The Plot Revealed and the Ascendant (1)

The corridor stretched on and on, a tunnel with not a single light in sight.

Its cylindrical slope looked as if it had been freshly grown from the old stone walls, which were slick with moss and age. The farther down they went, the thicker the underground chill became. After walking for roughly half an hour, Aila finally lost patience and spoke first.

"I'm dizzy, I feel gross, and now I want to wash again."

"Put up with it. We’ve already rested enough. At least we’re not running into those burrowing claws."

"Sure, but still... Then give me Horus at least. I want to go while playing."

Raul narrowed his eyes at her continued grumbling.

"I told you, I can't reveal my divinity until the time comes."

"Eeeeh, no. I'm bored. I'm cold. I'm bored. I'm cold!"

Raul was wondering whether he should raise his divinity just so he could smack Aila on the cheek when he heard voices from somewhere below.

"...right? This time you too..."

"...It’s just the ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠wind, isn’t it? Or maybe..."

Voices were coming from deep underground.

Raul and Aila both clamped their mouths shut and exchanged a glance.

Aila pressed her index finger to her lips first, then nodded.

Probably meant to keep quiet.

They stopped moving for a moment and listened, and the voices from before came through clearly.

"See? There's no sound at all. It's the wind."

"No, I’m telling you, I heard a thud, like bricks breaking."

"The thing that broke was your head, then."

"I'm fucking serious, you bastard."

Then, from the entrance far below, the sound of footsteps entering the corridor came, clack, clack.

"This is supposed to be the emergency escape route for those so-called bloodline nobles. Didn’t someone find the exit up top?"

"Cut the crap. Yeah, I know standing here staring at walls all day is shitty, but calm down a little— huh?"

Another guard gave a high-pitched yelp.

He was standing at the center where the entire cylindrical tunnel could be seen, and he narrowed his eyes.

"Wasn't this slope only built halfway?"

"Yeah. The rest was supposed to open from above..."

Both voices stopped at once.

That was the moment Raul leapt down into the vacant corridor.

"Wha— that is—!"

The two of them were already drawing their weapons as they stared at Raul, his robe flaring as he fell.

They bared their chests as if about to shout, showing both shock and hostility at once.

"Hup!"

Before things could spiral out of control, Raul gathered his divinity and kicked off the tunnel’s central pillar.

Thunk!

It made a loud noise, but the effect was decisive.

From behind him, Raul's black blade flashed out and cut down the throat of the man trying to cry out.

"Big..."

At the same time, the other guard opened his mouth wide to scream, but a streak of red hair followed Raul’s leap down right behind him.

No sound came from the sharp edge of the Cinder's blade.

Raul looked at her and gave a small laugh.

"You kept up pretty well."

"What? Hah. Don’t underestimate Cinder just because you're an old man."

Raul gave a small nod, then looked down at the two corpses in front of him.

Honestly, he had assumed this ancient facility would have been abandoned, so even he was a little surprised.

Who were these people?

Then Aila, standing beside him, suddenly said,

"Hey, old man. Aren’t these guys the ones from that missing persons list the knight showed us?"

"Hmm?"

Now that she mentioned it, they did look familiar.

Raul nodded at once.

"Yeah. They're the members of the first scouting party."

"The same ones as that blood-soaked bastard from yesterday?"

Raul nodded.

Something was definitely wrong.

He looked down at the heads of the men at his feet, whose skulls had split open and were coughing up thick red blood in gurgling spurts.

These ones weren't contractors.

Watching the scene, Aila let out a sigh.

"So it’s not like they were forced into a demon contract and ended up cooperating with those bastards..."

"But listen to what they were saying just now. They still had their sense of self."

At Raul's answer, Aila scratched beneath her chin with her finger.

"So their identities weren't destroyed and turned into thralls or slaves. They weren't blackmailed ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠into cooperation through some forced contract with demons either, and they still worked with bloodfiends? Were they never adventurers to begin with?"

"No, they were adventurers. That's true."

Aila stared at Raul as though asking, And then how does this make sense?

Of course, Raul's answer was the same as hers.

"It doesn't."

To become a bloodfiend’s thrall meant that if the bloodfiend told you to die, then you would die. Not as a figure of speech, but literally.

Who in the world would want to become a life as disposable as a fly, one that could be snuffed out by someone else’s whim?

They would rather die bravely on the battlefield before suffering every humiliation and cruel treatment imaginable.

That was why the scene before them made even less sense.

"Would an experienced adventurer, one capable enough to explore an uncharted labyrinth, really choose to become a disposable life on purpose?"

Raul asked it as though he were asking himself, and Aila, of course, only looked puzzled and gave no answer.

For now, the two of them agreed to find their original target first: the holy relic.

So Raul firmly shut the corridor door and stepped out into a hallway that, incongruously, even had an old-fashioned carpet laid along it.

He looked through the windows of the corridor, where row after row of candles burned with purple flame, and saw several enormous structures rising high in roughly the same layout as this place.

"A castle?"

Aila looked utterly incredulous.

As she said, this was indeed a castle.

A castle likely used in some very distant past by an ancient royal family.

Instinctively, Aila moved her body into the shadows where the purple light did not reach.

A gust of eerie wind stirred from ahead, bringing with it the sense of another presence.

Raul followed her without complaint.

When it came to infiltration and assassination, she was better than him by a step.

Soon, a figure in the distance drew closer.

It was a bloodfiend, with long fangs and bright red pupils visible at a glance.

Not a slave turned thrall by someone else, but a true bloodfiend.

"...I smell blood."

The creature muttered in a very low voice, its scarlet eyes rolling beneath the flickering purple candlelight.

It was as if it were searching for Raul and Aila, hidden in the shadows.

Raul was about to nudge Aila beside him when—

Hm?

When he reached out, there was nothing at all in the black shadow.

And then, immediately after,

"Ghk?!

A short, heavy scream rang out.

Turning his head, Raul saw Aila with both legs wrapped around the bloodfiend’s neck, one hand holding a hidden blade and the other a cloth, using them to slit its throat and gag its mouth at the same time.

As the dead man's body sagged, Aila planted a foot against the wall and crushed even the sound of it collapsing.

The sight carried the real presence of an assassin, far beyond Raul’s own boastful claim of assassination after eliminating all witnesses.

"Not bad."

When Raul spoke his honest impression, Aila shrugged and grinned.

"Got to earn my keep."

Thanks to the true killer's soundless death, Raul was able to reach the place they had been aiming for with ease.

It was a storage-like room at the very bottom of the fortress.

Beyond the wooden door, polished glossy despite the passing years, a strange divinity could be felt.

If the holy relic was here, it would be inside.

But as he had suspected several times already, something felt off.

Raul grasped Aila's shoulder just as he sensed the time had come and she was about to take the lead again.

"You hold the line here. From this point on, I go."

"If you mean blocking the way or killing someone, I’m better at the second one."

Aila had a point, but Raul shook his head.

"Bad feeling."

An indescribable, cold unease had been crawling up his neck for some time now.

He couldn't explain it, but for some reason Raul had the strong intuition that if he let Aila go on alone to the other side, she would lose her life in vain.

Before she could argue any further, Raul summoned Horus.

The guardian leapt at once and climbed onto Aila's shoulder.

"Then I'm counting on you."

"Wait—! Old man!"

While Aila was distracted by Horus, Raul opened the door and moved beyond it.

He wrapped his whole body in the divinity he had been gathering all along.

All five senses with which he saw and felt the world sharpened instantly.

Tap-tap-tap-tap-

"...Find them! Those guys are..."

"...If we follow the blood smell..."

"...An intruder! There's an intruder!"

Only then could Raul make out the many presences moving frantically through the upper hallway he had passed with Aila.

So they really were a blood-drinking species sensitive to the scent of blood.

Despite Aila's overwhelming performance, the castle seemed to have already been thrown into chaos.

And yet, what drew Raul’s alarm more than the dozens or hundreds of bloodsucking creatures living in the castle was what lay right in front of him.

He walked through a corridor devoid of even a single speck of light.

It was dark, but to Raul, whose obsidian eyes gleamed white, everything was visible.

On the walls of the underground hallway, where there should have been nothing at all, were countless dark-red inscriptions, as though written in blood long ago.

At the end of a jumble of ancient murals and demon script, Raul pulled at the handle of an impossibly massive door.

Creakggg—

The old iron door groaned as expected, and beyond it came the sound of something flowing.

What met Raul's eyes was nothing short of horrific.

Dozens of people were nailed to inverted crosses.

Their eyes had no focus.

Rivulets of bright red blood streamed like waterfalls down the spikes driven through their wrists and ankles.

At the center of the blood-red lake that gathered beneath them, some unidentified thing was walking across the blood.

It turned its head slightly.

Then, without the slightest delay, a scarlet flash exploded before Raul's eyes.

Kwa-jijijik───!

"Fuck!"

It had only lasted an instant, but Raul had felt his mind go blank. He immediately spat out a curse and steadied himself.

So that was why it had felt wrong to let Aila enter this room.

"So it really was the evil god's authority."

The mystery of how the adventurers had kept their sense of self while obeying his commands was solved at once.

At that moment, the thing that had been facing forward with its body while its head twisted around one hundred and eighty degrees to stare at Raul opened its mouth in a grotesque grin.

"I was waiting for you. Reincarnated Saint."

The voice that burst from beneath the clown mask it wore sounded thin, almost like a woman's at first glance.

Yet at the same time it also seemed childlike, and old, like the rasp of iron from some ancient throat.

Like...

Like the abyssal archdemon, the Void, that had split the heavens open and appeared with dozens of eyes fixed on Raul.

Without hesitation, Raul drew the sword behind his back and made white flame rise.

With pupils turned snow-white, he quickly scanned the surroundings and said,

"I thought this was Exceed territory..."

He asked in a deliberately calm tone, and the clown threw its head back with a laugh so twisted it was almost obscene.

"Exceed? Ah! You mean that archduke's pathetic little limbs?"

"Archduke... that bastard?"

Raul spread tension evenly through his body without showing it outwardly.

Among abyssal demons, rank and hierarchy were absolute law.

How many of them could look at an Abyss Grand Duke and call him "that bastard"?

Raul thought he might have to bring out Halo here and now.

Crack, crack.

Then the clown's head rotated clockwise while it continued to stare at Raul.

With the sound of bones breaking and resetting in turn, the thing completed a full circle and showed black teeth in a grin.

"We only borrowed this place for a little while. We slipped it away for a moment with the power of a great being."

"Borrowed?"

So this place really had belonged to Exceed originally, but now this thing had seized it by force?

Raul remembered that the evil god's authority which had appeared before him just now was Mental Collapse and Memory Manipulation.

"That archduke bastard was conducting an interesting experiment."

"An experiment...?"

Raul did not stop the clown from talking even though he had not asked a thing.

The more information he got, the better.

Drip, drip.

Suddenly the clown used its thumb and ring finger to pick up a scrap of paper that had been sunk in the sea of blood.

The creature continued speaking through a mouth that had grown from its shoulder.

"How can the flesh of demons resist divinity? Not just the makeshift tricks of resurrection and immortal resistance used by the Void demons. I mean a way to overcome divinity itself, which is practically the fate of demons."

...

Raul said nothing.

He already knew exactly what the result of that experiment had been.

The purple potion that granted the debuff Divine Paralysis.

And that very potion was still carefully tucked inside the inner pocket of Raul's robe.

Then the thing opened its mouth wide again.

"Rather than resisting divinity, the first option is to cultivate followers untouched by demonic energy. The second is to develop drugs and barriers that suppress the use of divinity, yes? Ho! Interesting. You think so too, don't you, Reincarnated Saint!!"

The clown laughed, clacking its teeth with a sharp snap, snap from new mouths that had sprouted on its palms and the insides of its elbows.

Raul narrowed his brow at the disgustingly inhuman sight.

"So the first and second aren't alternatives. If there are one and two, then there has to be a third, doesn't there?"

"Oh! Sharp. Very sharp, Reincarnated Saint! Hahaha! Hoo! Hahahahaha!"

"That level of bullshit is a disease."

"Then as you said, there is a third one, isn't there!? Seems the archduke chose this third method after all!"

Raul's eyebrows twitched.

He chose the third one?

Then what the hell was this purple potion in Raul's hand right now?

While Raul was briefly caught in confusion, the thing with a new eye growing out of its neck spoke again.

"Third: ascension."

"...Ascension?"

It was a word Raul had heard many times before, and he reacted before he could stop himself.

"A demon that accepts divinity... unstable, incomplete, but confirming a result more destructive than anything else. Hah! Confirmed! Confirmed, Saint! What will you do? They already made it! Hahahahahaha!"

Raul fixed a sharp gaze on the creature, which only laughed more and more madly as new mouths sprouted all over it.

"Looks ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠like I'll need to read that myself."

"Read it yourself? Hah! No chance. Who's going to give it to you? How? How exactly are you going to read it yourself?"

The demon, now baring more than ten mouths and six eyes, looked like it was openly mocking Raul.

Raul answered the clown-dressed demon in a dry voice.

"Like this, asshole."

Crack-!

White lightning flashed all over Raul's body.

When the clown shut its eyes tight and opened them again, Raul was already gone.

The ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠next instant, white flames were raging behind it.

The sword strike of white light had already severed the demon's throat in a level line.

"Ah..."

The clown tried to say something, but at that very moment, five forks of lightning raced along ten lines of sword path.

Kwa-roo-roo-ROOOOM!

Following the first burst of thunder, a massive crash rolled through the entire underground fortress, deep and heavy enough to shake the ground itself.

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