Evidence (4)
I rolled my tongue around inside a throat that had gone rough and scratchy in an instant.
“…Inquisitor.”
The title—one I hadn’t spoken in ages, or perhaps had never once let past my lips—rolled across my tongue like a ball of thorns.
Had the thorns pricked me into a moment’s hesitation? The demon answered smoothly. The mask of goat bone wore its perpetual, curving smile.
“…The first part was your doing.”
The problem was that every single word it spoke rested on truth. Not everything was right, yet none of it could be wholly denied.
“…….”
No rebuttal came to mind. It couldn’t. I was just as uncertain how the Inquisitor would react as anyone else.
“…She’s—”
“She… is the kind of person who would try to save me until the very end.”
“Yes.”
No. That wasn’t right. I was fairly confident I could predict her choice. She would try to save me—the Demon Knight.
She would try. Of that I was sure.
Whether that meant she would keep me alive was another matter entirely.
That was the problem. I had no way of guessing how the Inquisitor’s thoughts had run while I was gone. Whether she would still propose we build a future together, or whether she would accept the “Demon Knight’s best ending” I had been performing all this time—I simply could not know.
“…….”
I gripped the thrashing Latel until my fingers locked stiff. Thump, thump. Even now Behemoth was racing across the earth, shaking every bone in my body.
“…That’s true enough.”
…Ah, damn it. Now I understood why the kid had been played by this bastard.
I stared down at Latel for no good reason, holding a speech that sounded like a trap yet rang so plausible the moment I heard it. It felt exactly like cradling an apple whose skin was a deep, ripe red while the flesh inside had already gone rotten.
「If the reason you’re hesitating is because of me…」
But before I could take a bite, a single thread of voice slipped into my ear.
「Please don’t. You don’t have to.」
Something formed soundlessly on my forearm right after that.
The boy I had seen in the mind-scape clung to my arm at one-sixteenth his true size.
「I’ve already accepted falling into Hell. I made that decision long before now—on the day I decided to form a contract with a demon.」
“But…”
「Kind one. I’m truly grateful that you’re thinking of me. But I really am fine.」
When I raised my forearm, the boy released his grip, stood up, and used my arm as solid ground. A gentle smile lingered faintly on his face.
「Do the right thing. The people this Great Demon has murdered… this much is already enough.」
The apple in my hand was finally cast aside.
She purified the entire city wall, and still had strength left over to look beyond, toward Maryeok. Boom. That was roughly when the fleeing monster’s legs buckled.
“Ah… ahh—”
She slowly savored the shape of the Demon Energy turning the beast’s brain into pulp. Distance and the fact that it was happening inside the monster’s body meant there was nothing visual to see, but that hardly mattered. Her flesh, steeped in Holy Power, perceived the Demon Energy—her absolute opposite—with exquisite precision.
She could tell exactly how unpleasantly it seethed, how greedily it burned. Demon fire. No other flourishes were needed to describe it.
“The demon… the demon’s down…!”
“The d-demon…!”
Those who could not feel what she felt simply rejoiced at the demon’s collapse. That colossal calamity, the monster that had left them with wounds that would never fade, had toppled as though dying, and they cheered.
“It’s Lord Amber…!”
Or they shouted their guess at why the demon had stopped.
“Lord Amber did it!”
Of course. They had seen the one who clung to the enormous demon until the end, lighting the fire. If they needed a reason for the sudden fall, that figure was the first name that came to mind.
“Lord Amber has done it!”
How could they not cry the name?
“Lord Amber has brought victory to Munmunt!!”
Yet their hope would one day be betrayed. Whoever Lord Amber might be, the person they sought was certainly not the vessel of a demon, so betrayal was inevitable.
“Munmunt has won!!!”
Knowing that truth, the Hero felt a quiet desolation. Thud. A stone dropped inside her chest and began to bury her heart.
“Lady! Lady!”
The truth was… she had hoped they would never meet again. There were things she had wanted to ask him, yet she had still wished their paths would never cross for eternity.
“Lady, what in the world is going on…!”
Because a reunion would force a choice.
“…Lady.”
But fate was cruel, and trials were merciless.
The Hero quietly recalled the command of the one she served.
Slay the lost one.
She repeated the order that she, as the god’s proxy, could not refuse.
And the heart buried under stone stopped beating.
“Are you really going to kill him?”
“What else?”
No—perhaps it had not stopped completely. The Great Temple might still be in danger. Yet under the banner of “no other choice,” she had already turned her back on her own beginning.
She had come too far to start hopping about and acting flustered over a single person.
“It’s no one else—it’s My Lord!”
“And so?”
Therefore. Because of that.
She dropped another stone onto the tomb already piled high. The stone labeled Faith and Greater Good was so heavy and vast it completely muffled any possible heartbeat. Now she could neither laugh nor weep.
“I am the Hero.”
Ah. Would there ever come a day when she could look back on this moment as peace, as calm?
“So there’s no other way.”
…Probably not. Yet she would have to bear it. That was the duty she carried.
“After everything, what are you—!”
“Are you the one who raised the wall, purged the vermin, and healed the people?”
The Hero withdrew her gaze from the one who was angry. Instead she looked at the man who had come running, breathless, before her.
The first thing that caught her eye was the place where a leg should have been—severed by a demon or eaten by vermin, she could not tell—followed by the blood-matted navy hair and the deathly pale cheek.
“Thank you for your aid. Without you this city, this place…”
He bowed to her with a haggard face. His swaying body nearly toppled, but the knight standing beside him caught him. Even with a broken arm the knight supported a full-grown man with practiced ease—still a pike even when rotten, as the saying went.
“If it is not too much to ask… might we request a little more help? I know it is shameless—”
“I’m sorry, but I still have work left.”
Even if a man in such condition begged desperately, she could not grant every request.
The curse of hunger and thirst had already been lifted, and the filthy vermin Erysichthon had unleashed had crumbled to ash the moment Holy Power swept through them. Immediate priority was hard to claim.
“I… see…”
“If you have a request, please speak to those who will arrive after me. Since they came as reinforcements, they will offer every cooperation they can.”
Anything else would amount to gathering the wounded soldiers and soothing the townsfolk who had suffered the curse for so long. Neither of those tasks required her presence specifically. Others could handle them.
Therefore the place she needed to be right now, the work only she could do…
“Do you have rope?”
She stared at the horizon of Maryeok. The monster, so vast that the distance between them was hard to measure, still cradled seething Demon Energy in one place.
Not the monster’s own energy—the energy of the being that had killed it.
“It doesn’t have to be rope. Anything that will let me get down there.”
Yet that once-mighty Demon Energy was already shrinking, as if it had never been strong at all. Whether its power was spent or it was preparing to flee, she could not tell.
“…Why do you need that?”
“If you don’t have any, never mind.”
If it was the former, good. If the latter, she could not stand by. She had to reach that place before the Demon Energy escaped. Even if the result was meeting someone she both longed and dreaded to see.
The Hero lowered her eyelids with half a wish that the energy would vanish this instant and half a wish that it would not. The gaze of the one who could not quite insert himself into the conversation was piercingly sharp.
“Perfect timing—they’re here.”
“……?”
But whether she was understood or not no longer mattered.
Instead of herself, who had run without looking back to stop the Great Demon, she pointed to those now racing up while finishing the aftermath—clearing the gates she had smashed to enter the city, or dealing with the Lower Demons trying to climb through them.
“Daniel the Inquisitor.”
Naturally, the first to reach the top of the wall was a man as hot-tempered as she was.
“…Yes.”
Had he sensed the flame as well? His voice, calmer than usual, fixed on her. There was no need to name what burned behind his eyes.
“I leave the rest to you.”
Yet he was weak, and therefore not qualified to go there.
“Give this man your full cooperation.”
“…Yes.”
“Hey, Lady!”
She entrusted everything remaining to him. The one who had only glared without joining the conversation finally opened his mouth.
“I’m going to deal with the demon.”
“Are you kidding me? What’s down there isn’t a demon—!”
“Enough.”
“…A demon? What are you talking about?”
Whether Daniel the Inquisitor restrained Deathbringer or not, whether the navy-haired man was thrown into confusion by the word “demon” or not, she hurled her shield over the outer wall. Boom. The massive shield crushed demon corpses and shook the earth.
“Fuck, you think I’m just going to watch that?!”
A shield could be thrown like this, but what about her body? Should she simply jump? Yet leaping twenty meters in full armor would certainly jolt her hard.
“……! Wait, Brother—!”
“I’m not your brother!”
There might still be fighting ahead, so she wanted to conserve Holy Power as much as possible.
While she fretted over that, someone far lighter than she was leapt down from the wall. Dodging the Inquisitor and bouncing through the breached section, his skill was truly that of a back-alley kingpin.
“Don’t go.”
She could not let him leave unhindered. Lamenting that she was using Holy Power after all, she trapped Deathbringer behind a wall of it.
“Crazy Lady! Let me go! Let go of me!”
“Daniel the Inquisitor, please.”
Still, thanks to him she now knew a way down. Just as Deathbringer had done, she set foot for the first time into Maryeok through the collapsed wall. The faint Demon Energy under her soles was utterly nauseating.
“Are you sure you won’t regret killing My Lord, you idiot?!”
But it was nothing compared to what she had to do next.
She picked up the shield she had thrown and advanced toward her destination.
The flame that had melted the monster’s entire brain neither fled nor departed; it remained right there in the form of dying embers.