Chapter 36
Chapter 36
-----------------------------------------------------------------
>Translator: Ryuma
>Chapter: 36
>Chapter Title: The Wyvern Ate Me
>-----------------------------------------------------------------
The wide-open door of the control room.
However, the demonic energy couldn't cross the threshold, as if blocked by a transparent wall.
It was due to the defensive space set by the artifact, but right now, Prezen couldn't have cared less about such trivial demonic energy.
Why was that?
"You mad bastard! What Demonic Realm...! Hunting Dog, what are you doing?! Your mission is to protect me!"
Prezen trembled in fear at the boy standing before him.
He was just a lump of flesh that wouldn't even live half as long as Prezen had.
The divine presence that pierced through the Demonic Realm was astonishing enough, but if Prezen revealed his true abilities, the boy would ultimately end up as a puddle of blood.
But fear was in the realm of instinct, not reason.
All he could do was seek a proxy to step forward in his place.
However.
"Hunting Dog! What the hell...!"
"Prezen, still hiding behind others as always, I see."
A voice came from behind him.
Prezen reflexively scanned the spot where the boy had been.
He didn't have the courage to turn around, but the boy's position was empty.
Gulp.
Prezen swallowed hard without realizing it and finally turned around.
'...!'
Prezen's mind seemed to freeze.
The Hunting Dog's eyes were wide open.
His mouth hung slightly ajar, lips twitching as if trying to say something, but a hand had pierced right through his chest.
The owner of that hand was none other than the boy.
"W-When... exactly?"
"What do you mean 'when'? When I decided to kill you? Or when I gripped the heart of this repulsive Nonmar hunting dog? Or... are you wondering when you'll die?"
If he had to put it into words, all of it was what he wondered.
A dangerous curiosity, perhaps. An emotion that rose unbidden, offering no benefit in knowing, yet sticky and impossible to shake off.
However, Prezen never asked any of it in the end.
Curiosity killed the cat, as they say. Fools met death through curiosity, but at least Prezen was a man whose survival instinct outweighed it.
"D-Don't come any closer. The Demonic Realm...! Right, the Demonic Realm! If you kill me, you won't be able to stop it. You might have endured the Demonic Realm somehow, but can your friends do the same?!"
It was a last-ditch struggle.
A clichéd hostage drama.
But clichés existed for good reason.
Any normal person would hesitate, even over the life of a stranger, if it was held hostage in their hands.
What was it called?
A flimsy sense of justice, perhaps.
Or a trivial guilt.
Even without dirtying their own hands, the moment their will intervened even slightly in another's life or death, they put on a pathetic act of being a saint.
Of course, it was a method that didn't work on the worn-out monsters of the underworld...
'A mere lump of flesh. That's all he is.'
The academy uniform the boy wore led Prezen to make this choice.
But.
Prezen soon realized his mistake from the boy's next words.
"So?"
"W-What?"
"So what? Fine, I'll wait. Let's watch together until the Demonic Realm swallows them all. It'll be fun to spectate. You're next after that."
He was no different.
This boy was no different from the twisted monsters of the underworld, the hardened humans there.
However, even after realizing that...
"I-I can stop the Demonic Realm, you know? In five minutes, your friends will all..."
"Die."
"Y-Yeah, exactly. So why...! Gah!"
Suddenly, a grip tightened around his hand at that moment.
Crunch.
A gruesome rupturing sound echoed.
"Arrrgh!"
A sharp scream filled the control room.
"M-My hand... My hand! Hah!"
Prezen clutched his crushed wrist and groaned, then gasped in realization of the emptiness.
The glove. No, the artifact.
The glove-shaped artifact that had encased his hand was gone.
His lifelong masterpiece, into which he had poured everything to restore it.
The sense of loss from having it stolen was so immense that it momentarily drowned out the pain in his wrist.
"You little shit...!"
Prezen glared at the boy with boiling rage.
However, that lasted only a moment.
"......"
Prezen abruptly clamped his mouth shut.
The boy was approaching the core while equipping the artifact on his hand. The moment their eyes met, Prezen's surging fury subsided.
Just from locking eyes.
'What kind of... gaze is that...'
It was like eyes holding a chillingly cold flame.
Did that even make sense? A chillingly cold flame. Flames were supposed to be hot by nature, and as their temperature dropped, they simply faded away.
Yet there was no other way to describe it.
A cool voice echoed in the ears of Prezen, who had forcibly regained his composure.
"Why had I forgotten about you? You were the one I wanted to kill even before the Young Patriarch."
Even a dullard held the title of Young Patriarch.
Even if he had learned forbidden magic, Decullan wouldn't kill their own Young Patriarch.
But Prezen was different.
The sin of teaching the Young Patriarch forbidden magic. The sin of inciting him to disrupt the family. And countless other atrocities Prezen had committed.
Surely, Decullan would kill Prezen.
But.
How could Aster yield Prezen to Decullan?
Thus, Aster had pursued Prezen.
"It's been about a hundred days of chasing you, hasn't it? Maybe even longer. Or perhaps shorter. Every moment from back then still lingers in fragments. Makes it hard to gauge the time."
Right after that, light poured from the hand placed on—no, from the artifact on—the core.
Sss...
It was the same phenomenon as when Prezen had corrupted the core, but the result was the opposite.
The core was gradually clearing up.
The demonic energy that had infested the core was being absorbed into the artifact.
'How is that bastard...!'
Prezen's eyes widened at the sight.
A Demonic Realm created by an artifact could not be dispelled once established.
However, the Tower of Trials had only partially undergone Demonic Realm transformation.
It was still at a reversible stage.
Which meant it was entirely possible to eliminate the Demonic Realm.
What shocked Prezen was how the boy knew how to use the artifact.
However, the boy didn't satisfy Prezen's curiosity.
To Prezen, it was just incomprehensible babble.
But to the boy—no, to Aster—it was a ritual of considerable importance.
His eyes calmly gazed at a point in the past, holding the purifying core.
"I didn't know it then, but you were skilled at running away too. I prided myself on catching anyone I wanted on the continent, yet you evaded me masterfully."
He had scoured the entire eastern continent following those traces.
He couldn't remember how many Black-White Slums, but he had turned over several dens where fugitives from the Black-White Slums gathered.
"You never showed up. No matter where I went, you didn't appear. I just got innocent blood on my hands."
He had killed so many.
Not all were people who deserved death in his lifetime of killings, but they were deserving enough, so it felt easier on his conscience.
From the Black-White Slums to the kingdom's back alleys. From the kingdom's back alleys to the empire's underworld.
He had madly torn through everywhere chasing Prezen's traces.
"Honestly speaking, our lives are lighter than a feather. But I couldn't contain my anger. Why was that? If you'd died on a mission, I might not have been so furious."
In any case, after chasing and chasing and chasing.
"The place you ultimately chose was the Demonic Realm."
Before he knew it, he had flowed into the Demonic Realm.
No matter how great a mage, surviving in the Demonic Realm without special equipment was impossible.
Demonic corruption that rotted the flesh, madness that sickened the mind.
These effects were unavoidable for humans, regardless of their realm's height.
But.
Aster—no, No. 1—had entered the Demonic Realm.
But.
"You weren't there. Not even in that place. I searched everywhere, over and over and over. How many sunrises and sunsets did I see? By then, I finally realized."
Ah, this was bait.
The clever rat had lured me into a death trap.
Even now, he wondered how he'd been fooled, the question still gnawed at him.
But whether he could accept it or not, what had happened was done.
Aster left the Demonic Realm as is.
Then he heard one piece of news.
"Number whatever... A Troubleshooter was waiting. Didn't have the guts to enter the Demonic Realm, so he waited for me to come out. Said he had news to deliver."
Aster took in the nearly purified core.
Its surface was so smooth it dazzlingly reflected the light, and its restored transparency held not a speck of dust.
Inside remained only the demonic energy that hadn't fully escaped.
But even that would be gone soon.
The artifact excelled far more at absorbing demonic energy than emitting it.
In any case.
Aster continued speaking.
Recalling that time.
"They said you were dead."
"......"
"Not by my hand, but caught by Decullan's minions. Tortured, you spilled all the forbidden magic secrets and artifact usage methods before croaking."
The emptiness back then.
It was indescribable.
He sat blankly before the Demonic Realm, staring up at the sky.
For days, nights.
Blue night skies turned to darkness, alternating between starlit nights and pitch-black ones shrouded in storm clouds.
Then, one day.
"A wyvern ate me."
It felt freeing.
That was when he escaped his blind thirst for revenge.
Why had he sought revenge? It started for his comrades, but at some point, it became just to vent his boiling emotions.
Was there anything more foolish?
It was futile behavior.
So, he abandoned revenge.
As if he had never even considered it from the beginning.
He erased from his mind the time spent on revenge.
So thoroughly that he wouldn't even recall such a time existed unless he forced it.
Not just the Young Patriarch, but even Decullan itself.
And Prezen as a person.
He wiped them all from his memory.
"In a way, that makes you the savior of the Young Patriarch's life, doesn't it? The world's affairs are truly unpredictable."
Aster let out a dry laugh and looked at Prezen.
His expression seemed somehow relieved, but Prezen's feelings upon facing that face were endlessly complicated.
The story didn't connect at all.
What was a wyvern? What was the Young Patriarch? Why did he want to kill him?
There had to be a misunderstanding. No, there had to be one.
"I-I don't know what you're talking about. I've never been involved with any Young Patriarch from any family, and..."
Prezen desperately worked his tongue.
'I have to survive. It's fine if I'm caught at the academy. The Assembly will surely rescue me. They definitely will.'
He wouldn't have missed the news that the Assembly had created a Demonic Realm with an artifact.
If they heard about this, they would surely come to save him.
He had to somehow escape this situation.
But his opponent was already beyond reason.
"Why was that? I'd clearly erased my revenge. Strangely, I kept mulling over the knowledge you left behind, over and over."
Step, step.
Calm footsteps approaching him.
Prezen made his final struggle. Or tried to.
He drew up the black magic power hidden tightly in his lower abdomen to use forbidden magic, but...
"Gah!"
An immense impact severed the flow.
"But today, the moment I faced you, I realized. It was for today. Yeah, that's what it was. Even this repulsive artifact—I can use it now."
Aster smiled down as he trampled Prezen like an insect.
"The knowledge you documented detailed exactly how my comrades fell to what tactics, and the agonies they died in. We have plenty of time. I'll recreate each one for you."
He hadn't forgotten his revenge.
He had merely buried it.
Buried it so deeply that even he himself couldn't find it, forgetting what he'd buried.
......The Tower of Trials, now completely free of demonic energy.
In its depths.
"Aaahhhhhh—"
A scream like one rising from the abyss echoed.
It was the incarnation of long-buried revenge.