The Intruder
"Haa. Empty-handed again."
Nothing to eat today, either. Lately the wolves' hunts had been failing, one after another. My stomach answered with a miserable growl. There had been a time when they could at least bring back a few rabbits. These days even that was too much to ask.
Who was that woman, anyway, ranging over every last territory all by herself?
The wolves dipped their heads and let out a low, apologetic whine. I knew perfectly well it wasn't their fault. The trouble was that this village's hunter was far better than I had expected. Nothing to be done. Today, like so many days before it, I would have to get by on whatever berries I could pick. I ate what I had gathered, stroking the guilty wolves between the ears, and turned over what came next.
At this rate I would starve within a few days. Going down among the village houses was out of the question. I needed to get clear of this forest soon, or else go back. If even this place, empty of ogres and trolls, was this hard to live in, anywhere else would only be worse.
Huu. So I really did have to go back. The people there would make my life miserable, but at least I would not starve.
That was when the wolves all jerked their heads up in the same direction.
"Hm? Wait. This smell..."
I shut my eyes at once and drew in a deep breath. Savory, and sweet. The wolves and I tracked it as if bewitched, and at last we found it: a mansion standing alone in the woods, well clear of the village houses.
There's food in there...!
Consciousness crept back slowly. The first thing I felt was a chill against my skin.
"...Ngh."
My head pounded. My body was stiff. I tried to shift out of the uncomfortable position—
Clank.
"...?"
Shackles. Don't tell me I was tied up.
"Wh-where is this...?"
I looked around. Nothing about the room was ordinary. Abandoned experiment tables, restraints, and dreadful instruments of torture whose last use I could not begin to guess. It was like an underground dungeon built for experimenting on people.
I swallowed. Why was I here? What had happened?
Slowly, I picked my way back through my memory. The wolves' hunts had been so poor lately that I had barely eaten for days. Starving like that, I had suddenly caught a delicious smell from somewhere. It led to a remote mansion far from the village. The place looked quite large, and the owner seemed to live alone, with no one standing guard. Perfect for slipping inside. I had waited for an opening and crept into the kitchen.
Once I was in, there was not much worth eating. Stiff flour, and some fruit I recognized. It took the edge off the hunger, and then my throat went dry.
Right. That drink...!
I had drunk from a teapot anyone could see had been set out to be drunk. The color was strange and it foamed, which unsettled me, but it was so overwhelmingly sweet and good that a sound of pure admiration escaped me before I knew it. And from that moment, my body stopped listening.
No way.
Had it been poison? Was all of this a trap meant to catch me?
It's over.
Completely over. Was this how my short life came to an end? What in the world was going to happen to me now? I was busy sketching every awful future I could imagine when something tickled. I looked down. A tiny dust spirit was squirming around me, gobbling up dust.
"Cute..."
Where had this little one come from? Even one cute thing in a place this bleak was enough to settle me, just a little.
"There now... come here."
Eee?
I coaxed it gently and offered my hand. The dust spirit slid away from my fingers and bounced straight out through the bars.
"Ah."
A shame. It had been a short meeting, but—
Creeeak...
"...Awake, are you?"
"Hik—!"
A pale girl had appeared with a vicious-looking skeleton at her side, and I froze solid.
After the festival.
My perfect plan—to shut myself in the mansion and loaf for a good long while—shattered the instant I got home.
Haa. Damn it. Why did this have to happen while Evelyn was gone? If I had known, I would not have sent her off. I would have made her help haul the luggage.
The source of my headache was the kid collapsed in the kitchen. At first I thought it was a corpse. Amazingly, she was still alive after drinking my poison-herb extract cola. Judging by how much was gone, she had only managed a few sips. Those few sips would have killed an ordinary person long before now.
This kid, though... She seemed to be a demon. When I moved her later, I noticed the small horns on her head. And as far as I knew, the only race with horns was the demonkin.
Back when Eternal Arcadia was still a game, my grasp of the story sat at about the level of someone who skipped every cutscene. Even so, I remembered that demons were the villains. Were all of them bad? Maybe not. I would not know. Every demon I remembered was a bad guy the protagonist hunted down.
Even so, a kid who looked this young did not feel like she would be truly awful. Then again, she had broken into my sanctuary uninvited, so she was a villain in her own right. Still, there was no telling whether a demon's face matched her real age, so for the time being I locked her in the mansion's secret underground laboratory. Maybe because the basement had been built for exactly that sort of thing, it felt perfectly suited to holding one person.
...When I first saw a space that grim, I had wondered what I was ever supposed to do with it. Now that I had it, I was using it precisely as intended.
They had said No. 2 was awake, so I came down to look. And now I had no idea what to do.
Have you ever seen that awkward current that springs up when two introverts meet for the first time? That was exactly the air between me and this kid.
...What was I supposed to say?
I looked at Unit 1 like someone begging for help. She took my stare and answered it by staring straight back, as if to ask why I was looking at her.
What had I even been expecting? She could not talk either. We were in the same boat.
In truth, the one who wanted this situation least was Unit 1 herself. She was the one who had panicked and made a fuss—nothing like her usual self—the moment this little demon appeared. Even now, all I had asked was that she open the basement door and stand with me, and she had wrapped herself in clattering gear from who knows where and gone full heavy armor.
Did we even have armor like that in the house? I had not been the one to sort the storeroom, so I could not say. It was a noble mansion. It had probably been in there somewhere.
I looked away from Unit 1 and turned back to the little demon. Long, pointed ears. Tiny horn buds jutting out on either side of her forehead. Pupils stretched long and horizontal, like a goat's. Every demon trait sat on her with perfect precision, and the pink-bobbed child wore a face that could not have looked more tense.
Start with the name. I could not keep calling her little demon forever.
"Little demon... what's your name?"
"M-my name is Rain... Rain Balzac..."
Balzac. Certainly a demon's surname. The moment Unit 1 heard it, though, she shuddered as if she had been struck.
Was demon treated like a cockroach in this world? I had once had a classmate who hated even saying the word and always dodged it with "Mr. Roach." Unit 1's reaction looked exactly like that kid's, the one time someone actually said cockroach out loud.
Anyway, I set that aside and kept going.
"All right, Rain. How did you find this place?"
"I... I hadn't eaten anything for days... I was hungry..."
So she had snuck into the kitchen because she was hungry. That much I had expected. From the start she had been found looking exactly like someone who collapsed mid-bite in the kitchen, and her body was painfully thin, as if she had not had a proper meal in a long while. Wolves were roaming outside, too. Just getting here must have been hard.
Hmm. Hearing it laid out, she was pretty pitiful. Still.
"What I'm asking is why a demon was lurking around here in the first place. You're all on the Demon King's side, aren't you?"
Demons belonged to the Demon King, in the end. Think it through, and this was a lot like someone from North Korea getting caught wandering around in the South. I could not let go of my suspicion on that point.
"The Demon King...? What do you mean?"
But Rain, hearing those words, looked at me as if I were the strange one.
"His Majesty the Demon King was already slain years ago, by the Hero and the Saintess..."
"...Huh?"
The Demon King was dead? Then what did that mean?
The game's main story was already over?