Supreme Warlock System : From Zero to Ultimate With My Wives

Warlock Ch 450. Testimony

Damian didn't lift a hand. Didn't blink. It was his [Dispel] skill.

He just looked at the judge.

And the spell broke.

The silence that followed felt heavier than the stone in the walls.

"We," Damian said slowly, clearly, "are going to give our testimony."

His voice wasn't angry.

It was anchored.

One of the Tribunal responded, voice clipped. "We remember. But you also need to remember—you are the one who took the Demon King's mana core. And that… thing's core. Both. Without authorization."

A second judge chimed in, tone sharpening. "Do you understand what that means, Blackthorn? Absorbing another magus's core—especially one as powerful as a Demon King—goes against every tenet of the Accord. You've committed a crime. Two, in fact."

"I didn't take them," Damian replied, jaw tight. "I contained them."

"Semantic tricks," one of the older voices snapped. "You hold power that does not belong to you. You wield energy that should have been archived or sealed under Tribunal custody!"

Damian's eyes narrowed. "I defeated them and saved the city."

"And in doing so, you became too dangerous," the judge fired back. "That is why the law exists—to keep power from corrupting—"

"No," Damian said flatly, voice cutting the judge off mid-sentence. "The law exists to serve the people. And you forgot that."

The room tensed. Even the walls felt like they were holding their breath.

Another judge hissed, "Don't you dare lecture this council on the law, Blackthorn."

"I'm not lecturing," Damian said, stepping forward slightly. His tone dropped, colder now. "I'm reminding you. Of everything you claim to protect. But maybe that's the problem, isn't it? You protect a system. Not the people."

The words hung like thunderclouds. Too loud. Too true.

The judge with the floating staff leaned forward again. "And you think you're better? You think you can decide what laws to break? What power to claim? How long until you stop asking permission for anything at all?"

Damian's hands clenched at his sides.

Evelyn moved, but Aria gently stopped her with a hand on the arm.

He didn't need rescuing.

Not anymore.

"I didn't want this power," Damian said. "It burned me from the inside out. Nearly killed me. I didn't steal it. I survived it. I stopped it."

"And now you think survival makes you righteous?"

"No," Damian said. "But I know I'm right because I did this not out of greed."

He raised his head fully now, staring directly at the Tribunal. And then… just slightly… he let it out.

Not all of it.

Not even most.

Just a taste of his aura.

The air shifted.

Mana thickened. The marble floor beneath his boots shimmered faintly, and dust from the ceiling sifted down like the building had flinched. Even the light through the windows dimmed—not blocked, just recoiled.

And Damian's eyes—burning violet, flecked with infernal crimson—locked onto the central judge like a blade pressing against skin.

"Now… Stop flipping the truth," he said quietly. "I am restraining myself here. Because if I don't—"

The floor cracked beneath him. Not from force.

From pressure.

He didn't move. He didn't cast.

The building just felt it.

"I can flatten this place," Damian continued, voice low, sharp, unflinching, "with a single snap."

No one spoke.

No one could.

Even the Tribunal—for all their power, for all their arrogance—knew it.

He wasn't bluffing.

The only sound in the room was the faint tremor of the air trying to remember how to breathe.

And then Damian pulled his aura back in.

The pressure vanished like a lifted storm. The light returned. The stone stopped groaning.

But the warning stayed.

Not a threat.

A fact.

He exhaled slowly and stepped back beside Aria.

Then, quietly, calmly, he said—

"Now. Are you going to let us testify… or are we skipping straight to the part where I really become your problem?"

The silence cracked.

Not with words. Not right away.

But with murmurs—soft at first, like distant thunder rolling through the rafters. The kind of uncertainty that spreads like ink in water. No shouts. No objections. Just the sound of people—mages, nobles, aides, guards—realizing the room had shifted.

The Tribunal's head judge, the one whose eyes glowed the faintest gold beneath his veil, leaned back. His hands folded.

"We will let you testify," he said.

Damian smiled, just a little.

"Great."

He stepped forward, the center of the obsidian floor cold under his boots. His gaze flicked briefly upward—to the high thrones, the light cutting through stained-glass sigils, the shadowed balconies above where scribes etched every word with spells that shimmered faintly in the air.

Everyone was watching.

He didn't speak like a politician. Not like a noble. Not like someone rehearsing lines. He just told the truth. His truth.

He began from the start, not with anger but with the cold clarity of someone who had bled for a truth no one wanted to hear. He told them of the reports, the trial logs, the accusations—every twisted word used to paint him a villain. He laid bare the reality they had buried, the silencing, the tampered records, the convenient omissions that reshaped a man into a monster for the sake of order.

He gestured to Aria, his former enemy turned ally, who had been there to see it all—the betrayals, the erasures, the rewritten narratives. She didn't speak, but her presence was proof enough. And then Damian told them why he had taken the creature's mana core, why he had bonded with something no sane magus would dare touch. Not for power. Not for glory. But because no one else could, and because Haven would have fallen into fire and death if he hadn't.

A projection rune flared to life beside Evelyn, revealing the monstrous entity as it had been—unleashed and uncontainable. It had taken everything he had to survive it, and more to keep it from destroying the world. He didn't plead. He didn't excuse. He simply laid out the cost, a decision no one else had the strength—or madness—to make.