Chapter 1

Chapter 1: Prologue

‘You can become the greatest master of black magic, my son.’

Those were the proud words my father once spoke to me.

He was the lord of House Bayonel, one of the four great families of the Dark Empire.

But... Father, this time I want to ask you something.

Even if I were to become the greatest, if no one remained by my side...

Would that path truly mean anything?

“Wouldn’t it, Father?”

No answer came, no matter how I questioned the lich (Lich) lying beside me—the lich I had created from my father’s corpse.

Grrrgh....

Only the wet, phlegmy rattle unique to a lich answered in his place.

Swallowing down the turmoil in my chest, I drew back the mana residing within the lich’s body.

The lich’s teeth, which had been clacking together on instinct alone, at last fell still.

“You worked hard. And... I am sorry.”

Because I could not save you.

I reached out and closed the eyes of the old lich, whose pupils showed nothing but a cloudy white haze.

Even though I had come into this battle prepared to stake everything on it, the reality before me still twisted my face.

My father had died, and I had raised him again as a lich only to send him back into battle.

What kind of son does something like that?

FWOOSH-

No matter where I turned my eyes, black flames roared.

The moment the Hellfire Demon appeared, the flames of hellfire had erupted with it.

The vast blaze that had begun at the coastline of the Luknica Continent showed no sign of dying down.

Before long, those black flames would burn even this place where I lay.

RUMBLE-

From the sky above, shrouded in thick, sticky darkness, came a constant succession of thunderous roars and explosions.

How much time passed like that?

The deafening noise that had pounded at my ears slowly began to subside.

That meant the battle against the Hellfire Demon was coming to an end.

I desperately wanted to see how the battle had turned out, but...... right now, I only had enough strength left to twitch a finger.

Forcing my eyes downward, I looked at my abdomen.

Red blood poured from it.

The hole was so large that I could see the ground beneath me, already turned into a swamp by my lukewarm blood.

I lifted my gaze.

Before me, hundreds of bodies were piled high like a mountain.

The corpses here had long since begun to rot and decay.

“Heh.... I really am insane.”

In a place that could only be called a mountain of corpses, I muttered to myself with a bitter laugh.

For all its grand title as the continent’s final death squad, the corpses here had died before they could properly fight the Hellfire Demon.

And it was I who had turned the bodies of the dead into zombies and used them.

...I had no choice.

If I had not poured everything into this fight, I could not even have been sure we were capable of killing that thing.

A few more seconds passed.

THUD!

Something fell atop the mountain of corpses.

Valpurgis, the Hellfire Demon.

Its form, once made of pristine white bone, was now drenched in black blood.

The eye sockets that had once held a sinister gleam were now empty and dark.

Its enormous skull, cracked in several places and missing its lower jaw, had gone completely still.

One look was enough to tell it had not died cleanly. 

It had gone out looking every bit as wretched as it deserved.

“Hah.... Look at you. Serves you right, you bastard.”

I chuckled as I stared at the skull.

It had raved on and on about being the king of the seven sins and covering the entire continent in hellfire. 

And in the end, it had still lost its head to the very humans it had looked down on.

“As expected, I cannot stand being near you.”

With a sharp gust of wind, a woman landed beside me before I realized it.

Unlike me, sprawled across the ground, she stood there in a dignified posture, her holy sword planted in the earth.

She was the Holy Empire’s greatest champion, the woman renowned across the continent as the Sword Radiance.

On the back of her right hand glowed a golden sacred mark.

...Funny, when I thought about it.

The Dark Empire and the Holy Empire.

Who could have imagined that the two empires, which used to snarl at one another on sight, would form a death squad together in order to fight a monster?

In the end, only the Sword Radiance and I remained alive.

“Anyone looking at this would think you were the one who killed it.”

“You would not have been able to kill that thing if I had not loaded it with curses, so spare me the swagger.”

“I was not......”

She could not finish her sentence. 

Her body swayed, and then she dropped to one knee beside me.

Even her breathing had become ragged.

“See? And there you were, pretending you were fine.”

“Ugh......”

“You really are a fool. At least when it comes to curses, I know more than you do.”

I frowned as I looked her over.

She was barely supporting herself with her holy sword as though it were a cane.

Even with blessings reinforcing her body, her legs trembled.

So this was what it meant to survive by a hair’s breadth.

“You pathetic woman... at the very least, I know more about curses than you do.”

Beneath her pale skin, veins bulged so grotesquely they looked as though they were about to burst through the surface.

The demon’s curse was consuming her.

She looked fine on the outside, but her organs were probably already being burned alive and turned to ash.

And even then, she was still trying to act composed. 

In many ways, she was a terrifyingly stubborn woman.

“You......”

Cough!

Blood surged up my throat, and I spat out the bitter truth.

“...You are going to die soon.”

“Then... you are hardly one to say that.”

After forcing her breathing steady, the Sword Radiance stretched out her trembling hand and placed it over my abdomen.

Golden aura welled up from her palm and wrapped my body in warmth.

It did return a bit of strength to me, but my fatally wounded abdomen showed no sign of healing.

“W-why is it not healing......?”

“I am already done for.”

“But......”

“Do I need to say it again? Healing me will not change anything.”

The Sword Radiance’s high-tier blessing could restore even severed limbs, but right now our affinities were all wrong.

I had pushed myself too hard, closing in on Valpurgis so I could cram as many curses into it as possible, and my abdomen had been pierced clean through.

The curse had seeped deep into my body through the wound, so blessing magic could not properly take effect.

It was only because I had hastily cast a curse to numb my sense of pain before it got worse that I could still speak at all.

The Sword Radiance and I both fell silent as we looked around us.

“Ah......”

“...Fuck.”

A sigh escaped both of us at once.

FWOOOOSH-

Even though the Hellfire Demon was dead, the black flames had not gone out.

We had won, yet we had lost.

Destruction.

That word loomed before my eyes.

“Aron......”

The Sword Radiance called my name, then let the end of the sentence trail away.

“What exactly were we fighting for?”

“If you start thinking like that, there is no end to it.”

Her voice was so hollow that I answered in a deliberately indifferent tone.

It irritated me that she had turned her head away so I would not see her face...... but I let it slide.

Even so, she continued speaking in that vacant voice.

“If you and I... no, if the two empires had cleared up their misunderstandings sooner, would the outcome have been different?”

“It would have been better than this.”

Whether it would truly have been possible was another matter.

The bitterness that had piled up between the Dark Empire and the Holy Empire ran deep.

Even when I had been at the academy, I had never imagined the two empires would join hands and form a death squad to exterminate the demons.

The Sword Radiance swallowed a pained groan and spoke in a voice that broke apart every few words.

“If we had known about the demons’ attacks in advance and prevented them, things would have been better than this, wouldn’t they?”

“Maybe.”

Once the demons had begun to move in earnest, many of the continent’s finest talents had died futile deaths at the hands of demons and monsters.

If we had at least noticed the incidents caused by demons and monsters in advance and stopped them, things would never have become this dire.

“...Is that all? Does it not make you angry?”

She whipped her head toward me with a glare, then soon lowered it again as though she had given up.

My attitude must have seemed unbearably cold to her.

“If this is the end, at least answer me properly......”

Hah. 

We really must be at death’s door. 

I never thought this stubborn woman would say something like that to me.

The voice and shoulders of the woman once famed throughout the Holy Empire as the Sword Radiance had utterly slumped.

She hated to admit it, but she had no choice.

We had staked everything and still failed.

This continent was finished.

That was probably what she was thinking.

...But it was not over yet.

“Hey.”

We had fought with our backs against each other to the very end. 

For someone like that, I could at least tell her this much.

“You kept asking about the body-enhancement magic I use... didn’t you? Cough!”

“And what does that matter now?”

“Shut up and listen to the end. I was absurdly strong for a black mage, wasn’t I?”

“...I assumed you had learned magic from some other discipline besides black magic.”

“Idiot... you still do not get it.”

“That was black magic.”

“What exactly do you take me for?”

“You always doubt everything......”

“I do not understand why you are suddenly bringing this up.”

“Damn it... ptui!”

I spat out the clot of blood in my mouth and eased the frustration gnawing at me.

Then again, it was understandable that she could not believe me.

Black magic had nothing to do with blessings.

But when it came to curses, black magic displayed the greatest efficiency of all.

“...Time.”

“What?”

“I can cast black magic on time.”

One second into five.

A tenth of a second into one.

Black magic that let me feel time passing more slowly for myself.

“Th-that is possible?”

“It had to be. That is why I was called a genius in the Dark Empire and at the academy.”

It was thanks to this black magic that I had been able to make a name for myself second only to the woman beside me.

“And after using this black magic for so long... I started to think I might be able to do more.”

“What exactly do you mean by more......?”

She fell into thought, then her face stiffened. 

A moment later, she stared at me with shaking eyes.

“You... do not tell me......”

I placed my right palm over my heart and stirred my mana.

Vrrrrrr-

The violet aura unique to black magic coiled around my body.

As I gathered mana into my heart, I spoke the words that might well be my last.

“If I alter the spell formula just a little... I think I can do more than merely make time pass slowly. I think I might be able to turn it back.”

Her face drew closer to mine.

“Y-you mean that... truly?”

“Who knows? I cannot promise anything.”

In theory, it was already complete.

But— “I have never used it even once.”

“...So you could not guarantee whether it would succeed.”

“That is right. My life is precious to me too.”

Black magic that turned time back.

What would I do if a side effect appeared? 

What would happen to my body if the spell failed?

“Even if I can go back to the past, I do not know how far back I will return.”

This was no different from staking my life on a gamble with terrible odds.

But—

“I have already lost everything, so I might as well gamble.”

“If you had a method like that, you should have told me sooner!”

“Shut the hell up. If you were in my place, would you have honestly told someone who used to aim for your life about an ability like that? Cough!”

“Ugh......”

Judging by the way her expression faltered, it seemed her conscience had finally been pricked by everything that had happened between us.

“You and I never felt all that warmly toward each other.”

Before the demons had truly risen to power, we had stood on opposing sides, so we had clashed many times.

And if it had only been fighting, that would have been one thing.

Countless people had died in the war between the two empires.

I had killed people of the Holy Empire... and this woman had killed people of the Dark Empire....

The resentment between the Sword Radiance and me had long since grown too deep.

“I had intended to keep it secret until the very end.”

“Then......”

The Sword Radiance barely managed to release the breath that had caught in her throat.

The capillaries bulging grotesquely beneath her skin were slowly turning black.

She did not have much time left either.

“Why... why are you only telling me this now?”

“Because it pisses me off to see you sniffling like a child.”

“......!”

The Sword Radiance flinched, then hurriedly wiped the tears from her cheeks with her sleeve.

Too bad. 

I had already seen them.

“Heh, so the thought that I might make it back makes you that happy? You forgot you were even crying.”

“Ah, damn it... just shut up already......”

I let out a quiet laugh as I watched her flustered reaction, so unlike her usual self.

Just moments ago she had looked as though she had lost the whole world. 

Now, at least, she looked a little better.

“Let us not become pathetic at the very end.”

I looked up at the dark sky where not a single ray of sunlight shone.

Believing that beyond that sky, sunlight still remained.

“It is not over yet.”