Chapter 79
A week earlier—when the three witches were fleeing from the Golden Army’s barracks—the thing that had lain silent beneath the sea finally stirred.
It rose.
Its sheer size was monstrous, vast enough to swallow an imperial palace whole if it wished.
“So he really was dangerous…!”
The Emperor—or rather, Eraziel, who had seized and worn the Emperor’s body for over twenty years, shuddered in horror. He had always believed that witches summoned dangerous things to bring about the world’s ruin.
Witches claimed they needed beasts to serve as their limbs and claws, and so they recklessly called forth creatures from other dimensions. Had they summoned only true beasts, Eraziel might have merely frowned in disapproval.
But a century ago, one witch had summoned something far more perilous.
A god from another world.
Before Eraziel could intervene, that being twisted the very fabric of the world and unleashed a massive earthquake. Towering waves rose, and the continents Eraziel had shaped and maintained began to sink.
“What tyranny is this in another’s world? Stop at once!”
“Oh dear. Regrettably, that won’t do. The witch asked me to drown everything in the sea.”
Laughing, the being stirred the world again.
Another continent vanished beneath the waves.
It was a civilization Eraziel had cultivated for ages. He had not ruled it directly, but he had guided it through dreams, through prophets whose minds resonated with his frequency.
To see a world he had nurtured erased in an instant—
Eraziel fought desperately to preserve what remained. In the end, he killed the witch who had summoned the otherworldly god and barely managed to send the entity back to its own realm.
But the danger had not ended.
‘As long as witches live, this could happen again.’
Witches never stopped summoning things from beyond. It seemed they had learned nothing. Eventually, Eraziel concluded there was only one solution: eradicate them all.
Even a single witch alive, witch capable of performing the summoning ritual, meant his world would remain under threat.
He hated witches enough to want them dead. Yet he was only a consciousness, without a body of his own. He could not touch even a strand of a witch’s hair.
When he ordered prophets to kill them, his words were distorted into riddles and vague nonsense. Hearing a god’s voice was too much for a human mind to bear.
Frustration at being misunderstood, combined with his growing hatred, led Eraziel to a new decision.
He would kill the witches himself. So he borrowed a human body.
At first, it was a strong man.
“Die, witch!”
With his own hands, he strangled one to death. Then another. Then a third.
But a coven came for revenge.
Killing him was not enough, they turned him into a pig and left him to starve. Fortunately, it had only been a borrowed body.
He fled from body to body, killing witches as he went, until one day he realized:
“I don’t have to kill them with my own hands.”
If he used others, he could exterminate far more of them, far more quickly. So he began inhabiting those with authority—patriarchs, village heads, nobles.
Eventually, he became Emperor. And from the throne, he declared open persecution.
The surviving witches gathered in Aldehallow and resisted. But that, too, would end. He poured the Empire’s full military might into crushing them.
Alnazir’s sudden appearance had not been part of the calculation. Still, unlike the previous destroyer, this one did not seem inclined to obey witches.
“Fay, I’m not going to follow the contract.”
The look on the witch’s stunned face had been delicious.
Through the eyes of a soldier secretly loyal to him, Eraziel had watched it all.
Alnazir refused to honor the contract. The two split apart.
In that opening, Eraziel had planned to seize Aldehallow swiftly.
His mistake had been not killing the witch immediately. He should have crushed the danger at its root.
And yet watching Alnazir quarrel and fracture alongside the witch had been too amusing to ignore.
“You betrayed the witch. And now the witch has betrayed you.”
How could he resist mocking the being who strutted about as if he were supreme?
And now. Eraziel gazed at the grotesque figure rising from the sea and sneered.
He did not feel fear.
Even if that creature could not unleash destruction on the same scale as before, Eraziel still possessed a god’s pride.
Alnazir looked at him steadily with golden eyes. Then, as if struck by some thought, he curved his eyes into a soft smile.
“I like you.”
The sudden smile, the incomprehensible words, sent a chill through Eraziel.
Remaining inside that mind was dangerous.
With a sharp withdrawal, Eraziel fled Alnazir’s mental realm and returned to the imperial palace, to the Emperor’s body he wore.
But as he did, he felt something unfamiliar at his ankle.
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