I'm Quitting My Job as a High-Ranking Officer in the Demon Lord's Army (2)
It was often said that unexpected situations tend to arrive without warning. As usual, I finished my work and powered on the computer.
Whirrr.
The familiar hum of the main unit filled the room. Without hesitation, I logged into Fantastic Online. The instant the game launched—
Flash!
A blinding light exploded from the monitor. I winced, squinting at the screen.
You will be able to return home upon completing the final achievement or a hidden achievement.
That was the last thing I saw before the real nightmare began.
Being possessed into the game was pure torment. In most possession stories, the protagonist grows overwhelmingly strong with ease. Reality, however, was far less forgiving. In the game, slaughtering monsters meant nothing to me. In this world, every kill carried weight.
I had to wield weapons I had never touched in my life and use them to cut down creatures far deadlier than any human. For someone who had never so much as killed an animal back on Earth, it was absolute hell. It took me a full year just to adapt.
“Haa…”
I let out a sigh that seemed to hollow out the ground beneath me. How had things come to this? I couldn’t think of anything I’d done to deserve it. As that thought circled through my mind over dinner, a new message appeared.
4 years remain until the start of the main story.
It had already been a year since my possession. Four years. That was the minimum time left before I could return to reality. No—minimum was optimistic. The main story itself could drag on for years after it began.
Those fucking developers.
If they were going to possess me, they could have at least done it properly. Seriously. A year ago, I might have understood. I could have seen it as consideration, giving me time to adjust. But four years? That was just cruel.
It’s like they’re telling me to settle down and live here.
I was already struggling to survive. To adapt to this world, I exploited every scrap of knowledge from the game. Hidden items and spiritual elixirs no one else knew about. Secret tomes and grimoires left behind by legendary mages and martial artists for future generations. I claimed every unique class and profession I could get my hands on.
Some might call it cowardly. In a way, I had stolen other people’s futures. But I had no choice if I wanted to live. At the time, game knowledge was my only advantage.
So in the end, I have to wait at least four more years.
Even waiting one year felt unbearable. And in this insane world where people died so easily, four years might as well be an eternity. Even if I made it back, no one was waiting for an orphan like me. Still, I wanted out as fast as possible. At the very least, people didn’t die every other day on Earth.
I can’t do this. I won’t last four years here.
I thought hard about ways to return. That was when I remembered the hidden achievement.
The hidden achievement…
There was only one way to reach it: through a vote that allowed a player to become the Demon Lord. However—
“Haa…”
Easier said than done. I had only just finished adjusting, and now I was supposed to clear a hidden achievement? That route was essentially the hero’s corruption path. Its difficulty was easily ten times higher than the normal story.
For one thing, the protagonist’s mental state had to be perfectly managed. Falling to darkness meant killing humans, not demons. The slightest mistake would send the hero into a suicidal spiral like a fragile glass cannon. Since I wasn’t the actual hero, that part might be less of an issue, but the real problem was—
Getting into the Demon Lord’s army isn’t easy.
To join them, you needed demonic energy. There were two ways to obtain it. The first was to receive blood from a living demon. But—
That’s not a good option.
Anyone who accepted blood from a demon essentially became their servant. The success rate was also abysmal. So that method was best ignored.
Besides, there’s a limit to how strong you can become that way.
That left the final method. It had its own problems, of course. Namely, I would have to clear an S-rank dungeon: the Tomb of the Previous Demon Lord.
That’s not the only issue.
The difficulty was insane. But the bigger problem was its location—deep inside the Demon Realm. Still, if I wanted to return home as quickly as possible, going there was the best choice.
“Huu…”
Right. Let’s do it. I wasn’t as perfectly prepared as I would have liked, but I was far from weak enough to die easily. That day, I set off for the Previous Demon Lord’s Tomb to clear the hidden achievement.
“Ugh… Fuck.”
After quitting my job as a high-ranking officer in the Demon Lord’s army, I drank for the first time in a while. All it did was drag up filthy memories.
I want to kill myself.
Just like those memories, I had become a high-ranking officer in a desperate bid to escape this place. I had endured it all, somehow. I handled every trivial chore, every murder, every stack of paperwork by myself. And what did I have to show for it? Nothing. It felt like I had thrown away years of my life for nothing.
“This is seriously fucked.”
Even when the draft notice arrived back on Earth, I hadn’t felt this miserable.
What now?
The main story would begin soon. To join it, I needed to get to Oxford Academy. The problem was, no matter how hard I thought, I couldn’t come up with a single realistic way to do that.
If I had known, I would have built up a safe track record.
Right now I had neither career history nor proper identification. During that first year of powering up, I hadn’t even properly raised my adventurer rank. So the idea of me waltzing into Oxford Academy in the capital was laughable.
With my background, they wouldn’t even take me as a guard.
Should I train even more to get stronger? No. That was pointless too. I was already close to the strongest being in the entire world. What was the point of growing any further?
Besides, I can only go back after the hero defeats the Demon Lord.
In the end, this was all because of those damn developers. If not for them, I would have been back on Earth by now.
“Huu…”
Yeah. No amount of cursing them would change anything. As I let out a deep sigh and took another swig of liquor, a voice called out.
“Excuse me.”
An elderly woman with wrinkled skin approached. I slowly shifted my blurry gaze toward her. She let out a small sigh of her own.
“We’re closing up now. If you’re finished, I’d appreciate it if you left.”
“Hm? It’s closing time already?”
“It’s not ‘already.’ We’re closing two hours later than usual because of you.”
I glanced around the tavern. Sure enough, I was the only customer left. Feeling awkward, I scratched my cheek. I pulled a pouch of coins from my spatial bag and set it on the table.
“Sorry about that. Here’s the bill.”
“W-what?!”
The old woman’s eyes widened at the heavy pouch. She waved her hands frantically.
“You don’t have to pay this much…!”
“It’s fine. Think of it as an apology for keeping you from resting.”
Anyway, I don’t have anywhere to spend it now.
Leaving those words unsaid, I quietly walked out of the tavern.
After leaving the tavern, I walked without any destination in mind. There was no particular place I needed to be. No matter where I went, it all felt the same now.
I have no idea what to do next.
Going to Oxford Academy in the capital was out of the question. Taking the hidden route to become the Demon Lord was also impossible.
Is the only answer to just sit back and wait for the hero to defeat the Demon Lord?
Even that wasn’t guaranteed. With all the changes I had caused, the future was almost certainly altered.
Lost in that sense of helplessness, I kept walking. Then—
Thud!
I bumped shoulders with someone. I slowly lifted my hazy gaze. Realizing what had happened, I bowed my head.
“Sorry about that.”
I tried to keep walking, but—
“Hey.”
A hand suddenly grabbed my shoulder. I turned to see a burly man—the same one I had just bumped into. He scowled deeply.
“If you’re going to apologize, do it properly.”
“What?”
“Look at my expensive gear. It’s dirty now because of you.”
He pointed at the dust on his armor. To the average eye it might have looked pristine, but to me it was nothing but fancy garbage.
What the hell? Is the whole world out to get me?
I was already irritated beyond belief, and now this idiot was picking a fight over something so trivial. At this point, I genuinely wanted to ask the developers what the hell I had done to deserve all this.
“Are you deaf? Why aren’t you answering?”
“Boss, let’s take him somewhere else first.”
“Too many eyes here, Boss.”
They dragged me into a back alley, just like neighborhood bullies shaking down a kid for lunch money. A moment later—
“Huu.”
The man who had bumped into me lit a cigarette. But I barely registered him. My mind kept spinning on the same question: why was the world doing this to me? What had I done so wrong to deserve this kind of torment?
“What’s with this guy? Why does he look like he wants to die?”
“Beats me, Boss.”
“More importantly, what should we do with him? Doesn’t look like he has any money.”
“Hmm. Yeah, he does seem—wait. Isn’t that a spatial ring?”
The moment they noticed my spatial ring, their attitudes flipped. Spatial rings were luxury items; most people couldn’t afford them.
“What? I thought he was just some beggar, but he’s actually a rich golden goblin?”
The man smiled arrogantly and draped an arm over my shoulder. Without thinking, I muttered,
“Fuck. This won’t do.”
I had spent an entire week drinking to soothe my mood. It hadn’t worked. The frustration still burned in my chest. I slowly moved my hand and grabbed the wrist resting on my shoulder.
The next instant—
“Aaaaaaaaagh!!!”
The man screamed as if his bones were being crushed. His subordinates’ eyes widened. They drew their daggers and charged at me.
Yeah. This is exactly why I want to escape this place.
Humanity was already overwhelmed just dealing with the Demon Lord’s army. Outside the capital, public order was practically nonexistent. In this world, unlike modern Earth, anything without clear evidence was usually overlooked.
“Haa.”
I let out a sigh that seemed to empty my lungs. At the same time, I released a wave of mana infused with killing intent toward the two charging men.
“Guhk!”
“Grrrkkk…”
They foamed at the mouth and collapsed, unable to withstand the pressure. I turned to the man whose wrist I was still holding.
“Ah. I failed to control my strength.”
As expected, his eyes had rolled back too. Because he had been closest, the pressure must have been overwhelming. Unlike the others, there was a wet stain between his legs.
“Huu. What the hell am I doing while drunk?”
It was a sobering reminder. The sooner I escaped this insane world, the better. As I turned to leave—
Thud!
Something caught my foot. I lowered my blurry gaze. A strange piece of paper had fallen from the pocket of one of the men I had knocked out.
What’s this?
Without really knowing why, I reached for it. My old passive skill—Intuition—must have been speaking to me. It was telling me to pick up that paper right now.
Grab.
I picked it up and read the contents. Until that moment, my vision had been hazy and the path ahead dark. No matter how much I thought about it, I couldn’t find a way to join the hero.
But the instant I read those words, a single ray of light pierced the darkness.
Oxford Academy is currently recruiting teaching assistants.
We will prioritize skill and ability over prior experience.