"These damn demons."
Inside a test building of Justice Town, which happened to be the Town Hall, was a middle-aged man wearing a long black cloak. With his thick black hair slicked back with a handful of grease, he was able to cover up his head full of thick gray hair showing that his body was a lot older than he wanted people to believe.
The man's sharp blue eyes shimmered in the bright room as they reflected the chaotic scene above the town. If Yoze saw this middle-aged man, he would have been shocked to notice that he bore a striking resemblance to the golden statue of the young man who was rumored to have transformed into the God of Eternal Justice in the town's story.
The similarities were so close that he would have known this was the same man who had aged gracefully with time. Unfortunately, the hopeful and youthful aura surrounding the middle-aged man's statue was replaced with coldness.
As the middle-aged man stared at Gospel Peak and saw the level of destruction that had been caused, he couldn't help but feel the hatred buried deep in his heart resurface like a volcano. The middle-aged man clutched his heart in a fruitless attempt to stop himself, but he couldn't take it any longer.
He had been suppressing himself for far too long. The weight of responsibility and guilt he felt for all the deaths he had caused using demons' hands wrecked his mind and soul.
"God damm! Lucien, what happened to that promise you made a long time ago when you first ran away from this cursed town!? You said you were going to protect everyone and get help."
"What did you do instead when you returned? You brought a massive demon that treats your family and townspeople like food! You incompetent fool, you should have followed through and let it kill you!" The middle-aged man screamed as he slammed his fist into his forehead repeatedly.
The middle-aged man didn't even seem to notice the pain, as even when his forehead began to bleed, he didn't stop. His blood quickly streamed down his face and stained the pristine white carpet.
The memories of his past rapidly played through his mind like a broken record with no stop button. The memories of his childhood that were filled with his entire village falling apart due to rampant corruption and hired evil outsiders who forced the villagers into submission to the broken system.
The men and women in the village's hearts were filled with fear as they worried that one day they would be captured by the corrupt leader and evil outsiders. If it wasn't for the fact that they were forced to work on the farmers for ten hours a day, they would have rather locked themselves at home.
His entire memories of that were only of his parents trying to comfort him and his younger siblings even though they were just as scared as them. It was the common life of a villager back then, and he had no power to change it.
Years passed by in a flash in his mind as he reached the day he feared most and hated to remember. The day his younger sister was taken away to the town hall, and never came back.
Simply remembering the details caused the middle-aged man to cry as he felt helplessness completely engulf his soul. His strength seemed to have been snapped away from his body as his knees gave out, causing him to fall to the ground.
On that very day, he saw that something in his parents had snapped as he watched them secretly grab the knives and pans from the kitchen and walk outside in the middle of the night. The middle-aged man screamed at his younger self to follow them, but he could only feel the helplessness he felt grow as he had to watch his younger self do nothing due to fear.
"Follow them! Help them! If you don't, they will never come back!" The middle-aged man screamed as he felt immense pain coming from his heart.
Time seemed to pass slowly as the night in his memories seemed to never end until he heard the sound of something being squashed. The sound wasn't very loud since it came from somewhere far away, but the middle-aged man knew it came from the Town Hall.
The sound of his parents' heads being squashed like a watermelon by the evil and powerful outsiders drew him crazy. Without knowing what had happened next that day and not wanting to know, his younger self ran away.
He abandoned everything. He abandoned his life in the village. He abandoned his mother and father. He abandoned his younger siblings.
The only thing that helped the guilt from consuming his entire soil was his promise to bring help to save the village. He had a helpless idea that only evil could uproot evil. To save the village, he needed to bring even more evil outsiders to kill the outsiders preventing his village from being free.
"I promise I will come back and save the town! I will bring more outsiders to save us and kill all those bastards who have been terrorizing us!"
He didn't dare to think about what he would do to get rid of the more evil and even stronger outsider. All he wanted was to run away from his problems and not look back.
"Lucien, stop your bemoaning and hurry up and stop being useless. I already knew that your human witchcraft wasn't any good, but I didn't think it was so useless that a young demon wasn't affected in the slightest."
Suddenly as Lucien was grieving and suffering from his mind, body, and soul being consumed by his guilt of the past, present, and future, he heard the voice that he hated to the core of his being. The voice was rough and nonhuman-like, yet it easily reached his ears and entered his mind like a brain-eating parasite.
The moment Lucien heard this voice, he snapped out of his haze as he felt anger engulf his heart. Just as he was about to scream curses at the demon, his rationality took over, forcing him to swallow everything again and bottle it up in his tired heart.
Knowing that even though he could hear the demon from such a far distance between them, the demon wouldn't be able to hear his voice. He gritted his teeth and remained silent as he waited for the voice he found so disgusting to continue without pause.
As he expected, just as the demon's voice finished its sentence, it continued without a care about his feelings.
"The young demon I am fighting is cunning and has dug himself underground. The chances of him digging toward the town to use as an escape route is high."
"So I want you to use your weak and flimsy spells and tools to protect and block the demon from escaping. Even though you are weak, I expect you can hold him off for at least a second...maybe I should temper my expectations a bit."
"Hold him off for half a second if you can. If you fail to fulfill even this, you can expect that this demon will eat my farm before running away like a thief!" The demon's voice was filled with anxiety as it reached Lucien's ears.
However, he knew this anxiety wasn't for his or the townspeople's safety and protection. It was the anxiety that someone would have when they suspected that someone was going to eat the food while they went to the bathroom.
In this case, Lucien knew that the demon's food was himself and the hundreds of townspeople, while the thief was a young demon disguised as a young human man in his late twenties.
"I want you and your entire race to die a horrible death. If it wasn't for my people's lives being in danger, I wouldn't do anything for you." Lucien muttered to himself as he suppressed his bloodlust.
Without bothering to calm himself down, he took various strange tools and objects out of his black cloak and placed them in front of him. After placing the last object on the floor, he sat down and inspected each object to make sure there weren't any flaws or he would lose his life.
After taking a careful look at a marbled green clock, a wooden crying snake statue, a bottle of lizard tears, and the bag of random marbles that had shapes of screaming ghosts inside them, he closed his eyes and converted the crystal dust sticking to his Dead Crystal Nerves into crystal energy.
Once he converted all the crystal dust inside his body into crystal energy, Lucien touched the marbled green clock and muttered a curse with a clear target in mind. A detailed image of a strangely tall, muscular young man wearing a thick suit of armor made out of blood appeared in Lucien's mind as he cursed the young man with the Curse of Possibility.
The source of this c𝐨ntent is freewe(b)nov𝒆l