The Underground of the Demon Realm
"Ugh... uuugh..."
My whole body ached as if I'd been beaten from head to toe. What in the world had happened to me?
The demon Bloodstain had appeared... the ground had given way... I'd gone plunging into a bottomless pit...
And after that, nothing. I must have lost consciousness. I remembered none of it. The fact that I hurt this much probably meant I wasn't dead. Still — to have survived a fall from that insane a height...
I clenched my brow, grimacing hard, and barely managed to open my eyes.
Water was flowing somewhere right beside me. My clothes were soaked through.
How had the battle gone? No — forget that. Where was this? My thoughts wouldn't line up. Everything was a mess.
Apparently, after dropping through that hole, I'd blacked out and been carried here by the current.
"It's so cold..."
I wrapped my arms around myself, shivering. I checked over my body for any serious wounds, then took in my surroundings.
Stalactites hung from the ceiling; stalagmites rose from the floor. An underground cave, by the look of it. The walls and ground were thick with glowing moss and mushrooms, so at least I wasn't in the dark.
"My sword's gone..."
I'd lost it, it seemed. I searched everywhere around me, but there was no sign of it. It had probably been swept away down the same stream that had brought me here. Ah, and I'd gotten pretty attached to that sword, too.
More pressingly — was there even a way out of here? In the last thing I remembered, I'd been falling for a long, long time. From a depth like that, there wouldn't be any ordinary way back up.
Then, from a wall thick with mushrooms, a translucent and welcome presence suddenly appeared.
The little demon ghost, Shari.
"Ah, right. You were here."
Shari emerged from the wall with a gloomy look on her face, then broke into a bright smile the moment she saw me and clung fast to my body. Through the consciousness she sent into my mind, I could feel how terribly worried she'd been.
"There, there. I'm okay."
I stroked her head — though my hand passed straight through — and tried to reassure her.
Come to think of it, if Shari had been with me the whole time, she might know what had happened after I fell into that hole.
"Shari, can you show me what happened after I fell?"
I asked her. Then several scenes she offered up flashed through my mind.
My own figure, stretching a hand toward a sky it would never reach, falling endlessly down the hole.
Then plunging into a pool of water, blacking out, and being swept rapidly along the waterway connected to it.
After that, only the same scene, over and over — drifting on, and on, and on.
I'd apparently been carried a considerable distance just like that.
Yunoa was searching for a way back, but there was no means of return at hand.
He could not even hope for a rescue party.
He had been trapped in this abyssal underground.
If there was no way back, then the only choice was to go forward. Losing my sword made me uneasy, but sitting still wasn't going to accomplish anything.
Yunoa resolved to gather his courage and press onward through this labyrinthine underground.
But there was a fact he did not know.
Horn Canyon was land that sat close to the place called the Demon Realm.
If that was so, then this place — where he had fallen underground and drifted for so long — where was it?
I scooped a drink from the stream running beside me and was just about to get moving when Narration let something ominous slip.
The fact that it was going out of its way to remind me Horn Canyon sat close to the Demon Realm... don't tell me...
That's right. This was the underground of the Demon Realm.
The battle at Horn Canyon had, in the end, concluded as a victory for the subjugation force.
Bloodstain, the Lord of Blood and a direct subordinate of the Demon King, had crossed blades with Mireia, then withdrawn once the number of monsters had dwindled further.
The canyon was a wreck of countless monster corpses and shattered rock. The subjugation force — a coalition of adventurers, kingdom knights, and soldiers — had suffered heavy losses of its own. More than half had taken injuries large and small, and there had been fatalities. It had been a clear failure of the kingdom, which had never properly grasped the scale of the monsters to begin with.
Even so, the members of the subjugation force were glad they had made it through the battle and held the monsters back. Simply having survived a fight that could have killed them was reason enough to be glad.
But Mireia could not be glad.
She had let Bloodstain slip away — the enemy who had destroyed her hometown right before her eyes. She had spent her entire life pursuing strength with her gaze fixed only forward, all for the sake of revenge. And even so, a direct subordinate of the Demon King had been no easy opponent.
Moreover, Mireia had another reason to grieve.
"Yunoa..."
The enormous hole that had opened when the ground of Horn Canyon collapsed. The inside of it was so deep that nothing could be seen.
"...So Yunoa fell in here."
Mireia asked the other members of the subjugation force, her face expressionless.
"Th-that's right. The ground suddenly became unstable and everyone got out of the way, but he just happened to be standing here, and..."
Mireia picked up a fist-sized stone from the ground and threw it into the hole. The stone vanished in an instant, as if sucked into that pitch-black opening — but no sound of it striking the bottom ever came.
"Yunoa..."
Mireia called his name in a low voice. There was no chance of an answer. At this height, even a human whose body had been tempered with mana could not be guaranteed to be alive.
"Lady Mireia, there are many wounded. We'll need some time to regroup. What should we do?"
"..."
A member of the subjugation force asked her, but she did not answer.
Had she gotten it wrong again?
The moment she'd spotted Bloodstain, she had set everything aside in her thirst for revenge and gone to face him. And because of that, Yunoa had been unable to dodge the collapsing ground behind her, and had fallen into this hole.
Mireia thought that if she had been at Yunoa's side, this would never have happened.
She had misjudged again. And because of that misjudgment, she had lost Yunoa.
"Lady Mireia?"
Mireia was in turmoil. Casualties in a fierce battle were only to be expected. It wasn't even the first time someone had died in a subjugation force she led.
Yunoa was the only man who wasn't afraid of her, who spoke to her honestly. An advisor who could lay bare her mistakes and tell her that wrong was wrong.
That should have been all. Yunoa and Mireia didn't have any particularly special relationship.
"Yunoa..."
But what was this feeling, then?
Mireia could not understand her own emotions. The more she tried to find a reason, the more the confusion piled up, until she could no longer understand anything at all.
For a long time, Mireia stood motionless before the hole Yunoa had fallen into, as still as a stone. Even when someone spoke to her from the side, she gave no answer at all.
The capital, Pipnel. Inside the Central Church, in the Hero's chambers.
Cain, the Hero who had been hovering at death's door after the attack by Xavier, the Lord of Deceit, awoke in his bed.
"This goddamn..."
And Cain flew into a rage.
As if it weren't enough that refusing to fight the Demon King meant having his body torn apart in agony — now he was getting assassination attempts from demons on top of it.
"Ah, Hero. You've awakened? How is your body feeling?"
Just then, the bishop of the Castia Diocese entered the Hero's chambers and asked after him.
"Get out! You bastard! Are you a demon too? I don't trust anyone anymore!"
Cain shot up from the bed, grabbed the flower vase beside him, and hurled it at the bishop.
Crash!
The vase struck the bishop's head, shattered, and spilled water everywhere.
"Ugh... uuugh..."
The bishop groaned in pain, blood running from his head.
"Get out! Anyone who comes in here without my permission, I'll take for an assassin and kill them. Go tell them that!"
"H-Hero..."
"Get the hell out!"
Cain grabbed his sword, which had been standing beside the bed. The bishop sensed he genuinely meant to cut him down, and hurriedly left the room.
From that day on, the Hero's chambers did not even permit a knock on the door unless it was someone Cain had authorized.
The attempt by Xavier — a demon disguised as a human — to assassinate him had been an enormous shock. Cain could no longer trust the people around him.
If he stayed as the Hero, the demons would keep coming after his life anyway. His plan to use the Hero's status to live however he pleased was impossible.
"If I just kill that Demon King bastard, this whole goddamn mess will be over..."
But how was he supposed to kill the Demon King?
He'd nearly died even to that Xavier, supposedly a subordinate of the Demon King. If he hadn't desperately resisted and bought time, he would certainly have been killed.
This assassination attempt wouldn't be the last. As long as Cain the Hero was alive, the Demon King would never stop trying to kill him.
Cain wanted to end this Hero's life that had not a single good thing about it. Going back to the back alleys and living like a thug the way he used to would have suited him far better. But even holding that thought in his head was enough to send him writhing in the extreme agony of his body being torn apart.
Cain pondered. How could he bring down the Demon King as fast as possible?
In truth, the fastest path for a Hero to defeat the Demon King was to set out on an adventure, gather companions, and obtain the Holy Sword. Every previous Hero who had succeeded in subjugating the Demon King had done exactly that.
But Cain did not have the patience to wait through that process. He just wanted a way to storm the Demon King Castle right now and take the Demon King down.
Without knowing that such a shortcut would only delay the Demon King's defeat.