5. Look. Look at Me. (2)
Right after the sun had risen.
Because his mother was half bedridden, his father—having heard the news from somewhere—had belatedly returned home.
"Cariel. Did you really... did you truly have to go that far?"
He had no idea what the point of the question was.
Did he need to? Was that what this was about?
"Or what, exactly? Was I supposed to let Patina beat me senseless while she worked out her petty little frustrations? To be battered around like a dog? And if I'd been beaten like that, what would you be saying then?"
"Th—that's... Patina had no reason to go that far. I know you were both worked up, but even so—"
"Why are you so certain she didn't? Who decided that?"
"You know her character better than anyone, you and I both. Why do you always insist on turning things toward the worst possible—"
"Funny how you only ever lose your temper at me."
"That's... that's because her expectations for you were so high. It's been that way since you were a child."
"Did I ever ask anyone to expect anything of me? What exactly are they expecting, and on what grounds?"
The longer they talked, the more his fury piled up.
He didn't even want to deal with him, but still...
"In any case, when people fight, tempers flare and things can escalate. I'm not going to fault you for that much. But... showing even your mother a sight like that—don't you think that was a little much?"
"Why? You just said people get hurt when they fight, didn't you? Then it can happen in real combat too, can't it? Didn't you always tell me to train as if it were real?"
His left hand, which had been half-cracked and dangling uselessly, was perfectly whole again, as if nothing had ever happened.
Even his right hand, broken and crushed, was fine.
A few passes of his mother's hands, and the left and right hands that should have been ruined beyond saving had returned to normal, like a lie.
"But using such an extreme technique in a practice duel? Clearly, it was because you trusted in your mother's power to begin with... but ruining even your own body just because you were displeased—"
"I'm... sorry, what did you just say?"
Cutting him off mid-sentence, Cariel ground his teeth and drove the question in like a blade.
Yet Rueld continued, not a hair of composure disturbed.
"Because it could always be healed. Because if you showed it to Ermina, you assumed she'd mend it without a second thought. That's why you pulled such a reckless stunt. Better to show her once than waste a hundred words talking to Ermina, who nags at you anyway. A clever boy like you would have calculated it exactly that way and acted accordingly. Am I wrong?"
"What kind of absurd—!"
No.
No, wait.
...It might be true. That feeling hadn't been entirely absent.
No—yes. That was it. That was exactly it.
But had he done it out of rational calculation?
Not at all.
But if the result turned out this way, and this was how they wanted to interpret it—then so what? What of it?
In the end, it had been right.
Those warped expressions, those faces collapsing in abject despair—he'd seen every last one of them.
...It meant something, without a doubt.
"What a wretched way of thinking. If you'd made one wrong move and Ermina had gone into shock—something could have happened—"
There, his father fell silent for a moment, then let out a long, heavy sigh.
"...Cariel. Don't ever do that again."
"......"
"And you will explain the circumstances and apologize. To your mother, and to Patina."
...What?
Apologize?
"Why should I?"
"...What did you say?"
As though he'd heard something he couldn't possibly have heard.
Those two golden-tinted eyes warped, for an instant, into sheer bewilderment.
"Did I do something wrong?"
"You're calling that a statement? Now?"
"And what did Patina have to say for herself?"
"......"
Rueld, darkening, answered with the greatest effort to suppress his frustrated expression.
"She insisted it was entirely her own fault. Said she'd committed an unforgivable blunder, that she was ashamed to show her face—that she would even relinquish her knight's commission."
"Then that settles it, doesn't it."
"...Cariel."
That's all she said?
For an instant, worry and concern for Patina welled up in him—but Cariel turned away from it with a sigh.
What was he supposed to do about it?
Wasn't it her own doing, in the end?
In the first place—why should the victim... the victim have to drown in guilt?
Why did it always have to be
...why was it always him who had to worry over others' wounds, to mourn for them?
He was the one who'd been hurt, wasn't he?
He was the one it had been done to, wasn't he?
—Well, that's because you're soft as overripe fruit? Being kind is a fine thing and all, but a good heart is a flaw just begging to be exploited. It doesn't make you bad. It's the bastards who use that goodness as a lever against you—those are the ones who are despicable.
From one side came a voice, snorting and muttering to itself.
The Demon King, sprawled across the sofa as if she owned it, was murmuring to herself—reading his innermost thoughts as if they were printed on his face, or perhaps deliberately scratching at them.
And.
No matter how many days she talked.
That voice was a one-way echo, aimed at Cariel alone.
Rueld spoke with a sunken face.
"...You still haven't cooled your head, I see. We'll continue this conversation... once you've had time to settle."
And with that, Rueld moved to leave, making for the door.
"You'll stay in your room today. I can't in good conscience watch you wander about in that state. I'm not ordering you into seclusion—just calm yourself, and look back, at least once, on what went wrong and how it came to this."
"......"
He was going to shut himself away quietly anyway. No need to tell him.
Even without a reply, it was as though an unspoken agreement had been reached and confirmed.
Cariel. And Rueld alike.
In the end, without answer or acknowledgment on either side—
the door closed.
"Ha."
Relief and regret crashed over him all at once.
Which emotion held the upper hand, he still couldn't tell.
The confusion filling his skull only deepened, and the guilt that clouded his chest grew so thick that even breathing became laborious.
Why... why should he be tormented by guilt and sin?
It would have been better if he'd felt relieved.
No—he had felt it.
Briefly. Fleetingly, if nothing else.
But now?
Why did it irritate him so, this sickening sense that he'd done something unforgivable?
—I told you, didn't I? It's because you're hopelessly kind. You're more altruistic than the lot I've ever cursed at—you think of the harm you've caused before you think of the harm done to you. It's not complicated.
The Demon King snorted again and again, as if needling him.
She had the shape of a beautiful girl, yet her face was as though a demon's mask had been laid over it—
and on that overturned, sprawled visage of hers was carved a smile of truly wretched contempt.
From that figure steeped in malice, a cold, faint emotion bloomed.
—O General. Honor is, man or woman alike, the soul's most treasured possession after life itself.
Wherefore, those who would steal a lady's purse are but thieves of trash. Even should it exist, it means nothing! Absolutely nothing at all! Ahaha!
When she suddenly launched into such theatrical nonsense, Cariel—who had been absorbed in slow, deliberate breathing—couldn't help but retort.
"What in the world is that supposed to be?"
—What cannot be undone can only be forgotten. What is past is, plainly and simply, past.
The past is long gone and beyond grasping; the future has yet to arrive, so fear it not, dread it not. What remains to us, therefore, is only this threadbare present.
"......"
—O weakling! Thy name is Cariel! Kukuk!
The Demon King sprang up from the sofa.
—Set your feelings down. That is enough. If bearing them proves too heavy a task, then close thine eyes, if not forget.
"......"
—The moon has set. From this hour on, it is the sun's time and nothing else, is it not?
With that, the Demon King chuckled as if she'd said something terribly amusing, and then simply passed straight through the wall of the building and was gone.
"Hah."
That irresponsible creature... no, that Demon King.
As if sleep would come now, of all times.
And yet.
What he should do. What he wanted to do.
Nothing came to him. Not a single thing surfaced properly in his mind.
For now, he could only lie there wasting away.
As he always had.
Praying that this moment, too, would pass like a single fleeting instant.
Over the walls and across them.
Where the Demon King arrived, the two who had played their part in killing her were speaking with the woman who, only yesterday, had traded half-mad blows with Cariel—each of them wearing a complicated expression.
To be precise, it was a matter of Rueld questioning Patina, confirming the details of the incident with her one more time.
And the Saintess Ermina—
her hands clasped before her chest, her eyes closed.
The sight of her reciting her prayers, over and over, felt like that of a sinner atoning, a penitent convict.
And Rueld, watching her, unable to bring himself to beg her to stop, could only gaze upon it with quiet sorrow—
even as he turned his ear once more to Patina's continuing account.
The sight of the Hero soothing and tending his wife and his subordinate was, truthfully, almost pitiable to behold.
'Still the same as ever.'
She did not collapse.
She did not break.
Even in defeat, never mind dying—she didn't even come apart.
There had been Heroes other than Rueld, and many who bore the name of hero.
But of all the world, only one had ever made the Golden Demon King think: as an adversary, this bastard is genuinely without answer.
'Bends easily, but never breaks, that... damned will of his.'
The Nine Heroes, was it.
Once they had numbered more, but those who came to be called the Nine Heroes in the end had, as the years ground on, been driven psychologically to the brink—states of mind from which they could have shattered at any moment without surprising anyone.
And yet, for some unknowable reason, far from destroying themselves, they had only grown more unyielding.
'And yet.'
The aftermath, it seemed, still lingered.
Saintess Ermina.
Once innocent and pure, yet with compulsion hammered into her by the Church, she had possessed no will of her own in the beginning—nothing but a puppet.
As the years passed, the girl had descended into despair, convinced she had failed to fulfill her role as the world's savior—
...and even as a mother, she remained steeped in victimhood, in anxiety, in obsession.
Strictly speaking, post-traumatic stress disorder was the correct reading of it.
"You told me not to expect anything of you, my lord! Extreme or not, you made a fool of me all the same! And having seen that—how am I meant not to expect anything...!"
"Patina. What is it you actually want to say?"
"Whatever circumstances you may have, hiding your strength, playing the failure on purpose or what have you! You are striving in your own way, my lord! That much is true!"
"Patina. Calm yourself, and give me the point."
Just then, a sunken monologue drifted in from the other side of the room.
"Is it my sin? If only I had saved more of them... if I hadn't been so helpless, would that child have grown so crooked? Atonement is mine to make—so why did You make that child turn out this way? O Father in heaven, I cannot understand it at all. If it is my fault, then take me—kill me and take me instead—"
"...Ermina."
"M-Milady! Please, don't think such things! If you speak so, then what am I—the one you and Lord Rueld saved—supposed to be? Please... please, no more of these sorrowful words..."
The Demon King scoffed.
What an utter mess.
And even amid their entreaties, Ermina's eyes remained dull and unfocused, dead to the world.
"Isn't it... strange? When he was small, my child was never... never so crooked, so askew—was he, Rueld? Patina. They said that child was the world's blessing. And how we poured ourselves out so that he would grow up straight! Even when he offered himself as a hostage for Her Imperial Highness and the realm, traveling from country to country of his own accord... even there, that child... that child...!"
"......"
Rueld fell silent.
A perfectly appropriate choice.
Here, keeping one's mouth shut and listening quietly was the correct answer.
"That incident, five years ago—was that, in the end, the true problem?"
It came out of nowhere—
and it was Patina's remark that caused it.
"That is..."
Rueld's expression warped.
Ermina, too, parted her lips, but nothing came out of her mouth.
'Five years ago, hm.'
It was a story the Demon King didn't know.
But she could roughly guess.
Assembling the hints Cariel had let slip little by little, along with the various other traces visible around him, a rough inference was possible.
But.
This strayed considerably from the realm of expectation regarding Cariel, or of underestimating him, or overestimating him.
Moreover.
Even this, she had not grasped with any clarity.
And if something was not clear, then it was not truly known at all.
'To hazard a guess in the domain of a half-baked hypothesis is not the proper duty of a wise scholar.'
Even if that hypothesis were guaranteed to be nine parts in nine parts in nine—99% accurate.
The absence of that 1% was, at once, inaccuracy.
For a shortfall of even 0.1% meant perfect imperfection.
"We have always watched it, Rueld—examples of second generations who were wretched and foolish, who ruined their houses, sold their nations, and dismantled the great deeds and good names of their ancestors..."
"......"
At Ermina's words, Rueld nodded slowly, only his head moving.
"In times of confusion, as the world sank into the mire, those villains and degenerates seized upon it as their chance, devoting themselves wholly to the pursuit of their own pleasures. They protected no weaklings, cared nothing for their forebears' wills or greater causes—much less the will of God, which they scorned, betrayed, and turned away from, just as those men did. We could not allow our Cariel to grow up that way. Never..."
'Hm.'
Since her invasion of the Middle Realm, countless beings had betrayed their own nations and races right to her face, without a shred of shame.
And fair enough—once the tide had turned, unless one intended to die a dog's death, kneeling of one's own accord was the natural course.
Compared to other Demon Kings, she had treated her enemies relatively gentlemanly.
Those who surrendered, she respected thoroughly.
Conversely, those who neither surrendered nor accepted defeat—
...she burned down to the last blade of grass, and butchered without mercy.
But then, wasn't that simply what war was?
Besides.
The demonkin had ample justification, ample reason, ample cause to hate the beings who walked the Middle Realm.
Even under her control, it was not something that could be wholly controlled.
'That's my own affair, though. Irrelevant at this point.'
"Our lord is merely wandering for a time. His wounds have not yet all been washed clean..."
"Patina."
From that gaze somewhere between fervent and dangerously unsteady—from her color alone—it was plain she was not herself.
Had the young woman, too, suffered a shock nearly as deep as Ermina's?
"What gives you the right to be disappointed? You're the one who told him to expect nothing, weren't you?"
And within that—
Rueld set aside the opinions and thoughts of the two women for the moment.
And focused, with absolute rigor, solely on the words Cariel had spoken.
"I can't say we never placed burdens on him. But was it truly worse than all that?"
"Rueld?"
"...Commander?"
"Perhaps."
Looking somehow worn, yet swiftly banishing the anxious expression from his face, he said—
"Perhaps we should have paid that child a little more attention."
At that, Ermina, eyes wavering, asked back as if wondering whether she herself had missed something.
"Attention...? But we give him plenty even now... far too much, if anything...?"
Ohh?
At this, the Demon King let out a sound that might have been a groan or a scoff.
Rueld had, unexpectedly, arrived at the correct answer.
But would that correct answer turn out to be a fatal blunder that led only to ruin?
Or would it lead, truly, to some simple and clean resolution?
The Demon King found herself growing just a little curious about it.
Not that it mattered much—
'The water's long since spilled, and the well has run dry... just how do you plan to undo that?'
Besides.
That Saintess, still failing to grasp the situation, still convinced she had been acting in everyone's best interest.
Was it because pregnancy had left her psychologically anxious and fretful?
No—judging by Cariel's state, that couldn't be it.
Discipline and affection. Giving attention, yes—but what kind of attention.
On that point, she seemed, surprisingly, blind.
No—to put it precisely:
'Because he's her own child.'
No one knew better than the Golden Demon King how the Saintess treated outsiders.
Indeed, she had once used that very trait to drive a stiletto into the woman's heart.
Exploiting the unfortunate.
Leveraging the pitiable.
Plants of betrayal and guilt and sin and dread and hatred, sown deep in the woman's core—
she had fed her the full bitterness of it, every last drop.
And even so, the Saintess had never despaired of her, never hated her, never resented her.
A woman who had embraced even that in its entirety.
So wasn't it all the more laughable?
Why, then, did she not extend the same to her own son?
'Discipline him strictly so he doesn't stray... guide his path... is that how she frames it?'
It wasn't a wrong story, exactly.
But neither was it the right one, precisely.
Besides—if they were lacking in such things, wouldn't it have been simpler to keep a wet nurse at hand, or some counselor to advise them, to lean on someone for support?
'Pathetic.'
It was a problem of truly, truly trivial proportions.
Measured against what had once stood across from her, it was nothing but a trifle.
So why was it that heads which had turned so well in those days grew so complacent the moment they were placed in a household?
'Well... so be it. I'm only a bystander. It's none of my concern.'
Whether they reached the right answer—
or arrived at the wrong one and fell apart, broke, and watched everything they had built crumble like a fistful of sand—
to the Demon King, me, it was! Absolutely~ none of my business!
Not one bit!