“A… A titan ant? Is this the queen?”
As I’ve mentioned before, “dark magic” is essentially a set of magical techniques for interfering with the senses. People tended to frown at that description, perturbed by the thought that their own mind and emotions could be toyed with so easily. Often, people would expect that a wizard like me was the sort to sneak around at night doing unspeakable things to innocent victims, like in pornographic books for men.
And indeed, historically, countless men have used their magic for evil, doing outrageous things with it. As a result, I couldn’t really dispute that image. Often, those evildoers were high-ranking mages, making them even more despicable.
Did they go through all that for the sake of sex? Or did they just fall victim to the temptation of power? As someone who trained desperately for the sake of getting girls, I didn’t really have a leg to stand on when I said this, but I really wished guys like that would give up on the whole “using magic for evil” thing. Did they ever stop to consider how poorly it was going to make all their peers look?!
As a wizard, I could do that sort of thing if I really put my mind to it.
However, the human mind is much more powerful than the common man might think. Its resilience and ability to recover are rooted in instinct, meaning the mind is quick to return to its original state.
To put it simply, even if I tried to control someone’s mind, it would deplete nearly all of my magic to control them for a mere hour. The same goes for manipulating someone’s emotions; even if I did everything I could to alter someone’s feelings for a time, there would be no lasting effects on the target. To provide an example, even if I magically enticed a woman to my
room and did the deed, she would bear no love for me after. What fool would love her rapist, after all? It’s simply unimaginable. And let’s be real. I love sex as much as the next guy, but I also love cuddling afterward.
The complex curse placed on Olivia by the goddess of love was, if anything, the exception that proved the rule, and not the sort of thing I could ever dream of doing. If a mere mortal tried to replicate such absurdly powerful magic, his brain would probably explode.
Now, at this point, you might think that a wizard is useless when it comes to honest magic. But “the senses” don’t encompass just thoughts and emotions—the mind is a vast machine, and mental manipulation is similarly vast.
For example, memories. Remembering forgotten events. Forgetting painful memories. With enough care, I could even read another’s memories or communicate my own memories to them.
Another example: the five senses. A wizard can hone his own senses, or he can dull or even seal the target’s. He could even freely cause others to hallucinate.
Then, there’s curses. One could power up a spell by using the power of the grudges of the dead to affect the senses over a long period of time. One representative example would be the curse put on slaves. Monster-repellant magic also falls under this category, so curses aren’t all bad. People tended to put a nice spin on magic of this nature by calling such spells “charms”
instead.
I could keep going through examples of other uses, but honestly, almost all of them were the sort of thing to make people start babbling about the evils of dark magic. What this came down to was, with the bad impression people had of my particular magic specialty, I would probably have had to dress up my magic as something else… if I hadn’t been made a hero. I would’ve gone through life painfully aware of the glances of everyone around me as I tried to hide the truth of my magic.
So, while I grumbled to myself about the stupid old man who taught me all this creepy magic, I wove my spells to defeat the encroaching foes by using pain to make them die of shock. I was always concerned about using dark magic in front of others, but as this magic was specialized to work precisely on the targets I wanted to, and multiple of them at once, it was my only option. Something more traditional, like flame or lightning magic—
seriously, how come they were more respectable than dark magic, anyway?
—would be liable to catch my allies in the destruction.
The massive ants clustered as they erupted from the forest, forming mobs which launched themselves at our lines one group at a time. I stood atop the carriage that housed my wives and the princess I was charged to protect, attempting to mow down the monsters as they approached, but I feared there might be too many.
However, thanks to Salima’s snap decision to set the forest on fire, the ants attacking us soon began to decrease in number. At this rate, we’d have them routed soon. If things started to go south and it looked like we would sustain casualties, I could turn to using some large-radius magic to obliterate all of the monsters. But fortunately, their slow movements couldn’t stand up to Salima’s battle-weathered mercenaries. It seemed the only damage would be some minor loss of oil from the delivery.
In brief, I didn’t want the people around me to see me using dark magic any more than I could avoid. Part of that was just that it left a bad impression, but a bigger concern was that I would hate to have some thoughtless third party raising the specter of doubt among the populace by saying I was using my dark magic for mind control. Most of all, I was concerned that the Princess Lefay, who had so innocently taken to me, might come to fear me for my magic.
Anyway, I continued guarding the carriage, taking down ants as they came and healing the mercenaries with holy magic when I had the chance.
Just when I thought the assault would soon come to an end, I heard Salima yelling in horror.
“A… A titan ant? Is this the queen?”
Accompanied by the sounds of the earth quaking, a massive queen ant appeared, huge enough to be mistaken for a mountain. How strange. Even if these ants were of the monster variety, queen ants in general should not have been leaving the nest. Perhaps the reason she was poised to attack us was because she was a titan monster? Or was there another reason?
But now wasn’t the time to think about it. Now was the time to take down the colossus as soon as possible. Even if Olivia, Diane, and Princess Lefay could escape thanks to the speedy golem carriage, Salima and her two thousand men wouldn’t be safe to complete their mission.
For you see, the queen ant was, at that very moment, giving birth to
countless adult insects, as if they were hatching from her body. All the ants we had just defeated were replaced in even greater numbers, and the workers fell upon us en masse.
“What the absolute hell? This is impossible. This can’t be happening.”
That weak, quivering voice came from a huge fellow with bull horns near our carriage—one of the princess’s bodyguards. He had dropped his sword, staring in astonishment at the monster. The mercenaries near him were in a similarly sorry state. Salima cried out over the din.
“Forget the wagons, just grab a horse and get the hell out! Save yourselves!”
It was a good snap decision, but now that the titan had appeared, it came too late. The horses were already in a frenzy, unlikely to heed any human orders.