Chapter 65

He had never imagined she would attack tonight, beneath the full moon, before Kaiyan had even managed to secure the heart and eye of a witch. Suddenly, the reception-room door creaked open. The chief chamberlain of the Blue Shadow Palace stepped inside—a man who had served Kaiyan faithfully ever since the prince returned from the frontier.

“Don’t come in—“

Isaac’s warning died in his throat. The steward’s head rotated with a sickening, mechanical grind, tilted at an impossible angle as if searching for a target. His eyes were hollowed out.

Dear God.

The steward’s glassy gaze locked onto the prince, and he began a straight, rhythmic march toward Kaiyan, his movements resembling the creaking gait of a broken machine. Kaiyan tore down a heavy velvet curtain, threw it over the approaching man, and swung his blade. The curtain and the steward’s neck were severed in one fluid motion. Blood sprayed upward, charring the fabric into black ash.

“What… what a monstrous sight…” Isaac muttered, the words slipping out unbidden.

The chief chamberlain’s head protruded from beneath the discarded curtain, trembling in phantom pain for a long while before finally falling still. Then, the entire building shuddered as if struck by a massive earthquake. The floor bucked with such violence that Isaac nearly lost his footing, yet not a single item on the table or bookshelves shifted. Glass shattered with a piercing, rhythmic discord, again and again, but the violently trembling windows remained perfectly intact. When the tremor ended, the room was deathly quiet.

For a heartbeat, nothing seemed different. Then, Isaac noticed the most terrifying change: he could no longer see the outside world. The windows had turned black and opaque, as if smeared with thick, primordial mud. The garden and the full moon had been swallowed by an all-consuming darkness.

A barrier.

This space—perhaps the entirety of the Blue Shadow Palace—had been sealed off from reality. Isaac turned to the prince. Upon seeing the arm where the maid’s blade had grazed him, his expression twisted in horror. The flesh had already swollen, darkening into an oily, bruised black.

“Lord Kaiyan!”

Isaac rushed over, tearing a cord from the fallen curtain and binding it tightly around the prince’s upper arm to slow the spread. Before Kaiyan could speak, the reception-room door opened once more. People began drifting into the room in a long, grotesque procession, as though every living soul in the Blue Shadow Palace were being drawn here.

Each person scanned the room with vacant, unfocused eyes until they spotted the prince, then marched toward him with single-minded intent. Every face was familiar. Some were new hires from just days ago, while others had served the prince for years. Some were merely workers passing the time, whereas others possessed genuine, deep-seated loyalty.

Isaac had shared casual greetings with some and deep, long conversations with others. Now, they all approached like clockwork dolls, their veins filled with poison instead of blood. One young maid’s skin, too delicate to contain the toxicity within, began to weep putrid, toxic bile.

“…”

Isaac clenched his teeth, his jaw straining against the tremor of his own fear. He whispered to the cats, whose fur stood rigid along the windowsill. “How do we turn them back?”

「You cannot. It is too late. All their blood has been transformed into poison.」

「Their organs must be saturated. Nothing can be done.」

Isaac lost the ability to speak. All those people—everyone who had worked for the prince—they rushed toward Kaiyan now, stripped of humanity. The prince watched them with a hollow, expressionless gaze and raised his sword. Drops of venomous blood dripped to the floor, hissing where they landed. Just as Kaiyan prepared to swing—

“I will do it.”

Isaac seized his arm. Kaiyan paused, his eyes shifting to meet Isaac’s. Isaac lunged, driving his sword into the chest of the first servant to reach them. The blade pierced deep, finding the heart.

The servant convulsed violently, staggered, and collapsed. When Isaac wrenched the blade free, lumps of coagulating black blood forced themselves from the wound, beginning to incinerate the body from the inside out. Standing as a bulwark before the prince, Isaac began cutting down the throng of people one by one. He cut. He stabbed. He slashed. Each time his blade struck, another person fell like a bundle of rotten straw.

“Move aside. They are no threat to me.”

Kaiyan spoke from behind him, a faint, chilling detachment coloring his tone. He despised the necessity of surrendering his prey to another, even now. Isaac did not move, nor did he turn, his stance anchored in place.

“I will handle it. Do not touch them, Lord Kaiyan.”

“Move. I will not say it a third time.”

“Were they not the people who worked for you?”

Isaac’s voice emerged low, tightly restrained, and brittle—as if he might shatter into a sob or a scream at any second. Kaiyan fell into a heavy, suffocating silence. Isaac pressed his lips into a thin, white line and continued to cut down those who approached.

It was not difficult.

Most were simple servants or maids, and even the few guards among them offered no real challenge. They wielded no magic, launched no devastating strikes; they merely swung their daggers or clubs with clumsy, uncoordinated limbs before Isaac felled them like withered stalks.

They were simply dying. They had been sent here merely to perish, and people who had lived and worked beside the prince were now being forced to meet their ends by his hand. The cruelty of it was utterly unbearable.

“…”

Isaac ground his teeth together to contain a wretched groan, his grip tightening around the hilt of his sword. He pushed forward, carving through the endless stream of people until he reached the door, slamming it shut and locking it tight.

Those outside beat upon the wood, desperate to force their way in, but the pounding slowly faded as the poison claimed them. Black blood seeped beneath the door, carrying a foul, acrid stench. Isaac kept one hand pressed against the locked wood as if holding back a flood, his head bowed.

At his feet lay the last person to enter: Natasha. The middle-aged woman had been reduced to a discolored, ruined husk, acrid smoke rising from every opening in her flesh. She had become something entirely foreign, a mockery of the warmhearted woman he had spoken with only hours earlier. In the silence that followed, the only living people left in the room were Kaiyan and Isaac.

A carpet of cooling corpses lay strewn across the floor, painting the room in a grim, silent tableau. Kaiyan paced through the carnage, his gaze sweeping over the wreckage before finally settling on Isaac, who stood slumped against the doorframe, his features pallid and trembling as if he were on the verge of breaking into tears.

He had just opened his mouth to speak when the very foundation of the room shuddered.

GRUMBLE

Deep, subterranean tremors rippled through the floor, a heavy, grinding vibration that rattled the very marrow of his bones. Wisps of acrid smoke, curling upward from the poisoned bodies, began to coalesce. The haze swirled, thickening and darkening, churning in the air until it achieved a terrifying, anthropomorphic density. It drifted forward, coming to a halt just a few paces from the prince.

As the smoke cleared, the silhouette became a perfect reflection. The figure had Kaiyan’s face, his height, and even the same blackened, swollen arm injured by the maid’s blade. It was an exact copy, down to the last thread of his tunic.

The only difference from the original was a hint of a smile that began to form on its lips—a smile that widened and twisted with each passing second until it burst into a fit of manic, triumphant laughter.

『Magnificent. Truly, truly magnificent!』

The voice bypassed their ears, vibrating directly into their skulls with a maddening, visceral intensity. 『So, this is the true potential of a witch. Such boundless, intoxicating power! It is overflowing within me, so volatile I can barely contain it.』

It looked down at its own limbs with a look of deranged reverence, its eyes wide and luminous. Although it wore the prince’s face, the expression flickering behind those eyes belonged to someone else—the young magician.

『Had I realized a witch’s power was this extraordinary, I would have acted much sooner. I should have killed that decrepit old fool and claimed this vessel long ago. To think I left such a sublime treasure in the hands of a bumbling idiot all this time.』

The creature’s lips trembled with unbridled ecstasy. Then, it turned its focus back to the true prince, and the smile vanished instantly, replaced by a hollow, predatory desolation. A moment later, its features twisted into an elaborate, mocking grin, and it swept into an exaggerated, theatrical bow.

『It has been an eternity, Your Highness. Have you fared well?』

Kaiyan regarded the impostor with stony, expressionless eyes. The figure straightened, tilting its head with a crooked, venomous smirk.

『Do you admire this face?』

Without hesitation, the creature raked its fingernails deep across its own cheeks. Five jagged, sanguine gashes appeared across the perfect replica of the prince’s face. Kaiyan did not blink. The figure, however, descended into a fresh fit of hysterical, mad laughter.

『Do you even know who I am? No, of course not. Someone as illustrious as Your Highness would never deign to remember a trivial wretch like me.』

It lowered its brows in a caricature of grief, though its mouth remained stretched in a gruesome, static smile. Kaiyan watched in silence, his indifference sharper than a blade, before drawling in a voice of cold, languid detachment.

“You ask if I remember you, yet you hide behind this stolen mask. Is it because you lack an arm of your own?”

The smile vanished, replaced by a contorted, demonic rage. Its eyes bulged, the whites bleeding into ink-black depths as it fixed a burning glare upon the prince. Baring its teeth in a snarl that sat uncomfortably between a grin and a grimace, it hissed.

『Indeed. You severed my arm. I was born perfect, a creature without a single flaw, and you turned me into an object of scorn. But because of you, I have transcended. I have gained the will to curse you, and the boundless power of this witch!』

The creature roared with savage, discordant laughter, a sound so potent it felt as though Isaac’s eardrums might rupture. It flooded the room, an oppressive, sickening aura of malice that choked the air. Suddenly, the figure’s neck surged forward like a striking serpent, elongating unnaturally until its face was mere inches from the prince’s.

“You were hunting for witches, weren’t you? Trying to break your precious curse? How pathetically naive.”

It lowered its lashes in a mock display of sorrow, tilting its head with a sharp, wheezing sigh.

“A life shackled from birth. How wretched. How tragic. And now, no matter what pitiful efforts you make, you will remain bound by that curse until your dying breath.”

Its low whisper faded into a sinister, rattling chuckle. The serpent-like neck snapped back into place, and the creature continued to cackle, radiating a presence of profound, irredeemable evil.

Then—

“How tedious.”

The words were quiet, a sharp, private remark that cut through the noise like a guillotine. The laughter stopped instantly. The creature’s face hardened, twisted in sudden, sharp resentment. Kaiyan met its gaze, his voice dripping with cool, lethargic contempt.

“You are less than a common insect. Even now, if the witch’s consciousness doesn’t fade, you are nothing but a puppet—unable to control your own limbs or thoughts. Listening to you drone on is unbearable. Is that stagnant, pathetic little story all you have?”

He offered a faint, dismissive tilt of his head.

“Then your presence is worth nothing at all.”

With that, he brought his sword down. The strike appeared lazy, almost effortless, yet it moved with a lethal, terrifying velocity that made evasion impossible.

The edge was set to carve the apparition into twin halves.

CLANG