episode_0001

Where did it all go wrong?

No—when did it all go wrong?

If I could return to the past one more time, could I have stopped it? I can’t say for sure.

It all began when Leonah, a warrior in our party, brought a man with her.

She asked to hire him as a porter. Tall and well-built, the man was good at his job and had an easygoing personality, quickly blending into the group.

Even I, who had thought it would be nice to have another man around, took a liking to him and agreed to officially hire him.

At first, when the porter joined the party, I was the closest to him. Aside from each other, all the other members were women.

Babbling on about the camaraderie between men, I looked out for him often, sharing stories I couldn’t with the female members, and we quickly grew close.

The first sign of something being off appeared a week after hiring him.

I stumbled upon Leonah and the porter sharing a deep kiss. Leonah confessed to me that she had started dating him. Her flushed face was brimming with happiness.

I, too, was happy for them—my dear comrade and friend had found love. I congratulated them.

But a few days later, I found the porter entangled with another woman. This time, it was Erwin, the elf who had always subtly looked down on humans. When I confronted the porter, neither Leonah nor Erwin seemed to have any complaints.

Something was off. I knew there were men in the world who kept multiple mistresses and women who clung to such men. But even so, the level of devotion these two showed toward the porter was beyond comprehension.

Proud and stubborn, they had become submissive women who obeyed his every word. Even when he flirted with village girls right in front of them, they didn’t stop him. When he groped them openly in public, they only blushed, as if they enjoyed it.

It wasn’t normal. Leonah was a former knight who valued her dignity, and Erwin was a haughty elf by nature. Yet here they were, dressed like prostitutes, clinging to a single man.

At some point, the porter’s attitude changed drastically. His cheerful, friendly demeanor vanished, replaced by arrogance and selfishness. As a result, my relationship with him deteriorated severely.

Realizing I could no longer ignore the situation, I confided in Saint Marika and Yuria, the party’s leader and the Hero. I told them the porter had to be expelled.

Marika had been my childhood friend, and Yuria was my lover. Naturally, I expected them to take my side.

To my surprise, Marika vehemently opposed my suggestion. While I insisted on kicking the porter out, she argued we couldn’t just discard a comrade so easily. Looking back now, she must have already fallen under that man’s sway.

Thanks to Yuria’s mediation, the argument didn’t escalate, but our interactions ceased. Before I knew it, Marika had latched onto the porter just like the other two.

Now, without even bothering to hide it, the porter and the three women moaned and writhed in front of us. To me, they looked less like women in love and more like mindless beasts. Every time I saw my comrades and childhood friend like that, my mood soured, so I avoided them whenever possible.

Then, one night at an inn, I spoke to Yuria about the party’s future.

The party was in shambles. The three women acted as if they had forgotten their duty to defeat the Demon King, and the porter had never cared about world peace to begin with.

According to the goddess’s revelation, the only one truly necessary to slay the Demon King was the Hero. I argued that we should disband the party and reorganize, but Yuria seemed reluctant to part with the comrades she had fought alongside for so long.

She said she would talk to the porter herself and headed to his room.

That night, the party members came to me. They badmouthed the porter, saying they were utterly disappointed and that Yuria would soon kick him out.

I believed that if I just waited a little longer, everything would return to normal. Relaxed, I failed to notice that only Yuria and the porter were missing.

A few nights later, I was told Yuria wanted to see me and went to her room.

The moment I opened the door, I couldn’t believe my eyes.

The party’s steadfast leader, the Hero who would save the world, and my beloved lover—beautiful, strong, and noble. No, not mine anymore.

…Yuria was pinned beneath a man, moaning. With an expression I had never seen in all our time together, she said:

“I’m sorry, Liel. I loved you… but you’re not enough anymore. Females like us have no choice but to submit to superior males like Master.”

For the briefest moment, I replayed those words in my head dozens of times. Did I hear that right? No—before that, is this even real? Am I dreaming?

Faced with such an unreal scene, I desperately forced my frozen brain to work, clinging to my sanity. Once I regained my senses, what I had to do was clear: kill the trash defiling my lover right in front of me.

I was Liel Frost, hailed as the greatest mage of all time, past and present. Though I humbly dismissed such praise in public, deep down, I agreed.

The man before me was a porter with no combat skills—a worthless existence I could kill with a flick of my wrist. But the Hero’s party stood in my way.

From that moment on, the party—which no longer considered me a comrade—blocked me together.

The result was a crushing defeat. Though I was confident in my combat prowess, surpassing even the Hero at the time, I was no match for the entire party. As I lay beaten and sprawled on the ground, the porter laughed at me before disappearing with the others.

Left alone, I holed up in the inn for a long time, refusing to leave. I convinced myself it was all a dream—or at least some sick joke.

If I had let go of my sanity even for a moment, I would have gone berserk and razed the entire village. So I clung to my reason, wasting a long time before finally accepting that this was reality.

I shouldn’t have.

With no comrades, no friends, and no lover left, there was only one place for me to go: the home where my older sister and younger sister—the family I had relied on after losing our parents—waited.

When I opened the door, the stench that hit me made me vomit on the spot. Along with the shock, the deeply ingrained, nauseating scent of bodily fluids filled the house.

Before my brain could even process it, nausea overwhelmed me. My heart pounded like mad. From inside the room, familiar voices let out unfamiliar moans.

In that moment, I understood. What was happening. What had happened in this house while I was gone. Rage surged. I wanted to storm in and kill the man inside right then.

At the same time, I didn’t want to see it. If I witnessed that sight, if I saw that look in their eyes, if I was abandoned again—I wouldn’t be able to stand.

But this house was the only place I could return to. If I ran from here, I truly would have nothing left. So, in the end, I opened the door.

“You’re here, Liel?”

The man I had tried so hard to forget—the one I could never erase from my memory—was there.

And my older sister, my younger sister—no, what stood there wasn’t my family. They weren’t even human. Just livestock chasing pleasure. Bitches who had become their master’s property, obeying his every command.

Thud. I couldn’t stand. My legs gave out. How could they have any strength left? That day, I had lost everything in the truest sense.

“Welcome back, big bro.”

“Don’t call me that.”

The girl who grinned and waved at me with a twisted smile was no longer my little sister. But compared to my older sister, who didn’t even look at me, she was the better one.

I just sat there until it was all over. My former comrades were ready to restrain me if I moved, so there was no point in doing anything now.

A thousand times, I considered ending my own life if I couldn’t take his. Finally, the bastard who had finished his business in front of me approached.

“Hey, your little sister and older sister were amazing. I had a great time.”

The moment I heard those words, flames erupted in my heart, which had already been shattered to dust. Whether I could defeat the Hero’s party or not didn’t matter.

It wasn’t even willpower. Instinct took over as I gathered every last drop of mana, preparing a spell to take him down with me.

Even if the Hero’s party protected him, it wouldn’t matter. His body was that of an ordinary man—just the backlash of the spell would kill him. The same went for me and the two who had once been my family, now just normal humans without mana.

At that moment, I thought of nothing but killing him. I poured everything into the spell—and as a result, the condensed mana that should have swallowed the entire village scattered like sand.

I later learned that the porter had made Marika teach him a divine art called Magic Nullification. Though divine arts used by saints were different from magic, I had never seen such a technique in all my years of adventuring.

It made sense. On the Peria Continent, aside from special cases, only humans and elves could use magic. What could humans possibly gain by sealing their own means of fighting demons? That bastard had made the saint teach him a spell meant for human warfare—just to suppress me.

I realized how powerless I was without magic. As a normal human who couldn’t even wield mana, I was beaten mercilessly. In front of my former comrades and family, he trampled me. He broke my arm, stomped on my head, and displayed me as a pitiful loser, reveling in his superiority as the victor.

“Wow~ Big bro, you’re so pathetic. Trash.”

“Without magic, you’re nothing.”

Lying flat on the ground, bleeding, being insulted by my own family—Liel Frost, the human, was utterly broken. No trace remained of the proud, wise mage. My pride lay in shattered pieces.

I ran from home. Abandoned by the people I loved. I had lost everything.

No wealth, no lover, no family, no place to return to. There was nowhere left for me. The world may have wanted the Archmage Liel Frost, but none of it could ever be my home.

So I decided to disappear. To die quietly in a place where no one was around, where no one would know. I lived like a corpse, waiting only for the day of my death.

I didn’t eat. I didn’t drink. To this day, I still don’t know why I didn’t end my life then. Yet, this damned body, overflowing with mana, stubbornly sustained the bare minimum of life. I just lay in bed, fell asleep, woke up to stare emptily at the ceiling, and slept again. An eternity of moments passed.

With nothing to do, useless thoughts often crossed my mind.

Had the Demon King been defeated? What had become of the Hero’s party? Of my family?

I was deep in the forest, comparable to the Elia Greatwood where the elves lived. Aside from the house I had built, there was no trace of humans—no news from the outside world ever reached me.

And it should have stayed that way.

Until another letter arrived before me, shattering what little peace I had left.