What If (3)
“…That’s why the temple flies into a rage and tries to kill me.”
[What?]
“Nothing.”
It was done. There was no point brooding over what was already past. Even if I had known, I would not have run or refused.
I let it go and quietly posed the next question.
“If offering one’s own kind as a sacrifice is possible, then why do those demons leave one another alone? That is what I find curious.”
[Well… humans know that if they kill someone they can take that person’s possessions, yet they don’t go around murdering for it, do they? Same sort of thing, maybe?]
“…That is because society enforces norms with force, I believe. Do demons possess laws or customs for maintaining order as well?”
[I doubt they have any social standards everyone agreed to establish. But they do have that guy, don’t they?]
The mad king who made himself into a Wedge and succeeded in linking one dimension to another.
[If a bastard like that forbade kin-slaying, then everyone would have to obey.]
“So that is the logic…….”
I pictured Satan summoning the demons and grandly announcing a ban on fighting among themselves. The image was almost funny.
[Anyway, the original owner of that body still walking around with demon energy concealed remains a mystery. Judging by how he spent five full years scraping together sacrificial corpses, the contract must have been made before that… but is that even possible? You form a contract with a demon and then just hide the demon energy? If that worked, every demon contractor would have been living the high life ages ago.]
Yet when I tried to laugh at it, my own reality felt far too grim.
We steered the digression back to the main topic. Still no answer in sight.
[…What if the demon itself hid it?]
“I beg your pardon?”
[As I told you before, a human alone hiding demon energy is nearly impossible. But if a demon wanted to conceal its own energy… then the story changes. Yes. If the demon itself hid the energy, everything changes!]
Yukgui cut himself off mid-sentence and snapped his head up like Archimedes shouting “Eureka!”
[Yes, yes, this is it! This is the answer!]
“…I still do not understand.”
I tried to suggest he calm down and explain, but the hint bounced right off him.
[But why? Is there any profit for a demon in cooperating?]
“…I would like to understand as well.”
[Ah—ah, sorry.]
When I said it more bluntly a second time, it finally landed. Yukgui apologized, lowered the head he had been holding so proudly, and tapped the moss with a fin.
[Once you reach Great Demon level, rewriting your physical composition doesn’t leave you suffering side effects. Meaning you won’t end up deformed the way a human would, or wracked by the regenerative nature of demon energy. The energy was theirs to begin with.]
Of course there were still drawbacks—vulnerability to external attacks, internal injuries from prolonged backlash—but they were not the same crippling ones, he added.
[So if a demon took a direct hand, concealing the energy wouldn’t be completely impossible. However…….]
“The question is whether it had any reason to step forward.”
[Exactly.]
I tapped my fingers against the ground, turning over the doubt he had raised. Reaching this point, something felt off—something that scraped against the grain.
“…First, the contract between the original owner of this body and the demon was made more than five years ago. Correct?”
[No one would bother gathering sacrifices without a contract in place… so probably, yes?]
“And with those gathered sacrifices they brought me here. That much is solid truth.”
[Right?]
“…Why?”
[……?]
“This is not a lament of ‘why me of all people.’ That question is for those bastards. What I mean is simply this: why did they not settle the matter between themselves, and instead drag in a third party—me?”
A contract is, at its core, an agreement between parties. And agreements are usually reached through compromise and negotiation. In other words, they had mutually consented to the decision “we will bring in a third party.”
“If there was something they meant to achieve through me, I have never received a single instruction. I was never even told why I ended up in this body in the first place.”
The main story only appeared after I had already begun acting, so it is hard to call that an instruction. If anything, it felt more like a blindfold to keep me from realizing this place was reality. If they truly wanted me to kill Satan, they would have thrown up a main quest that said “Kill Satan” in bold letters.
“On the other hand, I was given a few conveniences useful for survival. An inventory bag that holds more than it appears, gear that never breaks—things like that.”
I did not mention the status window or the skills; those were harder to explain. They served both as a means to disguise this world as a game and as clear aids that tilted survival in my favor.
Then perhaps that itself was a meaningful clue?
[But what profit could your continued living produce for them?]
Like a man who has realized something is buried in the earth he has been digging, I began groping one by one at the stones that blocked the way. Once I cleared every last one of them, would the answer appear? A thin hope moved my lips on its own.
“If I go on living without ever recognizing the demon, that alone would serve as a restraint upon it… so the human side might have been aiming for that. You more or less saw what happened in Bemyurhen—the aftermath when it runs wild is far too great.”
[It feels a bit like forcing the pieces together… but it is not impossible. Keep going.]
Forcing the pieces? No. This was almost certainly the correct answer. I recalled the opening cinematic that had already grown faint. I did not want to believe even that had been a lie.
“And the demon’s side…….”
In contrast, the demon side offered nothing solid to grab. What could it gain by handing control of the body to a third party and then simply standing back with its arms folded to watch?
Well… a screen through my special trait—the Concealment of Ignorance?
Except that screen had failed completely, earning me every kind of misunderstanding and disaster. On the contrary, even when I was treated as a demon and stood on the brink of execution, those bastards could only stand there fretting unless some special trigger appeared.
Was that truly profit?
“…I do not know the details, but there must be some benefit. They would never have accepted and cooperated with such a compromise if it brought them nothing.”
[That’s true enough.]
“The problem is the content of that benefit…….”
I wrung my mind dry trying to discover what profit a demon could extract, then suddenly looked back at the original premise.
If my continued living produced some benefit for them… then what about the opposite?
“…I had it backwards.”
[……?]
“It is not the benefit the demon can gain from me that matters—”
I considered the stubborn vitality of this body that White Wind and I had researched together. And I reflected on every convenience that made my survival easier.
“What matters is how I can make them take a loss.”
Whatever else, I now understood one thing: if I die, you bastards will be in trouble.
“If I were to die.”
[Uh, uh?]
Then perhaps I could use that as leverage for a deal.
“Please send the corpse to Inquisitor Daniel, who should be living in Deorfumain.”
I took hold of the dagger.
Berserk turned the metal fragment the tortoise had left over in her hands. Unable to understand the tortoise’s voice, she had accepted it on the assumption it was a word of thanks… yet she still had no idea what it was.
“…Cold.”
But a lack of knowledge was no reason she could not recognize the object’s value. The metal was wrapped in a chill and a wind that never faded; that alone made its worth plain.
It was as if the metal itself had taken the shape of her homeland—the glacial earth that never melts.
“…Hmph.”
Come to think of it, she wondered how home was faring. She slowly closed her eyes over memories she had not touched in a long time.
In the days when she had lived there, that snowfield had seemed frozen even in time; it never changed.
Was it still filled, then, with fierce cold, death strewn everywhere, and a slow-approaching ruin? Did the warriors who died simply to live still continue their meaningless fights there?
The weak culled, the strong broken and shattered, blood flowing without end—yet that land remained only white.
“…You will pass the Glacial Trial twenty times. That was the punishment we laid upon you. And you passed it splendidly. You are free now.”
Still.
“Leaving? Well, all right. Nothing binds you any longer, so if you wish it, that is fine. We have no right to stop you.”
Still holding her sisters.
“But remember this. If you fail at dying, you will surely return. Just as we cannot leave this land even as the ground dries and the game dwindles, you too will eventually come back here.”
Berserk clenched the metal tighter; the longer she held it, the colder it grew.
“They said a curse hangs over the warriors of Nordah.”
Wise Virgir had already known. So long as her sisters lay buried there, Berserk would have no choice but to return. Her flight would end someday, inevitably.
“That was true.”
Yet it stirred no empty defiance. She had long since realized that the longer she shook her head refusing to face the truth, the more the burden fell upon herself.
“It was true.”
So only one choice remained.
It was time to go back.
Berserk rose. Layers of cold began to pile inside the chest that had wandered the south searching for a reason and lost it.
Before I drove the blade into myself, I forced one last round of thought.
Worries that the demon might burst out again the moment death threatened. Anxiety that, contrary to my expectation, the life or death of this body might have nothing to do with their gains or losses. The question of what would happen if I truly died. Most of the thoughts were of that sort.
[Wait, hey, uh!]
But I was already the bird perched at the tip of a blade of grass; there was nowhere left to retreat.
I steeled my heart.
[Hey, hey. Even so—!]
“Please.”
Above all, I had certainty.
Even in the worst case, if I died then I died; the demon would not seize this body. That certainty.
Looking back over every precedent so far, it was clear that several restrictions bound the demon’s ability to take over.
For instance, Rage had to activate and the Madness Gauge had to fill completely, or it could only sortie like a deus ex machina in situations that seemed truly impossible. Something along those lines.
Note that the “impossible situations” I speak of here do not take my own life as the baseline. My life had hung by a thread so many times, yet the demon had appeared only twice; the judgment follows naturally.
So when does the demon descend?
Not simply when my life alone is at stake, but when the lives of many more people hang in the balance. When the true Demon Knight compromises with the demon in order to save them and lets it out in his place—that is what I believe.
The clues I gathered in Bemyurhen alone made that nearly certain—honestly, what reason would a demon have to save humans, to save a hero, unless it were forced?
“Please, just honor the request I made just now.”
In short, for those reasons this gamble was not so great a loss. Not even my own death.
Returning home upon death would be best, of course, but even if I died without returning… well, was it not the same? If I could not hide the demon energy I would spend the rest of my life hunted and hated, and I had no confidence I could endure that. Better to die clutching at least a scrap of hope.
[You really…….]
“I am sorry.”
Therefore resorting even to a measure like this was not excessive in the least.
“…Please never do that again.”
I am sorry. An apology that would never reach her sank into the abyss.