Old Saruman lightly waved a finger. The ghostly blue light rippled, and the memory began moving forward once more, slowly revealing what happened after that fateful meeting in R'lyeh City a thousand years ago.
"Later, I learned the boy's name... Ian Prince."
As the ancient memory flowed onward, Old Saruman's calm narration gave a name to the mysterious figure.
The truth, and the price they had paid, were finally about to reveal themselves to the black-robed man.
The moment Saruman spoke Ian's name, it was as though the cold, distant youth in the memory became just a little more real, even if he remained shrouded in the mystery of a Legendary and the paradox of time itself.
Within the memory, young Saruman and Kag remained hidden behind the fallen pillar, their hearts pounding so hard they barely dared to breathe.
The pressure from Ian Prince's casual glance still hung over them like a blade suspended above their heads, refusing to fade.
'We're dead... We're definitely dead... He's looking right at us...'
Both of them felt their hearts stop. Their throats tightened, their nerves stretched to the limit.
But the attack they expected never came.
There were no questions, no warning, no attempt to drive them away.
Ian simply withdrew his gaze, as if he had done nothing more than notice a speck of dust in the corner, and turned all his attention back to the enormous, intricate magic circle on the ground.
"This has to be the passage leading to Cthulhu's sleeping chamber." Ian frowned slightly.
His pale fingers traced the engraved lines once more, the magic flowing from his fingertips becoming even more concentrated as he analyzed the formation's core nodes.
The crushing pressure eased just a little.
"...Whew..."
Even so, neither Saruman nor Kag truly relaxed. Time crawled by in complete silence until Kag's taut nerves loosened just enough for him to whisper through the faint mental link Saruman was maintaining.
"Did... did he not notice us? Or... does he just not care?"
Kag was a warrior through and through. Thinking through complicated questions like this wasn't exactly his strong suit.
"I don't think it's either of those," Saruman replied through their mental link, keeping his silver eyes fixed on Ian's back.
He could sense the unfathomably deep magic radiating from the boy and the absolute concentration with which he studied the formation. His tone was hard to describe.
"I think... he noticed us. He simply doesn't care."
"He... doesn't care?" Kag still couldn't understand.
So Saruman explained. "It's like when we walk across an open field. We never pay attention to whether a few ants beneath our feet are watching us, and we certainly don't stop to chase them away... or explain ourselves to them."
The comparison was brutally clear.
As a wizard, Saruman understood immediately why Ian hadn't reacted upon discovering them. Only a wizard could truly comprehend the perspective of someone who stood so far above everyone else.
"What?!"
The analogy left Kag feeling humiliated. He, Kag, a warrior at the very peak of his craft. Saruman, a genius wizard who had already touched the threshold of the Legendary realm.
And yet, in that young Legendary's eyes, they were nothing more than insignificant ants. The thought was almost unbearable.
Of course, Kag wasn't actually stupid.
No one could reach the top without possessing sharp judgment; compared to Saruman, he simply disliked thinking through complicated matters.
That was all.
And because he wasn't a fool, a cold voice deep inside him quietly admitted that Saruman's comparison, cruel as it was, was probably the truth.
The gap between Ian and themselves might have been even greater than the gap between a human and an ant.
"Damn it..."
In the end, Kag could only mutter a curse, forcibly swallowing the frustration and humiliation of being looked down upon.
That was reality.
In the face of absolute power, pride and dignity meant very little. For now, all they could do was stay hidden and watch.
'This is the world of wizards. The smallest difference can become an insurmountable gulf. And in the end, there are only two kinds of wizards... Legendary Wizards, and everyone else. To a Legendary, there may be no real difference between apprentice wizards and people like us.'
Young Saruman's emotions churned as well. After everything he had experienced, he could no longer deny the truth: the gap between himself and a Legendary was unimaginably vast.
Still, his bitterness quickly gave way to curiosity.
'What is he trying to do? Is that teleportation circle the exit?'
Kag was wondering the same thing.
"It's definitely a teleportation array," Saruman replied through their mental link. "I just don't know where it leads."
The two of them watched Ian slowly circle the magic array. Every so often, he would stop and trace glowing runes in the air with a fingertip before pressing them into specific points of the formation.
At other times, he quietly chanted strange incantations unlike any language Saruman had ever heard, words that seemed to resonate with the whispers filling the city itself, causing the surrounding space to tremble ever so slightly.
But what truly shook Saruman were the fragments of Ian's muttering that he occasionally managed to catch. His voice remained calm, yet every word carried absolute certainty.
"...The energy node is here... Mm... the weak point of the sealing core..."
"...Cthulhu..."
"...Just as I thought. It's in worse shape than expected..."
"...Before it fully wakes up..."
"...Kill it..."
"...End this once and for all..."
'Cthulhu.'
Saruman's mind flashed back to the stone tablet. The Sleeping God. The Dominator of the Old Ones.
Could the being Ian had mentioned so casually really be the true master of R'lyeh City? The terrifying existence whose mere presence twisted space itself and corrupted everything around it?
And what was this Legendary trying to do? Instead of desperately searching for a way to escape like they were, he was analyzing the very magic array that sealed, or perhaps summoned, that horrifying being.
Even more unbelievable, from what he had just said, Ian intended to strike while Cthulhu was still weakened and asleep... and kill it.
Young Saruman was overwhelmed by a mixture of shock and disbelief. He and Kag had been risking everything just to survive, just to escape.
Meanwhile, this Legendary youth had already fixed his sights on the source of the entire catastrophe itself... and planned to destroy it by the most direct, brutal method imaginable.
To end everything at its source.
This wasn't bravery anymore. It was madness, or perhaps the kind of confidence that only someone with absolute faith in their own strength could possess.
'So this is how a Legendary solves problems... Simple. Direct. Terrifying.'
Saruman smiled bitterly to himself. He finally realized that the gap between himself and a true Legendary wasn't just one of power. It was vision. Resolve. And the completely different way they faced the greatest horrors imaginable.
Yet perhaps it was Ian Prince's undisguised killing intent toward Cthulhu, and his attempt to unravel the formation, that disturbed something deep within R'lyeh City.
Just as Ian seemed to locate a crucial node, a tiny point of incredibly condensed dark magic gathered at his fingertip, dense enough to look capable of piercing space itself. He reached toward a twisted star-shaped symbol at the center of the array.
Then, everything changed.
'ROOOOOOOAAARRR!!'
A howl unlike anything that could be described in any known language erupted from every corner of R'lyeh City. It was filled with madness, hatred, and blasphemy.
The sound didn't travel through the air; it struck directly at the soul. It felt as though countless icy steel needles had been driven into their minds at once, shredding every trace of reason.
"Damn it! Those corrupted creatures!"
Young Saruman and Kag both groaned as agonizing pain exploded through their heads. Their vision darkened, and they nearly lost consciousness.
Realizing corruption was invading their minds, Saruman immediately pushed his 'Psychic Barrier' to its limit, barely managing to steady himself.
Kag bit down on his own tongue so hard that blood filled his mouth, using the sharp pain to resist the assault on his soul.
"Haa... haa..."
Even with Saruman's help, Kag was still struggling. Both of them stared into the distance in alarm.
That howl... it sounded less like a cry and more like a signal. A rallying call.
Around the plaza, the shadows cast by the twisted buildings suddenly began to writhe and stretch.
Ripples spread visibly through the air like waves across water. Then, one after another, countless creatures far stranger, and far more terrifying, were squeezed out of empty space itself.
These were nothing like the relatively low-level spawn they had encountered before.
Some were as massive as hills, covered in thick, slime-coated shells with countless sucker-lined tentacles wriggling from the gaps in their armor.
Others were little more than living shadows, their forms constantly shifting, with pairs of eyes burning like mad flames in the darkness, radiating overwhelming waves of mental corruption.
These were high-level corrupted beings. The more thoroughly they had been corrupted, the more powerful, and more grotesque, they had become.
Some were nothing but writhing masses of flesh and eyeballs, endlessly splitting apart and merging back together while producing nauseating, wet squelching sounds.
Every one of them carried an aura of madness coming from the same source as R'lyeh City itself, only far older and far deeper.
Enraged by Ian Prince's intentions and drawn out by his killing intent toward Cthulhu, they surged from the depths of the city's "dream", from the edge of the Sleeping God's subconscious.
They were the guardians of this place, or more accurately, part of Cthulhu's instinctive defense mechanism.
And they all had only one target: the black-robed boy standing beside the magic array, whose aura of death filled them with instinctive hatred and fear.
"Perfect. My improved Avada Kedavra was made specifically to deal with creatures like you."
Faced with a tidal wave of horrors rushing toward him from every direction, a force that would have driven anyone below the Legendary realm into utter despair, Ian Prince merely tilted his head.
His calm eyes didn't ripple in the slightest. To him, these weren't countless monsters rivaling Great Wizards; they were no more troublesome than a swarm of mosquitoes.
As Ian had noted, the original Killing Curse wasn't particularly effective against creatures corrupted by Cthulhu.
But after spending enough time inside these ruins, his extraordinary magical talent had allowed him to completely unravel the true nature of these corrupted lifeforms.
In doing so, he had created a version of the Killing Curse designed specifically to destroy them, and his earlier victories had already proven just how effective it was.
Of course, since this was Old Saruman's memory, neither young Saruman nor Kag knew any of that. They only heard Ian quietly muttering to himself.
As the corrupted creatures closed in, Ian didn't even pause what he was doing. The tiny point of condensed dark magic on his fingertip continued steadily toward the star-shaped symbol at the center of the array.
Then, the first shell-covered giant beast, as large as a hill, swung down a claw powerful enough to shatter mountains.
The first wave of shadow wraiths unleashed soul-piercing psychic screams. The first flesh-and-eye monsters spat torrents of highly corrosive acid.
At that exact moment, Ian casually flicked his free left hand to the side.
No incantation. No elaborate wand movement. Only a single declaration, spoken in a voice so calm it was almost cold.
"Avada... Wither."
Not the single-target death of the Killing Curse. Not a plague that spread from victim to victim. But 'withering'.
A grayish-green wave of magic spread silently from the sweep of his hand, like ripples across a still lake. Yet those ripples carried the very concept of all things reaching their inevitable end.
'Avada Wither.'
A forbidden variation of magic never before seen in the wizarding world.
Its origins could be traced back to the ancient and sinister Avada Kedavra, but unlike the Killing Curse's iconic green beam, Avada Wither spread like a cold green mist filled with dead leaves and winter frost.
Wherever it passed, it did more than steal life: flowers instantly lost their color, grass turned gray, and wooden objects cracked with patterns of decay.
It was a spell Ian had spent an enormous amount of time creating, reconstructing the original spell's magical circuitry from the ground up until it became something completely different from the ordinary Killing Curse.
Its very mechanism had evolved into an entirely new form of magic.
Even so, as wicked as the spell was, Ian had absolutely no intention of naming it after himself. After all, who would willingly let history remember them as a Dark Wizard? Ian had standards.
In the history books of the wizarding world, and in the stories passed between ordinary witches and wizards, Ian Prince had to remain forever associated with pure silver light and warm healing magic.
History should remember him as the wizard who drove back the rampaging dark magical creatures of the northern wastelands, as the one who freely lifted curses from Muggle villages without asking for anything in return.
Those he saved would speak of him as 'kind', 'merciful', and 'a beacon of hope'. The title 'White Wizard' had to be branded onto his name forever.
So, as far as Ian was concerned, the bad reputation could stay with 'Avada Kedavra'.
(End Of This Chapter)
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