Chapter 105 - Chapter 105 (1/2)

Drip, drip, drip—

With a small wooden house as the epicenter, corpses were strewn about in every direction.

Calvin’s expression as he stared at the chopped-up and burnt bodies was one of pure stupefaction. Without even realizing it, he had sunk down to his knees.

He couldn’t tell how long it had been, either.

<<None of it worked on him for real.>>

Su-hyeun did say this — that he was the natural enemy of the magicians.

When Calvin first heard that, he couldn’t quite grasp the concept. He simply figured that the attacker was confident of his defense against magic, and that was about it.

But that man, he was telling the truth.

Magic didn’t work on Su-hyeun. He ignored the spells that didn’t possess any physical form and continued to cut down the dark magicians.

Unsurprisingly, the gathered dark magicians all ran away from there in an instant. Su-hyeun didn’t chase after them, however. And that’s why Calvin thought about escaping as well, but couldn’t actually do it.

If he did, then he might really get killed off.

“Shall we start our conversation again?” Su-hyeun asked.

Creaaak—

He sat down on the sole remaining rocking chair found inside the completely destroyed house. It was also the same chair that he sat on when he first came here, too.

Calvin found it quite remarkable that a lone chair managed to escape unharmed from what had transpired just now, and at the same time, it gave him the creeps. He wondered whether Su-hyeun had deliberately left it alone or not.

“First, tell me everything you know about him,” said Su-hyeun.

“W-when you say him, you mean Malcolm…”

“It’s ‘Sir’ Malcolm.”

“Y-yes, yes.”

Half-out of his mind now, Calvin turned towards Su-hyeun while still on his knees. He racked his brain, trying to figure just where he should start and eventually opened his mouth. “Malcolm… Sir Malcolm, he’s more like a scholar rather than a true dark magician.”

“A scholar?”

“Y-yes. Rather than learning and mastering magic spells, he researches them. In reality, although he is a magician, you can’t really call him one.”

“Well, yeah. He did look that way.”

The amount of magical energy that could be sensed coming from Malcolm was indeed quite insignificant. So, that assertion wasn’t entirely wrong.

“However, Sir Malcolm as a scholar is someone more than worthy enough to be recorded in the history books. That’s why he was admitted to this city in the first place, too.”

“Okay, so?”

“As far as I know, the reason why Sir Malcolm came to this city was to perform research on the divine beasts.”

“Divine beasts?”

“Yes, divine beasts. Demonic beasts as well. To perform research related to them.”

Su-hyeun had been wondering why there were so many divine beast-related books in the basement study, but that seemed to be the reason.

“Was it really Sir Malcolm who summoned Ouroboros?” Su-hyeun asked another question.

“N-no, it’s not. He doesn’t have the ability to do so.”

“Then who did it?”

“Sir Malcolm only told us of the method. It was the dark magicians of this city that summoned the demonic beast, Ouroboros.”

“That was my mistake.”

***

Su-hyeun thought he could hear Malcolm’s voice — the voice filled with powerful self-torturing regret and guilt. The reason for that was precisely this.

“What’s the reason for sacrificing people to Ouroboros?”

“E-excuse me?” Calvin sounded flustered by Su-hyeun’s question. It seemed that he had no idea the latter knew about that fact. “C-could it be that… You have heard about it already?”

“Of course. How could I not when you lot have been yapping on so loudly about it?”

Earlier on, he heard what Calvin and the other dark magicians were noisily going on about through the slightly ajar door of the house: people being served up as sacrifices to Ouroboros, and the dark magicians using that as their source of entertainment and cackling away.

Su-hyeun barely managed to suppress the sick feeling welling up inside of him back then.

“Hurry up and speak. What’s the reason for sacrificing people to Ouroboros? If you take your time with your answers, from now on I will…”

“It-it’s to appease Ouroboros!”

“Appease? Appease what exactly?”

“Its appetite….”

Su-hyeun deeply furrowed his brows at Calvin’s reply. Something didn’t feel quite right with that answer. “Are you telling me that the appetite of such a humongous creature can be satisfied by feeding it just a few people?”

“Specifically, not its appetite but its sense of satisfaction. Satisfaction that it…had eaten humans.”

“You should’ve said that from the start. Trying to confuse me and all.”

“M-my apologies.”

“Okay, so? Why did Sir Malcolm teach your group the method to summon Ouroboros? And why did you go ahead and summon that bastard?”

“That is….”

Calvin ended up hesitating with his reply.

Wu-du-duk—!

“Kkeuh-aaaaaaahk!”

Su-hyeun’s foot stomped on Calvin’s knee. Now subjected to the pain of his kneecap being crushed to bits, the latter struggled in vain to remove the former’s foot while screaming out loudly.

“I-I’ll-I’ll answer you! Please!”

Su-hyeun took his foot away at Calvin’s seizure-like screaming. The smart thing to do when handing out a troublesome question was to not give the opponent time to formulate an answer.

“Kkeuh-euh….”

“You have three seconds. Three, two….”

“It-it was to protect the city!”

Su-hyeun stared straight at Calvin after hearing that reply. He needed a bit more explanation than that.

“Be more specific.”

“An empire across the sea was aiming for Moros. It was the worst crisis to fall upon Moros in its entire history.”

“Oh, so the reason for Ouroboros’s summoning was to protect Moros from the invasion of this empire?”

In order to reach Moros, an island nation, you had no choice but to cross the vast ocean. The empire failed to get past the giant snake of the oceans, Ouroboros, and eventually gave up on the invasion of Moros.

That was the end of Calvin’s explanation.

“Is that really everything?” Su-hyeun asked.

“T-that is…”

Calvin displayed yet another hint of hesitation at Su-hyeun’s pointed question.

Right then, Su-hyeun’s foot was raised up, prompting Calvin to urgently open his mouth. “That-that was the reason for Sir Malcolm’s decision to summon Ouroboros.”

“You said it ‘was’, which means….?”

“It-it was all a lie.”