"What, is there someone in town you care about? Or is your conscience getting in the way?"

  the witch asked.

  Her followers burst into laughter.

  Baron Byrd's steward, the one she had singled out earlier, laughed the loudest of all. His face under the hood was twisted with madness, eyes stretched wide, mouth opened as far as it could go. Ethan was genuinely worried the man might laugh himself unconscious.

  He guessed this was some kind of bizarre initiation ceremony.

  The witch's followers had probably all gone through something like this before.

  "In that case, let me help you along. See this rain? This is my gift to the town."

  The witch raised her right hand and let the rainwater gather in her palm.

  "I heard your sheriff graduated from the Society of Enlightenment. By now, she must have figured out what happened to Riverbend's water supply. She should be rallying the whole town to deal with me. But cursed water doesn't only mean drinking water. It can cling to all sorts of water. The effect may not be as obvious, but it will still let them feel their bodies rotting away bit by bit."

  She leaned into the words.

  "Yes, every person you know will die. The only difference is how long the pain lasts first. Really, helping me would be doing them a favor. You wouldn't want them struggling in despair any longer than they have to, would you?"

  Her voice was swallowed by the rain and the laughter around them.

  The laughter slowly turned into the snarling roar of beasts.

  Ethan's gaze drifted to Baron Byrd's steward.

  The man looked like he was laughing hard enough to be angry.

  This was exactly why Ethan disliked leaving town.

  He lived in a world full of danger. A world where, the moment you stepped outside a safe little town, there was always a chance you would end up surrounded by cultists of an Old God or some horrible dark creature. In truth, he had imagined scenes like this countless times before.

  This was just the first time one of them had actually happened.

  The good news was that he had spent a lot of time thinking about what he would do.

  So he calmly sorted through the situation in front of him.

  The evil witch had returned by taking over Baron Byrd's daughter. She was planning to kill the entire town through this storm. Which also meant she had to be at least above Tier Three.

  Tier Three was a dividing line.

  Anyone who crossed that threshold stopped being fully human and became something ordinary people could no longer understand.

  In other words, Ethan was facing a follower of the Old God Bazarthos, one with a crowd of followers of her own and a deep desire for revenge against Willowbrook.

  The three heroes who had once defeated her were dead.

  Their descendants were useless.

  So Willowbrook's fate was already settled.

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  It would be destroyed by the followers of an Old God, and every soul in town would be offered up to Bazarthos as a sacrifice.

  The situation was so overwhelmingly bad that Ethan did not really have a choice.

  Every line of thought he had ever followed led him to the same conclusion.

  He couldn't leave witnesses.

  A caster's body was too frail.

  He could not afford to expose himself in the open and become a target for someone else's attack.

  Which meant that from this moment on, he had no choice but to start thinking about the cleanup afterward.

  "Where do you think you're going?"

  The witch sounded genuinely confused.

  Ethan's reaction had caught her off guard. He did not answer. He simply turned around and started walking toward the rain-soaked cabin.

  This was supposed to be one of her favorite parts.

  She loved watching people get crushed under despair, watching them become puppets that listened only to her commands.

  Every single one of the people around her had gone through that.

  "Go get a jar."

  His answer finally came from the rain.

  "A jar? What for?"

  "The forecast said we're getting hail today."

  Hail?

  Had fear finally broken his mind, or had despair sent him straight over the edge?

  How boring.

  "You..."

  The witch's order died halfway out of her mouth.

  She suddenly sucked in a sharp breath.

  The tearing pain made her grit her teeth. Stunned, she stared at her raised hand. A hole had appeared straight through her palm at some point, and the rainwater she had gathered there now poured through the wound and back into the downpour.

  A brutal cold spread from the injury into the rest of her body.

  No blood came from the wound.

  The flesh had frozen over the instant it was pierced.

  An elemental caster?

  The absurd thought flashed through her mind.

  Why would an elemental caster be in a miserable nowhere town like this?

  And why hadn't she seen any sign of chanting or casting at all?

  Everything happened in the space of a heartbeat.

  There was no time to think.

  She saw Ethan take only two steps forward, and then every laugh around her vanished.

  The people who had been cackling a second ago pitched forward one after another. Only when the witch looked closely did she realize their bodies were riddled with fist-sized holes.

  Skin torn open.

  Bone punched through.

  The kind of sight that would send anyone with trypophobia straight into panic.

  They were all still smiling.

  It was as if none of them had realized they were already dead.

  The same thing was happening to her.

  And suddenly she thought of the meteor that had fallen from the clouds on the night of the blood moon. That ill-timed disaster had interrupted the sacrifice and bought Willowbrook a few extra days of survival.

  Now it seemed...

  That had actually been someone's spell?

  What kind of joke was this?

  What kind of joke?

  She took one step forward.

  Then, with nothing left to hold it up, her body dropped straight into the rain-soaked mud.

  Thud.

  ...

  That was what happened when a caster left herself exposed in the open.

  Every sound outside the cabin had vanished.

  Only the soft patter of rain remained.

  "Chloe, could you bring me that jar over there?"

  "Cluck."

  It was the largest jar in the cabin.

  It had originally been used to store odds and ends. Ethan emptied out the dusty junk inside, piled it onto the table, then pasted a sheet of parchment onto the side and wrote Betsy's name on it.

  Then he did the same for Baron Byrd's steward.

  Tilting her head, Chloe watched him curiously, so Ethan explained as he worked, passing on the technique.

  "This is a tradition from my hometown. It's for honoring the spirits of the dead. You burn the body to ash, put the ashes in a funerary container, then bury it somewhere with good feng shui."

  As far as Ethan was concerned, Fireball and Ice Arrow had plenty of uses.

  Lighting, warmth, cooling, creating water. They made daily life much more convenient.

  The one thing he disliked using magic for was combat.

  Like turning rain into hail.

  That was one of the changes unlocked by Beginner-level Ice Arrow.

  Unfortunately, it also meant he now had to deal with burial arrangements again.

  Fireball was very good at erasing the traces that people had ever existed.

  "Chloe, I need to ask you something important."

  Ethan's pen paused in midair, and his gaze turned grave.

  "Cluck?"

  Chloe stiffened up a little, suddenly nervous.

  "Other than Betsy and the steward, what were the others' names again?"

  Things had happened too fast just now, and the situation had been too urgent. He had forgotten to ask everyone's names.

  That was now causing serious trouble in the cleanup stage.

  At first Chloe just looked back at him blankly.

  Then she began glancing around in visible unease.

  Apparently this was a difficult question for her too.

  The standoff lasted nearly two full minutes.

  "I've got it."

  Ethan lowered the pen and started writing again, adding the names of the other deceased.

  Steward B.

  Steward C.

  Steward D...

  He was filled with sorrow.

  Here lay Betsy, along with her seven elderly stewards.