A Brief Reunion
Of all the Four Heavenly Kings, Clanis had to be the biggest lunatic.
“Didn’t you say Pector was fine before?”
“That bastard’s still one of the Four Heavenly Kings—he’s not normal either! Better than the Hero, maybe. First things first, block the doors with the teddy bears so nothing gets out! Keep the kids from coming in!”
“Yes!”
Celia’s teddy bears lumbered toward the exits.
Right now the priority was keeping the other mages in the Magic Corps from taking damage. These things weren’t ordinary monsters.
“Demon King. Demon King. Demon King.”
“Demon King. Demon King. Demon King.”
“For the Demon King.”
The monsters called for the Demon King and nothing else, their voices raw and desperate.
At first they’d tried to rush outside, but when that failed they turned on me instead.
Karrrrrk. Grrrrrk.
Their bizarre cries came with an extra layer of wrongness—every twitch of their fingers produced a sound that set my teeth on edge.
“Fuck. Creepy little shits.”
Once they’d been twisted this far, there was no fixing them. They weren’t even sacrifices anymore—just new monsters born from pure experimentation.
Whatever human minds they’d once had had died a long time ago.
“Demon King. Demon King.”
“O Demon King.”
No choice. These weren’t living people anymore.
I’d put down plenty like them before. End it the same way this time and be done with it.
Yeah. That was all it should take.
“Why do these ones feel so pitiful, though?”
Some of them probably hadn’t even been real nuns. This was Ashtar Territory—there had to be Ashtar subjects mixed in.
The Human-Demon War had thinned Ashtar’s people enough already. Plenty of them must have ended up snatched by Clanis.
It was war, in the end.
I couldn’t afford to feel simple pity. Still, my eyes kept drifting back to them no matter how hard I tried.
“So don’t blame me for this.”
Elemental magic was useless in this space—I had no idea what Clanis had done to it. That left me with little more than mana bullets.
Mana rounds cracked into the nuns as they slashed with their claws.
Tadadang! Tang!
Lately it felt like mana bullets were all I ever used.
“Gyaaaaah!”
“Kyaaaaaaah!”
At least they still worked. The rounds found their mark.
There were a few dozen of them, roughly. Didn’t look like Clanis had been maintaining this place for long. Maybe Bernoa had handed the site over during her days as a Heavenly King, and Clanis had simply abandoned it after Crad Castle fell.
Clanis hated anything bothersome, after all.
Leaving a lab somewhere a powerhouse strong enough to take down Bernoa was operating would have been a bad idea.
“Still… pulling something this grotesque?”
It was pure nightmare fuel.
I should have wiped her out first, years ago.
“Kieeeeeeek!”
“Oh, shit.”
“Kigigigik.”
While I was thinking, the nuns lunged.
I was halfway to firing another volley when they suddenly stopped and just stared at me.
“What the hell? Why are they reacting like that?”
“Demon King. Demon King. Demon King.”
Without warning they dropped flat on their faces in front of me.
“No, what are these crazy bitches doing? Demon King?”
No. Wait. It couldn’t be. Did they actually see me as the Demon King?
All because of one damn fragment, I was getting treated like the real thing.
Seto and Clanis themselves didn’t react this way, but these lab-grown freaks did? Or maybe Clanis’s fanatical worship of the Demon King had been branded into them so deep that pure instinct dragged them to their knees.
“Either way… this works out.”
No more reason to hesitate. No more reason to make it hard on myself.
The nuns had already gathered around me again, hands clasped in prayer.
They were genuinely worshipping me as their Demon King.
The people who’d been sacrificed would never get their minds or bodies back to anything like normal.
“Demon King. Demon King. Demon King.”
“Only the Demon King is our salvation.”
Salvation or not, I had zero intention of becoming their Demon King or leading them anywhere.
Chwaaaak!
Even knowing they were monsters, knowing the raw material had been human made killing them this disgusting.
“Fuck. This is pure bullshit.”
This whole mess was supposed to be that Hero bastard’s job.
So why the hell was I the one stuck doing it?
And the fragment Jerato had jammed into me was making them treat me like this?
“No… wait.”
Jerato’s fragment probably wasn’t the real cause.
Something more fundamental was different about this body.
I’d thought the short-term mana fusion was just this body’s natural talent. But maybe that insane bitch Lily’s mother had shoved something in that was still lingering…
“Lady Olivia? I’ve sealed them off!”
“Ah. Good. Already finished handling them.”
By the time Celia came back from blocking the exits, the nuns were all dead.
Mowing down a bunch of them once they were neatly gathered wasn’t exactly hard.
“That was quick. There were quite a few, too.”
“They just crawled over and groveled on their own.”
When the things clustered around praying to you, only a complete idiot would fail to clean them up.
“So is everything done, then?”
“No. Let’s look around more first.”
Clanis had almost certainly left something else behind.
Maybe a lead we could use to hunt her down.
While we were at it, I intended to catch her properly and wreck her for good.
We tore through the place for a good while. Nothing useful turned up.
Had she stripped every scrap of data?
“There’s really nothing here.”
“Looks like she pulled out completely.”
Not a single thing left. She’d cleaned the place out as if to say, “All yours now.”
“So leaving the nuns was just her way of making us clean up her mess.”
Yeah. Putting it that way only made me angrier.
Danced around like this and still couldn’t just walk away. Leave the place alone and Ashtar would be stuck with a festering boil on its territory.
In the end, the humans got stuck with all the tedious work.
Fucking Clanis. That Hero piece of shit. Everything was just pissing me off.
Shiiiiiiiik—
A strange presence stirred outside.
“What’s going on out there?”
“Lady Olivia! Outside the forest—it’s Pector!”
A mage rushed in with the report.
Sure enough, once we stepped out of the woods we found the familiar thick ash-gray fog.
Pector always made his entrances like that.
“One damn thing after another, and now it’s Pector.”
This was getting dangerous. If Pector decided to go after the Magic Corps—especially when most of them were still trainees—
They weren’t full members yet. If he used his Authority, there’d be no stopping it.
“Hah. Pector showing up here too… This isn’t even a one-on-one. Great.”
“So what? We catch him while we’re at it.”
Easy for her to say.
Honestly, fighting him head-on wasn’t so bad—direct combat suited me—but that Authority of his made him the single most annoying bastard to deal with.
“Catching him is secondary. If he fights for real and uses his Authority, Ashtar Territory itself is in danger. Same goes for the Magic Corps.”
“Is that so?”
This was a problem. I really hoped he hadn’t come here looking for a fight.
I ordered every mage to fall back.
They couldn’t handle him anyway. I left Celia in charge of them and went to meet Pector in front of the temple.
“Noah. No—Olivia, is it. It’s been a while.”
“What the hell are you doing here? You said you wouldn’t touch the Empire. Ashtar is still Imperial land. Or what—come for revenge for Berna?”
He’d agreed not to attack, at least for a while.
“No. Berna was the one who got hit, not me. I was never particularly close to that fallen Saint in the first place.”
Fair enough.
I wouldn’t want a slimy piece of work like her for a colleague either, let alone a friend.
“Then why?”
“I came to clean this place up.”
Pector pointed deeper into the temple he’d just entered.
“You knew about it?”
“Clanis mentioned it. Said she planned to use this place to strike at Ashtar.”
Ah. Right. Thinking about those “angels,” the numbers hadn’t been small.
Ashtar could have handled them, but a night raid would have cost a lot of civilian lives.
Not that it mattered now—I’d already wiped them all out.
“I already cleaned up everything inside.”
“That wasn’t all.”
Pector walked farther in.
Then he casually sliced one of the grotesque monster statues with his blade.
With a heavy rumble the statue and the wall behind it collapsed together.
“A hidden room?”
“Not just a room.”
He was right. Farther in, a dense, cloying demonic energy filled the air—strong enough that a normal human would lose their mind and die just from brushing against it.
I glanced down. A massive black sphere pulsed there, looking ready to detonate at any second.
If that thing went off it would be a nightmare. Half of Ashtar would drown in demonic energy.
“If this explodes… the area will be blanketed in thick miasma.”
Yeah. Looking at it, Clanis really was a vicious piece of work.
“Phase one: nun-monsters. Phase two: a bomb, huh?”
“Exactly. Something this size going off would contaminate the land even if the Empire flattened the site with its prized cannons. It would turn into a piece of the Demon Realm. Anyone who can’t handle mana would either die of poisoning or have to abandon their homes.”
Pector erased the whole thing in a single stroke of his Authority.
If it had detonated and soaked into the ground, even swinging that sword of mine wouldn’t have been enough to fix it.
“Well, thanks for the tip. But why go this far for us?”
I asked more out of idle curiosity than anything.
I never could figure out what went on in this guy’s head.
He was a weirdo, sure—but I still couldn’t tell whether he was simple or just ridiculously sharp.
“I already told you. I won’t touch the Empire.”
Nice excuse.
“That’s just you. Clanis is—”
“That eccentric must have gotten ideas after I invaded Ashtar and cooked up this plan. So this time I’m involved too. She already believes Noah is in the Empire, after all. She’s trying to poke the Empire itself.”
That tracked. A snake like Clanis would have picked up on something. She’d probably come looking for me soon enough.
“Is that so. Still, ‘for the time being’ is going to be shorter than you think. Whether you invade or not, you’re free now, right?”
“Life as a Heavenly King has been long. For me, ‘the time being’ still stretches quite far.”
“Yeah?”
I see. Hmm. Right.
Something about him felt incredibly complicated. What the hell was Pector actually thinking?
“There’s no real reason to attack the Empire anyway. If the Empire were the kind of country that would collapse under the Four Heavenly Kings, it would have fallen long ago.”
“That kind of talk doesn’t work on you. Or are you looking for another fight? Threatening me with the Empire sounds fun. I’m stuck protecting the place now, after all.”
Actual blackmail would be a pain, but at least it would be more honest than whatever he was hiding.
“I have no intention of threatening you with the Empire. Petty tricks like that are better left to Clanis or Seto. For me… as long as I have you, that’s the end of it.”
For a second my brain just shorted out.
Was this bastard seriously saying that out loud?
He needed to look at his audience first. Fuck, I got goosebumps.
That kind of line was the sort of thing you said to a woman.