Episode 58
“Are you suggesting a magical duel with me?”
“As heirs of the two towers, and given our current encounter, it wouldn’t hurt to gauge each other’s abilities.”
Dale asked, and Ray Eurys nodded in agreement.
“It’ll just be a trivial skirmish between kids,” Dale replied nonchalantly. After all, the person in front of him was just a child his age. There was no need to reveal his full hand.
“Do you really think so?” Ray Eurys asked, accelerating the two circles engraved in his heart.
“Two circles…?”
Dale swallowed hard as he watched the red magic power surge from the accelerating circles. He realized that the amount of magic being generated was beyond what a mere two-circle magician could produce.
Moreover, achieving two circles at such a young age was no small feat, even if it couldn’t quite compare to Dale’s own rapid growth.
Just as Dale wielded high-purity magic with icy coldness and refined darkness, Ray’s magic burned with a heat akin to magma.
A hellish blaze of absurdly pure red magic.
The number of circles is an undeniable indicator of a magician’s prowess. However, it doesn’t tell the whole story. Dale, a three-circle magician, and Sephia, a six-circle elf magician, were proof of that.
Instinctively, Dale could sense it. Even if Ray wasn’t as renowned as the “Black Prince” across the continent, the title of the Red Tower’s heir, son of the Blood Duke, was no empty boast.
It was a silence deliberately maintained from the shadows.
“Are you sure you don’t want to use your artifact, the ‘Shadow Cloak’?”
Ray asked, generating red magic from his two circles.
”…”
Dale was taken aback by Ray’s precise knowledge of his black artifact. He swallowed, feigning surprise.
“I happen to have a modest artifact myself,” Ray continued.
As the son of the Red Tower’s master, it wasn’t surprising for him to possess a couple of artifacts. Unlike Leonard Walter, Ray had the capability to control them.
The world is vast. In this wide world, there were those like Leonard Walter who saw their small pond as the entire universe, but the young magician before Dale was not one of them.
A ruthless meritocracy. Yet, ironically, that merit often stemmed from lineage and wealth in the world of magic.
“Let’s see how shiny that silver spoon of yours is,” Dale thought, letting his shadow cloak, disguised as a black overcoat, flutter. It was merely a reconnaissance mission.
“Though it may not compare to yours, Prince Dale,” Ray said, revealing his own red artifact, a cherished possession of Ray Eurys, son of the Blood Duke.
“Have you ever eaten a friend?”
It was then that Ray asked, catching Dale off guard with the unexpected question.
“I have,” Ray answered, recalling the hellish day.
“When you’re starving, with nothing to eat…”
Dozens of children were trapped in that lightless underground. Together, with no food or water.
“At first, we survived by catching and eating rats and insects.”
But one cannot live on rats and insects alone.
“So I ate.”
Ray Eurys spoke.
“The flesh, blood, and organs clinging to the bones, the marrow within, the brain and cerebrum inside the skull…”
Leaving nothing behind. Dale remained silent in the face of Ray Eurys’s confession.
“Humans are truly delicious and nutritious creatures.”
Only then did Dale realize that Ray had already revealed his artifact.
His mouth stretched wide, revealing rows of teeth lined up inside his jaw.
“The Dragon’s Jawbone.”
Dale finally swallowed hard.
“A bio-fusion artifact.”
The most powerful, terrifying, and irreversible form of artifact.
Dale knew it well. The magical tome rooted in his heart was, in a sense, a type of bio-fusion artifact.
“That’s the Blood Duke’s monster…”
Monster. Dale couldn’t help but chuckle at the thought.
“What’s so funny?”
“Nothing,” Dale replied calmly, controlling the shadows glowing at his feet.
“Aren’t you afraid?”
“Of what?” Dale asked in return.
”…”
Seeing this, Ray Eurys smiled.
“I think we might become ‘good friends.’”
Just then, a voice interrupted.
“What are you doing here?”
A voice that commanded the surroundings, as if to stop the reckless antics of mere children.
“Lord Black.”
“Father.”
Dale’s father, the continent’s greatest dark magician, stood there, black magic swirling at his feet.
Ray Eurys’s mouth had returned to its normal shape.
“I was just having a conversation with the young lord of the Saxon family,” Ray replied nonchalantly.
“As heirs to the Black and Red Towers, you see.”
”…”
Lord Black did not respond to that.
“The night is deep,” he finally said after a pause.
“Both of you should return for now.”
As if to say no further conflict would be tolerated.
That night, in the duke’s bedroom.
“Daddy! You’re back?”
Dale’s younger sister, Lize, ran to her father. She had grown into a little lady, freely expressing herself and moving energetically on her own two feet.
“Oh my, look at her,” their mother, Elena, smiled warmly at the sight.
“Yes, Lize,” Duke Saxon said, bending down to embrace his young daughter. Lize kissed her father’s cheek, and Lord Black smiled quietly at his daughter’s affection.
A beloved wife and daughter.
And a son with unparalleled talent.
He had parted ways with the old darkness of the Black Tower, striving to be a father unashamed before his son and wife.
That was the Saxon family, treasures more precious than anything Lord Black possessed.
Yet, to protect those treasures, he found himself bowing to the empire, complicit in their evil.
In the end, he was a weakling, forced to kneel before the empire and the Red Tower’s justice.
A coward, groveling before power to ensure his own survival.
“Elena.”
Thus, Lord Black spoke to his wife with a complex smile.
“Thank you.”
“Oh, you,” Elena laughed joyfully.
“Why so suddenly?”
”…”
Lord Black remained silent at Elena’s question, sipping the wine she poured and gazing out the window.
Into the unknowable depths of the night’s darkness, silently.
Some time later, at the upper levels of the Necropolis, the Black Tower.
When the man came to see him, Edgar, a high elder of the Black Tower and a seven-circle dark magician, was not surprised.
The third division commander of the Devil’s Legion, the Black Red Order. A rare friend of Lord Black, having trained and competed together since childhood in the Black Tower.
“You’ve come, Alan.”
He accepted it calmly, as if he had expected it. Casually speaking the name of Duke Saxon, a name not to be uttered lightly.
“Why did you betray me?”
Duke Saxon, Lord Black. And “Alan of Saxon” asked.
“You’ve changed.”
Edgar smiled bitterly at the question.
“You’ve grown weak.”
”…”
“You’ve forgotten the spirit of the Black Tower, ensnared by petty morals like the weight of life…”
He refused to become a monster of truth.
“That day, our Black Red Order’s experiment could have succeeded. No, it did succeed.”
Edgar continued, speaking of the true purpose of the Black Red Order, which the empire desperately tried to conceal.
“Beyond the veil of death… you touched the ‘truth’ that lies there.”
The truth the Black Tower had longed for and sought.
“Why did you return empty-handed from ‘that world’?”
Edgar asked, unable to comprehend.
“──Why did you give up reaching the realm of the ninth circle?”
A mysterious realm, untouched even by the five magicians at the pinnacle of the five-colored towers.
The experiment to reach the ninth circle.
The undeniable truth slipped from Edgar’s lips, and Duke Saxon’s expression wavered.
The true purpose of the Black Red Order, which the emperor desperately tried to hide. The real reason the empire waged a reckless war for continental unification.
An experiment to reach the realm of gods with a human body.
A ritual to become an artificial god, a demon god.
For that, the two towers of power and truth joined hands.
“Why did you give up becoming a god?”
The Black Duke did not respond to the question.
“So, you betrayed me, my old friend?”
After a long silence, the Black Duke finally spoke.
“Thanks to you, I’ve watched the Black Tower grow weaker and more decrepit by the day.”
Edgar replied coldly, “All that’s left are cowards too afraid to stain their hands with blood, and a tower whose spirit has long since died. The pathetic and laughable figure of the Black Tower’s master, trembling at the mere weight of life!”
“I don’t want to kill you,” Alan responded to Edgar’s words.
“No, you will end up killing me,” Edgar said.
A seventh-circle mage, just below the pinnacle reached by only a handful across the continent.
“And I hope you return to being the monster you once were.”
”…”
“What could possibly bring you back to that monstrous state?”
The monster of those days.
“Could the grief of losing your family turn you into a monster again?”
At Edgar’s question, all emotion drained from Alan’s face. A vortex of pitch-black magic began to swirl at his feet.
“Ah, it seems I’ve struck a nerve,” Edgar finally smiled, standing before the ‘monster of those days’ he remembered.
“I won’t let that happen.”
“No, it will happen,” Edgar continued, the seventh-circle dark mage.
“By now, they should have reached your castle.”
”…!”
The color drained from the Black Duke’s face as he thought of his wife, Elena, his daughter, Lize, and his proud son, Dale.
“And no matter how powerful an eighth-circle dark mage you are, I can at least hold you back for a while.”
“That won’t happen.”
The master of the Black Tower, one of the five mages at the pinnacle of the Five Towers, was unfolding the ‘World of Thought.’
The Black Duke’s world.
Flap!
─ Caw! Caw!
Behind the Black Duke, several birds took flight, their wings beating the air. They were jet-black and ominous ravens, their dark feathers scattering chaotically.