Contents

Cover

Insert

Title Page

Copyright

Chapter 1: The Pointless Battle

Chapter 2: Humans Need Their Souls (lol)

Chapter 3: The Main Act Is to Come

Chapter 4: Talk and Money Make the World Go Round

Chapter 5: Only Losers Talk Nonsense About Cowards

Chapter 6: My Magazine Stash Has Worse

Chapter 7: One Man’s Bad Ending Is Another Man’s Good Ending

Epilogue

Afterword

Yen Newsletter

He suddenly realized he didn’t know where he was.

But Shinichi Sotoyama wasn’t easily shaken by strange events. He was seventeen years old and in his second year of high school, where he wasn’t an active member of any clubs. He did well in the sciences and just okay in the humanities. He was perfectly average.

Well, that wasn’t entirely true: He was average in all things, except his courage. Unlike most people, he could always keep his composure. In fact, when a car hit him in the fourth grade, Shinichi didn’t seem bothered at all by his broken left arm. Onlookers screamed and shouted, but he just calmly pulled out his cell phone with his right hand to call for the police and an ambulance.

Justifiably exasperated, his father had asked him, “You’ve got a few screws loose, don’t you?”

Here was his latest predicament: He’d been riding the train, only to teleport (the only probable explanation) to some fantastical place. He now stood in a massive hall carved from stone, with a magic circle drawn on the floor.

But Shinichi had taken this absurd phenomenon in stride.

There’s no way something like a manga would happen in real life, right?

Now, however, he had on an uncharacteristically cold expression, and unlike his usual cool self, he was sweating bullets.

“…!”

He was so focused on keeping himself from shaking, he forgot to blink. He just stared straight ahead.

A colossal figure towered over him.

Shinichi quickly estimated the brute was over ten feet tall, twice his own height, with arms and legs thicker than tree trunks. His core muscles wrapped around his body like the armor of a tank, and as if to cockily suggest any actual armor was unnecessary, he wore only a loincloth and cloak. All this gave the imposing specimen the appearance of some ancient Spartan warrior or the physical manifestation of raw, furious force.

Facing each other, they must have looked like a kindergartner squaring off with a sumo champion or an elementary school student being attacked by a grizzly bear.

That alone would’ve been plenty to give Shinichi pause, but the strangeness didn’t stop there. This behemoth of a man had deep blue skin and two massive horns sprouting from his head. He was clearly some kind of monster—and most definitely not human.

There was absolutely no way Shinichi could defeat him.

On top of it all, the displaced high schooler was terrified to the very core of his being by an invisible force around him.

“Hmm…”

As if to examine something, the giant bent down toward Shinichi. The air around Shinichi trembled before pounding into him, wave after wave, as if in a storm at sea. It might’ve been the aftershock of the creature’s magical or supernatural powers, and Shinichi realized this monstrous, massive man wasn’t simply a beast of incredible physical strength: He was a weapon of mass destruction in humanoid form, a collection of massive energy, overwhelming his surroundings in one short breath.

There’s just no way. I’m just as good as dead.

There was nothing he could do. He’d clearly never been in a fight before and was obviously at a disadvantage in terms of strength, so combat was out of the question. If he turned his back to escape, this monster would surely pounce on top of him.

All Shinichi could do was sigh, knowing his life was over.

Huh, dying at seventeen. Well, I guess it wasn’t a bad life, but I kind of wish I wasn’t dying a virgin.

Shinichi was too scared to beg for his life. Instead, he began wondering what the giant thought of him—just standing there, trembling, silent, and staring back.

Menacingly, the gargantuan figure slowly walked up to him and swung his trunk-like arms for his finishing move…

Then he groveled so violently in front of Shinichi that the ground rumbled.

“Please save us, young man!” pleaded the giant with ardent desperation.

“Uh…what?” replied Shinichi.

“Please! I can grant you anything your heart desires! Please use your wisdom to do something!”

“Um? Uh?”

“Those disgusting humans keep taking advantage of my daughter’s kindness—!”

“Wait! Calm down!” shouted Shinichi.

The monster’s angry howls blasted out of his open mouth like a typhoon, forcing Shinichi to cling to the ground to prevent himself from being blown away.

“Oh, how often I’ve considered just slaughtering them all! Wait! It’s not too late—”

“Daddy, please calm down.” A bell-like voice rang out behind the titan’s epic stature just as Shinichi’s hands were about to give.

Instantly, the wind died down. The air stood so still it was hard to believe it had blown with such intensity a moment before. It was the same with the creature’s face: It was no longer contorted in rage and softened to let out a smile overflowing with joy.

“Oh, my beloved Rino! You’re still just as dazzling as the blue sun!” exclaimed the giant.

A young girl peeked out from behind him. She looked only about ten years old, though she wore an exquisite, extravagant dress. Everything about her was enchanting: Her hair was a lustrous jet black, her skin as white as snow, her eyes the color of rubies. In fact, she was so bewitching, Shinichi found himself staring at her, even though he had no predisposition toward little girls.

“Daddy, this isn’t the time for that,” she said to the behemoth (who was apparently her father, despite bearing no resemblance). He held her closely in a big bear hug, cradling her small body against his cheek.

She pushed him away.

“What…? Do you hate your daddy?!” The monster reacted in shock, but the girl didn’t seem to notice—or care. She walked up to Shinichi and delicately gathered her skirts to make an elegant curtsy.

“I’m glad to make your acquaintance. My name is Rinoladell Krolow Petrara, but please call me Rino,” she said.

“It’s a pleasure to meet you. My name is Shinichi Sotoyama: first name, Shinichi, last name, Sotoyama.”

“Shinichi… That sounds a little weird. You really must be from another world…,” remarked Rino, mulling it over. She smiled sweetly at him, charming him for a moment, but her father radiated such a murderous rage that he hurriedly put together a stern expression.

“So this really isn’t Earth?” he asked.

“I don’t know where this Earth is, but this world is called Obum,” she clarified.

“And you used some sort of magic to summon me here?”

“Yup, that’s right! Daddy hoped you’d be able to help us,” explained the girl, nodding as she answered his questions. She turned back to her father. “Daddy, it’s rude if you don’t introduce yourself.”

“…You bastard, ignoring me while you ingratiate yourself with my daughter! I swear, I’m going to incinerate you, burn you to ashes…,” growled the giant.

“Daddy! I really don’t like it when people can’t even introduce themselves!”

“Yes! Welcome, wise one from another world! I am the great and terrible Blue Demon King, Ludabite Krolow Semah!” he boomed, delivering his name with regal pride and pomposity. The grand reveal fell a little flat, though, seeing as he only did it to avoid upsetting his daughter.

“…Thank you, Demon King. I am Shinichi Sotoyama,” said Shinichi, doing his best to give a stiff reply. He was no longer afraid of imminent death. He was more disturbed by the strange situation in front of him.

The Demon King nodded in satisfaction at Shinichi’s deeply bowed head.

“Would you look at that! The boy knows his manners. He’s pretty sharp, too. You’re completely different from the previous pathetic, filth-spewing insect.”

“Previous?” asked Shinichi without thinking.

“Yes,” answered Rino with a pained look on her face. “You’re actually the second person we summoned from another world. The first wasn’t, well, quite as calm as you are…”

“He wet himself the moment he saw me, started sobbing, shouted meaningless drivel, writhed and wriggled all on his own, and then died,” interjected the Demon King.

The poor thing probably had a heart attack. One look at the Demon King could certainly have that effect. All things considered, it wasn’t surprising that’s how it ended.

“That person— No, you know what? Never mind,” Shinichi said. He was going to ask what happened to the corpse. When he realized they might say they feasted off his body so it wouldn’t go to waste, he got flustered and shut his mouth.

Rino seemed to read Shinichi’s thoughts and started to explain. “Shinichi, please don’t misunderstand. The first boy—”

“Pardon the interruption, Your Highness, Lady Rino.” As the massive door creaked open, a voice intruded. A single maid with dark brown skin and silver hair walked in. Her ears were long and pointed, resembling those of a dark elf, but she was undoubtedly drop-dead gorgeous.

“…Celestia, what is it?” The Demon King was impatient, but sensed he needed to deal with an urgent matter.

Under the King’s visibly vexed stare, the maid calmly reported, “They are here again.”

“Again, those disgusting maggots, graah!” he shouted, letting out an earsplitting bark. A scorching blast of air whipped around, heated by the King’s fury. “I’m done with them! I’ve called upon the wise one for this, but it was all in vain, as I will use my own hands to kill them—”

“Daddy! Please calm down! Please don’t do anything awful!” Rino cried in an attempt to soothe her enraged father. She tried wrapping her arms around one of his legs, but it was too thick. As she held on to him, though, the bloodthirsty rage flickered from his eyes, and he tenderly stroked his daughter’s hair.

“You’re right. I’m the most fortunate man in the demon world to have the most wonderful child in the world, my beloved Rino.”

“And I’m so glad to be the daughter of such a kind daddy,” she responded sweetly.

The Demon King chuckled. “Oh, don’t flatter me like that! Daddy just might get so excited he blows away the red sun!”

“……”

Shinichi was bored by their excessive display of affection, but the maid seemed used to their interactions and called out to the King.

“Your Highness, I regret to disturb such a beautiful moment, but you must be on your way to the southern lands.”

“Oh, of course. I’ll make those maggots pay for ruining this tender exchange between father and child!” he said as he placed an unimaginably massive hand on Shinichi’s shoulder. “Perfect timing. If you would be so kind as to accompany me, I shall show you the reason why I summoned you.”

“What? What’s that sup—,” Shinichi tried to say, but a disorienting, floating sensation overwhelmed him from speaking any further. Before he could blink, they moved from the great hall to a grass field squeezed between some mountains.

“Did we teleport? Amazing…,” said Shinichi. Having come into this world using teleportation, he felt a little silly commenting on it now, but he couldn’t help himself. He was awestruck by these magical phenomena.

He would soon realize he didn’t have much time to soak it all in.

“Scorching flames ignite! Fireball!”

Just as Shinichi heard a woman’s voice call out in the distance, his ears started ringing from the sound of an explosion.

“Wha…?”

His field of vision suddenly filled with a flash of crimson light, followed by the sensation of hot winds, carrying the nauseating smell of burned flesh and making him want to vomit.

A feeling of dread filled him, but he reflexively looked toward the source.

“Is that…a minotaur?”

He saw the bull-headed humanoid standing a few hundred feet from them. The minotaur seemed to have sustained damage from the explosion. His entire body was burned raw and red, and white smoke rose from his body as he collapsed onto the ground.

“I—I can still fight, moo…!” The bull-headed beast attempted to stand. It was a mystery how he still lived despite his injuries.

But before he could get on his feet, a blade swung down and callously severed his head from his body.

“Dammit, that one was stubborn,” cursed a man clad entirely in full plate mail as blood dripped from his sword. He had the appearance of a human knight. Behind him, Shinichi could see there was a male warrior wielding an ax, a male ranger carrying a bow, a priestess swinging a mace, and a sorceress holding a twisted wand.

“These are…,” Shinichi began.

“These are the maggots who have laid waste to my people,” the Demon King spitefully finished before disappearing from Shinichi’s side and reappearing in front of the knight and his party.

“You come again and again and refuse to give up, you maggots. I assume you’re prepared for what’s to come.”

“Ah, let’s go everyone!” the knight called. For a brief moment, he seemed to show fear under the Demon King’s death glare but immediately regained his composure.

The five attacked at once.

“Slicing Gale Blade! Hyah!”

“Destruction Ax!”

“Three-Shot Burst!”

“Divine Goddess, grant me an iron hammer of justice against evil! Force!”

“Scorching flames ignite! Fireball!”

For a moment, the Demon King’s body disappeared beneath the rapid movement of slashing swords, swinging axes, three arrows, an invisible force, and a sphere of flames deployed by the battle party.

“Yeah! We got him!” A satisfied grin appeared on the knight’s face, as he was certain there was no way the Demon King could’ve sustained all those powerful attacks and still be standing.

But from his position, Shinichi could see otherwise. The knight spoke too soon. To the almighty King, their attacks were as ineffective as a mosquito bite.

“Is that all?” he boomed as the flames began clearing. The smoke blew away to reveal his face, with an expression far surpassing anger, and his completely uninjured body. “And to think you actually had me… Begone, pathetic pests!” He raised his right hand, closed into a fist as if to crush an apple.

In that moment, the ranger’s body twisted and burst into pieces.

“Gaah…!”

His blood, sinew, and brain tissue sprayed out in a disgustingly dazzling display of fireworks. Shinichi grimaced at the sight, but the Demon King’s enemies didn’t seem shaken by their companion’s death at all.

“Press your attacks! Don’t let him use his magic!”

“Hyah!” roared the warrior next as he swung his ax at the colossal figure and finally landed a hit. But to the Demon King, the attack was as gentle as a baby’s hand reaching up to slap him in the face. After all, his body was pure muscle, further reinforced with an inordinate amount of magical power.

“That doesn’t even itch,” he said smugly as the ax deflected off his muscular chest. He balled both of his hands together, slamming them onto the fighter’s head.

The warrior’s substantial six-and-a-half-foot frame flattened to the thickness of a plank.

“Ha-ha-ha, is this a cartoon…?” Shinichi was so beyond horrified at this excessive display of violence that he could only laugh. Far away, the knight’s party refused to run, continuing to launch attacks at the Demon King.

“Don’t falter! Charge!”

“Hyah! Force!”

“Fireball!”

“…Maggots.” Apathetic, the Demon King didn’t attempt to dodge their moves.

The party was full of one-trick ponies using the same attacks. He entertained them a bit by withstanding all of them, then swung his right hand up to activate his first spell of the battle.

“Flames that flicker in the heart of the world, remove this filth! Blue Raging Flare!”

Hotter than red flames, more luminous than white, blue hellfire erupted from the ground. It was so bright it almost blinded Shinichi and indiscriminately scorched the entire battlefield.

“Are you trying to kill me?” shouted Shinichi. Though he stood far away, the air was hot enough to burn his skin, and he readied himself for death again.

A wall of light suddenly appeared in front of him, blocking the scorching gale.

“A barrier…?” he whispered in wonder.

“They really are a foolish lot,” the dark-skinned, silver-haired maid remarked sharply, standing beside Shinichi, who was stiff from fear.

“Uh, Celestia, right?” he asked.

“You may call me Celes, Lord Shinichi,” she replied.

“Oh, okay. Thank you for saving me, Celes,” said Shinichi, hesitantly expressing his gratitude and extending his hand. Celes glared at it suspiciously.

“What do you think you’re doing? Do you intend to grope my ass and use that memory to pleasure yourself later? Disgusting,” she spat.

“It’s disgusting you’d assume that!” Shinichi protested before realizing the misunderstanding.

Is it not customary to shake hands here? Well, I guess we’re in a different world. I mean, she’s not even human.

Shinichi retracted his hand, conscious yet again that he was in a completely foreign world. With that, the slaughter—it’d be wrong to call it a “battle”—was over, and the Demon King returned to the two, looking just a little triumphant.

“Celestia, I leave the rest to you. I’ll be returning to the castle.”

“Understood, Your Highness.” Celes bowed deeply before advancing into the field, circumventing the land that had melted into glass under the extreme heat.

Shinichi was finally composed enough to look around. He noticed a number of corpses scattered across the field: The knight’s party had killed more than just the bull-headed beast from before.

“So this is what a battle is like…”

Kill or be killed.

There was no justice nor morals. The strongest was the one left standing. The only rule was survival of the fittest. As he realized this, Shinichi felt neither fear nor revulsion. Perhaps it was because the reality of the situation had yet to hit him. He still couldn’t process being summoned to another world or seeing the King’s absurdly overabundant display of power.

And yet, five strangers were now dead. That was the only certainty he knew.

The Demon King let out a bored huff when he saw Shinichi’s concerned expression.

“Humph, calling this a ‘battle’ is an affront to the name of the Blue Demon King. Playtime’s over,” he grumbled.

“That was play for you…?”

If this behemoth fully unleashed his power, the ground would certainly break into two, and the sky would surely tear. It might even look like those paintings of Judgment Day when all hell broke loose.

This was why Shinichi’s question came up again.

“Why’d you summon me of all people?” he asked. He just couldn’t figure out why this tremendously terrifying beast would need the help of a puny, little high schooler so badly he’d get down on his knees and beg.

But the Demon King simply waved Shinichi’s query off.

“I’m tired today. We shall speak more tomorrow.”

What he had in power, he certainly lacked in responsibility.

“Wow, and to think you’re the King…”

“Silence! Today, I get to bathe with my daughter and read her a book before bedtime!”

“Wait, isn’t that a crime?! Rino’s too old for that! (I think?) Geez, cut the cord already!”

“Be quiet, be quiet! She always said she was ‘gonna marry Daddy’! Yes, it’s fine!”

“How many years ago was that?!” In the face of such unhealthy parental attachment, Shinichi forgot formality and lashed out at the Demon King with an impolite retort.

The Demon King didn’t respond. Instead, he placed his hands on Shinichi’s shoulders and activated his teleportation magic. In that split second, as they teleported off the blood-soaked battlefield, Shinichi suddenly felt like something was off.

Wait. Were two of the men’s bodies missing?

The bodies of the first two killed—the ranger and the warrior—had disappeared from the battlefield. Shinichi wondered if they’d been obliterated by the blue flames, but he didn’t dwell on it too much and quickly forgot all about it.

“Good morning, Lord Shinichi.”

Most boys only dreamed of being woken up by a busty, tan, silver-haired beauty in a maid outfit, so Shinichi made sure to soak in this precious moment, even though he was feeling low.

“Well, I figured it wasn’t a dream,” Shinichi muttered, resigning himself to his fate and getting out of the extravagant bed in the guest room.

“Breakfast has been served. This way, please,” said Celes, exiting the room with Shinichi scurrying behind her in tow.

His stomach growled.

Oh yeah, I guess I haven’t eaten anything for, like, an entire day.

Shinichi had been so worn out by the events of the day before that he’d immediately fallen asleep once he’d been shown his room. Consequently, he still hadn’t learned why he’d been summoned.

“This way,” called Celes. She led him into a room, smaller than he anticipated for a dining hall in a castle. In fact, it was only about the size of a classroom, though the ceiling was fairly high to accommodate their ten-foot-tall monarch as he entered and exited. In the center of this chamber, the Demon King and Rino already occupied the middle seats of a marble table, which looked quite expensive, as they awaited Shinichi’s arrival.

“Good morning, Shinichi,” chirped Rino.

“Morning, Rino,” he replied.

“First, we eat. Then we can talk,” commanded the Demon King.

Celes pulled out a chair for him, and Shinichi accepted the monarch’s offer to have some breakfast. But when Celes placed a plate in front of him, he couldn’t help wrinkling his nose in disgust.

“What is this?” he exclaimed.

Gilded with gold accents, the plate looked inconceivably expensive, which brought even more attention to the purple…thing on it.

“Parbegut meat,” answered Celes.

“Come again?”

“Like I said, it’s a roasted parbegut.”

“……” Though Celes took the time to expand on her original comment, Shinichi couldn’t make sense of it and sat in stunned silence.

Up until this point, Shinichi had been conversing pretty normally with the Demon King and everyone else, but he hadn’t, in fact, been speaking Japanese. Thanks to a magic spell that freely translated between the two languages, Shinichi had been speaking quite naturally in their tongue. This spell had probably been activated when he was summoned.

For example, just now, when Celes said “roasted,” she’d actually pronounced it “bibinana.” The spell took the word bibinana, translated it to “a dish of roasted meat,” and simplified it into “roasted,” just like our great teacher, Goo–le. And it did all this right inside Shinichi’s head so he knew exactly what they were saying.

Though the spell worked astonishingly well, it didn’t necessarily download their vocabulary into his brain. So if a word had no equivalent in Japanese, it was left as it was. In other words, the spell couldn’t suggest a replacement for parbegut, the meat of some mysterious animal that definitely didn’t exist on Earth.

“What’s wrong? Are you not going to eat?” asked the Demon King, giving Shinichi a strange look while picking up the purple-colored flesh and setting on it voraciously.

Well, the meat probably wasn’t poisonous—at least, that’s what Shinichi wanted to believe. Then again, weren’t onions poisonous to dogs but safe for humans? So this wasn’t remotely a guarantee the dish was safe for him. Despite all this, he knew it’d be rude not to eat the food he’d been given.

And Shinichi was starving.

He gathered every last bit of courage, picked up the parbegut meat with his hands, and closed his eyes as he bit into it.

“…That…is vile.” After chewing ten times and swallowing, that was the only way he could describe the experience. “Seriously, what the hell is this?! It’s absolutely disgusting!”

Though aware this was expressly not how a guest should respond to a feast, he couldn’t stop himself. This mysterious parbegut was so repulsive, even his hunger—the world’s best spice—did nothing to mask its taste.

Its texture was squishy like clay, and a raw fishy odor emanated from its juices. The fat had neither the sweetness nor the bitterness one might expect from meat and tasted exactly like nothing. It was so disgusting it made him question his entire existence. He would’ve much rather eaten paper instead. And couldn’t he get a little bit of praise and recognition for keeping it down rather than vomiting it back up?

“Something must be wrong with the ingredients if this thing tastes so terrible roasted. Roasting something is, like, the simplest way to cook… Or are my taste buds weird?” he asked, suddenly self-conscious. It could very well have been that this was considered gourmet in this world. Maybe their palates were different from his.

If that was the case, he felt bad for his outburst and sheepishly looked at the Demon King, who shook his head grimly.

“You’re not in the wrong. This is part of the reason why I summoned you.”

“What?” Shinichi gaped, incredulous.

“It isn’t just parbegut. Even to us, all foods from the demon world are, um… very not good,” explained Rino after hesitating for a moment. Her sweet smile was replaced with an uncharacteristic bitterness.

“I know not why. All I know is all food from the demon world is absolutely foul,” said the Demon King.

“Okay, could you please explain everything to me—starting with this ‘demon world’?” asked Shinichi. Obviously, this world of darkness—this demon world—had to exist, since they had a Demon King, but he didn’t want there to be any misunderstandings.

“Well then, allow me to start,” offered Celes from behind, responding to Shinichi’s question. “Intelligent creatures born with magical prowess are who we call demons, and the world in which we reside is called the demon world.”

“Uh-huh…”

“Unlike the ‘human world’ and its rising red sun, the blue sun always shines in the demon world. There’s no such thing as night,” she continued.

“A blue sun? I’d like to see that sometime,” said Shinichi. Though it certainly piqued his interest, he realized it probably wasn’t entirely safe. He’d probably die instantly of suffocation under their poisonous atmosphere.

“Anyway, as Lady Rino explained, the food available in the demon world is all unpalatable,” continued Celes, getting the conversation back on track.

“Though most people don’t seem to mind and keep eating it…,” said Rino. Her face was sad as she recalled the time no one listened to her talk about the importance of taste.

“Have demons lost some of their taste buds due to the environment?” inquired Shinichi.

The number of taste buds—the receptors on your tongue that sense flavor—vary among animals. For example, herbivores have lots of taste buds to avoid eating poisonous plants, while carnivores have very few as they simply eat the spoils of the hunt. There were even animals, like snakes, that had no taste buds at all.

“Maybe,” he speculated, “in exchange for your taste buds, your stomach evolved into one that’s strong as steel and resistant to food poisoning or something.”

“I wonder. I do believe those resistant to poison have dulled tastes.” Celes cocked her head as she considered Shinichi’s theory.

Regardless, the majority of demons weren’t at all concerned with taste. On the other side, there was the minority, like their ruler and his daughter, who were aware of the terrible flavors but had endured them up until now…or something like that.

“Mommy loves to travel. She’s visited all kinds of places. A little while ago, she visited the human world,” said Rino.

“She left ‘to find someone stronger’ than her. Unfortunately, though, no human was strong enough to satisfy her,” the Demon King added casually.

“What are you, some kind of martial arts group?” quipped Shinichi dryly. This information made it an even greater mystery how the Demon King and his equally combative wife had raised their daughter to be such a good and honest child.

“When Mommy came back, she brought me food called bread from the human world.”

She’d given leftover human food to her wide-eyed daughter upon returning home. This gift had carried no deeper meaning. After all, her mother was generally uninterested in flavors and didn’t place much value on human food. Her daughter, however, reacted theatrically after placing the bread in her mouth.

“It was just so delicious…,” recalled Rino with a smile melting across her face.

Later, Shinichi would discover this bread was more like hardtack—heavily salted and dried out to prevent it from spoiling. Born in twenty-first-century Japan with its tasty treats, Shinichi would’ve found it barely edible, calling it too hard, too salty, and too disgusting. In fact, if he were to rate it on a scale from zero to one hundred, it would’ve scored a solid five. But compared to the food in the demon world, which would’ve scored negative one thousand, it was so delicious to Rino and her sensitive, young palate, it could’ve opened heaven’s gate to paradise.

In a place a two-day walk southwest from the Demon King’s castle, there was a flat landmass with a large flowing river, bountiful fields of crops that spread throughout, and a fortified city surrounded by stone walls.

This was Boar Kingdom. They’d sent six thousand soldiers against the Demon King and lost half their army. Rumors about the monsters—the legendary demons—spread throughout the country, accompanied with stories of the army’s defeat. Dread crept up on the faces of the townspeople, fearing the demons would descend on the city at any moment.

There was one group of people, however, sharing drinks at the tavern, making a cheerful racket. It was as if they’d never heard of the word fear.

“Whew, that was another spectacular death,” shouted one man, the ranger, shaking with laughter.

“We didn’t do anything, though,” insisted the sorceress, stunning as always. “But I suppose that’s to be expected with an enemy like that.”

“…Mhm.” The male knight wordlessly agreed with them both.

“It’s still a little disappointing,” said the priestess, quiet and reserved, and the leader of the group, the knight, nodded deeply in agreement.

“It is. But we’ll win in the end,” he maintained without any arrogance or pretention in his voice. Though he said this with confidence, they still hadn’t managed to leave a single scratch on the Demon King who’d killed them again.

But continuously challenging this undefeatable enemy was part of their plan.

“Okay, yeah, he’s strong. But if we keep attacking him, his magical powers will eventually run out if he keeps firing off those powerful spells.”

This magical power was necessary to cast spells. Even if one used up their supply, the resource replenished once you rested and recuperated. Recovery time, however, wasn’t necessarily fast, correlating with the person’s maximum magical capacity. For example, magicians’ apprentices might be able to completely regain their powers within a day, but sorceresses, priestesses, and other first-class magicians would need at least two. This applied to the feared Demon King, as well. And though their actions were like trying to drain a lake one cupful at a time, the party knew there would be an end to the limited supply eventually.

“Which is why we leave the bodies of the small fry intact, right?” asked the ranger, a cruel smile twisting the corners of his mouth.

As long as they didn’t burn the corpses and left them intact, the Demon King would use his magic to resurrect them over and over again. At first glance, this plan might seem foolish, but they were draining the Demon King’s powers bit by bit.

“I almost feel bad that all his people are weaklings,” professed the sorceress, purring with laughter, knowing that the orcs and goblins could be easily defeated with her magic.

She didn’t feel a single shred of guilt for taking their lives. After all, she and her companions were on the side of justice, and the demons were evil filth defiling this world.

“Hey, hey, don’t lose focus because they’re weak. I mean, other than the Demon King,” warned the knight in a joking tone, knowing they’d never lose and always manage to come back to life.

“We’re the heroes of the Divine Goddess. We must fight gracefully to uphold the honor bestowed by this title,” the knight grandly proclaimed.

His comrades raised their pints of beer in agreement.

“So their strategy is to wear the King down,” observed Shinichi as he hesitantly chowed down on the mystery meat in the castle’s dining hall. He saw through their strategy and reckless daily attacks upon listening to Celes explain magical powers and spells.

“Your Highness, let’s just say they continue to attack like this. How many more days would your powers last?” he asked.

“I mean, they’d last for a year or two,” the King replied.

“Wait, I thought that recovery time was slow…?”

Shinichi wondered why he even bothered to listen to Celes’s lengthy exposition. The King huffed in annoyance at his confusion.

“Hmph, I am the Blue Demon King! Do not dare lump me in with those average plebeians! If I’m only using magic a few times to teleport and resurrect, I can recover it all in the course of a single night.”

“I understand,” said Shinichi, feeling like something was amiss and burying these suspicions deep in his heart.

“If I may be permitted to add, Your Highness is the only one capable of such high-speed recovery. The recovery time for your average demon is only slightly faster than humans,” remarked Celes. Her face was as expressionless as it had been the day before, but her tanned complexion had taken on a pale tinge. Maybe it was for taking on the responsibility of resurrecting many of those who’d died, in order to lessen the burden on the King.

“What if you called all the strongest fighters from the demon world here to help?” suggested Shinichi, thinking that might lighten the load on Celes. “I mean, they obviously don’t have to be as powerful as the King. But if they’re strong enough to fend off the heroes’ attacks, a guard of a couple dozen could reduce the number of casualties. Then the humans might realize their attacks are futile and maybe even give up,” he continued with some optimism.

It was a good suggestion, but the King’s and Rino’s faces became grim as they listened to Shinichi.

“You’re not wrong, Shinichi, but the powerful demons tend to be quite violent…,” replied Rino.

“They’d ignore Rino’s request and kill all the humans. You really can’t trust that bloodthirsty lot!” yelled the King. He continued rebuking his subjects, though everyone else in the room knew the King was the most hotheaded of them all.

That explains why the demons here are all super-weak.

Though they had intimidating appearances, these demons were continuously defeated by the heroes due to their weak and timid natures. That said, they were still monsters who could kill an average person like Shinichi in one critical hit.

“So reinforcements aren’t an option. But I have a feeling you’ll be okay if you have inexhaustible magical powers—,” began Shinichi.

“But I’m well on my way to the end of my patience,” interrupted the Demon King.

“Ah…” The sight of the veins throbbing in her father’s blue forehead prompted Rino to look down apologetically.

It was true that kindness was one of her virtues, making her want to prevent unnecessary causalities, even those outside her own kin. At the same time, these demands tied the King’s hands, allowing the humans to make a fool of him and creating their current predicament. Taking things to the extreme, if the King were allowed to exterminate all of humankind, he’d probably be able to get rid of whatever trickery kept reviving the heroes and defeating them, as well.

Understanding this, Rino suggested repentantly:

“Daddy, if I stop complaining about the food being gross, can we just give up and go back to the demon world?”

“What’re you saying?! I’d fight for a thousand years for my little girl!”

“I know you would, Daddy. But if it keeps going on like this, Mr. Kalbi or Mr. Sirloin will be killed for real…”

They’d been lucky so far, but if their bodies vanished without a trace, the foot soldiers could face death at any time.

“In that case, I suppose I must destroy all of humankind,” insisted the King, itching to fight. He refused to sacrifice his people any longer, and this would be the fastest way to resolve their issue.

“But—but that…,” stammered Rino, unable to find the words to persuade her father and looking around her for help. Her eyes met those of the silver-tongued Shinichi.

“Hmm, I can’t say no to the requests of a beautiful girl,” he said.

“What did you just say, you pervert?”

Shinichi shrank back in response to Celes’s outburst and stood.

“I understand your frustration, Your Highness, but it’d be a waste to destroy humankind. Please reconsider your course of action,” he advised.

“A waste?” asked the King.

“Yes. You ventured out to find good food, right? Well, the humans know how to cultivate and cook all that food. It’d be a waste to kill them.”

“Hmm.” The King found himself nodding in agreement to his logic. “But we have you. Isn’t that enough?”

“I’m human, but I’m also from another world. Sure, I can cook a little bit, but I have no idea what the best food source is or any idea about how to farm,” replied Shinichi.

Unfortunately, he’d been raised by white-collar workers in an average household, so he had no clue how to plant and harvest rice, catch large hauls of fish from the ocean, or slaughter cattle.

“Wouldn’t it be more efficient to have the humans do all the labor and steal their bounty instead of starting from scratch? And also—,” he said, summoning a devilish smile, “it’d be too kind and boring to kill those foolish, insubordinate humans and spare them from pain, right?”

He knew the sweet taste of victory would pair well with the feeling of terrifying the humans, forcing them into despair, and conquering them. It’d only be appropriate for the supreme ruler of the demon world—the Blue Demon King—to enjoy it, too.

“Ha-ha-ha, you’re right. Shinichi, you’re truly nefarious,” declared the King with a cackle.

“Not as evil as Your Highness,” flattered Shinichi, playing up the part of a criminal and pandering to the Demon King, who spoke like a corrupt cop.

Once Shinichi saw he’d expertly convinced the King, he looked over at Rino and—

“Shinichi, you’re scarier than any demon alive…,” she remarked.

“What—?!” He pretended to be evil for Rino and to save the humans from complete annihilation, but she’d taken his words to heart.

“Oh come on, my performance was perfect…!”

“Too perfect to be a performance.”

Celes’s response cut into him as he slumped back to his seat, shocked. But when he passed by Rino, she whispered quietly so only he could hear.

“Thank you, Shinichi.” Her smile showed her gratitude—for his kindness and for pretending to be evil for her sake.

“Rino…” Shinichi’s heart beat faster when he saw Rino’s seriously angelic smile, but the maid’s icy look and her father’s murderous glare made him clear his throat and pretend nothing had happened. “Ahem… One other thing: You should forget about returning to the demon world for now,” Shinichi said.

“Why would that be?” asked Rino.

“The humans might think you’re running home in fear. If they do, they might get carried away and follow you back to attack the demon world,” replied Shinichi.

He looked at Celes, who understood what he meant and expanded on it.

“If they’re capable of teleportation, anyone can move between this world and the demon world. They don’t know the location of the demon world yet, which is the only thing stopping them. But they could easily follow us into our world if they found any magical residue left behind. And seeing we’ve already teleported from this castle to the real one, it won’t take them long.”

If the humans came to the demon world, all hell would break loose…for the humans.

“Then all the bloodthirsty demons would go crazy and spill out into the human world. Would you be able to stop them, Your Highness?” asked Shinichi.

“What? I would have no desire to,” he responded.

“Mm-hmm, just as I thought.” The King didn’t say he couldn’t stop them.

“Ooh, if that happens, then the humans…,” began Rino.

“They’d all be killed. In fact, they’d face complete annihilation with no chance to retreat,” Shinichi finished for her.

If the humans chose to go to the demon world, they’d find hell. If they tried to retreat, they’d find hell. The humans weren’t aware they’d be cornered either way.

“All I wanted was to eat tasty snacks. Why did it have to come to this…?” asked Rino as tears streamed down her face. Her selfish desires had caused the humans so much trouble.

“You’re not in the wrong! You’re good! The humans are the ones who are all bad!” bellowed the Demon King, attempting to console his daughter. He seemed unaware he was the cause of her tears.

Shinichi watched them from the corner of his eyes as he continued to talk to Celes.

“Let’s get back on topic. How are we going to defeat those cheating, indestructible bastards? I’m just going to refer to them as the heroes for now,” he clarified.

“That’s the reason we called you. Now get to it, you idle good-for-nothing,” she sneered.

“Stop making me sound like a NEET or something!” Shinichi was so fed up with Celes, who took every opportunity to insult him.

Whatever. He’d already found a solution to the problem.

“I’ve already thought of a way to defeat the heroes, but in order to do it, we need to round them up,” he declared.

“Like capture them?” Celes asked, looking at her master.

Capturing them using the King’s power should be simple enough. The main problem was keeping him from going overboard and killing them.

“I was thinking we should set some sort of trap for them. But before that, quick question: Where do these heroes come from?” questioned Shinichi.

“Hmm, I assume from where the humans live,” said the King, returning to the conversation after consoling his daughter. He held up his palm, projecting a satellite photograph of a bird’s-eye view of the region out of thin air. “The center’s my castle. This in the bottom right is the nearest human settlement. I imagine they come from here.”

“You say nearest, but how many miles away is it?” asked Shinichi.

“About eighteen goats (thirty-five miles),” replied the King.

“It seems that our great teacher, Mr. Translate, even handles unit conversion,” said Shinichi to himself, impressed again by the capabilities of this spell.

“They’re probably respawning from there, but walking on an unpaved wild path for thirty-five miles? That’d be hard to do in a day, even if you trained hard enough. I guess that leaves us with magic,” he concluded.

Teleportation spells were a convenient staple in the fantasy genre. In fact, he’d already seen the King use it a number of times in the short span he’d been here.

“Maybe they’re teleporting?” offered Shinichi.

“Yeah, probably. What’s so strange about that?” demanded the King.

“Nothing. Wait, is it really that easy to teleport?”

In many video games, the player needed to have some mastery of magic to teleport. Of course, there were some games that allowed you to teleport from the beginning to eliminate lengthy expositions and travel time. But teleportation was something that twenty-first-century science hadn’t been able to manage. He naturally assumed it’d be difficult to do, even with the use of magic.

Once again, Celes answered Shinichi’s question.

“No, it’s not particularly easy. The King’s just a special case,” she explained.

“Ah, of course.”

“Ha! My power is to be feared,” butted in the King, trying in vain to show off.

Shinichi noticed the way the maid looked at the King, but kept his mouth shut. It was as if she’d seen some strange animal.

“Based on what you’re saying, anyone can teleport with some difficulty, right?”

“Yes. If you spend a few hours drawing a magic circle at either terminal and commit them both to memory, it’s possible to move between two points with ease,” said Celes.

It still required natural-born talent and a few minutes of mental focus before a person could cast the spell. But the King could teleport anywhere without a magic circle or incantation. Shinichi was starting to learn just how powerful he was.

“I see, so they teleport to a magic circle…,” murmured Shinichi.

“Do you intend to find the circle and destroy it?” inquired Celes.

“No, I won’t destroy it.” Shinichi immediately shot down her assumption.

Even if they destroyed the circle, the heroes could make another one somewhere more inconspicuous. They’d all just end up in a vicious cat and mouse game.

“No, we won’t be destroying it,” he repeated.

Shinichi had a better plan, and the corners of his mouth sprung up into a smile. His grin was more evil and sinister than the one on the Blue Demon King himself.

“All right! Let’s get a move on!”

It was noon, and the red sun had reached its peak. The heroes began their daily routine by preparing for teleportation. They were in a mansion belonging to the knight, one of the Boar Kingdom’s lower-class aristocrats.

“Okay, everyone, step into the magic circle.”

The party followed the sorceress’s orders and stepped into the massive magic circle, covering the floor of the entire room.

“I think the Demon King’s gotten a lot weaker.”

“Yeah, I’d like to finish him off in, like, five days,” said the knight.

“…Really?” asked the warrior.

The knight nodded deeply in response to the warrior’s short question.

“We’ll be the ones to take down the Demon King. We’re going to be granted land of our own and become earls. And I’m not going to let that be taken away from me by anyone,” declared the knight.

“Yes, and we’ve gotten stronger over the past few days, thanks to these battles. Let’s give it our all!” encouraged the priestess, agreeing wholeheartedly with the leader of their party. The two made a promise that they’d get married when this fight was over and the knight became an earl. It’s only natural they were hopeful.

“That’s enough chitchat for now. We’re leaving,” announced the sorceress. Her eyes had been closed all along, as she continued to concentrate on the Teleport spell.

“All right, we’ll leave it to you,” said the knight.

“You got it… We turn our bodies into light; take us to their land! Teleport!”

Her magical power accumulated, bursting into light and enveloping the party. Their vision twisted and tunneled, disorienting them and their sense of direction—left and right, up and down. A moment later, their surroundings changed into a magic circle inscribed near the Demon King’s castle, where they…didn’t appear.

“…Huh?”

The knight knew something was wrong, but it took a few seconds for his brain to take in this strange situation.

His eyes were open, but he couldn’t see anything. He was in true darkness, blacker than the night.

“What the—? Was there some kind of mistake in the spell—?!”

He tried looking in the direction of the sorceress and then realized another problem.

He couldn’t move his neck. No. He couldn’t move his hands or his feet or his entire body. He couldn’t move a single finger for that matter.

“What the—? What the hell is this?!”

He screamed in fear, but it rebounded from something directly in front of his eyes, ricocheting back and leaving his eardrums ringing.

That’s when he noticed something else. His entire body was wrapped tightly in a hard substance. He couldn’t move an inch.

“What is this…? Shit, move!”

He put all his might into moving his hands and legs, but it was completely pointless. Worse, his failed attempts quickened the onset of despair.

“Huff, huff… Can’t breathe…”

There wasn’t enough room for him to lift a single finger, and air was running out quickly in the confined space.

“Let me out…please… Get me out of here!”

He gathered the last of his strength to scream, but it was swallowed by the void and reached only his ears.

The only thing he could do was count the quiet footsteps of the Grim Reaper, approaching him from behind, and die without knowing what happened to him.

“All right! It looks like it went pretty well,” said Shinichi, observing the heroes succumbing to despair just a few yards away. To be exact, he wasn’t directly looking at the heroes themselves but rather the massive stone in which they were trapped.

“To think we could place a giant stone at their destination to close them in,” marveled the King.

“What a dirty trick,” sneered Celes.

The King, who’d moved the massive stone using magic, was quite impressed, and Celes, who found their location with a spell, wore an inscrutable expression as always.

“I call it the amazing ‘Stuck in a Stone’ strategy! It’s their fault for using the Teleport spell without understanding its risks,” explained Shinichi.

Having them teleport into a rock was a brutal trap, guaranteed to destroy even the most powerful party. Anyone familiar with a certain dungeon role-playing game would think to use this strategy—with some traumatic flashbacks. It was incredibly effective and gave the heroes no way to resist their impending doom.

“Yeah, it’s lucky I played all those good old classics.”

“I don’t understand what you’re saying. Anyway, what do we do with them now? Should I throw them into the mouth of a volcano?” asked the King.

“No. Like I said, we can’t kill them. Can you remove them from the stone once they’ve lost consciousness?”

“Leave it to me.”

Using magic, the King became clairvoyant to look into the stone. When all the heroes were unconscious, he struck the rock with a powerful punch.

“Humph!”

And just like that, cracks appeared in the boulder, taller than the King, and it shattered into millions of tiny pieces.

“I bet you’d be able to free yourself even if you were buried deep in the South Pole…,” Shinichi speculated.

“South Pole… What’s that?” asked the King.

“I’ll explain later,” he replied. “All right. Let’s go back to the castle. The real fun starts now.”

Shinichi and the others divvied up the unconscious heroes, carried them on their backs, and teleported back to the castle.

Later, the heroes would think back to this moment. If only they’d been lucky enough to suffocate to death.

“…Ugh, where am I?” groaned the knight as he slowly opened his eyes, glancing around at his surroundings in a daze.

In his field of view, he saw an unfamiliar stone room. Ironically, he was slightly relieved by this. Far better this than that black void. No sooner had he taken a moment to relax, however, than an unfamiliar voice whispered into his ear. It was as if someone had been waiting to catch him off guard.

“Have you finally woken up?”

“Who are you?!” demanded the knight. He reflexively tried to jump back, but his hands and feet pulled him off balance. His movements were accompanied by the irritating sound of clanking metal, and he finally realized he’d been shackled to a wall.

“Ack!”

“It seems you finally understand your predicament. Don’t worry, your friends are unharmed.”

The knight looked to his side and saw the other four chained to the wall. Their eyes opened slowly at the commotion.

“Hey, what the hell is this?!”

“Have we been captured?”

“…Hmph.”

The ranger, priestess, and warrior all cried out in bewilderment as they tried to grasp the situation. But as the figure had said, everyone was fine.

Well, with the exception of one person.

“Let me out… It’s dark, no, it hurts, I’m scared, let me out, let me out…,” the sorceress kept muttering, unaware of her companions around her. Her eyes were glazed over. She’d lost her marbles upon being trapped in stone.

“Mirida!” shouted the knight.

“So her name is Mirida? She must be claustrophobic. I’m truly sorry about that. I had no intention of pushing her to the breaking point.”

“You arrogant asshole! Show yourself!” barked the knight at the mysterious voice, presumably the mastermind behind this entire operation. He couldn’t tell where it was coming from.

As it turned out, the voice emanated from a rather unexpected direction.

“I wasn’t trying to hide or anything. I’m above you,” it said.

“What?!”

Looking up, the knight saw there was no ceiling. Instead, a solitary figure, concealed entirely in a black cloak, stood on the edge of the wall. The only thing clearly visible about the monster was its white mask and the sinister smile drawn upon it.

“I am the Blue Demon King’s Dirty Advisor. My name is—well, you can call me Smile.”

“Smile, what an eerie name…” The knight gulped, nervous.

Shinichi—or Smile—was undaunted as he grinned behind his mask and looked down at the petrified knight.

It’s interesting they’re scared of the untranslated word smile. I wonder what they’d think of Shinichi Sotoyama? Rino said it sounded odd, but what would the humans think?

He was admittedly a bit curious, but chose to focus on the task at hand.

“First of all, I would like to apologize that we must converse under such terrible conditions. This was the only way, however, you seemed willing to talk to us.”

“Talk?” inquired the knight.

“That’s right. I believe there’s been a misunderstanding between us,” replied Shinichi.

The knight sternly glared at him as if to say he had no business talking to demons, but Shinichi continued speaking, completely disregarding the knight’s menacing stare.

“What do you think about us demons?” he asked.

“What do I think…? That you’re savages and dangerous monsters who crawl out from the depths of the earth!” cried the ranger.

“You’re the kin of the Evil God, sealed deep underground with the Evil Dragon. Tens of thousands of years ago, he was banished there, defeated by the Divine Goddess,” accused the priestess.

Shinichi smiled to himself as he gleaned new information from the ranger and priestess.

So the demons come from deep within the earth…which means the demon world is underground. And there’ve been times when demons came up to their world in the past.

To be clear, this situation started when Rino’s mother appeared in the human world. She was apparently picking fights with those who crossed her path. To her, she was benevolently flexing her skills, but to the people she attacked, she was a truly terrifying presence. If similar events had happened before, it’s no wonder the humans saw the demons as their enemies.

“I see. It seems my brethren have caused much trouble for you. I do apologize for that. However, I would like you to understand that we, the members of the Blue Demon King’s clan, have no desire to fight you.”

He apologized before expressing his hope of reconciliation. If they accepted his peace offering, their futile fighting would be put to rest. But just as Shinichi had expected, the knight rejected it completely.

“Cut the crap! Don’t try to feed us this bullshit after everything that’s happened!”

“That’s because you attacked us without warning,” said Shinichi.

“Of course we’re going to attack! You slaughtered three thousand of our soldiers!”

“Ah, well, were you not the ones who sent your army to slaughter our brethren?”

“Tch… If we hadn’t, you bastards would have attacked us. You’re the ones who invaded our territory, and you’re in the wrong for occupying Dog Valley!”

“It’s located in a distant area, a full two-day walk from your kingdom. Not a single person lives here, and there are no roads nor signs. You call this narrow, untamed valley your territory? Do you have any proof?”

“Proof or no proof, these mountains were conquered by our kingdom’s founder, Tortoise I! It’s Boar Kingdom’s territory!”

“Hmm… I’ll admit it was our fault for building our castle without properly investigating how the national boundaries are defined. Whatever. I arranged for us to meet to discuss this: Would it be possible for us to lower our swords and peacefully discuss a monetary solution?”

“This entire world belongs to the Divine Goddess and humankind! There isn’t a shred of land we’d give you vile demons!”

No matter what Shinichi said, the knight shot down all of his proposals.

This isn’t working. We’ll never be on the same page.

Even though Shinichi was giving up this method, he was still satisfied with the new information he’d gleaned. Based on the knight’s attitude and answers, it was clear the demons had told him the truth: The humans had attacked first.

I’m not saying the demons are blameless, but it’s clear the humans are definitely in the wrong. Great. This means I don’t have to go easy on them.

Even though they were in a totally different world, he was aware they were all connected as human beings. He was raised with morals and social standards in Japan, a peaceful, law-governed country. But he had more than enough reason to throw that all aside. He was the Demon King’s Dirty Advisor, after all, and he smiled menacingly beneath his mask.

“That’s a shame. I’d hoped we could abandon our prejudices and build a positive relationship…,” he said.

That would’ve been the best outcome—appeasing Rino, too—but there wasn’t much he could do if the heroes themselves rejected his offer.

“If you’re saying you’re going to continue attacking us, you leave me with no choice but to destroy you,” Shinichi warned.

“Ha! See if you can!” the ranger retorted with a snort.

He wouldn’t be able to kill them—well, even if he did, they’d just come back to life. They were immortal, therefore invincible. There was no way they’d lose, which guaranteed they’d eventually defeat the almighty Demon King.

Shinichi let out a snicker at the sight of the cocky heroes.

“Don’t misunderstand me. I never once said I would ‘kill you.’ I said I’d ‘end you’ and your capacity to respawn over and over again, you fiendish insects,” he said.

“……”

The knight picked up on his strange word choice. Silently, he began gathering his magical powers, preparing to cast a certain spell, but Shinichi saw right through his hardened expression.

“Oh, I won’t let you do that,” said Shinichi, gently raising his hand and signaling to Celes, who’d been waiting silently behind him the whole time.

With his cue, the talented maid understood, jumped down in front of the knight, and lifted him up by his neck.

“Gah—!”

“Were you planning to kill yourself to escape this place? You really don’t want to do that. This area’s under a special magic field. If you die here, you can’t be resurrected,” taunted Shinichi.

“What?!”

“Y-you’re bluffing!” shouted the ranger.

“Feel free to test it out,” Shinichi calmly replied.

“……Tsk.”

Even though he’d spoken forcefully a moment before, the ranger fell silent in the face of Shinichi’s confidence. The whole magic field thing was a lie, of course. Shinichi even anticipated the heroes would see through it, but that was all part of the plan. If there was even a small doubt that maybe, just maybe, it was true, they wouldn’t be able to kill themselves as easily, which bought Shinichi more time.

All right. Here we go.

To defeat an immortal monster, the “Make It Impossible to Move and Seal It Away for All of Eternity” strategy was the most popular method. For example, one could encase its body in iron and sink it into the depths of the ocean. Though not dead, the creature would be rendered harmless.

This method worked well for immortals but less so for those who could be brought back to life. It’s hard to say it’d be impossible, but they’d need constant monitoring to keep them from killing themselves. So it really wasn’t a practical solution.

“I can break you down mentally so you lack the will to fight back anymore,” mumbled Shinichi.

“…Ah!” The priestess’s body shook in terror at Shinichi’s quiet words.

“Do you intend to torture us? Ha! Give us your best shot!” The knight broke free from Celes’s hand and let out a shout, as if to console the priestess.

“Hmm. Brave, aren’t you?” observed Shinichi.

“Lord Smile,” said Celes, leaping nimbly to Shinichi’s side and whispering a warning in his ear. “Torture’s pointless. All of them are under the Pain Block spell at all times.”

“I’m not surprised.” This answered another question that’d been lingering in the depths of his heart.

Even if one could come back to life, no one would want to experience and writhe in pain from deadly injuries. This was the reason these heroes removed their sense of pain, as they faced the King day in and day out.

This would also explain why they’re able to continue fighting even if they’re in a critical condition of, like, 1 HP.

Shinichi switched to his backup plan.

“The word torture isn’t just limited to physical pain,” said Shinichi, turning to face the priestess with his creepy mask.

“Ah!” She shrieked in horror.

“Defiling a young maiden and using her body for your own pleasure? Definitely the sickest and dirtiest method,” said Celes.

“I didn’t say that! Well, actually, it crossed my mind, but I wasn’t actually going to do it!” Shinichi shot back, out of character for a moment, responding to the maid’s scornful look. He coughed before continuing. “…What I’m talking about is even more terrifying than torture. Let’s see. How about putting a large number of these in that hole you’re in?” he proposed, reaching into his cloak to produce a glass bottle, containing something he’d found in the castle.

The thing in the vial made a rasping sound as it ran around, the light glistening off its slimy—

“Gyaaaah—!”

A deep, earsplitting scream suddenly echoed throughout the room. Surprised, Shinichi looked to see where it’d come from and saw the silent warrior and his brawny body quivering in fear.

“P-p-please, not that… I’ll do anything…”

“So if I asked you not to attack again—,” began Shinichi.

“I promise! So just get that black thing…”

“Huh, seriously?” asked Shinichi, confused by the tears welling up in the warrior’s eyes and his willingness to give in to Shinichi’s demands. “But what if I just put it in there with you? Put some cuts on your body, slathered on some honey, let her eat from your wounds, lay eggs—”

“S-st-stooop—!” The warrior let out a high-pitched, girlie scream, then passed out upon listening to Shinichi casually explain his torture method of choice.

“Dammit! It’s really low of you to intimidate Goldeo with a bug!”

“I can’t believe we’re parting ways like this…”

“I mean, if the bug came up to me, I’d also…”

“You’re all fine with this?” inquired Shinichi, exasperated the heroes would so easily accept their comrade’s fate.

“I can’t believe he’s that afraid of a little roach. Right?” Shinichi looked to Celes in solidarity.

“Please don’t come any closer,” said Celes, her face pale. In the next moment, she suddenly moved to the opposite end of the room.

What a sad creature, always despised, even in this world…

When he’d found the cockroach in the castle halls, Shinichi’d actually felt a bit homesick to encounter a familiar creature. That said, he wasn’t particularly fond of cockroaches, either, which was why he’d caught the pest in a bottle, fully intending to dispose of it later.

“Well, whatever. Now that this pair is pretty much useless, have you two decided not to attack us anymore?” asked Shinichi, turning to the knight and priestess. “If not, I’ll be forced to do something horrible, something that can’t be undone.”

“I refuse to succumb to you and your ulterior motives! It’s our divine duty as the heroes of the Divine Goddess to root out and eliminate demonkind!” cried the knight.

“Heroes, huh…” He was a bit taken aback they’d refer to themselves as heroes. Shinichi had only used the term for convenience sake, based off video games.

Anyway, he’d already made his decision.

“It seems we have no choice. Please use that,” he commanded.

“Understood, Lord Smile,” replied Celes, who bowed and jumped in front of the knight once more. With her left hand, she pried the knight’s cheeks apart, and with her right hand, she pulled a vial from her pocket, forcing him to drink its contents.

“Ugh, gah…ack, pah… Poison is pointless,” he sputtered.

Poison would only help him die and resurrect elsewhere. But Shinichi gazed at the brave knight with amusement.

“I guess you could say it’s a kind of poison. But we’ll see if it’s as pointless as you say.”

“What do you mea— Ack!” yelped the knight, his face suddenly white as a sheet.

“Leader, what’s wrong?!” asked the priestess.

“Put a spell on me to—,” he began to reply.

“I won’t let you,” interrupted Shinichi.

Celes stopped the priestess from interfering. Her spells would’ve been pointless anyway. They all watched as the knight broke out in a greasy sweat, body trembling.

“Agh…gah, ngah!”

“I’ll explain in place of our poor knight here. He’s just consumed a concoction made from chekin berries,” said Shinichi.

“Chekin berries?” asked the ranger.

These berries didn’t exist in the human world, so the heroes hadn’t heard of them before.

“It’s the fruit of a plant from the demon world. It’s incredibly disgusting, of course, but it’s better known for having a particular side effect, handy when you’re sitting between two ladies,” continued Shinichi.

“Ladies…? It can’t be!” cried the priestess.

Shinichi grinned demonically at her as she finally understood.

“Yeah, it’s a medicine that makes you really have to go. In other words, it’s a laxative.”

Guborgyuu—u!

The knight’s stomach made a strange sound as if in agreement, reverberating throughout the chamber, as the berries completely destroyed him from within.

“P-please let me out of these chains!”

“You’re the one who brushed aside the hand of friendship. You’re pushing your luck,” replied Shinichi sadly.

“Ack, gah… But as a knight, as the Goddess’s hero, to give in to evil demons would…ah!”

“Your resolve is commendable. Then I guess soiling yourself isn’t too bad, right?”

“Bu…but—but…ah!”

The knight gritted his teeth and tried to endure the pain, looking at the priestess—the woman he loved, the one who’d promised to become his wife once all this was over. Her face was very pale with fear, but her eyes wouldn’t leave his.

In front of the love of his life, the knight finally—

“Don’t look! Oh, please don’t look…agh, aaaah—!”

“Guh, ugh…”

A few minutes later, the hole was filled with a strange and disgusting smell, the sound of a man sobbing, and the five heroes.

“How pathetic. An adult openly crying in front of other people,” scolded Shinichi.

“You say that as if you’re not the one who did this to him. You’re sick,” said Celes, exasperated.

Called out by Celes once again, Shinichi lowered his brows.

“You think so? I’ve heard stories about rookie soldiers wetting themselves from fear and first-class snipers waiting for their target for three or four days. They don’t move a muscle, even if they soil themselves. You know what’s really sick? The fact that they’d be more eager to kill people than dirty themselves with their own poop,” he replied.

Shinichi just could not understand how someone could casually kill another intelligent creature, even if it was a different species.

“All right. Let’s show them something nice now,” he suggested, holding out an item to the heroes. It’d coincidentally been in his uniform pocket when he’d been summoned into this world and was the closest man-made thing to magic.

“This is a magic tool called a smartphone. It can capture the images and sounds and re-create them indefinitely.”

“Smartphone?” echoed the priestess, peering into the mysterious object.

Shinichi expressionlessly pressed the button to replay the video.

“Don’t look! Oh, please don’t look…agh, aaaah—!”

“S-stop—!” cried the knight, waking up to the sounds of his intestinal destruction. They echoed throughout the room once again, and the Dirty Advisor of the Blue Demon King made no move to stop them.

“I wonder what’d happen if we projected this video in the sky, right above your country,” Shinichi speculated deviously.

“What?!”

“The Brown Knight or the Manure Pit Hero… I’m sure they’ll mock you with nicknames.”

“Ack!”

“Even if you manage to defeat the Demon King, even if you become the hero who saved the world, even if your name goes down in history, people will always laugh at you. You know, where I’m from, there was a general who united the land but made one little mistake. It’s been more than four hundred years since his death, but people are still laughing at him,” cackled Shinichi, thinking about how scary history was, while holding up the smartphone. “So if you attack us again—”

“I won’t! I swear! So please…,” interrupted the knight, begging between heavy sobs.

“Leader…,” intoned the ranger, disappointed by the pathetic sight.

But the priestess turned to the defiled knight with a look of tenderness.

“Ruzal, lift your face. Everyone’s bound to soil themselves in front of others. Think about babies or those approaching death in old age. You need not worry,” she said.

“But an adult doing this…”

“You did nothing wrong. It’s simply a result of a lowly plan carried out by the demons. You’ve nothing to be ashamed of. You fight for the people, and you’re a magnificent hero of the Goddess…and the man I love.”

“Minya…,” said the knight, forgetting his soiled lower half. He basked under her saintly smile and gazed into his lover’s eyes.

Seeing the moving scene unfold in front of him, Shinichi bowed his head and—

“Actually, I think I’ll make this public,” he announced.

“Aaa—ah?!”

“You’re the worst.” Celes’s voice dripped with disgust as the masked advisor made no attempt to conceal his jealousy of the couple in love.

The audience chambers were on the top floor of the king’s castle, built in the very center of Boar Kingdom. In the middle of this room, King Tortoise IV rose from his throne in shock.

“Are the heroes actually missing?!”

“Yes, Ruzal and the other four heroes have left Boar Kingdom,” reported the commander, deeply distressed and uncertain whether or not he himself believed it. “They sent word that the responsibility of defeating the Demon King was far too great, and the five of them left the kingdom, going their separate ways.”

“Ridiculous! Ruzal is the heir of a great and noble house. Are you saying he’d throw away his inheritance and title?!”

“Yes. He said, ‘I’ve found something more precious than land and honor.’”

“That’s absurd…” Displeased, Tortoise IV sank back onto his throne. “All five heroes leaving at the same time…”

Under the Goddess’s guardianship, the heroes were an important military force, not only against monsters and demons but against neighboring countries as well. Only those with outstanding talent could become heroes. They had immense magical prowess, and they could take on a thousand enemies at once, single-handedly influencing the fate of the country. And now the kingdom was losing five of them at once, which made even the king’s face pale.

“Were you unable to stop them? No, it’s not too late. Go and bring them back using any means necessary,” ordered Tortoise IV. He wouldn’t punish them for their failure to defeat the Demon King. In fact, he’d go so far as to offer them a monetary gift as an apology for forcing them to take on an impossible task. He’d even offer Ruzal the title of earl he so desired.

The commander shook his head with a pained look as his king desperately threw out suggestions.

“I fear it will not work. I’ve attempted to stop them and persuade them to change their minds, but they’re steadfast in their decision…”

The knight had already abandoned the most important thing to him: his family. Nothing could sway a decision that immense.

“Above all else, they’re absolutely petrified of the Demon King. According to them, ‘He’s a creature more wicked than the Evil God himself, and we’re no match for him…,’” continued the commander.

To be exact, the heroes were actually afraid of the Demon King’s advisor, but there was no way the commander could know that.

“Are you saying the Demon King’s so horrifying the heroes would throw away everything?!” asked the king incredulously.

“I was under the impression Your Highness was also well aware of this.”

“Mm…” The king let out a long groan and fell silent.

They were talking about the same Demon King who’d single-handedly defeated three thousand soldiers. Both the king and his commander, who’d led the remaining shreds of that army, had seen an immense power beyond their worst nightmares.

“An embodiment of true horror, as you would expect from his title…,” murmured the king.

The army had pushed forth in high spirits after breezily dispatching the orcs and goblins. Those ugly monsters were as weak as legend would have them. But then the army came face-to-face with that blue giant, who raised one hand and spoke some incantation. In the next moment, arrows of light rained from the sky, moving of their own accord and piercing the hearts of three thousand soldiers. In the length of a short breath, they were killed and utterly defeated.

“How much power does he have…?”

His controlled attack left the bodies of the slain soldiers intact, striking even more fear into the hearts of those who remained. Had the bodies been injured any further, resurrection would’ve been impossible, unless they were heroes, of course. The Demon King must’ve known this, as all the soldiers sustained only a single injury.

It’s kind of like how it’s harder to take an enemy alive than to kill them. It’s even harder to kill your enemy and leave an undamaged corpse. And yet, with incredible ease, that’s what the Demon King did. In other words, if he’d intended to kill them, he could’ve destroyed not just half the army but the entire army and kingdom, eradicating everyone, including Tortoise IV. They’d encountered a demon of great strength, just as legend had it—no, more powerful than in those stories.

Were they fighting an impossible battle?

Should they surrender themselves as quickly as possible?

“We shouldn’t have faced the demons…” The king quietly uttered these cowardly words.

“What’re you saying, Your Highness?” chimed in a man in his early thirties who’d been standing at the king’s side with a serene smile on his face. He wore a pure-white robe emblazoned with a golden symbol reminiscent of the sun. He carried no sword and wore no armor. “Our Goddess will not look kindly on us if we overlook the demons and their sins.”

“O-of course, Bishop Hube.” Tortoise IV became flustered when he saw the bishop’s smile. At first glance, it appeared benevolent, but it carried a quiet forcefulness, allowing no room for excuses or objections. “We, the faithful followers of the Divine Goddess, would never yield to those foul demons!”

“Hmm, I see. All is well.”

Tortoise IV rubbed his chest in relief upon receiving a pardon from Bishop Hube, as the commander and other ministers displayed visible displeasure at the pathetic sight of their king. They didn’t dare say anything, though. The pope and other high-ranking cardinals were the only people in this country—actually, in this world—who could take a stand against a Goddess’s bishop.

“However, it’s unforgivable for the heroes, for the Goddess’s disciples, to flee from evil,” said Bishop Hube in a hellishly calm voice. “Let us contact the church to have Ruzal and the others excommunicated.”

“What…?!” Tortoise IV let out a cry of shock, and the others froze in response to this callous decision.

There’s always at least one church for the Goddess in every territory. This was true, of course, for great cities like Boar Kingdom but also for small towns with a couple hundred residents. The church wasn’t just a pillar of faith: It was an institution that literally held life itself in its very hands. It healed disease and injury and gave back life to those who died. To be excommunicated meant they could never enter the church again. In other words, it meant they’d never again be resurrected.

In normal cases, one could be resurrected as long as the body was intact. But this security blanket would be taken away if one was excommunicated. Faced with this fear, not even the king could go against the Goddess’s bishops.

“But Ruzal and the others are heroes. Excommunication would…”

As heroes chosen by the Goddess and granted the power of immortality, wouldn’t it be pointless to kick them out?

Bishop Hube beamed as he spoke to Tortoise IV.

“As believers of the Goddess, we know best how to handle heroes,” said Hube. He didn’t provide any more details, and his excessively wide smile was anything but comforting.

“Th-that’s good, then…,” stammered the king.

“Yes, Your Highness has nothing to be concerned about,” reassured Hube, turning from the king, who could do nothing but agree with him. He looked toward the entrance. “A true hero will grant our prayers and defeat the evil demons,” he insisted.

Just as he finished saying this, the large door to the audience chamber opened, and a lone figure walked in—a swordswoman with flaming red hair and a matching crimson scarf.

What she lacked in grace, she had in energy. In light clothing, she came to a full stop in front of the king, respectfully took a knee, and spoke with a strong, clear voice.

“Arian, hero of the Divine Goddess, reporting back from my duties as ordered by the church! The great black wolf has been exterminated!”

“I’m glad to see you’ve returned safely,” said Hube, momentarily taking his attention off the king.

Arian was unsure if she’d interrupted their conversation, but she simply flashed a smile before dropping and opening her sack. From her bag, she withdrew a fang, the length of a grown man’s forearm. With one look, the audience saw the size and brutality of the black wolf she’d single-handedly fought. The fang served as proof of her skills.

“Ah, that’s amazing! As I’d expect from Miss Arian!” crooned the commander.

“Thank you very much,” she replied with an embarrassed smile.

As Hube watched this exchange, his smile hardened slightly. He quickly changed the topic, asking her, “So, Arian, you’ve been away from the kingdom, but I am sure you’ve heard the rumors.”

“Are you talking about the stories about demons in Dog Valley?” she asked.

“Precisely. An army of evil demons is attempting to steal our land and slaughter our people.”

He failed to say that Boar Kingdom had mobilized their army first and continued the attack with their five heroes. He also made a point to not mention he’d pushed for the use of force, despite the king’s repeated insistence they proceed with caution.

“So the demons continue to do such horrible things…,” said Arian, taking Hube’s words as truth. She hung her head as a dark expression overtook her face.

“Yes, and as the Goddess has taught us, the demons are hideous, barbaric filth that must be eliminated,” continued Hube.

“……”

“The five heroes, including Ruzal, attempted to eliminate our enemy, but they feared the Demon King to such a degree that they ran and abandoned their country.”

“What? Sir Ruzal and the others?!” exclaimed Arian.

Thanks to the river flowing from Dog Valley, Boar Kingdom controlled large swaths of fertile land, ideal for agriculture. This made it a target for many neighboring countries. As a result, the city was surrounded with high walls, and the castle gates were guarded by many soldiers, harshly questioning and interrogating any suspicious individuals. Obviously, they weren’t going to let a scruffy, middle-aged farmer walk in with a gorgeous, pale maid with blond locks.

“You there! Where’d you come from?”

“Oh yes, my name is Manju from the Daifuku village in the south. I’m here to find some work,” replied the farmer.

“Daifuku? I’ve never heard that name before,” said the guard, leering incredulously at the friendly farmer who was smiling from ear to ear. “And why’s a backwater hick like you looking for work with a beauty like this?” He ogled the fair-haired maid from head to toe.

The farmer stooped in closer to the guard to interrupt his lewd stare.

“Yes, well, she’s the most beautiful girl in our village, so she’s been called to serve a noble household,” he said, fishing out a few small pieces of glittering gold from his pouch and firmly pressing them into the guard’s hand.

“So you’ve come to serve the nobility. Impressive.” With a grin, the guard quickly slipped the gold into his breast pocket. His demeanor completely changed. “I’d also like the service of a woman this beautiful.”

The guard knew she would’ve had a letter of introduction if she’d actually been invited to serve a noble household. Seeing she didn’t, he knew their story was a lie and guessed she was probably being sold to a brothel.

“Yes, of course. Please come when you have the chance.”

“I look forward to it. All right, on you go,” prodded the guard with a vulgar smirk as he opened the path for the small-statured farmer and his companion.

The two passed through the gate, walking down the road before quickly ducking into the shadows between some buildings. At that moment, the Illusion spell melted off them, and the middle-aged farmer turned back into a high school boy.

“He didn’t see through our magic and eagerly caved to a bribe. It seems the average soldier doesn’t have much talent or interest in the job.” Shinichi snickered.

“We did that little role-play so you could confirm that?” The blond maid questioned Shinichi, shrugging with some annoyance. The woman, of course, was Celes, but she continued holding her illusion, as her long ears would immediately give her away.

“Just in case. I wanted to get a feel for this country.”

If they wanted to enter the city, they could’ve waited until nightfall and flown over the walls, but Shinichi insisted on walking through the gate in order to investigate.

“It isn’t safe to make assumptions based on a sample size of one, but the gatekeeper didn’t seem afraid of execution for accepting a bribe. Their laws probably aren’t super-strict and stuff,” he noted as he smiled wickedly.

From a criminal’s point of view, he was thankful for this. He patted the heavy pouch swinging at his waist and filled with gold pieces.

“The King gave us access to his mountain of gold, to use it all if need be. It didn’t work with the knight and his party, but it may well win over or settle things with the nobility and merchants,” he continued.

“Settle things with money? Human culture is completely incomprehensible,” said Celes, cocking her head in utter confusion. Shinichi had assumed this method was universally applicable.

“Huh, I figured you also had a monetary system in the demon world, I mean, you collect gold, for crying out loud.”

“Yes, but we usually barter and trade.”

“So you never pay money to avoid wars or bribe the enemy’s general?”

“Why would we do something like that? One should just aim to win those fights. If you lose, isn’t it your fault for being weak?”

“Ah yes, you’re completely right,” he said, looking at Celes, as she pursued her peculiar logic. He decided to give up trying to explain it to her.

If their culture’s so advanced they build castles and use cutlery, why are they such muscle heads…?

Shinichi guessed it might have something to do with magic.

Come to think of it, armed with the knowledge of fire, monkeys evolved into humans precisely because they were weak. They weren’t like bears with their incredible strength and claws. They didn’t have fast reflexes or the fangs of tigers. And they definitely didn’t have the massive bodies of elephants. In order to survive in this cruel world, they were forced to forge a weapon no other animal possessed: intellect.

They learned to sharpen rocks into weapons, coordinate attacks with their companions, and lure enemies into pitfalls. All because they were weak. If they had the strength to defeat bears and tigers with their bare hands, monkeys would’ve never evolved into humans, and they would all still be living freely and easily in the forest.

But demons were born with magic, a power far greater than claws or fangs. This was why every situation was settled with it, and it definitely wasn’t coincidence they’d think every problem could be solved by their magical prowess.

If that’s the case, I’m not sure why the demons were able to develop intellect on par with humans. Even though there were so many physical differences among them, they all seem to share a base level of intelligence. Should I just chalk that up as a coincidence, too?

It’d be easier to believe a higher being created them.

“What’s our plan from here?” asked Celes, pulling Shinichi out of his thoughts.

“Well, first, let’s gather some more information,” replied Shinichi, walking down the street again.

“Information? Do you intend to find the hero’s location?” Celes called after him.

“That’s one piece of information, but food first.”

“…What?”

Shinichi ignored the maid’s exasperated voice and walked down the street in search of a suitable store.

“All right. Let’s go with this one,” he said as he opened the door of a building that appeared, based on the sign out front with a beer keg on it, to be a tavern.

Inside, there were four old, well-polished, round wooden tables in a neat row and a grim, middle-aged owner standing at the front counter, cutting some potato-like vegetables.

“Welcome. Please take a seat at the counter,” he invited.

It seemed they’d just opened, as they were the only customers. Taking a seat at the counter as directed, Shinichi placed three pieces of gold in front of him as he ordered.

“Two of your shop’s most expensive and delicious meals, please,” he said.

“You idiot! Everything we serve is delicious.” The owner seemed perturbed by Shinichi’s cocky order, but he smiled as he took the gold. “You don’t have any silver coins? What boonies did you come from?”

“From the Senbei village in the south,” replied Shinichi.

“Hmm, that’s the first I’ve ever heard of it,” said the owner, making small talk as he pulled about twenty thin silver coins from his cashbox and placed them in front of Shinichi. “Your change. The currency exchange shop’s right down this road toward the castle. It’s the shop with scales on the sign.”

“Ah, okay. Thanks.” Sincerely grateful, Shinichi placed the silver coins in his pouch. He wasn’t sure he’d been given the correct change, but the owner didn’t seem like a bad guy, seeing as he’d given them some money back. He’d even told them about the currency exchange shop.

“So has there been anything interesting going on lately?” asked Shinichi.

“Not really. Let’s see. Those legendary demons showed up in Dog Valley. Oh, and we lost horribly against them. Everywhere you look, we only have bad news.” The owner sighed as he placed wooden cups filled with a pale brown liquid in front of Shinichi and Celes.

Is this ale? I’ve heard in ancient Europe, they drank alcohol because it didn’t carry parasites, unlike water.

It was admittedly a bit too late, but he started worrying whether the water at the Demon King’s castle had been safe to drink. Never mind that. Sipping his glass of ale, he chose to forget the legal drinking age. Celes watched him and followed suit. When she took her first sip, her eyes opened wide at its bursting flavor profile, and she pressed her hand over her mouth.

Just as I expected. Alcohol in the demon world must be pretty horrible, too.

He remembered he’d consumed a tiny amount of ale in the human world. It didn’t exactly taste that great. And when he was a kid, his uncle let him drink a bit of alcohol just for fun. This was the extent of his experience, and though he couldn’t be certain, he still felt this ale tasted like really watered-down Japanese beer.

It’s either the ingredients or his cooking skills. If this continues, then the food must be…

“I’m warming up the soup, but eat this in the meantime. Here ya go,” said the owner, plunking down a plate with thinly sliced ham and black bread.

“Thanks,” replied Shinichi, lowering his expectations as he lifted the ham and bread to his mouth.

Hmm. The ham’s a bit salty but not too bad. This bread, though… It’s hard and sour.

It wasn’t like the white loaves sold in Japan and tasted similar to rye bread in Germany. Flour in the twenty-first century was far superior to this bitter wheat grain.

Thank you, selective plant breeding.

As he thought, Shinichi looked to his side at Celes, whose eyes opened wider out of wonderment and delight. Their reactions couldn’t have been more different.

“It’s delicious…,” she said, her stony face giving way to a rare sight—a slight smile. “So this is the bread Lady Rino spoke of and properly cooked meat. I never thought it’d be this wonderful.”

These dishes were real, authentic cuisine from the human world, completely different from the unrefined food at the banquet. Celes’s eyes sparkled like a child’s as she furiously stuffed the morsels into her small mouth. Shinichi caught himself staring at her uncharacteristically childlike mannerisms and slid the plate with his leftovers in front of her.

“You can have the rest if you’d like. It’s a bit salty for me,” he said.

“Lord Shinichi… There’s no use trying to dose me with an aphrodisiac. I’ll never sleep with you,” she insisted.

“I’m not dosing you! I don’t have any!”

Though she was hell-bent on treating him like a pervert and accusing him of wrongdoing, she went ahead and ate his bread and ham without reservation.

Afterward, the owner handed them some soup with potatoes (or some similar vegetable), simply seasoned with salt but definitely edible. For the first time since coming into this world, Shinichi was satiated. He smiled and went back to the task at hand.

“By the way, I heard there’s a hero who’s come to beat the demons you were just talking about,” he said to the owner.

“Hero? Oh yeah, you’re talking about that young maiden Arian. If I’m not mistaken, she’s actually staying here at my inn,” he replied.

“…Hmm, is that so?” Shinichi swallowed his surprise. He looked beyond the owner’s extended finger, pointing at the sleeping quarters on the second floor.

I’d heard she was in the city, but to think she’d actually be at this shop…

Though it was a simple coincidence, Shinichi’s mind was so corrupt it made him suspicious this was some kind of trap.

“This hero, Arian, is she really that strong?” he asked.

“Aye, I haven’t seen it with my own eyes, mind you, but I hear she’s got the strength of a beast. We’ve had some other heroes, and she single-handedly beat ’em all at once.”

“Oh, that’s impressive.”

He knew she’d been able to injure the Demon King, so it was obvious she was more powerful than those five heroes, all of whom failed to leave a single scratch. Shinichi considered this as he tried to change topics as naturally as possible.

“The Goddess’s heroes…if they’re that incredible, I wonder if I could be one.”

“……”

Fearing he might be contemplating betraying them, Celes silently sharpened her gaze. But he wasn’t thinking about that at all. The owner let out a loud guffaw as if to blow away the chilled air between his two customers.

“Don’t be stupid. If a scrawny kid like you could be a hero, then I could become a hero, too!” he said.

“Ha-ha, yeah. You got me there.” Shinichi smirked.

“There are fifty thousand people in Boar Kingdom, but legend has it that only six…no, seven people have been chosen by the Goddess to serve as heroes. Are you that good at sword fighting or magic?”

“Nah, there’s no way. Guess I should just give it up,” said Shinichi with a warm grin that matched the owner’s. On the inside, his smile was much more sinister.

So there’s seven people. If you take out the knight and his party of four, that leaves us with Arian and one other.

He’d also learned the heroes weren’t chosen by blood or heritage but for being the strongest. There was only one other thing he wanted to check.

“Hey, is it true that if you become one of the heroes, you can be resurrected without a corpse?”

This wasn’t just an inference; it was a wish. If every single person could be resurrected from nothing, the demons had no chance of winning. Shinichi waited nervously for his answer, and the owner nodded with a wry smile.

“Yeah, well, it sounds nice to be resurrected in any condition or circumstance. But normal folk like us don’t really die in horrible ways anyway,” replied the owner.

“Mm, yeah, it’d have to be pretty terrible if your body sustained so much damage it was incapable of resurrection… I guess it could happen if you’re incinerated or something.”

“Or if a hunter gets swallowed whole by a giant snake, digesting you to your bones.”

“Blech. You’d be pretty traumatized even if you could come back to life.”

“I mean, there are the poor, who’re told they didn’t donate enough to the church to receive the spell. It’s a luxury to be resurrected with no strings attached,” mused the owner.

“I see.” Shinichi nodded in agreement, but he was dancing in victory on the inside.

All right! Their normal conditions for resurrection are about the same as the demons. The heroes are just a special case.

Shinichi didn’t know the reason behind this, but the Goddess sure seemed miserly, only saving her chosen few. Thanks to that, though, he only needed to worry about the heroes.

“By the way, if I visited the cathedral without any money, would they be all, like, Heathen, get out! and chase me away?” asked Shinichi.

“…Is the priest in your village that cruel?”

“Ah, um, no? It’s just the city’s such a scary place, so I wasn’t sure if the priests were also kind of stingy or something,” Shinichi responded hastily. He’d asked out of curiosity, but the owner expressed such pity for him that Shinichi found himself backpedaling. “Our priests aren’t that miserly. In fact, they’ll even wait for you to pay your donations. But a debt’s a debt. It looks bad if you never pay, so if you’re some old guy out of a job, there’s not much you can do…”

“Well, that can’t be helped.” To the owner’s strangely vague reply, Shinichi looked back at him quizzically before nodding.

Guess resurrecting the dead certainly has its own problems, huh?

Just imagining the aftermath of resurrecting some people was terrifying, like a woman who’d been killed by her husband for committing adultery. If he’d had more time, Shinichi would’ve been interested in learning more about their laws and population issues.

“Thank you, sir. We’ll definitely come back sometime,” Shinichi promised, rising from his seat. He was thankful from the bottom of his heart for hearing such useful information. Celes followed him, and they placed their hands on the door to leave.

At that exact moment, an energetic call echoed down from the second floor of the tavern.

“Good morning, sir!”

“Ah, morning, miss. You’re up later than usual today,” greeted the owner.

“Yeah, I was up all night training and accidentally overslept!” said the redheaded girl as she bounded down the stairs to take a seat at the counter. The scarf on her neck was the same color as her hair and served as a symbol of justice. She seemed energetic and honest, and she walked in the path of light, a far cry from a certain someone and his twisted personality.

This was the Goddess’s hero, the only person who’d been able to injure the Demon King.

“She really is just a girl…,” observed Shinichi. He’d only seen her for a moment, but he was unable to conceal his surprise at her physique, even after hearing the King’s story about their fight.

“Is it that strange she’s a girl?” Celes asked.

“No, that’s not it.”

In this world, magic eliminated any semblance of a gender gap. One look at Celes was proof enough. No, the thing that caught his attention was much simpler, more pedestrian.

“It’s just I thought she was kind of cute,” he admitted.

“And it’d be fun to get her all wet with her tears and an unnamed white substance? You’re a pervert.”

“What? Do I really look like a sex offender?”

What’s with her perpetual need to put people down and her sexual innuendoes? This was perhaps a greater mystery than the unexplainable methods the heroes used to respawn.

After leaving the tavern, Shinichi and Celes asked for directions from passersby to find their way to the center of the city, where the castle stood. Right next to it, there was a massive stone building, overloaded with garish decorations. This was a place of worship for a certain being who’d come up in their conversation earlier and was the greatest threat to the Demon King.

“Welcome, travelers. What brings you to the Boar Kingdom Cathedral of Our Goddess Elazonia?” A middle-aged woman who greeted Shinichi and Celes was wrapped in a pure-white robe with a golden symbol and appeared to be a member of the clergy. She spoke with a gentle smile that seemed tired at the same time.

A church dedicated to the Goddess who chose the heroes. All right, let’s see what’s going on.

Shinichi spoke with a perfectly natural smile on his face, despite the fact they were about to infiltrate the home base of their enemy.

“I’m from the Senbei village in the south, and I thought that I’d like to offer my prayers to our Goddess in this magnificent Boar Kingdom Cathedral.”

“Oh, what a wonderful idea. Things are somewhat hectic right now, but please come on in,” the woman offered. The two followed her lead, passed through the door, and set foot in the Goddess’s cathedral.

Inside, its complex and beautiful construction featured many arches, and made of finely polished marble, its floors and pillars had a certain grandeur.

“It looks like they’re doing pretty well for themselves. Maybe I should found a religion to make some money, too.”

“That’s your only impression?”

Shinichi and Celes spoke in quiet whispers so the priestess walking in front of them couldn’t hear, but suddenly, Shinichi saw something that interested him.

“This is…”

There was a massive painting on the wall depicting a horned demon sitting astride a sinister black dragon, both falling into a bottomless abyss in a terrifying and hellish scene.

“This painting shows the defeat of the Evil God and Evil Dragon, cast into the bowels of the world long ago by the almighty powers of the good gods in an effort led by our Divine Goddess,” the priestess kindly explained, but there was a shadow of fear and anger on her face. “Sometimes, I think about how terrifying it is that there are such evil beings sealed below the land we walk on,” she continued.

“I agree,” said Shinichi, responding appropriately and then asking a quick question. “I can understand how the Evil God might be feared, but is the dragon really that evil?”

He wasn’t particularly surprised about dragons in this world. After all, they were in a fantastical world where magic existed. Even though the massive beasts tended to have a reputation for evil on Earth, there were many legends of good dragons in Asia and the Middle East, such as the Azure Dragon of the Four Symbols. He also vaguely remembered hearing that certain types with colors in their names, like the Red Dragon, were evil, but those associated with the color gold were good.

This was the train of thought going through his head when he asked his question, not really meaning anything more by it, but the woman’s eyes opened in surprise and suspicion given he was a foreigner.

“It’s been said that the dragons ate and killed all the gods other than our Divine Goddess, Elazonia. They are truly evil existences. Our Goddess will punish you if you’re ever foolish enough to think there are such things as good dragons,” she warned.

“Of course. I’m sorry.” Shinichi did his best to seem apologetic after being told off, as a child might for acting mischievously. He then cast a glance at Celes next to him.

“Is what she said true?” he whispered.

“…It’s completely different from the tales we’re taught as demons.” The maid’s face looked slightly upset as she replied. “We have no idea how long it’s been there or where it came from, but demons do talk about a Black Dragon sleeping in the depths of the demon world.”

She also explained they regarded the dragon as a powerful and noble being, though not necessarily “good” if measured by the human concept of good and evil.

“Let me tell you about one legend. Some time ago, there was a demon who called himself the Black Demon King. As a result of his own hubristic desire to be the only black creature, he led a massive army against the Black Dragon.”

“I feel like I can see where this is going.” Shinichi moaned.

Celes shook her head at Shinichi, who’d hastily concluded the whole army had been eliminated.

“No, he and his entire army were said to have returned without a single casualty. However, he gave up his title as the Black Demon King, and upon hearing this, not a single demon took up the name Black ever again.”

“Why?” Shinichi thought about the Blue Demon King. Having a title associated with a color must be quite an honor for demons. When Celes continued her explanation, it was quite obvious why the Black Demon King had given up his name.

“His entire army put everything they had into attacking the Black Dragon, but they failed to tear off a single scale, much less wake the dragon from its slumber.”

“What?!” Shinichi accidentally exclaimed, making the priestess eye him suspiciously. He tried to brush it off with vague smile. “So you’re telling me this self-professed Demon King’s will was broken just by being treated like a pest?”

“The story’s been passed down as a lesson to humbly keep improving oneself, so there’s no proof it’s true.”

Even so, many demons believed the Black Dragon existed, and they worshipped and aspired to such absolute power.

“And our own Demon King?” he asked.

“He reveres the Black Dragon and said he’d like to go search for it once Lady Rino has grown up and leaves his side.”

“I seriously can’t imagine him ever leaving Rino given how he acts.” Shinichi poked fun at him, but he couldn’t help but be nervous deep inside.

Hmm, dragons, huh…? In recent releases, there’ve been games where you’d hunt them for their scales and claws, but I’m guessing that’s not the case here.

Dubious about its existence, he took it as a good thing that there was no chance he’d be meeting this legendary being. He wanted to ask for more specifics about the dragon but was worried they might seem suspicious if their conversation went on any longer, and the two walked away from the painting.

Almost immediately, something else caught Shinichi’s eye: At the end of a very broad aisle, there were rows of armored figures. There were several hundreds of them, and each one had a clean hole in its chest. They were the soldiers’ corpses.

“Those can’t possibly be…,” began Shinichi.

“Yes, these are the royal soldiers who gave their lives in a brave fight against the evil Demon King,” confirmed the woman, bowing deeply to show her respect for their service, though she expressed visible bitterness toward the demons. “Thanks to our Goddess’s protection, their bodies will all be resurrected, but there’s just too many victims. We’ve tried everything—half of them were taken to churches nearby—but it’s just too much for the bishop to handle…”

A spell had been cast to keep the corpses from decomposing as they waited for resurrection.

“I’ve tried to help out where I can, but considering the Bishop’s other duties, we can only save fifty people per day…,” she continued.

“I see. Thank you for your service.” Shinichi’s expression was somber, but he was gleeful to glean more information.

So they don’t have many people capable of casting the Resurrection spell.

On the demons’ side, the King and Celes were the only two who could cast these spells, though Rino might be able to with great effort. They’d have some serious problems if the humans had spell casters like them all over the place.

They’re relatively weak, but it seems they can help each other out. I wonder if they can lend their MP to others or divide their powers. One particular battle manga comes to mind.

Either way, they shouldn’t take the humans lightly or look down on their potential.

The trio finally reached the prayer room at the end of the cathedral, as Shinichi was still deep in thought. The prayer room, taller and wider than any of the others, didn’t contain any corpses. Instead, the light filtered through the glass windows to illuminate the only thing present—a saintly white statue of a woman.

“So this is the Goddess…,” remarked Shinichi.

She was a beautiful woman with long hair and a serene smile, but she had no wings and resembled a human in physique.

Shinichi and Celes pretended to give their appropriate prayers by taking cues from another family praying in the chamber. Afterward, Shinichi asked Celes for a handkerchief, which he used to wrap up a large amount of gold to place in the hands of the priestess.

“Thank you for taking the time out of your busy day to help us. We don’t know the ways of the city,” he said, “but I would like to give this to the Goddess…”

“Oh, that’s not necessary,” objected the priestess.

“Please. We’ve been able to live peacefully thanks to the blessings of our Divine Goddess. It’s the least I can do.”

“Well, if you insist…” She accepted the gold after he repeatedly insisted she take it.

“You’re really good at imitating plebeians,” whispered Celes.

“Hey, I know that’s not a compliment.”

Shinichi let her sarcastic comment go before making a face as if he’d suddenly remembered something.

“By the way, I was wondering if I might be able to ask you a question,” he said to the priestess.

“Of course. What is it?” she replied.

“My youngest brother’s heard those stories about the demons lately, and he’s gotten himself all worked up, saying things like, ‘I’m going to become the Goddess’s hero and beat them all!’”

“Oh, he sounds like an energetic little boy,” said the priestess.

“It’d be too dangerous for him, so we don’t plan on letting him do it, but I was wondering if I could ask you a little about the heroes.”

“I can definitely do that much.”

Having accepted a large amount of gold from them, the priestess happily invited them to take a seat in some chairs against the wall.

“First of all, how are the heroes chosen?” asked Shinichi.

“First, they must excel in either the martial or magical arts, and they must also have the courage and strength to defeat the monsters who threaten humanity. Once they receive the Goddess’s blessing, they’re accepted as a hero for the first time.”

Shinichi noticed the priestess used the word monsters instead of demons, but he continued asking about the heroes for now.

“I see. What’s this blessing like?”

“It’s nothing difficult. Those who are confident in their courage and strength stand in front of the statue of the Goddess in the church, offer themselves to her, and vow to fight for the people,” explained the priestess.

“That’s it?” Shinichi sounded incredulous.

“Yes, and if you’re accepted by the Goddess, proof of your status as a hero will appear somewhere on your body.” She pointed to the symbol of the Goddess depicted on her own robe.

“That’s really all there is to it? I mean, if that’s the case, I’d think there’d be far more heroes,” said Shinichi.

His point left the priestess looking slightly confused.

“Well, if the criteria was only mastery of swordsmanship or magic, there’d probably be many more people capable of becoming heroes, but when you think about the courage and purity needed in order to be chosen…”

“Are you saying some people are skilled enough and still not chosen by her?” asked Shinichi.

He reworded his initial question, sensing it was difficult for her to answer, and the priestess leaned in to prevent others from overhearing.

“Being chosen as a hero is one of the greatest honors. Those aspiring for high positions in the church, like a cardinal or archbishop, must receive the Goddess’s blessing. But if they aren’t chosen… You know where this is going, right?” she asked.

There were many people who didn’t seek the Goddess’s blessing out of fear they might be labeled as impure and talked about behind their backs. It’d be a particularly hard blow for those in positions of power or those vulnerable to rumors, such as the royal family. It would also close off possibilities for future advancement for priests, as it would serve as proof she had rejected them. In the worst-case scenario, they’d be forced to leave the church—a death sentence, in essence. These risks would explain why more people didn’t aim to become heroes, despite the obvious benefit of resurrection without limitations.

Would it be like being excommunicated from the church? I guess that’d be scary…

When someone volunteered themselves as a hero, they theoretically had the necessary skills and resulting achievements. Yet, they could be branded as “virtueless” in seconds and lose everything they’d worked for, which was a huge gamble with pretty poor odds.

The knight and his party must have been high rollers.

Though now, that knight was on the brink of destruction with no future prospects or a way to receive his title as an earl.

While Shinichi was deep in thought, Celes let out a huge sigh of relief next to him.

“I’m relieved you have no chance of becoming a hero and betraying us.”

“Yeah, yeah, I’m a twisted bastard. Whatever.” By this point, Shinichi was used to letting Celes’s spiteful comments go and stood from his chair.

“Thank you for speaking with us. One last thing: This might be rude of me to ask but…does the Goddess really look like that statue?”

“Excuse me?” For a moment, the priestess seemed at a loss for words, staring back with a blank look on her face, but she regained her composure and smiled. “Unfortunately, I haven’t been blessed with the opportunity to see our Divine Goddess, so I can’t say for sure.”

“Oh, I see.”

“However, the statue in the Archbasilica, which serves as a model for all other statues of the Goddess, was carved by the first pope, who’s said to have been taught directly by the Goddess.”

“I see. What a beautiful story. I’ll share it with the other villagers.” When Shinichi finished expressing his thanks, he turned his back on the priestess and the statue to leave.

As the two made to depart the church, a man in his thirties walked up to them with a crowd of clergymen in tow. His robes were simple but more impressive than others in the church. He raised his hand and smiled to devotees who bowed their heads as he passed by. Shinichi followed their lead, shuffling to the side to leave the aisle open and bowing his head in a position that would let him hide Celes. The man didn’t seem to notice the maid in the shadows and walked by them as he continued to smile genially.

Hmm…

Shinichi saw something just before the man walked past him. Inside his right palm, there was the golden symbol of the Goddess.

So he must be the seventh hero and the highest-ranking church member here.

It was somewhat inconvenient that the last hero was also someone who could use the Resurrection spell, but it seemed he had neither the capacity to resurrect the remaining hundreds of dead soldiers nor the time to advance to the King’s castle.

It seems our only real threat is that girl, Arian.

Shinichi continued calculating as he left the church and looked up at the blue sky.

“Were you able to extract the information you needed?” asked Celes.

“About seventy percent of it.” Shinichi answered Celes’s question half-heartedly and continued his musings.

I’d hoped to see a Goddess’s hero get resurrected, but I guess that’s asking for too much.

Though he delighted in his twisted fantasy of torturing the knight’s party to reveal more information or conducting human experimentations on them, his expression started to cloud over.

I would’ve seemed too suspicious if I’d asked that priestess how the heroes are resurrected. Then again, she probably would’ve said something cheesy like “by the Goddess’s power.”

It’s possible that no one—not the priestess or the other members of clergy, not a single other human being—knew the truth besides the Goddess and Her heroes.

I don’t know if this Goddess Elazonia is a single intelligent being or a larger formless system in place, but one thing I do know is that someone or something exists.

Nobody had met the Goddess. But the heroes were capable of resurrection. And—

The Goddess can do something the King can’t. She can bring people back to life from nothing. Does that mean she’s more powerful than he is?

Scared by his own suspicions, Shinichi clenched his jaw to keep himself from trembling. He didn’t even know exactly how powerful the King was, except that he was as powerful as a small-scale weapon of mass destruction. He had more than enough power to cause wide-scale devastation. Could there be a deity that could surpass him?

If you’re out there, please don’t reveal yourself.

At this point, there didn’t seem to be any chance of the Goddess appearing, but what would happen if a situation arose where humanity teetered on the brink of annihilation?

I need to make sure things don’t get out of hand for the sake of the humans and the demons.

Sometime earlier, Rino had told him that if the humans attacked the demon world, the demons would annihilate humankind in retaliation, but it might just be that the demons would be the ones to find themselves on the brink of total destruction.

“What do we do next?” asked Celes.

“Uh, yeah.” Shaken from his thoughts, Shinichi focused on the task at hand. He tried to speak optimistically. “We have a haiku where I’m from: A computer is / nothing more than just a box / if the OS breaks.”

“Huh…?”

“To put it in simpler terms, everything’s over when you sever the head issuing the orders,” he said, making a perfunctory effort to reword the saying as he turned his gaze to the large castle next to the church. “In other words, let’s overthrow their king.”

Presumably, it was their king giving the orders to attack the demons. There’d be no need to fight the heroes if they defeated the ruler of Boar Kingdom.

“We can win without fighting. This is the most basic strategy of war,” he said.

“You put all this effort into investigating the heroes to reach this conclusion?” asked Celes.

“It’s because I investigated them. It’s pointless to take on the heroes if we can’t get rid of whatever trick they’re using to resurrect,” replied Shinichi.

If all went according to plan, it wouldn’t matter if more heroes came along if they kept the King in check and could preserve the peace at the Demon King’s castle.

“But can we defeat their king?” Celes sounded concerned. To the basic mind-set of a demon, it was natural to think the king was the most powerful being, but Shinichi nodded to reassure her.

“It’ll be fine. It’s not like we’re going to get into a fistfight.”

“What?”

“A fight between politicians can be settled with talk and this right here.” Shinichi slipped a silver coin out of the heavy pouch hanging at his hip. “You can do anything as long as you have money. Long live capitalism!”

“That’s so dirty,” said Celes coldly. She might not have known anything about human society, but she knew this as a fact.

Every morning, Tortoise IV began his daily duties by making an appearance in front of an audience. He met with the lower-ranking nobility, the guilds that supported the city’s economy, and ambassadors from other countries. He listened to their suggestions and requests and provided answers after consulting with his ministers.

He always thought it’d be faster to get rid of this stiflingly formal affair and deal with their issues by letter, but part of his duty was to act with a particular degree of pomp and circumstance in front of them.

Not that a puppet of the church has a say in anything.

Inside his mind, Tortoise IV let out a heavy sigh and held on to his last shred of self-respect as he took his seat on the throne with performative regal grace.

“Who do we have first today?” he asked.

“Yes. About that…,” said the prime minister, looking puzzled at the parchment in his hand. “It seems to be a merchant called Manju from the Daifuku village.”

“A village merchant? If it’s about trade, he should contact the guild.”

The king wasn’t so idle that he had time to meet one-on-one with merchants.

The minister knew that, of course, but pressed on. “Yes, but to express his desire to meet directly with Your Highness, he sent this…” Blinking rapidly, he signaled two guards to carry a large chest forward. They set the chest down in front of the king with a heavy thump and gently opened the lid.

The gold inside reflected an immense light, filling the audience chamber and momentarily dazzling everyone.

“What?! The chest’s filled with gold bars?!” exclaimed the king.

“The contents have been tested. It’s all pure gold—no other metals mixed in.”

Converted to the country’s currency, its contents were the equivalent of over one hundred thousand gold coins. Considering the yearly pay of a solider was fifteen gold coins, it was an absurdly large amount of money.

“He said he gives it as a gift in hopes of your appearance, regardless of your answer.”

“Absurd! Who exactly is this person?!”

The king’s surprise was not without reason. The guild leaders and ambassadors had offered gifts to appease him in the past, but their combined monetary worth wouldn’t even make up one hundredth of what was within this chest. It was customary for the value to be in proportion to the request, but this merchant called Manju had just given a mountain of gold to meet with the king.

“He can’t possibly be some village merchant. Who is he? Where is he actually from?” inquired the king.

“Nobody in the Merchants’ Guild has heard of him…”

Merchants were known to receive information faster than nobles and knights. If they didn’t know who he was, then no one in Boar Kingdom did.

“Your Highness, what shall we do?”

“Hmmm…” Tortoise IV groaned, deep in thought.

This merchant was obviously suspicious, likely an agent from one of the other countries aiming to take over Boar Kingdom. Despite this, the king was tempted to devour this forbidden fruit, even while knowing it was poisonous. In front of him, the gold glittered and winked as if to guarantee there was more where this came from. Boar Kingdom was not so rich that he could reject such an offer without at least considering it first.

If only half our treasury hadn’t been drained out by our attempts to resurrect the fallen soldiers…

The country had made large donations to the church in order to cover the costs of resurrecting the soldiers who had fallen at the hands of the Demon King. Half the soldiers needed to be taken to churches in neighboring countries, which meant the king needed to prepare dozens of horse-drawn carriages. For some reason, he was burdened with this responsibility, though Bishop Hube had originally insisted—no, forced him—to deploy the troops.

To take it one step further, he was starting to suspect the church might have waged war on the demons in order to receive more donations and weaken the power of his kingdom.

Is this merchant one of the church’s pawns?

Tortoise IV glanced furtively at Bishop Hube, standing next to him and looking at the gold with unchanging serenity.

“Bring him in,” ordered the king.

He wouldn’t know if it was a trap or who sent him until he met the man.

Obeying his request, the minister brought the merchant to stand in front of his throne. Wearing modest clothing, he was a middle-aged man of average build, average height, and no distinguishing features. Behind him, however, was a blue-haired maid so beautiful that gazing upon her felt like looking at the world for the first time.

“Your Excellency, King Tortoise IV, I’m truly honored to be in your presence,” said the merchant.

“It’s my pleasure. Raise your head,” said the king, responding with routine formality. The merchant had respectfully taken a knee and slipped his head into a bow. “Well, what did you wish to speak about?”

“Yes, I wish to request Your Highness’s permission to open trade,” stated the merchant.

“Trade? If that’s the case, would it not be faster to discuss this with the Merchants’ Guild?”

If he approached them with that amount of money, the guild would certainly welcome him with open arms. However, the middle-aged merchant Manju gently shook his head.

“Unfortunately, I cannot begin this trade without Your Highness’s approval.”

“I don’t understand. What exactly is it that you wish to do?”

The man answered with a tiny, evil smirk after confirming he’d grabbed the monarch’s attention.

“I wish to open trade with the demons in Dog Valley.”

“Wh-what?!”

The king, the minister, the ambassadors, and even the guards were all shocked by the merchant’s words. Even Bishop Hube opened his eyes wide in surprise.

“Are you insane? Are you seriously asking to open trade with the demons?!” cried the king.

“I’m perfectly sane. But sanity isn’t what makes a merchant successful,” he replied, flashing a fearless smile to the flustered Tortoise IV. “I’ve already heard the rumors that the demons are horrifying. However, I question whether or not they’re truly our enemies.”

“Wh-what do you mean?!”

The king’s shoulders unconsciously shook, suggesting the same exact thought had crossed his mind. Seeing this, the merchant seemed satisfied and continued.

“Though they faced six thousand soldiers and killed half of them, the demons haven’t made further advances against Boar Kingdom, right? If they’re truly as powerful as rumored, they probably could take the country in three days if they tried.”

“Mm-hmm…”

“And if all that’s true, there’s only one explanation. The demons in Dog Valley don’t see us as an enemy. At the very least, it means they have no desire to destroy Boar Kingdom.”

“Wha—?!”

Though Tortoise IV raised his voice in surprise, he was convinced because he’d already come to the same conclusions earlier. This, however, wasn’t something that could be taken lightly.

“We’re talking about the evil demons, the kin of the Evil God who was defeated by the Gods and driven to the depths of the earth. It’s only expected they find us, the children of the Gods, abhorrent!” Tortoise IV deflected the merchant’s argument by referencing this well-known folklore. He held it in front of him like a shield.

However, the mysterious man simply shook his head slowly, seemingly unfazed.

“Perhaps the legends were wrong. Well, maybe the demons are evil beings. But just as humans are rarely born evil, perhaps the demons in Dog Valley are friendly.”

“That can’t possibly be…”

“They executed a controlled attack, killing only half of the six thousand soldiers in such a way that they could be resurrected. They’ve been attacked from all sides yet haven’t retaliated. Instead, they remain in the valley as recluses… Do you not see these facts alone are enough to make this explanation seem reasonable?”

“……”

Tortoise IV was silent, faced with the reality of their situation, far away from vague legends and folklore.

Could it be true? Could these demons not be as evil as the legends say?

Had they simply been blinded by fear of the Demon King thrashing their army and his extreme strength? If he cast aside his prejudices and assumptions, the merchant’s explanation certainly seemed plausible.

“I mean, even though they haven’t advanced into our territory, they killed a large number of the kingdom’s soldiers and drove away the heroes. Obviously, we can’t trust them so easily. Maybe they have some hidden motive as to why they haven’t attacked us yet,” continued the merchant.

“Hmm.”

“This is why I’d like to make first contact with the demons through the guise of trade and attempt to learn their true intentions.”

“Hmm…”

There was some truth in the merchant’s words. The king had nothing to lose from this plan.

“But what’s in it for you?” he asked, and the merchant flashed another sinister smile.

“If I’m able to successfully open trade with the demons, I’ll obtain items and skills known only to them. I imagine that’d be worth a fortune hundreds of times more than what I’ve given you.”

“Yes, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they’ll give you what you seek,” rebuffed the king.

“Trading’s a gamble. It’s necessary to accept the risk of failure. Even if there are no goods or skills, there’s sure to be one thing even more valuable.”

“And what’s that?”

He smirked wickedly at the deeply interested king hanging on the edge of his seat.

“A connection to insurmountable strength, the power to win against armies of tens of thousands of soldiers—a connection to the Demon King.”

“What—?!”

Everyone in the audience chamber was stunned by the answer. What the merchant was suggesting was dangerous and sacrilegious yet so incredibly tempting.

“If the Demon King became our ally, you could destroy and conquer other countries. Boar Kingdom could become one large, unified kingdom. Do you not dream of creating the Boar Empire?”

“The Boar Empire… I could be an emperor…?” he speculated, stunned.

“Even if it doesn’t go that well, you could still form an alliance with the Demon King, putting a check on enemy countries and preventing them from attacking us. I’m not well educated in such matters, so I can’t be certain, but have we not been attacked by other countries two or three times in the past?”

“Hmm…”

The merchant’s words were as sweet and dangerous as nectar, and they ate away at Tortoise IV’s heart.

“Say that I fail. All that you would’ve lost is one idiot merchant. Your Highness, please permit me to trade with the demons,” pleaded the merchant, bringing his request to a close as he bowed his head once again.

His words were backed by reason. Boar Kingdom had nothing to lose and everything to gain. If it were up to him, the king would have no reason to consider this request further.

“I—I—”

Clap, clap, clap.

The king’s response was interrupted by the sound of a dry clap.

The noise came from someone standing next to the king, a man with an unwaveringly saintly smile—the Goddess’s bishop.

“A wonderful performance, you heretical merchant,” he said.

“Heretical?” asked the man, his eyebrows raising in surprise.

Bishop Hube’s smile deepened as if to suggest that much was obvious.

“To join hands with the enemy for money, to sleep with the vile demons who have wronged Elazonia, the Goddess of Light… If that’s not stabbing our Goddess—no, all humanity—in the back, what is it?” accused Bishop Hube, casting his gaze at everyone in the audience chamber.

The look in his eyes said more than his words: If you went against the Goddess’s teachings, you could kiss your life good-bye. For the rest of your life, your wounds would go unmended, your illnesses left uncured, and worst of all, you wouldn’t be brought back to life in the face of death.

“It’s time for Shinichi’s three-minute training! Yay!” Shinichi yelled excitedly.

“Yay!” mimicked Rino happily.

“…What’s this?” inquired Celes, abandoning her normally judgmental attitude.

To avoid suspicion, Shinichi and Celes had left the city as the merchant and his maid, casting the Fly spell in the middle of the night once they were on a southern road near Boar Kingdom. It was the day after their return to the Demon King’s castle.

“Hey, Rino, is it all right for you to play here?” asked Shinichi.

“Yup! Daddy’s busy with work, so it’d make me so very happy if I could play with you!”

“…A Demon King’s work? Like paperwork and stuff?” Shinichi sounded skeptical.

“Paperwork? Um, you know Daddy’s job is to beat up the bad guys and keep getting stronger, right?”

“Okay! You know what? That doesn’t even surprise me anymore!” said Shinichi, forcing out an energetic laugh to fake some enthusiasm. “Actually, I’m going to do the same thing: train to get stronger. You think you could help me out, Rino?”

“You can count on me!”

“Why exactly are you suddenly interested in becoming stronger?” interrupted Celes sharply, finally returning to her senses.

“I’m preparing to defeat the heroes,” replied Shinichi, also reverting to his normal self.

“So you fully admit you’ll fail if you continue to be weak?”

“Yep. Also, I feel like I’ll die outright if I don’t train a bit,” Shinichi admitted.

Since he was the Demon King’s advisor, the King or Celes would probably bring him back using the Resurrection spell if he died. But if things kept escalating, someone was going to want him dead permanently. So a little preparation seemed important.

“Okay, but one day of training isn’t going to change anything.” Celes raised a valid concern.

Just as on Earth, the quickest path to strength was slow but intense regular training. But Shinichi was starting to learn rules could be bent with human intellect and magic.

“You’ll see in a minute. Rino, can you cast the Pain Block spell?” Shinichi requested.

“Yes! It’s the first type of magic we learn. Daddy says we must fight with all our strength till the moment before we die.”

“Ah…um, sure. Could you cast that on me?”

“Yes! Mm!” said Rino as she puffed out her cheeks. Adorably calling upon her powers, she chanted, “Pain, pain, go away, come again another day! Pain Block!”

“Wait, that cute incantation was a spell?” asked Shinichi, thinking of the time Celes cast Pain Block so he could burn his face. She’d used a much simpler incantation.

“Yep, spells don’t have any set incantations, so they’re different depending on the caster,” related Rino.

“I see,” Shinichi said as a light sprang from Rino’s palms and enveloped his body. He pinched his arms, and sure enough, he couldn’t feel any pain. “All right, now for some high-speed strength training.”

Shinichi placed both hands on the ground and started doing push-ups.

“One, two, three… This is amazing! I feel like I could go on forever.”

Were he in his natural state, his chest and arms would go numb after twenty push-ups, and he’d reach his limit just before forty. But that number came and went. He couldn’t feel anything but did, however, reach a physical limit where he just couldn’t do any more.

“One hundred and two, one hundred and three… Augh, that might be it.” Shinichi was unable to move his body no matter how hard he tried. He’d used all his strength doing push-ups. Collapsing on the ground, he pulled up his shirt to look at his pectoral muscles, red and swollen. He was bleeding internally after tearing a muscle by pushing it past its limits.

“Ah, that looks like it hurts.” Rino winced.

“If I didn’t have that spell on me, I probably would’ve died from the pain.”

For a motivated athlete, this amount of training was entirely possible on Earth, but his next trick was only possible in a fantasy world.

“Rino, can you cast a spell to heal my torn muscles? I don’t want a spell that’ll turn back time or reconstruct my body or something. I want something that’ll increase my natural healing process.”

“Ah, um, I don’t think I understand,” stammered Rino, confused and shaking her head at Shinichi’s complicated explanation.

Celes let out a heavy sigh and came over to sit down next to Shinichi.

“What if I improve your body’s restorative capacity?” she suggested.

“Ah, that would be perfect.”

“All right. Self-Healing Power Boost!” she said, casting the spell by placing her palms on Shinichi’s swollen chest. A colorless energy flowed from Celes’s hands and ran through his body. His chest was on fire as all the cells reproduced at an abnormally fast pace.

“Ooh, I can see it healing!”

The internal bleeding would’ve normally taken at least three days to heal, but it completely vanished in about a minute. That’s not the only thing the magic did.

“Now we’ll see if my idea works. One, two, three…,” said Shinichi as he started doing push-ups again once his muscles were fully recovered.

And he kept going, even after he hit his previous limit of 103.

“One hundred and twenty, one hundred and twenty-one… I can still move! It worked!”

“What? Did you get stronger just by doing that?!” asked Rino in shock. Shinichi didn’t stop his push-ups to explain in more detail.

“It’s called post-workout recovery. Muscles get stronger because they repair themselves after their fibers are broken. Normally, you’d need to rest for like two or three days for it to fully heal, but I sped that process up with magic,” explained Shinichi, reaching his new limit of one hundred fifty push-ups.

Celes cast the spell again, and Shinichi’s muscles healed again, becoming stronger.

“It’s not high-speed leveling up, it’s high-speed strength training. Man, getting strong is fun!”

“You’re cheating again. Do you ever feel bad for those who put in constant and steady effort?” asked Celes.

“Searching for the most efficient training method is its own kind of effort. It doesn’t take much effort to stop thinking and do the same thing over and over again,” replied Shinichi.

“And how do you really feel?”

“I love that I can cheat and take the easy way and still manage to do better than others!”

“You degenerate.”

Shinichi started doing squats, enduring the insults to which he’d become accustomed.

“Rino, I’m sorry to ask you this, but could you run to get me some food and something to drink? I’ll start to lose mass if I don’t get enough nutrients, even with all this exercise and muscle restoration.”

“Yep! I’ll go prepare a feast for you!” beamed Rino, excited he was relying on her. She ran off toward the dining hall.

“Wow, she’s such a good kid! Nothing like the Demon King at all.”

“If you touch her—,” warned Celes.

“Yeah, yeah, I know what’ll happen. But that’s beside the point—I won’t do anything!”

“……”

“What’s with that look? You know what? I know exactly what you’re thinking: That’s something that a pedophile would say.”

“That’s something that a pedophile would say.”

“So I was right? That’s what you’ve been thinking all along?!” Shinichi’s cry carried a bit more force than he’d intended, which broke them out of their normal comedic banter. Shinichi had a feeling the maid would enjoy manzai-style comedy.

“Okay, on a serious note, I think Rino’s cute and all, but there’s seriously no chance of anything romantic happening between us.”

Though it was entirely possible Rino was actually older than Shinichi, as they were different species, it still was out of the question. He couldn’t shake the moral standards of his home country.

“I don’t have any siblings, so I just see her as a little sister. I want to spoil her, that’s all.”

“…As do I,” agreed Celes, uncharacteristically responding in a serious tone. In fact, her face seemed a little softer. Her relationship with Rino was beyond that of a maid and her master’s daughter, and she seemed to really care about her.

“Just to be clear, I’m more into big boobs, so I actually prefer busty women like you, Celes!” declared Shinichi, intentionally saying something rude to break out of this embarrassingly tender moment. He’d thought she’d call him out for sexual harassment or being a pervert, but—

“……” Celes said nothing, turning her face from Shinichi and looking down.

“Um, Celes?”

“……”

“Are you blushing, by chance?”

“Hyper Gravity!”

“Ah?!”

Shinichi’s body suddenly became so heavy he was unable to remain standing and sprawled on the floor like he’d been nailed down.

“I am going to help Lady Rino. I will be back shortly,” quipped Celes.

“No, wait—before you go! Could you undo…?”

“It’s my gift to you. Good luck on your training.” Celes smiled like a flower in full bloom as she left the room. Just before the doors closed, though, she looked back at Shinichi as if he were a pig awaiting slaughter.

“She’s…surprisingly innocent…”

Shinichi found this glimpse of a cuter Celes somewhat endearing, but the bones in his body were starting to make a horrendous creaking sound, and he prepared himself for his first death.

The day after becoming Arian’s companion, Shinichi, Arian, and Celes grabbed a table in the tavern to discuss their plan of action.

“First, we need to get you a weapon,” said Shinichi.

“Uh, a weapon?” Arian tilted her head in surprise as she sucked on a candy. Shinichi had given her some because he knew one of the most basic ways to someone’s heart was through his or her stomach.

“Yeah, your weapon’s too weak compared to your strength,” he asserted.

“Really?” Arian pulled her blade from its sheath at her hip and stared at it.

Her two-handed sword was forged from iron and slightly shorter than a normal blade, for her to swing it in a dense forest, but thick so it could bear her strength. The instrument was sturdy but heavy with a poor cutting edge. In reality, it was closer to a thin club than a real sword.

“You’ve worked so hard to get strong, but your weapon’s holding you back. So we have to get you something better.”

“Hmm, now that you mention it…,” considered Arian, aware of the importance of good weaponry from her experience fighting monsters.

Until now, she’d thought as long as it was strong enough not to break, any weapon was fine. After all, she was too strong to have experienced a critical fight and didn’t really have an attachment to material things.

“You’d be so much stronger if you had a light, sharp sword,” concluded Shinichi.

“But I’m not sure that’d actually make me ‘stronger,’” replied Arian.

“This is why you’re a moron!”

“What—?!”

Shinichi crossed his arms smugly and started lecturing Arian, who was confused by his sudden outburst.

“Strength is more than swinging your sword to build muscle or casting magic spells to increase your magical power. Strength is also about having the necessary skills to gather information and finding the right equipment.”

“R-r-really?”

“For example, I heard you scratched the Demon King when you fought him.”

“Uh-huh.”

“What do you think would’ve happened if you’d used a magic sword that could cut through anything rather than this piece of junk?”

“Um…”

“Yeah, you might have won. Or at least, you would’ve given him a good fight.”

There’s the saying that only a poor craftsman blames his tools for his lack of ability, but it’d be more accurate to say a skilled craftsman knows how to choose the right tools.

“Say you give an unskilled fighter an excellent weapon: They wouldn’t know the difference. But if we gave it to you, you’d be like a demon with a crowbar.”

“Y-yeah!” Arian nodded, persuaded not by the two unfamiliar idioms but by Shinichi’s assertiveness.

“So do you have enough money to buy a magic sword?”

“Money? Well, I have a little saved…,” muttered Arian quietly as the owner of the tavern walked up with their food and overheard their conversation.

He responded with a short sigh.

“Son, do you have any idea how much a magic sword costs?” he asked sternly.

“Not at all,” replied Shinichi.

“The cheapest you’ll find is about a thousand gold pieces.”

“Whaaa—?!” Arian let out a shriek. A soldier’s yearly pay was fifteen gold coins. “E-even if I scrounged for every last coin of mine, I wouldn’t even have fifty!” she said.

“That’s not going to work, then,” said Shinichi lightly as he did some mental math.

Would that convert to about a hundred million yen? Some katana go for a couple billion, so I guess that makes sense. I don’t think we’re being swindled or anything.

Then again, the value of works of art differed from that of items that served a practical use. His idea of pricing didn’t apply to this world, so he couldn’t make any generalizations.

“Anyway,” continued the owner, “there aren’t many folks who can make a magic sword anymore. The swords are so rare that, even if you had the money, no one’d want to give theirs up.”

“Oh, really?” asked Shinichi.

“You mean to tell me you didn’t know any of this and just casually suggested getting a magic sword?” inquired the owner, sighing again in exasperation.

Shinichi smiled and scratched his head as he sent a telepathic message to the maid next to him, eating her dark bread without a care for the world.

“Celes, are magic swords rare in the demon world, too?”

“No, not particularly. The dvergr make them every day,” she responded.

“Ah, I see…”

“Do you know the hoe Kalbi uses? The dvergr made that, too.”

“A magical hoe?! Oh man, I want one!” Shinichi insisted energetically.

What the demon world lacked in food quality, they definitely made up for in technological advancements.

“But the King’s fists are far stronger than their magical weapons. No matter how much effort the dvergr put in, their weapons all end up collecting dust in our shed.”

“That’s really sad…” Shinichi felt sympathetic toward the dvergr, though he hadn’t met any of them yet. At the same time, he was fired up, admiring how training could lead to great strength.

Thanks to their conversation, he had an idea for the next part of their plan.

“What should we do? We don’t have time to earn a thousand gold coins…,” muttered Arian glumly.

“Don’t worry, I’ve got a good idea!” Shinichi beamed with a sweet smile. He nudged her shoulder as he said, “I actually heard about a sword entombed in a cave.”

“Ah, you did?!”

“Yeah, and I happened to overhear the location of the cave. It’s watched over by a nefarious guardian, so no one dared go there and it has long since been forgotten.”

“Wow, so the magic sword’s still there!” Arian’s eyes sparkling with excitement as she digested his story.

“Which means we’ll need to prepare for a trip to get the magic sword.”

“Yeah, just give me a second, and I’ll get ready!” said Arian before dashing up to the second floor. Shinichi smiled and waved after her while the owner of the tavern watched and sighed for the third time that day.

“Son, when I first saw you, I thought you were a pathetic, scrawny boy. Just when I thought you’d beaten Miss Arian and joined forces with her, now you’re going off on a wild adventure for a magic sword? You’re a strange one,” observed the owner.

“Strange is my middle name,” replied Shinichi.

“Cut the BS. And finish what’s on your plate.” The innkeeper smacked Shinichi upside the head with his tray. Shinichi sheepishly started eating his cold soup.

“…Do you think he caught on to our lie?” asked Shinichi.

“I’m just worried an innocent girl is being fooled by a despicable man,” said Celes.

“Well then, you have nothing to worry about— Hey!” Shinichi quietly added that last interjection to prevent the owner from overhearing their conversation.

“When exactly did you discover a cave with a magic sword?” asked Celes.

“Never. I’d like to know about it if there is one,” replied Shinichi.

“…What?” Yet again, Celes found herself unable to follow his meaning. Her stone-cold expression lacked any emotion.

Shinichi replied with a familiar smirk.

“There is no cave. We’re going to make one. In fact, we’re going to make a heart-thumping, hair-raising dungeon and make Arian’s opinion of me skyrocket to the ether.”

“Uh-huh…”

Baffled by his explanation, Celes gave up trying to think about it further.

“The weather’s so nice today! It’s the perfect day for a trip!”

“Yeah, it’s almost a bit too warm.”

Together, the three of them left Boar Kingdom after buying preserved foods and other travel supplies and headed westward toward the mountains.

“You seem more upbeat than usual. Are you antsy to get that magic sword?” asked Shinichi.

“It’s not that. It’s just been a long time since I’ve gone on a trip with anyone, so I’m really excited,” replied Arian.

“Ah…”

“Why are you looking at me with pity?! I know lots of people now!”

“The way you said ‘now’ and ‘know people’ really makes you sound like a loner…”

“Ugh…”

Arian began sulking, blinking back tears, as Shinichi patted her shoulder compassionately.

“Why are you picking on her? Is it so you can make her your sex slave?” asked a smug voice.

“This isn’t going to turn into smut!” Shinichi shot back at Celes’s telepathic query before comforting the hero.

“Well, now we’re team members and friends, so you’re not alone anymore,” he said reassuringly.

“Y-yeah…” Arian turned red and looked down as Shinichi casually grabbed her hand. She squeezed his hand back as if to check his temperature.

“……”

“Um, Celes? This is all for the King, you know. If you wouldn’t mind, could you please stop glaring at me?” asked Shinichi, unable to endure the icy cold stare. She sighed and changed the subject.

“You mentioned we’d be making a cave that entombs a magic sword. Care to explain how and why you’re doing this?”

“Ah, can you telepathically connect us to the King so I can explain?”

“With the King? One moment, please.”

Unlike Shinichi, Celes only concentrated for ten seconds to get them on the same mental frequency with the King, dozens of miles away.

“Celes, Shinichi, how are things going?”

“It’s going. We’re still in the middle of preparing to entice the hero to betray humankind.” Shinichi explained his strategy to become close to Arian before persuading her to give up the fight against them.

“As part of that strategy, we’re heading to the western mountainside. I want you to use your magic to carve a cave and put a spare magic sword in there.”

“Hmm, I could do that much.” The King explained he used to dig mountains into flat plains as part of his training. He nonchalantly spoke of his terrifying deeds like they were nothing particularly special before asking, “Will that not just make the hero stronger, though?”

“The sword doesn’t need to be so strong that it poses a threat to you. It just needs to be better than her iron one. I mean, the sword’s just there to entice the hero and shift our power dynamic so it looks like we’re relying on her. The real strategy lies in the ‘trap’ in the cave itself.”

“Ha, tell me more,” laughed the King, knowing Shinichi had another morally questionable plan.

Shinichi’s internal grin widened as he explained: “I want Arian to be caught in a trap in a compromising situation. Then I’ll come along and gallantly save her, and she’ll be all like, OMG, sleep with me. Basically, she’s bound to fall in love with me.”

It was actually a phenomenon called “misattribution of arousal,” where a person mistakes a heart racing from fear for the throbbing feeling of love.

“Do you really believe it’ll go that well?” asked the King, incredulous.

“Well, it might be going a bit far to say she’ll fall in love with me, but she’s more likely to listen to someone who’s saved her life, right?”

This would probably have an enormous effect on an honest person like Arian. As proof, Shinichi put his telepathic conference call on hold to strike up a conversation with the girl next to him.

“By the way, wasn’t it that bishop who invited you to become a hero?”

“Yep. It’s all thanks to Bishop Hube that I received the Goddess’s blessing.”

“Yeah?”

“Even after I became a hero, he’s always checking up on me, treating me to dinner. He’s really a great person. I’ve always thought this is what it might feel like to have your dad around, hee-hee.”

“Oh, that’s really nice of him.”

“Yep! That’s why I have to work extra hard to defeat the Demon King for the bishop’s sake.”

“Yeah.”

Shinichi returned to his conversation with the King, while occasionally interjecting a half-hearted response to his exchange with Arian.

“As you just saw, Arian easily feels indebted to others. But she needs to feel more indebted to me than the bishop. Otherwise, any attempt to persuade her will fail.”

“I understand that, but…,” started Celes.

“If I’m not mistaken, it seems the bishop or whatever has hardly done much for her.” The King finished Celes’s thought. He was right: Bishop Hube hadn’t really done anything of importance.

All the bishop did was invite her to receive her blessing. She was successful because of her own skill and personality. Also, he probably had an ulterior motive—getting control of a very powerful pawn. As for checking in on her at every opportunity and taking her out for food, well, it’s obvious this middle-aged man had uncouth desires for a cute young girl. If he’d been in Japan, someone would have called the cops.

“This hero is…what you might call…simple. You know. Naive,” offered Celes.

“Yeah, I agree…,” said Shinichi.

As her enemy, he was grateful for Arian’s naiveté, if not slightly concerned about her future.

“Anyway, what type of trap do you have in mind?” asked the King.

“Well, I think it’d be more convenient if the two of us were alone…,” started Shinichi. He hadn’t forgotten his conversation with the hero, whose hand he was still holding, and said, “You know, I feel really safe when I’m with you.”

“Oh, r-r-really?”

“I think you’re the first person I’ve been able to let loose with.”

“Yeah?”

“I’m so glad we’ve become teammates, no—friends.”

“Hee-hee-hee, I’m glad we’re friends, too!”

Arian didn’t care about the respect, responsibility, or being relied on as a hero. As a loner, she wanted friendship: It was tantalizing like nectar, far sweeter than the candy Shinichi had given her and far harder to resist.

“…You’re really sick,” said Celes so quietly no one could hear.

Shinichi was too preoccupied with his conversation with the Demon King that he neither saw nor wondered what kind of expression she made as she said this.

“Ah, here it is. The cave that holds the magic sword.”

After camping in the forest overnight, the three finally reached a large hole on the side of a mountain.

“Is this it? It seems kind of new…,” said Arian, tilting her head to the side skeptically. The cave looked like it’d been forcefully hewn in the past day or two. There was virtually no moss on the bare rocks.

“I think it’s all in your head. Anyway, let’s go,” suggested Shinichi.

“Yeah!” Arian forgot her concerns as her new friend pulled her forward, hand in hand. They stepped into the dark hole.

“Please watch your step,” said Celes, following behind the two and casting a Light spell.

“You know, this is the first time I’ve ever explored a cave,” exclaimed Arian.

“Really? Didn’t you hunt monsters for a living? I thought you would’ve defeated monsters sleeping in caves and taken their loot or something,” replied Shinichi.

“I’m not a burglar! I only fought monsters that came near civilization or threatened us. Besides, there aren’t really that many of them.”

She went on to explain that monsters are mutated animals that absorbed magical power, but they were still intellectually the same as normal animals. Consequently, they didn’t exactly have great treasures or loot that humans might want.

“Yeah, but you’re so strong! Don’t you ever dream of defeating a dragon and getting superrich or something?” asked Shinichi.

According to Celes, dragons were as strong as—if not stronger than—the King. They weren’t creatures that could be easily defeated, but it’d be a task worth trying for one of the Goddess’s heroes. At least, that’s what Shinichi thought. He didn’t mean anything more than to use this as a conversation topic, but—

“…I suppose,” said Arian vaguely, a shadow suddenly falling over her face.

“Huh? Did I say something offensive?” whispered Shinichi to Celes.

“Maybe she’s scared of reptiles?” Celes offered without much conviction.

They looked at each other, not knowing what was wrong.

Arian put in a lot of effort to fake excitement to hide her true feelings and exclaimed, “Ah, I see something!”

Blocking their way forward was an uneven door carved from stone. On it, there was a message carved in colloquial terms, so that Arian could also understand.

—ONE MAN AND ONE WOMAN TOGETHER MAY ENTER—

“What’s this?” asked Arian.

The message was a trick to get the two of them alone together. Shinichi would only be able to put on his performance to save Arian if Celes wasn’t there. But Arian didn’t know that, of course.

“I don’t really know. But it looks like only two people can enter. Celes, I’m sorry, but could you wait here?” asked Shinichi.

“As you wish.” Celes delivered her line perfectly. They had practiced beforehand.

After this exchange, Shinichi took Arian’s hand and placed a hand on the stone door.

“All right, let’s go,” he said.

“Y-yeah,” answered Arian somewhat reluctantly. She almost said, You know, this whole thing is kind of like a wedding ceremony, but she turned bright red and kept her mouth shut as she placed her hand on the stone door.

When both of their palms were on the heavy stone partition, it swung open, and the moment they passed through the entryway, the door closed behind them without a sound.

“How does this door work?” asked Shinichi inside his head.

“By using my magic, obviously.” As the creator of the cave, the King replied to his question. “I do not make magic tools, and the dvergr didn’t have time to help me out, so I am using Telekinesis.”

“So a manual automatic door,” joked Shinichi, pretending to move cautiously while remaining intrigued by this simultaneously high- and low-tech door. He moved on to his next question: “So what exactly did you put in here anyway?”

All Shinichi had asked the King to do was to put in something that would get Arian in a tough spot, so he didn’t even know the details yet. But the King just laughed, refusing to answer.

“Ha-ha-ha, I’m going to keep that a surprise until you see it.”

“Okay, I won’t ask any further. But it’s something I can defeat, right?”

“…Oh.”

“Wait, what do you mean by ‘oh’?!” Shinichi was suddenly very uneasy, but there was no time to modify the plan now. They had just arrived at their final destination.

“Look, I think that’s it!” exclaimed Arian.

The narrow path in front of them led to an open space with a single sword in the middle of it all. The sword glittered in the same dazzling light as the holy Excalibur, which selected Arthur as king. Even from the distance, they could see it was a very fine sword.

“How amazing! The sword actually exists!” cried Arian excitedly, dashing out alone to the sword and hastily gripping its handle.

The moment she did, a black, semitranslucent goo fell from above and swallowed her whole.

“Ng…gah—!”

She was shaken by its sudden appearance, struggling frantically to escape the goop, but with every move she made, it wobbled in the opposite direction. It was keen on trapping her.

“A slime?!” shouted Shinichi.

“The worst type, called a gluttony slime. I had some trouble after getting trapped in one in my younger years,” boomed the King in his mind.

“Is this really the time to have a chat?!” shouted Shinichi, accidentally responding to the King out loud. The black goo—the so-called gluttony slime—was beginning to dissolve its prey in front of him.

But for some reason, it started with her clothes.

“No way, slime play?! Nice! All right! Good job!”

“Ga, gabobbb—! (Don’t look—!)”

He was watching one of his top three erotic fantasies play out right in front of him. Shinichi momentarily forgot where he was and what he was supposed to do. He even gave a thumbs-up.

But he didn’t have another moment to spare. This might be a fantasy of his, but he definitely didn’t want to watch her skin, muscles, and internal organs start disintegrating before his eyes. That would be the most terrifying way to die.

“Hang on, I’ll save you!” yelled Shinichi, drawing his sword and slashing the goo with all his might. He was careful not to hit Arian, but it felt like he was cutting through water.

The slime didn’t have much surface tension. For a moment, its body looked like it had been sliced open, but it quickly bounded back to its original shape. What’s more, the tip of the sword started melting, as if it’d been soaked in acid.

“Shit, this thing is actually strong! What the hell?!”

Of course it was strong. The same gluttony slime had given the young Demon King a hard fight, because physical attacks were not effective against its liquid body. The goo was quick to suck in its opponent. It reminded him of the shoggoth in the Cthulhu Mythos—the original slime—which was extremely unpredictable and dangerous.

Bishop Hube first met Arian a year earlier.

“What exactly is wrong with me?!”

“That’s only for the Goddess to know. It’s unfortunate, but I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”

A priest took the young swordsman’s arm and dragged him away from the statue of the Goddess. Watching after them was Bishop Hube, sighing and speaking quietly so no one could hear.

“Failure again.”

Another failure to receive the blessing and become an undying hero.

That was the twentieth person who’d failed since he’d been assigned as bishop of Boar Kingdom two years ago.

“I guess it never goes as one hopes.”

He thought things would be easier after Ruzal and his four companions became heroes, but things never went as one hoped.

“Not even I know your will,” he said to the Goddess.

Though he was a bishop and a hero, he’d never heard the Goddess’s voice and didn’t know the requirements for becoming a hero. There was a stronger chance someone would become a hero if they excelled in martial and magical arts, deeply worshipped the Goddess, and had strong morals.

But even these rules weren’t absolute. This was why so few people voluntarily sought out the Goddess’s blessing, and many refused even if they were invited.

“Things will get complicated if we don’t have more heroes.”

Hube won the dangerous gamble to become a hero only after figuring out the odds were in his favor. This led to his appointment as the bishop of Boar Kingdom when he was in his thirties, which was abnormally young for someone in his position. It was all thanks to his talent and luck: He was undeniably blessed with natural-born ability, capable of mastering high-level spells like Resurrection, and the prior bishop passed away of natural causes at just the right time.

Hube had no intention of stopping now that he’d become bishop, though.

“I’m still looking for a hero who can enforce the Goddess’s power in my place,” he muttered.

There weren’t many ways to achieve distinction within the Goddess’s church. The main path was to improve your magic abilities, travel to remote villages, defeat evil monsters, heal the wounded, resurrect the dead, and spread the Goddess’s message in order to bring more followers to the church. Hube had taken the time to do this and had achieved enough success to rise to his current rank. But he couldn’t rely on his own skills to move up anymore.

He didn’t have time to go gallivanting about on missionary duty. After all, he’d been given the responsibility of his own diocese. Not only did he need to heal numerous people every day, he was also busy making sure the king and lords of his country didn’t act against the Goddess’s will.

One of his only options was to bring in large amounts of money to the church through donations.

The other was discovering heroes and having them defeat monsters. The successes of heroes were also attributed to the bishop who found them. That’s why all bishops, not just Hube, scrambled to gather the most excellent warriors and magic users and make them their own heroes.

“And Ruzal and the others are not very useful,” Hube said in disgust.

Those five were strong if you compared them to your average soldier, but heroes needed to be far more…heroic. They needed to be powerful enough to destroy the legendary dragon that devoured the gods, the evil sealed deep within the earth. If they couldn’t, they’d never be idolized enough to successfully spread the Goddess’s will and make people believe in her.

“It’d take time, but it may be faster to mentor a child.”

Though it was a secret from the masses, it was possible to train someone’s magical power by absorbing spells. This method even worked for someone believed to not have these capabilities. But it only awakened latent magical powers, so not everyone could become a magic user or swordsman.

Not only that but this method required a lot of labor and time. For example, if a high-class magic user like Hube cast magic on someone until he collapsed for consecutive days, it’d take at least three months for one child to be able to use magic. But because he used his magic to heal and resurrect people all day, he didn’t have enough capacity to use magic outside of work. It was questionable whether he’d be able to train one person a year. If all went well, though, that person would become a loyal pawn for Hube and the Goddess.

It’d be a gamble whether or not that person would be chosen as a hero or able to surpass Ruzal, but it was probably better than waiting around for something to fall in his lap.

It was around the time he really started considering that option when he heard the news.

“Bishop, there is something you should know about,” said a single priest, appearing soundlessly behind Hube.

But Hube wasn’t surprised. This priest was their shadow, a spy responsible for taking care of the darker business of the church.

“What is it?” asked Hube.

“A skilled monster hunter has come to town, known simply as Red.”

“Red, huh?” Hube’s brows knitted together slightly in disapproval at the nickname.

According to church dogma, the nefarious underground devils were partial to titles with colors in them like Black Demon King or Silver Demon Queen. Names with colors in them were not received well in the church. Though there were some arrogant fools who’d try to reclaim the title, spouting drivel like, I’m the White Swordsman, even the demons should fear me!

“And this person is a monster hunter?” asked Hube.

Though they made a living defeating dangerous monsters and protecting people, the Goddess’s church didn’t view them very kindly. Not because they were mercenaries, bandits, and other unsavory types who threatened people, but because they cut in on the heroes’ and church’s role of defeating monsters and protecting the peace, necessary to spread the Goddess’s will.

That said, it’s not like they could tell innocent folk to Please kindly let the monsters eat you until the heroes arrive. There weren’t enough heroes to go around, so the church had to turn a blind eye to the monster hunters.

“Well, it’s convenient if you consider it an opportunity to reduce the number of heathens,” said Hube.

Knowing there was nothing to lose, Hube went to the location of the monster hunter, Arian. On an empty street on the fringes of the city, a girl stared wistfully at a happy family walking in the distance as her namesake red hair and scarf blew in the wind.

It was like an electrical current ran through him the moment he saw her profile. He knew she was the hero he’d been waiting for.

“Ms. Arian, right? May I have a moment of your time?” he’d asked her. His cool expression concealed his thundering heart.

Arian seemed a little surprised, but she quickly realized he was a member of the Goddess’s clergy based on his clothing.

“Yes, what can I do for you?” she replied energetically and smiled, not a shred of her loneliness in sight.

Impressed by her strength, the bishop was now far more nervous to speak to her than when he’d received the Goddess’s blessing.

“Will you become a hero of the Goddess, a guardian of the people?”

Arian hesitated at first, but he persuaded her by telling her she’d be respected by everyone and there would be nothing in this world she’d need to fear. After some resistance, she finally accepted his invitation.

And so she became a hero. In order to measure her skills, Hube had her fight in a match against her seniors, Ruzal and his four companions. Despite her disadvantages, she was able to upset the match and secure victory. She’d shown as much promise as he’d hoped, and soon afterward, she was receiving missions directly from the Holy See.

Then the legends came to life, and the wicked demon army of the Blue Demon King appeared in Dog Valley. If she was victorious in her fight against them, Arian’s name would go down in history, and the seat of archbishop, cardinal, and even pope would be within Hube’s grasp.

Yes, their glory was so close at hand. However—

“Bishop, I apologize for bothering you after working so hard.”

The priest’s voice at his ear stopped him from dozing off.

“I’m very sorry, but we should get started soon.”

Now fully awake, he remembered where he was and what he needed to do. He stood from his chair, and after passing through the church’s antechamber, he faced the row of corpses at the end of the aisle. Once his morning duties at the castle were finished, it was his responsibility to tirelessly resurrect them one after another.

“Everyone, your hands, please.”

He joined hands with a dozen members of the clergy, who’d been waiting for him, as they all formed a circle around one of the bodies.

“Our Mother, radiant in the heavens, our shining Goddess Elazonia, please hear our prayers.”

The clergy followed Hube in unified prayer. At the same time, their magical power generated heat, which ran through their joined hands into the bishop’s body. They could transfer and share their magical powers only because they all believed in the same Goddess under the same principles.

Their magic gathered as one, and Hube enacted the miracle.

“Kind and merciful Goddess, grant life to your child one more time. Resurrection.”

The magic power gathered in Hube’s body and radiated out as angelic light, permeating the soldier’s body. The hole in his chest closed in the next moment, and the revived heart began beating again. The dead soldier finally opened his eyes.

“Ah… Where am I?”

“You’re in the Goddess’s cathedral. Thank you for your service,” said Hube, smiling gently at the confused soldier, who’d just woken up for the first time in a few weeks. The bishop then left him in the care of a priestess waiting behind him. He didn’t have time to give a detailed explanation. There were just too many people to take care of.

Just when they’d resurrected six people, the cathedral was filled by the following exchange.

“Shinichi, I’m surprised you’re so devout.”

“Yeah, the massive boobs on the Goddess’s statue really put me in the mood to worship.”

“Oh, you! Don’t say such blasphemous things!”

The two voices rang through the sacred cathedral. One was energetic, the other mean-spirited, and both were completely inappropriate to the setting. Hube didn’t need to look to know who they belonged to. It was the redheaded hero, Arian, and her black-haired companion.

“Ha-ha-ha, maybe yours will get bigger if you prayed more passionately to the Goddess.”

“…I’ve tried.”

“Oops, my bad.”

Arian looked down at her flat chest with a sullen face. Seeing this, the boy apologized in a serious tone and reached for her hand.

“Oh, don’t be mad. I’ll make you some pancakes as an apology,” he said.

“Pancakes?! Those sweet and fluffy things? I love those!” replied Arian.

“Yeah? It’ll have to be after we go to the market on the way back. I want to buy a pen and some parchments. Is that okay?”

“Yeah! But why do you need that? Have you been writing in a diary, too?”

“No, but I’m pretty confident in my drawing skills.”

“You can draw?! Wow, okay, you have to draw me something later!”

“Okay. I’ll draw you, all wet and sticky, getting attacked by the slime.”

“Stop bringing that up already—!”

Arian turned bright red and playfully punched the boy’s chest for teasing her.

As he watched the two warm up to each other, Hube’s heart flared in a dark bitterness, unbefitting a man of faith.

“Bishop, is something wrong?”

“Nothing’s wrong. Let us continue,” replied Hube to the concerned priest, and he plastered a calm smile on his face before beginning to recite the prayer for the Resurrection spell.

Even though he knew he needed to concentrate in order to cast the spell, the reverberating voices tore at his heart.

“It really is a beautiful church… All right.”

“Why do you touch the pillars every time we come to pray, Shinichi?”

“I’m actually super-interested in architecture, so I was trying to see how the church was built.”

“I didn’t know that! You’re great with your hands, so I’m sure you’d make a wonderful craftsman.”

“Do you have any dreams, Arian? It’s not like you can be a hero forever.”

“Uh, I haven’t really thought about it…but I’d like to get married someday,” admitted Arian flirtatiously. Her cheeks flushed in a deeper shade of red than her hair.

Her face held an expression of a maiden in love, which she’d never directed at Hube.

“…I apologize. It seems that I am a bit tired,” said Hube, brushing away the confused priests as he bitterly cut off the spell.

He quickly returned to his room with hurried feet and cast a Silence spell to soundproof the walls before flinging off the books piled on his desk with all his strength.

“Those blasphemous bastards!” he screamed.

As the books hit the floor, they made a clamor, but the spell prevented this sound from leaking out of the room. As he continued pounding on his desk, he ground his teeth in an ugly, spiteful grimace, far from his public figure as the mild and moderate bishop.

“That lecherous servant of the Evil God coming to tempt and corrupt the Goddess’s hero! My Arian!”

Knowing no one could hear him, he spit out every curse and damnation that came to mind. It wasn’t necessary for him to name the target of his jealousy. It was the boy who’d suddenly come along and stolen Arian’s heart.

It was the boy named Shinichi.

“She’ll never go to defeat the Demon King if he leads her astray!”

If she didn’t defeat the demons in Dog Valley soon, he’d not only fail to become archbishop, but his name would be tarnished. People would start doubting his faith, wondering whether he was just letting the enemies of the Goddess gallivant and roam around. The high-ranking officials of the church were ruthless in establishing their hierarchical order. It was hell: perpetually one-upping each other, tripping each other up, and dragging each other into a bottomless abyss if one wasn’t careful enough.

“He must be eliminated.”

He made his decision with his usual composure, calming down slightly. His only option was to take care of the boy for his sake—and for Arian’s.

However, the silver-haired maid, who followed him around like a shadow, would be troublesome to deal with. He’d sent spies from the church to tail them, but the maid had put an Enemy Sonar spell and a Hard Lock spell on their rooms at the inn as a precaution, sealing them. There were no good opportunities for assassination.

And if he was to completely believe the spies’ reports, the maid’s magic was in the same league as his own, capable of Full Healing and even Resurrection. This meant he’d need to completely get rid of the boy’s body for him to die. He could cut him up into little pieces with his sword and feed him to the fishes in the moat or use flames to incinerate him to his bones. In any case, it would draw too much attention and take too much time, and there was a chance Arian might see through his plans in the worst-case scenario.

“I suppose I could make the king work for me.”

He could fabricate an appropriate crime that’d have the boy banished. Hube could probably pull something like that off, seeing as he pulled the strings of Boar Kingdom. But would Arian return to his side even if he was successful in executing this plan?

“Impossible! A hero would never stab a Goddess’s bishop in the back…”

Hube reassured himself his quiet inner voice was just part of his imagination. He continued to agonize over the situation until the sun fell below the horizon line and night set in.

There was a knock at the door.

“Bishop Hube, do you have a moment?”

After knocking, a single priest opened the door and entered the room. He noticed the books scattered on the floor but didn’t mention them, as he went to Hube’s side to speak quietly into his ear.

“We’ve discovered something about the boy and his maid.”

“What is it?”

As the bishop urged him to continue, the priest—a spy—was unusually nervous.

“Yes, um, right. The maid’s a demon.”

“…What did you just say?”

“The maid is a demon. I believe her companion is either a demon or a traitor to humankind.”

“……”

Hube’s mind blanked for a moment. As he stood there stunned, the spy continued his explanation with an expression that said he still wasn’t sure if he believed it.

“There was a moment when the Illusion spell dissipated. She must have relaxed when they were alone.”

When she did, her shining silver hair had stayed the same, but the color of her skin deepened, and her ears grew longer. She perfectly resembled a legendary dark elf, the fallen form of a forest fairy.

“They’re also conspiring to ask ‘the Demon King to prepare more gold’ so they could try to ‘curry favor from His Majesty again,’ which leads us to believe we aren’t mistaken.”

“Ha…ha! Ha-ha-ha-ha!”

Finally comprehending the spy’s report, Hube was unable to control his laughter.

“I thought he was an unholy heretic, attempting to lead the Goddess’s hero astray, but to think he’s an agent of the Evil God!”

He hated himself for being too foolish to see it sooner. At the same time, he thanked the Goddess from the bottom of his heart for giving him a reason to eliminate the boy.

There was one more truth that delighted him.

“He must also be the same merchant who disgraced me in front of the king. What a wonderful miscalculation on his part.” He chuckled.

The merchant was the only figure who could talk of winning the king’s support with gold. Thinking about it now, he realized that although the merchant’s face had been hidden with grotesque burn scars, his height and build were the same as the boy’s.

“Ah. This all makes sense. This is why I had a feeling of déjà vu when I saw the maid.”

His silver-haired companion and the blue-haired maid at the audience chamber were surely the same person. Under a spell, her outer appearance was changed.

“If I had forced her to remove the Illusion spell right then and there, things would’ve been over much quicker. It seems I’m still lacking in diligence.”

He’d noticed immediately that the maid was concealing her appearance with magic. But he didn’t force her to reveal herself, because he was recovering from the shame of losing to the merchant—a sharp thorn that pierced his heart. This was quite the strategy if this was all part of his grand plan, revealing his burn marks to achieve this outcome.

But his little secret was out.

“Just as I thought. The Goddess would never turn a blind eye to evil,” said Hube. He renewed his faith in the Goddess while planning to exterminate evil.

“Bishop, shall I immediately inform the king and ask the troops to be readied?” asked the spy.

The agents of the Demon King infiltrating the city was a serious issue. They should mobilize their entire army, surround them, and ensure they kill the agents in question.

Hube shook his head slowly at the spy’s suggestion.

“No, that won’t be necessary. Is there not someone more suited to eliminate these vile demons?” he prompted.

“That would be…,” started the spy, trailing off when he realized whom Hube was speaking of.

“Would you be so kind as to bring this person to me?” ordered Hube, smiling as he patted the spy’s shoulder.

The light that settled in his eyes was not that of a bishop executing the Goddess’s will. It was the flames of dark envy of someone who desired a girl many times younger than him—the true and pathetic form of a middle-aged man.

“Ah, those pancakes were really tasty!”

In the afternoon, after they finished saying their prayers at church, Arian and Shinichi went shopping around town before he presented her with home-baked goods. Arian lay down on her bed at the inn, letting her cheeks widen into a smile.

“Shinichi really doesn’t care about it, huh?”

On the night she revealed her true self as a half dragon, she’d prepared for the worst, but Shinichi’s attitude toward her hadn’t changed at all. In fact, it seemed like the distance between them had gotten shorter.

“And today, it kind of felt like we were on a date…,” said Arian, her cheeks flushing red, even though she was the one who’d said it.

She’d been lonely when she ran from town to town with her mother and later became a monster hunter. She’d never had a male friend close in age, let alone a boyfriend, which made her all the more excited and bashful.

“Oh, a date… If we become boyfriend and girlfriend, I wonder if we’ll kiss and stuff?” speculated Arian.

As she fantasized, she recalled the events of the other night in the back of her mind. She’d sadly lamented her fears, and he’d smiled at her wryly, as if to suggest he had no choice but to console her. Any normal person would’ve been grossed out, but he’d just calmly put his tongue on her—

“Aahhh! No, something was wrong with me that night!” Arian turned bright red at the memory, rolling around on the bed and trying to make up an excuse to no one in particular. “Ugh, seriously, why would I say something so embarrassing…?”

There’d come a time in the future when she’d be frozen with embarrassment when she discovered that male and female dragons twine together and lick each other’s necks during courtship.

Right now, there was only one reason she was flustered.

“I think I like him…”

She had a lot of fun talking to Shinichi. When he suddenly got too close, her heart would start to race. When she saw him talking to Celes or other girls in the city, it felt like someone was squeezing her heart, a reaction so painful she wanted to cry.

She didn’t have enough experience to know if this was love.

“I wonder how Shinichi feels about me.”

He was always kind to her, so she didn’t think he disliked her. But it felt like he wasn’t being completely honest, though she couldn’t say for sure. It felt like he was always guarded or wearing a mask.

Aside from the occasional teasing, he mostly smiled at her. But when he talked to Celes, he would get angry or wrinkle his eyebrows in annoyance. He showed a bunch of different emotions, but in the end, he looked happy and—

“—Ugh, no! I’m a hero of the Goddess! I shouldn’t be thinking about things like that!” shouted Arian frantically to blow out the dark flames trying to take hold of her heart.

And then she remembered something.

Stricken by illness, her mom used to always say: “Arian, no matter how much pain you’re in or how much it hurts, you should never hold a grudge.”

There’d been times when she was unlucky, when someone saw the scales on her neck and called her a monster or threw stones at her.

But it was wrong to be angry. It was wrong to hate them. She had strength, the power of a dragon. Even if she followed her gut and killed someone, no one would’ve been able to punish her.

This was the reason why she needed to have self-control that was harder than steel.

Her mother had always assured her. “You’re human. You’re a bit stronger than other people, but you’re human.”

Yes, she was human, so she shouldn’t kill other humans. She couldn’t become one of the beasts that threatened humans—the monsters, demons, or even the dragons.

“Yeah, I know, Mom,” said Arian, remembering her mother’s words and steadying her heart.

She’d lived by those words: not hating anyone, smiling through the pain, and always fighting for others. It was this lifestyle that let her become a hero of the glorious Goddess, become friends with the people of this city, and find Shinichi, someone who understood and accepted her. It’d be ludicrous for a half dragon to ever hope for more happiness.

“Well, I’m allowed to like someone, right?” murmured Arian, like she was seeking forgiveness.

As if to answer her prayers, a knock came from the door.

“Ah?! O-one minute!”

Arian jumped from the bed in a fluster, patted her blushing cheeks, and tried to show a calm demeanor as she opened the door. But it wasn’t the black-haired boy she kind of hoped it’d be but a priest clad in white robes.

“I’m very sorry to bother you late at night, but Bishop Hube requests your presence.”

“The bishop?” asked Arian, cocking her neck in response to this unexpected demand.

That said, there’s no way she could turn down a request from the person who’d saved her life and made her a hero. Arian put herself together and placed her new favorite sword, which she found together with Shinichi, at her hip. She headed toward the cathedral with the priest.

The inside of the cathedral was dimly lit, and the two walked down the aisle, eerily lined with corpses, before entering the prayer room in the back. In front of the giant statue of the Goddess, Bishop Hube stood in contemplative prayer. He turned to face them when he heard their footsteps, smiling.

“—gh!”

A shiver suddenly ran up Arian’s spine when she saw his tranquil expression. It was somehow completely different from usual. Hube walked slowly up to Arian and spoke the following words.

“Hero Arian, as the bishop of our Goddess of Light Elazonia, I command you to eliminate the heretics, Shinichi and his attendant, from this world.”

Kill the boy she loved with her own hands.

“Take extra care to completely destroy his body so he cannot stray into this world again.”

“W-wait a minute!” yelled Arian, bewildered, at Bishop Hube, who smiled and spoke like he was apprehending a child for running and tripping. His composure opposed his command. “Why would you tell me to kill him?!”

“I already said why. He’s a heretic and an agent of the demons.”

“Th-there must be some mistake! There’s no way Shinichi’s working for the demons!”

“I understand why you might not want to believe it, but it’s simply the truth,” said Hube as he glanced at the priest who’d brought her. “You’ve surely noticed the boy’s maid conceals her appearance using magic.”

“I’m sure she has something she’d like to keep to herself…,” said Arian. She herself had secret scales on her neck, so she did not push the matter any further. But—

“The maid’s true form is a wicked demon, a dark elf.”

“No, you’re lying…”

“I speak only truth. Do you really think I’d deceive a hero, a devout follower of our Goddess, like you?” asked Hube. He spit out that final line, an obvious lie, clapping his hands on Arian’s small shoulders.

“B-but I—,” began Arian, desperately trying to resist, but the bishop bent down and whispered into her ear.

“You wouldn’t want anyone to know who you truly are, would you?”

“—gh!”

Arian pulled back in shock, but Hube stared at the scarf and her concealed neck, as if to tell her she couldn’t escape.

“H-how, bishop, do you—?!”

The only person in this country who should’ve known she was a half dragon was Shinichi.

“Our Goddess sees all” was all Hube said, conjuring up a fake smile at Arian, who was flustered and shaken with surprise.

It occurred to her the bishop might’ve succumbed to lust and used Clairvoyance to watch over women and children in private.

“All the people of this country rely on you. You know you can’t let them down, right?”

This included the kind owner of the tavern and inn who treated her like she was a normal customer, like she was his own daughter. There were the easygoing guards at the gates who greeted her every morning as she went to train. There were the ladies, the children, the elderly, who all smiled when they saw her and thanked her for giving them another peaceful day.

She’d be hated by all of them if she were exposed as a tainted half dragon—a creature more hated and feared than the demons.

“I—I…”

Arian shook, her face pale with fear, and Hube gently patted her shoulders again.

“You’ll see to it, right? Arian?”

Now that she was a hero, she’d finally found a sanctuary, a safe and welcoming place in reach. If it meant protecting that, there was only one answer she could give.

Arian returned to the inn, and dawn broke before she could rest her eyes.

Shinichi greeted her with his usual smile as she came down the stairs to the tavern with a horrible expression on her face.

“You look tired. You should eat something and rest,” he said, offering her some candy.

Under normal circumstances, she would’ve happily thrown it in her mouth and chatted with him until the owner had finished making their breakfast. But those days were over now.

“Shinichi, let’s go defeat the Demon King.”

“…Okay.” He misread her expression and assumed that it was from nerves and steadfast resolve. He nodded his head with a serious expression and went to his room to prepare for the journey in silence.

The owner watched with worried eyes as the three left the tavern.

“……”

Shinichi and Celes were unusually quiet on their walk northwest to Dog Valley, perhaps out of respect for Arian. She clung to that hope as she looked up at the clear sky, contrary to her clouded inner conscience, and just kept putting one foot in front of the other.

“Guess we’ll rest here today,” suggested Shinichi as the sky became a deep red, and the three of them stopped on a narrow forest path.

Arian watched him drop his pack and start preparing food before asking the question she’d been avoiding until now.

“Shinichi, it’s a lie you’re working for the demons, right?”

What are you talking about? Your food’s going to get cold if you don’t hurry.

This is what she wanted him to say with a smile like he always did, to laugh it off like he always did.

But she’d never seen him so serious. His expression betrayed any lingering hope.

“Celes,” he said.

“Understood.”

When she heard her name, Celes broke the spell that hid her form. Her long, plain skirt, her maid outfit, the figure Arian so envied, her facial features, and her silver hair did not change. But her skin darkened, and her ears grew threefold, ending in a sharp point.

“A dark elf…”

She was a demon, the Goddess’s enemy, the Evil God’s kin, one of the beasts who had killed three thousand of Boar Kingdom’s soldiers.

She’d known and tried to prepare herself, but Arian was frozen by shock. Shinichi looked at her with serious eyes and confessed.

“As you can see, Celes is a demon and a loyal servant to the Blue Demon King. And I am human, but I serve the Demon King as his advisor.”

As he spoke, he took an eerie smiling mask from his breast pocket and covered his face, as if to conceal his expression with it.

“Why? Why would you do this?!” Arian let out a heartrending shriek as she berated him. Shinichi removed the mask and threw it aside, telling her everything.

“I come from a different world, a world called Earth.”

“Earth…?”

“And the Demon King summoned me to defeat the heroes who kept respawning to attack him.”

“What are you saying?!”

“You don’t have to believe me, but I’m the one who forced Ruzal and his companions to surrender and leave.”

“What…?”

She didn’t want to believe it.

She didn’t want to believe he was working for the demons or the one who trapped the other heroes. She didn’t want to believe everything he did was to bury all of them deep into the ground. Becoming her friend, lending her a hand, saying and acting like he didn’t care that she was a half dragon, walking down the streets, making pancakes for her—all those nice memories were to consign her to oblivion. They were all lies. She didn’t want to believe it.

“Liar! Please tell me that you’re lying—!” pleaded Arian, sobbing, as she drew her sword and pointed it at Shinichi.

Celes immediately moved toward them when she saw this, but Shinichi stopped her with the motion of his hand.

“You decide what you believe,” he said.

“What…?”

“There’s no such thing as an absolute truth. There are unlimited truths of ‘things that you want to believe.’” Shinichi wore a serious expression that belied no emotion. He waited for Arian’s reply.

Do you believe all the Goddess’s teachings are completely true and demons are an enemy that must be destroyed? Or will you work with them and make some interesting friends, even though they can be simpletons and come from a different culture than yours?

“What the hell? Don’t try to deceive me with such ridiculous things!” screamed Arian furiously, but Shinichi’s assertion did not change.

“I was summoned from a different world. I became the Demon King’s advisor, and I defeated the heroes who were hostile toward the demons. That’s it. The rest is up to you. You decide what happens next.”

“That’s so cowardly!”

She would have preferred for him to pathetically beg for his life. Then she would’ve been disillusioned, and she could cut him down without hesitation. Or she would’ve preferred if he’d just been kind and said it was all a misunderstanding and kept deceiving her. Then she could have forgotten everything and thrown herself into his arms.

But he told her the truth and left Arian to make the final decision. To kill him or to—

“You’re a coward! A liar! Sick!”

“I didn’t think you’d start saying that, too,” said Shinichi. For the first time, his serious expression cracked with a small grin.

It was the same smile he’d always directed at her. It was a little troubled but kind.

“Ah, HYAAAAaaaa—!”

Arian’s emotions burst inside her as she brandished her sword, lunging toward Shinichi, who kept smiling, making no attempt to dodge, and—

It was just past midnight. It wouldn’t be long until the sun showed its face again. Arian walked down the dark aisle of the cathedral with a bowed head and leaden feet. The magic sword was missing from her side, and she was splattered with mud. Walking like a specter, she drifted unsteadily. She proceeded to the far back of the cathedral and opened the door to the prayer room.

Bishop Hube stood in front of the Goddess’s statue in the unilluminated chamber, as if he knew she was about to return.

“Welcome back, Arian. Am I safe to assume the heretic has been eliminated?” he asked.

“…Yes.”

Hube smiled gently and walked up to Arian. She nodded, as if she were about to crumble into pieces. He grasped her shoulders and let out a voice that could’ve come up from the bowels of hell.

“Heroes of the Goddess should not lie.”

“—gh!”

Arian snapped her head up as if drawn by an invisible string, and at the same time, chains stretched up from the ground and wrapped around her body.

“Gah—!”

“So unfortunate. This is all so very unfortunate, Arian.”

Following Hube’s voice, more than thirty priests stepped out of the shadows, concentrating on the magic chains, as they slowly tightened their circle around her.

“I’ve already been informed that you let the heretics escape,” said Hube. Behind him, the middle-aged priest who’d talked to her at the inn appeared.

He’d been sent to secretly follow her and make sure that she carried out the bishop’s orders to lure Shinichi and Celes out of the city and kill them both.

“Why did you let the heretics go?” asked Hube. His expression was somehow gentle and ghastly at the same time. His gaze told her that he wouldn’t accept any excuses. A single tear ran from Arian’s eye.

“I couldn’t carry out your orders to kill Shinichi!”

Heartbroken by his betrayal, she had pointed her sword at Shinichi, but in the end, she’d wavered. The sword had fallen from her hands, leaving him uninjured. Yes, he’d hidden from her that he was working for the demons, and yes, it’d all been part of a plan to bring down the heroes. But he was telling the truth when he said they’d become friends, that she was no longer alone, and that he didn’t care she was a half dragon. When she listened to him and looked at his wry smile that accepted his inevitable death, she decided to believe him.

But that was just a pathetic attempt to circumvent the truth.

“I—I love Shinichi.”

She liked him. She’d been swept away by love. This was why she believed him, forgave everything, overlooked everything, and ran away without asking any more questions.

The maid had been annoyed she was a dumbass girl to let herself be led on by a worthless boy like him.

“I love, I love him…!” repeated Arian. As she repeated this final phrase, her unrequited feelings stabbed her heart over and over again. They had failed to reach him. Large teardrops rolled down her cheeks.

Seeing the girl’s tragic tears, the Goddess’s Bishop Hube—

“Filthy traitor!” he screamed, bearing resemblance to a monster, as he slapped Arian’s cheek with the flat of his palm.

“—gh!”

“Traitor! Apostate! To be defiled by an agent of a demon! You vile traitor!” he bellowed as he struck her face over and over. She didn’t resist him, trapped more by her guilt than by the magical chains.

The surrounding priests were frozen in shock at the sight of his frenzied breakdown. They just stood there. None of them stepped forward to stop him.

“Do you know? How? Much? I’ve given you?”

He was the one who’d persuaded her to become a hero, even though she’d hesitated at first. He gave her every possible mission to defeat monsters so her name would be well-known throughout the kingdom. He’d kept the fact that she was a filthy half dragon locked away in his heart.

“Everything! Everything you have is because of me!”

Hube violently attacked Arian for her betrayal, dismissing the fact that everything he’d done had been for his own benefit, his advancement within the church. But it was less about choosing not to kill someone working for the demons. It was the betrayal of giving her heart to someone other than him.

“Huff, huff…”

Hube finally lowered his arm after striking her dozens of times. The bones in his hand hurt as if they’d been fractured.

Arian’s cheek was swollen and bright red but quickly returned to normal. As a half dragon, her immense magical power gave her a sturdy corporeal body and faster regeneration than the average human. It meant that even the bishop, who specialized in healing spells, had no way to actually injure her.

Besides, she was a hero, a figure capable of resurrection. Between two heroes, killing each other was impossible.

But the Goddess’s church had some precautions in place. After all, they’d relied on heroes for hundreds of years and learned some things along the way.

“It’s so incredibly unfortunate I have to destroy an excellent hero like you,” Hube said. He somehow managed to return his voice to normal, as he caught his breath and wrapped his hands around Arian’s slender neck and scarf.

“—gh!”

“Prepare yourself. The torturers at the Holy See are truly brutal.”

There was one way to render a hero powerless. Coincidentally, the Demon King’s Dirty Advisor had also thought of it but never implemented it. This method was a product of a dark, mad mind.

“They’ll place carnivorous insects in every orifice. You’ll come to know the fear and pain of being eaten alive from inside out. The Pain Block spell won’t help you. After they eat through a third of your brain, you’ll be unable to maintain the spell, and in that moment, all your senses will return and overwhelm you.”

“Hyagh—!” It was the ordinary priests who let out the shriek and started shaking after listening to his words, but Arian’s expression didn’t change. Her tears of repentance just kept running down her cheeks.

“I’m sorry…”

She spoke to the Goddess, who’d made her a hero and trusted her to look after the people, and to the bishop, who was the reason she’d become one.

And she spoke to her dead mother, who’d refused to abandon this half dragon and spent her life raising her.

“It’s far too late for apologies!” Hube admired her for her dignity, for not groveling and begging for her life, even though she was afraid. His attraction to her lingered, which was why he raised his hand to strike her again.

But the blow didn’t reach her face.

“That’s enough domestic violence, bishop.”

Hube didn’t understand this phrase, but he could tell it was mocking him based on the voice’s spiteful tone.

The speaker had just kicked open the doors to the prayer room, appearing before them with an exceptionally sinister smile. He’d loved watching every moment as they readily stumbled into his trap.

“Shinichi?!” Arian twisted around to see his face, and the black-haired heretic responded by sticking his thumb up.

“Sorry we’re late. We’re a bit busy carrying some corpses around,” he said nonchalantly.

“I did most of the carrying,” clarified Celes, seeming somewhat tired as she appeared behind him.

“What are you doing here?!” shouted Hube. His smile crumbled away, and he faltered.

Seeing this, Shinichi could not restrain his laughter.

“Hey, hey, did you really think we wouldn’t notice Arian had been tailed?”

“I was the one who located him,” Celes chimed in.

“By the way, we defeated all the guys you sent to finish us off. They’re tied up, naked, in front of the city gates.”

“I was the one who did that, too,” she quickly added.

Celes was pretty burned out: She’d cast a Fly spell to go after Arian, who was running faster than a bullet train, and put a number of backup spells in place. Shinichi, on the other hand, seemed full of energy, beaming triumphantly as he happily explained his plan.

“It’s amazing you moved into place exactly as I’d hoped. You didn’t even realize I revealed my true form on purpose, ha-ha-ha!”

“You mean to tell me this was all part of your plan?!” cried Hube, refusing to believe him. To his surprise, Shinichi shook his head.

Hube crawled out from the ruins of the cathedral, waving away the gaze of curious onlookers with his hand, and hurried into the king’s castle.

“At least I can get him!” he growled.

He knew the girl he so wanted would never return.

But at the very least, he wouldn’t rest until he’d inflicted a horrifying death on that despicable usurper. As he pushed open the door to the audience chamber, the black desire for revenge was the only thing in his heart.

It was still early for the royal business to begin for the day, but everyone had woken up to the sounds of the cathedral collapsing. The king and all the lords who acted as his ministers were already present.

“Your Highness, we have a crisis!” said Hube.

“Hmm, a crisis indeed,” replied King Tortoise IV dryly, in contrast to Hube’s attempt to play up the tragedy to its utmost.

His face showed no bewilderment or fear despite the sudden destruction of the Goddess’s cathedral. It almost seemed like he already knew the entire situation.

“Your Highness…?” began Hube.

“Well then, bishop,” said the king, gesturing toward a minister, who walked up to Hube. In the minister’s hand was a sheet of parchment.

“Do you have any justification for your crimes?” asked the king.

“…What?” Hube stood stupidly, completely unable to understand what the king was talking about. He looked down at the paper in his hands. He was lost for words when he saw what was written on it.

Sex abuse in the church! Bishop uses position of authority for repeated sexual harassment of hero!

And beneath it, there was an oddly well-drawn image of him with a lewd face, tearing the clothing off Arian, who was refusing his advances.

It went on to say the Goddess destroyed the cathedral as divine punishment for the bishop’s wicked deeds.

“Wh-what is this?” he stammered.

“I’d hoped to ask the same thing,” replied the king. His eyes were frosted cold as he gazed upon the bishop and his flustered state.

When the king had heard the sounds of the cathedral collapsing, he’d sent out soldiers to investigate, and they’d all returned carrying these leaflets. They were scattered in the castle gardens and throughout the city.

“According to these papers, you, the bishop, raped the hero Arian, and the cathedral was destroyed as a result of your sins. On top of that, Arian fled Boar Kingdom, unable to endure what you put her through.”

“Your Highness, you cannot possibly believe such absurd claims!”

“Well, do you have another explanation?”

“That… Arian betrayed us!” shouted Hube in response to the questioning. “The black-haired boy pretended to be her friend but was really an agent of the demons! He led Arian astray so she’d betray us, and he attacked the cathedral!”

Hube explained he’d attempted in vain to fight back against the boy. There were some lies and exaggerations mixed in, but overall, Hube told the truth. He spoke in a way that showed how mortified he was.

However, the cold gaze of the king and his ministers showed that Hube failed to stir the same emotions in them.

“What an interesting story. What proof do you have to show us?” asked the king coldly.

“The proof is…”

There was no proof. Everyone who could have testified on his behalf was buried beneath the rubble of the cathedral. Not only that, but they were all priests of Hube’s church, meaning most people would think they were simply lying to cover for their bishop.

“I’ve only spoken with Arian a handful of times, and she’s not only an excellent hero but also conscientious and polite. Even if we assume she was raped, she’s not the kind of person who’d commit the great sin of destroying a Goddess’s cathedral.”

“……”

“Furthermore, I unfortunately haven’t met this black-haired boy, but what makes you so sure he’s an agent working for the demons? According to rumors among my soldiers, he helped Arian obtain a powerful magical sword that could defeat the Demon King.”

“That was surely a ploy to get in her good graces! Oh yes, I almost forgot! He was also that heretic merchant with the vile plan of opening trade with the demons! He’s truly a strategist to be feared!”

“That merchant? Ha-ha-ha! This is quite amusing,” said Tortoise IV with a chortle to mock Hube for continuing to spit out these absurd lies.

It wasn’t surprising they didn’t believe him. They didn’t know the truth, and Hube had no proof.

“Bishop, I considered being lenient and forgiving your crimes if you admitted them. This is quite unfortunate.”

“Your Highness, you’d believe this absurd scrap of paper over my word?!” demanded Hube. But he realized something.

The king and the ministers hadn’t taken this scandalous message as absolute truth. They believed it because they wanted to believe it. They finally had the justification needed to rid themselves of the arrogant, high-and-mighty bishop who’d always looked down on them. Even if they’d known the truth, their decision likely wouldn’t have changed.

“Bishop Hube, based on these events, I’m forced to report this to the Holy See,” said the king, issuing the closest thing to a death sentence with his limited power under the Goddess’s church and his weakhearted nature.

A cathedral of the church had been destroyed, and a promising hero chased away. Hube was as good as dead once word of his immense failures reached the church. He’d either be posted in some backwater village or imprisoned for life deep within the cathedral. Regardless, there was no way he could ever hope to see the sun again, let alone advance to archbishop.

“That… Ridiculous…”

Even though he was a bishop and a hero, there was no way he could change the flow of events now. If he announced Arian was actually a half dragon, they’d just decide he was lying again.

Everyone in the audience chamber almost screamed in relief as they watched Hube collapse to his knees.

The pedophile bishop’s despair is sure to make my dinner taste better!

Well, they weren’t quite so sick or boorish, but they must have felt something similar as triumphant smiles spread across their faces.

“Aah, that’s what you did?!” squealed Arian after Shinichi filled her in on his “Fabricated Scandal” strategy as they walked to the Demon King’s castle.

“I thought if I destroyed his reputation, he’d stop his attacks on the demons, even on the off chance I failed to persuade you. Pretty effective, right?” asked Shinichi.

“Uh-huh, you’re diabolic, Shinichi…,” said Arian, her face pale, as she imagined the uproar in Boar Kingdom. “I wonder if the bishop is okay…”

Shinichi cracked a small grin at her kindness. She was still worried about Hube after all he’d put her through and in the wake of cutting ties with him.

“Hey, you can see the Demon King’s castle from here,” he said.

“Y-yeah…,” murmured Arian.

The tall and secure walls of the Demon King’s castle stuck out from the wild untamed land in Dog Valley. Arian was incredibly nervous as Shinichi took her hand and led her inside the castle. She had the Twisted Advisor to vouch for her, but she had been their enemy at one point, fighting against them as a hero. It wouldn’t be surprising if they killed her.

Arian readied herself for the possibility, but the actual reaction from the demons was the complete opposite.

“Welcome, little Miss Hero!”

“Nice to meet you, Ms. Arian. Shinichi’s told us all about you. Yes, ma’am!”

When the castle gates opened, the Demon King and Rino were there, awaiting their arrival with warm smiles.

“This is the kid who hurt the King, oink? Small but impressive, oink.”

“I guess humans aren’t too bad, moo.”

“I hope we’ll get to know each other!”

The other demons were waiting, too, eyes filled with curiosity, as they crowded around Arian to welcome her. No one held it against her that she was both a human and the hero who’d fought against them. They respected her strength and seemed happy to have a new friend.

“Uh, um? But I…,” started Arian, confused by their reactions.

“Don’t worry. Everyone in this castle is like this.” Shinichi patted her shoulder reassuringly.

Of course, not all demons were this warm and welcoming. This crowd had been specifically chosen to enter the human world because their personalities were gentle and they wouldn’t wreak havoc on humankind. She was still surprised there didn’t seem to be any hatred in their eyes toward a human like her. There was only one thing they used to measure a person—strength.

“Oh, and by the way, here!” said Shinichi as he stole Arian’s scarf from her neck.

“Ah!” shrieked Arian, panicking and covering her neck with her hands. But it was too late. The crowd had already gotten a good look at the red, glittering scales on her throat, and this image was burned into their minds.

“Ooh, so you really are a half dragon.”

“Wow, the scales are so pretty! They’re like little gems!”

“Since they’re red, does that mean you’re the child of the Red Dragon, oink?”

Afterword

Hello, Famitsu Bunko readers. Sakuma Sasaki here.

First of all, I’d like to thank everyone for picking up this book.

As you might have guessed from the subtitle, this story was born from the idea of a world where the heroes never die, like in D—gon Quest, the crowning jewel among Japanese role-playing games (RPGs). In the game, a player can respawn after losing a battle by giving up half of their cash on hand. The creators of the game were probably thinking this would be the saving grace of Japanese gamers, who weren’t really used to RPGs on their computers at the time. But if you think about it from the perspective of the Demon King, this is a truly horrific situation.

The heroes would resurrect no matter what he did, which meant there was no way he could defeat them. Moreover, he was in a position where he’d definitely be killed at some point… The word cheat hadn’t yet been defined at the time, but I bet the Demon King would’ve complained, “They’re cheating! This game is hella rigged!”

The only way this pitiful Demon King could stay alive is if he somehow got the player to stop playing. He could bore the players by setting up encounters with some small monsters every three steps to stall them. Or he could secretly place items needed to progress the story on random roadsides with no hints to their locations. Or he could fill the story with stupid and tedious characters to drain the player’s spirit and morale to continue reading game exposition. He could use other tactics to put the player under a lot of stress until they exclaimed, “I’m through with this stupid game!” and indefinitely put gameplay on hold.

The Demon King wins the game when the players give up.

“In other words, all those shitty games were really just the stories where the boss won beat the players!”

“Wait, whaaaaaat—?!”

I’m obviously just joking.

But it’s true that when you can’t physically defeat an enemy, you’re only left with psychological attacks to force them into submission. That’s how this book was born—to protect the Demon King by breaking the heroes’ psyches.

To cause someone to have a mental breakdown, the main character naturally had to have a particularly sick and twisted personality. I think there may have been some unpleasant scenes, but I hope you were able to enjoy the book, even if it was just a little bit.

Lastly, I would like to thank the incredibly talented Asagi Tosaka, who breathed life into my characters through her illustrations, my editor Kimiko Bugi, who was always so polite during our interactions, all the people at the printer, and anyone else involved in the publication of the book. Most of all, I’d like conclude this book by thanking my readers for picking it up and giving it a try.

Sakuma Sasaki, January 2017

P.S. All the heroines in this novel are older than ten, but only one is older than eighteen.