New Clothes, Old Friends (6)
"...It's a paper crane?"
"Huh, is it? So why are you wearing it around your neck?"
The Demon King figured that if she kept talking to Rebecca, her friend would scold her for it. So she shut her mouth again. Rebecca's next thoughtless remark, however, shattered the silence at once.
"...No reason. It just looks cool."
"R-right?"
The moment Rebecca started heaping praise on the Paper Crane, the Demon King's tail swished back and forth. What with yesterday, when she'd said that Baek Dongha and the Demon King made a good pair of friends... the Demon King was beginning to think that Pink might actually be a decent person.
"Yeah. The wings especially are badass."
"Badass? You're not supposed to use that word. But you mean it looks cool, right?"
"Yeah."
In a thoroughly good mood, the Demon King made a special exception and let Rebecca touch the Paper Crane.
"It's pretty."
Rebecca offered the compliment as she stroked the little crane.
"Right? My friend made it for me."
"Oh, for real? Dongha used to make me a bunch of stuff too."
"...What?"
The Demon King flinched as if a fishbone had lodged in her throat and a swallow of water had just washed over it.
"Dongha made me this hair ribbon a while back, and see this knee brace? He made this too. He's always been good with his hands."
The Demon King felt strangely unsettled. Her friend could be kind to other people too. They were former comrades, after all. If you thought about it, that was only natural.
"And here on my shoulder, too..."
A conversation between her friend and his old friend—people who had spent far more time together than the mere few months she had shared with him.
For reasons she herself did not understand, the Demon King's chest grew tight and her throat stung. She looked down at the Paper Crane around her neck.
Somehow, she found herself wanting to brag even more about what she had received.
"Th-this isn't an ordinary paper crane."
"...Huh? What's that supposed to mean?"
"This is a crane that turns into a game in one year."
And so the Demon King explained the Paper Crane to Rebecca. How she cast buffs on it every morning. How it was alive, and ate meals with them. How it would soon turn into a game, and how she and Baek Dongha had promised to play it together.
Rebecca thought about that.
Whoa.
That's insane. That's Dongha for you.
"That's incredible. You're so lucky."
"Right? Heheh."
"Can I touch it just one more time?"
"Hehe. Just once, okay?"
The Demon King's gloomy mood lifted. And she even briefly considered that if Pink turned out to be a bit nicer, she might show her the paper house, and maybe even let her read Library or Zoo.
Ah—I can't do that.
These people had bullied her friend. They were terrible. She wasn't supposed to open her heart to them either.
Still, the Demon King was curious.
Why had they bullied her friend—someone so kind, so thoughtful, so good at every game, so good at cooking, and so handsome?
She asked Rebecca why.
"...Hmm... I don't really know either. Actually, we were just talking about that among ourselves."
"...Talking about what?"
"Nine started it by telling Dorothy, 'This whole mess happened because you treated Dongha like dirt!' and then they went back and forth arguing over who was right. Me, I just piled on him because I liked him, put wrestling moves on him, sent him on smithy errands—that was about it? That's the kind of stuff friends do, right?"
"You're bad after all. You need to be punished."
In the dark hallway, the Demon King locked Rebecca into a rear naked choke. She held it until a desperate scream of "I'll never bully Dongha again!" tore from Rebecca's mouth. After that, she escorted the bathroom-bound Rebecca back to the Cabbage Patch and returned to her seat.
"Nnngh."
"Titan's Head, Protection of Demeter..."
Beside me, the Demon King was hanging buff after buff on the Paper Crane. I'd seen it so many times it wasn't anything special.
Come to think of it, there isn't that much of the year left...
No. I'd told her that every buff I put on the Paper Crane would bring the one-year transformation closer, which meant it was actually less than a year.
I will get out of here before that year is up. If I have to, I'll make a parachute out of a tablecloth and jump.
...There would be no such thing now.
The time was coming when I would have to tell the Demon King the truth.
I knew perfectly well how much that Paper Crane meant to her.
Which was exactly why I couldn't say it.
In every happy memory of hers, the Paper Crane had been there with me.
It had given rules and hope to the Demon King's gray, joyless days.
And if I told her now that none of it was real—could she bear that?
No. Of course she couldn't.
She would break. She would cry.
I didn't want that.
No matter how many times I saw the Demon King cry, I never got used to it. If anything, my resistance got weaker every time.
I knew better than anyone that putting it off wouldn't solve anything.
So what on earth was I supposed to do?
Hope for some context-breaking magic, like last time with the meteor shower?
"Hey."
The Demon King's voice pulled my gaze down from the ceiling. She must have finished today's round of buffs.
"Thank you. For giving this to me."
She said it while stroking the Paper Crane's head, looking at it with a face even more loving than usual.
Days had passed, and the barrier still hadn't come down.
Which meant the idiots' labor detail had stretched on accordingly. They seemed to have gotten used to it by now; their hands moved first, without the grumbling. Even fussy Dorothy no longer cared about getting dirt on her skirt hem.
We expanded the fields. I figured it was better to get the work done while we had the labor on hand.
"Red. That's the carrot plot, so you need to dig a little deeper."
The Demon King was giving Nine instructions. She called them by their hair colors. Nine was Red, Rebecca was Pink, Yuria was Yellow, and Dorothy—maybe because of her hair—was Loopy. Still, I had to admit the Demon King had a better naming sense than I did.
"Ah, right. Yuria, is there any fertilizer left?"
"I left it yonder, beside the Jewel Stars. Rebecca. I am headed to the restroom—wilt thou come along?"
They've gone full farmer.
I'd give them this: their adaptability was excellent. At this rate, they could survive the thirty-seven days of army boot camp.
The Demon King wandered from plot to plot, helping her former party members whenever they did something wrong.
"Ugh, come on! Why won't this thing come out. You stupid weeds! I ought to just blast the whole lot with magic—"
A shadow fell across Dorothy, who was yanking cabbages in the corner and muttering to herself. She looked up, and there was the object of her terror, the Demon King, looking down at her.
"Hm? Blast what, now?"
"Ah, n-nothing! I misspoke! Please, anything but the forehead flick—"
"Hmm. That's not how you do it, Loopy. You grab it here, like this."
The Demon King took Dorothy's hands and showed her how. Dorothy was clearly terrified of her, but she seemed to be picking up the technique properly all the same.
What is any of this.
All I wanted was for the barrier to open already so the whole lot of them would get lost.
Once the work was done, they usually went straight to the Cabbage Patch and passed out snoring. For some reason, today they showed up in the kitchen.
"..."
"..."
"..."
"..."
"...Work's over for today. What are you doing? Shouldn't you be crawling back to the Cabbage Patch?"
I'd been planning to eat a nice bowl of kimchi stew and play with the Demon King. Instead, a pack of vagrants was staring at us from behind the table.
"...Well..."
Every pair of eyes drifted toward the kimchi stew on the table. Of course I hadn't set places for them. They'd looked at the food we ate with open contempt before.
Right.
Starve long enough and your circumstances change, don't they?
"Stop hovering and get lost."
The four of them put on disappointed faces. There was nothing left in those expressions of a noble, or a refined elven archer, or a sword saint. They were ramen beggars, plain and simple.
Then the Demon King shot up from her seat, as if something had just occurred to her.
"You guys..."
Hope lit up in the vagrants' eyes. The look of fools who had once been stuffed full of arrogance and aristocratic gall, now wondering if the Demon King might take pity on them and give them something after all.
"You came because the kimchi smell is too strong, huh. Shoo, shoo, get out of here. Don't worry! I will never give you any!"
That's my Demon King. Nailed it.
Getting their hopes up just to drop them was a work of art.
"Ahem, well, you see... we may have gone a bit too far last time—"
"No, it's fine. I've forgotten all of it. The smell's pretty strong, right? Hurry back."
The Demon King dragged the four of them—who clearly still had plenty left to say—all the way to the Cabbage Patch and shoved them in. I hadn't had any way of knowing until now, but it seemed the Demon King hated it when anyone butted in on her time with me.
The next morning.
A rare sight unfolded in the Cabbage Patch.
No one in this world would have believed it.
I'd gone to fetch them for morning labor, only to find each of them pulling up crops and crunching away. Even Dorothy was tearing into a cabbage.
"Ah, n-no... that's..."
"Didn't you say last time, 'Honestly, who would eat something like that,' Dorothy?"
"I-I didn't eat it."
"You might want to hide the teeth marks on that cabbage."
Furious at these crop thieves who had abandoned all human dignity, the Demon King went around giving each of them an earful. In the middle of it, she simply smacked Nine, who'd eaten a carrot.
"Ugh. You guys are hungry, aren't you?"
"..."
"Want that kimchi stew from before?"
At that, they all set down the vegetables they'd been crunching through and flocked around the Demon King. Shameless, the lot of them. They were already lower than livestock.
The kitchen filled with the clink of spoons on dishes and the sound of teeth.
Even the mage who wouldn't touch anything that wasn't fairy grapes was gone now.
Watching the four of them kite their spoons in a feeding frenzy, I was reminded of the first time the Demon King had served me kimchi stew. Surely I hadn't eaten like that—like some beggar wrapping his food in rags. If I had, I would have wanted to die of shame.
"Wow, that was so good!"
"Your cooking is on the same level as Dongha's! I'll never look down on kimchi stew again!"
"She's right. The spice is quite addictive. But Rebecca, what are you doing?"
"Uh... huh? N-no. I am not licking the broth off the bowl."
The whole table was nothing but praise for the Demon King's cooking.
"...Really? Heheh."
The Demon King looked a little pleased.
The four serfs, who had been cowed this whole time, were chattering noisily for the first time in ages. Full bellies and warm backs—they were living it up.
I couldn't take it.
This was not the kitchen that had always been full of joy, of conversation with the Demon King.
It had turned into a window for those trashy bitches to talk through.
Me, silent in the corner of the table.
The four of them, leaning back in their chairs, making a racket.
Back then, they'd do this and then suddenly call my name to start picking on me.
"Dongha!"
Just like that.
"So that's why you've put on weight. It's this delicious—"
"The kitchen stinks now, so get lost once you're done stuffing your faces."
I hated it.
I hated it so much.
That casual ease of theirs—remembering perfectly well what they had done, and still flashing their teeth, grinning away like nothing had happened.
There was a difference, I realized, between a victim choosing to bury their own trauma and watching the perpetrators bury it themselves.
I thought I might be sick. I didn't touch a bite of the delicious food the Demon King had made.
I snatched the four empty bowls off the table and started washing the dishes.
Scrubbing, as if I were peeling something filthy off them. Until they were clean.
I washed for a long time. When I finally looked back, the four of them were already gone, and only the Demon King was there, watching me, waiting.
"Kihihi. Shall we go?"
"Yeah."
"...What's with you today?"
"I just felt like it."
Before we went to sleep, I received a Free Pass, written out in the Demon King's crooked handwriting.
You can use the Demon King however you want for the whole day.
"...Don't I pretty much get to do that anyway?"
"Excuse me. What did you just say?"
"Nothing. I'll put it to good use."
...A Free Pass.
When a beauty on another level, with impossibly soft skin, hands you something like this, what you want is already decided, isn't it.
Squeeze, squeeze.
I was going to spend the whole night just touching her cheeks.
My body felt like it was floating, bouncing along on top of a cloud. The murky energy that had soaked into me, the darkness—it all felt like it was being purified. I was definitely addicted. So this was why people couldn't quit drugs.
Squeeze, squeeze.
...Ah... that's good.
Just a few steps outside, demons were gathered.
Just a few months back, those goddamn memories were smeared across everything.
The soft flesh under my fingertips right now cast a barrier that kept all of that from getting through.
"...You're amazing. My friend."
The Demon King said it as she hugged me. The way she wriggled, trying to wrap her small arms and small body around mine, was painfully endearing.
"...Hehe. I think you're too big for me to hold."
I didn't answer. I just looked into her eyes. She went on.
"...Your bad memories are probably like that too. For someone as little as me... even if I spread both arms, there'd be too many painful things to hold them all."
That's true of you too, though.
You have those kinds of memories as well.
"And even so, you got through it... and you came to me. Thank you so much. The you from before, and the you right now—I'm grateful for all of it. Kihihi."
Thank you. A thing the Demon King said often. Everyone in this world hated her.
"Today it's napa cabbage!"
And still, the Demon King always found things in this world to be grateful for.
All that time... she must have suffered so much more than I had.
The Demon King lived by throwing her whole body against the new sorrows that arrived every day. And even then, she always tried to show me a bright smile.
Unlike her, I had been childish. I had infected her with my sadness. I had made her pull out the thorn stuck in my wound, too.
"I'm sorry."
"...Hm? For what?"
As if the Demon King would be happy sharing a space with the people who had tried to kill her.
I wasn't granting my former party members some grand act of mercy.
The barrier would open soon enough anyway. Until then, I had no choice but to run into them. Because the Demon King had chosen to send them back alive instead of killing them.
Hadn't I decided to respect her choice? If I got angry here, she would be the one left feeling sorry—and she hadn't done anything wrong.
Right. I'd endured for years. Compared to that, this was nothing. I could put up with it for the brief time we had to spend together.
Not for them. For the Demon King, who was worried about me.
"Starting tomorrow, let's make them do the dishes."
"Ah! That's a great idea!"