Why He Is Needed (8)
"Jim, I'm sorry. I said I'd protect you... Maybe I really am useless after all."
At the gloomy voice, Esmeralda flinched.
Milia moved through the flames as though she couldn't care less what happened to anything around her.
With every single step she took, a black, amorphous liquid slithered out behind her, writhing and clinging to everything in its path.
Viscous as tar, that shapeless matter stuck to the building's walls and floor, and whether it was still endlessly venting heat or not, the surroundings were swallowed by fire in an instant.
Single-handedly, she was bringing down the inside of the Fortress City with fire magic.
Wow! No more worrying about sieges ever again! Right now I only need to worry about myself! Dammit!!
Her mental state looked endlessly unstable, and the whole scene carried the air that if nobody stopped her, she would bring Fortress City Senoba crashing down exactly as it stood.
"Esmeralda! I'm sorry? I think I said something I shouldn't have to Milia!"
"Tina?!"
Writhing amorphous matter swirled around Milia. Inextinguishable flames clung to the building's outer walls.
And there was Tina, weaving through those flames in every direction.
Esmeralda grasped the situation in a heartbeat. Apparently Tina, second only to her in speed, had gone to check on Jim's lodgings first.
It would have been fine if it had ended there—but Tina had gone and shared that information with another party member. With the one person who must never have been told.
The result was Milia's rampage.
"I'm pulling out of this position, now!"
And in that brief window, while Esmeralda stood there frozen in disbelief, the men in black slipped away for good.
Or rather, she had no choice but to let them go. She was the only one present who could rein in Milia.
"Kgh!"
Should she subdue Milia in her rampage, or should she go find Jim, who'd been kidnapped by the men in black?
Either choice was agonizing. To anyone else watching, abandoning Jim and stopping Milia would have looked like the obviously correct call.
But to Esmeralda, at least, the answer was as plain as day.
Because in truth, the two were one and the same.
Stopping Milia's rampage would require Jim's presence either way.
What on earth did he do to make her obsess over him like this?
Esmeralda shuddered.
He had a decent enough face—looked like the type to fool around with women, sure—but she had never imagined it would come to this.
In hindsight, she shouldn't have scoffed back when Jim used every honeyed word in the book to butter up the party members just to fit in.
Because with his silver tongue alone, he had genuinely just blown a party to pieces.
"Tina, go get Jim back. In broad daylight, a bunch of suspicious men in black hauled him off. ...He's injured, so he can't have gotten far."
It was pure luck. Esmeralda had been attacking Jim relentlessly, and the men in black had scrambled at the last moment to protect him.
If they had simply fled without caring whether they took him or not, even Esmeralda would have struggled to stop their escape.
"Jim?! Isn't it better to just give up on him? His life isn't worth more than a person's—"
"It's not that Jim."
"Oh, that's terrible?! Got it, on my way!"
Gripping the Holy Sword tighter, Esmeralda thought.
"Haah... Honestly, I hated that bastard's name from the very start."
It confuses people, that's why.
I had slipped free of the Hero.
That should have been something to celebrate, but the atmosphere said otherwise.
"Commander, do you truly intend to go through with this? You saw the Hero back there. She was never someone we needed to worry about. Even without pulling a stunt like this, she is surely upright and—"
"You utter fool. Which is exactly why we must do this."
Thwack! The sound of someone crumpling to the ground followed.
Uh, why are you allies fighting each other? Get along, would you?
Granted, military discipline being what it is, some of that is unavoidable—but all the man did was voice one honest opinion, didn't he?
So what exactly is the problem here?
"We kill this one."
...Ah. I'm the problem.
The words snapped me wide awake.
Are these bastards conspiring right now over whether to dispose of me or not?
Honestly, I'd thought something was off from the very beginning. And no, that's not hindsight talking—it's the truth.
"Even if the Hero is mentally mature, she cannot bring herself to discard a single piece of dead weight like this one. That will become her weakness. You all know how great a poison an incompetent ally is on the battlefield, don't you?"
"......"
Shriiing!
Blades being drawn sounded from every direction. Apparently these weren't demons after all.
So a mysterious faction of humans, jealous of me, had decided to take my head. I knew this would happen. This is exactly why I wanted to quit the Hero's party.
Somehow, the moment you belong to the Hero's party, you end up with three separate sets of enemies.
The blind blades of the demons.
The indiscriminate blades of the dragon-kin.
And now the serpentine, cunning blades of humanity itself.
A regular festival of swords. The Hero, who wields dozens of blades herself, would have loved it. Bastard.
"Remove the sack."
"Sir!"
While I was still weighing my options, the sack came off and bright light spilled in. These lunatics. Now that I think about it, they pulled this off in broad daylight, too.
"...At the very least, I suppose I should know who is killing me before I go."
What is wrong with this guy?
I shouldn't even be saying this, but he is a genuinely unbelievable idiot.
If it were me, I'd have kept the sack on and driven the blade straight through it. But maybe he's got some worthless sense of heroism in him, because he's extending me a final mercy.
After kidnapping a man specifically to murder him, no less.
Does he think he has some grand principle he's honoring?
A sigh escaped me of its own accord.
"Humanity really is a suffocating race, you know."
"What are you trying to say?"
I wasn't talking about being stuffed in a sack. What I found suffocating was human nature itself.
"A race that can never be honest with itself, that does nothing but make excuses—and yet the moment regret comes knocking, it can't scrub it off fast enough. Isn't that what you are?"
"Hmph... You're not wrong, I'll give you that."
The leader of the men in black—the ones I'd mistaken for the execution squad—let out a hearty laugh, as if he found common ground with my words.
I suppose even he found his own double standard absurd. And the fact that he knows it and still can't fix it—well, that too.
I understand completely.
That's just what being human is.
It's why they can never hold together, why they splinter from within.
"I'll grant you a chance. If you can strike us down, then you might be said to have earned some small measure of the right."
Why are you so spineless?
Why can't you commit to anything?
Why do you all turn into half-witted fools who can't tilt fully to one side or the other?
If you were going to kill me, you should have done it from the start. And if not that, you should never have pulled this stunt in the first place.
What is wrong with you people?
Are things so plentiful for you that you can afford to overturn a decision like that?
Only the strong get to make choices that leisurely. Be it power, be it strength—only those who hold either can afford the luxury.
None of which described these mediocre men, who with a mediocre choice had now released me into the sunlight like this.
"Which is exactly why none of you have earned that right yet."
Hesitation is the kind of thing that always comes bursting out of the box, after all.
And what calamity that box contains—no one ever understands until it lands on their head.
The instant I cast my dark magic—did they realize I was a demon?
I wondered about that as I stared at the corpses of the men in black, men who had opened their mouths to say something and had their throats severed mid-word.
I was never a mere demon footsoldier, after all. I was a commissioned officer.
In other words: rabble without the Hero could never stop me.
These dimwits had failed to size up their opponent and squandered their one golden opportunity. That's all it came down to. I hadn't felt like trading words with them in the first place—the ones who are neither one thing nor the other are always the first to die.
These men were simply no exception.
I didn't hear their screams. I didn't hear their excuses either.
Maybe that's why.
"Oh, for fu—"
Only after striking enough cool-guy poses atop the human corpses to last a lifetime did I finally notice something glinting in the breast pocket of the man who appeared to be the leader.
"Why is this thing still on?"
It was a reporting device—a magical tool linked to somewhere else, used for transmitting situation reports.
Being the sharp demon that I am, I could immediately deduce who was behind all this.
This is human territory to begin with, so it must have been humans who orchestrated it. And from what those men said and did before they died, it was clear they belonged to the military.
Right—the military. Pelheim Senoba.
That one-eyed hag. I hated her from the very start, but I never saw this coming. Good grief...
"...Well, either way, the objective was achieved. Time to bolt."
I'd slipped out of the Hero's grasp, so all things considered, this was a win. The grand stratagem of the Great Demon Jim, who used those foolish humans and walked away clean.
The moment I decided to think of it that way, my mood inexplicably lifted.
"Ha-ha! Freedom!"
And so I went bounding off through the forest.
Exactly thirty minutes later, Tina had me by the scruff of the neck, dragging me back.
"Oh, Jim, thank goodness. You're safe?"
"Ah, thank you for your concern, Lady Milia. Lady Tina arrived just in time, so I survived."
"Oh, it was nothing. I just scooped you up while you were scrambling away in a panic. Still, you got lucky, huh? How did you even escape well enough to make it that far?"
"Ha ha, you've got me there."
"......"
Esmeralda stayed silent, utterly at a loss for what to do with Jim.
She wanted to kill him. Right now, if she could. But she had just confirmed, mere moments ago, exactly how spectacularly the Hero's party would fall apart if he were gone.
So Jim had to stay alive. As always.
[Note: Subject Jim is currently fidgeting anxiously, worried that Pelheim Senoba may have discovered his identity as a demon.]
Just how far am I supposed to cover for this absolute lunatic? What in the world did he even do this time...?
Does this bastard have a single thought in his head?
Esmeralda felt her blood pressure climbing at the sight of Jim, a man in whom the concept of caution simply did not exist. And Jim, oblivious as ever, just kept grinning his dumb grin.
Of course, inside, Jim was burning up with anxiety just the same...
No, but seriously, this bastard...
Esmeralda playing the fool, and Jim playing the innocent errand boy.
Each looked at the other and thought the same thing.
You can laugh at a time like this?
Your comrade nearly died and you're laughing?
Birds of a feather, truly.