The Scoundrel Prince Sold Out the Empire - Chapter 64

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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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Episode 64: Wings of the Bat (9)
“Crown Prince!”
“What in the name of—”
“The Empire won’t stand for this!”
“No, I said let go!”
These were the words the Marquis had repeated all through the night sky.
Let go? Of all things to ask for?
At this height, the fall would kill him.
“You truly wish to be released? Very well.”
The moment Zion’s grip loosened, the Marquis’s eyes swelled wide as saucers.
Gravity pulled him down, away, faster than thought.
Instinct transcends all else.
For a moment, Zion savored the primal terror blooming across the Marquis’s face.
Only then did he seize the man’s collar once more.
“Gasp—gasp!”
“I would prefer silence. Will you cooperate?”
“Hold your tongue! A descendant of the royal house turned terrorist—have you no shame before your ancestors?”
Ah, so that was how he meant to play it.
Seeing the calculation in his eyes, Zion abandoned any hope of shutting him up with words.
‘Quere Stellam Orbita.’
Instead, he cast Silence Magic.
Watching the Marquis rant on, oblivious that his voice could not carry, was almost amusing.
The distraction made the journey pass quickly.
“I never thought I would regret arrival. I spent days and nights considering how best to orchestrate your final curtain call.”
Truly, days and nights.
Ever since witnessing through the Branching Point’s guidance how the Marquis had wrung the lifeblood from Deber’s people, Zion had labored to craft a finale befitting him.
‘I hope you appreciate it, old friend. Tonight’s show.’
He let go.
“Gasp!”
This second fall drew forth no less terror—instinct knows no lessening the second time.
The Marquis crashed through a hut roof woven of straw and grass, his body punching through the structure and lodging in the heap within.
Bruises, most likely. Nothing worse.
Twenty years of rebel life had taught Zion to read such injuries at a glance.
“Crown Prince! Why—why would you do this to me……?”
As the Marquis crawled from the ruined straw, his voice rose to a shout—then faltered.
A man in rags.
A woman cradling a child.
An elder, leaning on a walking stick, his legs barely holding him upright.
The Deber folk of the Slums had gathered in a circle.
“As I said, keep quiet. Now you’ve woken everyone.”
The Deber people, stripped of everything and cast out, were emerging from every corner.
Most of them had borrowed money from Marquis Remikoning at some point.
Most had endured his relentless torment.
The Slums were fertile ground for such exploitation, their suffering as profitable as it was unwitnessed.
“Remikoning…….”
More than a few had fled in the dead of night, hounded by debt.
Several had sold their daughters into servitude at his manor.
Resentment began to crystallize in their eyes.
As the atmosphere shifted, the Marquis raised his dust-covered arms in fury.
“How dare you speak the noble name of an aristocrat so carelessly!”
His voice carried far enough.
“Wretched vermin! Do you think because I have fallen alone in this godforsaken hour, you can threaten me? You cannot!”
The Marquis pounded his chest.
“You. You. You! How dare you look upon nobility with such eyes? Have you forgotten? Your debt certificates rest in my hands. I can sell not just your wives and daughters, but your very souls if I choose. Only then will you learn your place!”
In that moment, resentment began to curdle into something darker.
“Fear not.”
A quiet, measured voice cut through the night.
It was Zion.
“All of your debts now belong to me.”
From atop the Marquis’s manor roof, he let fall the thick stack of papers he’d been holding beneath his coat.
They were all debt certificates.
The ones the Marquis had exchanged for chips at the casino.
“That… how on earth did you get your hands on those!”
Zion shrugged as he watched the Marquis’s eyes widen like saucers.
“I ransacked Zion Riobert’s residence. Actually, ‘ransacked’ is too generous a word—I slipped in and out, that’s all.”
He continued speaking.
It was to build an alibi.
“The Ninth Prince apparently didn’t consider the common people’s debts worth much. He didn’t keep them in a safe—just tossed them in a desk drawer.”
A lie.
Winter had given them to him.
But he couldn’t reveal that fact.
Right now, he stood in this place as Zion Blizje with black hair and blue eyes.
‘Besides, I can do something like this instead.’
“Quere Stellam Orbita.”
A spark crackled to life at his fingertips.
Zion brought the flame to the stack of debt certificates.
“No!”
The Marquis lunged forward.
He understood well enough that these were his lifeline.
“Never been easier than this.”
With a dull thud, the Marquis bounced backward.
An invisible barrier isolated the space between them.
In that moment, fire touched paper.
The aged, brittle pages went up in flame in an instant.
The fire crept up toward his hand, dancing and writhing.
But Zion didn’t let go of the bundle.
“Behold.”
Instead, he held it aloft like a torch, illuminating the heads of the Deber people.
This heat was nothing.
Compared to the fire in their hearts.
“Until now, you didn’t even know the Marquis had passed your debts on to someone else. Perhaps he sold off your debts and then brazenly continued squeezing money from you anyway. So you must understand every detail of such financial dealings.”
But.
But then again.
The letters inscribed with names and amounts and interest rates twisted in the flames.
The paper blackened, became ash, and could hold no writing anymore.
“Now you needn’t worry. Never again.”
Zion Riobert—having obtained the debt certificates through a path he could openly justify—would claim that part of his property had been stolen and file a report with the Security Bureau under the Governor’s Headquarters.
Then he would rage and demand they bring Zion Blizje to him.
Meanwhile, Zion Blizje would make a spectacular reappearance, announcing to all that the past belief of his death at Zion Riobert’s hands was false, thus justifying Zion Riobert’s fury.
‘Just thinking about it is thrilling… wait?’
Only then did he realize it.
Though all the debts had become fire, the people of Deber were not rejoicing.
When he looked toward where someone’s lips had parted, what escaped was not a cheer.
Something between relief and sorrow.
The debt that had crushed them all their lives became ash before their eyes.
Yet on their faces bloomed something other than joy.
Across the gaunt faces spread quietly that emotion’s name: bittersweet sorrow.
One who has run for so long cannot rejoice even upon reaching the destination at last.
They can only collapse there.
‘…It hurts.’
It ached terribly.
It stung.
The magical power in his heart trembled and throbbed.
Whoosh!
Thanks to all his diligent training, his magical power had grown considerably.
All that formless force surged forth under the control of will and intention.
That is, magical power responsive to intention.
This too is a form of magic.
Whoooosh!
Black, translucent wings erupted from behind Zion’s back.
Raven feathers dancing on the wind.
Fragments of magical power reached each of the people it had failed to protect until now.
‘Quere Stellam Orbita.’
In that moment.
An old man wiped away tears without a sound.
A woman held the child in her arms more tightly still.
A small man gazed at the Marquis, then at the sky, and exhaled slowly.
Yet all these reactions were things only those who had not given up could see.
“I’ve only ever felt sorry toward you all.”
He meant it.
“That’s not something Your Highness should apologize for.”
Someone shook his head.
It was an elder with a bent back.
“Truth is, even before Deber fell, it was never truly a righteous or good nation.”
The king of Deber before its fall was Zion’s father.
So it wasn’t pleasant to hear, exactly.
‘It’s true, though. Regrettably.’
“Nations are things that fall because they deserve to fall, aren’t they? The Empire is strong, yes, but Deber was worth devouring, so the Empire bared its fangs.”
The old man wiped his eyes with his sleeve.
“Still, Your Highness bears no blame. What sin could you possibly carry for something that happened fifty years ago?”
From another direction came a woman’s voice.
“The fact that you’ve returned to us alive is enough…….”
Then a cacophony burst forth all at once.
Yet to Zion’s ears, it sounded like beautiful harmony.
Sobs.
Sighs of relief.
Weeping laden with gratitude.
All of it.
‘Surely among them there are some.’
Those who came wearing black hats to my execution ceremony, Zion Blizel’s—my own execution.
Knowing full well that such an act alone would mark them as persons of concern under the Security Bureau’s surveillance.
To pay their respects to the House of Deber, to its last heir.
‘I’m sorry. For being weak. For choosing isolation and falling behind. For not cultivating magic enough to keep pace.’
He swallowed the words rising in his throat.
The apology he felt now was not a debt that could be repaid in words.
“No blame?”
That was when.
The Marquis cut in.
“If the Crown Prince bears no blame, then neither do I!”
A thought that kept recurring—the old man certainly had a good voice.
“Your Highness! What in blazes is this about!”
“……Blazes?”
“What else would you call this! Why are you doing this to me!”
His brow furrowed.
The crudeness of it.
Whether Zion thought so or not, the Marquis bellowed like a man boiling a train whistle, his voice coarse and raw.
“The nation was worth falling just as those people said! I simply found my own path to survival! Why do you hold a grudge only against me, spouting this nonsense! Answer me, Your Highness!”
Listening to him, a laugh nearly escaped.
The man’s bearing was far too low to be called human dignity.
In truth, just watching how he treated his own son, Winter, had been enough to doubt he deserved to be called a person at all.
“Let me be clear. No amount of shouting will summon the Security Bureau. I’ve cast Silence Magic here.”
“…….”
Only then did the Marquis close his mouth.
From the moment his collar was seized and he was dragged across the night sky until now, his shouting had been for one purpose: to summon the guards.
But Silence Magic?
“Now that I think of it……why isn’t the magical detection sensor……?”
“Working, you mean?”
The Marquis’s eyes grew wider and wider.
He was only now realizing.
That Zion had flown here openly using Flight Magic.
In truth, the magical detection sensors throughout the royal capital should have been screaming long ago.
It was common knowledge that casting magic without authorization in the city would expose your location in an instant, drawing armed security officers swarming like hornets.
But that didn’t happen.
“First. The security officers have all been drawn far away from Luminous Street. One of the Liberation Army commanders appeared over there.”
“A diversion tactic?”
“By now, quite the commotion should be unfolding on that front. Every security officer worth their badge has likely rushed over there.”
Reianna had led her comrades in pulling every security officer and military police far across the river and away from this place.
Now she was quietly slipping out to arrive here and witness the Marquis’s final moments.
Tonight, no police power would come to rescue this Marquis.
‘And the second reason.’
The Void Attribute.
No one could perceive Zion’s magic.
Not a soul—not if Zion willed it otherwise.
Zion savored the strange sensation of absence, of presence and void intertwined.
The flux of magical power, the traces of its manifestation—all erased as cleanly as if wiped by a rubber.
The overlap of existence and non-existence.
Power that does not radiate outward.
Hidden presence.
Even the most sophisticated Mage Engineering sensors were blind as bats before the Void Attribute’s power.
“An age where magic is rendered obsolete by engineering. Which is precisely why I thought it fitting to demonstrate the opposite. But that’s not what matters now.”
Now was the time to focus on the Marquis.
“Listen well, all of you. The debts the Marquis imposed on you have burned away. But there remain liabilities yet to be settled.”
Settling liabilities.
At those four words, unease began to seep into the eyes of the people of Deber.
But the settlement Zion spoke of was the opposite of what they imagined.
“Five Thieves Inside the Palace, Remikoning. You have committed far too many atrocities under the guise of petty debts.”
Zion stretched out his hand, and the magical power that erupted forcibly bound the Marquis.
“Why did you torment your own countrymen so relentlessly with that yellow-dyed hair, Marquis? Was it merely to line your pockets?”
Not that an answer mattered either way.
Zion was of the firm belief that he had every right to enforce silence upon the guilty.
What truly mattered was the hearts of the victims.
“I ask you all: what will you have done with the Marquis?”
A long silence fell. No one dared speak first.
Everyone here was a commoner.
Though fifty years had passed since the nation’s collapse, the differences in station did not fade easily.
Yet when there are many, one or two often find courage.
“……I wish to kill him.”
A trembling voice.
It was the answer he had waited for, but understanding the emotion behind it left only a bitter taste.
‘I was mistaken. It was not courage.’
A different emotion filled that void where courage should have been.
It was hatred, festering and rotten to the core.
“That wretch starved my son to death. When I couldn’t pay the interest, he took everything—and the boy, he never got his fill of milk. He just withered away.”
Another voice cried out behind the first.
“I wish him dead!”
It was a woman, clutching an infant to her chest.
Tears streamed down her face.
“That beast took everything—our entire family’s food for a week. No, not just food. Now there’s only me and this newborn girl left. He promised money, then took my child’s father away. Why has he never come back? Why haven’t you brought him back?!”
The woman’s anguished cry tore through the night air.
‘So she was the wife of someone pressed into morphia trafficking.’
Zion’s fists clenched.
“My daughter…… was sold to that wretch’s mansion. He dragged her away as payment for the debt.”
“Marquis! You beat me half to death for not repaying your usurious loan. Because of you, I became a cripple!”
Suppressed sobs and groans erupted from every corner, mingled with burning rage.
“Do you hear it, Marquis? These are all the debts you must repay.”
Zion snapped his fingers sharply.
“By fortunate coincidence, tonight magic carries particularly well on the night wind. No light, no sound—not a trace shall escape beyond this river bank.”
A murmur that kindled courage.
At the same moment, Zion shoved the Marquis hard from behind.
When the Marquis stumbled forward and raised his head in panic, the people of Deber already filled his entire field of vision.
One step. Slow, but deliberate.
Those surrounding the Marquis stepped forward. The circle tightened.
“P-please, spare me, Your Highness!”
The Marquis shrieked toward Zion.
The man who moments before had strained his neck in fury now clawed with both hands in supplication.
“Spare me! I’ll—I’ll do anything! Anything!”
‘Sorry, but that’s the second time I’ve heard that plea.’
As Zion remained silent, hands stretched out from all directions, covering the Marquis’s head.
Hands black as ash.
Hands with dirt caked beneath the nails.
Hands pale as death itself, nothing but bone.
The debtors who had starved while being bled dry reached toward the Marquis, each one clawing.
They resembled ghouls tearing flesh from the living.
Yet it was this very Marquis who had made the living resemble the dead, so in a sense, this was merely karma coming due.
‘He won’t die easily at this rate.’
“Ahhhhhhh!”
The Marquis’s screams stretched on and on.
Endless, until the dawn light grew pale and wan above the river.

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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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