Chapter 52 – Quidon of Collapse

As the rapier touching the strings slid mercilessly, everyone frowned at the horrible sound of scraping metal.

Everyone, except Seraphine, who was not prepared, was a target.

Through Part 1, she had assimilated all their emotions, senses, and even nerves into her performance, and simultaneously with starting Part 2, she invited them into the hell she had experienced in the past.

As if they had become the protagonists, the entire audience was forced to possess her past self.

“W-What is… this?”

“What am I looking at right now?”

“Ugh! Aaaaarggh!”

Screams burst out from all over, but this was only for a brief moment.

With all their senses controlled, they were now completely trapped in her past.

The music room of the Vocal Academy.

The quiet silence shattered as the children’s screams crashed over them like a wave.

Each time a note went wrong, the rune branded like a sinner’s mark shone, delivering terrible pain.

It was not simply a tingling sensation, but was equivalent to the pain of flesh tearing and bones breaking, and numerous children were ground away under the repeatedly recurring pain.

Leaving such children behind,

the voice of a demon disguised as a believer was heard.

“These are children who would have starved to death on the streets if I hadn’t taken pity on them and gathered them. Aren’t their lives already forfeit anyway?”

“Do not worry about the intensity of the training. They are children who would have died in much more terrible pain.”

That voice was exactly like someone’s from their younger days.

“Do you think the order is some kind of charity? Select only the thoroughly genuine ones. Do not care about the rest. There is no need to care anyway.”

“The fallen children? Just send them back to the streets, back to the dirt. Aren’t they abandoned orphans anyway? They are returning to where they originally belonged, so what is there to worry about?”

Each time the possessed audience members looked to their sides, the children who trembled in fear day after day fell behind one by one and disappeared.

There was no way to know where the children went.

With no time to grieve, the place they were dragged to was a soundproof room.

In a place thoroughly isolated from the world, they were thrown into a terrible experiment to become one with sound itself.

High frequencies resembling screams resonated with their bodies, and their eardrums, unable to endure, frequently ruptured.

Nonsensical training and high-intensity experiments to make the body and sound one were repeated.

Their bodies became a mess, and their minds were crumpled and torn like sheets of paper.

“What? You say there is a child with a unique talent among the children?”

“Dominates people through performance? The listener’s emotions are tuned like magic?”

“Haha, what a precious talent. Isn’t she a treasure bestowed by heaven?”

“That child… must be raised in a different way.”

The child holding the violin

was forced to train in dominating the child in front of her.

It was not simply about making the listening child feel emotions and sensations.

The first thing she was forced to do was to inflict pain.

The child exposed to her performance screamed a scream more terrible than those in the soundproof room.

If she refused to play, the rune branded on her body attacked her.

Whether to attack or to endure it herself.

She began attacking the children facing her to survive.

The guilt she felt in the beginning became duller as time passed, and from some point, she came to feel no guilt at all.

“The body moves on its own when hearing music? Nice. Train her more. I look forward to seeing how she grows already.”

“Aha. We can punish heretics with that child. She will definitely be of benefit to the order.”

Her sanity slowly collapsed.

By the time she could not remember the number of children she had killed through her performances,

she realized that killing people was not such a big deal.

She was raised not to move people with music, but as a killing weapon that thoroughly ravaged and killed them.

She had become a monster, so to speak.

The hall was filled with the audience’s screams and writhing of pain.

The Director of Palace Affairs found them, acting so disgracefully, simply laughable.

‘Truly boring. Just when is it going to end?’

They could just kill them.

He wore an expression showing he did not understand why she was dragging it out like this.

“Excuse me, the restroom.”

It was the same for his younger sister sitting next to him.

Although he could not hear any sound, Vane, feeling a presence and turning to look beside him, wore a bewildered expression.

“Aria…”

She looked completely different from the audience members who shrieked in pain and acted disgracefully.

It was an expression drained of emotion, just like him.

The startled Vane’s expression quickly cooled down.

‘What is this? Why is she completely fine?’

According to what he heard from Seraphine, everyone fascinated by the performance could absolutely never escape her mind control.

If there was a way, not listening to the performance was the only one.

‘A silent barrier…’

However, Vane could not help but tilt his head.

He could not understand.

Why? How?

Looking down at the hall filled with only chaos with an unfavorable look, he smiled bitterly.

‘I should handle her in a different way. Well, there are many ways.’

He had heard that she recently hired a professional lawyer related to inheritance.

It was a ridiculous struggle and trick.

‘You are the same. Indeed, everyone was the same. Where would that blood go.’

Aria, completely ignoring the audience seats filled only with pain, screams, and chaos, went straight to her superior and stood before him.

Since both of their eardrums were deaf, there was only one means to converse.

Pulling out a small notebook and a pen, she wrote something and showed it to him.

[Will you just watch like this?]

Rashid took her notebook and pen and wrote something.

[End of Part 2]

She took it back and wrote.

[And me?]

Rashid pointed toward the outside of the Choral Dome with his thumb raised.

It meant to leave.

She suddenly wondered about the reason, but decided not to question her superior’s command.

[I will wait outside.]

Rashid nodded lightly.

Leaving her as she brushed past him, Rashid felt that the end of Part 2 was gradually approaching.

The state of the audience assimilated into Seraphine’s performance was miserable.

It was the height of ugliness.

‘It will move to Part 3 soon.’

The Canon collapses and transforms into a Quidon.

Part 2, the Quidon of Collapse (Breaking Canon), was a song that revealed Seraphine’s past.

Why she had been ruined, and why she had no choice but to become such a villain.

It was a process of explaining this.

In the following Part 3, the audience would commit the foolish act of self-harming.

‘I must step forward before that.’

Seraphine, who had escaped from the Vocal Academy, wandered aimlessly without a place to go and was engulfed by the dirty and ugly hands of desire that targeted her.

Realizing that the world was no different from the Vocal Academy, she shuddered at humanity.

The performance she had learned at the Vocal Academy shone, and she had now become a complete monster.

She had been ruined so completely that she could no longer return to her pure past.

Near the very end of Part 2, her rapier stopped.

The audience was literally a crucible of chaos.

No one could steady their body properly.

Without being able to decorate the end of Part 2, she looked far away

and glared at an inquisitor who was opening his armory and leisurely putting on his magic armor.

‘If the Count were here, my performance would probably not have been cut off in the middle… That is indeed a pity.’

Why did she miss him, who was not here, so much?

At any rate, he was coming.

‘You aren’t the only one who possesses magic armor.’

As she tore the space with her fingertips, an armory popped out from her subdimension.

There sat her magic armor, which had a similar feel to the one the count had worn.

Seraphine entrusted her body to the magic armor, and an intense tightening, different from before, rushed over her entire body.

The audience plunged in chaos still did not think of moving.

Precisely, they could not escape Seraphine’s mind control.

They kept wandering inside her past, doing nothing but screaming.

‘They won’t be released easily. They need more time to return fully.’

That was why she had gone out of her way to drag out the time and perform a symphony of as many as four parts.

Had it been a simple performance, the audience would have quickly regained their senses and fled in a hurry.

‘I will settle that man and play the following Part 3 for you again. I shall bring eternal peace to this world and to you.’

For the final Part 4, the deaths of the entire audience were required.

What completed that death was none other than Part 3.

Seraphine intended to defeat him before performing Part 3.

“Was this the reason you played so long?”

Rashid, who had made his way onto the stage before anyone knew, activated his absorption core and faced her.

Since the silent barrier unfolded earlier had run its course, Rashid was now able to converse with her.

“Yes, and the scale is large, isn’t it? Not just here.”

She laughed cruelly.

“I was aiming at the entire capital.”

Heheh!

The sound of escaping ridicule was quite harsh.

“Ah, is that so?”

Rashid, who had not lowered his visor yet, curled up the corners of his mouth.

“But what should we do about this? I have already disposed of the Sacred Sound Resonator and resonators you pre-installed.”

She wore an expression of disbelief.

“How could you…”

“Did you think I would just get hit like an idiot without knowing anything? It is me, who even caught the count. There is nothing I cannot do.”

“You…”

Clear anger was loaded into her voice.

“You ruined everything! Do you know how I have prepared until now!”

“If it was such pain, you should have just carried it alone, why drag in innocent others? Surely there were people among them you wanted to take revenge on. But that isn’t everyone, is it?”

“You! I’ll kill you!”

The visors of both went down simultaneously.

Then, the two clashed violently, and that crisp sound slowly began to wake the chaos in the hall.

“Stop! Please save me!”

“Urrgh…”

“This isn’t music! It’s the song of a demon.”

“Let’s go. This place is hell.”

Amid the remaining reverberations of the cruel notes, the audience members, whose pain had not yet subsided, poured out in a rush.

‘Damn it…’

It ended just like that without the desired picture being drawn.

The stage was ruined, and Seraphine’s performance was blocked by his intrusion.

Vane saw the audience members fleeing outside in panic amidst the slowly breaking chaos.

His younger sister did not return, and the commander located far away could be seen sneering at him.

‘That guy ruined everything.’

Vane glared at an inquisitor who was clashing with Seraphine on the stage while wearing magic armor.

It was dumbfounding.

To think he would ruin his work this time too, just like the last time.

‘He was not a fellow to be taken lightly.’

The empty seats in the hall began to overflow, and the responsibility would go entirely to him.

How terrible her performance was, there were even followers pointing fingers and throwing insults at him as they went outside.

It was behavior they could absolutely never show under normal circumstances.

Vane, feeling a slight sense of crisis, smiled bitterly without wavering.

‘I won’t collapse from a mere matter like this.’

Soon, Lucian approached his side.

“Your Excellency, I think you should avoid this place.”

“I will.”

From the moment the concert was ruined, he had deactivated the silent barrier himself.

Vane headed out of the Choral Dome, leaving himself to the chaos.