What a Windfall (2)
The Skeleton Demon King's brow twitched as he took in the sight of demons targeting him.
No parents.
Truthfully, that part hadn't bothered him. Family from his father's side had still come to fetch him. And he'd caught the words the Emperor let slip when his uncle arrived to collect him.
"I never imagined a direct descendant of House Eshua would come in person."
That single remark had told him at once that he wouldn't be a welcome presence in the family. But that, too, was fine. The house would soon belong to him anyway—welcomed or not, what did it matter? Once he claimed the seat of its head, such things would cease to mean anything.
Which was exactly why, until that day came, he needed to get cozy with the naive young uncle who'd come for him and suck every last drop of value out of the man.
These useless bastards!
Demons whose heads were barely dry, and this was who they chose to glare at? And it wasn't even the first time—this was the second. Bloodline or not, a baby whispered about as one demons kept targeting would inevitably be cast aside. If it happened inside the family's own territory, all the more so!
The divine faction would never leave alone a child who might one day become the seed of calamity. As they always had, they would cut such a child loose for their own safety—the obvious, time-honored choice. And for a child with no parents to speak for him, there would be nothing to even deliberate.
And these demons, of all people, knew that habit of the divine faction better than anyone.
"Taking that child with you will do nothing but keep you exhausted and give you headaches until the end of your days."
"Demons will keep swarming until that brat is dealt with."
"That's right. So leave the child behind, and we'll let the rest of you pass without so much as a finger laid on you."
Such impeccably exemplary words. The Skeleton King's brow twitched again.
Well, well. Someone trained them nicely—they certainly know how to run their mouths.
The sort who'd chop off your neck the moment they caught you...
"All of this is the teaching and the will of the great Skeleton King. Since you are people of the Saintess's house, surely your ears are sharper than most. Let's spare each other the trouble, shall we?"
Yeah, damn it. You follow the script so well it brings tears to my eyes.
Can't be helped, then. They're no acquaintances of mine, but I'll have to deal with them before the family casts me ou—
That was the moment.
THUNK!
The head of a demon disguised as a guard burst open.
A sword had punched straight through the mouth and out the back of the skull, jutting free like a harpoon. The hand that drew it moved so fast no eye could have caught the blade leaving its sheath. The uncle—having skewered a demon's head clean through—flashed eyes as blue and cold as winter steel.
"So I truly did look like a pushover to you. How dare you spew such filth in front of the demon-slaying Eshua."
"Guhk—...!"
"Demons have ears too, I assume, so listen well. We of House Eshua, of the Blue Faith, are those who destroy evil so that every small thing in this world may be kept safe."
The uncle poured blue holy power into his blade.
"Whatever venom your three-inch tongues may spit, we are the ones who will chase you to the very ends of Hell to erase your existence, all for the sake of protecting a child!"
The instant the sword came free, blue light exploded outward and the carriage went up with it.
BOOM!
Held in the knight commander's arms, the Skeleton King was carried clear of the blast. Then he looked back at the carriage—shattered past pieces, ground to powder—and stared in something close to disgust.
You insane bastards!
Of course they call the Saintess's house a pack of lunatics. Looking like a band of peaceful pacifists, and then you just blow the carriage sky-high! The kid almost got caught in it, you absolute madmen!
But whether he ranted or not, the uncle—having detonated a demon in a single breath—brushed the gore from his sleeve and said,
"There. Didn't I tell you? The Skeleton King was behind it."
No, he wasn't, you idiot. No, he wasn't—so fix your eyes first. Knights, someone say something to him too...
"What a waste that they were sent off without pain. Had they been minions of the Skeleton King, we'd have carved them apart limb by limb and granted them an eternity of torture."
Ha. These lunatics. They've all lost their minds, every last one of them. I truly came to the wrong family. They don't care one whit that their own territory just got demolished.
And the culprit those lunatics despised—the very author of it all—gazed up at the sky in apparent surrender. Apparently the name Skeleton King was a seizure switch for the House of Eshua.
If my identity's ever exposed, will I end up like that too? ...Well. Who knows.
The Skeleton King's eyes had already turned as cold as sheet ice. For in truth, he was the one person in the world for whom this situation made the least sense.
Demons had come targeting him? No—it wasn't for any reason like that.
I distinctly placed a taboo forbidding entry into human territory, didn't I?
This place was already deep in the heart of human lands. And the Skeleton King had established an absolute principle of non-aggression toward the human faction: demons could fight at the borderlands to defend their own territory, but they were never to invade first and sow the seeds of conflict.
That had been the rule he clung to from beginning to end.
An invasion is another matter entirely.
In war, invasion is a ready-made justification. So instead of striking first, he had chosen defensive battles along the frontier. Though, granted, for those who truly crossed the line, he'd gone out personally and uprooted them by the root.
Demons devouring humans as playthings and striking the first blow—idiocy of the highest order. Simply barring that one thing had prevented countless pointless wars and let him pour everything into the revival of the demon race.
And above all—he had been human.
Yes. Human. A person.
Even as a skeleton whose nerves had died away to nothing, unable to feel so much as emotion, he had refused to give up the fact that he had once been a man. So he made it his principle.
— Do not invade.
— Do not devour humans.
Not decrees, but a binding taboo, laid down to pave the road to coexistence. And not just any taboo—a Thousand-Year Taboo. An absolute oath no demon could defy for the entirety of its duration.
So why were these bastards ignoring his words and wading into the very heart of human territory?
From the look of them, these ones answer to the Western branch of the command.
Which meant, in a word, that they were bastards who lived disgustingly far away.
Is it fashionable for the sea-folk to drift inland these days?
That they broke a taboo to come all this way—what the hell were they even doing here?
And it seems they came under orders from someone other than me.
Which meant a demon with swollen ambitions had turned traitor. At that thought, the Skeleton King wiped his mouth with a quiet hiss.
Well. Fair enough, I suppose.
It had been a hundred and fifty years since the sealing. In that time, some other Skeleton King might well have claimed the throne in his place. The order to kill the Saint might have come from the skeleton living next door.
Right. Then I should understand. Hand the era over to the new blood. Yes. Can't go on like a stubborn old codger forever.
"O wicked Skeleton King. So desperate to escape your prison that you'd send your own minions into human lands. You have rotted through and through."
"A mere human, daring to dishonor Lord Isaac!"
"All of it—for the resurrection of our king, Isaac!"
...Doesn't seem like a new skeleton has taken the throne after all.
The Skeleton King's brow began to twitch violently.
He had known, of course. He'd known that the taboo could only be broken if a new king shattered it with power overwhelming the previous generation—just as he himself once had. But if the taboo had truly been broken, there was no way he wouldn't know. Which meant these fools had defied it unilaterally.
Even so, he had never imagined there existed a madman brazen enough to wield his own name to his face like this...
"Kill them all! You were told to bring the Saint back as a corpse—the rest you may devour as you please!"
He hadn't known they'd trample even the highest-priority clause of the taboo—the Prohibition of Human Consumption—so openly and shamelessly.
The knight commander, evidently interpreting the Skeleton King's expression in her own way, stroked his face with gentle hands.
"Young Master Isaac, it's all right. Please don't make such a face. We—no, your uncle especially—are strong."
No, that's not what this is about.
"We will burn the hateful Skeleton King's minions to ash without even leaving their magic cores behind."
No—could you leave the magic cores, actually? I know you're strong, but do you have any idea how hard those are to come by? And strictly speaking they're not even my minions. Total strangers. I don't know their faces.
The Skeleton King's gaze grew colder still. He wore that expression because the five demons here were not the whole of it.
There are more nearby.
And quite a lot of them, at that. Twenty... no, forty. Doubtless these wretches' comrades. They seemed to be moving with their power suppressed so thoroughly that even the garrison couldn't sense them.
At ordinary distances, they'd have been undetectable entirely—but even in an infant's body, he was still the Skeleton King. Among those closing in, one individual in particular radiated exceptional strength.
Is that the one who sent them?
It was a chance to capture them all and drag the mastermind into the light—but at 1st Tier, he couldn't even pin down exact numbers. Casting the proper magic would change that, of course, but with a 6th-Tier high paladin cradling him in her arms at all times, spellwork was... rather a problem.
And then—
"Young Master Isaac. Forgive me, but please remain here, just for a moment."
"!"
The knight commander interlaced her fingers, wove a special sigil, and a holy formation bloomed across the ground. A defensive ward. She set the Skeleton King down within it.
"I shall return shortly."
Judging the enemy no pushover, she hastened to join the uncle at once. The moment she was gone, a membrane of blue light rose and settled over him.
A barrier even a high-rank demon couldn't breach.
No wonder they spoke of the sharpest blade on the front lines—the density was such that even the Skeleton King felt a flicker of admiration. At this level, the ward was flawless; nothing from outside could slip through...
The corner of the Skeleton King's mouth curled slowly upward.
Which means, by the same token, that nothing on the inside can slip out.
At that instant, the Skeleton King unleashed his Survival Origin.
⸢ Origin: Magic Unsealing ⸥
With the Survival Origin, the Skeleton King's magic worked a little differently from anyone else's.
Pak!
Deep within him, in the primordial world, a vast deployment chart of magic unfolded. It was a universe unto itself. Spells mastered, spells known, spells whose very existence he'd never suspected—all of them linked together like constellations across a night sky. The ones he could not yet use, or did not know existed, gave off no light; only the knowledge that a higher tier existed, waiting.
The system's great advantage was the full map it offered—and its price was that nothing activated unless its conditions were met. Even a spell he knew by heart could not be cast until its conditions were fulfilled.
Which, conversely, means that if I satisfy the conditions, the spell is mine to cast.
And the unsealing conditions for lower-order spells were, as a rule, the total volume of mana accumulated in the body.
This one leans toward the higher arts—but this much is more than enough to unseal it!
At that moment, the Skeleton King's magic core blazed white-hot.
FWOOSH!
With it, a single unlit star caught fire. One of the Skeleton King's original spells—unlocking at last.
In the next heartbeat, a rolling black mist began to seep up from the Skeleton King's small body. The mist was nothing other than mana itself—yet it moved as though alive, and it spoke.
[My Master!]
Yes, it's been a while. Ah—don't come out.
No sooner had the order fallen than the black mana ducked neatly back inside. But the voice—a moaning, ecstatic rapture—kept flooding his ears regardless.
[Ahh, my great Lord! You live! I feared that this time, truly, I would never again behold that precious presence. And—congratulations on stealing a child's body with nary a scrap of conscience.]
Is this thing celebrating me or mocking me?
The Skeleton King clicked his tongue. This was his Detection Magic with intelligence granted to it—mana, in short, that had grown a personality and a life of its own. He'd made the thing because casting detection spells one by one mid-battle, analyzing everything by hand, had been tedious.
Whatever the case, it was his spell now, and his minion for matters of analysis. And the loyal Whisper, peering into its master's body, let out a shriek of outrage.
[...Those filthy gods DARE! Even granting that Master is a sorry piece of work, this is beyond the pale! Stuffing you into the body of this grubby little brat—I'd devour them whole and it wouldn't begin to—]
Watch it, you.
Enough. Detect the enemy.
[At current mana level, detection range: one hundred meters.]
[Eighty-eight hidden targets in the vicinity, my Master—all magical beasts. Not that any of them would be worth your time, my great Lord.]
The Skeleton King scowled. Good news, certainly—but eighty-eight?
Have they truly lost their minds?
It wasn't a matter of them being hard to fight. When demons gathered in packs, an entire city could vanish, and so a territory's alert level would climb. Then the whole domain would be blanketed in needless holy formations, crawling with extra guards.
And that means needless trouble for me.
Heightened vigilance drew suspicion onto him, and moving his minions about—summoning them at all—became that much harder. And to prevent that whole damned mess, what was the answer?
All eighty-eight get quietly disposed of.
And so the Skeleton King heaved a deep sigh.
Ah, what a chore.
Fortunately, even at his current level there was a way to erase the lot of them in one stroke—but it would burn through every scrap of mana he had.
This body can barely scrape mana together as it is.
Pouring his precious, painstakingly hoarded mana into swatting these worthless nobodies. Damn it all, the waste was killing him! If only he'd had his limbs back, he'd have delegated the grunt work and pocketed the cores for himself.
But there was nothing for it now.
Unseal every drop of my stored mana and handle them personall—
[No need, my Master. You needn't dirty your hands in the slightest, my great Lord.]
The Skeleton King's eyes went wide.
What are you talking about? Eighty-eight, not one or two—the priests will come swarming. It becomes a headache, so I have to clean them up right her—
[Ah, about that. They were there. Now they're gone.]
...Huh?
The Skeleton King's expression warped.
What do you mean, gone?
And that was the exact moment it happened.
An overwhelming surge of mana came bearing down on the Skeleton King's location. At the speed of its approach, the holy knights grew urgent.
"Young Master Rillai!"
"So this is their mastermind."
As the voices rose, the demons dressed as guards broke into grins.
"Yes—you've finally arrived, kinsman. Come, join us in killing the Sai—"
But they never finished the sentence. The demons who had dared move against the Skeleton King were butchered, merciless and wholesale.
"Hk—! Who... who are you...?!"
"Why would something that isn't even human attack us—hk!"
In the blink of an eye, the demons came apart and dropped. Precious magic cores rolled carelessly across the ground. And over them, a shadow—one he had seen before—undulated slowly.
The Skeleton King, recognizing the culprit, curled his lips upward.