HDBMTD 71 💥

~Chapter 71~

On the day of the final battle, I was already near my limit even before the fight began.

The Cambiata leader sensed this and relentlessly targeted me.

He took my comrades hostage and cornered me. I resisted desperately, but my mind was breaking.

When faint awareness returned in my clouded mind, I was restrained by an iron machine.

They seated me in a chair.

I had been offered as a sacrifice for the new world the Cambiata dreamed of.

“To control the human mind is to control the world itself. Ariadna, with your power, we will become the gods of the new world!”

The leader offered me to the altar, trying to inject Cambiata’s ideology into me and open the new world they dreamed of.

“Turn the empire into a sea of fire and engrave our power into the entire world.”

They planned to use me as a medium to control Nocturne, making him burn the empire that fought against Cambiata, as the opening ceremony of a new era.

‘No!’

Even while restrained in the chair and my mind under control, my subconscious kept struggling.

He had started a civil war, killed my comrades, desecrated their bodies, and now he wanted to use me to trample on everything I loved.

Images of dead comrades and horrible traumas tangled chaotically in my mind.

— I’ll kill you.

Had I ever hated anyone so much?

— You will, without fail, by my own hand…

I dug into the deepest part of his subconscious and gave an order.

— Vomit all the blood in your body, curse yourself, and burn to death in the fires of hell.

The leader obeyed my command exactly. Vomiting blood, cursing himself, he activated the bomb, turning the land into a sea of fire, and threw himself into the flames. The moment he died, I lost consciousness too.

When my blurred consciousness returned, the first thing I saw was Nocturne. His body still bore wounds from the fierce battle. He released me from the chair’s restraints and said,

“The Cambiata leader is dead.”

As he delivered the news, he looked at me with a slightly unsettled gaze.

I just felt relief. The enemy who had blocked the empire’s path at every moment, Cambiata, was gone to the root — the thought made me feel refreshed to my core.

But the moment I freed myself and rose from the chair—

— Kiiiii!

A piercing ringing in my ears, and from above my forehead, a horror poured out.

Like an unraveling ball of thread, countless monsters, weapons, and corpses flowed out. In the air, they clung together, forming a single shape. I couldn’t understand what was happening.

“What is that…”

The world suddenly went dark.

Looking up, I saw an enormous monster made of countless corpses stuck together. Behind that grotesque mass, pure white wings slowly fluttered.

I was shocked at first, but soon realized it wasn’t real.

Each time I blinked, the sky briefly returned to blue, and the monster vanished for an instant.

Then I understood.

‘Ah, it’s a hallucination.’

It was a symptom I often saw in comrades suffering from trauma. Whenever I erased their painful memories, I also experienced the hallucinations they saw.

Maybe that’s why, above my head, appeared a concentrated form of countless people’s fears. Disgusting, overwhelming, and horrifying things all tangled together.

Seeing it made me think about how many people’s hearts I had looked into.

In the past, I never read the minds of the sick or those possessed by fanatic beliefs. But after the war began, I couldn’t keep that rule anymore.

And this time, to kill that fanatic leader, I had read his ideology and memories perfectly — no wonder my mind, already at its limit, was shattering.

“…Ari.”

“Yes, Nocturne.”

I answered calmly to hide my symptoms.

But strangely, Nocturne’s eyes were fixed above my head.

“Don’t provoke it. Come here slowly.”

“…What?”

“Where did that monster come from?”

Hearing the wariness in his voice, I froze.

He was seeing the same hallucination I saw.

I was failing to control my psychic ability, showing him my hallucination.

“Ari!”

The moment he pulled me into his arms to shield me from the monster above, it began to attack Nocturne.

Reality twisted in an instant. The unreal monster wielded the most absolute power the human mind could imagine. Light and darkness, space itself twisted wildly, piercing Nocturne’s body.

He created flames to protect me.

I shouted urgently,

“Nocturne, it’s just a hallucination! I’ll erase it…”

I tried to withdraw my power immediately — but it didn’t work.

My mind was already a mess, full of comrades’ traumas, the fanatic leader’s entire life read from his subconscious, and countless chimeras’ memories.

“Grrr…”

In the same way it had been formed, the monster was destroyed, broken apart in the hottest flames Nocturne could create.

Over the flames covering the ground, half-melted corpses of humans and beasts drifted together.

“Cough.”

When I turned at Nocturne’s rough cough, I was horrified.

Blood was flowing from his mouth.

Each time the monster attacked, he was truly taking damage.

In that moment, the leader’s words came back to me.

‘If you can control a person’s mind, you can control the world.’

My psychic ability was creating that monster in reality.

Which meant — the one attacking Nocturne was actually me.

I looked anxiously at the pitch-black sky. The darkness was expanding, its borders slowly widening. If it kept spreading, I didn’t know what would happen.

Even while I was frozen in fear, the nightmare continued. The wreckage scattered on the ground began to writhe, rising and merging again into one monster.

“Ari, before those things get up, let’s—”

Then, as he turned to protect me, Nocturne’s eyes widened.

“Ari, you…”

“…Huh.”

A slick liquid dripped from my nose.

It was blood.

The moment I saw it, I realized—

— Vomit all the blood in your body, curse yourself, and burn to death in the fires of hell.

The brainwashing I had used to kill the Cambiata leader was carved into my own brain as well.

‘At this rate, I’ll die soon.’

If I harmed someone through empathy, I would receive the exact same damage.

But I wanted to end this situation somehow.

I clutched my head and tried erasing all my memories.

‘If I erase all memories tied to my trauma and brainwashing, maybe this will end.’

I began wiping out every memory related to Cambiata. Then the bleeding stopped, and the world returned to normal.

But it only lasted a short while. The shattered fragments of memory would quickly regenerate at the slightest trigger.

‘Erase it!’

I kept ordering myself to erase my memories.

I knew complete erasure was impossible and they would remain in my unconscious. But my memories returned faster than normal — and each time they came back, the scattered remains of the monster stubbornly reformed and tried to attack Nocturne again.

Only after my mind was in pieces did I realize erasing memories wasn’t the fundamental solution.

So I looked around and picked up a sword lying on the ground.

Seeing me, Nocturne’s voice turned urgent, as if he sensed something.