**Chapter 61**
—
A world of monsters unfolded before him—
the very embodiment of the countless atrocities once committed by the man who had served as a battalion commander of the Black-Red Order.
“AAAH! My leg—my leg is rotting!”
“Please, please spare me! My baby—there’s a baby in my belly—!”
The Sixth-Circle black mage, **Belloc**, had projected his *inner world* into reality—
the world of his consciousness: a *biological laboratory of the Black-Red Order*.
A man screamed in madness as rot spread up from his toes.
A mother, unable to watch her own legs decay while trying to protect the child inside her, took a saw and began cutting off her own limbs.
“……It was an experiment to observe maternal instinct,”
said the monster.
“The man in the control group couldn’t even bring himself to lift the saw as his own body decomposed.”
Black mage **Belloc** boasted proudly of his own vile achievements.
“But, astonishingly! The pregnant woman was different.”
To protect the life in her womb, she severed her own leg without the slightest hesitation.
“……”
“Truly, is a mother’s love not something magnificent?”
Belloc spread his arms wide, shouting as if in reverent awe.
“That is why I pondered, endlessly, how far a mother could endure suffering for her child….”
Dale bit down hard on his lip in silence.
“—And, furthermore, how one might harness that maternal instinct, that maternal *will*, and turn it into the form of a weapon.
We spent countless nights deliberating over that very question.”
Before Belloc’s rambling sermon, Dale could only remain wordless.
The battalion commander of the Black-Red Order, a man who had committed unforgivable evils—
and this world was a projection of that monster’s mind.
Even Dale found himself struggling to hold back the nausea rising in his throat.
He was no stranger to the truth about the Black-Red Order, not as a Hero summoned from another world.
But knowing it and *witnessing it* with one’s own eyes were entirely different things.
In truth, there had never been any direct contact between the Hero and the Black-Red Order—
except that a few of his companions had become “painful test subjects” in their hands.
The faces of his mother **Elena** and sister **Lize** flashed across his mind.
His stomach twisted violently. He could barely stop himself from vomiting outright.
“……Don’t think you’ll die an easy death.”
Dale finally spoke, his voice low, his lips bleeding from how hard he bit them.
“I’ll show you what a real living hell looks like.”
“Oh, what a delightful promise.”
“……”
“It seems the rumors about the ‘Black Prince’s cruelty and infamy’ were not exaggerated after all.”
Dale did not respond to Belloc’s sneer.
He only unfurled his shadowed cloak, smothering the surroundings in darkness.
The wave of shadow spread outward like a flood.
“The Black Prince’s proud artifact—the *Shadow Cloak*!”
But atop the lake of darkness spreading through the air, Belloc remained unfazed.
“To have already extended the artifact’s form to the level of summoning a *Shadow Lurker*…”
As a Sixth-Circle elder of the Black Tower, Belloc was well-acquainted with such artifacts.
He knew what they could do.
“I was aware your talent, as shown in the Tower’s test that day, was extraordinary.”
“……”
“But to think it had reached this level. Truly worthy of the ‘Black Prince’s’ name.”
He spoke almost regretfully.
“To think I must kill such a brilliant, radiant talent…! Blame the weakness of your father, the Black Tower Lord.”
At the mention of his father’s weakness, Dale let out a bitter smile.
Then, without a word, he snapped his fingers.
*Thunk!*
From beneath Belloc’s shadow, the spiked tendrils of the *Shadow Lurker* surged upward.
But before they could reach him, Belloc’s body dissolved into a blur of dark mist and lunged at Dale.
**Wraith Form.**
He truly was worthy of being called a Sixth-Circle black mage.
That day in the *Library of Hell*, when Dale had triumphed over the white mage **Nicolai** of the Sixth Circle using the *Tome of the Black Goat*,
it had been a victory born of corrupt ideas, wicked faith, and the hellish terrain that favored him.
But this battlefield was different.
“The Empire’s greatest prodigy, who grows stronger with each passing day.”
That was the name people whispered when speaking of the *Black Prince of House Saxen*.
And it was no baseless rumor.
Since the day he defeated Nicolai, time had passed—
time in which Dale had grown even further, to an extent even he could not gauge.
Thus, what followed was something no ordinary Sixth-Circle black mage could ever imagine.
Accelerating his three mana circles, Dale’s feet opened the horizon of the void.
A white, darkened world—
a winter night of frost and shadow.
Chilling cold and refined dark mana whirled together in a storm of black-blue light,
and a voice rang out.
The voice of a pure, innocent girl—untainted by even a speck of dust.
— *You finally came to play with me?*
Before he knew it, she stood at his side—
a young girl clad in a jet-black dress.
From her dark hair rose two black, curved horns—
the horns of a goat.
— *I’ve been waiting so, so long.*
From beneath her skirt, countless black tendrils writhed and slithered.
—
—
**Wraith Form.**
Belloc, who had slipped through the Shadow Lurker’s attacks, now closed the distance to Dale.
“……!”
But the moment he saw the being standing beside Dale, Belloc froze in horror.
The most dreadful existence in the world stood there.
A monstrous mass of writhing tendrils—so revolting that even demons would recoil in disgust.
From those tentacles dripped a tar-like, pitch-black fluid, thick and vile.
And Belloc could *feel* it—
the indescribable malice dwelling within that tar.
*What… what in the hell is that…?*
Then, all at once, the black tendrils came crashing down.
They struck straight toward Belloc, whose body was now a shadow itself.
Even in Wraith Form, this was an attack he could not evade.
Those tentacles—far beyond the *spike tendrils* of a Shadow Lurker—
were the purest manifestations of corruption and hatred.
Belloc retreated swiftly, chanting his spell.
From beneath his feet, a storm of death surged toward Dale.
《Wave of Annihilation.》
The wind of death—concentrated extinction—rushed forward.
Dale didn’t flinch. His shadow cloak, disguised as a black surcoat, fluttered as he charged.
He wasn’t fighting relying solely on the *Tome of the Black Goat*.
The tendrils attacked from behind to cover him,
but it was *Dale himself* who carried out the battle.
The *Black Prince*—the Empire’s foremost prodigy, a swordsman and a mage—charged straight at Belloc.
He didn’t even try to dodge the oncoming death wind.
*Does he have a death wish?*
Belloc was puzzled.
His death wind—though Dale wouldn’t know its mechanics—was essentially an accelerated decomposition spell,
a process breaking down organic compounds through corrupt bacteria.
And yet, Dale faced it head-on.
Drawing upon the knowledge of another world, Dale refined his dark-blue mana.
A black-blue armor of frost and void wrapped around him, shielding him from the death wind.
The two magics collided—and Belloc’s wind of annihilation vanished without a trace.
“……!”
Dale dashed forward. From his cloak of shadow, a blade of darkness formed.
*How did he neutralize my decay magic?*
It didn’t matter. Belloc didn’t have time to ponder.
He quickly formed another *barrier of decay* to block the onrushing enemy.
When Dale’s body finally collided with that barrier—
*I won!*
Belloc’s heart leapt—
but instead of rotting away, Dale’s body burst through the barrier intact,
still encased in his dark-blue armor, striking directly at Belloc.
Completely unharmed. Perfectly whole.
“……!”
Shock distorted Belloc’s face—the look of a mage who had just been cornered by a swordsman.
Around Dale, blades of shadow rotated like orbiting satellites, all pointed toward Belloc.
“H-how—how did you pierce the barrier of decay!?”
Belloc, who knew only decay as the symbol of his power, could never understand.
*Decay*—the decomposition of organic nitrogen compounds by bacteria.
Decay magic merely accelerated that natural process through the power of will.
So to one who understood the mechanism fully, blocking it wasn’t difficult.
The answer was simple:
**Sterilization.**
There exists no life immune to death—
not even bacteria.
*Thunk!*
Before Belloc could resist further, the black tendrils rained down, pinning his movements from all sides.
Then the shadow blades struck.
“Aaaaaaahhh!”
It wasn’t a killing blow—
just one to immobilize him.
His tendons were severed; his limbs, carved in pain that would not kill but could not be endured.
“Aaaaagh! Aaaahhhh!”
His screams echoed through the world.
“My, what a drama queen.”
Dale scoffed coldly, unmoved by the pitiful noise.
It was an anticlimax.
A mage’s duel, after all, is a contest of whose *logic*—whose magical reasoning—is more precise and powerful.
And in a battle of will and logic, the *refined reasoning* born from another world’s knowledge was unmatched.
Even against a Sixth-Circle black mage.
Especially so, since they shared the same element—making the disparity all the more absolute.
*He didn’t even need to borrow the tome’s power.*
Indeed, he hadn’t needed to show the true might of the *Tome of the Black Goat* at all.
For that tome had been summoned for another reason entirely.
“I told you,” Dale said quietly.
Belloc, on his knees and screaming, looked up as Dale’s emotionless gaze met his.
“I told you I’d show you a real living hell.”
“Ah… ahhh…”
“Now, are you finally starting to fear the name of the Black Prince?”
At Dale’s side, the girl’s skirt began to writhe once more—
beneath it, countless tendrils stirred.
“Does the title *Heir to the Black Tower Lord* still sound amusing to you?”
And before the helpless Belloc’s eyes, those tendrils began to crawl toward him—
thin, delicate strands, like surgical nano-wires from some nightmare of science fiction.
“……!”
The black tendrils pierced his ears, his nostrils, his mouth—
ripping through his retinas, plunging deep toward his skull.
Toward his brain.
“Aaaaaaagh!”
Belloc screamed as blood poured like tears from his torn eyes.
“It’s better to take your beating early,” Dale murmured flatly.
“Since you’ll be going to hell anyway…
let me give you a little preview before you fall.”
His voice was filled with a hatred colder than anything in this world.
