As Prince opened his eyes, he was shocked to see complete darkness in front of him.
He looked down; he felt like something was grabbing his feet, and saw some living corpses snarling at his feet.
Some hands eventually came from behind him and grabbed his neck tightly, trying to kill him.
Prince couldn’t understand what was happening. He simply tried to brush their hands off him. There were so many hands.
He suddenly realized that these hands were those he had killed in his previous life.
[Pride of Kings is trembling]
"Hey, get your filthy hands off me." He blurted out in the space of endless darkness, while kicking the hands reaching for his feet.
Every hand vanished in a fraction of a second, as ’he’ appeared before Prince.
Prince had forgotten, in the weeks since their last meeting, exactly how much smaller everything else felt in this man’s presence, himself included.
"It’s been a while, Prince."
Prince recognized this overwhelming existence as he saw ’him’, the masked man.
Prince looked at the masked man and spoke in a tone tinged with both anger and deep fear.
"What-t in the world was that!?"
The masked man replied calmly. "Ohh, that? That was your own shadow soldiers hehe~"
"My shadow soldiers!?"
"Yes. Your shadow soldiers, dear Prince. These were the trials you have to overcome by your own."
Prince narrowed his eyes and looked like a confused person. "And why should I complete these trials?"
The Masked Man chuckled softly. "Hehe~ baka! You still didn’t get anything? It will help you collect more of your authority fragments, as well as help you get new authorities."
’W-Wait! Baka!? Is he Japanese?’
Without bothering to ask whether he was Japanese, Prince asked a question that had been bugging him. "That trial, just right now, was it your doing?"
"Ohh yeah. You are absolutely not wrong."
"So why did you create this space again? And why bother inviting a mere existence here?"
"Let’s come to the main point then. There is a hidden artifact, Noctis Arcanum, deep in the abyssal realm. Go there, and find it."
Prince’s expressions were totally blank, trying hard to find the word ’Noctis Arcanum’ in his mind, but nothing came to the surface. It was as if he knew what it was but couldn’t spill it out from his throat.
"What was that again?? Noc-tis Arcanum-m? Ahmmm..."
The Masked Man summoned two chairs from the darkness and explained what Noctis Arcanum is while they both took their seats.
Noctis Arcanum is the artifact that helps Dark element users use dark powers at the Infinite level.
However, you need two things to use Noctis Arcanum: the first is Netherheart.
And the other thing is, you need an immense amount of mana, more than SSS+ rank mana.
Every single human wants to have Noctis Arcanum. Not only humans but demons too. It is like the Crown of a Nameless King.
Straining to recall something just out of reach, he frowned like something was a part of him, but he forgot it somehow.
"Don’t be so surprised. Your memory of Noctis Arcanum, I removed it when you regressed."
The masked man said it so casually, like he was mentioning he’d borrowed a book without asking.
Like not admitting to reaching directly into Prince’s mind and cutting something out of it.
That casualness, more than the confession itself, was what finally cracked through Prince’s composure.
"Huh? W-Why? Why did you do that for!?" Prince’s voice rose a bit; his grip tightened around the chair’s arms.
"I think, because it was necessary."
"Necessary? Who are you to decide what is necessary for me or not!?" His voice filled with rage; he’d completely lost his temper.
"Decide, you say? Hmm... if I’m doing something, there would be a reason. Even after I’ve helped you this much, you still want to keep whining about it?"
Prince heaved a sigh, frustration bleeding out of him, and slumped back into the chair.
"Tell me, what exactly do you want from me? Why are you helping me? Or perhaps do you want to use Noctis Arcanum for yourself? And how exactly powerful are you??" He slumped in his seat, looking thoroughly burned out.
"What I truly want... I’ll tell you when you successfully take control over Noctis Arcanum. And about how powerful exactly I am..."
The Masked Man paused for a second, then continued with a serious tone. "I have crossed over so many universes, but never found someone as powerful as me."
"So how can I help a being such as you?"
"I told you, you should stop worrying and instead focus on getting stronger, go obtain Noctis Arcanum."
"..."
The Masked Man broke the silence that had hung for a moment between them.
He pulled a smartphone out of his pocket and asked, "by the way, can you tell me how to fix this problem?"
Upon seeing a smartphone in his hand, Prince looked confused, maybe because he was not expecting to see one in this world.
He curiously asked first, "How in the world do you get a phone?" and stepped closer, catching sight of what was on the screen.
[Your device’s storage is full. Please clean up the storage!]
"Oh, I went to Shibuya, Japan last week. And this device caught my eye. Though there were some sort of Sorcerers fighting each other."
"WHATTT!??? Did you really go to Japan? The world where I came from?" Prince was completely shocked.
"Ohh yeah, I was quite bored, so I decided to go somewhere else."
As if crossing entire universes was the equivalent of a lazy Sunday errand.
As if a being who claimed to have never met anyone more powerful than himself spent his downtime wandering modern Tokyo, getting distracted by street fights and running out of phone storage like literally anyone else on the planet.
Prince glanced at the smartphone, then back at the Masked Man. He had many questions to ask, but utterly speechless.