I Became the Youngest Prince in the Novel
Chapter 9

Purging the Weeds IV

In a forest within the imperial castle, a slight distance from the Sunken Star Palace, was Alex, a knight who’d secretly been keeping guard at the command of Ivelin Agnes. He looked puzzled at the red light that had suddenly emerged from the palace.

“What’s this?”

It spread outward from the training field and slowly covered the entire compound. It felt ominous—perhaps the color of the light made him uneasy.

Alex frowned slightly.

“I’m not certain,” remarked Alex’s aide beside him. The man strained his ears, listening to the sounds on the wind. “It looks like magic, but it doesn’t seem that there was another attack.”

If there had been an attack, they would be able to detect the sounds of clashing weapons and other noises of battle. Yet there was nothing of that sort to be heard.

“Hmm... Do I report this?”

Alex was uncertain about whether he should or not. After all, this report would make it directly into the ears of the “Lioness Princess.” He didn’t want to waste her time with unimportant information.

A sound he heard next quickly made up his mind—a screech so horrible that it suggested the source was having their lungs carved out of their body. He wondered if demons from hell would even produce such a noise.

Alex’s hand trembled slightly at the instinctive repulsion he felt. He spoke to the aide. “Make a report immediately.”

“Understood.”

The aide bowed and ran off, thinking there was no time to lose.

Alex watched him for a moment, then began making his way toward the Sunken Star Palace.

* * *

The Foe Locator Sigil, which Sion had told Priscilla to create, had a very simple effect. It revealed the true nature of any “enemies” within a certain radius.

Prior to the start of the war two years from now, the humans had developed this magic array in order to root out the countless “enemies” that had mixed in among them...and to great effect.

As the Sion watched the array’s red light grow brighter and scanned the people gathered near it, he turned to Priscilla, who stood beside him with a puzzled look.

“I need some of your blood.”

“I’m sorry?” Priscilla asked. Ever since his request for the magic array, he’d been making no sense.

Sion didn’t answer. He simply said, “Just one drop will do.”

He continued to look forward, his eyes gleaming.

Priscilla shook her head a couple of times, made a slight wound on the tip of her finger, and let a single drop of her blood fall to the center.

Suddenly, a piercing wail came from where the attendants were gathered.

Priscilla took a step back, feeling an innate disgust.

Sion quietly spoke.

“Found you.”

The prince gazed at Baren, the deputy chamberlain of the Sunken Star Palace—or, rather, at the beast that had once been Baren. It no longer looked human at all as it squealed.

Tentacles burst from every bit of its body, and its arms and legs twisted in strange ways.

“W-what... What is that?” Priscilla asked. She paled at the evil energy coming from the monster.

“The enemy,” Sion stated with a shrug.

It was a true enemy of humanity and an antagonist of the novel Chronicles of Plocimaar the’s Warrior: a demon.

This was the word used to describe hellspawn, demons, shadowkin, and all other beings that resided in the Demonic Lands—monsters hostile to all living creatures besides their own kind.

They served the demon lord and had been responsible for the end of the world.

So there was one here after all.

These creatures, as described in the novel, were extremely crafty beings. At the command of the demon lord, they’d infiltrated the world dozens of years before the war, eating away at humanity from the inside.

Their ways were insidious, and humans failed to notice their presence until the war began. They swayed people, causing humans to attack one another.

Humanity walked down the path of self-destruction—the world met its demise.

One low-ranked demonic monster, Sion thought as he watched the creature that had been exposed.

Since the Sunken Star Palace had next to no influence, only one such creature had probably been sent here. In truth, the fact that the Demonic Lands had been meticulous enough to send one of their own into such a palace at all was shocking.

The moment the demon stopped screeching, it rushed right at Priscilla.

She let out a screech of her own. “W-why is it coming at me?”

Sion, on the other hand, looked calm as he began summoning the darkness. He’d known the monster would do this very thing.

Priscilla’s blood, termed “infernal blood,” was the rarest of elixirs for the demonic monsters whom it could affect. About a year from now, she would be kidnapped by hellspawn for the blood in her veins, rendered into something neither living nor dead, and used as an infinite supply of infernal blood.

It was for this reason that she was referred to as the Woeful Lady.

Mixing her blood with the array amplified the effects of the Foe Locator Sigil, allowing it to detect even mid-ranked demonic monsters instead of the usual low-ranked ones.

No wonder the current monster had been unable to remain hidden.

With a shriek, it ignored everyone else around it and lunged at Priscilla like she was the only person there.

“Protect His Highness and Lady Priscilla!”

Some knights belatedly snapped to attention and hurried to put themselves in the monster’s path, but they weren’t good enough.

Dozens of tentacles moved at lightning speed, slicing their bodies to ribbons.

“M-my sword!”

“Oh my god!”

It took less than a minute for all the knights who’d stood in the way to be killed or rendered unable to fight. Such was the power of a demonic monster—even the low-ranked ones had power beyond compare, especially relative to humans.

And the Demonic Lands are teeming with more of them, Sion thought with a grin as he took a single step.

The sun had set. He seemed to melt into the darkness around him.

Then, he reappeared right in front of the monster.

Unlike Sion’s previous foes, the demon noticed him right away and moved its tentacles, which could slice and dice effortlessly. They flew toward Sion’s vital points, and Sion’s body was torn to bits.

“Y-Your Highness!” Fredo shouted desperately from behind his liege.

But then, Sion’s perforated body scattered suddenly, like ink dissolving in water.

At the same moment, he reappeared behind the monster.

Darkness gathered around his hand, and he ripped a tentacle clean off the demon’s body.

The monster screamed in pain as it squirmed.

Throwing the limb aside, Sion sent a flurry of blows toward the monster’s vital spot, which had been exposed.

It growled, perhaps sensing danger, and mobilized all its tentacles to defend against Sion’s attacks. Demonic energy covered all its appendages, but the moment they touched Sion’s hand, that energy vanished as if it had never been there in the first place.

The demon seemed to stagger in shock.

Sion easily crushed the monster’s defenses as it stood there in wide-eyed stupefaction. Then, he crushed one of its hearts with his bare hand.

The monster screamed.

They have two hearts, if I’m not mistaken.

Sion did not hesitate—he immediately scanned his eyes across the demon’s body, searching for the other heart.

The monster soon recovered its composure and gathered up all the demonic energy left in its body, sending it outward in a powerful, desperate burst.

Sion leaped away from the explosion since he couldn’t yet destroy so much demonic energy at once. This allowed the monster a moment to breathe. It glared at Sion.

“How...” The demon spoke with a clumsy semblance of human speech from what was presumably its mouth.

It had been living here in the Sunken Star Palace amongst the humans for twenty years. Nothing of this sort had happened in that time—nothing even remotely similar. The humans were too stupid to recognize a demon for what it was, and that was how it had always expected things to be.

“That...magic array... What is it?”

The moment it had seen the red light, the demon had felt the urge to rid itself of its human disguise. And as soon as Priscilla had let her blood drop into the magic array, it had lost all control. The only thing on its mind had been a ravishing hunger for her blood.

There was something even more puzzling than the array, however.

“And what...is that power?”

It referred to the prince’s darkness—the power that had consumed its demonic energy upon contact.

The demon had never heard of such a power.

Most of all, it was impossible to believe that all of this was owing to Prince Sion, whom it had been watching for over ten years.

“Who are you?”

This man was not Prince Sion. Such was the monster’s conclusion.

“Your enemy,” Sion spat.

“What...?” murmured the monster, puzzled. Its confusion didn’t last long.

Sion moved as soon as he spoke, his body whisking up to the monster in an instant, carried by the darkness.

The beast formed a gigantic cone with all of its tentacles and screeched loudly as it fired at Sion. This attack was the most powerful yet—perhaps it had realized instinctively that it would be its last.

This should be enough to pierce that darkness—

Sion’s hand, which had crushed everything in his path so far, suddenly moved in an odd manner. It slid smoothly under the bunch of tentacles like a water snake, then curved upward slightly at a strange angle.

There was a huge thud as the tentacles were sent flying into the air, as if they’d been hit by lightning.

“How—?”

This created an opening for Sion. Without a moment’s hesitation, he reached for the heart he’d located just moments ago.

The air filled with the sound of crushing flesh.

The last thing the monster saw as it died, both its hearts destroyed, were Sion’s smiling eyes and a dark star spinning within.

This might have been difficult if I hadn’t reached the first tier of mastery.

Demonic monsters who’d snuck into the human world

did not leave bodies behind.

They hid the evidence of their infiltration,

even in death.

Watching the body fade, Sion thought,

It’s strong.

This was the first demonic monster he’d ever fought, and it was very powerful.

If this was a low-ranked one, how much stronger were the ones above it?

The thought excited him. The stronger the opponent and the higher the obstacle, the more intrigued Sion became.

I think it was right about here.

Sion watched the body for a moment, then pushed his hand into the monster’s neck, which had yet to fade.

There was the sound of something breaking.

The Demonic Lands took two measures with monsters that infiltrated the human world: the first was to make sure no corpse was left behind, as was evident now, and the other was the insertion of a device to relay information.

The moment a monster died, all that it had heard and seen would be transmitted to the Demonic Lands. Sion had just crushed the core responsible for this function.

As Sion completed the perfect kill, a trembling voice spoke up. “What...just happened?”

He turned to find Priscilla watching him with wavering eyes.

Sion also noticed pale-faced knights who’d suffered damage to their spirits from the demonic energy, as well as attendants who had sunk to the ground. They looked completely unable to comprehend what had just happened.

Priscilla carried on, unable to hold back her question. “And the thing that just died—”

Suddenly, the outer gate burst open, and a group of knights rushed inside.

“Your Highness!”

They possessed a far higher level of energy than the knights stationed here at the Sunken Star Palace. These were probably Ivelin’s knights, whom she’d secretly assigned to guard the palace.

The knight who appeared to be their leader had already ascertained that the situation had been handled. He came up to Sion and bowed.

“Honored to meet you, Your Highness. I’m Alex, of the White Lion Knights. May I ask what happened here?”

Sion’s eyes were unreadable as he slowly said, “Nothing.”

“I’m sorry?”

“I simply purged an enemy.”

Alex looked even more confused, but Sion said no more.

Not yet.

He couldn’t reveal this information yet.

If it became known, the demonic monsters would burrow deep into humanity and become even harder to find.

I can’t allow that. Not until I hunt down every one of them.

His eyes moved toward the White Star Palace in the distance.