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“Ho-oh? I thought you said you only look out for yourself? Or do you think I’m not capable of killing you too?”

“In my opinion, I don’t think you will.”

“...I would have understood it if you are really a child. However, you are acting like a black-hearted old man.”

Leone’s eyes widened. He could barely see Azell’s movement as a sword was aimed at Leone’s throat. Azell was so fast that it looked as if time had stopped for a brief moment. It was as if Leone couldn’t pick up what had happened in between.

However, Leone continued to smile even in such circumstances.

“You can take out your anger on me. I’ll accept it, but you won’t kill me.”

“.......”

Azell grinded his teeth.

‘This bastard... He isn’t bluffing.’

Azell realized it when he saw Leone’s eyes. This bastard meant what he said. It was as if he didn’t believe that Azell would do such an act. He wasn’t saying this with determination or fear.

His eyes really said he didn’t care what happened. Azell might be the person they are looking for, so he would accept Azell’s retaliation....

In the end, Azell lowered his sword.

“What is this Prophecy you keep talking about?”

“He is a human yet he possesses Dragon Demon Magic. He is the bowl that will be filled with the Great Power, and he will fulfil your most earnest wish.”

The Prophecy was very short.

The Keepers of the Prophecy’s earnest wish was for the Dragon Demon King worshippers to be wiped out. They had given up their lives as humans to see it come true. They had become a part of the Guardian Shadows.

Azell asked a question.

“A bowl that will be filled with a Great Power? What do you mean by that?”

“We aren’t at the point where we can tell you more about it. We’ll probably tell you when we receive confirmation that you are the one.”

“So you’ll tell me when you confirm that I’m the person that is prophesied to bring the end to the Dragon Demon King?”

“Yes.”

“How can you confirm such a thing?”

“That we do not know.”

“.......”

“You can look at me that way, but I’m not lying. In truth, we also don’t know much.”

“The Guardian Shadows are a real mess of an organization. It seems there are a lot of Keepers of Prophecy. I thought there would at least be a hierarchy amongst you guys. I’m guessing there isn’t one?”

“Not really. For example, we have no idea what criteria was used in selecting us as the Keepers of Prophecy. We just know we were chosen, and we accepted it. From that moment on, we were like newly born beings that just learned how to breathe. We instinctively knew what to do, and we merely acted on those instincts.”

“What?”

Azell was dumbfounded. Leone shrugged his shoulders.

“I know about the process in becoming a Guardian Shadow. However, I don’t have much information in regards to how a Keeper of Prophecy is chosen.”

“If one wants to become a member of the Guardian Shadows... I was told that another Guardian Shadow has to choose you.”

“Ah. This is what I just spoke to you about. It is the process in how one becomes a Guardian Shadow.”

“Huh?”

“The members of the organization called the Guardian Shadows chooses the other Guardian Shadows. Basically, they are given a choice.”

The sound of a children whispering was heard, and at the same time, the ghostly Guardian Shadows started to appear. There was someone with a small stature like a child, there was someone with a bent back like an old man, there was someone with a stature of a giant, there was a someone that was fat.... A variety of silhouettes formed, but they all shared the same appearance as they circled around Leone.

Leone looked at them as he told Azell a secret.

“The Guardian Shadows were all humans once.”

“They were humans once?”

Azell was surprised. Maybe he should have expected it. However, the Guardian Shadows had been too alien for him to think of them as former humans.

Azell looked at variety shapes of humans.

Magic and Spirit Order techniques could be used to alter a human. There were living beings, who chose to change until they became monsters. Then there were those who became Undeads in death.

However, the alterations seen by Azell in the past didn’t resemble anything to the Guardian Shadows. In some ways, they looked like spirits without bodies. In some other aspects, they resembled the Undead. However, they were neither of the two. One couldn’t feel evil energy from them, yet they didn’t have true forms. They were strange beings. It was as if they were living between this world and another.

“There used to be a great magician in the past. Mmm. There might have been couple more magicians, but in the story I was told, there was only one.”

Leone was talking about the origins of the Guardian Shadows. Azell had seen numerous magic in the Dragon Demon War. He had witnessed the greatest mysteries of these magic, yet he couldn’t wrap his mind around the Guardian Shadows. How was such an organization born?

“He opposed Dragon Demon King Atein, and the people who worshipped him. He wanted to fight those that were manipulating the situation of the world from behind the curtain. However, even if he did possess incredible magic, he didn’t have enough power to fight all of them.”

This was why the great magician had come up with this method.

He couldn’t stop all of them by himself. He couldn’t just simply create an organization... He decided to gather the power of more people. The Dragon Demon Worshippers built a relationship of cooperation based on their worship for the Dragon Demon King. He wanted to something akin to that. He needed people that wouldn’t calculate the gains and losses. He needed beings that would cooperate on the pure desire of obstructing the Dragon Demon King and his worshippers.

“Basically, he picked beings that held a grudge against the Dragon Demon King worshippers that couldn’t be washed away.”

However, there had been a problem. Normally, those with that much enmity against the Dragon Demon King worshippers were already all dead. The Dragon Demon King worshippers were obsessed with keeping their secrets. The easiest way to keep a secret is to dispose of all the witnesses.

“This was why he didn’t recruit the living. He found willing allies in the dead.”

This was how this great magic was completed. If other magicians were told what he was doing, they would have said it was impossible to do. This was a massive magical spell that would encompass every person in this world.

“This magic is basically called the Guardian Shadow.”

There had been souls of the dead where the enmity against the Dragon Demon King worshippers couldn’t be washed away. The souls was confronted with the essence of this magic, and they were given a choice. They could either pass on to the land of the dead or they could give up the peace of the afterlife. They could become a part of the magic, and they could fight against the Dragon Demon King worshippers until the end of the world.

The Guardian Shadows were the souls, who picked the latter choice.

“Do you really want me to believe such a story?”

Azell was struck dumb. If he looked back on the Dragon Demon war, his enemies and allies had used almost calamity-level magic. The land over a town, which supported a thousand people, were turned to the land of the dead. All the living beings were infected with a magical infectious disease, and it turned the living beings into Undeads. Such evil miracles had occurred before.

However, even if Azell used the standard of magic that had been used during that time, this was preposterous.

Leone spoke.

“I’m also a magician, so I know my words sound absurd. However... There is one dream that every magician possesses.”

A cataclysmic event had forever left a scar on this world.

When Carlos was being full of himself, he used to repeat his desire to achieve this very same dream. It was the ultimate task all magicians worked towards solving.

It was passed down that the Dragon Slayer’s Ritual and the common language between people were the result of fulfilling this desire.

If one thought in those terms, the magic that had formed as the Guardian Shadows didn’t seem impossible.

“Through the long history of magic, the knowledge and techniques were passed down, and there were beings that rose above those past knowledge. They were able to create miracles. The Guardian Shadows is one of these miraculous feats. This was the information that had been passed down amongst us.”

“.......”

Azell was at a loss for words when Leone revealed the origins of the Guardian Shadows.

8

Jares was far away as he synced his vision with a Guardian Shadow next to Leone. He furrowed his brows as he mumbled to himself.

“I had this thought from the beginning, but... He really looks like someone I know.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I don’t have much of my memories left, but...”

Jares went over his memories when he heard his comrade’s question.

When one became a Keeper of Prophecy, one looked like a human, but one had given up everything that made one be a human. They weren’t affected by the passage of time, and the Keepers of the Prophecy always maintained their original appearance. They didn’t age or get sick. They didn’t die unless they were murdered.

In a way, they were the manifestation of the desire for humanity to live forever. Of course, they had given up being humans, so they had also given up the advantages of being humans that allowed them to enjoy their life.

They were beings that were gripped by their most powerful memory. They had enmity against the Dragon Demon King worshippers that couldn’t be washed away. This memory was embedded like a curse, and it wrapped itself around their minds. It wouldn’t let them go. Any other memories unrelated to that one became fuzzy. The other memories were like heat shimmers in a summer day. The memories disappeared across the fog in their mind.

Even amongst the Keepers of the Prophecy, Jares had lost the most memories.

He knew he was of noble birth, so he maintained his prideful attitude. However, he had lost all his memories from childhood. Currently, he only had a vague sense that he had a father, mother, older brother and a little sister. However, he couldn’t even remember their faces.

At time, he thought about them, and it drove him nuts. He could remember some of the memories he had with them. He could remember someone of the precious feelings he had felt... However, he couldn’t remember their faces, no matter what methods he used.

“Azell Zestringer. I’ve seen that man before.”

Jares furrowed his brow.

He couldn’t even remember his precious family, yet how could he feel as if he had see Azell’s face? Was he mistaken? It couldn’t be. When they first went to greet Azell, there was a voice in the back of his mind that kept speaking to him.

‘This is something important. I can’t let this go. I must not pass this by.’

Jares put a big importance on his intuition. It had never ended well when he ignored such a feeling.

At that moment, another Keeper of Prophecy spoke.

“I think I know what you are thinking about.”

“Mmmm? What are you talking about?”

“Portrait.”

He also closed his eyes to get a closer look at Azell’s face.

“He looks very similar to the portrait of the hero Azell Karzark that I saw before.”

“A portrait?”

“Yes. It might be, because they share the same distinctive red hair and blue eyes... However, their overall features are quite similar. From what I gathered, every portrait of Azell Karzark looks different from each other, so I’m not sure if it is a reliable source.”

“Mmmm.......”

Jares furrowed his eyebrows as he tried to remember the past. A voice he heard when he was still a young child brushed by his mind.

‘Jares. No one else in this world knows about this, but we are a family that had been descended from a great bloodline. You should be proud of this truth.’

He was sure that this was something his father had told him. He had a feeling that he had heard this story many times before. Moreover... He was sure he had loved listening to this story.

Jares’ head hurt as he focused on his memories. However, he couldn’t remember anything related to that story.

“Shit.”

Jares grinded his teeth from frustration.