"Don't... don't come any closer!"
Only two prisoners remained. Injured by the aftershocks of the battle, they lay collapsed in a corner, forced to watch as their companions were slaughtered as effortlessly as vegetables on a chopping board.
Looking up at the black-robed figure, the very incarnation of Death itself, walking toward them step by step, they no longer even had the courage to raise their wands.
There was no escape. There truly was no escape.
The black-robed figure raised his wand and pointed it at the two trembling survivors, whose eyes had already lost all hope. His mission was not yet complete, and Saruman's order still echoed in his ears:
"Not a single one is to escape."
A flash of green illuminated the hall. The crippled prisoners, those already missing arms or legs, died as well.
In truth, the black-robed figure's mind had already begun to warp, extremism acting as one of the earliest symptoms of his condition.
"Criminals will always be criminals. Once a criminal, always a criminal. Even without conscious intent, you'll still seek to harm this world."
The black-robed figure stood in the center of the entrance hall, surrounded by a sea of corpses like the shadow cast by Death itself. The tip of his plain wooden wand still shimmered faintly with the lingering green glow of the Killing Curse.
His gaze, those vertical, inhuman pupils, slowly swept across the battlefield before settling on the deeper reaches of the hall, where half of a side corridor had collapsed during the fighting.
Someone was still hiding there. An overwhelming stench of fear, despair, and desperate malice seeped out from the shadows like tangible filth, even more nauseating than the aura lingering around the corpses scattered across the floor.
"Are you coming out on your own, or shall I drag you out?" The black-robed figure made no immediate move. He simply stared into the darkness as an invisible pressure surged toward it like a rising tide.
Finally, the shadows stirred. One... two... three...
In the end, roughly thirty figures slowly, painfully slowly, emerged from behind the shattered walls and magically conjured barricades.
These people were nothing like the rabble that had come before. They radiated concentrated killing intent, and while fear remained in their eyes, it was overshadowed by the brutality and savagery engraved deep into their bones.
These were the true monsters imprisoned in the deepest level of the African Ministry of Magic's underground prison, the worst of the worst, individuals sentenced to permanent confinement, left to rot until death.
Among them were leaders of Dark Wizard organizations, lunatics responsible for mass slaughter, and mad researchers whose forbidden magic experiments had twisted entire villages into nightmares.
Every one of them had once possessed a name capable of silencing crying children in the outside world.
As for those who had died earlier? They had merely been these people's lackeys, or prisoners they had bribed.
Their plan had been simple: let the expendable fools draw the guards' attention while they hid in the shadows, increasing their own chances of escaping.
It wasn't a bad plan.
Unfortunately, they had underestimated how tightly this prison was sealed. More importantly, they had underestimated the terrifying strength of the black-robed figure, and his determination to ensure that not a single fish slipped through the net.
"W-Who... who are you?" At this moment, these ferocious criminals, men whose very names inspired terror, stood frozen before the silent black-robed figure, too intimidated to make a move.
"We can give you money! Power! Women! Anything you want!" Someone attempted to bribe him.
They had witnessed firsthand how effortlessly their companions had been massacred, and the overwhelming disparity in strength stretched before them like a cold, bottomless abyss.
"I only want one thing," the black-robed figure finally spoke. His voice was flat, devoid of emotion, yet carried the certainty of an irrevocable judgment. "I want you to stay here. You cannot leave. The outside world cannot bear the disaster you would bring."
His words became the spark that ignited a long-suppressed fury. A wizard with a twisted centipede tattoo covering his face and one missing ear suddenly raised his head.
He roared with bloodshot eyes blazing, "Disaster?! You're saying 'we're' the ones who threaten the world? Hahaha! What a joke! You're the butcher! You're the monster who treats human lives like blades of grass! You've slaughtered more people than any of us! Your methods are even crueler than the darkest Dark Magic! Aren't 'you' far more evil than we are? What gives you the right to stand on the moral high ground and judge us?!"
He had completely misunderstood what the black-robed figure meant by "bringing disaster." His outburst quickly resonated with the others, and a wave of suppressed murmurs and angry agreement spread through the crowd.
Exactly. This man in black killed without the slightest hesitation, wielding strange and terrifying magic. What right did 'he' have to accuse them of endangering the world? The prisoners began talking all at once, voices overlapping into a chaotic clamor.
The black-robed figure fell silent. His expression remained hidden beneath the shadow of his hood, and only those vertical pupils seemed to waver ever so slightly. He neither denied their accusation nor acknowledged it.
The one-eared wizard saw the black-robed figure remain silent and assumed he had struck a nerve. Or perhaps, realizing there was no hope of surviving today, a reckless, nothing-left-to-lose ferocity surged within him.
He suddenly turned toward the other prisoners, his voice sharp and distorted with agitation.
"Everyone! You saw it! This monster isn't going to spare a single one of us! We're dead either way, so are we really going to stand here like livestock waiting for slaughter?!"
He waved both arms wildly, looking like a madman.
"Then let's join forces! Use 'that forbidden ritual'! Offer up our lives, our souls, everything we have as a sacrifice! Summon the power of the Abyss... and drag this damned monster down with us!"
Clearly, this region had its own forbidden Dark Magic that many of them had learned.
"Die together!"
Those four words acted like a charm, instantly igniting the last trace of savagery within the desperate criminals. When despair reached its limit, it transformed into a frenzied counterattack.
They were already lawless beings who disregarded every rule, and once they accepted that survival was impossible, taking someone this powerful down with them became, in their twisted minds, their final victory. Even their own lives meant nothing to them.
It could only be said that a desperate criminal was still a desperate criminal.
"That's right! Kill him!"
"Damn it! If I'm going down, I'm taking a piece of him with me!"
"You arrogant bastard! Let's all go to hell together!"
Curses and roars rose one after another. The nearly thirty remaining monsters reached an unprecedented consensus.
They quickly spread out into a bizarre formation, surrounding the black-robed figure at its center, while raising their wands or using their fingernails to cut open their own flesh, drawing twisted symbols across the floor with their blood.
The black-robed figure did nothing to stop them.
An ancient, obscure chant filled with blasphemous overtones echoed simultaneously from thirty throats. The voices varied in pitch and rhythm, yet somehow merged into a single chorus that made one's scalp crawl.
The temperature throughout the underground chamber plummeted. Black, viscous shadows began seeping from the walls and floor, and the air became saturated with the stench of sulfur, decay, and an indescribable aura that belonged to the primordial Abyss itself.
A composite Dark Magic ritual,
[Abyssal Covenant: The Withering of All Things]
A forbidden spell requiring numerous casters to sacrifice both their lives and souls. Its destructive power was sufficient to erase an entire small town, dragging every form of matter and energy within its range into the eternal Shadow Abyss.
Terrifying magical radiance erupted from the prisoners' bodies, the final, dazzling brilliance produced by lives burning themselves away. Black energy spread outward beneath their feet like a rising tide.
Wherever it passed, the ground turned into scorched wasteland, stone crumbled silently into dust, and even the ambient magical energy filling the air was completely devoured and annihilated.
The entire underground prison seemed to have been submerged in an ocean of ink. Light rapidly faded until only the blazing life-force burning from the prisoners and the surging darkness swallowing everything beneath them remained.
"He's terrified!"
"He doesn't dare move!"
"Hahaha! Monster! Regretting it now, aren't you? Too late!"
"Embrace the Abyss! Fall into eternal darkness with us!"
Seeing that the black-robed figure still stood motionless, making no attempt to stop or evade the ritual, the prisoners burst into hysterical laughter and mockery.
They believed he had been intimidated by the overwhelming power of their combined forbidden spell. They believed victory was within reach. Even if they died, they would die without regrets.
Yet the instant that the overwhelming tide of darkness, carrying the destructive power born from thirty powerful dark wizards sacrificing everything, was about to swallow the black-robed figure, something unexpected happened.
The all-devouring darkness, the shadow that seemed capable of annihilating even light and space itself, suddenly stopped when it came within an inch of the hem of the black-robed figure's robe. Then, like a living creature encountering its natural predator, it recoiled and retreated.
It was as though an invisible, absolute domain surrounded the black-robed figure. Even this forbidden power born of the Abyss did not dare, did not wish, and perhaps simply could not touch him in the slightest.
The surging tide of black energy battered the invisible boundary in vain, unable to cross even a single step beyond it, forming a strange vacuum around the black-robed figure instead.
The laughter and jeering came to an abrupt halt. The madness and triumph frozen on every prisoner's face instantly gave way to overwhelming shock, confusion, and utter disbelief.
"H-How... is that possible?!"
"The power of the Abyss... it's rejecting him?"
"No... it's... it's afraid of him?!"
"Our sacrifice... our lives... was it all for nothing?!"
Someone broke down and screamed. Some collapsed to the ground as their life force rapidly drained away and the backlash from the magic tore through them.
The one-eared wizard who had proposed the ritual glared with bloodshot eyes. Watching his arm shrivel before him while the darkness itself recoiled in fear, he let out a despairing roar.
"No, !! Demons of Hell! You've broken your promise! You accepted our sacrifice! Why aren't you honoring the contract?!"
They had no idea that the corruption carried by the black-robed figure originated from an existence of a far higher order than anything they could comprehend or communicate with, far beyond the so-called Hell Demons or the Will of the Abyss.
It was a fundamental distortion born from confronting the Great Old Ones, and even their Origin, in the depths of 'R'lyeh', a corruption that came from the dark side of the cosmos itself.
Compared to that, the Abyssal shadows they had summoned through sacrifice were nothing more than muddy puddles beside a pond. How could such a thing dare contaminate an existence connected to an endless ocean of darkness?
"So... even demons fear it." The black-robed figure sounded disappointed.
The real reason he had allowed these people to complete their spell was because he had hoped to witness some force capable of opposing the corruption within him. Reality, however, proved otherwise.
Just like the god they had previously experimented upon, even the evil gods of Hell were nothing more than weaklings before the power of 'Cthulhu'.
That realization shattered the last illusion lingering in the black-robed figure's heart, and he let out a long sigh.
"I don't believe it!!" Another prisoner, in the final moments of his strength, burned away the last remnants of his life force and hurled one powerful Dark Magic spell after another.
'Reductor Curse.'
'Corrosion Curse.'
'Soul Rending Curse.'
Yet every ray of magic vanished the instant it entered the invisible domain surrounding the black-robed figure, disappearing without a sound, without producing even the slightest ripple.
From beginning to end, the black-robed figure never moved so much as an inch. He merely stood there quietly, as though watching a farce that had nothing to do with him.
At last, the sacrificial ritual completely turned against its casters. Their life force exhausted, the dark wizards let out one agonizing scream after another, their bodies rapidly withering within the darkness before breaking apart into drifting ash.
Even the remnants of their souls were devoured by the Abyssal shadows they themselves had summoned.
As the final person, the one-eared wizard, reached the moment before complete annihilation, perhaps because of a final burst of consciousness, or perhaps because the countless spells being erased caused a tiny fluctuation in the invisible field, a faint current of air lifted one corner of the hood.
And he saw it.
Hidden beneath the shadows was a face that was utterly inhuman. Grayish-green scales covered its skin, and vertical pupils stared back at him.
"Y-You... you're... not human!!" Using the very last of his strength, the one-eared wizard screamed in utter horror and resentment. Then, his body and his voice were erased together into the lingering darkness.
With every caster now dead, the Abyssal shadows receded like an ebbing tide. What remained was only a devastated hall, ravaged as though some invisible beast had feasted upon it. The air still reeked of sulfur, burnt flesh, and fragments of shattered souls.
"You're right." The black-robed figure slowly lowered his head. Beneath the sleeve of his robe, his own hand was likewise covered with fine scales. The one-eared wizard's dying words pierced his long-numb heart like a shard of ice, stirring bitter ripples of self-mockery.
Not human... anymore?
He stood there silently for a long time. Only after the final trace of magical disturbance had faded from the air did he finally speak. "At the very least... I was once human. And even now, a part of me still is."
He slowly raised his head. The slight disturbance in those vertical pupils, the emotion born from having his inhuman nature exposed, quickly vanished, replaced once more by the cold resolve of an executioner.
His mission was not yet complete. Saruman's order had been simple:
"Not a single one is to escape."
And ensuring absolutely nothing went wrong was a law engraved into his very instincts. It was his duty, his duty as someone who was still, in part, human.
That was precisely why the black-robed figure showed no mercy. He turned away, no longer paying attention to the grotesquely scarred floor left behind by the composite Dark Magic or to the lingering echoes of tormented souls still hanging in the air.
'Tap.'
'Tap.'
'Tap.'
His footsteps echoed softly as he disappeared back into the shadows. He began one final inspection of the entire underground prison, the last and most thorough search of all. After all, he had no intention of making the same mistake twice.
Besides, he already knew this prison would never be used again, just as today would be the final day of his own life.
(End Of This Chapter)
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