"Do you think we did it wrong?" Etienne stared at Kellan, his gaze sharp enough to make Kellan uneasy. "Do you think we shouldn't have sacrificed one of our own?"
"No." Kellan swallowed the doubt deep inside. Some things weren't meant to be said aloud to Etienne.
"I broke into the Black Sorcerers' market, caused chaos, slaughtered a dozen powerful warlocks and witches. When I reached the ritual altar in the center, I saw you and eight or nine other children tied up together. Why did I only take you with me? Why did I train only you to be a demon hunter?"
"I don't know." Kellan honestly couldn't understand. The other children were released, sent back to their families. Only he stayed — Etienne insisted on teaching him the hunter's craft.
"Because you didn't cry. You were the only one who didn't cry in fear."
"I never shed tears." Kellan's voice was quiet but steady. "People in the village say I didn't even cry when I was born."
"Our only recruitment standard for new hunters is willpower. You met that standard."
"Dalton… Dalton is a hunter too. But he ran away, decided to go home. Does that make him strong-willed?"
"People change. Maybe one day, something will break you, and you'll cry."
"No, I won't."
Etienne turned his gaze to the forest, then back to Kellan's face.
"This is a harsh reality. Either we sacrifice one or two hunters—wounded or dead—but successfully suppress the Blade Demon, banish it, imprison it in the sanctuary... Or we lose no hunters, but the demon escapes to other lands... Imagine, if a demon god manifests publicly, ordinary people don't stand a chance. Their minds are corroded, and they fall to ruin instantly."
"So... Denvar died." Kellan whispered. Denvar had fought for life, once.
"Yes, he died. But he saved millions of innocents." Etienne nodded. "That's why I said their deaths were meaningful."
"What if one day it's our turn to be sacrificed?"
"...I was once placed in a similar position, decades ago. Kellan. If you don't have the power to escape a fate set for you, you're just trapped in it."
Kellan felt the weight of their impossible dilemma.
"—If Denvar died knowing the meaning of his death, that's a sacrifice. But if he died in ignorance, sent to die without knowing why... what is that?" Kellan fixed Etienne with a hard look.
"Don't entertain these thoughts." Etienne's hands gripped Kellan's shoulders firmly. His cloudy eyes locked onto Kellan's, voice rising. "On this battlefield where demons and hunters fight with life and death, your only focus is 'kill the demon.' Everything else? Throw it all away!"
Kellan remained silent.
"Now, I'm going to teach you another important spell. Remember its rhythm, its pace, and its tone. Make sure you can recite it perfectly, understood?"
"…Understood." Kellan nodded.
Etienne turned to the open clearing and spoke the Hunter's incantation:
"Exile beyond the skies."
"Exile beyond the skies," Kellan repeated.
Etienne fixed his gaze on Kellan, adjusted his cloak, and nodded with a small salute. "Practice here diligently. We'll come back soon."
"What? Mr. Etienne, aren't you supposed to stay behind?"
"Don't talk nonsense. I'm staying because I'm worried about you. But I have to go. If I'm not there and we fail to defeat the Blade Demon, that loss would haunt me for the rest of my life. You stay here. Do not leave under any circumstances."
Before Kellan could say anything, Etienne turned and hurried away from the campsite ruins, heading deep into the Twilight Forest.
Kellan rested his hand on the cold camping stone.
As a demon hunter, his duty was to hunt demons. Since joining their ranks, he had accepted that fighting demons—even to the death—was part of the job.
But...
Kellan shook his head hard.
It was sad, yes, but he wasn't the one making the rules.
Like a game of chess—he'd watched gamblers at the tavern play a "king's game," moving wooden pieces on a board. Those pieces were shaped like knights, soldiers, and officers, each with fancy names, but to the players, they were all just pawns—moved, sacrificed, and exchanged at will, as long as the final victory was secured.
Was Frederick the player, and they the pawns?
The thought made Kellan sink deeper into despair.
Maybe leaving him behind at the camp was part of their strategy. If the Blade Demon...
He didn't dare finish the thought.
Instead, Kellan pushed away the doubts and focused on practicing the hunter's spell.
"Phantom Force."
He concentrated, intoning the words with a special tone. The spell took form, invisible currents swirling faintly in the air.
How should he use it?
According to Jevnie, Phantom Force was a power that manipulated the flow of the wind. Kellan thought deeply. A skilled demon hunter could maximize a spell's effect by focusing their mind to subtly alter its parameters — changing its range, its strength, or other properties.
Take Aphen Flame, for example. Kellan could only ignite his own soul to keep himself alert, making a ghostly flame flicker from his palm to burn nearby objects — a fire without heat. But he had seen Etienne summon soulfire gold flames with the same spell, blazing fiercely over his entire body. Those supernatural golden flames could burn anything to ash.
Kellan believed that if he could master the casting rules of Phantom Force, the spell's potential would be limitless.
First, Jevnie had shown him a basic method — "Blocking."
He picked up a stone and threw it hard into the air. The stone shot upwards quickly, reached its peak, then began to fall fast.
"Phantom Force!" Kellan chanted, eyes fixed on the air right beneath the falling stone, focusing all his will on a single point.
There—flow!
Swish... The stone landed softly and rolled on the grass without any obstruction.
It was still far from perfect. Should he keep practicing? Kellan pondered.
Hunter spells drew power from the soul, so practicing had to be calculated. Repeated use in a short time would drain him exponentially.
Use less magic to preserve his soul, and maybe live until seventy. Or practice desperately, mastering every detail and technique, becoming an expert hunter mage—but that would hollow out his soul, leaving him a shell by forty.
Well... practice it is! Kellan steeled himself.
From what he'd seen, one thing was clear: without enough power, others would treat him as expendable. Otherwise, he'd end up like Dalton — powerless to protect himself, forced to run away. But alone, his chances of escaping the forest were slim.
So he practiced from dawn till dusk.
Kellan repeated the spell one hundred and twenty-seven times.
At first, Phantom Force's effect was weak and unstable, barely working at all. But as Kellan used it more, learning and reflecting, he began to grasp the true meaning of the incantation.
He even devised his own method to record the spell.
Each syllable of the spell had a corresponding pitch, and Kellan assigned different levels to these tones — lower numbers meant deeper, more somber sounds, while higher numbers represented sharper, more piercing notes. Math wasn't Kellan's strong suit, but he could handle counting from one to twenty.
After marking each syllable with pitch symbols, he deliberately varied the tones, then tested the changes by casting the spell.
Through this trial and error, he identified which syllables formed the core of the spell — even the slightest alteration would cause the whole incantation to fail. He also figured out which tones adjusted the spell's power, and which influenced its range.
The ground before the camping stone was a mess, covered in intricate musical notes, annotations, and Kellan's own scribbled symbols.
He ate only a little in the afternoon, spending the rest of the time fully focused on experimenting with his understanding of the spell. He'd never shown this habit to any other demon hunter — not even Etienne knew. Kellan feared ridicule. He had never seen any other hunter record spells the way he did. The others simply memorized the rhythm and could cast effortlessly, unlike Kellan's painstaking analysis, which he thought was clumsy and inefficient.
Yet, while drawing on the ground and researching the spell, Kellan felt a joy he'd never experienced before. It became his entertainment. Every time he discovered a connection between pitch shifts and spell effects, a genuine surge of encouragement filled him.
The results of that entire day were about to be put to the test.
Kellan picked up a stone — larger this time, palm-sized, not the small pebbles from before — and tossed it high into the air.
The stone soared upward, then quickly began to fall.
Kellan fixed his gaze on its descent.
Adjusting the pitch, regulating the power's amplitude, focusing his mind to determine the precise point…
"Phantom—Force!"
Whoosh! A fierce gust sliced through the air. Invisible power shifted the wind and currents. To Kellan, it felt like an unseen rod had struck the stone midair. The stone abruptly changed direction, flying straight outward at incredible speed before crashing against a distant ruin wall with a loud clang.
Kellan smiled in satisfaction.
Still… was this how the spell was meant to be used? He felt a little puzzled. According to Jevnie, it was supposed to be a protective spell. But after so many hours of practice, his mouth was dry and his head heavy — thinking clearly was impossible.
At the twilight hour, with the sun slanting low and darkness creeping in, the thing Kellan had been worried about — or perhaps expecting, or even fearing — finally happened.
"Ha—ha ha—ha!" A hoarse, eerie laugh echoed.
Kellan heard footsteps approaching from the edge of the forest, along with the heavy dragging sound of something large being pulled. Afraid the hunters might see the markings he'd drawn on the ground and mock him, Kellan hurriedly wiped away all the traces with his hands—scraping and kicking to erase every symbol and note.
The hunters were returning from battle.
Kellan watched the figures in the distance, but an inexplicable chill gripped his heart.
They slowly made their way back toward the campsite by the camping stone, and behind them, the massive shadow they dragged seemed to be...
The Blade Demon.