Memoirs of a Wicked Magician - Chapter 24

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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 24
In that instant, did Liliope’s vision flood with the lantern slides of her entire life?
Only by returning to the past could she see again her sister’s spotless, luminous smile, and it bloomed first across her sight.
Old acquaintances she’d shared those unwelcome hours with flickered through her mind for a heartbeat before dissolving, swept away by the acrid stench of dust and blood mixed with dry earth.
And the unfulfilled yearning she’d left behind in the rainy Black Forest…….
‘No.’
Liliope screamed soundlessly.
‘I can’t die like this……!’
Miracles were rare enough to encounter once in a lifetime—twice was impossible.
So she had to do something, anything, with her own strength.
Even if failure meant her body crumbled to dust, it would be infinitely better than perishing so pathetically, so uselessly!
Rip!
Mana was torn forcibly from her underdeveloped Mana Core, and a shock of pain unlike anything she’d ever experienced came crashing down upon Liliope.
Whatever the voice in her head was screaming, it didn’t reach her ears.
Fortunately, the mana driven by instinct moved faster than conscious thought could follow. Yet she had lived her entire life as a half-blood, never once casting a proper spell.
The experience she’d accumulated was woefully insufficient to instantly materialize theories she’d only ever known in principle.
The uncontrolled mana, finding no outlet, began to show signs of runaway rampage.
But just as the incomplete Magic Circle was about to scatter like smoke, leaving only a pathetic afterimage, Liliope’s mana began to trace another precarious trajectory.
As if her unconscious mind had found the optimal path necessary for her to survive in this very moment.
The spacetime that resonated with it warped soundlessly. And immediately after, the wind that had brushed against Liliope’s body ceased.
The half-burned vine leaves that had been dancing in empty air stopped moving the moment they touched her pale cheek.
With it came the silence of the earth.
The world’s blank space.
A colorless, hibernating landscape.
In the frozen time, the twisted faces of Zed’s gang, consumed by terror, looked like pictures trapped in frames.
The silver-haired boy before her was equally motionless, preserved like a taxidermied creature, his clothes and hair still streaming as if caught mid-motion.
Only Liliope alone, on this patch of earth, existed as the sole living thing permitted to breathe—solitary and vital upon a reality isolated from the world.
Boom!
This impossible phenomenon had lasted only as long as it took to blink once or twice.
But that was enough to evade the incoming magic.
The flash that plummeted like Lightning Strike found its target in an instant.
Like insects touched by the fierce sun’s rays, leaving no trace, Zed and his companions died without so much as a scream.
The boy’s magic was thus flawless, but the result was not.
“You dodged?”
Suspicious words fell toward Liliope, who lay sprawled on the ground, clutching her chest in agony.
“How?”
The boy’s head tilted, as if unable to fathom the cause of this unpredictable outcome.
“I don’t understand. Let me try again.”
And once more, appallingly violent magic struck Liliope directly.
“Ugh, khh……. Hggh…….”
This time too, Liliope barely managed to dodge the spell and survive.
Though the pain was terrible enough that she thought her forcibly-activated Mana Core had shattered, had pulverized into powder.
“This time too, I couldn’t see movement. It’s not Teleportation Magic.”
At last the boy’s feet touched the ground.
“Is it your Unique Magic? I’ve never seen a mana combination like that. How did you do it?”
He drew close to Liliope, looming over her with eyes devoid of the slightest warmth.
Still that look—as if he were regarding her as an insect, something inanimate.
Within Liliope, the faint ember of emotion that had lingered flared into flame.
“I… I can’t die…….”
In the next instant, when the boy saw Liliope raise her head, his eyes held a clarity they had never known before.
He had expected tears born of fear and despair at life’s end, or of pain—but instead the girl stared at him with blazing fury, her eyes bone-dry.
“Not yet, not yet can I die, damn you……!”
Thunk!
And the next moment, a blade was driven into the boy’s foot. The chipped and broken blade was the one Zed had dropped from the insect’s body.
Though the distance between Liliope and the boy was very close, not so close that he couldn’t have avoided the attack.
Yet this time too, the boy did not see Liliope drive the blade into his foot.
Though he hadn’t taken his eyes off her for a single moment, it was as if someone had forcibly torn time away and sewn it back together—when he perceived the situation, everything was already done.
If he hadn’t been pinned to the ground, unable even to rise, could she have driven that blade into his heart?
Belkiers regarded the furious Liliope with eyes like those of someone beholding a rare creature never before seen.
But it was not mere curiosity or observation—rather, his gaze was relentlessly invasive, as though he meant to cut through her flesh, strip her bones, burrow into her very innards, and brand them all upon his eyes.
Liliope’s eyes were violet, like the sky in that dim twilight when the first star begins to emerge.
The fierce light captured within them burned so fiercely it seemed it would consume everything around it and even immolate itself.
That persistent stare, which seemed it might continue forever, was severed by a black butterfly that came flying from somewhere.
“You’re fun.”
In the next moment, a faint laugh echoed at the edge of Liliope’s hearing.
The blade lodged in the boy’s foot withdrew of its own accord and fell to the ground.
“Go on living, then.”
Before Liliope could even respond to that arrogant dismissal, a swarm of black butterflies obscured her vision.
“I’ll watch to see how you flounder in this wretched mire.”
When she reflexively closed her eyes against the fierce wind and opened them again, the boy had already vanished without a trace from before her.
As if it had all been a dream of the night.
[Hey, are you alright? Hey, Contractor……!]
The nerves that had been taut with tension finally snapped, and a belated wave of exhaustion crashed over her.
The voice in her head, calling to her urgently, became audible again at last.
But Liliope was drained of all strength; she couldn’t answer. She simply collapsed where she stood, sliding down, and lost consciousness.
5. Two Meetings
Whiiiish.
Time passed, and a dry wind blowing from the south swept lightly across the Wasteland, where the corpse of an enormous white insect lay sprawled.
Where the silver-haired boy and Liliope had vanished, dust swirled up and covered the black bloodstains left on the ground.
Blood that had flowed from beneath the boy’s foot along with the blade torn away by magic, pooling with a faint metallic reek.
Pulse.
Suddenly it throbbed ever so slightly, as if possessed of will.
Thereafter it moved fluidly, gathering together, then slowly flowed across the dusty earth before seeping into the nearest corpse with the greatest efficiency.
And moments later, the dead boy’s hand, cooling and growing pale, twitched ever so faintly.
The boy’s unfocused gray eyes opened beneath heavy lids, taking in the desolate landscape.
Whiiiish.
The quiet wind blew once more from somewhere, covering the ashen-gray earth.
As if concealing a secret that must never be discovered.
Moments later, footprints that began to mark the dusty ground one by one quietly revealed the truth that could not be hidden—what had transpired in that 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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