Chapter 1
The demons’ cries tore through the air in every direction.
Demons clad in black armor filled the corridor, while monsters with batlike wings hung densely from the ceiling. The floor was already slick with blood and shattered bones.
The Demon King was kneeling on one knee atop the ruined throne.
He was still breathing.
That was the most serious problem.
“Concentrate fire on the rear!”
At my shout, the elf archer’s arrows flew forth cloaked in light. I followed by cutting off a short incantation.
Seca
[Severance]
Space twisted as if it were folding in on itself.
The horde of demons split apart. Red blood and black flesh burst across the walls, opening a narrow path.
It was only a fleeting moment, but.
“Run!”
That was enough.
The hero turned with the holy sword clenched in his hand. The elf archer practically carried the gnome saintess as they ran. The saintess continued to pour out healing light with bloodstained hands, but her face had already gone pale.
Everyone ran.
Except for one person.
“…?”
Perhaps sensing something strange, the hero turned around.
His eyes met mine.
“Kael!”
I smiled at his trembling voice, so unlike him.
I had no choice but to smile.
Otherwise, wouldn’t I look like someone who had stayed behind intending to die?
“Go.”
“What are you doing!”
“Trust me.”
I drove my staff into the floor.
The magical formula I had hidden beneath the black marble floor of the Demon King’s Castle spread outward. Blue lines branched out like a spiderweb, beginning to envelop the entire throne hall.
“We’ve somehow survived until now.”
“Kael!”
“I have no intention of dying this time, either.”
The hero’s face twisted.
At the very moment he took a step toward me.
“If you stay, everyone will die.”
I deliberately spoke more coldly.
The hero’s body stiffened for a moment at those words, but.
It seemed to have the desired effect.
He gritted his teeth. Clutching the holy sword so tightly that his hand trembled, he finally turned around.
“You’d better follow us!”
“Don’t order me around. Since when were you my superior?”
The hero didn’t answer.
He simply ran with his head bowed.
Their figures vanished beyond the collapsed corridor.
Only then did I let out a long breath.
“…Now.”
The demons came rushing in.
The wounded demonic beasts began approaching me, like animals fighting over the last morsel of prey.
The Demon King raised his head.
A smile spread across his bloodied face.
“Mage… What can you do all by yourself?”
I looked at him.
How many people had died to kill that monster?
The soldiers at the northern fortress who never closed the gates to the very end.
The priests who evacuated the children first and burned to death.
The corps of engineers who severed the bridge and were buried alive to delay the Demon King’s army by a single day.
And my master.
That foolish, kind old man who had told me to survive until the very end was dead, too.
This was my only chance.
The Demon King was dying.
But he was still breathing.
This moment would never come again. Even if it did, how many more sacrifices would it cost?
The demons would raise a new king, and the Demon King would recover. The war would not end. The continent would once again be drenched in blood for decades.
Rather than see that sight again, I would rather stand at the center of the magic circle myself.
“You ask what I can do alone?”
Snap.
When I snapped my fingers, the entire throne hall lit up.
The floor, the pillars, the ceiling, the Demon King’s throne, even beneath the demons’ feet.
Every spell formation I had carved from the moment I entered the castle awakened simultaneously.
“A mage’s job is to turn a battlefield upside down all by themselves.”
The Demon King’s expression twisted.
“Don’t tell me….”
“That’s right.”
I took a small crystal from my robes.
A teleportation coordinate stone.
I had linked it beforehand to an escape point outside.
In theory, it was perfect.
Just before the great explosion, I would escape through the coordinate stone. The Demon King and the demons would vanish along with the hall. The hero’s party would survive. The war would end.
What a neat plan.
“Deploy the Incineration Formula.”
Blue flames sprang up around me.
Mana surged wildly along the circuits, beginning from inside my body, near my heart.
Through my arms, legs, and all the way to the tips of my hair.
The mana circuits carved throughout my body began opening one by one.
It was a method I would never normally use.
Because this was essentially no different from gambling.
I knew that better than anyone.
But I had no choice now.
This was my only chance to kill the Demon King.
If I let that bastard escape, the war would begin again, and.
Countless people would collapse, groaning in agony.
So.
I would kill him here, once and for all.
Even if the price was losing the ability to use magic ever again.
No.
Even if my mana circuits burned out right here.
“Compress.”
The mana was sucked into the center of the throne hall.
At the same time, I felt something tear inside me.
Some of my mana circuits were exceeding their limits.
Pain like fire flowing through my veins pierced my entire body. My fingertips trembled, and the edges of my vision darkened. Thin trickles of red blood ran from my eyes and mouth.
I gritted my teeth.
Without stopping, I forcibly opened the circuits I had kept sealed, one by one.
The first circuit.
The second circuit.
The third circuit.
I forcibly drew up even the deep circuits I would normally have kept sealed away.
The blue flames grew denser.
The magical formations covering the throne hall gradually regained their light. Lines on the floor spread to the pillars, and the lines on the pillars continued up to the ceiling. The entire hall began to pulse.
The demons screamed.
Before their bodies could even touch the flames, they crumbled into ash.
The magical structures sustaining their existence were collapsing from within.
The Demon King tried to rise, but it was already too late.
The spell formation had reached beneath his feet as well.
Every line and mark I had laid down from the moment I entered the castle.
All of it was now converging toward a single purpose.
To erase every being in this place.
Without leaving a single one behind.
“Are you planning to die with them?!”
The Demon King roared.
For the first time, there was fear mixed into his voice.
I gripped the coordinate stone in my robes.
I couldn’t properly put strength into my fingers.
I had opened too many mana circuits.
I couldn’t guarantee that I would still be able to activate the teleportation.
I laughed.
I had thought my plan was perfect in theory.
“No.”
I said as I exhaled a breath mixed with blood.
“It’s enough if you die.”
The Demon King’s eyes burned with rage.
-Kael Arvent!
The moment he shouted my name.
I released the final seal.
The core circuit bound deep beneath my heart.
The final path my master had warned me never to open recklessly.
When that circuit opened, it felt as if the world had stopped for a moment.
Sound.
Heat.
Screams.
They all drifted farther away.
Instead, a single light surged up from within me.
All the mana I had accumulated until now.
Every bit of it flowed into a single spell formation.
With my final incantation, I completed the spell formation.
Confringo
[Blast]
The world turned white.
Even sound disappeared.
Heat, pain, light, darkness—all of them mixed together in an instant.
..
..
“….”
I opened my eyes to an indescribable stench. My head was throbbing.
It was probably the aftershock caused by mana depletion.
‘But what is this smell…?’
It wasn’t the smell of blood or gunpowder, but it was utterly foul.
Nor was it the stench of sulfur and rotting flesh I had smelled beneath the Demon King’s Castle.
Rotten food, grease, old filth, and some unknown odor had mingled together, stabbing at my nose.
The stench was foul enough to make me believe it was the Demon King’s curse, and I gagged.
I forced my eyes open.
My blurry vision gradually cleared, and I began to see what was ahead.
“…?”
I was speechless.
A rusty metal lid was tilted halfway over it, and my body was wedged inside. I could feel something damp behind me being crushed and bursting beneath my weight.
I slowly raised my hand.
An unidentifiable brown liquid ran between my fingers.
“Ugh….”
I hurriedly shook off the disgustingly sticky liquid.
“Where am I…?”
The coordinates I had designated were definitely a small village on the outskirts of the Demon King’s Castle.
A place with low stone walls, a windmill, and an old well at the village entrance.
The safe zone where Leon, Aileen, and Miria should have arrived.
But this wasn’t it.
Absolutely not.
I gripped the edge of the metal container and pushed myself up. My stomach churned as if it were about to turn inside out. My legs gave way and I nearly sank back down, but I barely managed to keep my balance.
First, breathe.
Then, check my senses.
Sight, hearing, touch, and mana perception.
A mage dies if they let their emotions control them.
I immediately sank my consciousness inward.
Mana circuits.
The pure path of mana I had honed throughout my life.
I had to check whether it was still there.
A moment later, I let out a short breath.
It was still there.
But naturally, it wasn’t perfectly fine.
“…It’s not the worst.”
I muttered under my breath.
The circuits hadn’t burned out completely.
Then they could recover.
Having avoided one crisis, I focused on the situation at hand.
‘Coordinate error.’
One possibility.
Mana turbulence occurring just before the great explosion had twisted the transfer coordinates.
‘Spatial interference.’
Possibility two.
A barrier remaining in the Demon King or the Demon King’s Castle itself had interfered with the teleportation spell formation.
‘Temporal-axis deviation.’
Possibility three.
It was the hypothesis I wanted to avoid most.
I raised my head and surveyed my surroundings.
It was a narrow alley.
It looked like stone, but it wasn’t natural stone.
Knock, knock.
When I tapped it lightly with my hand, a hollow resonance returned.
I didn’t know its precise name, but I could tell what it was used for.
A cheap, lightweight material that was easy to stack quickly.
It was inadequate for the outer walls of a mage tower, but suitable for erecting an entire city as if stamping it out.
Blue letters appeared and vanished in various places along the walls outside the alley.
‘Runic script?’
No, it was different.
It looked like runes, but the mana flow was shallow.
It was closer to a device that repeatedly displayed predetermined information in light.
‘A display illusion formula.’
I didn’t know its name, but I could see how it worked.
The magic in this city was different from what I knew.
I placed my hand against the wall.
Cold.
I could feel a faint vibration from within the wall.
Mana was flowing.
But it wasn’t the natural flow of mana that I knew.
A refined, divided, standardized force.
If mana were piped through conduits like water, would it feel like this?
‘Is the entire city one magic circle?’
Then a low rumble sounded from above the alley.
Vrrrrm.
I reflexively looked up.
And once again, I was speechless.
I couldn’t see the sky.
No, more precisely, there were too many things blocking it.
Buildings rising on both sides of the alley pierced the clouds.
They couldn’t even be compared to castle towers.
Skyscrapers that looked as though dozens of palace spires had been stacked together stretched toward the black sky as if competing with one another.
It wasn’t an impossible structure.
It would be possible with gravity-mitigation formulas and load-distribution circuits.
The problem was that they had applied it not to a single building, but to the entire city.
‘There’s a separate mana source.’
This was beyond the level of an individual mage or noble family.
This city was receiving mana from a central source.
One building glittered entirely like a gigantic crystal pillar.
Another was covered in black metal, with golden circuits rotating endlessly along its surface.
An unfamiliar emblem floated atop it.
A winged gear.
A crystal eye.
A staff entwined by a snake.
Each looked like the crest of a different noble family.
But something was strange.
They weren’t flags.
The crests floated in midair.
‘Illusion magic?’
I furrowed my brow.
Then who was wasting resources like this?
Maintaining illusions at all times just to display the crests of noble families?
‘Are they showing off their wealth?’
A silver monster slid along the inside of a transparent, tube-like track.
I instinctively ducked.
I couldn’t tell whether it was a living creature, a golem, or a siege weapon.
There were people inside the silver monster.
Dozens of them.
No, hundreds.
They sat there calmly.
‘A transport vehicle moved by a levitation formula?’
Below it, flying carriages—or rather, metal masses too ridiculous to call carriages—crossed through the air.
Letters glowed on the sides of their bodies.
[Arkeon Genetics]
[Lumendine Fuel]
[Seraph Industries]
I stared at them blankly.
A gigantic woman floated between the buildings. More precisely, it was the upper half of a semi-transparent woman.
Half of her body was human, while the other half was made of mechanical devices. Smiling, she floated a small crystal vial above her palm.
A message flashed beneath it.
[Mana Depletion, Suffer No More.]
[Legal Awakening Aid, Etherlin.]
The corners of my mouth stiffened.
‘They solve mana depletion with medicine?’
Nonsense.
Mana depletion wasn’t caused solely by insufficient mana. Since various complex factors were involved, it was one of the taboos that must never be tampered with recklessly.
But that didn’t mean it was a completely impossible idea, either.
If it was a stimulant that forcibly squeezed out the residual mana left in one’s circuits, rather than a drug that restored mana, it would have a temporary effect.
Of course, the user’s circuits would be ruined.
I stared at the woman’s smile in the illusion.
‘It’s not a cure. It’s poison.’
I let out a hollow laugh.
“This place is insane.”
But I didn’t have long to admire it.
첫째.
This wasn’t the village I had designated.
둘째.
The surrounding environment was unlike any city on the continent where I had lived.
셋째.
The level of magitech was abnormally high.
넷째.
The mana concentration in the air was high, but its flow was being artificially controlled.
There was nowhere I could infer from the facts I had confirmed so far.
At least, not in my mind.
And.
This was not the world I knew.
It took a day to admit that fact.
It took a month to admit that I might never be able to return.
Finally.
It took a year before I gave up struggling to find my way back.