into the air at once.
Unable to keep their balance, they had no choice but to spin helplessly in midair. Naturally, concentrating enough to cast sorcery was impossible, and most of them still hadn't recovered from the agony of having their legs severed.
"Hero…!!!"
The old woman screamed, veins bulging. But that cry did not reach Leon's heart.
"That's right—I'm the Hero. And that's—"
Sword, magic, divine power. Viewed separately in each discipline, Leon had yet to reach the apex—but wielding all 3 at a master level was a feat only he could demonstrate anywhere on the continent.
Hero—that's what a Hero is. A Hero who works miracles and strikes down evil.
"—the reason you die."
Fft—his sword moved.
Crack-crack-crack-crack-crack—
A single line was drawn through the air, yet countless slashes rained down upon the bodies of the Dark Sorcerers.
Among them were some who were shredded in real time like worn rags, losing all coherent form.
The only ones left untouched were the old woman and the 2 who had been chosen by sheer luck. It didn't take long for the rest of the Dark Sorcerers to stop having ever been human.
"Anti-Gravity Field—release."
Leon sheathed his sword and murmured, the spell dissolved, and the corpses rained down to the floor in a cascade. The blood and chunks of flesh falling together felt like a scene from a monsoon where rain and hail fall at once.
Leon made no move to dodge the blood spattering toward him. Instead he walked forward into it head-on, leaving footprints stained entirely red.
"How dare you—"
"Shut up."
Leon kicked the jaw of the old woman who was glaring at him with furious, bulging eyes. The old woman, who had been on the verge of losing consciousness, was once again prevented from doing so by the force of Divine Power and came back to her senses.
"…Heh heh heh—how amusing. The plan has already been set in motion."
She then looked up at Leon and smiled as if amused. When she bared her entirely crooked teeth and showed her grotesque face, Lucy made a gagging sound and turned away.
"That wh—! I, because of women like you I've had to—!"
***
The Dark Sorcerer Guild, Black Night. The Seven Seats of the Seven Sorcerers.
Necromancer Karanz.
He had been born with a hideous face by nature. Malformed teeth, bulging eyes, skin that looked as if it had melted away.
Merely by being born, he had earned his father's contempt and the pointed fingers of the villagers.
'Despite my efforts to win their favor, they never—'
"Don't start reminiscing, you piece of trash."
"Gack!"
Leon stood with 1 foot planted on Karanz's back as he writhed on the floor. The other surviving Dark Sorcerers had seemingly already lost the will to resist—they were simply trembling and staring at him, wetting themselves.
"Heh heh heh… a binding seal has been placed regardless. It means there's no information you can extract from those men!"
"Oh, is that so?"
"…!"
Having heard Karanz's words, Leon cut the throats of the now-useless 2 without hesitation. Their heads and bodies parted, and they crumpled just as they were—faces frozen in terror—without even registering that they had been cut.
"Not even a moment of hesitation…!"
"Do you hesitate when you're swatting a cockroach?"
Leon looked down at Karanz with the expression of someone wondering what to do with him. Even looking at him again, that grotesquely aged face had a persistent power to stoke his anger.
"…Should I try torturing him?"
Now that the casters were gone, Lucy—naturally freed from her restraints—approached his side. The shocking slaughter had just taken place, but to her credit as someone from the back alleys, she had regained her composure quickly.
"No—there's a binding seal on him anyway. I doubt this one is any different. It usually works that way."
"You know your stuff! Then just kill me!"
"I'd rather not."
"Gyaaargh…!!"
Heat rose from the sole of Leon's shoe as it pressed down on Karanz's back, venting steam. It was a technique that generated heat by colliding mana and Aura—one of several grappling arts he had devised himself.
"Then… what about using the spell you used on the man called Vincent to turn him into a confessional puppet?"
"That's a bit difficult too—it wasn't designed for that purpose to begin with, and more fundamentally, it doesn't actually break the binding seal."
"…So we're stuck either way."
While the 2 were talking, Karanz had been quietly gripping his staff and calculating a sorcery formula in his mind.
A scene drenched in blood and corpses, filled with grief and pain—for a Dark Sorcerer like him, this was a location strewn with the finest of materials.
'You let your guard down, Hero…! However low-ranked I may be, I am a sorcerer of the Seven Seats. I won't go down this easily…!'
"Chorus of Flesh…!!!!"
"…Hero!"
The blood splattered all across the floor began to bubble and churn. At the same time, the shredded corpses clumped together in grotesque formations and finally swirled in a torrent centered on the bodies of the 2 dead men.
"I am… one of the Seven Sorcerers—Necromancer Karanz…!!"
"Tsk—I suppose I have no choice but to use that method."
—Yet Leon, as if it didn't matter what sorcery he used, simply kept turning over how to extract information and lightly snapped his fingers.
The blood and flesh that had been swirling around the 2 corpses lost all momentum and collapsed back to the floor.
"What…?"
Like a gust of wind that stops dead in an instant.
"That's why sorcery is what it is—you should have learned proper dark magic."
Then, from somewhere near Leon's chest, a brilliantly blazing golden flame flowed out and rose into the air, taking the shape of a sphere. The warm light that filled the vast cavern gave the illusion that a small sun had manifested in this place.
"Gyaaaaaaaargh—!!!!!"
That alone was enough to make Karanz writhe in agony as if he were dying.
"What is this…."
"It's just a mass of Divine Power. Don't bother trying to understand it."
Lucy stared at it in a brief daze, captivated, then turned to look at Leon. Leon glanced at the wavering flame with an expression suggesting something displeased him, then reached down and grabbed Karanz by the scruff of the neck as he crawled across the floor like a worm.
Leon was the Hero—but he didn't particularly like the Goddess. When he had first been chosen as Hero and the party was being formed, he had felt warmly toward her.
Because she had chosen him as Hero. Because he had thought that perhaps the Goddess was the one who had brought him from a dull reality into a romance-filled fantasy.
But that feeling changed as he traveled the Battlefront and witnessed the conduct of the Holy Kingdom.
Was the Goddess truly a god?
'Then why does she fatten the bellies of swine while turning her eyes away from those dying in the cold wind?'
Because of that, from a certain point on, he was reluctant to use Divine Power for anything beyond simple Healing Holy Arts.
It wasn't that he lacked the ability—he simply didn't want to. He had wanted to save the world using only his own inherent power, the power of a human—Aura and magic.
'…But I can't let my own desires ruin things.'
Yet the limitations of a Hero—the responsibility of having to save more lives—was the obstacle that stood in the way of that wish.
"Nnngh…!"
Just as the Divine Sun floated in the air, a brilliantly blazing flame spread from Leon's palm as it gripped Karanz by the scruff.
Soon Karanz's entire body was enveloped in the wavering flames and radiating white light.
"Aren't you burning yourself?"
"This doesn't burn people."
"Then what does it burn?"
"Demonic energy."
A power solely for exterminating the Demon Race.
The Divine Bonfire. A high-level Holy Art—a kind of divine authority—that Leon had created himself.
"Ah~ So you're using it to burn away the binding seal?"
He shook his head at Lucy's guess, as if to say unfortunately not. She responded to his reaction with an expression of even greater curiosity.
"I'm doing something beyond that."
"Beyond?"
"Existence Laundering."
One of the techniques used with the Divine Bonfire was the very thing Karanz was experiencing right now—Existence Laundering.
Encounters with Dark Sorcerers allied with the Demon Race had been fairly frequent. They were the type who interfered at every turn and sang praises of the Demon Race's dominion.
'They were a bit of a nuisance when I was less powerful.'
In truth, he had been struck by their attacks and hovered near death on more than one occasion. …Of course, if Airen had properly committed to combat, that would never have happened.
Either way, facing Dark Sorcerers like them had given rise to a question. What would happen if he didn't stop at burning away all the demonic energy they possessed, but went further and burned away everything—the connections they had with the Demon Race, and even the records that remained in their souls?
"Ugh…."
The body of Karanz, still moving within the flames, went limp and slack.
"Hm?! Isn't that bad?"
"No—the truly important part is now."
Leon quickly withdrew his hand, brought both hands together in prayer, and closed his eyes. Even Lucy could immediately sense the depth of concentration he was pouring into whatever he was doing.
What he was concentrating on gathering was ash. The ash that had scattered through the air as it burned away everything that was Karanz through the Existence Laundering.
When everything a Dark Sorcerer had was burned away, only a hollow shell remained—one with all memory and selfhood gone. Just as he was beginning to think the effort yielded little return for the power expended, he had happened to encounter a Sword Master on the Battlefront who said something to him.
Why not try gathering the remnants left behind after the burning?
'And that produced a rather interesting result.'
The ash was the very existence of the Dark Sorcerer—having undergone a kind of purification. By carefully gathering and shaping it, Leon could obtain fragmented pieces of memory.
It was a useful technique against Dark Sorcerers who were so fond of placing binding seals on their memories and speech.
"Wow…."
As Leon layered concentration upon concentration, the Divine Sun that had been illuminating the cavern disappeared, and a small bead shimmering in pure white dropped down.
He picked it up immediately and—
"Hmm?"
Placed it in Lucy's mouth.
He had no desire to read even a fragment of the memories of vermin like a Dark Sorcerer.
"Mmph! Mm… hm?!"
He held her mouth shut so she couldn't spit it out, and after a moment Lucy jolted in shock and looked at Leon with trembling eyes.
"…What is it?"
"Hero—that, um."
Having heard Lucy's explanation, Leon—left the people held captive in the cavern in Lucy's care and walked out of it wearing an expression like a demon possessed.
***
Among the Seven Sorcerers of the Black Night Guild, there was an atmosphere of mutual wariness. Comrades, yes—but simultaneously rivals, each striving to claim a larger share than the others.
Among them, Karanz the Necromancer—who had barely scraped into the lowest seat—had been growing increasingly anxious ever since the Hero returned to the Capital City.
He had heard the news that the forces of the Demon Race led by the Demon King had momentarily faltered.
From his position as a servant of the Demon Race, that was hardly welcome news to begin with—and on top of that, he had heard rumors that the other members of the Seven Sorcerers were seizing this lull to curry favor with the higher-ranking demons through their own ventures.
And so Karanz steeled his resolve to carry out a plan he had been developing for some time.
Timed precisely to the Capital City's festival.
Summon the Demon Race. Let those demons carry out a massacre. Then use the vengeful spirits and bodies of the massacred, as well as those very demons, as offerings to summon more demons.
From which higher-ranking demons would emerge.
Repeating this cycle to continuously summon greater and greater entities.
The Blood Ring. A sorcery Karanz had obtained from a gemstone that transmitted knowledge of the demon realm—at the cost of thousands sacrificed as offerings.
The conditions required to activate it were extraordinarily demanding, but if properly triggered, it was a sorcery capable of bringing about nothing short of catastrophe.
The most difficult of those conditions to prepare was an object that had been steeped in the Hero's divine energy for a long period—yet wasn't that exactly what the infiltrator Vincent, sent in to gather information on the Hero, had gone ahead and secured and sent over?
As Karanz had heard it, the party's Divine Bow user, Serin, was such an airhead that when asked, she had simply handed over a bracelet she herself had once given to the Hero.
The plan had moved forward without a hitch.
The 1 thing he was worried about was the first or second summoned demon being eliminated too quickly. After all, for the process of ascending to ever-greater entities to continue, the massacre had to take place without fail.
In the Capital City—particularly during the festival period—troops would certainly be concentrated there.
And the one solving that particular problem was the Scales of Ash's Noble District Branch. The nobles, each for their own separate reasons, had dispersed the forces and arranged for the Sword Masters to be drawn away from the festival grounds.
To that extent, agents of the Dark Sorcerers had already been embedded throughout the Empire's upper leadership.
The final variable was the Hero. And so Karanz had completed all preparations for the sorcery's activation and simply waited for the Hero's whereabouts to be confirmed.
Then, just before death, he activated the Blood Ring—deciding he had no other choice.
…That was the full account as heard through Lucy's mouth.
At the break of dawn, Leon was cutting through the air, himself become a meteor shower.
'Damn it all…!'
Praying with everything he had that he was not too late.