Chapter 3
Behind the ranks of guardsmen, clad in armor soaked with the scent of blood, a colossal bolt of lightning suddenly crashed down.
Even though the lightning had exploded behind them, its brilliance was so intense that it temporarily blinded the guardsmen who had been facing forward.
“…….”
Hans, the captain of the guard, who had been delivering his final address at the rear of the formation, turned around groggily and stared at the spot where the lightning had struck.
There, standing where the lightning had descended, was the boy with white hair who had once shared bread with him.
Dressed in rags, the boy stood unscathed, despite having absorbed the bolt with his bare body.
……No, he wasn’t just unscathed.
A soft blue light was emanating from his entire body.
Each step the boy took caused small bolts of lightning to burst forth, scorching the ground beneath.
“Would you mind stepping aside, please?”
The boy, his voice calm and collected, slowly made his way toward the center of the battlefield.
Not a single guardsman dared to obstruct his path.
The boy’s expression was serene, yet cold, like that of a sage who had attained enlightenment.
The currents of the air around him rippled with every small step he took. The dark clouds that swathed the sky roiled restlessly, as if ready to unleash another bolt of lightning at any moment.
“This is something I’ve wanted to try for a while,” the boy muttered, his words incomprehensible to Hans and the other guardsmen, as he strode regally toward the center of the battlefield.
“…Are you a mage?”
An astounded Hans could only look on vacantly at the boy’s retreating figure.
“Kind of,” the boy replied casually, smoothing back his wildly rising hair with both hands.
“What are you? There’s no way a mage could be residing in this humble town.”
The towering figure of a marauder, standing at the center of the mutant army, emerged from between the giant mass of flesh and eyed the boy curiously. His skin was a mixture of green and red, and it was evident that the sight of the boy unsettled him.
“Where did you come from? We still have days to go until reinforcements arrive.”
Indeed, as he claimed, there had been no mages in this town until just a couple of hours ago.
“This is where I was born, apparently,” the boy said, his voice cold and dismissive, refusing to elaborate further about himself.
“Is this some kind of joke? It’s not very funny.”
“…I was actually being sincere.”
Through their brief exchange, the marauder had realized it was futile trying to gather any useful information. Clearly, the boy had no intention of cooperating.
Instead, the marauder began to quietly observe the boy.
The boy looked young—no older than 16 or 17.
‘He’s too young to have received proper training at a magic tower. At this age, he’d barely qualify for being an apprentice… And given his tattered appearance, he’s obviously one of the street urchins.’
In the marauder’s experience, street urchins were mostly low-intelligence beings who struggled even to read or write, let alone practice magic.
“…This is strange.”
Still, the boy standing before him unmistakably wielded the power of lightning.
A feeling of dissonance began to spread through the marauder’s red-tinged skin.
The marauder began to assess the boy’s mana levels with his special ability, trying to understand this feeling of wrongness.
‘Not an incredibly powerful mage… His mana reserves are only at the level of a Tier 4 mid-rank mage at best.’
Considering the boy’s age and background, it was impressive, but certainly insufficient to face down the marauder and his mutant army alone.
‘Still…’
BOOM!
Finally, a thunderous bolt of lightning struck beside the boy from the dark clouds overhead.
The energy of 10 billion volts ripped through the ionized air, carving a massive crater into the flesh-and-blood covered ground.
The boy didn’t flinch at the lightning that barely missed him.
A chilling madness lurked in his blue eyes, a determination to annihilate the marauder before him, for reasons unknown.
‘Given his limited mana reserves, his control over this magic is unrealistically high. Moreover, he possesses a fierce tenacity that belies his young age. He’s not an ordinary Tier 4 mage by any stretch…’
The marauder, having his previous data completely negated by this irregularity, began to noticeably grow tense, carefully settling into position.
“Let’s test him out a bit.”
The marauder surveyed the numerous mutants surrounding him and raised a finger toward the lone, white-haired boy.
“Spare me…”
“Ma, ma, Mamaaaa!”
“Lady Estella will protect me! Please guide these beings to the light…”
“Kill… Kill! Kill him… Kill…!”
The mutants charged the boy, pushing off the ground with wobbly legs.
They were all grotesque distortions of human forms.
Some had arms replaced with sharp blades, others had heads compressed into long, flat shapes by what looked like hydraulic presses, and still others had lost all their bones, becoming lumps of flesh that somehow remained alive.
All of them retained faint traces of consciousness.
The marauders intentionally left this fragment of awareness when capturing humans or elves for mutation, knowing full well how the mutants’ cries could sow hesitation in the hearts of warriors facing them.
The boy’s frozen face contorted with the physiological discomfort that any human would feel rising in his chest.
FSSHHH!
Raising his left arm cautiously, the boy released a thin, sharp flash of lightning. The light enveloped all the mutants rushing toward him, reducing them to heaps of white ash.
“Unbelievable.”
The marauder finally understood that his carefully crafted mutants could be annihilated in a single strike.
“…No matter how I think about it, you must be hiding your true magical power.”
The boy’s magic was so precise and powerful that it defied belief for a mere Tier 4 mage.
Worse, the boy’s gaze was unwavering, filled with an intense, almost mad determination.
It wasn’t mere tenacity—it was a mixture of obsessive madness and deep-rooted hatred, swirling unpredictably.
“Most young mages would panic at the sight of marauders and mutants. But that look in your eyes… It’s more like a predator stalking its prey.”
Dangerous.
Through careful observation and instinct, the marauder realized this boy wasn’t someone he could handle with his current abilities.
“There’s nothing left to see. I’m retreating.”
The marauder decided to flee swiftly. There were no foolish marauders in existence who would challenge someone whose caliber was impossible to gauge.
Unfolding the wings he had hidden behind his back, he rose into the air. With a flick of his hand, the countless mutants he had brought to this battlefield began to charge the boy all at once.
Though it was painful to lose all his forces this way, it was far better than losing his life. Mutants, after all, could be recreated anytime.
Mutants that were hybrids of pigs and deers with eight legs, mutants that combined humans with dwarves and had four eyes. Each of them looked different but carried potent toxic substances throughout their bodies.
The sharp hooves of a mutant deer held a powerful acid strong enough to melt skin at a touch, while the thick tendons of a mutant dwarf exhaled a gas that could paralyze anyone who breathed it in. The exposed organs of a mutant human leaked repulsive waste that defied description.
Unable to retain their human forms, the mutants stumbled, tripped, and piled onto each other as they charged the boy, forming what resembled a tsunami of writhing flesh.
The boy.
Standing still before the tidal wave of flesh, he simply flicked his fingers.
TAP.
That was the only sound audible to those standing on the battlefield.
Afterward, a devastating flash of lightning descended upon the field, incomparably more powerful than the one that had struck earlier.
The single bolt of lightning that had emanated from the boy’s fingertips quickly scattered, burning away everything that dared to obstruct it.
Rising into the air to escape the battlefield, the marauder was engulfed in the brilliant light before he could react, vanishing without a trace.
The charging mutants that had been rushing the boy were consumed by the massive electric energy, turning into white ash in an instant.
In less than a second, the tens of thousands of bodies that had covered the battlefield were completely annihilated.
Timely, the pitch-black clouds began to part, allowing a faint ray of sunlight to creep through.
The massive amounts of ash, created from the burning of thousands of tons of flesh, filled the battlefield, turning it an icy white.
The massive shockwave rendered most of the guardsmen temporarily blind and deaf.
It took a long time for their senses to return.
“….”
When the guardsmen finally regained their vision, the sight before them was hard to believe.
The blood-soaked battlefield had been transformed into pure white by a single flash of light.
In the middle of the transformed battlefield stood the lone boy, emanating electricity from his entire body.
All traces of blood and flesh were erased, leaving behind only the vast wasteland and the scorched earth.
The boy began to walk slowly and regally toward the city’s guard forces, against the white backdrop, resembling an angel sent from the heavens.
“…Oh, Lady Estella has saved us!”
A guard with a broken leg shouted out loud upon seeing the boy.
Other guards, who had been staring blankly at the white battlefield, began to unconsciously offer prayers of gratitude to their gods, mistaking the boy for a divine emissary.
This wasn’t entirely surprising.
Despite his casual tone, the boy, who introduced himself as having “just been born in the town,” had miraculously emerged as a savior, rescuing the besieged city.
The fatigue of battle, the relief of surviving, and the exhilaration of seeing marauders destroyed had all swirled in their minds, making their assumption that the boy was a divine messenger quite plausible.
“…Hey, though, prayers to the gods are all well and good, but shouldn’t you thank me first?”
“Oh! Oh sorry, Mage sir! My mind was scattered! Please forgive me!”
The guard who had prayed first to the gods now bowed deeply toward the boy.
“Still, I imagine you must have had a reason. For a mage of this caliber to wander around a remote town like Strathus dressed like a vagrant…”
“….”
The boy refrained from replying with the truth—”It’s because I started as a vagrant to increase my critical hit chance,”—choosing instead to maintain an enigmatic expression of silence.
“I won’t ask further. It wouldn’t be proper to trouble the hero who saved our city. Though we have little, we’ll offer you the finest food we have left. Please come inside the city.”
“That’s right! If it weren’t for you, we wouldn’t even know what these foods look like. Eat to your heart’s content and put some weight on those skinny limbs!”
“Exactly! Thanks to you, we get another day to live! While you’re here, why not exterminate all the marauders in this vicinity!”
The guards, lifting their splinted arms high, warmly welcomed the boy.
The boy, feeling not entirely bad about the reception, allowed a faint smile to grace his cold features.
“Come in! Though we don’t have much left, we will offer the mage some wine…”
An adjutant standing next to Hans approached the boy cheerfully. As the boy extended his arm, intending to take the adjutant’s hand…
Thud.
“…?”
“Mage sir?”
The boy’s body suddenly crumbled forward, falling to the ground. Five minutes turned out to be much shorter than the boy had anticipated.
—
Inside a deep, dark cave dripping with blood and flesh, the cries of those who were yet to transform completely into mutants filled the air.
Even further inside the damp, foul cave, sat a marauder with long horns and pitch-black skin.
The chair he sat on was a grotesque assemblage of stitched-together pieces of flesh, so grotesque that it was impossible to determine whose it had once been.
“Impressive.”
The highest-ranking marauder, Grand Marshal Maltiel, let out a low murmur of admiration as he gazed at the diminutive image of the boy with white hair and the tremendous power he had unleashed, conjured by magic.
“The boy’s skills are extraordinary.”
“I didn’t expect such a mage to be in that city. It seems reinforcements have arrived.”
The two marauders bowing at Maltiel’s sides chimed in their thoughts on the image.
“And he’s so young! If we leave this one alone, he’ll surely become a great obstacle to us in the future.”
Maltiel nodded in agreement, his grin unpleasant and unsettling.
“Prepare the army. We need to cut off this monstrosity at its root.”
“An excellent decision, sir. Which marauder will you send? Binverde is already prepared, and Belluda will soon return from her mission…”
“I’ll go myself.”
“…Sir, are you saying the Grand Marshal will personally move?”
The adjutants showed a hint of surprise at Maltiel’s words.
“Yes. That mage clearly only used a single skill. And yet, he reduced my army of mutants and my underlings to ash in a single strike. The implications of this should be clear with just a little thought.”
“…You mean that wasn’t his full power?”
“Tier 7. Based on my estimation, that freak is likely at that level. Considering his age… reaching Tier 9 doesn’t seem so far off in the future.”
Grand Marshal Maltiel rose slowly from the fleshy throne, a smirk of unpleasant anticipation still etched on his face.
“And that fellow… He possesses quite dangerous eyes. The eyes of a human destined to become a monster. That is…”
With each step Maltiel took, chunks of rotting flesh and skin fell from his throne to the cave floor.
“Surely, we must uproot the seed of monstrosity, don’t you think?”
