The blinding green light of the Killing Curse washed over Victor Hansen, instantly freezing the twisted, fanatical expression on his face.
In his final fraction of a second, countless memory fragments flashed through his mind. The phenomenon of life flashing before one's eyes is actually a desperate self-rescue mechanism of the brain, rapidly scouring its deepest memories for a way to survive.
However, no memory could save Victor from this.
His soul was violently severed from his body; the Killing Curse left absolutely nothing behind for his dark rituals to cling to.
The thundering, eldritch heartbeat rapidly subsided. The grotesque black blood vessels extending across his chest shriveled and blackened into dead tissue.
Filled with unwilling resentment, Victor Hansen tipped backward and collapsed like a puppet with its strings cut.
Damian sensed the dark wizard's magical fluctuations flatline into deathly silence. Only then did he slowly lower his wand. The radiant Zouwu Patronus also dissolved into glowing motes of light, fading into the ambient air.
Victor had clearly been trying to commune with some eldritch entity. Damian, however, had absolutely no habit of politely waiting for an enemy to finish charging their ultimate attack. He had opted for the Killing Curse immediately. Victor's soul simply wasn't strong enough to withstand the absolute lethality of Damian's magic.
Damian didn't immediately wake the unconscious wizards. Instead, he walked over to the three traitors who had attacked him.
The wizard who had been skewered by the earth spike was hovering on the brink of death. His massive abdominal wound hadn't been treated, and the shockwave of Victor's ritual heartbeat had knocked him unconscious.
Damian first cast Petrificus Totalus on the other two surviving traitors, locking their bodies in a rigid bind so they wouldn't cause trouble if they woke up.
Then, he crouched down, pried open the eyelids of the dying wizard, and pressed the tip of his wand against the man's sweaty forehead.
"Legilimens!"
Damian's eyes flickered with a cold blue light as he forcefully invaded the dying man's mind. When a person is near death and their bodily functions are failing, their mental defenses crumble to absolute zero.
Damian effortlessly bypassed the man's mental barriers, diving straight into a sea of fractured memories.
A human mind is not a neatly organized library, nor are thoughts perfectly transcribed on the brain. Memories are chaotic, multi-layered constructs. The fragments Damian ripped from the dying wizard were mostly incoherent and disjointed, but his out-of-world mental discipline allowed him to rapidly sift for key information.
A moment later, he hit the jackpot.
The Mining Brotherhood? Thor Griffin, the White Stone Town branch president? Damian's heart tightened.
But that wasn't even the worst of it. In the wizard's memories, Damian saw Madam Alsha—the leading representative of the Court Wizards in White Stone Town —secretly plotting with Thor Griffin!
If the leader of the Court Wizards was harboring dark motives, their future in White Stone Town was going to be incredibly dangerous.
Damian dug deeper, but these three men were merely low-level thugs for the Brotherhood. They didn't know the exact details of Madam Alsha and Griffin's conspiracy.
He did, however, uncover one other crucial detail: Logistics Wizard Al was a deep-cover mole planted by Madam Alsha.
Damian cast a cold glance at Al, who was currently unconscious on the dirt. No wonder a wizard with the magical capacity of a mere first-year student had miraculously survived every crisis so far.
The outer perimeter of the Winter Forest was dominated by aggressive, carnivorous Dragon-Serpent Trees. Typically, wizards used a specialized pollen powder to confuse the trees' senses and pass safely.
Madam Alsha had supplied Al with a tampered batch of powder. Instead of repelling the Dragon-Serpent Trees, it acted as a potent fertilizer that would send the deadly flora into a feeding frenzy. Their original plan was to sabotage the expedition on the return journey through the Dragon-Serpent Tree forest.
However, after overhearing Lilith's plan to use the Secret Medicine to hunt the Shadow White Deer, Al and the traitors had improvised. They stole a portion of the potion and released it early to drastically whittle down the expedition's numbers.
While the rest of the camp was still dead to the world, Damian discreetly flicked his wand.
Two razor-sharp stone spikes erupted from the earth, instantly piercing Logistics Wizard Al's heart and throat. The traitorous cook died without ever waking up.
Damian had no intention of revealing what he had seen through Legilimency. He had no logical way to explain how he knew Al was a traitor, and he wasn't going to risk taking the mole back to town alive. It was safer to just eliminate the variable.
Having drained the dying wizard of all useful intel, Damian's wand flashed with another burst of green light. The skewered man took his final, rattling breath and went still.
Damian glanced over at Victor Hansen's corpse. The ringleader undoubtedly possessed all the core secrets, but unfortunately, dead men's minds couldn't be read.
From what Damian had pieced together, the core members of the Mining Brotherhood operated an underground secret society. Or rather, the secret society had created the Mining Brotherhood as a front. Victor Hansen had been a high-ranking member of that shadow faction.
Damian recalled Victor's final, desperate chant to the "Lord of the Moon Candle." It was highly likely the secret society was a cult dedicated to that exact entity.
Moving quickly, Damian looted the bodies. He stripped four magical artifacts off Victor, and one off each of the three lackeys.
By the time he finished, the surviving members of the expedition were beginning to stir.
Link groaned, clutching his pounding head. The concussive force of Victor's ritual heartbeat had violently rattled his Sea of Spirit before knocking him out.
Blinking the blurriness from his vision, Link looked around the devastated camp in shock. It seemed Damian had single-handedly slaughtered Victor and his men.
Staggering to his feet, Link hurried over to shake Anna awake.
Damian handed them both a restorative potion. After drinking it down, the agonizing ringing in their heads finally cleared.
"Thank you, Damian," Link rasped, looking at the bodies. "We'd all be wiped out right now. Who would have thought four of our own were planning to butcher us?"
Link, of course, remained blissfully ignorant that Logistics Wizard Al had been the fifth traitor.
A few moments later, Lilith and the tall Court Wizard team leader also regained consciousness.
The wizards who had been possessed by the Spirits of Corruption remained comatose on the ground. With Victor dead, the Spirits of Corruption had seemingly fallen into a dormant state.
Of Lilith's original mercantile escort, she was the only one left standing.
One of the Court Wizard squads had been entirely wiped out in the Dragon-Serpent Tree forest by the Exploding Leaf-Bugs. The tall female wizard's squad had also been decimated; her three subordinates had died when the Protective Magic Array shattered.
Out of the twenty-four wizards who had marched into the Winter Forest, only five combat-capable members remained.
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