Omen of Calamity
As I descended from my master’s residence, I let out a long sigh of relief. The energy she had unleashed moments ago was the Heavenly Demon Divine Art pushed to its absolute limit. If I had been even a second slower to intervene, Iris wouldn’t have managed a single sound before dying. Any decent fighter would be reduced to a mouse before a cat in the face of that power. Master’s martial might was simply incomparable to anyone else’s. Even I had only witnessed her true strength twice. Once when she decided to show me exactly what the Heavenly Demon Divine Art was. The other time was when I accidentally saw her naked while fetching bathwater. That second time, I really thought I was going to die. It’s a miracle I’m still breathing.
“By the way, my disciple?”
“Yes, Master.”
“Do you have some kind of self-healing ability?”
“No?”
“Then why are you following me with such a perfectly fine face? Didn’t I clearly tell you to stay at my residence for a while? The same guy who was coughing up blood and on the verge of death just moments ago. Doesn’t it hurt?”
“It hurts. It hurts so much right now! Following you down like this will probably hurt enough to kill me. But if I stayed next to the Grandmaster, I’d really die, you know?”
This kid… There really is nothing she won’t say. I can overlook a lot, but I can’t stand it when she talks about Master like that. I raised my hand to give her a knuckle on the forehead, then stopped as the earlier scene flashed through my mind. I had released some of my own energy to soothe her insides for the time being, but there was no way she could be perfectly fine after taking the full force of Master’s original power.
“You’re not hitting me?”
“I don’t have a hobby of beating disciples who are already in pain.”
“Liar. You always made me train even when I said it hurt.”
“That wasn’t beating, it was training, you brat!”
Well, to be honest, I did push her pretty hard. But that was only because Iris showed absolutely no promise no matter what I tried. I couldn’t figure out how to draw out her true potential.
“More importantly, where are we going?”
“Down to the foot of the mountain.”
“Ah, that city I saw on the way up?”
“City, village, whatever it is. That’s the place.”
“Why are we going there?”
“To buy a few things for Master.”
“Will you buy something for me too?”
“What do you think I’m going to buy?”
“…Ah. Aha! Right, of course. Ahaha!!”
What was with this kid? Talking to herself and then laughing alone. After getting thoroughly scolded by Master, I was starting to worry her mind had gone a little sideways. Still, I could understand. I had been the same. The first time Master beat me, I passed out and stayed in bed for three full days. When I thought about how this body had been granted as a special perk, it really drove home just what kind of existence my master was.
“I’m sorry.”
“Hm?”
“It seems like because of me, your relationship with the Grandmaster got… a little strained.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. It’s not like that at all. If we were the kind of people who could fall out over something like this, I would have been killed by Master long ago, or I would have run away from her.”
“Is your bond that deep?”
“You could say we’ve seen each other through good times and bad.”
In the beginning, I had approached her with only one goal: survival. I was myself, and the Heavenly Demon was nothing more than a game character. With that mindset, I tried to squeeze out every possible advantage. But as time passed, the fact that both Master and I were outsiders created a strange sense of kinship that worked in our favor. On top of that, I already knew how to raise her favorability. Thanks to that, I learned many settings I had never known while simply living together. For instance, Master had not become the Heavenly Demon by deliberately walking the path of tyranny. She had simply ended up as the strongest in the Demonic Cult and risen to that position. She stood at the pinnacle ruling over everyone, not by choice, but by circumstance.
“…Do you like the Grandmaster, Master?”
“Did you toss out everything this master just said? We’ve seen each other through good times and—”
“No, that’s not what I mean. You’re a man, and the Grandmaster is a woman.”
“Huh?”
“Not just the bond between master and disciple. Something more… romantic…”
“Ow!! My head feels like it’s splitting open! Kyaaaa!! It hurts so much!!”
“I warned you that if you spouted nonsense one more time, I’d make sure your skull didn’t stay in one piece, my disciple.”
“Why is this nonsense?! Why?! How is it?!”
“I pay my deepest respects to that mouth of yours that asks because it genuinely doesn’t know. So you want another one?”
“Absolutely not. No way at all!”
Iris immediately tucked her tail and subtly retreated. How in the world had a kid like this ended up with the title of Last Hero? I genuinely wanted to crack open the developers’ skulls to find out.
“…But you’re really not going to answer me?”
“You really are asking for it, aren’t you.”
“I can’t help it. You’ve known each other for a very long time, and after seeing her earlier, the Grandmaster is an incredible beauty. Honestly, I can’t even guess how old she is.”
That was because Master had reached a realm no one else could touch and undergone Marrow Cleansing. In truth, even I didn’t know her exact age. The creators apparently decided that adding an age setting would only earn backlash from users. The split between the Heavenly Demon faction and the anti-Heavenly Demon faction among players had also stemmed from that unknown age. In the end, one side argued that you only needed to look at her appearance, while the other claimed it was a turn-off if she might be an old grandmother of unknown age. I had always thought the whole debate was stupid. If that was the case, then the elves everyone simped for were hundreds of years old by default. It was ridiculous that they didn’t care about the elves’ ages but suddenly drew the line at the Heavenly Demon character.
“You’re a man too, Master. When I see you in the mornings, you’re quite… healthy.”
“My disciple? Instead of doing the morning exercises I assigned, were you secretly watching me?”
“Ah, caught.”
This kid, seriously. My hand itched to smack her one more time, but I held back. I had seen her grimace in genuine pain a moment ago.
“As you said, this master is an irredeemable man, and my master is indeed an unparalleled beauty. However, my disciple, no desire in this world can ever be stronger than the desire to survive.”
“What do you mean?”
“It means if you entertain those kinds of thoughts, my master will beat you to death.”
Honestly, seeing Master for the first time had been pure torment. Undergoing Marrow Cleansing and becoming a peerless beauty was only natural. Even the game illustrations had been enough to make a man lust in the crudest sense. Facing the real Heavenly Demon in person made even speaking feel like a sin. But no matter how beautiful she was, what did it matter? One wrong move and she could rip a person’s head clean off. I was certain that the moment her palm connected with your cheek would be the day you left this world.
In the past, a group of bandits fleeing a subjugation force had wandered onto the mountain where Master lived. When they saw her, they thought they had stumbled upon a gift from heaven and charged. Master claimed she had only slapped each of the insolent fools once to teach them a lesson. But when I checked their corpses, every single one of them had a broken neck.
“Still, Master. Have you really never once…”
“My disciple. Please, can we have a productive conversation for once?”
“This is plenty productive to me.”
“You really have a talent for driving your master insane.”
“Why?! Your disciple is worrying about your love life and you hate it that much?!”
“I do.”
This wasn’t the time to worry about romance. It was time to worry about survival. Once we entered season two, monsters would start appearing everywhere. In the game, even raising the children to six-star rank made clearing region one of season two extremely difficult. If my current disciples were roughly at that six-star level, I was already worried sick. Yet Iris was nowhere near six-star. She was barely scraping three-star, if that. In short, she would be of no help whatsoever in the coming events. Instead of focusing on the training I assigned, she was babbling about some ridiculous romance. Romance with Master? What kind of nonsense was that?
“Then does that mean you think the Grandmaster isn’t much as a woman?”
I drew the character for ‘endure’ three times in my mind and bit my lip hard.
“If I said she wasn’t much, what would you do about it?”
“Then… what about me?”
“…Iris.”
“Yes?”
“Let’s have a little talk with my fists.”
“Sob… sob…”
“If you don’t stop crying, I’ll add two more lumps to that head of yours.”
“You hit me too much! There’s no more room left!”
“Then I’ll just make more on top of the existing ones.”
The reason I hit Iris? Because I was embarrassed? Embarrassed my ass. Honestly, if there was one character I had the least affection for, it was probably this very Iris. I had spent a long time with the other disciples both in the game and in this world, but Iris was the latecomer who had joined last in both places. She never asked if she was cute, but she was so adorable it made me want to bite her to death.
“The other disciples are all living diligently in their own ways. Don’t you feel ashamed when you look at your seniors?”
“Hmm… Those people are already so amazing they don’t need your teachings anymore.”
“You received the exact same lessons from me for the exact same length of time.”
“That’s because my seniors, my senior sisters, are too outstanding! I’m the normal one here!”
“…”
They had all come with the Hero title just like her. What on earth was the problem that the performance gap was so enormous? Although I had been a true black-cow user, I had never once regretted pulling her when I looked up at the sky. Yet now that regret was surging like crazy, you damn disciple.
The same worries I had while teaching Iris raised their heads again. Maybe I should have just skipped her and prepared for season two with the others. Keeping someone who wouldn’t be any help and had almost no useful information was only a waste of time. But then I remembered the message that had appeared the exact moment I pulled Iris. Because of that damned thing, I had been semi-forcibly stuck with her.
The final moment.
The final light.
⟨ The final hope. ⟩
It was an incredibly cringeworthy line, but it was also annoyingly stuck in my head. The other characters had descriptions like “genius of the sword” or “shield blessed by the gods,” but because this one contained the words light and hope, I couldn’t discard her. But why does the performance feel like the last light and the last piece of shit?
I was sighing heavily while climbing the hill when—
“…Master? That over there…”
“I see it too. Looks like some kind of problem has occurred.”
Thick black smoke was rising in heavy plumes from the city visible in the distance. It seemed that right before we crossed the threshold into season two, the omens of calamity had begun erupting everywhere.