Drinking Game (2)
I wonder how weak she'll actually get.
I didn't even need to kill the Demon King. All she had to do was drink herself unconscious. The moment she did, the barrier that kept anyone from leaving the hundredth floor would crumble.
If I can just get that far, the rest is on me.
I would sprint all the way down to the first floor of the tower, burst straight out, and never come back. Farewell to this goddamn prison.
"Haaaah... I've never felt like this before. Hoo..."
The Demon King seemed unable to control her own body, drowning in a drunkenness she had never experienced in her life.
"Alright. Your turn to ask the questions."
"Uuu... okay. Hey, you suddenly look like you're having fun?"
"No. Fun, my ass."
I'm so happy about escaping I could drop dead.
"...I thought of one."
Get her wasted fast and put her under. Who would have guessed that the techniques I'd picked up getting freshmen hammered at college orientation would shine in a place like this?
"Is it alive?"
"Yeees. That's correct."
She answered in a coquettish, sugary voice. Maybe it was that last big gulp, but her energy had already shifted. This was going to be over in no time.
"Second question. Can it speak human language?"
"Huhh... your questions are pretty sharp, huh? Yes. That's also correct."
Your questions are the ones that suck.
"...The answer: me."
She bounced in her seat at the answer I'd submitted.
"No! How did you get it already?!"
How many people do you even know...
Watching her set up chess or that round of Little Farm, she could look clever — and then there were moments like this. I could never tell if she was an idiot or just that pure.
"...Uuugh, I have to drink again?"
She hesitated, bottle in hand. Those bright, glittering crimson eyes sent me a desperate distress signal. When eyes that beautiful and that innocent begged me for salvation...
"Want me to pour yours for you?"
You thought I'd let you off? Not a chance. Newbie drinker, lightweight, whatever she was — I was going to wreck her at full power.
"Huh? I'll just pour it myself!"
She must have caught on to my scheme of flooding the glass, because the Demon King filled her own cup.
!!!
...Oh, you have got to be fucking kidding me.
I had never seen a girl with so little drinking etiquette. She poured less than a quarter of the glass and set the bottle down. If this were Korea, that stunt would have gotten her stomped into the floor.
"Hey. You're supposed to fill the whole cup."
"...Diminuendo."
"Diminuendo."
⟨ Shrink ⟩
A beam shot from the Demon King's fingertip with a bright little chime, and the cup shrank.
"...There. Happy?"
Her water glass was now exactly the size of a soju cup. Genuinely, spectacularly cheap. This was why being mana-insensitive was such a miserable lot. In this world, it was about as respected as dropping out of elementary school.
Fine. Fine, you stingy little brat. You're passing out tonight either way. It'll just take a little longer.
I was going to get her blackout drunk. Tomorrow there were going to be a few pancakes splattered across the Demon King's Castle floor. Enjoy cleaning them up. By yourself, of course.
A grin spread across my face for the first time in a good while. Heh heh heh.
I was the one who suggested the next game, riding the wave of motivation. The Demon King, who still owed me a guilty conscience, accepted without much of a fight.
Which is how we ended up playing the Letter Game.
"For example, if I say 'present,' what are you supposed to say?"
"Umm... perish? purge?"
"Of all the words you could've picked, those are the ones you go with... well, yeah. That's how it works."
And so the game began. The problem was... the Demon King's vocabulary was far better than I'd expected, and a vicious back-and-forth ensued.
Before long we'd upgraded to three-syllable words.
"Nuisance."
"Nightingale!"
"N-neighboring."
"Newsdealer!"
"...N-narjacto?"
The Demon King tilted her head.
"You've been saying weird stuff this whole time. Narjacto? What's that even supposed to be? That's not a real word, is it?"
"I-it is."
"If you're lying, I'll turn you into a parrot."
"H-hiiik. I'm not lying."
Oblivious as she usually was, she always had a nose for this kind of thing.
We went back and forth, drinking all the while, until we'd climbed all the way to five-syllable words — by which point we were bowing, scraping, and thoroughly frying our brains.
"Terromite."
"Tulimiatue!"
"To-torimuon...ta."
"Terremiant!"
You little shiiit!!!
Not that I had any room to talk, given I was firing off the same brand of complete nonsense... but anyone could see she was making those up on the spot!
"Terramayturn!"
"W-wait a second!"
"Ah! You're out! Drink!"
"Let's play like human beings here. You have to say things that actually exist, don't you?"
Saying "like human beings" to a demon was a little rich, but this was still not okay.
"W-what are you talking about... I didn't lie. Demons don't lie."
Wow, this shameless bitch!
Gulp.
Hah... fine. Let's take this all the way. Let's see who walks away with the gold medal at the end of this dumpster-fire Olympics.
"Orionforpennant."
"Eriafarphenont!"
"Warriorprophinote."
"Williamfalapenent!"
"Ewo— ah, for fuck's sake."
By the time I could no longer tell whether this was a drinking game or a contest to see who could spew more garbage out of their mouth, my tongue tied itself in a knot again.
"Wooowaaah! I won again!"
The Demon King spun in circles with her arms in the air. Her astonishing pronunciation and vocabulary made me feel like I was staring up at a high wall.
She's a whole different class.
I got utterly wrecked. The answers came out click-click, like a machine. That's how good she was — I was this close to believing those impossible syllable-combinations weren't lies.
The Demon King had had a few drinks herself, but I'd drunk five times as much.
"Eheheh. Driiink! Come on."
Even drunk, her counting was razor-sharp. If she were a housewife, she'd keep a hell of a household ledger.
Gulp.
...Kk. I'm going to lose my mind.
A few emptied bottles lay scattered across the table. The wreckage of a long, hard war.
"Alright. Then this next one's a game I made uuup."
The Demon King flipped through her notebook with half-lidded eyes, then stopped on a page and sucked in a huge breath.
"Wooowaaah! This one! I've wanted to play this one so baaad!"
Her cheeks had gone as red as her eyes. She shook the notebook in excitement, her tongue curling so far it was a miracle she could still talk.
"This game is where we take turns complimenting each other's good points!"
!!!!
What? What kind of hell-difficulty game is that?!
There was no time to dodge. With the Demon King's excitement rocketing all the way up to the hundred-and-first floor, there was absolutely no chance of this game getting cancelled.
Think, Baek Dongha! Think of something good about the Demon King!
"I'll go first! First of all, you're really good at harvesting king potatoes!"
She launched the game without giving me so much as a second to think. God dammit... if I couldn't answer this, I wasn't just screwed.
Is it the alcohol... I can't think.
The Demon King, her face thoroughly flushed, cupped her cheeks in her hands and stared at nothing but my lips. Waiting, expecting, to hear what praise would come.
"Y-you're a good cook."
Alright. That much, at least, was certain. She was about ten times better than Yuria, who cooked about as often as it rained in a drought.
"Hihihit. Kihihit. Thank you. You're good at chess."
This cowardly bitch!
All she had to do was list off the games she'd gotten wrecked in — convenient for her. If I tried something like "you're good at chess for a first-timer," I'd just be poking the loser in the pride.
After that, I got stuck. Several times, I couldn't answer at all.
"....Aren't you going to compliment me?"
".....I mean... you're...."
I'd already said everything I could think of. You're good at fighting. You're good at cracking skulls. Your mana's at a fucking Archmage level. You've got a great vocabulary. And so on.
Nothing else came to mind.
"........"
"........"
".......Drink."
The Demon King's voice had gone cold. She didn't look the least bit happy, even though she'd won. And the game went on.
"You look nice when you smile, sometimes."
"..........."
".....Drink."
Gulp.
"You make really pretty Paper Cranes."
"........."
"........*sniff*... Drink."
Gulp.
...Fuck. The alcohol was one thing, but her reaction was driving me insane. She'd gone so red, and she was huffing so hard, I couldn't tell if she was about to burst into tears or explode.
I had to answer the next one. No matter what.
"...You're good at dodging Death God Ryuk's pepper bombs."
"......You're pretty."
"......Drink... wait. What did you just say?"
"I said you're pretty. Out of the people I've seen... well, no. Anyway. The most."
".....Huh?"
It wasn't a lie. The Demon King was just enormously pretty. My idiot former party members had all been pretty too, every last one of them, but she was in a different league. Pretty enough that I wondered, if I ever made it back to Earth, whether I'd be able to feel anything for another woman again.
At that single sentence, her thoroughly gloomy face instantly brightened. And then, declaring herself the loser, she promptly knocked back a drink.
"...Can we play a different game now? We've done this one a lot."
"Suuure! We can, we can. Hihihit."
The Demon King, grinning sloppily, flipped through her booklet and named the next game. It was one I'd heard of before.
"Next is the Truth Game."
All answers must be the truth. If you cannot answer, you drink.
Penalties for Lying
God strikes you with lightning, and you spend the rest of your life as a vegetable.
A military re-enlistment notice arrives in the mail.
...
Yeah, fucking right.
If there were a god, he wouldn't have thrown me into this shithole. And if there was one, it was a god who fucking hated my guts.
Which meant that in this game, I was going to tell nothing but lies. Thoroughly.
"Okaaay, then I'll staaart."
The thoroughly drunk Demon King staggered, grabbed an empty bottle, and gave it a spin.
The bottle whirled busily across the table. The mouth of it came to a stop pointing at the Demon King.
"...Huh? It's me... Hihih, okay! Ask me something!"
She puffed her chest out as she said it.
What should I ask. I wasn't sure.
There was too much I wanted to know. What her weakness was, how many buffs she was wearing, why she liked cracking skulls so much, why she'd made me a potato serf, when she was planning to kill me, why she acted so human, why...
But more than any of that, a suitably unanswerable question floated to mind — the kind I didn't think she'd be able to respond to. That was the one I had to ask. What mattered wasn't her personal information. What mattered was getting alcohol into her.
"...That time before. Why were you lying in my room, and then you left?"
"...Ah.. ah?"
The heat drained from the Demon King's flushed cheeks in an instant. That distinctive flustered look of hers told me the question had landed perfectly.
Someone as pure as you wouldn't be able to lie in the Truth Game, would you.
"..."
Just as I'd expected, the Demon King knocked the drink straight back.
Gulp.
It had been something she'd done carefully, trying not to get caught, while I was pretending to sleep. Something she'd wanted to keep hidden, so of course she wouldn't be able to answer.
Not like I care.
I wasn't curious about the reason or the purpose behind it. My only goal was to get her drunk, and to get out of here.
"Th-theeen... second round..."
She spun the bottle. It stopped in front of her again.
"Awww... me again. Go aheaaad..."
...Don't hesitate.
Even if it means putting a hole in her chest.
"That time you suspected I was the one who sent the rescue letter. Did you go outside and cry?"
"......... Huh...? Ah...?"
I was merciless. I dragged out every last thing this naive girl had wanted to hide — the girl who wore every feeling on her face, in every direction. All to get one more drink into her. All to get out of here.
"......"
Her expression had already gone bitter before the alcohol even touched her lips. She drank the next glass like she was swallowing medicine.
Good. From here on I'll tell nothing but lies... and I'll demand nothing but the truth from you. Then sooner or later, you'll go down.
...But why, then.
Why, after gouging out the Demon King's chest like this, did I feel so filthy.
After that, the mouth of the bottle stopped in front of her and only her, and I kept throwing sharp questions. Bound tightly to the rules of the Truth Game, she came apart, piece by piece.
Gulp... gulp...
"Hooooaaaah... everything's spinning..."
The Demon King had grown distinctly weaker. I could tell from the way the neck of the Paper Crane — which had always been so rigid — was creased under the weight of her body slumped against the table.
Not yet. I can't be sure. Let's get a little more into her.
"...Hey. I have a faaavor..."
The Demon King said, breathing hard against the tabletop.
"Can I ask a question too, just ooone?"
Rules or no rules, there was something she'd wanted to ask.
"...Sure. *hic* Go ahead."
It wasn't like I had any truth to give her anyway. Whatever she asked, I would answer with a lie.
"Do you want to leave this place?"
...
A direct, cutting question. The Demon King's woozy expression turned abruptly serious.
Say no, and get her to drink some more.
...
But my mouth wouldn't open. Why? Had I been hit with some kind of mind-control magic?
Gulp.
I could have just lied. Same as always — No. Being here with you makes me stupidly happy, actually? — and that would have been the end of it. But I couldn't. For some reason, I drained the glass instead.
".....Heheh. So that's your answer..."
The Demon King's serious face loosened into an empty little laugh. She lifted her head from the table and spun the bottle again.
It whirled. It stopped.
Without fail, it came to rest in front of the Demon King. Same as with Barrel Roulette — she never had any luck.
"...Go aheaaad..."
...
Every question I'd asked so far had torn open her chest.
She was a demon. There was no way she could hurt the way a human would.
...You're a demon, but you...
You have a human heart.
Even so, I had to ask the next question.
"Can't you just let me out of here?"
A rare silence settled over this place that belonged to only the two of us — the Demon King and me.
For the first time, the Demon King did not drink in response to my question. Her pale pink lips parted.
With that, the Demon King closed her eyes. At last, the alcohol had taken her under.
I approached her unconscious form. Then I set a fingernail on end and pressed it firmly into her palm.
...
...It worked.
The Demon King's body, layered in every apocalypse-grade buff she owned. And at the edge of her palm, a fingernail mark from a mere human had been carved in. The Demon King's magic had weakened.
...Let's get out of here.
I was drunk.
My steps were a mess, staggering all over.
So. So, that being the case.
The small voice of hers I heard last, before I stepped out the door — I had definitely misheard it.
"Haa... haa..."
...Why.
I staggered all the way to the entrance. But the barrier of the hundredth floor had not vanished.
Suddenly, something Dorothy had said once rose to the surface.
"The less important things get dispelled first, as the mana decreases."
...
Which meant... she considered this barrier that kept me in more important than her own body.
...I couldn't understand it.
"Then... there's only one way, isn't there."
Kill you, now that you're defenseless. And get out of here.
I went back. I drew the two-handed sword the Demon King had been using as a kitchen knife. And I approached her. I set the blade against the pale white line of her neck, slumped over the table.
With this... I can save this goddamn world too... and go back to Earth.