Chapter 50: I! M! GOD!
White light surged into the heavens, vast and magnificent, rippling outward like waves across the surface of water, illuminating the entire sky.
Beneath that savage force, the Academy was thoroughly and completely destroyed—even the last stone tile was ground to powder.
People throughout the Royal Capital seed to feel it in their bones, and could not help but look up toward the Academy in the distance.
A staggering pillar of light, like heaven's radiance shattering through the clouds.
The shockwave, like that of a nuclear detonation, left every Mage present in a state of complete and utter disbelief.
Even with Viktor having used the crystals to seal the Academy in advance, the energy that leaked out still bombarded the entire compound in an instant.
Thankfully the area of effect had been contained—otherwise, everyone within the Academy would have perished alongside it.
Had the barrier been breached, the resulting devastation would likely have leveled nearly half the Royal Capital's city districts.
Even so, a number of people who had been standing too close to the spell took considerable damage from the shockwave.
The light faded. A terrifying crater had opened in the ground.
Dozens of ters deep, and of astonishing breadth.
Not a trace remained of the surrounding buildings. An entire Academy vanished from the Royal Capital in a single instant.
The Demon, too, had vanished without a trace.
The Mages dragged their exhausted bodies forward, trembling as they stared at the scene before them.
"This, what the hell….."
"Where's the school!?"
"The school got blown to nothing!?"
They were in a daze—yet the bone-deep exhaustion draining every last ounce of strength from their bodies was a constant reminder that everything they were witnessing had truly, actually happened.
In the final monts, Viktor had drawn out every last drop of Magic Power from all the Mages in the vicinity and unleashed a spell powerful enough to threaten the Royal Capital itself.
A human-shaped instrunt of War Magic……in their hearts, Viktor had just acquired yet another title to his na.
Viktor stood at the bottom of the crater, holding the unconscious Heni in his arms.
Heni had her hood up. No one could make out her face.
Many people spotted Viktor standing in the crater, and every single one of them was at a complete loss.
Viktor—why was he holding another woman in his arms again!?
Everyone's attention was fixed entirely on Viktor. No one noticed that inside the crater, an ugly toad was hopping along, one labored leap at a ti.
Soaked in Black Ink, it dragged itself forward step by painstaking step, crawling its way onto a scorched and blackened body.
Dewen Rether.
Beneath a spell of that sheer magnitude, Dewen Rether had sohow not died.
In its final injured monts, Yem had swept Dewen Rether into its maw.
Every last point of damage had landed on the Demon's body.
Because Yem understood—if it still wanted to go on existing, then Dewen Rether could not die.
The toad crawled up onto Dewen's body and dissolved into a stream of pitch-black Black Ink that coiled itself around Dewen Rether.
Dewen Rether rose from the ground like a reanimated corpse.
The bones throughout his body cracked and popped, and the disjointed bones snapped back into place.
His eyes blazed a deep crimson. He fixed a predatory stare on the students before him, a trickle of foul-slling fluid running from the corner of his mouth.
As though stripped of all reason, he let out a low, threatening grunt, head tilted to one side—looking for all the world like a wild beast.
"Isn't that Professor Dewen!? He's alive!"
"He is! It's Professor Dewen!"
"Wait—sothing's wrong. Professor Dewen looks… strange!"
One person had caught the vacant, dazed look on Professor Dewen's face and could not help but voice their unease.
Very quickly, the people around them began to sense that sothing was off about Dewen as well.
"Dewen Rether really was up to sothing!"
"Look at him! Has he been possessed by the Demon!?"
As the title of Professor was stripped from him in the mouths of the crowd, Dewen seamlessly beca the villain—a man used and then possessed by the Demon.
The truth of the entire conspiracy seed to be rising to the surface at last.
Dewen Rether was that filthy Demon all along!
The Mages slowly raised their arms, preparing to pour every last scrap of remaining Magic Power into Dewen Rether.
But what happened next caught everyone completely off guard. Dewen Rether simply wrenched his head around toward Viktor and dropped a single, cold threat:
"I. Will rember every last one of you."
Black Ink suddenly rippled to life beneath his feet, swelling outward in waves—and swallowed Dewen Rether whole, pulling him down into the darkness. He was gone.
A chill ran through the Mages the mont they heard Dewen's words. Being marked by a Demon felt like a long iron lance driving straight through the heart.
Their gazes turned as one toward Viktor—because it was Viktor who had stepped forward to defeat the Demon, and if the job needed to be finished completely, it seed only Viktor could do it.
But at this mont, no one dared give Viktor an order.
Duke Livi picked his way over the rubble and ca to stand before Viktor, glancing briefly down at Heni in his arms.
"This is……"
"My Teaching Assistant. Dewen Rether stole her knowledge and used it to construct the barrier Formation from before."
Duke Livi could not keep a flicker of surprise from his expression.
He had not been inside the Formation himself, but word had naturally reached him.
Well over half of the Royal Capital's 3rd-Tier Mages had co to lend their aid—and yet not a single one of them had been able to make sense of the Formation's intricacies, let alone break it.
In the end, it had been Viktor who led a handful of Mages in dismantling it from the inside.
"Your Teaching Assistant is a rare and exceptional genius."
Viktor turned his head away and paid Duke Livi's flattery no mind.
After the ordeal of this Demon battle, Duke Livi's hostility toward Viktor had diminished considerably.
Whatever else one might say, Viktor had acted again—and protected the Royal Capital.
The first ti, during the volcanic eruption, no one had known what Viktor had done. In fact, most of the Mages had grown suspicious of him.
But this ti, the Mages of the Royal Capital had seen it with their own eyes.
Their admiration for him was absolute. Not a single person would ever again question Viktor's credentials as a 4th-Tier Mage.
Viktor was terrifyingly powerful.
And he was still so young.
Duke Livi let out a quiet sigh.
If not for Erika, perhaps he might have been able to maintain a far better relationship with Viktor.
He pushed the thought aside, shaking his head. He did not want to keep turning it over. His daughter was his final and absolute line.
And so he said to Viktor:
"After this incident, Dewen Rether's cris will be formally charged—even if he is His Majesty's nephew."
What Duke Livi was implying, without saying it outright, was that Viktor need not worry about being prosecuted for harming an Imperial Relative.
Even if the entire Academy had been destroyed in the process, he was without question a hero who had rendered extraordinary service.
Had the Demon not been stopped, the losses sustained would have amounted to far more than a single Academy.
"However, His Majesty will not move against the Rether Family."
Viktor was not the least bit surprised.
The Rether Family was the Imperial household's personal instrunt for accumulating wealth—and on top of that, the Emperor's own younger sister was the lady of the Rether household.
As long as the family was willing to sacrifice Dewen Rether, the Rether Family itself would walk away unscathed.
At most, they would be slapped with the charge of failing to properly discipline a mber of their household.
Viktor understood perfectly well that Duke Livi was warning him.
Regardless of how things played out, he had already made an enemy of the Rether Family.
"My Lord Duke, I've made enough enemies already."
One more hardly matters.
Viktor held Heni in his arms, turned, and made to leave.
Seeing him about to go, Duke Livi reached out a hand to stop him.
"One more thing, Viktor."
"The Demon didn't die—it escaped. Could it possibly……"
He was worried the Demon might return, but Viktor set his mind at ease.
"It won't die. It is a 'part' of this world."
Duke Livi paused, looking slightly taken aback. Sothing seed to occur to him, though he did not say it aloud.
"Does it not remind you of the Calamities? The Calamities are a part of the world's elents—and so the Calamities cannot die either."
Duke Livi's face settled into a composed, asured expression, and he replied evenly:
"Calamities? I don't know what you're talking about."
His reaction was exactly what Viktor had wanted. It was as though sothing had just been confird.
Viktor looked at Duke Livi and gave a slight smile, the aning of it quietly reaching Duke Livi's ears.
"All I can tell you is that this Demon is nothing like the ordinary Demons you have encountered before."
"It is the embodint of Greed."
"As long as there are still intelligent beings in this world—as long as they still harbor Greed—that thing will never die."
"Even if 1 is destroyed, another will revive and reappear before long."
Duke Livi felt a full-body chill crawl across his skin.
"What you should be grateful for right now is that it didn't die—it was crippled."
Viktor left those words hanging in the air, then held Heni close and teleported out of the crater.
Duke Livi stood there in a slight daze, watching the space where Viktor had vanished, when a sudden thought struck him.
Where had that Crow on Viktor's shoulder gone?
***
Beyond the forest, Dewen Rether was running—running without stopping.
He had already cleared the Royal Capital and was outside the city walls, putting more and more distance between himself and the Royal Capital with every passing mont.
He had to keep running, because he refused to 'disappear.'
Greed would never truly cease to exist—but once Yem died, only a new Yem would rise to replace it.
And along with that replacent: mories, power, everything that it currently was—would no longer be him.
"Damn it! Damn it! Damn it!"
"That Mage—who on earth is he! How could he possibly know my na, how could he!?"
Inhabiting Dewen Rether's body, Yem's speech and behavior had taken on every mannerism of Dewen Rether himself.
If not for its own survival, it would never have stooped to possessing such a worthless shell.
And now it found itself actually grateful—grateful that it had not eaten this fat pig.
This fat pig harbored more than enough Greed of his own, and that Greed could be converted into the nourishnt that allowed Yem to barely keep moving.
All at once, Dewen Rether stopped dead in his tracks.
A violent, bone-deep dread crawled from the soles of his feet up to the crown of his head, and he seized up on the spot, unable to move a single muscle.
The forest fell utterly still. Nothing could be heard but the faint drift of leaves in the air.
A single black feather floated down and landed before him. Dewen Rether snapped his gaze forward.
A small black Crow stood before him.
It had only 1 eye—set in the center of its forehead.
Dewen Rether froze. For reasons he could not explain, he found himself trembling from head to toe, gripped by fear.
He was the Demon!
He was the very source of terror that spread dread across the world—so why was he afraid of a Crow? Why was he afraid of one tiny, insignificant Crow?
"Hello there. Where do you think you're going?"
The Crow's voice materialized in his ear out of thin air, and Dewen Rether's body jolted violently.
"Who—who are you!?"
"?"
Without warning, the Crow began to laugh—a wicked, unhinged sound.
Caw caw caw—a sharp, piercing laugh that echoed through the entire forest.
As though the darkness were moving to consu Dewen completely.
Dewen Rether blinked.
In the fraction of a second it took to blink.
The Crow's talons swelled, growing vast and razor-sharp. The feathers along its body turned slicker, harder, more like obsidian blades.
Threads of pitch-black smoke began to pour steadily from its body.
To a Demon's eyes, its form was like an imnse shadow blotting out the canopy of the sky, looming over Dewen from an insurmountable height.
Its voice was no longer sharp—it dropped into sothing deep, resonant, rhythmic.
A reverberation like the voice of the abyss rang out. Trees shook, sending every last leaf spiraling down. Birds burst from their perches and scattered in all directions.
Only its arrogant, sovereign voice remained, threading its way through the depths of the forest.
"I!"
"M!"
"GOD!"
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