Chapter 3

Behind the guards clad in blood-soaked plate armor, a massive lightning bolt suddenly crashed down.

Even though the lightning burst forth from behind, its light was so intense that it momentarily blinded the eyes of the guards facing forward.

“…”

Standing at the very rear of the formation, giving his final speech, Guard Captain Hans, with a dazed expression, gazed at the spot where the lightning had struck, his vision slowly returning.

There stood the white-haired boy to whom he had given a piece of bread.

Clad in rags that barely qualified as clothing, the boy had withstood a lightning strike with his bare body and remained, impossibly, intact.

…No, more than merely intact.

A blue light emanated from every inch of his being.

With each step he took, small bolts of lightning erupted, scorching the ground beneath his feet.

“Excuse me, please.”

In a calm, even voice, the boy strolled slowly towards the heart of the battlefield.

Not a single guardsman dared to even contemplate blocking his path.

His expression was serene, frigid, like a sage who understood all things.

The very air around him roiled with each of his small, deliberate steps. The dark clouds overhead churned, threatening to unleash another barrage of lightning.

“It’s something I’ve wanted to try for a while now, you see.”

The boy uttered words that were incomprehensible to Hans, or any of the other guardsmen, as he continued his stately march towards the fray.

“…Are you a mage?”

Guard Captain Hans stammered, his face a mask of bewilderment as he stared blankly at the boy’s retreating figure.

“Well, for the moment, yes.”

The boy casually smoothed down his hair, which was constantly rising and crackling with energy, and responded without concern.

“What are you? There shouldn’t be a mage stationed in this small town.”

The demon, standing amidst the monstrous aberrations, slowly emerged from the mass of grotesque flesh and addressed the boy.

His skin a sickly blend of green and red, the demon couldn’t conceal his obvious bewilderment.

“Where did you come from…? There are still days left until reinforcements arrive.”

He was right. Until just an hour or two ago, this town had been without a mage.

“That I also wonder about. Waking up just now, it seems this is the city?”

The boy spoke in a cold, clipped tone, as if he had no intention of explaining himself in detail.

“A joke? Not a particularly amusing one.”

“…I was answering as truthfully as I could, in my own way.”

The demon gave up on trying to extract information from the boy through conversation. He didn’t seem to have any intention of engaging in a proper dialogue.

Instead, the demon began to observe the boy quietly.

The boy was young. To all appearances, he seemed to be only sixteen or seventeen years old.

‘Being so young, he couldn’t have received proper training at a magic tower. At that age, he would barely be at the apprentice level… Add to that his appearance, he must be one of the street urchins.’

As far as he knew, such vagrants were mostly creatures of low intelligence, incapable of learning even a single proper letter, let alone magic.

“…Strange.”

And yet, the boy unmistakably possessed the air of a mage who commanded lightning.

An unsettling feeling, the cause unknown, flowed along the demon’s crimson skin.

The demon began to examine the amount of magical power within the boy’s body with his unique eyes, capable of discerning the target’s mana. He had to discover the nature of this unease.

‘Not a mage of particularly high caliber…’

The amount of magical power the boy held within him was only at the level of a mid-tier mage of the 4th Circle.

Considering his age and social standing, it was impressive, but still not enough to single-handedly contend with himself and his army of aberrations.

‘…However.’

*BANG!*

Finally, a gigantic lightning bolt descended from the dark clouds in the sky, striking the ground next to the boy.

A billion volts of energy drew lines between ionized pockets of the atmosphere, creating a massive crater in the earth covered in flesh and blood.

The lightning struck mere inches from the boy, yet he betrayed no surprise.

His blue eyes held an inexplicable madness and obsession, a vow that the demon before him would not live to see another dawn.

‘For the amount of mana he possesses, the completion of that spell is absurdly high. Add to that a tenacity far beyond his years. He’s far from your average fourth-circle mage, something is wrong here.’

The demon, unnerved by this anomaly that defied all the data he’d accumulated, took a deep, bracing breath and carefully adjusted his stance.

“Let’s, perhaps, test the waters.”

The demon swept his gaze over the horde of mutants surrounding him, then raised a finger towards the lone, white-haired boy.

“Help m….”

“Mom! Mo-om! Mommmmy!”

“Estella, watch over me and bring these souls to the light….”

“Kill. Kill them. Kill. Kill. Kill me…!”

The mutants surged towards the boy, their legs kicking the ground with frenzied, uncertain force.

Each one had lost all semblance of human form.

One had a sharp blade where his arm used to be , another’s head was compressed as if by a hydraulic press, stretching his face horizontally, and yet another had lost all the bones supporting his body, transformed into a mass of living flesh.

They all retained a faint flicker of consciousness.

Cunning demons, when they captured sentient beings like humans or elves to turn them into mutants, deliberately refrained from completely extinguishing their minds.

They knew all too well that the mutants’ screams instilled hesitation in the hearts of the warriors who faced them.

The boy’s frigid face tightened with a grimace. A primal disgust, inherent to all humans, rose from the depths of his being.

*Swish…*!

The boy carefully raised his left arm, intending to grant them a painless end.

A thin, sharp flash descended upon the battlefield, and the light incinerated every mutant charging towards the boy, turning them into a pile of pure white ashes.

“Beyond illogical.”

The demon was certain, watching his meticulously crafted chimeras turn to ash with a single strike.

“…No matter how I ponder it, I can only conclude you’re concealing your mana.”

The magic the boy displayed possessed a precision and power that defied belief for a supposed Fourth Circle mid-level mage.

Adding to that, the boy now stared at the demon with an intense gaze, as if absolutely certain of victory.

The boy’s eyes held a force that surpassed mere fighting spirit.

A frenzied obsession and a revulsion rising from deep within were chaotically mixed together.

‘Most young mages, when faced with demons and chimeras, are seized by fear. But that look… it resembles the eyes of a predator stalking its prey.’

Dangerous.

Through careful observation and a touch of instinct, the demon realized that this boy before him was not someone he could handle with his own abilities alone.

“There’s no point in lingering. I must retreat.”

The demon swiftly chose flight. No demon in this world was foolish enough to provoke a being whose strength was impossible to gauge.

Having made his decision, he spread the wings concealed behind his back. As he rose into the air, he gestured, and the countless chimeras that had arrived on this battlefield with him surged towards the boy as one.

Losing his entire army in this manner was somewhat regrettable, but it was a hundred times preferable to losing his life.

Chimeras could be created anytime, after all.

Chimeras of all sorts: a hybrid of pig and deer with eight legs, a fusion of human and dwarf with four eyes. Each chimera was unique in its appearance, but all were covered head-to-toe in virulent toxins.

The sharply honed hooves of the deer contained a potent acidic venom that melted skin on contact, the thick tendons of the dwarf held a gas that paralyzed the body upon inhalation, and the spilled entrails of the human released a noisome waste with a stench too vile for words.

The unidentifiable masses of flesh tripped, stumbled, crushed one another, and tumbled chaotically as they charged the boy. It was like a tidal wave of grotesque flesh.

The boy…

…stood still before the monstrous wave of flesh and lightly flicked his fingers.

*Thwack.*

That was the only sound those standing on the battlefield could hear.

Immediately after.

An overwhelming flash of light, incomparable to the lightning that had struck near the boy moments before, descended upon the battlefield.

A single stream of electricity emitted from the boy’s fingertips met the tsunami of grotesque flesh and, scattering in every direction, began to incinerate everything in its path.

A demon, having risen into the air to escape the battlefield, couldn’t even mount a defense, swallowed whole by the blinding white light, vanishing without a trace.

The masses of flesh surging towards the boy were likewise engulfed in immense electrical energy, transforming into nothing more than pale-white ash in an instant.

In a fraction of a moment, the tens of thousands of mounds of flesh that had overrun the battlefield were cleanly erased.

As if on cue, the sky, choked with dark storm clouds, cracked open, allowing a faint ray of sunlight to squeeze through.

The enormous quantity of ash created by the incineration of thousands of tons of flesh mingled with the mist, painting the battlefield a stark white.

Most of the guards standing on the battlefield were temporarily blinded and deafened by the immense shockwave.

It would be a long while before their senses returned.

“…”

After what felt like an eternity, the guards, their vision finally recovered, surveyed the silent battlefield with disbelief, struggling to accept what they were seeing as reality.

The crimson battlefield had, in a single flash of light, been transformed into a canvas of white.

Upon that field stood only a single boy, radiating electricity from his entire body.

Blood, flesh, all traces of the battle were cleanly gone, leaving behind only a vast wilderness and scorched earth, white as bone.

The boy, like an angel descended from the heavens, left the white battlefield behind and began walking slowly towards the city’s guards, his steps measured and noble.

“…Estella, Estella has saved us!”

Seeing the boy’s figure, a guard with a broken leg cried out, his voice filled with awe.

The other guards, their faces slack with bewilderment, were staring blankly at the pure white battlefield. Unconsciously, they too began offering prayers of gratitude to the god they believed in.

They seemed to consider the boy an apostle sent by the divine.

And it wasn’t that strange, really.

Though spoken with a touch of jest, the boy who’d introduced himself as having “just been born in the city,” had suddenly appeared like a savior, rescuing the city in its hour of peril.

The fatigue of battle, the relief of survival, and the exhilarating fact that those damned demonic creatures had been vanquished all swirled chaotically in their minds. Mistaking the boy for a divine emissary was more than understandable.

“…Well, offering thanks to the gods is fine and all. But shouldn’t you be thanking *me* first, perhaps?”

“Ah, ah, magician-sama, my deepest apologies! I was simply too overwhelmed!”

The guard who had first offered thanks to his god, seemingly snapping back to his senses, bowed deeply to the boy.

“There must be a reason, I suppose. For a magician of your caliber to be wandering around a backwater city like Straderos, dressed like a vagrant.”

“…”

The boy couldn’t exactly respond with, “I just started as a pauper to boost my crit chance and this whole mess happened,” so he maintained a meaningful silence.

“I won’t pry further. I cannot bring trouble to the hero who saved our city. Though we have little, we will treat you to the finest food we have. Please, come inside the fortress.”

“That’s right! We would have never tasted such delicacies again if it weren’t for you, magician-sama! Eat your fill and put some meat on those skinny bones!”

“Yes! Thanks to you, we live to see another day! While you’re at it, why not crush all the demonic scum lurking around this area!”

The guards raised their splinted arms high, offering the boy a boisterous welcome.

The boy, feeling a satisfaction that wasn’t entirely unpleasant, returned a faint smile to their cheerful expressions across his otherwise cold features.

“Let’s go inside! Though we may not have much left, there’s still some ale for the magician…”

The lieutenant beside Hans approached the boy with a bright smile. The boy, smiling even brighter, reached out to take his hand…

Thud.

“…?”

“Magician?”

The boy’s body slumped forward, collapsing without strength.

Five minutes was a far shorter time than the boy had imagined.

* * *

Inside the deep, dark cave where blood and flesh dripped to the floor, the anguished cries of those not yet fully transformed into aberrations echoed.

And deeper still, within the humid, filthy heart of the cave, sat a demon with long horns and jet-black skin.

The chair he occupied was a grotesque sculpture, pieced together from so many scraps of skin that one could no longer discern who they once belonged to.

“Impressive.”

Grand Duke Maltiel, the highest-ranking demon with skin like polished obsidian, muttered his admiration as he watched the white-haired boy and the enormous power he unleashed on a small, magically projected screen.

“A mage of considerable skill.”

“We didn’t anticipate such a magician existing in that city. It seems reinforcements have arrived.”

The two demons flanking Grand Duke Maltiel, their bodies bowed in deference, each added a comment as they observed the screen.

“And so young too. Leaving a whelp like that unchecked will surely become a major obstacle for us down the line.”

Maltiel, with a chilling smile, signaled his agreement with his lieutenants’ words.

“Prepare the army. The seeds of monsters must be nipped in the bud.”

“A wise decision. Which demons shall we dispatch? Vinberde has been ready for some time… and Veluda will soon be returning from her mission.”

“I shall go myself.”

“…You mean, Grand Duke, that you intend to move personally?”

The lieutenants displayed a reaction of slight bewilderment at Maltiel’s declaration.

“Indeed. That magician clearly used only one skill. And with a single blow, he reduced a multitude of aberrations and my own subordinates to ashes. You should be able to grasp its implications with a modicum of thought.”

“……You’re saying that wasn’t its full power?”

“Seventh Circle. I estimate that monster to be a major player in that realm. Considering its age… reaching the Ninth Circle isn’t a distant future for it.”

Lord Maltiel, as though anticipating a long-awaited outing, still wore that unsettling smile on his lips, slowly rising from his throne of festering flesh.

“And to add to that… that thing had rather dangerous eyes. The eyes of a human destined to become a monster. That it was.”

With each step Maltiel took, chunks of rotten flesh and skin peeled from the throne, falling to the cave floor with a soft thud.

“Shouldn’t we nip the monster’s bud in its… beginning?”

*