Shepherd Wizard

Side Story - Turan Zahar (10)

Translator: Pai_

That night, the people who had escaped the city watched from a nearby mountainside as their hometown was destroyed.

Five-Colored Light embroidering the pitch-dark sky, followed by a scorching heat that could be felt even kilometers away.

Each time a thunderous roar rang out, buildings came crashing down, and at times the shockwaves reached places far beyond the city.

It was a sight they had never once imagined seeing in their lifetimes, as if the gods of heaven themselves had descended to do battle, and the faint of heart collapsed or wet themselves.

It was a full day later before the people came back down, long after the sounds of battle had ceased.

"No......."

"Dear gods in heaven."

Astonishingly, the city they had lived in was left with literally nothing, not even rubble.

Everything had burned or melted away in the poison.

The buildings, the walls, even the citizens and wizards who had failed to flee in time.

Only a sticky liquid remained like a swamp, as if all of it had been boiled down, and after a few people who ventured close promptly vomited blood and died, no one dared approach.

"Wait."

"Hm?"

"So......who won?"

At someone's question, the people could hardly answer that the great Family Head of Varaha had won, as one might expect.

If he had, someone should have come to restore order.

Their doubts were resolved before long.

Word had spread across the entire Land of Lakes that Helio City, the capital of Varaha, had been destroyed.

*

"Heh."

Walking alone through the wasteland, Turan caught sight of his reflection in a filthy puddle and laughed.

The burns that had scorched his entire body had erased every trace of his once-handsome features; he looked like nothing short of a monster.

If anything, ending up like this was a relief.

Even if he saw his original face now, he would have found it hard to feel it was truly his own.

Having barely won his battle against Solif, Turan had agonized over whether to absorb his soul as well, or only his magic power.

For absorbing Ymir alone had already made him feel that something inside him was coming loose.

But after long deliberation, the decision he reached was to absorb.

In the end, however strong he grew by absorbing magic power, he was alone, and his enemies were many and mighty.

To save his father, he could discard a sense of self that already felt barely real.

And so Turan plundered Solif's soul and magic power, along with the magic power of the well over a hundred other Varaha wizards who had died in the battle, incapacitated by poison, and was reborn as a mightier being.

By absorbing a soul that was half White Elf, he was also reborn as something even less human.

But even in that state, he had to be careful in assaulting Varaha's home ground.

Even a Great Noble House's Family Head wielding a god's power would be hard-pressed to fight thousands of wizards alone at once, and the Temple of the Sun held a power that hindered the Night Hunter's abilities.

So the first thing Turan did upon arriving at Helio City was to divert the waterways around the Temple of the Sun, release massive quantities of poison, and pour it all into the temple's interior.

That the citizens of Helio City died in droves from the indirect effects hardly mattered.

Once he had drenched them in poison like that, the rest was simple.

As deadly venom bestowed directly by a powerhouse of Family Head caliber filled the temple, the Varaha Nobles who could not withstand it became sacrifices to his arrows every time they came running out.

The high nobles who barely managed to endure, and the handful of divine Possessed Bodies, likewise could not overcome Turan's relentless hit-and-run assaults using Tracking and Concealment magic.

Shadow Magical Beasts, wielding power that could threaten even most high nobles and armed with fangs and claws steeped in deadly venom, formed a perfect encirclement from which not a single soul could escape.

When the hunt was finally over, Turan followed Solif's memories to the Soul Stronghold beneath the Varaha palace and absorbed every last one of the gods' souls there.

Memories that had already blurred with only two now overflowed with the memories of the old Preah God Tribe, hundreds of lives lived.

He could no longer feel that he was Turan Zahar.

Renaud Nagin, Solif Varaha, Insen Varaha, Karz Varaha, Reshion Varaha.......

More than a dozen names surfaced at a glance, along with the identities they had used even further back and those memories, even the memories of their days living as White Elves before fusing with the gods; everything tangled together in chaos.

Still, taking on such risks was not without its reward.

Snap. Flicking his fingers once, Turan smiled at the enormous ring of light that bloomed behind his back.

The secret art that none but Varaha's Sun Bloodline could use, the Light of Judgement.

A power obtained by gorging himself on Spirit Forms that carried the Sun Bloodline's strength.

Having killed Solif and every last wizard of Varaha, absorbing their magic power along with the gods' Spirit Forms, Turan's power now rivaled that of Haroon in his prime.

But even this much power was not enough.

He was Otas, the mightiest god in the world and the great Night Hunter.

The god of gods had to be a being even more powerful than he was now.

To take revenge on the wicked gods.

And to become a splendid Night Hunter, worthy of his father's expectations.

But who was his father again?

The thought lasted only a moment; at the headache surging in, Turan turned his mind elsewhere.

First, the goal at hand.

'I need to eat more.'

He had already devoured every wizard of note in the lands of Varaha.

So what came next?

The Enril Desert.

In the homeland where he had once lived, many traitors still remained.

'That's right, traitors. Who crawled to the enemy and made their deals.'

No memory surfaced of how they had once fought together under the name of Zahar.

After several days of travel, Turan returned to the Enril Desert and began his wizard hunt anew.

"Aaaargh!"

"G-Great Night Hunter! Why on earth!?"

"Turan, Turan! It's me, snap out of it!"

The Enril Desert held more wizards to devour than he had expected.

The Zahar Nobles who had fled long ago had returned, drawn back by the brilliant exploits he had achieved under the alias Otas.

Turan killed them all as they pleaded for dialogue and cooperation, absorbing their power.

To someone with Family Head-class magic power, ordinary Knights and Nobles yielded no perceptible increase in strength even after devouring dozens, but that didn't matter.

Either way, eating them would leave him better off than before.

"You think Haroon would be happy to see you like this?"

Leaving those last words, Ridel Zahar, Kim Woong, became one with Turan.

He found it hard to understand what he meant by asking whether his father would be happy to see him like this.

Considering he had become a great Night Hunter, of course his father would rejoice.

And so, in the midst of wandering the desert in search of one wizard after another to devour.

Someone both strange and familiar appeared before Turan.

"Turan."

"Hm?"

"Is it really......you?"

Turan pondered for a moment who the woman blocking his path might be.

Red hair, blue eyes, a gaunt frame.

"Ah, Meisa."

The woman who had, for the first time, kindled a competitive fire in Turan, who from birth had only ever seen beings beneath him or beings to be looked up to.

The first person he had wanted to spare even at the cost of defying his father's will, and the woman who, because of that, had cost him his father.

He was fairly sure that had once tormented him, but now he felt nothing in particular.

Why had he ever been so desperate over a woman like this?

Thinking so, Turan gazed quietly at Meisa.

She seemed a little thinner than before, as if she hadn't been eating well since they last parted.

Though still far better off than when he had first seen her.

How long did they stare at each other in silence?

Meisa was the first to speak, carefully.

"I heard the rumors. They say you're killing every wizard there is."

"That's right."

He did kill commoners too when they got in his way, but he never hunted them with the persistence he reserved for wizards.

It was merely crushing a passing bug that happened to annoy him; hunting down every single ant one by one was simply too much bother.

"Why?"

"Because I must become the great Night Hunter."

Within Turan, the Night Hunter was no longer the divine being who had saved the Enril Desert from the giants.

It was merely a nameless idol, the mightiest in all the world, blended together from every divine being in the countless memories lodged inside him.

Even his original goal of saving his father no longer felt all that important.

At Turan's words, Meisa asked, her expression darkening.

"And that's a goal worth achieving even if it means killing every last wizard?"

"Yes."

Kwarung. With his answer, a bolt of Lightning slammed down into Turan's body.

With force enough to burn most high nobles to death, or incapacitate them, before they could so much as brace themselves.

But it was not enough to harm a mighty body coursing with Family Head-class magic power.

Having launched her ambush, Meisa swiftly lifted herself with Flight Magic, opening the distance from Turan.

Her auburn hair fluttering in the wind looked like nothing so much as flame.

"Then I'll stop you."

"With that?"

Perhaps once, but the Turan of now overwhelmed Meisa in the sheer quantity of his magic power alone.

An ordinary heir who didn't even know the secret of souls, claiming she would stop him; there were limits to not knowing one's place.

Apparently even his burned face could still convey a sneer, for Meisa bit down on her lip and said,

"You were never like this! Not that I don't know how you ended up this way......."

"Running your mouth when you know nothing."

He had only treated her kindly at first to lower the odds of her escaping.

Releasing her, too, had been because of his father's order to send her back to Aravion.

Of course, he had known that once freed she would never return to Aravion, but the reason he hadn't told his father that was...

'Why was that again?'

Turan scattered the question that had suddenly surfaced from his mind.

None of that mattered.

What mattered was that prey, the heir of Aravion no less, had walked right up to him.

Prey of that caliber would surely be at least some small help in growing his power.

With a rushing surge, shadow rose from Turan's body and dyed the desert pitch black in an instant.

The poison within it was more than enough to melt those of Knight rank to death in moments; even Nobles would draw only a few breaths before their lives were snuffed out.

But Meisa, as if she had anticipated the assault, soared high to open the distance and immediately hurled down a bolt of Lightning.

Thanks to the Defensive Magic Devices that had all been confiscated when she was kidnapped, but which Turan had returned in the course of releasing her.

When Turan raised the desert sand with Earth Transformation to catch it, Meisa poured out a massive quantity of water, gathered from who knew where, letting it soak in before firing another bolt of Lightning to punch through.

She could not have gathered that much moisture in this desert; she must have filled a high-capacity pouch to the brim with water from some oasis.

'What a pain.'

She was no match for him anyway; she should have just let herself be caught.

Clicking his tongue at the tingling numbness, Turan manifested the Light of Judgement and melted the water-soaked wall of sand away.

Then he aimed his bow straight at Meisa flying in the distance and loosed.

That she was flying at tremendous speed, befitting a master of Wind Magic, hardly mattered.

The Night Hunter's arrow never missed its mark.

In an instant the arrow split into dozens, embroidering the air black and seizing every direction Meisa might dodge.

Meisa hurriedly spread a curtain of Wind Magic to block them, but the shadow-cloaked arrows punched through the headwind and stabbed into her coat again and again.

The result not merely of the gap in magic power, but of Skill overriding magic with its superiority.

Crack, kwak. Weakened by splitting into dozens, the arrows broke through her defenses after several impacts and pierced her gaunt collarbone, shattering it.

"Agh!"

The moment a single arrow struck, the fight was over.

Poisoned by the venom in the arrow, Meisa could not withstand the barrage that followed and plummeted from the sky.

Approaching at a leisurely pace, Turan looked down at Meisa, sprawled across the ground in literal tatters.

As the shadow arrows vanished, the blood flowing from her wounds soaked the desert red.

"Ngh, Tu, ran......."

Turan watched tears spill from Meisa's blue eyes as she looked up at him.

What would she say, he wondered, in a moment like this?

Beg forgiveness, plead that she was wrong? Or appeal to him, asking weren't they close once?

For all his fluttering anticipation, what came from her lips was neither.

"I'm, sorry."

"For what?"

"Because of me, the war broke out because of me, and you ended up like this. I'm truly, sorry. At the very least, I wanted to......."

To stop you.

With that final murmur, the trembling in Meisa's body stilled.

Staring into those unfocused blue eyes, Turan ground his teeth at a discomfort whose source he could not name.

Surely watching a person die should have been quite an entertaining sight.

How long did he dig through the roots of what he was feeling? Before long, Turan clicked his tongue, tch, and absorbed Meisa's magic power.

With a jolt, he felt the pleasure of growth, unfelt for so long since absorbing Solif's power.

'Yes, this is it.'

The value that came before all else was growing stronger.

Drawing ever closer to the great Night Hunter, to the being all the gods once held in awe; nothing more.

What vanished with Meisa's death was not her life alone.

The moment he brushed it aside, the being called Turan Zahar had, for all intents and purposes, vanished from the world.

*

The successive devastation of the Land of Lakes and the Enril Desert came as a shock even to the Preah God Tribe who ruled this world.

They too had committed every manner of evil across their long lives, but at the very least they had never deliberately massacred the wizards of an entire region.

That was something only possible in a full-scale invasion by the non-human races, on the order of the great Dark Elf invasion of the past.

No, even then, a Great Noble House had never fallen.

And so the Great Noble Houses declared the self-styled Otas, Turan Zahar, the 'Enemy of the World'.

A foe whose very existence, like that of the non-human races, humanity was bound to exterminate.

This held true not only for Nagin and Aravion under Monarch's influence, but also for Carmine, who had opposed them for long ages, and for Ruvan, who had maintained neutrality.

Because even in their eyes, Turan's rampage had gone far beyond the pale.

Lavitas, who did not serve the fallen gods but had once had a precious Sacred Relic stolen by Turan, joined the alliance as well.

But unfortunately, having devoured the wizards of the Enril Desert and Meisa besides, Turan was a monster they could not stop even with their strength combined.

All the more so because his former weakness, open battle, had been shored up now that he could wield Varaha's power almost to perfection.

One day, then another.

The corpses of heroes who had come with a single conviction, to hunt an enemy of the world like the non-human kings of old, decayed in the winds of the Enril Desert.

Not even the Family Heads of the Great Noble Houses were exceptions.

Osel Lavitas, Rodor Carmine, Kalais Ruvan, Badal Aravion.

Even with all of these men, who by rights should have stayed holed up in their family strongholds, taking the field, Turan could not be caught.

Any two of them joining forces would have been more than enough to overwhelm Turan, but Turan, knowing this, absolutely refused to fight them head-on.

Turan hunted the weaker wizards with an almost obsessive persistence, at times incapacitating them instead of killing them outright to grind down the capacity of the healing wizards.

As for Osel, the strongest healer and purifier and the most troublesome of enemies to leave standing in the rear, Turan kidnapped the sister Osel so cherished, lured him out alone, and assassinated him.

In all of this, Monarch found no opening to intervene.

For Turan dealt with no one, plundering all his supplies from whoever he happened to come across.

Wizard puppets and Flesh Monsters of remade flesh alike simply melted and died, helpless before the Night Hunter's deadly venom.

As time passed and he absorbed the souls of gods, Turan grew stronger still.

His already exceptional magical talent now let him wield water and cold, wind and lightning, healing and purification as though they were bloodline abilities, and the synergy compounded.

His features, once twisted by burns, recovered, and by absorbing Ruvan's Half-Elves he gained even the hardy physical prowess they had possessed.

Of course, through all of it, the mightiest power Turan wielded remained the Night Hunter's.

The Symbols seated within him were, in the end, those four, and so the Skills formed by combining Symbols were the only ones he could use.

How long did he battle the thousands, the tens of thousands of wizards gathered in the Enril Desert?

At the last, after killing Badal Aravion and absorbing the Spirit Form of Haps, the god who had occupied his body, Turan learned from the memories he gained where Monarch's true body lay hidden.

'So that's where you were?'

Having failed to obtain the body of a human with four bloodlines, a being qualified to become a god, Monarch was performing the ritual of godhood while lodged in the body of a magical beast.

At the southeastern edge of the world, in the old empire's laboratory.

Upon learning this, Turan laughed with delight and raced there.

What blocked his way at the laboratory were the Flesh Monsters Monarch had prepared in advance.

But things housing no proper souls, lacking even intelligence, could never hope to stop Turan.

Burning, tearing, and melting every Flesh Monster that stood in his path, Turan at last reached Monarch.

He had arrived at the World's Boundary, a space where all things were made of Essence.

"Hello, Monarch. First time meeting in person, isn't it?"

[You lunatic.]

"What?"

[I always figured I was a bastard, but......what the hell are you? What could possibly drive you this far?]

At the question, tinged with something like revulsion, Turan thought for a moment.

What had driven him, again?

He was fairly sure he had once wanted to save his father.

But having indirectly lived through tens of thousands of years, hundreds of lives, by absorbing the souls of gods, Turan no longer yearned for that goal.

The souls of Haroon and the other Zahar gods were already beyond finding in any case.

They had been ground away as fuel while Monarch bored a hole through the world to enter the World's Boundary.

So Turan gave voice to a lie that even he did not believe.

"For revenge. For my father and my kin."

[Pretty sure you've killed more of those kin than I ever did.]

And what of it?

With no desire to prolong the pointless conversation, Turan loosed an arrow straight at Monarch.

[What the-]

Monarch was no easy opponent.

While the surface world was being razed, the creature had gained control over a considerable amount of Essence through the Presence harvested by his puppets.

Just as Skills formed from Symbol combinations overrode magic with their superiority, the power to wield Essence acted with superiority over Skills.

But alongside his immense magic power, Turan had a weapon of his own, a Spirit Form swollen to a monstrous size from absorbing dozens of Spirit Forms over time.

The world of the Boundary, where body and mind tangled together beneath Essence.

A Spirit Form was, in the end, information, and in a place where quantity of information could be converted into Essence, that amounted to real power.

On top of that, the Presence Turan had accumulated did not fall short of what Monarch had built over the past centuries.

Because every human in the entire world regarded him as the great king of terror, the Evil God.

Need more be said, when the fear ran so deep that new religions flourished, choosing to worship him rather than face his wrath?

With Presence born of that immense terror, Turan swallowed vast quantities of Essence and met Monarch as an equal.

A colossal shadow wolf, hundreds of meters in length, pounced upon the deer.

How long did the death struggle last?

Turan faltered for a moment at a powerful reverberation sounding from within.

From the innermost depths, where the Spirit Forms of countless gods already lay tangled, voices burst forth to denounce him.

[Damn it, I can't watch this anymore. To think I'd end up feeding a monster like this.......]

[Monarch! Doo Seok-hoon, you damned idiot! We'll hold him down, so kill this thing!]

The souls of the old Great Gods, springing forth from within his own soul, tried to stop Turan.

Saying that Monarch's victory would be better than his.

Turan sneered at them.

'What, was this in here?'

Turan's horrifically bloated Spirit Form was more than enough to swallow even them and make them one.

Tracing back through the memories, Turan realized that one of them was the Night Hunter, the being he had once wished to emulate.

Of course, he couldn't have cared less.

Anyone could see that he was now the stronger, the finer Night Hunter.

Having at last absorbed even the Presence of the Great Gods, Turan overwhelmed Monarch in the power of Essence as well.

[No, this is, insane, no.......]

Monarch had always cast himself as the mastermind scheming in the shadows, the demon king of the tale; yet ironically, he now felt like nothing so much as a failed hero.

Merely imagining what that monster would do next filled him with dread.

Better to shatter his own Spirit Form to pieces here and now, even if it meant...

"No, you don't."

Sensing his opponent's intent, Turan stripped Monarch entirely of the Essence he could wield and seized his Spirit Form, swallowing it whole.

He could feel the vast Presence Monarch had held, and all his Essence, becoming his own.

"This is it."

Turan trembled at the sense of omnipotence, of holding the very source of the world in his hands, of being able to bend all of it to his will.

Just then, monstrous birds from beyond, come through the collapsed barrier, saw this and fled in fright.

"Ah."

They had looked like new prey.

His disappointment lasted only a moment; gazing at the world beyond the blurred boundary, Turan smiled in satisfaction.

For so very much still remained to be devoured.

If he absorbed all the information that composed this world's laws, all the magic power and natural phenomena that composed its forces, all the objects and living things that composed its matter, he could grow stronger still.

Of course, with his Presence for absorbing and wielding Essence still lacking, digesting it all would take quite some time.

Fortunately, even after he had eaten all of it, prey would remain in plenty.

The neighboring world, Earth, homeland of the fallen gods.

And on the far side of Earth, the worlds lying beyond the twelve branches connected to their original world.

The gluttonous wolf, the Night Hunter, laughed with the world in his grasp.

*****

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