If It Exists
I let out a long breath on the rocky plain where grains of sand swirled in fitful gusts, watching the demons gather.
This was the Demon Realm, after all. Even if the priests sensed my demon energy, they would take it for some other devil’s rather than the Demon Knight’s—that was the calculation I moved under. Whether it was true was another matter entirely. Perhaps this choice would prove a mistake, a seed of future disaster.
The same fretting had circled the same spot inside my skull the entire way here.
“Ha.”
Still, I could not stop. I would not stop.
A Korean, once he has eaten the rice, has to work it off before his conscience settles.
Whiiish!
I drew the sword from my inventory and swung. Black mana unfurled like wildfire—or a tidal wave—racing toward the horizon.
Slash! The ghouls and skeletons that had been trickling together began to tumble apart, torsos and legs dropping to the ground in a messy rain. Roughly a hundred of them.
Grrrkk.
Kyaaak!
“Creepy little bastards, seriously…”
Of course some of them stubbornly clung to unlife, thrashing the severed limbs. The skeletons even tried to reassemble themselves, yanking free broken vertebrae and grafting the rest back together.
That was why slash attributes were no good against undead. The complaint slipped out under my breath before I could stop it.
Crashhh!
Fortunately their efforts mostly failed. The ghouls, higher-tier than the skeletons, died cleanly within the blast radius; as long as I did not open their bellies afterward, none would rise again.
So that was enough. It would have to be enough.
The city now had at least a hundred fewer burdens to carry. I had done the bare minimum of what was right…
I savored, for the first time in a while, the wind threading through my real hair instead of the suffocating wig. Naturally the hot breeze did nothing to soothe the unease inside me.
A spoonful of embarrassment at preening over a mere hundred kills. A spoonful of relief that the numbers had been so low—maybe they had never been a real threat to begin with. A spoonful of worry that I had simply arrived too early, before the real swarm collected. Stirred together, the mix left my gut thoroughly unsettled.
“They’re not going to keep coming, right…?”
I could not linger longer either.
This was the Demon Realm, after all.
Ssshk.
Half unconsciously I ran a hand along my right arm. The worry of earlier days seemed almost silly now; the arm—the demon—remained utterly still.
It had been the same when I first stepped into the Demon Realm, and it was the same an hour later.
Did merely entering the Demon Realm grant no particular buff to a demon, then?
I recalled something the Archmage had said long ago. The memory felt ancient and yet as vivid as yesterday—perhaps because it was one of the reasons I had buried myself so deeply in the persona.
“A Great Demon is no different from Satan’s… what you must guard against is the demon’s…”
Of course I could not claim perfect recall. I was no genius, and half a year… was it only half a year? It already felt older than that.
How precisely could anyone remember something from roughly half a year ago? I simply mashed her words into a rough lump and kept only the meaning and tone she had meant to convey.
“Perhaps prepare a means of sealing it…”
Yes. Words that had been both a worry and a contingency.
A future that had come to nothing in the end.
Haa.
I breathed out. Air that would have been midwinter in Korea was merely muggy here for no better reason than that the world itself was different. The desert of the scorching lands hid the shape of my breath behind dry heat.
Shhhhheeeek.
Then, suddenly, something like the scrape of metal rose through the sand. An arm sheathed in plate and an empty space above the neck made its identity easy to read.
A Dullahan. A corpse fashioned from knights and slain by knights. Or else a corpse born precisely because knights had been trained to kill it.
“Oh… I wasn’t exactly looking for live practice.”
The irony between knight and Dullahan was not so different from the chicken and the egg; people had argued about it for quite some time, at least according to what I had heard.
“Looks like I’m going to put what I learned into practice right away.”
At least in this city that particular debate might finally die down. It would certainly shrink compared to before.
Shhhhheeeek.
I watched the headless knight raise its sword with a sound of leaking wind and tightened my grip on the longsword. High stance. I lifted the blade I usually let hang low and set my right hand above the edge.
I would have preferred to practice swinging with the right, but the Disguise was off; there was no choice.
As I settled into position the Dullahan mirrored me almost exactly. The black armor of the headless knight clanked. The stance was strikingly similar to the one Sir Walter had shown me yesterday.
Swordsmanship across this world could not all begin the same way, so it was probably a distinctive feature of the style developed in this city.
“…Honor to the victor.”
Had the body of that Dullahan once been a living knight who breathed in this very city?
…Had it known Sir Walter?
“Insight to the vanquished.”
I glanced at the faded scales visible between the plates. Caked with time and dust they looked almost yellowed; polished, they might have shown a fine black. That was the feeling I got.
“Fairness in the duel.”
I offered the salute Berserk had taught me. Even if it was a demon now, the flesh had once belonged to a knight who fought for people. The least I could do was show that much respect.
Shhhhheeeek.
Was it only my imagination? While I paid my respects the Dullahan did not charge. Instead it seemed to match the ritual, releasing that metallic wind-sound in perfect timing. A thoroughly eerie feeling.
Clang! Our bodies collided.
[…How wondrously you continue to obstruct my work.]
Upon the throne of the lake, the being who looked down upon the world gripped his scepter. Before him a thin, broad mirror of water reflected some distant place.
Thump, thump. With each faint tremor the angle shifted every second; the image was never precise. A plain of red rock, two silhouettes, intermittent noise.
Boom! The moment a silent explosion filled the screen the water-mirror burst. The energy waves of the place under observation had been too unstable.
—If you but grant leave, I shall go and dispose of it myself.
Moreover, that was something that should have been done from the start.
He tapped the scepter against the edge of his influence, the region too far for proper observation. Tock. The instant his nail struck the scepter’s shaft the mirror restored itself. The scene that reappeared was the same place, yet a small difference had already taken root.
No longer did two figures stand upon the plain.
—O Morning Star, grant us leave.
[I do not grant it.]
—……
The information value of that battle’s outcome was of little importance. The victor had been decided from the beginning.
“How damp and unpleasant. If you wish to watch, why not come yourself?”
What truly needed watching was why that one had allowed itself to be observed at all.
[…Deception, or not.]
Every region mankind called the Demon Realm fell within his sight. The farther the fringe, the less he could observe and the easier it became to “interfere,” yet it remained true.
[O Wrathful One, always you test me.]
And the other knew it. Yes—that was the problem.
Knowing, or even if it had not known, it would have realized the moment it stepped into his domain. Why? Why did it not scatter interference across a one-kilometer radius as usual? Why did it not even pretend to notice the surveillance?
Why?
…Because the host had won again?
—Then, O Morning Star… the plan…
He exhaled languidly.
[It is not amended. Your role is to carry it out as it stands.]
He could not rely on the possibility that the thing was not Wrath. Just as he had been called the Morning Star before Pride, that one had been Deception before Wrath.
[Inform Sloth and Gluttony.]
And precisely because it had once been called Deception, paradoxically it would never be able to win.
[The hour has come to deliver the end of the battlefield.]
Such was the future of a liar who could purchase no one’s trust.
That bat bastard again…
The moment I grasped the feel of the interpersonal technique Sir Walter had taught me and succeeded in destroying only the Dullahan’s heart without desecrating the body any further—
I lifted my head at a strangely odd sensation. Nothing shouted “Here!” yet I had the distinct feeling of being watched.
Like… that place. The demon who had slapped a “You scared, bro?” debuff on me and vanished. More precisely, like the forest I had searched all night trying to hunt the bastard down.
“…Because this is the Demon Realm?”
Mmm. I had felt this same uncanny prickle back then, but after finding nothing I had dismissed it as imagination.
“Guess I’ll have to give up on going all the way to Munmunt this way…”
Yet the location being what it was, I could not simply brush this off either.
I abandoned the dream of hunting demons along the fringe of the Demon Realm. I had never truly believed it possible, so resignation came easily.
I possessed no ability to forage supplies in a dried-out desert.
Clank.
Instead I secured the Dullahan’s corpse lying before me. In the process the rocky ground, already crushed under combat boots, crumbled a few more times. Crunch. The faint demon energy it held seeped into the air.
I was beginning to understand why this place was called the Demon Realm.
Grrraaagh—
“Ah, crap—!”
Well, the demons bursting out of holes between rocks or from sandbanks certainly lived up to the name. I could not tell whether I had come for a desert trek or a test of courage.
Crunch!
I stomped the skeleton that had popped out from between the rocks. The skull caught between boot heel and ground gave a wet grinding sound, then shattered completely.
Clatter.
At the same time the light glittering in its eye sockets evaporated. Crushing the head had been the correct answer; the fingers that had seized my ankle went still as well.
Damn it—the grip itself still would not let go, so I had to shake my leg once before it released.
“Ugh.”
Better get out before something else jumped “peekaboo” at me. After checking the remaining ghouls and skeletons I trotted away from the area.
Sure, I had been forced to act, but I had no desire to generate more eyewitness accounts. And the most effective way to erase such accounts was simply to shorten the time spent active.
Of course the distance between here and the city was wide enough that to ordinary eyes I would not even appear as a speck. I myself could not see the people on the walls, after all.
Yet there was no guarantee they lacked magnifying magic—or telescopes—and the persistent unease made me wonder whether the gaze I felt belonged not to the demons but to the city itself.
Pak!
Just as when I had arrived, I wrapped mana around my legs and ran. The coat I had not worn since discarding the persona fluttered behind me.
Perhaps because nothing snagged at the upper body, it felt a little more comfortable than the mantle I had been wearing lately—or maybe not quite.
Bang!
The combat boots now pounding the ground… well, they had always been uncomfortable, so there was nothing to compare. At least they never smelled no matter how long you walked; that was a clear win for this side.
Pants and shirt were much the same—the difference was merely whether they possessed an auto-wash function or not; comfort sat at roughly the same level. If I had to force a plus for this outfit, it was that it fit my body properly and flapped less?
For the record, excess room was absolutely not my problem. In a world where humans over 190 cm were rare unless they were Shagi, the world itself was the problem. The market that sized every ready-made garment to that physique was also the problem…
Damn it. If the Shagi had the builds of judo or MMA fighters I could have worn things that fit. Why did every last one of them have the physique of a sumo wrestler? Was it the fur? It had to be the fur!!
I thought any number of remarks that might have been rude to the Shagi—please let them forgive me; thanks to this market structure I always had to pay extra for alterations whenever I bought clothes—and leapt again in a great bound.
Thoom. The ground that had served as my foothold crumpled, and my body soared over a cliff several meters high. Rock formations stacked like layered oyster mushrooms flashed past beneath my feet.
Bang!
After that it was simply forward until I hit the wall. I crossed several more ridges and reached the highest crest. A fence closer to a log palisade than a true rampart blocked my path.
Rather than a serious attempt to stop demons, it was a device to make passage obvious—any crossing would require breaking the wall, and the traces would remain.
Whish!
But I possessed the ability to cross without breaking it… Having used the same route as when I entered—close enough that even if not identical I would not be caught; the watch posts were sparse because the coverage area was so wide—there was no chance of being spotted by sentries.
Without the slightest trouble I returned to the realm of humans.
Now there was nothing left to hold me back.