SLASH—!
“Ghk... urgh.......”
A man collapsed limply beneath a knight’s sword.
Blood poured from the gaping wound that ran from his neck to his chest.
It soaked the ground beneath him.
And he was not the only one whose blood stained the earth.
Countless corpses lay strewn between the burning houses.
It was a scene of merciless slaughter, a veritable sea of blood.
Not even the faintest trace of peace remained here.
One of the knights planted a foot on the torso of the man who had just fallen and said,
“What good are black mages if they’re this weak? I thought the necromancers might be different, but they’re no better. As expected of the Doiten Kingdom, huh?”
“Exactly. They’re nothing but a disorganized mob of rats. Why did they even bother ordering us to wipe out every last one of them?”
“They said it was just in case. I suppose the necromancers they can’t touch are already more than enough.”
Another knight thought about that for a moment, then nodded in agreement.
“True. We practically won the war thanks to the necromancers... Just imagine if those bastards ever turned on us. Damn, it’d be a complete fucking mess.”
“We’d all die. Why do you think the mages can’t so much as squeak in front of the necromancers? All they can do is order us to wipe them out behind their backs.”
“You’ve got to hand it to those mages. Their hunger to stay on top knows no bounds.”
How were knights supposed to live with such indignity? Muttering to himself, he spat on the ground.
As the knights traded their idle remarks,
CLATTER. CLATTER.
Skeletons carrying all manner of weapons blocked their path.
Some were already standing, while others were rising from among the corpses.
In the blink of an eye, dozens of skeletons had surrounded the knights.
Behind them stood the necromancers who had summoned them and the commoners, all gritting their teeth.
“Tch. You’re still making this a pain to the bitter end. Are you the last of them?”
“Hey, quit wasting time talking and finish it. We can drink ourselves stupid once this is over.”
With those final words, the knights began to move.
The necromancers responded by wielding black magic and commanding their skeletons.
But then—
HUM—
The black magic was stopped by artifacts imbued with divine power.
FWIP— CLANG!
Every arrow the skeletons lost was knocked aside by the knights’ swords.
The skeletons wielding other weapons fared no better.
And so began a one-sided assault that did virtually no damage to the knights.
“Graaaaaah!”
One knight unleashed a slash that cut through several skeletons at once.
Another struck them down one by one at tremendous speed.
Each knight swung his sword differently, but the result was the same.
Every swing sent skeletons collapsing into heaps.
CLATTER—
CLATTER!
The fallen bones piled up like a mountain.
There were now more shattered skeletons than intact ones.
Anyone who witnessed this would have had the same question.
How could knights who could not even use aura defeat necromancers?
Yet this kingdom was so weak that such knights could swagger about while relying on low-grade artifacts.
The people who gathered here were black mages and necromancers in name only.
“N-No! S-save me... COUGH!”
“R-Run!”
After finishing off his share, the knight’s next targets were the people whose faces had gone deathly pale.
The knights carrying out their orders showed no mercy.
Amid the people being slaughtered, several commoners who had been watching for an opening broke into a run.
One knight exhaled sharply and chased after them.
And in the end,
“If you’re going to die anyway, why can’t you just die quietly?”
The knight, his face twisted with irritation, pulled his sword from the prone body.
He was about to head back when he spotted a woman in a corner.
She sat there clutching her blood-soaked abdomen.
“Tch. Another little rat was hiding here.”
Just as the knight raised his sword to bring it down on her,
HSSSS—
Black smoke rose from the ground, and a skeleton crawled up from beneath it.
“Ha. Your gut’s been torn open, so why don’t you just die quietly? What do you think summoning one pathetic thing like this is going to do?”
The knight looked at the woman’s futile resistance with a face full of annoyance.
But someone else was controlling that skeleton.
He was simply far enough away that the knight had not noticed him.
Unaware of that fact, the knight brought his sword down on the skeleton.
CLATTER!
Just like all the others, it collapsed in a single blow.
With the obstacle removed, the knight’s blade turned toward the woman.
But then,
“What the hell? Why is my hand moving on its own....?”
Footsteps sounded, and the knight’s wrist began to rotate.
He turned his head toward the sound and saw a silver-haired man.
A man staring at him while moving his hand.
Even then, the knight’s wrist continued to turn.
At last, against his will, he found himself pointing his own sword at himself.
“W-What in the world is this...?!”
“I can control a person’s hands and feet, at least.”
Before the knight could ask what that meant, his sword began moving toward his own throat.
It moved slowly, but terror filled his eyes as his hand refused to obey him.
“N-No... G-Gaaaaaah!!”
The knight drove his own sword into his neck and collapsed with his eyes still open.
Only then did the silver-haired man lower his hand and run to gather the woman into his arms.
“Mother, please drink this.”
But the woman only pushed away the bottle he held out and said,
“Ter... lo. You have to... run....”
“...Please.”
Just as he forced the bottle to her lips,
“Why aren’t you cleaning this up already? What’s all this noise—?!”
Another knight, who had followed after them with an irritated expression, discovered the knight who had killed himself.
“...John?”
He had barely called out the name in shock when black smoke rose, and the knight called John stood up, sloughing off his skin.
The comrade who had been fighting beside him only moments ago had become a skeleton.
The pursuing knight’s eyes shifted from shock to killing intent.
“You bastard... How dare you do that to John....”
The knight muttered under his breath, then kicked off the ground.
The skeleton called John stepped in front of the mother and son.
With a crack, it pulled free the sword lodged in its neck bone and raised it.
The knight faltered briefly at the sight of his comrade’s remains, but quickly regained his senses and swung his sword.
“Graaaaaah!”
The knight and his former comrade’s skeleton crossed swords again and again.
This skeleton was nothing like the others that had gone down in a single blow.
But that was all.
In the end, it too collapsed, and the knight charged through the falling bones toward the mother and son.
“I’ll kill you!”
STUMBLE—
“...?!”
The knight, who had charged in so boldly, tripped as though his foot had caught on a jutting stone and tumbled across the ground.
Then, just like the knight who had become a skeleton, he turned his sword toward his own chest.
He could not resist it through force of will.
“Ghk. H-How can this be happening...?!”
The knight struggled desperately to resist, but in the end, he drove the sword into his own chest.
SQUELCH.
He spat up bright red blood, and his movements gradually stilled.
After confirming the knight’s death, Terlo checked the woman’s condition.
He had made her drink a potion that aided recovery, but his response had come too late, and the healing appeared to be slow.
Worry clouded his face as he watched her.
Meanwhile, someone else was observing him with great interest.
“Hmm. He can control hands and feet? Since they remain conscious until the moment they die, it cannot be mind magic.”
The man muttering to himself and stroking his chin was the mage who had brought the knights here.
Even if their opponent was a pitiful kingdom, the knights he had brought were far from weak.
And yet they had been forced to kill themselves so helplessly.
“I have never seen a necromancer who could control even the living.”
As a mage, he believed black magic moved along a fundamentally different path from orthodox magic, that mysterious and boundless field of study.
Were black mages not gutter rats who committed every filthy act imaginable for power and did not hesitate to make contracts with demons?
That was why witnessing an incomprehensible power like this was not, in itself, so strange.
What was curious was that a kind of necromancer he had never seen before had appeared in none other than the Doiten Kingdom.
“Has he been hiding here and plotting something in secret?”
But if that were the case, the skill he displayed was far too pathetic.
Unless....
“Perhaps he does not even know the extent of his own ability.”
The mage gave a faint laugh. He could simply find out.
Then he vanished from where he stood.
He reappeared directly in front of the mother and son.
Just as expected, Terlo had sensed nothing.
The mage smiled at the sight and spoke.
“What a curious talent you possess.”
“...!”
Terlo hurriedly raised a hand.
Following the frantic gesture, a black sphere began to form, and the skeleton of the recently slain knight had not even begun to rise when—
“It is a pity that you cannot make use of that potential. But do not worry. I will make excellent use of you as material.”
The mage’s spell, cast with absolute composure, engulfed him.
***
“M-Mooooother! Haaah... Hah....”
Terlo, who had been standing perfectly still, suddenly shouted and staggered.
Then he bent at the waist and began breathing heavily.
The motion left his neatly arranged silver hair in disarray.
“...? What has come over you all of a sudden?”
His father, Doristen Krauber, asked in surprise at the sight of him.
But there was no chance Terlo, who had just died and returned to life, would hear the question.
‘He definitely wasn’t a holy mage.’
It had not been divine magic, yet Terlo had been defeated in such a brief instant.
Of course, Terlo could not have defeated a mage anyway.
He knew only a handful of black magic spells, and he had never fought a mage in his life.
‘Still, I thought I could at least buy some time.’
But the moment the mage noticed his existence, something like fire blazed up around his body.
Then came that suffocating pain, as if his entire body were being squeezed tight, accompanied by the mage’s voice.
Terlo could still hear it ringing in his ears.
‘He said it was a pity I couldn’t make use of my potential.’
So his talent was not limited to controlling hands and feet after all?
Terlo possessed an unusual ability unlike anyone else’s.
He could control living creatures just as he controlled summoned undead.
And he could hear the thoughts of the living creatures he controlled.
It was an ability that manifested through the shadow-like black forms he had seen beside living creatures since childhood.
Once he realized that only he could see them and gave the matter some thought, a spell naturally took shape in his mind.
‘Even though I could only control one part of the body.’
Even that alone was undeniably an extraordinary ability.
Had he not protected his mother, Lydia, from the knights with it?
Though in the end, he had still died at the mage’s hands.
‘That’s right. I died....’
Then Terlo suddenly realized something was wrong.
‘...?’
He was dead, so how was he breathing?
Come to think of it, the suffocating pain that had constricted his body had vanished long ago.
Terlo straightened from where he had been bent over and began inspecting himself.
‘My body is far too small.’
It was the size of a child’s body.
Confused, Terlo looked around.
His father, Doristen Krauber, the skeleton his father had summoned, and the servant Bail all came into view.
‘The training ground. Father, a skeleton, Bail....’
As Terlo stared at the younger Doristen Krauber and tried to make sense of it,
“Terlo. What cannot be done cannot be done. Did I not tell you that your power is still far too unstable? It will not be safe for you to handle dark mana until you are at least twelve.”
His father’s stern voice reached him.
‘Wait, this was definitely the day....’
It was the day Terlo had used dark mana for the first time.
The very day he had not only wielded dark mana despite never having been taught, but had even managed to summon a skeleton.
It was also the day he had been forbidden from using black magic.
His father had said it was not yet time.
That was precisely why the moment had remained so vivid in his memory.
‘What’s going on?’
Terlo was confused.
The situation was disorienting enough to make him wonder whether everything that had happened before had merely been a dream, but....
If either reality was a dream, it was the present one. The attack on the kingdom could never have been a dream.
Then he seemed to hear someone’s voice.
It asked whether, if he had returned to this day, he intended to live the same life and become some mage’s material all over again.
‘No. Never.’
Of course, his life had been happy and good until the day he died.
But that did not mean he intended to live the same life again for the sake of a finite happiness.
‘If I really have returned....’
Unlike in his previous life, there was one thing he had to do before anything else.
This time, he had to face it and see it through so that he would never be defeated so helplessly again.
He still could not be certain what had happened to him, but....
Terlo spoke with greater seriousness than ever before.
“Father. I must learn black magic.”