The border castle.
Seeing Bagis walking up the stairs, the subordinate guarding the stairwell immediately bowed and asked cautiously, “Are you finished, sir?”
Bagis clicked his tongue disdainfully and replied casually, “Yeah. Compared to all the noise it was making, it was a pretty unremarkable fellow.”
This was the passageway leading from the underground to the surface. Along with Bagis’s footsteps, a faint scent of blood wafted up from below. Considering what had just occurred down there, the smell was entirely unavoidable.
“Still, it’s better than nothing.”
Bagis clenched his fists, clearly feeling that the power within his body had grown a bit stronger than before.
Not long ago, he had obtained the power to absorb magic power by personally killing specific targets.
It was precisely this power that had transformed Bagis, a lowly illegal slave trader, into a powerhouse capable of rivaling a regular knight, ultimately making him the leader of a powerful faction.
He firmly believed that this was power bestowed upon him by a great deity.
Bagis looked up at his subordinate and commanded coldly, “Find the next sacrifice within a week. This is entirely the will of the god, understood?”
“...Yes, Boss!” The subordinate smiled fawnishly, bowing his head as he accepted the order to find new prey.
They had been doing this sort of thing for a long time now.
In just a few short days, dozens of people had already died at Bagis’s hands.
In return, Bagis grew stronger and stronger, and the faction he led expanded rapidly, taking advantage of the chaos of this troubled world.
“I am the chosen one! The messenger who will overturn this wretched world and usher in a brand-new era!”
Bagis climbed to the castle’s spire and looked down upon everything beneath him, his lips curling upward.
This castle and the vast territory before his eyes had originally belonged to a Baron family, but now, it was all his.
Although most of what he currently possessed was obtained through plundering, he had also conquered a fair amount of territory with his own hands.
Sacking villages, capturing lords’ castles, and fighting the monsters that wanted to steal everything from him.
Bagis treated all the plundered goods as the reward he rightfully deserved.
After all, both sides were fighting with their lives on the line, weren’t they?
He was merely exercising the right of the victor—taking everything from the defeated, and continuing to climb higher.
“In any case, this is just how the world is!”
Although Bagis possessed sky-high ambition and desire, he also had a matching level of calmness and clarity that allowed him to see reality for what it was.
And what ultimately drove this slave trader, who used to keep to his place, to take this step was not just the power that had suddenly awakened one day, but also the voice of a god echoing in his mind.
Long before he awakened his power, this world had already fallen into chaos.
The kingdom had crumbled, the order established by the lords had completely collapsed, and the state of the world had long reached a point where it would surprise no one if anyone overthrew the old order.
This was an era of the survival of the fittest, a time when the strong had to devour the weak to survive.
Because of this, for some, it was also an era filled with opportunity.
Bagis believed this without a shred of doubt.
Having grown a bit stronger by hunting new prey, Bagis, immersed in the pride of the foundation he had built, turned and walked toward the dungeon beneath the lord’s castle.
In the dungeon, a haggard-looking woman hung in midair, bound by iron chains.
He looked at this woman and spoke coldly, “Are you still refusing to change your mind?”
The woman bit her chapped lips and glared death at him, her blue eyes filled with unyielding defiance. “...Ugh, just kill me.”
Bagis couldn’t help but sigh. “Still so stubborn. I thought hanging you up for a few days would help you figure things out.”
This woman’s name was Celia Rehberg. She was the daughter of the lord whose castle Bagis had captured, and also a mage possessing a special talent that Bagis coveted.
Bagis raised his voice, looking at her with a gaze filled with complete incomprehension:
“Celia, the world changed long ago. A slave trader whom you wouldn’t have even looked at in the past can now strike down knights and capture a lord’s castle. This is the proof.”
In his eyes, this world—where order was long gone and only the strong could possess everything through power—was the reality of today.
Celia finally raised her eyes, glaring at Bagis, and asked back word for word, “Then by your logic, if someone stronger than you defeats you, will you willingly accept whatever they do to you?”
“Of course. That is the price the defeated must bear.”
Meeting her icy gaze, Bagis bared his teeth and smiled.
Seeing him like this, the woman simply closed her eyes. Clearly, she no longer wanted to listen, nor did she want to say another word to him.
“Let’s see how long you can keep that stubborn mouth shut, foolish woman. If you were just prey, I would have enjoyed myself with you long ago before personally killing you.”
Bagis left her there just like that, turning to exit the dungeon.
He was firmly convinced that once Celia’s strength was completely depleted, she would sooner or later cry and beg him for mercy.
After all, he had broken in quite a few rebellious slaves in his lifetime.
He knew far too many ways to destroy a person’s will and make them submit completely.
“L-Lord! M-Monsters have appeared from the northeast!”
Just then, a guard scrambled into the hall, shouting with a deathly pale face, shattering the peace of the castle.
“Monsters from the abyss?”
Bagis frowned upon hearing the guard’s report.
It wasn’t as if he hadn’t heard of this rumor.
He had heard that in the vast, undeveloped forest to the northeast, a horde of monsters had appeared that could level an entire region.
Those who fled from there spoke with faces full of terror, claiming they were true ‘monsters’ that devoured everything in sight, making no distinction between humans, beasts, or magical beasts.
“Isn’t that place the territory of those uncivilized goblins?”
Bagis recalled the goblin chief who had proactively come to his door a few days ago, and couldn’t help but sneer.
That goblin actually dared, as a mere goblin, to propose an alliance to him, a chosen and special human.
Although the chief was indeed taller and seemed more intelligent compared to those ordinary goblins who couldn’t even speak properly, in Bagis’s eyes, goblins were ultimately nothing but eyesores and disgusting, low-grade monsters.
“What are those goblins doing? Letting monsters appear in their own territory?” Bagis growled irritably.
“W-We don’t know either. It’s just that the scouts reported that monsters this large are moving in swarms.”
Bagis’s confidant, Garno, who was also once a regular knight, gestured with his arms wide, describing it in an exaggerated manner.
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