Memoirs of a Wicked Magician - Chapter 22
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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 22
“Z-Zed? Where are you? Answer me!”
Moments later, Liriope’s hands fell still, her breath coming in ragged gasps.
From Zed’s limp form came not even the faintest sound of breathing.
The red blood spreading slowly across the pale earth was sharp enough to burn her eyes.
‘Is he dead?’
The boy’s body, which had been convulsing moments ago, now lay utterly motionless—there seemed no chance he was still alive.
“You’ll take your younger sister’s share too? My, how noble. What a dutiful pair of sisters.”
Liriope drew a slow, deliberate breath.
Ever since that reunion, his voice had clung to her mind like a specter, and now—as though a stone had broken the surface of still water and sent mud rising to the top—it began to take on sharper, more vivid form.
“But you ask for a favor while speaking so impertinently. I’m in a foul mood, so I think I’ll beat one of you two. If it’s your sister, one blow. If it’s you, three. What’ll it be? Want to take a guess?”
Foolish Liriope.
The truth was she should have killed him long ago. Instead of cowering and sniveling pitifully like some wretch.
Had she simply forgotten everything, it might have been easier—but Liriope still remembered the sacrifices and devotion that Kaliona, in those days when she was an unfailingly tender older sister, had gladly endured for her sake.
“Ha! You’re tougher than I thought. I’d probably just let my sister take one of the hits. But you took ten today when you could’ve ended it in five, didn’t you?”
Later, she became crueler than anyone, wounding and trampling Liriope without mercy—and yet…….
Even so, she could not erase from within herself what the old Kaliona had given her, as though it had never existed from the start.
That was why, even after hatred had taken root, she found herself unable to be the first to let go of her sister by her own hand.
So much so that she had thought it better to meet Kaliona one last time, even if it meant dying by her hand.
But Liriope no longer harbored such helpless thoughts.
Instead, in this very moment—having for the first time bloodied her own hands and cut off the breath of the beast who had tormented her sister and her—she tasted a strange liberation she had never known before.
Not only Zed, but this world held far too many creatures who deserved to die, creatures that had tormented her sister and her.
So why not, this time, hunt down every last grain of sand on White Sand Beach and exterminate them all with these two hands?
Seized by a peculiar exhilaration similar to what she had felt just after the coronation ceremony, Liriope drew in a deep breath and released it slowly.
When she looked up, beyond the still-unsettled dust, a white silhouette rose like a rounded hill.
From its cavernous maw, foam-like white froth continued to pour forth. The Red Berries’ deadly toxin proved fatal even to so massive a creature.
Given time, Zed could have recovered his Mana and escaped from the beast’s belly, but that was not the scenario Liriope desired.
Her objective had always been to neutralize Zed, and the result was decidedly a success.
With their leader fallen, the pack would descend into chaos and swiftly disintegrate.
Liriope steadied her grip on the slipping stone shards, then turned toward the voices calling out for Zed.
[Wait……! Contractor, stop!]
It was then that a cry—sharp enough to shatter—pierced her mind.
Liriope felt the very air around her shift and came to an abrupt halt.
Whoosh!
Above her head, a staggering surge of Mana descended.
The wind that grazed her cheek and the earth beneath her feet trembled as an overwhelming, formless pressure swept outward—drawing all things toward itself like the eye of a typhoon.
Her body shook of its own accord, gripped by instinctive tension.
Like animals that sense an approaching disaster and scramble to flee, every fiber of Liriope’s being urged her to run, to escape anywhere at all.
Yet she could not move freely—as though standing barefoot on thousands of blades.
Before she could take so much as a single step, the master who had seized complete dominion over that space descended upon the earth.
“Found you.”
The utterly pure black Mana that clung to the boy’s form like a second skin rippled with an intensity that felt like the crystallization of all that was profane.
“Blond hair, violet eyes. So it’s you.”
The moment that achromatic voice—stripped of all warmth and feeling—bored into her eardrums, the nape of her neck stood on end and her heart seized.
“I sensed a disturbance in Mana nearby just moments ago. Was it you?”
Liriope had felt this bone-chilling sensation before.
That fearsome, strange oppressiveness that emanated only from those who had reached the summit—the Magic Tower Master of the North, and those select few mages who had inherited Mana directly from her.
A presence she had felt before, from her sister, sometime in the future.
It was as though something incomprehensible had donned a human skin, and what leaked through was the discord and alienness of their very being.
A primal dread welled up from that awareness, and her legs nearly buckled.
‘How is this possible?’
But the true source of Liriope’s turmoil lay elsewhere.
A Dark Blue Cloak wreathed in four pairs of golden wings hung suspended in the air.
The boy’s hair, illuminated by the black Mana, shimmered with an exquisite white brilliance as it danced in the wind.
And between those strands, the eyes that opened were a crimson so cold it seemed as though blood had been refined and frozen.
At the Northern Magic Tower, Liriope had known only one person with such distinctive features.
At first she had doubted her own eyes, but the boy now before her radiated an presence so overwhelmingly vivid that it proved beyond doubt he was no phantom.
Liriope went pale with shock.
‘Why is this bastard here?’
She had expected to encounter many ghosts of the past at the Outer Estate, but certainly not him.
He had no reason whatsoever to be in this place.
Evangelion Belegoth.
The chosen boy who had received Mana directly from the Magic Tower Master and became her adopted son; the prodigious mage whose name had once been entered among candidates for the next Magic Tower Master; the very embodiment of promise.
And the garbage who, when Liriope was driven from the Northern Magic Tower, had trampled her more relentlessly than anyone else.
And truly, though she would sooner die than admit it…….
He was the damned bastard who had been Kaliona’s lover before the Time Reversal.
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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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