episode_0011

“……….”

When I opened my eyes, a familiar scene came into view.

The cabin ceiling, the creaking bed. And…

“You’re awake?”

Roland, looking incredibly exhausted.

He was far more haggard than when I last saw him before losing consciousness.

“Roland?”

“Yes, it’s me.”

“Kara is… Ugh…!”

As I tried to sit up, a dizzying pain shot through me.

Every part of my body felt burning hot, as if scalded by fire, and my ribs and other bones were incredibly painful with every movement.

Roland stopped me and gently laid me back down on the bed.

“Calm down and lie back down. Though the ‘cursed power’ has increased your recovery rate, you’re in a state where it wouldn’t be strange to die instantly if you make a mistake.”

“Cursed power?”

Adding the word ‘recovery’ to a cursed power that gnaws at human souls and harms the body felt utterly mismatched.

But as I heard Roland’s incomprehensible words, doubts about what the cursed power was began to sprout.

“Roland.”

“What is it?”

“What is the cursed power?”

“…….”

At first, I’d simply thought it was a power that awakened something dormant in the city and began to emanate, literally a curse that cursed me.

However, I soon realized that despite being called a cursed power, it didn’t solely exert negative effects.

Initially, I thought it was a delusion, but seeing my physical strength gradually increase turned it into suspicion.

And during the time I saved Kara from thirty thugs, and when I faced the armored Prophet Knights, I finally became certain.

This power held something I didn’t know about.

Plop.

Instead of answering, Roland first offered me a bottle filled with a red liquid.

A top-grade potion.

It was the closest healing potion to an elixir, something not found outside, created only in Ember, and now existing only in Fallen.

“Drink that first. We’ll talk afterward.”

“…….”

Chug.

I nodded in gratitude and chugged down the potion.

I admired the potion’s effect for only a moment, observing the visible changes, then I looked back at Roland.

As if he’d been waiting, Roland began to explain the cursed power.

“Just how many threats, and how dangerous, are lurking in this city, and across the entire continent?”

“What?”

“The Navigator didn’t just casually grant humanity the ability to hold the power of the stars within their souls for no reason.”

This continent, in its early days, before any civilization could even establish itself, was rife with countless dangers that ordinary humanity couldn’t handle.

And as people became capable of wielding the three great powers – aura, magic, and divine power – thanks to the power of the stars, these dangers gradually died or were sealed away, disappearing into the annals of history.

“That’s why in cities or regions with long histories or deep historical significance, there are often many threats that couldn’t be eliminated and were merely sealed or put to sleep. More than you’d think.”

“What are you trying to say?”

“Think about what kind of city this is.”

Ember.

The final achievement of the First Prophet Feanor.

The City of Destiny, which he personally designed.

This city, built with the hope and destiny of becoming a beacon in a dark world, was constructed immediately after the fall of the Golden Age.

It was also the city that inherited the legacy of the Golden Age most profoundly and completely.

“So, how great an ‘Darkness’ would be lurking in a city with such immense symbolism and history? Perhaps comparable to the imperial capital of the Shahlnu Empire, which is similarly old? No, perhaps even more so.”

“How do you know such things—”

He held up a finger.

Roland stopped my words with a gesture.

“Let’s talk about that later for now.”

“…….”

Should I really just listen in silence like this?

I hadn’t even properly grasped what happened to Kara, or how the current situation was unfolding.

But it didn’t seem like he would answer if I asked him directly, so I quietly listened to Roland.

“‘Darkness’.”

Darkness.

It felt like a slightly different kind of ‘Darkness’ than the one Roland mentioned earlier.

It wasn’t a figurative expression; it sounded like the name of something.

“Ember was the greatest and strongest city,” Roland said.

“And the arrogant former king, beyond his command as the king of the greatest city-state, desired to become the master of the continent.”

A story unknown to the world, known only to a select few.

“But he lacked power. While he could have attempted it if he’d taken a long time, he didn’t trust his descendants enough to do so. He believed his own abilities were essential to achieve that colossal feat.”

That’s when the thought occurred to him.

“What if I were to put the ‘sealed entity’ that led to the downfall of the Golden Age into my hands?”

The ‘Darkness’ that brought about the collapse of the glorious and powerful Golden Age, the most brilliant era in continental history.

“If I did that, wouldn’t the continent be mine forever?”

With that thought, the former king began years of research.

He explored ancient texts to learn about the ‘Darkness,’ and he also studied the Navigator’s magic that sealed the Darkness.

Years of research finally bore fruit, and the former king sought to unseal the ‘Darkness’ that was sealed in the ‘basement’ of the royal palace.

“But he failed. As you know.”

Due to the immense power and the unimaginably complex magic created by the Navigator who sealed the ‘Darkness’.

The former king was a genius, but he lacked the necessary qualifications to control an ancient catastrophe as he wished.

As everyone knows, the subsequent result was the spread of cursed power throughout the entire city.

“The cursed power is a part of the ‘Darkness’.”

How does Roland know this?

“To be precise, it’s an incomplete and residual power, among the powers that can be created from the ‘Darkness’, a power that was only halfway formed.”

Could he know simply because he was smart?

“The power spread through our bodies is like that. Because of the ‘Darkness’s’ strong and dark nature, we couldn’t contain the ‘stars,’ which are the potential and light that illuminate our souls. This is all due to that reason.”

“Because, while light cannot swallow darkness, darkness can swallow light.”

Even so, the secret Roland knew was too vast.

“You…”

He was Roland, whom I knew, but he also seemed different from the Roland I knew.

It was as if I was seeing a Roland who was beyond that, much more mature.

“Who are you?”

“My friend.”

Roland chuckled.

“You asked the right question, but you should have asked it differently.”

He spoke words that I couldn’t possibly understand.

“The Prophet of the Moon.”

The Moon.

An ancient star.

The star of the First Prophet Feanor.

An ancient star with the greatest foresight, capable of foreseeing those with foresight.

Roland was saying that his true identity was a Prophet who inherited that power.

“You, the Prophet of the Moon?”

As I wore a look of disbelief, Roland nodded earnestly.

“Yes.”

“Since when, exactly?”

“To artificially inherit the power of a star, it usually has to be injected into the soul before birth, so it would have been before I was born, wouldn’t it?”

He was saying he had been the Prophet of the Moon from the very beginning.

We had lived together for eleven years, and the fact that this casual Roland was such an immense being made my body and tongue instinctively stiffen.

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Shouldn’t even the closest friends have at least one secret of their own?”

He answered with his characteristic sly tone, but to put it another way, it meant he simply didn’t want to tell me.

My speech was momentarily stifled by that fact, then Roland changed his expression and spoke to me.

“I made a deal with the Prophet of Light.”

“A deal?”

“Yes.”

It was hard to believe that he had made a deal with that arrogant Prophet of Light.

No matter how intelligent he was, or how easily he made deals with the citizens of Fallen, making a deal with *that* Prophet was a completely different matter.

Roland, noticing my expression, pointed to himself with his thumb.

As if to say that someone of his ability could naturally handle such a task.

“I am the Prophet of the Moon.”

“…….”

I immediately understood Roland’s words.

If it was the Prophet of the Moon, then he had the ability to deal with the Prophet of Light.

“First, the Prophet agreed to spare you.”

“Me?”

My brow furrowed without meaning to.

The words that Prophet, who had acted as if he would kill me at any moment, would spare me, sounded ominous for some reason.

“…….”

Roland and I simply stared at each other without a word.

“What’s the price for saving me?”

Price.

Hearing those words, he reacted as if he had expected me to say them, like a Prophet, yet his body became even more rigid.

“Kara will be—”

Kara will be sent away.

“…What?”

“…….”

Slam!

I immediately stood up and grabbed Roland by the collar.

“Ugh…!”

His staff clattered onto the wooden floor.

My whole body screamed in pain from the violent movement, but I gritted my teeth and ignored the pain, glaring at Roland.

“Are you insane?!”

“Agapé, calm down first and listen to me—”

“You should have just killed me and prevented them from taking Kara! Why did you do this?!”

“Dammit, calm down!!!!”

“!!!!!!”

My body naturally stiffened at the curse he had directed at me for the first time.

“…….”

Slipping loose.

As my collar naturally slipped loose, Roland coughed repeatedly as he picked up his staff.

“If I had told them to leave Kara here when making a deal, do they look like the kind of guys who would just leave Kara alone? Snap out of it, you idiot! Those guys are here to find a hero! A hero to save this continent that’s going to hell in real-time!”

“It must be easy for you, moving only with the single thought of saving Kara! But I’m not like that! This damn foresight constantly shows me future events, showing me the world’s destruction dozens, hundreds of times! And in such a situation, you’re telling me to just do things for Kara’s sake?”

Pant. Pant.

Roland, who had been speaking like a machine gun without even catching his breath, paused to breathe.

“Don’t you know? This world is going to hell in real-time.”

“What?”

“The Army of Death.”

An undead legion originating from the capital of the ancient Elven Empire.

The greatest and unprecedented disaster since the Golden Age, created using the power of the World Tree, is slowly eroding the continent, creating mountains of corpses.

“Right now, dozens of kingdoms, including the Empire, have formed an alliance. They are fighting those guys with all their might.”

“…….”

“And even that isn’t enough. They are losing territory day after day to the Army of Death.”

The territory of the legion, which started from the capital of the Elven Empire, had grown to the point where it had completely swallowed the Western continent.

The Army of Death, which now occupied half of the continent, had grown so vast that it would be irreversible if they gained any more power.

“The Prophets are serious.”

They’ve scattered the hero’s stars across the world, so they’ll hunt down those with the qualities of a hero, born with those stars, like rats.

Because that’s how they’ve always defeated disasters, and in fact, it’s the only hope for overcoming the current catastrophe.

“Alright, then I’ll ask you again.”

Against such determined Prophets, can you really protect Kara?

“A Prophet who has wielded influence even before civilization began to sprout on this continent, against Prophets with influence so great that even the Emperor of the Empire cannot control them—someone like you claims to protect Kara, who is to become a hero?”

No.

“That’s something only an Emperor of the continent could possibly achieve. Even the great nobles of the Empire, who can make kings of individual nations kneel, cannot stop the Prophets’ resolve!”

Roland was right.

For me, not even an Emperor of the Empire, but someone from a cursed city, worse than a mere street urchin—

I had neither the power nor the authority to prevent Kara from being dragged to the battlefield.

But that wasn’t a reason for me to give up.