Magus: Rise of the Darkness Empress

”Do you have a book or manual of your secret art ?”

Hearing this question, the man looked at his bag and said -

”Yes, I always being my book of the secret art with me. It’s in that bag.”

Carrying around the the book of the secret art was a foolish thing to do in Weiss’s opinion. But from what she had read in the diary of the previous baron, for knight’s who were not part of a noble family, it was actually quite common for them to carry their secret art manual with them all the time.

The reason behind this was quite simple. For many knights, their secret art was the most valuable thing in their life. So without having a very safe location to hide it, the knights felt that keeping it with them was the safest option.

Weiss went to the bag and started to check it earlier than she had planned. She was actually looking forward to getting more secret arts to use as reference material and she had not expected to suddenly find one so easily.

Except for some clothing and food, there were not many things in the bag. Another small bag filled with a decent sum of money was there. There were also a black metallic card with the symbol of a crow peeking at the moon, a few papers and a book.

Weiss controlled her curiosity to check the book immediately and first checked out the papers. To her surprise, she found several identification papers among them.

There were three different names that were used on these papers and the name Karl that he had given to Weiss was on most of the papers.

Among those papers, one caught Weiss’s eyes. This paper had the same symbol of the crow and the name of the Night Crow. And the name mentioned here was Karl. So it looked like Karl was really the name that this man used as his true name.

Now finding so many different identification at the same time, Weiss really could not help but think of this man as a fool.

But at same time, Weiss thought that his overconfidence and trust in his strength could also be the reason for his carefree behaviour.

From what he had told Weiss, it looked like he had not taken this mission of his too seriously. He was confident that no one would be able to match him in this remote part of the Brightshine kingdom.

That could very well be the reason why he had not taken any precautions against information leak. But whatever the reason was, it turned out to be a good thing for Weiss.

After checking all the other papers briefly, finally she took the book out and looked at the cover. The name of the secret art written in it was the ”Bloody Slaughter Secret Art”.

Just the name alone gave a clear impression about what kind of secret art it was. Weiss started to read it thoroughly while making Karl to wait for his interrogation to be resumed.

Seeing that the young miss was very focused on the book, he decided to keep quite as to not disturb her. His life was currently in her hands, so Karl had no intention to piss her off.

...

With her fast reading speed, Weiss was able to finish reading this book in under an hour.

She would like to read it again while being more thorough but for the time being, she had gotten a very good general idea about what kind of secret art the ”Bloody Slaughter Secret Art” was.

In terms of quality, it was better than the Heavy Mountain secret art of the Souran family by a considerable degree.

It’s ability to boost the perception attribute of a knight made it special even among other high quality secret arts. But this secret art was not without some major flaws.

One such flaw was the continuous deterioration of the mental state of the practitioner.

Anyone practicing this secret art would continue to become more and more murderous and could even lose their mind eventually if their willpower was not strong enough.

Currently her prisoner Karl was only showing very minor symptoms of this side effect. That was because he was currently only a low level knight.

But if he could reach the high or even peak level while using this secret art, then there was a very high possibly that by then his mental state would completely deteriorate and he would become a mindless killing machine without having any capabilities to think.

With this kind of effect, Weiss marked this secret art as a Demonic one. It gave a very decent boost to the attributes of a knight and making progress with this art was considerably easier than other arts of its quality.

But the price one needed to pay for this was too much. Losing ones mind completely and becoming a killing puppet was never a desirable outcome.

Even though this secret art was not something that Weiss would recommend to anyone, it was actually quite helpful for her research.

As this was truly a very high grade secret art, there were many informations in it that Weiss was not aware of previously. So Weiss was quite satisfied with the her gains from this.

But after she was done with it, she fell into deep thoughts. So far, from all the evidence that she had found, it looked like this man named Karl was not lying to her at all.

Weiss just wanted to get all the valuable information out of him with various kinds of methods and then to get rid of him.

But after he started to become so cooperative, Weiss became unsure of what she should do with him.

She had no idea why this man was suddenly being so obedient. When he was fighting and at the time when he was captured, he acted like a rebellious sort.

But after he was brought back to this cave, he suddenly did an 180 and became very obedient.

Weiss thought back to everything that had happened in this cave and realised something. Then she made a disgusted expression.

She realised that Karl’s changes had started to happen after she had revealed her face to him. From this Weiss could only guess that she and her looks were the reason for his drastic shift in attitude.

But before making any assumption about it, Weiss decided to just directly ask him about it. Even if he lied about this matter, it was not a big deal. But Weiss was interested in knowing what kind of reason could this man come up with to explain his sudden change in attitude.

With this in mind, Weiss closed the book and came before Karl again. Then with the same frosty expression on her face, she asked -

”From everything I have seen and heard so far, it looks like you’re long lying. But why are you suddenly being to cooperative with me. Didn’t you come here to kill a bunch of people and gather information ?”