Sheryl’s Perspective
—That day.
The day my sister was killed.
I saw it all through the keyhole of the door.
My brother, straddling her on the bed, violently siphoning away my sister’s magic power.
This was the same brother who had always secretly snuck us sweets—us, who were fed nothing but tasteless nutritional blocks that looked and tasted like packed mud. The same brother who stole precious moments right out from under the watchful eyes of our caretakers just to read us picture books.
Whenever we saw his face, my sister’s eyes and mine would light up. Our sepia-toned world, painted over by grueling magic drills, would instantly burst into vibrant color.
Why did Brother do that to my sister?
That day, that time, that exact instant. From the moment that mysterious red-haired boy took Brother out to another room, the gears of our lives began to disastrously slip.
That Brother killed my sister. That Brother plunged his hands into the criminal underworld just to earn money. That Brother gained a terrifying power far beyond the realm of humanity. And that Brother was now preparing to slaughter hundreds of innocent people just to save me.
All of it… all of it was entirely wrong. I no longer understood what any of it meant.
Summoned by my brother, I arrived at the door of the underworld guild. I knocked the secret signal—three slow knocks, followed by two quick taps.
Strange. There was no answer from the other side. When I gripped the doorknob, I realized it wasn’t even locked.
The instant I pushed the door open, the sight unfolding before my eyes struck me completely dumb. A choking, metallic stench filled the room… the unmistakable smell of fresh blood.
Lit only by the pale moonlight filtering through the window, a corpulent man—the guild boss—lay sprawled dead on the floor. Standing right over him, drenched in the man’s blood, was my brother.
“…Brother? Why?”
“Because I need money,” he answered immediately, his voice disturbingly casual. “If I have to take it anyway… it might as well be rotten money.”
It was a simple, brutal response.
“…You don’t have to do things like this anymore. We don’t need money for a while. I managed to buy a magic crystal the other day.”
“I need funds to flee the country. I have no intention of trying to fight an entire nation.”
“…Flee?”
“I’m about to harvest several hundred lives. A massive sum of money to keep my head down afterward… is absolutely necessary.”
“…Why? Why do you need to gather souls like that?!”
“To refine high-concentration magic crystals, and I need them in massive quantities. The quickest method… is to harvest the students at the magic academy. Am I wrong?”
What’s so strange about that?—his eyes seemed to ask me.
I bit my lip until it nearly bled.
“…I don’t want Brother to dirty his hands any further!”
“You understand the reality yourself, surely! The magic crystals you require to maintain your body are growing larger and larger by the year. Eventually… the size you need will become completely unobtainable, no matter how much gold you stack. You’d have to raid a secure national facility, and that simply isn’t realistic.”
“…If it is my destiny to die, then I will accept it as my fate! That’s all!”
“Just this once. If we get through this one event, I can obtain a massive stockpile of large crystals. Then… you will finally be permanently released from your cursed fate, Sheryl.”
“…With several hundred lives as the foundation?! If my survival requires the deaths of others as a prerequisite… then I… I don’t want to live like that!”
Without a word, Brother swung his right hand up high and brought it down violently across my cheek.
Crack!
The force of the blow sent me flying across the room, my face slamming hard into the stone wall. It didn’t feel like a simple slap—it felt like being struck full-force with a blunt iron weapon.
“Who do you think I’m doing all of this for, Sheryl?!” he roared.
But as blood began pouring freely from my nose, Brother suddenly caught his breath, his expression cracking. “Ah…”
“…Sheryl, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry… lately, there are times where I just can’t control my own power and emotions.”
I looked up at him through the pain.
“…Brother. Why did you lay a hand on my twin sister?”
At those words, my brother’s eyes widened in sheer shock.
“You… you knew?”
“…Yes.”
Brother shifted his gaze to the moon shining through the window, his eyes turning distant and hollow. Then, with a profoundly melancholy expression, he whispered,
“That day, a god appeared before me.”
“…A god?”
“A red-haired god. He… he told me that Claire didn’t have much time left due to her magic power depletion. He told me that you would suffer the exact same fate before long. And then—he looked at me, a boy born with absolutely zero magic aptitude, and called me blessed by god.”
“…What does that even mean?”
“He opened the Root of Roots and bestowed this power upon me. And… he taught me the one and only method to save you, Sheryl.”
“…And the method to save me… was to murder my sister?”
Brother nodded, a gentle, thoroughly twisted smile spreading across his face.
“For you to live, a sacrifice was required. You understand, don’t you? You’ll understand it for my sake, won’t you?”
“…I don’t understand! I don’t… I don’t ever want to understand something so horrible!”
“Someday, the time will come when you see the truth. Without a doubt… yes.”
Brother brought the thumb and middle finger of his right hand together.
“But since you don’t seem to understand right now… let’s have you sleep for a little while. It’s a slightly cramped environment, but once everything is over, I promise I’ll come back for you. So don’t worry… Sheryl.”
“Sleep magic…?”
“Ah, that’s right… I’m scheduled to meet that god a month from now. When that time comes, I’ll let you meet him too.”
Suddenly, my entire body felt ice-cold. My eyelids grew impossibly heavy. Every ounce of strength drained from my limbs. Struck by a weightless, floating sensation, my consciousness was instantly swallowed into a deep, suffocating darkness.
When I finally came to, I was trapped inside a cold stone cell.
This was likely a hidden holding facility maintained by the underworld guild—a place meant for storing slaves, kidnapped victims, or illicit contraband. Thrown carelessly onto the damp flagstones, I tried to push myself up immediately.
I desperately wondered if I could somehow break through the heavy iron bars, but I quickly realized I faced a far more fundamental problem.
I couldn’t even stand up.
“…He completely paralyzed me.”
Apparently, a high-tier freezing binding spell had been woven tightly around me. In my current state, I couldn’t so much as twitch a finger or a toe.
And in that quiet cell, a crushing realization washed over me: everything was already far too late.
The die had already been cast. Whether I could successfully persuade him or not didn’t matter anymore; the problem went far deeper than that. Brother had settled his resolve a long, long time ago.
And I… I finally realized how utterly powerless I truly was. Brother wouldn’t stop. And there was absolutely no one in this world capable of stopping him.
Hot tears of sheer bitterness began to spill over my cheeks.
──That I had to inherit this miserable fate of magic power depletion.
──That I had forced Brother to walk such a harrowing path of crime.
──That my sister had to die… no, that Brother had murdered her, entirely for my sake.
──And above all, my own pathetic powerlessness in this situation, completely unable to do a single thing.
I couldn’t even move my limbs. The absolute weakness of this fragile body was the bitterest pill of all to swallow. By all accounts, if I only possessed an adequate supply of magic power, I was supposed to be a high-tier mage.
If only I had enough power, there was a chance—even a tiny fragment of one—that I could have stopped Brother by sheer force. Yes, with enough power, I could have put an end to this madness. If I couldn’t stop him, it was solely because I was weak.
Power… I wanted power.
Under this cruel destiny a spiteful god had handed me, I was nothing more than a tiny, helpless boat left adrift… entirely unable to do anything but wait for the storm to violently rip me apart.
I wanted the strength to go anywhere I pleased with my own two feet. I wanted the power to drive my own will through the rough, merciless waves and force my way past them. That was the kind of power I desperately craved.
Amidst my endless, silent tears, the image of a certain black-haired boy suddenly flickered across my mind.
Ephthal. The person who carried the exact same scent Brother used to have before he changed. The person who, for reasons I couldn’t explain, put my heart completely at ease.
Right at that exact moment… the sharp, metallic clatter of shearing iron echoed through the cell.
When I strained to turn my head, I saw heavily cut iron bars raining down onto the stone floor one after another, ringing loudly in the silence.
Standing there with a glowing blade in his hand was Ephthal. He looked down at me and asked a single question.
“Your magic power depletion… want me to cure it for you, Sheryl?”
“…Ephthal? Why… how are you here?”
“I was standing right outside the guild’s front door, listening in,” he replied smoothly. “I’ve managed to grasp the situation, more or less.”
Truly… why on earth is he here? I tried to process it, but my mind was trapped in a state of absolute panic, leaving me completely unable to think straight.
“So? What’s the verdict? If you give me the okay, I can completely cure your mana depletion right here, right now.”
“…Cure my magic power depletion? There is no way a thing like that is possible! How many ancient texts do you think my family went through trying to find a solution?!”
“Well, going by the common sense of this current era… you’d be entirely right.”
“…The common sense of this era?”
Ephthal gave a deep, knowing nod and confidently declared his solution.
“I’ll give you the conclusion flat out. We’re going to form a familiar contract.”
“…A familiar contract?”
“You are structurally human, but you are also structurally a spirit. Half of what that body keeps sealed inside it is essentially a demon… and that supernatural half is actively causing severe biological harm to your human side.”
“…It is true that I am half spirit. A contract of the familiar variety… isn’t theoretically impossible, but…”
“If you understand the underlying theory that well, then this will be quick. We will link my soul directly to yours, and I—acting as your master—will continuously supply the massive amounts of magic power your body requires. No problems with that logic, right?”
I gasped. I had read fragments about this before. I knew that the legendary first Ice God Emperor had kept his own child’s failing life going by utilizing that exact methodology. Naturally, ancient texts regarding that specific subject were the very first things my sister and I had desperately investigated.
“…That method was thoroughly examined by us as well. But in the end, we concluded it was entirely impossible.”
“And why is that?”
“…Binding a high-tier spirit as a familiar is a legendary tale from over four hundred years ago! Nowadays, due to the environmental transformation of souls caused by the catastrophic Magia Burst… there isn’t a single human alive capable of generating that kind of foundational mana output.”
Because of the historical shifting of human souls, the mages of this current era and the legendary mages of antiquity were completely different species regarding the absolute ceiling of magic power their bodies could naturally generate. It wasn’t just a matter of high-tier Level 9 or Level 10 formulas being lost to time; we modern mages had fundamentally become fragile, lesser creatures.
“…Moreover, even during the ancient era, for a feat of that magnitude to be possible… it required the overwhelming, godlike power of a first-generation member of the Four Emperors.”
Ephthal looked down at me, his expression completely unbothered.
“Sheryl? What would you do if I told you that I am that exact first-generation Thunder God Emperor?”
“…Ephthal. This isn’t the time for jokes.”
“Hey, I have a lot of personal history with your ancestor Isaac. Besides—how exactly do you imagine I managed to tail you all the way here and listen in to your private conversation without anyone noticing?”
Ephthal casually snapped his fingers. Instantly, his physical body became entirely transparent, vanishing from sight in the blink of an eye.
“This is… Level 8: Invisible?!”
My eyes went wide, my mind going utterly blank as I stared in sheer disbelief at the empty space.
“Yeah, that’s right,” Ephthal’s voice echoed out from the void. “And that legendary Ice God Emperor relic you used to trap everyone in the dining room… who do you think effortlessly shattered that Level 9 barrier?”
“…Surely… it can’t be…? Truly…?”
“Reincarnation is a beautiful thing. That’s about the gist of it.”
With that, Ephthal deactivated his invisibility, manifesting back into reality, and immediately began refining a completely new magic formula.
He’s incredibly fast.
It was a fluid, seamless motion—mana manipulation so breathtakingly beautiful it could only be described as artistic. I seriously doubted whether even Headmaster Merlin, widely hailed as the fastest caster among the modern demons, could ever hope to manage a feat of this caliber.
He was currently assembling an incredibly dense, profoundly complex ancient formula, yet he paid the immense difficulty no mind whatsoever, knitting the complex mana matrix together at an extraordinary, breakneck speed.
“…Amazing.”
A genuine sigh of pure admiration involuntarily escaped my lips.
In the first place, that invisibility spell from a moment ago… triggering a high-tier Level 8 spell with absolutely zero casting time was supposed to be a physical impossibility. This simply wasn’t a feat a normal human being could perform. If anyone in history could pull this off, it would be the work of a literal transcendent being.
“The contract formula is officially complete,” Ephthal announced, extending his hand down toward me. “Take my hand, and the contract will be finalized. I will save you without fail—so trust me, Sheryl.”
I could no longer fully comprehend the sheer absurdity of what Ephthal was telling me. He managed to assemble a legendary soul-binding contract formula in a mere matter of seconds?! A formula that a seasoned high-mage would take an entire day of intense concentration to map out… done in an instant?
“…Ephthal. Right now, I do not understand even half of what you are saying. But… this much I do understand.”
“What’s that?”
“…Ephthal is a deeply good person.”
Yes. That Ephthal held a terrifying power far beyond the realm of ordinary mortals was glaringly obvious. But whether he truly was the legendary reincarnated Thunder God Emperor was far too outlandish a story for me to fully process right now.
But in reality, none of that mattered. Ephthal was the one who had willingly given a place to belong to me—a miserable girl who had shut herself away in a messy room, completely alone all that time.
──If I am with Ephthal, I know I can feel safe.
And so I reached out to him. Yes… I wanted to trust not the Thunder God Emperor, but the black-haired boy standing before me—Ephthal. With that final thought, I clasped his outstretched hand, gripping it with every ounce of strength I could muster.
“Good. Now you’re my familiar… and you are under my protection.”
“…Mm.”
When I gave a small, resolute nod, Ephthal lightly thumped his chest, as if telling me to leave the rest to him.
“From here on out, I’m taking over. Hand over the crushing burden you’ve been carrying all this time, and hand all of it to me.”