Birth of a Demon Lord (1)

There was an old saying:

Kill one man, and you are a murderer. Kill ten thousand, and you are a hero.

Back in my childhood, in a distant past I could hardly even recall, I saw that childish adage drifting around the internet and found myself asking a single question:

If someone who kills ten thousand is a hero, then what do you call someone who kills a hundred thousand? A million? Ten million? A hundred million?

It was a question born of pure ignorance and childish daydreaming, yet surprisingly, quite a few people ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠took the time to answer.

Mass murderers, pioneers, Hitler, saviors, and plenty more.

Answers poured in, ranging from the thoroughly sensible to the delightfully unhinged. I found them fascinating to read through, thinking back then that any one of them—or perhaps all of them—could be the right answer.

Now, however, things were different.

I could state with absolute certainty that none of the answers I had read back then hit the mark.

The reason was simple enough.

The word embedded in the single sentence hovering right before my eyes—neither a hallucination nor a trick of the light—had given me the true answer.

Demon Lord.

The real answer to what you call someone who slaughters a hundred million people was, of all things, a Demon Lord.

Where had it all gone wrong?

It was a question that lingered as I wandered across this sea of ash, forged from the rubble of burned and collapsed ruins. Where had everything begun to unravel? Where had I taken the wrong turn? Which choice had been the fatal mistake?

The day the Gate opened?

Was that day the problem?

In a sense, you could say it was. After all, the root of every disaster had been the Gates and the demonic beasts—commonly referred to as monsters—that came pouring out of them. Summed up in a single sentence, that day had looked like something straight out of a run-of-the-mill fusion fantasy novel. Gates tear open, monsters run amok, ability users awaken to suppress the rifts and the beasts, and some destined protagonist becomes an overpowered monster who saves the world—the exact kind of novel everyone has read.

Except, damn it all, reality was no novel.

There was no overpowered protagonist. Unlike the comfortable tropes of fiction, the Gates did not simply vanish once subjugated; instead, they proliferated endlessly, multiplying like cancer cells. Competent ability users only began to emerge five whole years after the first Gates appeared, and five years had been more than enough time for humanity's population to be whittled down to a quarter of its original size.

Naturally, through sheer luck, I happened to be among that surviving quarter.

Truth be told, it was nothing short of a miracle. To survive for five years in a desolate, post-apocalyptic cityscape, dodging monsters straight out of a cheap horror flick alongside roving bands of cannibalistic raiders—what else could you call that if not a miracle?

"Pfft..."

The more I thought about it, the more hollow my dry chuckle sounded.

Miracle, my ass. Dying back then would have been so much easier. If I had died right there and then, I wouldn't be stuck enduring this wretched excuse for an existence today.

People don't say "better off dead" for nothing.

If I had known what the future held, if I had known I was slated to awaken as an ability user, I probably would have chosen suicide instead.

Even after all these years, the day I awakened as an ability user remained vivid in my memory. That fateful day. Looking back, that day was also one of the prime reasons I found myself in this predicament. If I had been granted an ordinary ability, or better yet, no ability at all, I would have led a far more ordinary life than this. Though, in all likelihood, I probably would have met a violent end somewhere along the way.

Regardless, ever since that day of awakening, a single title trailed behind my name like a shadow.

Gate Closer.

I was the only person on Earth—the only human in existence—capable of permanently closing a Gate.

What followed from there was, well, entirely predictable.

I traversed the globe alongside other ability users. I sealed Gates, saved countless lives, and lived out days that felt like something ripped from a comic book superhero's reel. To be blunt, I felt no regrets whatsoever back then. Far from remorse, I was brimming with hope and confidence. Because I believed the path I walked was the righteous one. Because I believed I could save the world.

Yet every single ounce of that had been nothing more than misjudgment and hubris.

BOOM—!

My gaze immediately snapped toward the source of the noise, taking ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠in the scenery of ruined desolation.

"Another unexploded shell, huh..."

What pulled me from my reverie was unexploded ordnance.

Those damn duds.

Given that the sheer volume of missiles and artillery rounds dumped onto this soil exceeded the combined totals of both World War I and World War II, stumbling upon unexploded ordnance was practically second nature. The real headache was that their manufacturing quality was just marginally too good, meaning that even now, decades later, a dud or two still went off somewhere every single day.

Exhaling a weary sigh, I slowly expanded my field of perception.

An intangible domain that no one else could see or sense expanded abruptly, blanketing the crater where the dud had exploded before stretching outward, surging past the horizon in an instant. It took barely two minutes for that invisible boundary to envelop the entirety of the globe. The moment the domain encompassed all of Earth, I extracted a single piece of data—a conclusion.

It was the exact same piece of data, the exact same conclusion, that I had drawn yesterday, the day before that, a month ago, a year ago, and ten years ago.

I was the sole intelligent life form remaining on this Earth.

No need to mince words. This reality was both the root cause and the final conclusion of all my brooding and remorse. A solo life on Earth. How utterly pathetic.

Oh, to be clear, it wasn't the kind of apocalypse where the rest of humanity had gone extinct. They had simply fled, making a home for themselves somewhere up in that glittering night sky. Technically speaking, this leaned more toward sci-fi or a space opera.

Tilting my head back, I gazed into the heavens. A cluster of particularly brilliant stars caught my eye. Not just one or two, but a constellation numbering in the dozens. Those stars, tracing a faint, gleaming line across the night sky, were the living proof of humanity's survival. The crowning achievement of an exiled civilization that had abandoned Earth—sleepless watchdogs built solely for one lone man.

The Tactical Surveillance Satellite Argos.

Thanks to those 101 satellites stationed in geostationary orbit, I lived with virtually no privacy, watched twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week by someone out there in the depths of space. Yet, when you thought about it, that scrutiny was only natural. After all, I was the traitor and butcher who had slaughtered half of mankind and driven the rest into the void of space.

Traitor to humanity, mass murderer, madman, tyrant.

Hope of mankind, Gate Closer, Hero, savior.

Two sets of entirely irreconcilable titles, yet every single one belonged to me.

The reasoning behind them was painfully straightforward. I was a savior because I had freed mankind from the horrors of the Gates, and I ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠was a slaughterer because I had massacred half of humanity. I had saved humanity because I believed it was right, and I had killed half of humanity because I believed that, too, was necessary.

It was never a slaughter devoid of reason.

There was a reason; it had been an unavoidable choice. Even if I were to regress through time and stand at that critical crossroads once more, I would kill half of humanity again without a moment's hesitation. That was the weight of the reason.

Even so, I had no intention of indulging in vile self-justification—claiming I was a necessary evil, or pretending I had voluntarily taken up the cross of self-sacrifice. The unvarnished truth remained: I had murdered them with my own two hands.

Still, there was no stopping the regret and despair from seeping through the cracks.

Nineteen years and 364 days.

It had been exactly nineteen years and 364 days since the rest of humanity vanished from the face of the Earth. I had honestly believed I had discarded human emotions long ago, just as I had when I cut down all those lives. Underestimating the abrasive friction of time had been my fatal miscalculation. Before I even realized it, remorse and sorrow had burrowed into me piece by piece, until now, even sheer loneliness had settled deep into my marrow.

At times, the isolation was so suffocating I genuinely wanted to die.

In the end, I was nothing more than a frail human being—still an immature child at heart. I was no man of iron. I was no superman.

"...Pathetic bastard."

Suicide wasn't an option for me. Having chosen this path, I had to endure for at least another thirty years.

Was there really no other way?

Even though I already knew the answer was no, it was a question I had asked myself tens, hundreds, thousands of times. I had spent quite a while lost in that foolish spiral of questioning myself when—

Beep, beep, beep, beep, beep—!

A faint electronic chime rang out.

Pulling my vacant gaze away from the night sky, I glanced down at my wrist to see a battered, thoroughly weathered military watch. A relic manufactured back in 2050—a model from seventy years ago. The alarm on this borderline scrap-heap watch signified only one thing: the counter of nineteen years and 364 days had officially ticked over to twenty years.

"Twenty years..."

Memories of the years already spent didn't even cross my mind. Instead, a wave of crushing dread about the thirty years still ahead came crashing down upon me.

"Haaah..."

Thirty years. Could I really hold out? Tonight, the oppressive weight of time felt unusually heavy. It was right in the middle of that sigh, as I stood weighed down by the crushing march of time, that it happened.

Two lines of text materialized out of thin air, instantly arresting my attention.

What is this?

A mental attack? A new enemy? A hologram? An illusion?

Floating in empty air, the sentences resembled the status windows often seen in fantasy novels, yet to me, they were utterly alien. Because in this garbage heap of a world, such a thing as a status window had never existed. Which meant the words hovering before me were either the product of my mind finally unraveling into hallucinations, or the result of some external intervention.

Paying no heed to my reaction, the air continued to churn out line after line of text.

Pandemonium? An approval request? What the hell is being approved?

Watching the sentences multiply one by one, any hope of grasping the situation was drowned out by sheer bewilderment. I couldn't make heads or tails of what it was babbling about. And the final nail in the coffin of my confusion was the last sentence to appear—and the single word woven into it.

"...Demon Lord?"

Demon Lord? What kind of bullshit is this?