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Long ago, in an empty plain. No matter how much the hero shouted, no one could hear his resentful screams directed at the world, as he was destined to save it.

“Why is this happening!”

The hero shouted at a god he didn’t even believe in.

“Why is this my fate? Why does this little, little legacy of my ancestors show me no other path at all! Why!”

Walter, in a fit of rage, took off his glasses and hurled them onto the barren ground. Although the force seemed enough to shatter them, the sturdy pair, being a relic of the previous hero, withstood Walter Hellhound’s throw with all his might. Overcome with a sense of helplessness, Walter lay flat on the ground, covering his face with both hands.

The tears flowing down his face felt worthless. A voice filled with anger and injustice was of no use. Nothing could be changed with that. Nothing from the future he had seen that day had transferred over.

The enemy was strong, and the weapons they possessed were transcendent artifacts. No matter how much wisdom he squeezed out, there was no way to break through with standard methods. Only this strange and bizarre trap could fool the Demon King. This was the only way to open a path for the Empire and save it.

To stop the operation of the Moriarty Machine. For that, Walter Hellhound had to die.

“Please, just show me one other path. Even if it’s a rough road, even if it’s a thorny path filled only with pain, show me just one way that I can break through. Please, show me a way where I can laugh in the end!”

Walter shouted loudly, putting the glasses he had thrown back on his face. The glasses showed him nothing. Just as it had always been, Harriet’s Glasses maintained a terrible silence before Walter’s wish. In the end, the hero had to resign himself.

“Yes, I see.”

Walter muttered.

“I’ll die. If that’s the only way for our victory, I’ll gladly step forward and die. Let’s do that. Yes, I will do it!”

Who was he even speaking to? Perhaps a deity that might exist? Himself, unable to accept the inevitable outcome despite knowing it? It could be anyone. But no matter who it was directed at, that being could not change Walter’s path. No one could comfortably lay the road he must travel.

Walter Hellhound lay on the ground, burying his face in the dirt, whispering in a voice no one could hear.

“I just… wanted to smile.”

The tears didn’t stop. The tears he couldn’t shed in front of others kept flowing down.

“I just… wanted to smile after winning. I wanted to be alive in the world I saved… just for that moment. I wanted to see how it would turn out.”

The hero sighed as he looked up at the sky.

“Are you not allowing me?”

And now he was running across the plains of the Demon King’s Territory with illusions.

Jenis Harker’s illusion magic was powerful. Even Walter himself was momentarily convinced that members of the hero party were executing a plan alongside him. Walter Hellhound drew the Holy Sword from his waist and swung it wildly, shouting.

“Come on, guys! If we’re too late, the Demon King will use that magic. After that, it’ll be the end for all of us!”

And, as expected, this entire scene was being watched by the Demon King himself, sitting in his castle.

Violet Moriarty sneered while peering through the crystal orb at the hero party’s display.

“Everything is as expected. Everything is so predictable that it makes me chuckle.”

“The magic is ready, Your Majesty.”

The Succubus Queen knelt before the Demon King, bowing her head. The King, unable to hide his excitement on his face, said,

“Surely the analysis of its power is reliable.”

“Absolutely. That scroll was a masterpiece. That magic will definitely pierce through any defense, including Rose Caprice’s, and not only will it evaporate them all, but it will also completely devastate the surrounding area. I can’t believe such a scroll was… managed so poorly.”

“Hmph, those who believe carrying it on their person is the safest storage method are fools. Isn’t it well-known that heroes don’t trust anyone except for themselves and their close aides?”

The Succubus Queen made quite a sharp observation, but the Demon King ignored her. She was too excited about the fact that her ultimate dream was drawing near.

If this one move could annihilate the hero party, she would have already won this war. There would no longer be any core forces that could resist her, and no one would dare to charge at the Demon Castle again.

“I thought for sure there would be a spare scroll when I first saw the magic circle. This is an enormous gain from my reconnaissance. Originally, I intended to steal some strategic plans or military secrets, but an item beyond my imagination has come into my hands.”

Violet said with a smile on her face.

“I knew it the moment I saw it. Since it has come into my hands, there’s only one path the hero can take. Gathering the entire hero party to charge directly toward my castle and somehow retrieve this. But he didn’t realize that I had almost completed the machine, which is why he is foolishly leading his comrades to slaughter today.”

Wrong. The hero knew that the Moriarty Machine was nearly complete, and that’s precisely why he intentionally handed her the two ‘Manhattan’ scrolls, launching this desperate assault.

He knew it would take the bait. He had already seen it with his foresight.

“Succubus Queen. Is the magic energy needed to activate this scroll sufficiently charged into the machine?”

“Indeed, Your Majesty. Although the machine is not yet entirely finished, it can execute a high-level spell without issue.”

“In that case, good. This is the perfect timing.”

The Demon King stood up abruptly, laughing loudly.

“Activate the great magic! Drop the strongest weapon developed by humans upon their heads!”

The Demon King’s command was executed quickly. The Moriarty Machine, the size of an elephant, began to unleash the accumulated mana, illuminating all the bulbs. The coordinate magic activated first, capturing Walter’s party’s position. Numerous chain explosion magic circles began to interlace and form above the generated coordinates.

Walter, who had been running wildly for smoke, stopped in his tracks, looking up at the sky. It had become evident that there was no longer a need to pretend to deceive the Demon King.

“Ah.”

The hero truly realized his death was imminent and gasped. The chain magic circles continued to multiply every minute, every second. The masterpiece of the Grand Mage designed solely for the purpose of destroying everything on the ground was revealing itself in the air.

“Wow. It’s larger than any magic circle I’ve seen in my life…”

The hero knelt down, planting his Holy Sword into the ground. His heartbeat wouldn’t settle. Regardless of pride, the impulse to cry again surged within him.

Even now, thoughts of whether he should flee from this spot crossed his mind. No matter how he thought about it, he didn’t want to die. He couldn’t believe that he was going to die. The very fact that his death was taking such a concrete form was unfathomable.

He fantasized that someone might cancel that spell and save him, as if it were all a lie. But even as such meaningless fantasies flitted through the hero’s mind, the Manhattan magic circle created by the Moriarty Machine was taking form and stabilizing.

Noticing something was off, the Demon King raised his hand.

“Why is no one reacting besides the hero? Stop the magic for a moment. Something seems off to me.”

“But the Holy Power of the Holy Sword was real. Did you not confirm that already? No one but the hero can extract true Holy Power from the Holy Sword.”

“Right. The hero is indeed real. But isn’t it strange for the others? Why is there such a huge magic circle appearing above them, yet no one is reacting? And why is the hero sitting on the ground, looking hopeless? It feels like we’ve been tricked. Stop the magic right now!”

“Your Majesty.”

The Succubus Queen spoke with a pale face.

“We can’t stop it anymore.”

“What do you mean…”

In the center of the Demon King’s Territory on the plain, Walter Hellhound knelt, looking up at the sky with a resentful expression. That was his destiny, his end, and the final explosion that would bring him death.

What he would see last while alive would be the greatest explosion magic created by the Grand Mage from another world. This was a curse worth no less than facing death in terror, like a condemned prisoner awaiting execution.

“No, at least I know what I’m dying for and what’s happening. Perhaps this is a blessing.”

Walter murmured to calm his trembling heart.

“Knowing that there is nothing after death, at least I could make my own choice and decision. Is this mercy bestowed upon me?”

The magic circle had taken complete shape. Now, ‘Manhattan’ was ready to unleash its flames, aimed solely at Walter.

“When everyone dies, they are alone.”

Walter watched the magic circle glowing red.

“How many people could possibly be more alone than me?”

In the ultimate final second, in that last moment, Walter looked up at his death and smiled just a little.

And the future that had come to him since the moment he first saw the ‘Manhattan’ scroll. That future had never left his mind even for a moment since that moment.

A massive mushroom cloud shaking heaven and earth, and himself standing right in the middle of it.

That future was becoming a reality.

The gigantic explosion created an environment where not only solids but gases could not exist. Everything on the ground evaporated, and due to the explosion, the entire area transformed into a state of superheated vacuum.

The being known as Walter Hellhound no longer remained. The air rushing in to fill the vacuum created a very familiar and famous shape of a cloud.

A gigantic mushroom cloud, which had never even existed on Earth, erupted in the center of the Caprice Continent’s Demon King’s Territory.

The thunderclap reverberated, vibrating the air thousands of kilometers away, and the heat caused severe burns to wild animals hundreds of kilometers away. Even some demonic soldiers surrounding Febria Bay were greatly injured by the heat, and had Jenis not taken precautions, even the Southern Alliance soldiers would have suffered considerable damage.

Fortunately, the southern front, whether it’s the Demon King’s army or the Imperial army, was well defended by magic, so it was hardly affected by the weakened tremors and heat wave. However, several orc villages were caught up in the explosion and blown to pieces, and many high-ranking demonic officials who weren’t on the battlefield were also injured.

The power of Manhattan exceeded the limits of what the Demon King could imagine.

The Demon King regretted having caused such a mad explosion in the very heart of his territory the moment he saw the explosion through the crystal orb. And upon realizing that only the hero had died from this explosion, he discovered that all his plans had gone awry and was enraged.

“Prepare the machine again. There’s still another scroll left, and my calculations were wrong!”

“Your Majesty!”

The Succubus Queen knelt before the Demon King, trembling with fear.

“I apologize for the misreport! The Moriarty Machine could not withstand the mana and malfunctioned. All the bulbs have shattered, and the internal circuit is irreparably damaged. The machine… has become completely unusable!”

“So that means we’re back to square one?”

“We could remove some parts of the machine, but… if we are to repair it, we would have to return to the starting point. I—I don’t know how this error occurred. The mana should have been within the machine’s limits…”

The Demon King barely restrained his anger as he looked at the remaining ‘Manhattan’ scroll in his hand. The Demon King, who was meticulously reading through the documents as if reviewing financial paperwork, spoke in a hollow voice.

“There’s a life force conversion magic circle.”

“Pardon?”

“If we were going to use this magic with the machine, we should have extracted that magic circle. But the magic circle was so complicated that even I couldn’t notice it. The machine has no life force. That’s why the magic circle intertwined too closely with the other explosion magic circles and malfunctioned during activation. This is solely my fault, not anyone else’s. This is solely… my fault.”

The Demon King stared into the crystal orb with a vacant expression. The thought that he might have almost been caught up in this magic sent chills down his spine.

“What kind of power is this? How can a human come up with an idea like this?”

The meaning of the Demon King’s question was complex. On one hand, it was directed at Jeongjae, who had created this magic, and on the other, it was directed at Walter, who chose to die by directly taking the brunt of this magic.

 

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