He said it plainly.
“I’ll stop it. Myself.”
“And how, exactly?”
“…By giving the order for the students to stop harassing you. And by having them monitored.”
“That may be the most useless thing I’ve ever heard. Your Highness, how is it possible for your thought process to be this short-sighted?”
“What did you just say?”
“Never mind. Please leave now. I’d like to be alone.”
He didn’t need to see it to feel Leopold’s expression crumpling. But it was deeply satisfying.
Terren decided to accept his own terrible nature.
Sixteen or twenty-six, Leopold Delua was just Leopold Delua. So why should he care?
“Allow me to offer my condolences for Your Highness’s narrow worldview. And please — even if I haven’t cooperated, do not go off on your own thinking and acting on it. Disaster will follow.”
“…Terren. Stop it.”
“How rude of me again, in the presence of our esteemed prince. I’ll get on my knees and beg forgiveness another time. Now please leave, Your Highness.”
“Just — just stop — no, then what am I supposed to do?! I saw you being attacked and injured — are you telling me to stand there and do nothing?”
Leopold finally snapped. He threw aside the composure he had been barely holding together and let his anger out.
“You’d be better off doing nothing at all, rather than doing something foolish with that dim head of yours.”
Terren opened his eyes — drawn awake by a surge of energy he hadn’t felt in a long time.
Just how far will he go before he breaks?
That curiosity was something entirely new, growing by the day. He was a little afraid that the original history might end up changing at this rate — but Terren ultimately trusted Leopold. That capacity for generosity of his.
True to his age, Leopold bit down hard and gripped the blanket as though he meant to tear it apart. The tendons standing out sharply on his neck were unsettling.
He had been enduring insult after insult from a mere commoner lately, and yet he was still only at this point — which was, in its own way, impressive.
“Without even that dim head’s help, you’ll end up in the exact same situation again.”
“Even with help, every student in the Academy will think: that annoying commoner. We should kidnap him somewhere the prince can’t see and kill him.“
“That’s completely—!”
“You think that’s unreasonable?”
Leopold stopped. He took a moment to collect himself, then looked at Terren. And admitted that his own words had been rash.
“You’re right, you’d know better than me. I’m nothing but a bystander who doesn’t understand anything.”
“Glad you know. So please disappear from my sight now.”
“Tell me, then. What can I do to prevent something like this from happening again?”
Terren Meyer let out a short, derisive laugh.
“Why should I tell you that — that’s for you to figure out. Leopold, you’re ignorant and arrogant, and now you’re trying to dump the responsibility on me too.”
At that, the First Prince of the Kingdom of Delua came very close to losing every shred of his remaining sanity and launching himself at Terren. He was stopped only by the sight of bandages wrapped around every inch of that battered body, blood seeping through them.
He had given a long speech several times over about not behaving insolently — and Leopold had in the end been completely undone by Terren’s venom and started proposing solutions on his own, one after another — but every response that came back was nothing but mockery.
“Utterly hopeless.”
“Even a goldfish could reach a better conclusion than Your Highness.”
“Is whatever’s sitting above your neck completely useless?”
Lines like these drove him past reason and into towering fury time and time again. The atmosphere had become a complete disaster — but in the end, there was one answer that Terren would acknowledge.
“Will this do? Establishing a new rule under the pretext of improving student welfare, without specifying you in any way, shape, or form.”
“…Do as you like.”
“Good. So this will do?”
Leopold felt a flash of joy — and then, abruptly, a surge of irritation.
“This is being done for your sake in the first place — why am I the one feeling pleased about it. Just make sure you start showing some basic courtesy to your fellow students. The reason the people who dislike you get so emboldened is because you behave like this.”
“Yes. It’s all my fault. I know.”
“What? Don’t twist my words. And think about it. Your attitude right now is appalling to begin with. How far do you think I’m supposed to look past that?”
“Then just kill me. If you can’t stand the sight of me, you could have me executed right now. That would be good for Your Highness and good for the Academy students alike. You could even throw a celebration party after my death — that would be perfect.”
“…You’re going to ruin yourself with that mouth of yours.”
Leopold’s face had gone scarlet. He slammed the infirmary door shut on his way out. Terren let out a sigh. Today might very well be the day he had seen that man the angriest in his entire life.
He did wonder, if he was being honest, whether he had gone too far. He had never provoked Leopold to this degree before — not until after they had become enemies.
If Leopold’s patience reached its end because Terren had gotten reckless with nothing to his name, Terren was finished. But holding back harsh words when looking at that infuriating face was all but impossible.
Young Leopold was far softer and more naive than the one Terren remembered. He was at the age where the world still looked like his for the taking, because he hadn’t been properly burned by it yet. The result of that, almost certainly, was him drowning in that petty sense of justice — stiff, rigid, and inflexible.
That damned man had been the same even grown — but at least by then he had possessed some sense of reality.
This was probably his peak.
His stomach turned even though he hadn’t eaten anything. Every exchange with Leopold left him feeling worse. It had been a chronic ailment his entire life. He never wanted to speak to him again. Not that there would be any reason to. At the very least, he would not need to pay Leopold any particular attention for the next two years.
The infirmary bed was offensively soft. He lay there, limp and unmoving — and then fell asleep.
Ah — the little sun of the Kingdom of Delua, soaring higher than the sky itself. That terrible person I have to save.
It was clear that Terren had come through safely in no small part because of him. Leopold had handled the aftermath magnificently. On top of that, he had achieved the remarkable feat of establishing a school rule that no one had anticipated.
Immediate expulsion upon discovery of student-on-student assault.
That rule — stumbled upon while he worked himself into a frenzy proposing one alternative after another — had actually been realized.
He was the one person capable of blocking, with nothing more than his bloodline, every form of hatred that Terren received because of his own.
Thanks to that, Terren was not expelled despite having gotten into a sword fight with Milo and his group. The random wooden swords and fists flying at him disappeared as well. Which meant he could now give back in kind to anyone who came at him. Even making Lloyd van Acker tremble with fury no longer brought Terren any repercussions.
With the stress that had been building up finally beginning to release, things on the dark magic front were proceeding smoothly as well.
Having memorized more or less every standard magical formula by now, he had recently been mixing various formulas together to test variations, and trying to use them simultaneously alongside dark magic.
In his previous life, consumed by dark magic, he had never done proper research — but ordinary magic was also a field with considerable research value. On the surface it appeared unimpressive and weak, and generating mana was difficult on top of that. For those reasons, magic had settled into nothing more than a basic accomplishment expected of nobles. Support for dedicated magic practitioners was woefully inadequate.
That was why dark magic had flourished.
In practice, ordinary magic had clear limits. To others, it must have seemed like there was nowhere left for it to develop. But if that were truly the case — how had dark magic itself been created in the first place?
Terren saw a glimmer of hope. It was a hope no better than a tiny boat adrift on a vast and boundless sea — but even that was something he desperately needed.
As for killing…
He had sketched out a rough plan.
The hypothesis — what if dark magic could be trained without killing? — had crossed his mind hundreds upon thousands of times. There were actually a few methods he wanted to test in practice. But if he started down that path in the middle of this urgent situation, by the time he came to his senses, his lord would surely have emerged from the cave and begun a full-scale massacre.
So inevitably, in this life too, he would have to kill people. It left a bitter taste — but it was inescapable.
Fortunately, the circumstances were favorable.
Inside the Academy, Terren ignored Leopold completely — and Leopold Delua did the same. Occasionally he felt Leopold’s gaze on him, but mercifully, he never came close.
Lloyd, having apparently been scolded by Leopold, spent a few days cursing Terren with everything he had — but as Terren began to meet it head-on, Lloyd gradually shifted to simply ignoring him. The students would mock him or start something with him in public every now and then. But at least they no longer swung swords at him. That alone was something.
In the mental peace that had come to him, Terren moved steadily through his preparations. He attended classes diligently, covered his assignments and exams with perfect scores. He swung a sword with genuine enjoyment during fencing class, applied himself earnestly to memorizing magical formulas, and received a very decent score on the written administrative studies exam.
He may have been on edge. After hundreds of deliberations, he had finally accepted that this was the best course available to him — but as ever, useless thoughts came to snag his feet once more.
Killing was a strange thing.
Because it was an act in which an intelligent creature deliberately ended the life of one of its own kind.
And even stranger — the sensation felt when red blood poured from a human body, when a pulse stopped, when the reality of a single life extinguishing itself fully settled in. A tingling sensation rose from the tips of his fingers. Gradually the heart began to pound, and a wave of emotion crashed all the way to the inside of his skull. An indescribable feeling steeped itself into the brain.
It was like opium. Once started, it could not be stopped.
One kill. Then two. Then, in a stupor, mass slaughter. This was the clear and simple answer to becoming a dark sorcerer.
The addict decided to begin in the slums.
