Chapter 17: Chapter 17 — The Story of an Extraordinary Spiritualist Part II
I swallowed hard, unable to articulate a single word in the face of such monumental tragedy.
"I was arrested, tried, and found guilty of high treason and the involuntary manslaughter of thousands of civilians," she continued, her voice flat and resigned.
"My parents traveled for days from the farm just to be at the trial. They had to watch from the gallery as the court ordered their only daughter to be chained from head to toe with magic-nullifying iron. I didn’t utter a single complaint. I had destroyed a city and killed my master; I decided to accept my punishment."
"I was confined in the Abyss Prison for unstable mages for an entire decade. Ten years of darkness, dampness, and cold. And during all that time, despite the public shame, my parents never stopped visiting me in that dungeon. They came and spoke to me of trivial things—how the sowing was going, the animals—trying to keep me sane."
"They were good people..." I whispered, understanding the immense love they had for her.
"The best," she affirmed, her voice trembling.
"After serving ten years of my sentence, a royal emissary arrived at my damp cell. He handed me an official decree: the magical council had decided to release me."
"Apparently, Nava Tower was collapsing without leadership, and they desperately needed someone with my affinity to decipher the complex grimoires my master had left behind, and they required that I assume her post as High Mage. Surprised by the amnesty, but bound by duty to my late master, I accepted."
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"Weeks after my release and having settled the Tower’s affairs, I decided to take some time to visit my parents in person. I told the council members I would make a research trip, though in reality I had already deciphered all of Almira’s spells in secret. I longed to see my home."
Samira sat up slightly, settling on the bed beside me. The sheet fell onto her lap, leaving the large scar on her torso exposed.
"I arrived at the farm at dusk. From the outside, everything looked exactly the same as when I was a child. I wanted to give them a happy surprise, so I silenced my footsteps and opened the main door with stealth."
Her breath hitched and her violet eyes widened as she relived the trauma in real time.
"Upon crossing the threshold... the smell of blood flooded my senses. What I saw destroyed my soul forever."
"In the middle of the room I myself had helped paint, there were three humanoid beasts, deformed, putrid corpses... Ghouls. They were crouched on the floor, savagely devouring my parents’ bodies. Tearing the flesh from the people I loved most in this damn world."
A shiver ran down my spine imagining the Dantesque scene. The horror of her tale eclipsed any monster we had faced in the dungeon so far.
"My brain shut down, Hal. All logical reasoning, all the academy’s training, vanished under a tide of black, blind, uncontrollable rage."
"I tore the ghouls apart in the house with my own hands and pure magic. Upon leaving, I discovered a dense trail of dark mana—cheap necromancy—leading deep into the nearby forest."
"I unleashed the combined power of my entire legion of spirits. The forest burned."
"Today I only remember bloody fragments of that night, but I know with absolute certainty that I hunted down the hooded figures controlling the beasts and annihilated them in cold blood. I ripped them apart regardless of the fact that some of them turned out to be children—mere apprentices with minds washed by dark mages. I didn’t have a single gram of mercy or remorse. I only cared about collecting the blood debt for my parents."
She clenched her fists on the sheets so tightly that her knuckles turned white.
"After the massacre, I returned to the farm. Spending my entire fortune, I hired a high purifier from the Holy Church of the Eternal Goddess. He cleansed the corruption from my parents’ corpses and aesthetically restored their bodies so they would look like the kind people they had always been."
"I embraced their inert, cold bodies and buried them myself beneath the great oak in the yard. There were no crowds lamenting, no noble ceremonies; it was just the priest, the churned earth, and me."
Samira took a deep breath, trying to calm the trembling of her hands.
---
"After the funeral, I returned to the capital with absolute coldness. I formally delivered the translated grimoires to the council to fulfill my debt, and then I shut myself in the subterranean levels of Nava Tower."
"I began a personal witch hunt, investigating the residual magical signature of the bastards who had sent those flesh puppets to my home."
"I summoned Gerber, an ancient primordial spirit of knowledge, known as ’the one who knows all.’ When I asked him the whereabouts of the cabal, his answer froze my blood. The trail led directly to the Valetri."
"The Valetri?" I asked, noting the disgust in her tone as she pronounced the name.
"Yes. A powerful high-magic family that had been stripped of all their nobility titles and exiled from the court fifteen years prior."
"They fell into disgrace due to the madness of their eldest daughter, Hestia Von Valetri. During my years at the academy, Hestia—blinded by arrogance—used forbidden dark magic to brutally murder a young commoner student I got along well with."
"I remember that, after being discovered, Hestia lost control of her own magic and attempted to murder half the classroom, laughing with a sick cynicism after having torn apart that innocent girl. It was I who had to subdue her by force."
"As a result of that incident, Hestia was imprisoned, and the royal guard discovered that the entire Valetri family had been financing necromancy laboratories and illegal experiments on their domains for decades. They lost everything."
"I didn’t know whether the attack on my parents was calculated revenge for my role in Hestia’s capture years earlier, or if they were simply random victims of their thirst for corpses for rituals, but I didn’t care. I was going to extinguish the Valetri name."
She rose from the bed, walking barefoot around the room as the tension of the tale overtook her.
"I traveled alone to the Valetri’s old exiled mansion, located in the southern swamps. As I approached the black stone walls, I sensed an overwhelming anomaly: a fluctuation of dark energy so dense it suffocated the air, coming directly from the property’s catacombs."
"I burst in, smashing the main doors. I ran down the spiral staircase, wrapped in my protective aura, and upon reaching the immense ritual basement, I came face-to-face with hell itself."
Samira hugged herself, recalling the madness of that night.
"There were hundreds of dark mages kneeling in concentric circles. They wore black robes embroidered with the symbol of a single grotesque Great Eye. They were bellowing a dissonant chant in an arcane dialect that tore at my eardrums. And at the absolute center of the formation, chained to an obsidian sacrificial table... was Hestia Valetri."
"I tried to cast a massive interruption spell, but I was a second too late. The head priest, with a ceremonial bone dagger, stabbed Hestia directly in the center of her chest."
"The impact didn’t release blood. It released a shockwave of pure black annihilation."
"Instantly, the hundreds of dark mages present in the room began to melt. Their bodies liquefied into a pasty amalgam of bubbling flesh, viscera, and bone, which flowed like an unnatural river toward the altar, being absorbed by the open wound in Hestia’s chest."
The room in our inn seemed to have grown colder at her words.
"From Hestia’s suspended body, a colossal pillar of dark power began to erupt. The energy broke through the mansion’s roof and projected toward the firmament, covering the entire kingdom’s sky with sickly purple clouds."
"Through the hole in the ceiling, I could see how the very sky was tearing open. The barrier of our reality was splitting, and from the dimensional abyss... an enormous red eye, the size of a blood moon, peered into our world, followed by colossal black tentacles that began descending among the clouds, seeking to latch onto our land."
"They were opening a dimensional rift..." I whispered, tying threads to my own world and the monster invasions.
"They were summoning an outer god," Samira corrected.
"To sever the link and prevent that aberration from fully crossing the rift, I had no other choice. I materialized my spiritual lance and pierced through Hestia Valetri’s skull with all my power."
"The instant her brain was destroyed, the chant ceased. The pillar of energy collapsed and the rift in the sky violently slammed shut, severing the tentacles that had managed to cross and dissolving them into ashes."
"A sepulchral silence fell over everything."
Samira looked at me, and for the first time, I saw a trace of pure terror in the eyes of the invincible 5-star warrior.
"I stared at Hestia’s decapitated corpse on the altar. We had never gotten along, and I knew she was the worst scum that existed, but the aura of the room didn’t feel like victory. It left a taste of rust and death in my throat."
"When I turned around, preparing to send a messenger spirit to the capital’s council... I heard a laugh."
"A choked, bubbling laugh, coming from the altar."
"I spun on my heels, channeling ether into my hands. Hestia—or the thing using Hestia’s destroyed body—had sat up on the edge of the obsidian table."
"It was laughing with hysterical cackles, as thick tears of dense blood streamed from its eyes. Its human pupils had disappeared, replaced by pits of a dark violet, almost black, and its hair, once a normal brown, had bleached to a spectral silver-white, floating unnaturally without any wind."
"I immediately took a combat stance, preparing my most devastating attack."
"Hestia’s possessed corpse didn’t stop smiling at me, even as its jaw began to unhinge with a sickening crack, spewing waves of black, viscous liquid that stained its robes and the altar."
"It stared fixedly at me and, with a voice that sounded like a thousand souls scraping stone, pronounced its final words:"
"You have already known pain, little spiritualist... you have already witnessed the gaze of our creator. But you do not yet truly know us. I hope to see you the day the end of this earth fully arrives... and all the blind lambs are sacrificed upon the altar of the void."
"With that said," Samira concluded, lowering her voice to a gloomy murmur, "Hestia’s body dissolved into a puddle of black mud, and I was left alone in the darkness."
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