Memoirs of a Wicked Magician - Chapter 133

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This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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Chapter 133
“T-this… a monster……!”
“This can’t be happening. I’ve done all this—why won’t it die?”
“Die. Just die already, please!”
“Be quiet.”
Crash!
The mirror nearest to Caliona’s swinging fist shattered. Yet the image replaying within it did not stop.
What had once been the future became the present, and now stood fixed as an unchanging past—a landscape of slaughter.
Those trapped in the Ancient Ruin quickly realized that the mirrors in the chamber were showing each of them the trajectory of their own lives.
Among them, the first to sow seeds of discord was whoever had their shameful past—the sort one never wished others to see—laid bare before them.
“Wait, Joseph? Were you a sodomite? And looking at the figures reflected in the mirror, you seem to have selected men you disliked and forced yourself upon them…… You’re absolute filth, aren’t you?”
“P-please, hold your tongue! That is a fabrication! I am a prized disciple of Master Proud. To insult me is to insult Master Proud!”
Yet among the countless scenes within the mirrors, one problem loomed far larger than the rest. It was the sight of Caliona brutally murdering the other people trapped in the Ancient Ruin.
At first, the others felt profoundly uneasy but tried to convince themselves that it was merely a malicious illusion conjured by the ruins.
But as they moved from chamber to chamber and the same mirror appeared again and again, the atmosphere grew irreversibly cold.
What happened next was tragedy written in advance.
Without anyone quite being first, they all began attacking Caliona at once.
It was an attempt to eliminate the source of trouble before the scene in the mirror could manifest as reality—and for people driven into such a corner, it was a decision born of a certain desperate logic.
Had Caliona been an ordinary human, the tide would have turned in favor of the many. But she was no such thing.
Everyone froze when they saw that Caliona did not die, even after receiving wounds that should have been fatal.
When her injuries healed with a sickly black bubbling, they recoiled in horror. And by the time they belatedly tried to flee to another chamber, it was already too late.
When Caliona came to her senses, butchered corpses lay strewn across the broken mirror shards with a savagery that exceeded all reckoning.
Caliona could feel the power dwelling within her surging roughly against her will even now.
She crouched in a corner of the ruined chamber, breathing heavily.
‘I can’t leave like this. Liriope will be horrified.’
Just as it had been on the day of the Banquet, the power embedded in her body was manifesting again.
Caliona struggled desperately to suppress the dark, writhing things that churned furiously beneath her skin.
She felt no guilt or sorrow for having killed people who were, until mere hours before, her companions.
Caliona concerned herself only with her younger sister, Liriope, and her younger sister’s welfare alone. This had become second nature ever since their parents passed.
So even now, amid the carnage she had wrought, she regretted something else entirely.
She regretted not having rejected Liriope’s persuasion two years ago and instead maintained her distance from her sister.
And there was also the boy before her now, whose grotesque appearance was nearly as vile as her own.
She thought only that Belkiers Belegot must be separated from Liriope, and soon.
“You…… Stay away from Liriope.”
Caliona could no longer tell whether what she was seeing before her eyes was a real person standing in this place, or merely a phantom conjured by the mirrors.
But the fear she felt now was genuine, and she spoke her warning while fighting through it with all her will.
Belkiers concealed something so thoroughly from Liriope that her younger sister remained ignorant—but beneath that immaculate facade lay something as revolting and terrible as anything in this world could be.
“Now I understand. I didn’t know at first, but at some point I just… came to see it. You’re the one who made me this way, aren’t you?”
Caliona could be all the more certain precisely because she had, against her will, become something that resembled him.
What he was belonged to the most unclean and dangerous things in existence—a monster that should never have been born into this world.
What was more chilling was that this presence seemed to grow stronger with each passing day.
“I remember meeting you at the Outer Estate three years ago. Why? You said something to me back then, remember?”
The thought of such a vile creature clinging to the side of her beloved younger sister filled Caliona with unbearable revulsion.
“No matter how much you desire her, if you don’t want to murder that girl with your own hands, then rein in your greed a little.”
So, unable to discern whether the boy before her was real or false, Caliona threw back at him the words that had surfaced dimly in her memory.
“So if you have any conscience at all, distance yourself. I won’t allow something as dangerous and terrible as you to remain at Liriope’s side.”
– Shut up.
Crash!
In that instant, a vast and violent aura descended like a calamity, sweeping over Caliona.
Unable to withstand that force, the mirrors beside her shattered mercilessly.
– I have no reason to hear that from you.
The boy, his form twisted and distorted, was threatening even to behold from a distance.
With each step he took, a blackened substance dripped away, and the air in the chamber grew suffocating in moments.
The instant Caliona met his savage golden eyes at close range, she thought he would burst her skull asunder.
Yet instead of punishing her for her insolence, he began to suppress the power still raging wildly within her.
After escaping the Illusory Space on the day of the Banquet, even Evangellin had offered assistance to the manifesting Caliona with a kind of charitable grace.
But the effect now was far more immediate.
The moment she felt an eerie chill seeping into her forehead, Caliona understood that he had deliberately tracked her traces to this Ancient Ruin.
The reason was to bring her out of this place.
Surely Belkiers Belegot’s direct intervention could only have been for one person.
It might have been ungracious to harbor resistance while being rescued, but Caliona felt only greater revulsion instead.
“You…… are deceiving Liriope. A monster like you, something like you, clinging to her side wearing the mask of an ordinary human. It disgusts me. It horrifies me. That’s… deception.”
Yet why did it feel as though the hatred and condemnation pouring from her lips were not directed at Belkiers at all?
– You don’t think the same applies to you?
As if penetrating her very thoughts, a sharp mockery drove into the depths of Caliona’s chest.
– You’ve been deceiving Liriope for a long time now.
Before Caliona could even mount a rebuttal, Belkiers continued.
– I won’t kill that girl. I won’t even harm her.
“I don’t believe you. I can’t.”
– I don’t need your belief.
Belkiers cut her off with a coldly measured edge to his voice.
– It’s unfair. The fact that she values you above her own life, merely because you’re her older sister.
In the mirror that had slid past them, the next moment revealed an image of Caliona shattering Liriope’s Mana Core.
– Until now it’s been that way, and frankly, I don’t see you being helpful to her in the future either.
“No… no, that’s not true……! That’s all fake!”
Caliona denied it violently, just as the person who had died at her hands had done.
For her sister’s sake, she herself could be broken, could even die. So there was no way that such an image in the mirror could be the true future to come.
“I will die for that girl someday. I’ve pledged myself to it.”
Caliona spoke her long-ago promise aloud once more.
– Don’t fool yourself into thinking you’re the only one capable of that. I treasure that girl far more than you ever could.
The gaze that pierced her face and the voice that bored into her ears struck Caliona like a thunderbolt.
– Yet you believe Liriope will forgive you for anything, while I cannot. How presumptuous.
Caliona covered her ears and squeezed her eyes shut.
When she opened them again, the boy who had stood before her was gone without a trace.
In his place lay the core of the Ancient Ruin.
A hand mirror, split in half, identical to the magical artifact that had drawn Caliona into this place.

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This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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