Defining the Relationship (1)
As always, the Chief Manager's authority was absolute.
The forum drama was extinguished in the blink of an eye. All mention of my handle vanished, and within minutes, the Demon Lord Gallery had returned to its pristine, tranquil state. There was hardly any need to state the obvious.
"Gotta admit, the guy gets results."
Sitting back, I found myself thinking once again just how ridiculously lucky I was. Born by sheer chance into an ultra-rare, low-depth dimension, I had drawn the curious gazes of forum veterans and even snagged a direct personal connection with the Chief Manager himself. In a way, you could call me dimensionally silver-spooned.
Naturally, none of this came without a price. The other users only paid attention to me because they stood to gain something from my existence. Even so, whatever debt I owed for this intervention was a problem for future me to solve—and considering the fee was just a permission contract for a dimensional relay station, it probably wouldn't amount to much anyway.
I had traded away something that held zero value to me, and in return, the board had been sanitized and a cyber witch-hunt had been averted. That was more than fair in my book.
"Time to get some actual, constructive work done."
The gallery had been restored to normal, and targeted harassment was out of the question for the foreseeable future. With the board momentarily quiet under the weight of the Chief Manager's pinned notice, now was the golden hour to gather intelligence and post my questions. By tomorrow afternoon, the place would undoubtedly revert to its usual chaotic, brawling circus, so it was now or never.
Besides, since I had already publicly spilled the beans about picking up a Hero, there was no reason to be coy. I laid out the exact reality of my situation and began drafting my thread.
I'm not looking for jokes or snark here, guys. Serious, thoughtful advice only, please.
If you saw my previous post, you already know the gist: a Hero fell out of the sky into my lap out of nowhere. She woke up after being out cold for a few days, but there are a couple of problems.
Her Causality Correction was unmistakably sitting at Stage 3 while she was unconscious, but now that she's awake, it looks more like Stage 0 or Stage 1. Her actual combat power is pretty weak.
She says she was subjected to esper chimera experiments. She has a huge variety of abilities, but the overall output quality is so low she couldn't scratch me even if she tried. Her growth potential is definitely real, though...
The problem is, I have no idea what to do with her.
For context, we're currently on friendly terms. She has some pretty severe trauma, but she harbors zero malice or hostility toward me.
My dilemma is this:
Killing her outright leaves a bitter taste in my mouth, and since I've got some planetary matters coming up soon, I could really use an extra pair of hands. I also think she might serve as a decent mediator between me and the local humans, so I'd prefer to keep her alive.
On the flip side, I'm worried she might act outside my expectations, or that harboring a Hero might inadvertently hand humanity the exact justification they need to launch an all-out assault against me.
Help a fellow Demon Lord out just this once...
Predictably, dropping that thread onto the advice board ignited an immediate firestorm of engagement.
The resident lurkers who practically lived on the Q&A board swarmed in by default. Users who had been busy stoking forum drama rushed over, and even long-inactive veterans who had only logged in after spotting the Chief Manager's announcement poked their heads into my thread. Their motivations were varied, but clear:
Just what kind of freak was this newbie that the Chief Manager had personally stepped in to shield?
What catastrophic stunt had he pulled to set the entire gallery on fire in the first place?
And what on earth was this center-of-attention rookie going to ask?
Whatever their individual reasons, the collective firepower of the Demon Lords congregating in the comment section was staggering. Dozens of replies flooded in by the second, quickly turning into hundreds. Just sorting through the noise to find constructive answers took an eternity, and actually digesting the useful ones took even longer.
"That ought to do it."
After a considerable amount of digging, I managed to isolate the users who had offered substantive, valuable input. With an assist from our helpful Sub-Manager, SpiderLord, I generated viewing permissions and invited those selected users into a private, restricted thread where we could talk without the peanut gallery screaming in our ears.
Though honestly, isn't this cliquey feature a little much?
Writing a hidden post and selectively handing out viewing keys to specific users was basically a built-in tool for cliquish favoritism. I had only learned about the feature today, but no matter how you sliced it, the potential for abuse was ridiculously high. How was this any different from running an invite-only private chatroom behind everyone's backs?
Then again, it wasn't something I needed to lose sleep over. I was the one reaping massive benefits from this exact favoritism right now.
Thanks to this private thread, I was finally able to exchange thoughts with users who possessed at least a shred of common sense.
The first registered user to reply was refreshingly rational. If you graded the Demon Lords on this forum by sanity, he easily fell into the top zero-point-one percent. Trading observations with someone who sounded like an actual academic allowed me to gather genuine data regarding the Hero's causality mechanics. It was a promising start.
The rest of the thread was on an entirely different level compared to the garbage spewed on the public boards. Nearly every commenter provided substantiated logic, lived experiences, and relevant data to back up their claims, without descending into petty insults or trying to tear each other down.
Was this... the majesty of ancient forum addicts?
Was this the weight of cosmic experience?
Well, mostly.
"..."
I was certain I had filtered the guest list, so how on earth did this registered degenerate slip through the cracks? Considering this lunatic popped up under every single thread involving a male and a female interacting, he was clearly no ordinary user. Lacking deeper knowledge of the forum's inner workings, I could only assume he possessed some underhanded method of cracking clearance permissions, not unlike Odin.
Setting aside those rare, utterly worthless comments, the vast majority of experienced Demon Lords converged on a single shared piece of counsel.
"If you can become allies with the Hero, do it..."
Some of the commenters shared their own personal histories. Most of their stories revolved around innate racial curses, tragic misunderstandings, or insurmountable cosmic laws that had forced them to wage war against Heroes against their will. To hear them tell it, had there been an alternative that allowed them to avoid bloodshed, they would have seized it without hesitation.
A Demon Lord dreading combat? To an outsider, that might sound paradoxical, but digging into the fundamental nature of what it meant to be a Demon Lord made it completely understandable.
With the exception of entities native to Hell, very few Demon Lords fell neatly into black-and-white concepts of pure good or evil. Viewed through the eyes of humans or foreign species, they were branded as "evil," but within the borders of their own demonic realms or among their kin, they were revered as "good"—as sovereign leaders, protectors, and monarchs. There were almost no beings who were purely, mindlessly evil for the sake of it.
Demon Lords had subordinates. They had families, peoples, and empires to defend. They had zero reason to squander their own subjects in purposeless, unprovoked wars unless they were forced into a corner, or the generational hatred had grown so deep it was impossible to mend.
Unfortunately, the dimensions most of these gallery users hailed from had split into irreconcilable extremes eons ago. For them, collisions with Heroes and their coalitions were inevitable.
"I guess coming from a dimension with zero supernatural history is actually a blessing in disguise."
In the world I lived in, "Heroes" and "Demon Lords" had only ever existed in bedtime fairy tales and pulp fiction novels. There was no deep emotional rift carved by centuries of slaughter. There was no divine mandate forcing us to kill each other, but by that same token, there was no reason to fight either.
Faced with that choice, picking peace was a no-brainer.
One particular comment made me pause, forcing me to mull over my thoughts until a clear path materialized before me.
"..."
Don't end up like me.
A single sentence, heavy with the suffocating weight of irrevocable regret. A block of text preceded it, but those five words were the only thing burned into my vision. Someone ahead of me on this path had willingly stepped on a landmine called remorse and was warning me to turn back. What was left to debate?
I'm going to raise this Hero.
That was my conclusion, and the directive I would commit to going forward. Put another way, a Demon Lord was about to step into the role of a Hero's caretaker.
"...Though 'caretaker' sounds kind of weird, doesn't it?"
No matter how I spun it, the term sat poorly on my tongue. A fifty-year-old virgin who had never even held hands with a woman acting like a paternal guardian? The contradiction was borderline absurd. It was just a label, but I couldn't shake the nagging awkwardness. I racked my brain for a while, searching for a title that felt natural.
Then, inspiration struck.
"Master."
I would be the master, and Astrea would be the disciple. It rolled off the tongue beautifully.
"Yeah, let's go with that."
A Demon Lord master and a Hero disciple. It was an inherently contradictory, absurd arrangement, but for someone like me, it felt just right. In fact, I liked it quite a lot.
"The Chief Manager's reaction was far too fast..."
Around the time the pinned announcement went live and snuffed out the forum's flames, an entity sat in the shadows of a distant plane, scowling at his terminal screen with a darkened expression.
"This is going to disrupt the schedule."
Every conceivable variable regarding the newcomer had been accounted for—from the most microscopic coincidences to probabilities so astronomically low they bordered on impossible. He had not doubted his own calculations for a second. If there had been room for doubt, it lay only with the pawns executing them.
"For the Chief Manager to move this swiftly, someone must have reached out to him."
Nowhere in his blueprints had he factored in an emergency summons to Solomon. He had known for an age that the sub-managers policing the boards had no direct channel to summon the head administrator. Messages sent to the Chief Manager's personal account were routed straight into automated data incinerators.
During the previous forum riot just prior to the Pandemonium assembly, many users assumed the Chief Manager had arrived at the sub-managers' behest, but he knew better. It was only natural, really.
The Chief Manager. Supreme Chairman of Pandemonium. Architect of the Demon Lord Gallery. The God-slayer who possessed the power to strike down true divinities.
Solomon existed in a realm fundamentally divorced from the rest of them. In terms of sheer, unfathomable might, ordinary Demon Lords shouldn't even have been permitted to gaze upon his countenance during the Grand Assembly, let alone raise their voices in his presence. Simply speaking unbidden before Solomon was an act of profound insolence. In truth, the very existence of the Pandemonium Council—a venue where any Demon Lord could speak freely—was nothing more than a testament to Solomon's infinite magnanimity.
Or perhaps, an expression of his utter indifference.
The point was simple: a transcendent sovereign like Solomon was not an entity swayed by the pleas or wills of lesser beings. He moved solely on his own whim, by his own volition.
"...No, that rookie couldn't possibly have spoken to him. How did this happen?"
Had Solomon engaged with the newcomer out of sheer curiosity, it might explain why he dropped an official administrative hammer the moment the newbie ran into trouble; Solomon was known to fiercely protect whatever caught his fleeting interest. Yet according to his own intelligence grid, as well as the reports from his "Second Friend," the rookie had never exchanged a single syllable with the Chief Manager.
Not on the open board, and not inside the grand halls of Pandemonium.
Even if they had utilized the administrative backroom inaccessible to his "First Friend," entering that sanctuary required physical or mental contact with the host. A direct meeting between Solomon and the rookie was a mandatory prerequisite.
"They never met. I know they didn't... It makes no sense."
An unaccounted-for variable had manifested. Closing his eyes, the Demon Lord sank into quiet contemplation, only to be snapped back to reality by a sharp chime echoing through his terminal.
It was an incoming comm from his "Second Friend."
"What is it?" he answered, keeping his tone measured.
"Word travels fast," the Demon Lord muttered dryly.
For a faction of rigid, dogmatic traditionalists, their ears were surprisingly sharp. Did they maintain an informant network independent of his own? He couldn't be sure, but a swift response was useful regardless.
"It is a matter of paramount importance. Natural that we keep abreast. Where exactly does the error lie?"
"The cyber witch-hunt against the rookie fell through," the Demon Lord said, leaning back. "Whether he made direct contact with Solomon or not, the motion to authorize his dimensional relay station is almost guaranteed to pass now."
"...Has Solomon realized there is an enemy nestled within his ranks?"
"He's likely suspected it for a long time. He simply hasn't pinpointed who."
To imagine one could remain entirely concealed beneath Solomon's piercing gaze was the pinnacle of arrogance. No matter how meticulously one tread, no matter how many layers of misdirection were woven, Solomon was bound to notice something amiss eventually. True skill lay not in remaining utterly invisible, but in deciding whether he caught your tail or your head.
"Could he have traced—"
"He hasn't dug that deep, so relax. Solomon's hands are full directing the Divine-Demonic War; he doesn't have the luxury to cast his gaze toward this corner of the cosmos. The Dimensional Empire is keeping its head down for now, too."
"Then we have simply lost one of our secondary contingencies."
It was an annoyance, certainly, but an alternate failsafe remained intact. Even if that second safeguard collapsed, the core objective would remain unaffected. From the very beginning, every plan he forged was built upon the presumption of worst-case scenarios. Still, the setback caused by the Chief Manager's abrupt intervention rankled—it was one of the rare miscalculations in his career.
"Precisely. We lost the information advantage," the Demon Lord conceded coolly. "Which means..."
"We must draft the next phase assuming an inevitable frontal collision. Understood."
"Good."
"Until our next rendezvous, then."
The transmission severed with a soft click.
Staring into the darkened screen, the Demon Lord murmured with a cold, mocking smirk.
"Farewell, Sir Hero."