Chapter 62 Volume II – Chapter 28: A Noble Plaything

“Ah, I found it!”

Aiden’s body trembled with excitement, he looked like he couldn’t stand still.

I realized that I had goosebumps and that I was suddenly standing upright and frozen in place.

Am I scared?

Am I, Justin Malus, scared right now?

Does this boy standing in front of me make me startled, frightened by him?

I tried to move my body, I wanted to remove my daggers from my dimensional inventory, but I couldn’t, even though I needed to use my body to do so.

Even my mind seemed to be under pressure. Everything I could do other than think seemed to be restricted.

So, I finally experienced something I thought I would never experience.

I started shaking involuntarily.

Aiden looked at me with a crazy smile on his face. His left eye, which was slowly turning purple, had completely lost its old gray color. The same purple color was now slowly enveloping his body.

Was there any purple energy in the world?

None of the mana attributes I remembered were purple. It was the first time I had ever seen such a thing. I wasn’t supposed to know how to feel about it, how dangerous it was.

Yet here I was, just looking at that purple energy made me feel uneasy. It was as if it was a creature hungry for destruction, wanting to destroy everything around it, wanting to tear it apart.

“Let’s play a game!”

Aiden raised his hands to his sides. His eyes were wide with excitement, the smile on his face growing more evil with every passing second.

“A- atta…”

I realized I was stammering, and I froze again.

Did I really… stutter?

Is this how I feel in front of a weaker boy of the same age as me?

I gritted my teeth, narrowed my eyes, and forced myself to calm down.

You are a nobleman, Justin Malus. You’re not a simple man, you’re not someone to flinch or be afraid of whatever is in front of you.

You shouldn’t be afraid of him. Snap out of it!

“Get your shit together!”

I shouted fearlessly, calling out to all those who, like me, were frozen, and slowly some of them began to come to their senses. With that, I felt a little relief, realizing that I could finally move.

It was just a momentary thing. I couldn’t think straight because I had seen something I had never seen in my life and Aiden was acting like a madman… That was it, he was still someone I would crush under my feet.

I’m not going to let him fool me.

I quickly focused on the two daggers in my dimensional inventory, then grasped the two blue lights that appeared in the air before they had finished materializing.

Now that I had my daggers in my hands, I was calmer, my confidence had returned. So I looked at Aiden again.

He still had the same expression. His raised hands were down and he looked like he was having fun.

“Attack!”

Aiden tilted his head slightly to the side, the smile on his face widening even more.

“Are we fighting?”

He brought his hands closer together and then the purple glow that surrounded his body suddenly began to recede quickly into the palms of his hands.

“But I don’t like fighting so much… What should we do…?”

Whatever he was doing, it wasn’t going to be pleasant. I could feel the heavy pressure from what was condensing between his palms. My mind was screaming at me ‘That thing is dangerous’, so I wanted to stop him before he could do what he was going to do.

I got into position with my daggers and charged at him quickly.

The distance between us closed in an instant, it wasn’t much, to begin with. Still, with my speed, I was sure he wouldn’t react.

I was sure that in the worst-case scenario, I would wound him, but then I realized that my daggers did not meet any force.

My daggers entered Aiden’s body and passed through him as if they had cut through the air. Aiden’s body disintegrated as if it were a gas instead of a solid, and my eyes widened.

“Ah, you shouldn’t focus on one place while playing… Didn’t anyone teach you?”

With those words coming from behind me, the area was covered in a purple glow and a strange, spherical wave of purple-colored energy, which faded and disappeared as it moved away, suddenly expanded, spreading for meters.

When the purple energy passed through my body, all my muscles trembled with pain.

My vision suddenly blurred because of the intense pain, as if everything was burning and eroding at once.

Screams, many screams of different people, echoed so loudly that my ears rang.

I tried to move my body but I couldn’t do anything. The pain was so sharp, the fear so intense that the connection between me and my body was completely severed.

The truth suddenly hit me in the face and I stared into the void, unable to make the slightest sound despite the intense pain I felt.

The fear I felt was real, not an illusion. Aiden was strong, my uncle had warned me, but I had not listened to him.

Now I could feel it, I was still, as if death had enveloped my whole body.

I was carefree, and now I was… being punished.

With these thoughts, I suddenly felt something pressing on my back. I hit the ground so hard, with such force that I had to bury my face in the dirt.

I was being humiliated, humiliated as a nobleman from a ducal family, one of the Malus, something that only a few seconds ago I might not have been able to bear.

Now… what I felt was neither disgust nor a desire for revenge.

It was just pure fear, fear of the person who had stepped on me.

And it wasn’t over yet, it was just beginning.

“But the game ended so quickly? It can’t be…”

Suddenly there was an intense burning sensation in my back, right where he pressed his foot. It was the same burning sensation that had spread throughout my body, only much stronger.

As I felt my back burning like it was on fire, literally eroding, intense pain came with it, and my involuntary scream echoed through the field.

“We will play more…”

He grabbed my hair, raised my head, and made me see what was happening.

The boys I had brought to beat him to death were all writhing in pain. They were struggling, gripping the grass so hard that their hands were bruised.

They were in pain, so much pain that they couldn’t even faint.

Yet, just as I was looking at them, the struggles of one of them grew weaker and weaker and weaker.

When he finally stopped moving, I heard a chuckle.

“He’s dead, the others will die soon… they’re all dying slowly, in pain, as their organs are eroded. Ah… Isn’t it marvelous?”

My eyes widened when I realized what he meant.

He was a psychopath. He was nothing but a sadist who enjoyed it.

And his next target was me.

My mind suddenly stopped working as I felt that burning, abrasive sensation on my back start to intensify.

“S- stop! I apologize!”

The only response I got was a chuckle that slowly turned into laughter. Tears welled up in my eyes as the pain in my back spread through my body like a parasite.

“R- really… I really am sorry! I- I promise I won’t even mention your sister’s name! Stop… S- stop, please stop!”

But he didn’t stop.

I tried to struggle, I tried to get off his foot, but whatever the purple energy was doing was making Aiden even stronger than me. So all my efforts were in vain and after a short while, inevitably, my muscles stopped contracting on their own.

I stopped struggling, my widened eyes slowly squinting.

I… I’m going to die… I’m eighteen, I’m a noble, but I’m going to die…

I thought about death, imagined myself disappearing from this world, and then paused.

No… I… I don’t want to die.

I felt an intense rage rising up from inside me, every cell of my body trembled as if it held a magnificent grudge against Aiden, and I forced myself to stand up.

But then… something unexpected happened.

The pressure on my back suddenly stopped and the feeling of eroding was replaced by just pure pain. Right after that, I heard something hit the ground.

Even though I couldn’t move properly because of the pain, I turned my head as far back as I could.

I saw Aiden’s body slumped on the ground, and then the purple energy that had enveloped his body slowly disappeared into the atmosphere.

Then I raised my gaze slightly.

What I saw was perhaps the last thing I expected to see in all this.

Sue, who had already taken a few steps back and was still walking away from us, her legs shaking violently, was holding a large stone in her hand. There was a tiny little blood stain on the stone.

That was the last thing I heard after the purple glow intensified enough to take my sight.

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