Shepherd Wizard

Side Story - Turan Zahar (9)

Translator: Pai_

Having barely survived the war, the first place Turan headed was the Siraf Wetland, ruled by House Lavitas.

To recover his mangled body, starting with his severed arm, he needed the help of a Healer.

Naturally, it was no easy thing for a noble of the fallen House Zahar to borrow the power of a high-ranking Healer.

After several rounds of negotiation and conflict, trickery and murder, Turan finally managed to receive treatment from one of the nobles of the Lavitas main family.

"Whew......"

How long had he spent examining the arm he had finally gotten back?

When he turned his gaze behind him, he saw the corpses of Moroz, the Lavitas noble who had healed him, and Moroz's lover.

"Thank you, Moroz."

Turan offered his thanks, words the dead could never hear, and absorbed their Magic Power.

His first connection with them had been in Merem, the Lavitas capital.

Moroz had approached Turan while he was seeking out Lavitas nobles in search of someone to heal him, and declared that if Turan completed a single job, he would perfectly heal not only his other wounds but his arm as well.

That job was nothing less than stealing 'Modest Wish', a holy relic passed down through House Lavitas for generations.

The item granted its owner the physical traits of a Purifier and a Healer, and wearing it could halt physical aging.

It could not prevent spiritual aging, so its owner would still die eventually, but it kept one from aging outwardly and granted resistance to poison along with regenerative power, which made it a superb item all the same.

So Turan planned alongside Moroz and stole Modest Wish, but after getting his hands on the item, instead of healing Turan, the bastard tried to frame him as the culprit and use him as a shield while fleeing with his lover.

And the result of that betrayal, of course, was the state they were in now.

After recovering his body and returning to the Enril Desert, what reached Turan's ears was news of Zahar's complete downfall.

Their territory had become a colony of the three Great Noble Houses, and the survivors had vanished without a trace.

He had already expected as much, so he was not particularly crushed by it.

No, if anything, he even felt his heart grow lighter at having no one left to look after.

A war between factions was one thing, but for someone in the position of pricking at an overwhelmingly powerful giant, traveling alone was simply easier on the mind.

*

The first place he began his assassinations was a small city south of the capital, Axum.

Measures had been put in place to guard against the Zahar nobles scattered in all directions, but they were nowhere near enough to stop Turan.

He had skills, all manner of divine abilities he could wield by combining the symbols of the Chaser and the Hunter.

Scattering the Mist of Concealment to distort the light, Turan slipped inside, swung his blade and severed the neck of a noble snoring away in deep sleep, then wrote a message beside the body.

That Otas had returned.

The name by which the God Tribe of Zahar had once called him had now become his own.

As the assassinations continued, Turan's Magic Power naturally grew as well, little by little.

Of course, the nobles dispatched to the desert were mostly small fry, considered bottom-tier within their houses, but even dust, piled high enough, eventually becomes a mountain.

Naturally, the effect Turan's existence had on the Enril Desert was enormous.

The Vassal Houses that had submitted grew terrified of retaliation upon learning that a surviving Zahar noble was resisting, and the nobles dispatched from the three Great Noble Houses became desperate to return home at once.

So the three Great Noble Houses immediately dispatched hunting parties to bring Turan down.

Not only would running the colony be impossible at this rate, but Monarch, the de facto head of the coalition, wanted Turan's body, so the parties were composed of the elite of the elite.

Each member was a noble with at least mid-tier Magic Power, and each party's captain was a Possessed Body with top-tier Magic Power and the soul of a God.

With their combined numbers reaching some thirty men, Turan's capture seemed only a matter of time.

It did not take long for them to realize how wrong they were.

"There he is!"

"Get him!"

"The light......damn it, where did he go?"

Turan's abilities, his masterful handling of skills that combined three bloodline powers, on top of the diverse array of other magic he wielded, exceeded anything they had imagined.

Every time they caught wind of an assassination and formed an encirclement, Turan slipped through with all manner of ingenious tricks, toying with the hunting parties, and every time, there were casualties.

And whenever he had the leisure, he absorbed their Magic Power and grew stronger, as a bonus.

"We formed a perfect encirclement, I'm sure of it!"

"No, this is like fighting some kind of ghost."

And so the Wizards dispatched from the three Great Noble Houses gave Turan the nickname of the Ghost of Zahar.

He was elusive beyond all capture, and he was, after all, like the vengeful specter of a faction already dead.

The chase between Turan and the hunting parties continued for weeks afterward.

At times they managed to corner Turan and wound him, but minor wounds healed quickly with the help of Modest Wish, and whenever that happened, someone in the hunting party was certain to die.

By then, the hunting parties felt as if they had become large herbivores being hunted by a small predator.

They could win in a head-on clash, but their opponent would never fight them that way.

He simply circled them endlessly, scraping away little by little, bleeding them out and whittling down their strength.

And on the day three full weeks had passed, Turan finally succeeded in sinking his fangs into his prey's throat.

"Guh, gurk."

Renaud Nagin, the young noble dispatched from House Nagin, crawled across the ground like an insect, spilling blood from his mouth.

The temperature was far too low even for a desert night, and white breath streamed out with every exhale.

There was no one here to help Renaud now.

He was the last survivor of the hunting party.

'Ymir, save me, Ymir......'

The being that had brought on this cold was none other than the Preah God Tribe spirit dwelling within him, Ymir.

The one who had, at some point, become his inner advisor and steadfast ally.

But ever since sensing that the battle was lost, that his body had been completely incapacitated, Ymir had refused to come out.

Thanks to that, Renaud had to face the culprit who had reduced him to this state himself.

Thud, thud. The approaching footsteps stopped, and someone seized him by the hair and yanked his head up.

"Ugh......"

When he raised his head, he saw a young man with roughly cropped ash-gray hair and eyes of the same color.

His well-defined face, somewhat gaunt with sunken cheeks, called to mind a melancholy gray wolf.

Turan's condition was not particularly good either.

He had taken no small number of wounds in the process of eliminating his pursuers one by one, and Ymir's final resistance had been fierce beyond words.

The only reason he had been able to defeat Ymir was that he knew his opponent was a Possessed Body, and thus could not wield such power for long.

Even winning by dragging things out like that had left frostbite across his entire body; without Modest Wish, he would surely have had to amputate quite a lot.

"What's your name?"

"Re, Renaud Nagin. Spare me, please......"

"Forget the shell. Tell me the real name of the thing inside you."

"Ymir won't come out of me. I swear it!"

Desperate to survive by any means, he blurted out the truth, but Turan only wore a crooked smile at his words.

"Of course he won't. He wouldn't want to feel the pain. Ymir, is that what you're thinking, by any chance? That all you have to do is die here, and you'll get to go back?"

Ymir, who had been hiding while leaving Renaud's shell to front for him, flinched at Turan's words.

Just as he said, the knowledge that his opponent could do nothing to him was exactly what allowed him this audacity.

The Soul Prisons that Monarch had made long ago with the aid of Enchantment Wizards had once been shared with Zahar as well, but every one of them had been recovered in the last war.

The fact that the hunting parties' other two Possessed Bodies had returned safely to their home bases after death was proof enough.

Of course, at the time there had been too many of their comrades around for Turan to take his time harvesting souls.

In any case, it meant that even if Turan killed Renaud, he had no real way of harming the Ymir inside him.

So Ymir considered seizing control of Renaud's body to mock his opponent, then decided against it.

If he took back the reins now and got hit even once, it would hurt.

Then Turan reached a hand toward Renaud's face and murmured in a low voice.

"Let me show you what a mistake that is."

Crack. Shadow Tentacles shot from his hand, piercing Renaud's eyeball, punching through the socket, and churning through his brain.

When the human called Renaud Nagin died, Ymir's Spirit Form naturally rose up from within.

If he returned to the Soul Stronghold like this-

[Huh?]

Freed in his Spirit Form, Ymir's eyes went round as he realized Turan's Spirit Form stood right in front of him.

Except for the sharp vertical pupils, the black dust swirling around his body, and a cloak that looked woven from the night itself, it was nearly identical to his physical form.

'What is this? Is he trying to damage my Spirit Form or something?'

If that was what he was after, Ymir was fully prepared to sneer at the futile effort.

Damaging a Spirit Form took far longer than most people imagined.

However much stronger the other side might be, anchored as he was in a physical body, Ymir could hold out until he returned.

But as if to mock that very thought, Turan lunged, seized Ymir's Spirit Form, and began to absorb it.

At the pain of his soul being torn away, quite literally, he howled before he knew it.

[Gh, aaaaargh! You crazy bastard! What are you doing!]

[This is the only place I can hold you without a prison. The others I let slip because I didn't have the time, but things are different now.]

An eerie trace of laughter crept over Turan's face as he answered, and for the first time in the thousands of years since losing his body, Ymir felt fear.

This was no bluff. The bastard genuinely intended to devour his Spirit Form!

[You stupid son of a bitch! Absorb a Spirit Form and the memories get all mixed together, you won't even be able to hold on to your own self! Did that Nazi bastard never even teach you th-]

Crack. Before the words could finish, Turan bit into Ymir's face.

Chewing on the flesh of the Spirit Form, he murmured quietly.

[I know.]

*

How horrific were the consequences of absorbing another Spirit Form directly with one's own?

Turan already knew the side effects well, having heard them from Haroon.

As one's own memories mixed with another's, even one's emotions fell into chaos, until in the end it became impossible to tell exactly which parts had been oneself at all, or so the story went.

But to the Turan of now, none of that mattered.

Growing stronger by ordinary means would never make him strong enough to defeat those mighty Gods anyway.

Absorbing another's Spirit Form, horrific side effects aside, was the most direct means of plundering everything an opponent knew while strengthening one's spiritual power.

As for the confusion of self, he would simply overcome it with willpower.

So Turan had thought, and not long after, he learned all over again just how arrogant that mindset had been.

"Ngh, guh......"

What filled his head was a long, long flood of memory.

The thousands of years lived as Ymir of the Preah God Tribe, and different memories for every body he had ever possessed.

Tracing even further back, Turan came to know even the truths his father and the other Gods had never told him.

That their true identities were nothing more than mere humans who had once lived in another world called Earth, enjoying a pastime called games.

"Heh."

Even in the grip of a horrific headache, learning that fact drew a fresh laugh out of him.

Better that his enemies were humans who merely wielded tremendous power than something truly transcendent.

Ymir's memories continued to seep into his mind without end.

Memories of clinging to powerful players inside the game and begging, memories of setting fire to the factory where he worked and running away, memories of latching onto the strong kids at school and bullying a classmate until he killed himself......

How long did he lie there on the battlefield?

By the time it was all over, Turan opened his eyes and thought,

'Who am I?'

Turan Zahar, who had lived barely twenty-odd years, and Ymir of the Preah God Tribe, who had lived for thousands.

The gap between the sheer volume of the two beings' memories went without saying; by all rights, Turan's sense of self should have been swept away and erased in an instant.

Yet for whatever reason, he managed to hold on to some measure of his identity.

Perhaps one reason was the disgust he had felt living through Ymir's life.

The bastard's entire identity had been that of a despicable rat, forever clinging to the strong and sneering at the weak.

But that did not mean Turan's personality remained wholly the same as before.

Was it because far too many years had rushed through his mind all at once?

Now, a great many of the memories he had lived as Turan had faded and blurred like the pages of an old book.

The faces of those he had grown up with as a noble of House Zahar, their names, the memories they had shared, none of it came easily to mind.

All that surfaced was the will that he had to save his father, the one who had been so precious to him.

"Father......"

Reciting the reason he fought, Turan absorbed the Magic Power from Renaud's corpse.

It was a level of power that offered little to Turan, who already possessed strength comparable to, or even surpassing, Rahmann, the mightiest of Zahar's heirs.

Yet upon absorbing it, Turan flinched for a moment, then immediately drew up his Magic Power and sprayed out a blast of frost.

The surrounding air froze at once, and chunks of ice fell with a pitter-patter.

"Ha."

Judging by the amount of Magic Power consumed and the force produced, he could roughly guess.

Not quite on par with a true noble of the Frost Bloodline, but his aptitude for Frost Magic had risen.

Devouring the soul of a God was unquestionably worth it.

*

Turan's next target was the east, the land of Varaha.

His greatest enemy was Monarch, ruler of the Aravion and Nagin factions, but the Family Head of Varaha was nearly as hateful an opponent.

If that bastard had not betrayed them, Zahar would never have fallen so wretchedly.

Entering the Land of Lakes, Turan headed straight for the border city of Ronco, conjured a massive spear of flame, and hurled it at the lord's manor.

The aim was to draw out the Wizard family that ruled this place.

"We're under attack!"

"Ring the bells! All Knights, assemble!"

Perhaps because they had anticipated retaliation from a Zahar noble?

Ronco's Wizard family responded to the attack more swiftly and systematically than expected.

Ironically enough, that only made Turan's hunt easier.

If they had scattered in a panic, he would have had to hunt them down and kill them one by one.

To deal with the gathered Wizards, it was enough simply to unleash countless tentacles with the power of the Shadow Bloodline.

"Aaaaargh!"

"Run! It's a monster!"

"Mom-!"

Naturally, it was impossible for the Wizards of a border region like this to stand against Turan, who had grown powerful enough to break even most Possessed Bodies.

Unlike in the Enril Desert, where he had hunted only the nobles dispatched from other houses, upon crossing into Varaha's land Turan mercilessly slaughtered every last Wizard he encountered, quite literally.

He even killed every Knight, whose deaths would not strengthen him by so much as a speck, and plundered their Magic Power.

It was not only because they belonged to House Varaha.

After absorbing Ymir's soul, Turan, who had never felt much empathy for humans to begin with, now found it difficult to tell the difference between humans and beasts.

No, if anything, watching them writhe and scream in agony was even somewhat enjoyable.

The sadistic instinct peculiar to the Shadow Bloodline, which Haroon and Talis had once bound in the shackles of love and discipline, had naturally surfaced as the memories of that upbringing faded.

News of Turan's massacres was relayed to the main house in an instant through the beacon system installed across the Land of Lakes.

Solif, after briefly considering sending a few of the other White Elves since it was all such a bother, soon decided to take the field himself.

After all, a smart demon king does not send trash mobs for the hero to level up on; he steps out and crushes the hero personally.

What he failed to realize, however, was that such mistakes had already been made several times over, and that Turan was a hero clever enough to keep dodging the demon king.

"He's vanished again?"

"Yes, Family Head......"

"What a headache he's turning out to be."

Turan, having learned the route of the Varaha army Solif led, kept his Tracking Magic in constant effect and never once gave them the distance to make contact.

A massacre would erupt in one region, and by the time they gave chase he would already be carrying out another massacre somewhere else, without a trace left behind.

Naturally, as time passed, the Land of Lakes fell into ruin at frightening speed.

Regions whose Wizards had been slaughtered wholesale lost the ability to resist the Magical Beasts and were laid waste, and even the regions spared saw their capacity to maintain order crumble as their Wizards were levied away.

The Wizards he killed directly numbered in the hundreds, and the people whose deaths he caused indirectly numbered at the very least in the tens of thousands.

By then, the Ghost of Zahar, the existence known as Otas, had become something like a nightmare to the people of Varaha.

'If you don't sleep at night, Otas will come and carry you off.'

Around the time such sayings began circulating openly, Solif received yet another report of a massacre, let out a sigh, and gave the order.

"Fine, fine. Let's go have another look, shall we."

Though we'll only ever be chasing his tail... there was no need to say that part aloud.

It would only hurt morale.

Yet in defiance of Solif's expectations, this time Turan stood still in the plaza of the city he had massacred, waiting for Solif and the other Varaha nobles to arrive.

Could he have set up a double? After a moment's hesitation, Solif spoke first.

"What are you thinking?"

"About what?"

"I assumed you'd have run again, naturally."

However much power Turan had built by devouring countless Wizards, there was no chance he could match Solif.

Unless he was a fool, Turan had to know that as well.

Watching in silence as the Varaha Wizards encircled him alongside Solif, Turan slowly opened his mouth.

"I gave you a clear warning. Otas has returned."

"When you don't even know what that name means."

"Did you really think I wouldn't?"

At first it had been nothing more than a name used within his family, but thanks to devouring Ymir's soul, he knew now.

Though in truth, he had already guessed who it was, given the way his father had regarded him as the Night Hunter's reincarnation.

Snap. He flicked his fingers, and explosions rang out all across the city as torrents of green liquid poured down.

A good deal of it splashed onto the Varaha Wizards surrounding Turan as well.

"Wh, what is, urgh."

"Don't tell me, poison?"

The Varaha Wizards who had encircled Turan sank to the ground where they stood, dizzy and nauseous.

Knights were one thing, but it was common knowledge that ordinary poison had no effect on nobles.

And yet most of Varaha's elite gathered here had been incapacitated in an instant.

There were not many ways to break that rule.

Collecting the venom of powerful venomous Magical Beasts, or else-

"You, don't tell me?"

"I told you. I've returned."

Or wielding the power of the bloodline that commanded poison, the Alchemist.

With that answer, Turan nocked the arrow he had been quietly holding to his bow in a flash and aimed it at Solif.

The arrow of the Night Hunter, returned after thousands of years, was loosed.

*****

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