A Hundred Against Forty Thousand
With the thread in hand, I called a meeting at once and shared everything we had learned.
The nobles seated in the places of honor each wore a smile at the corner of their mouths, visibly excited — the war had certainly not begun badly.
The first stitch had been sewn quite cleanly.
"……If what you say is true, my lord, then our real problem is that we have almost no reliable means of killing the Demon King. A devastating spell or a single blow from an Aura Master could certainly take his life, but if we cannot determine the exact number of times that ability can be used, then our most valuable forces become utterly meaningless."
At Dana's remark, I nodded.
Aside from me, only an Aura Master or an Overlord could hope to cut the Demon King's lifeline — and the moment he died even once to their powers, he would gain complete immunity to aura and magic alike.
'Still……'
I reassured those around me that there was nothing to worry about just yet.
Fairness synchronized my body with the Demon King's.
In a single phrase: any means capable of killing an Aura Master would become capable of killing the Demon King as well.
There was one caveat — the synchronization only took effect when the Demon King made me his target and attacked.
Its duration was limitless, but that blind spot was Fairness's greatest weakness.
Which meant that for now, so long as the Demon King could simply be killed, it was only right to seize any means at our disposal, however ruthless.
The defense lines of the frontier had been built with the full expectation that they would break.
The best we could do was use that time — and this intelligence — to reap something meaningful from it.
"When I looked into the past with the White Feather Fan, it seemed they retained at least some memory of the previous war. Their first priority will almost certainly be intelligence-gathering — and once that's finished, they'll try to break through here."
For that reason, I needed to stay at the Demon King's side as long as possible.
If I read the Demon King's movements of a day prior with the White Feather Fan and then moved to respond, the gap had to be as small as I could make it.
Reading the full twenty-four hours before acting would mean arriving only after the damage was already done.
"That being the case, I will now be moving to Javelin County."
The current Free Trade City had no Aura Master or Overlord in residence.
But it boasted no fewer than three standing knight orders, and the Mage Battalions were deployed in equal measure.
Lapis and Dana would each support the staff officers here according to their talents, so the city was unlikely to fall in the opening phase of the war.
"I'll put my trust in you both. I'll be off."
"You needn't worry, my lord."
"We'll show you we didn't follow you here intending to be dead weight."
Hearing Lapis and Dana speak with such confidence, I climbed onto Miho's great back at once and soared into the sky.
I could have reached Javelin County directly through spatial movement, but I intended to intercept the Demon King's army on its way here, cutting off any unforeseen variables before they could arise.
'The Night Parade of a Hundred Demons can't be used once morning comes.'
Besides, while the other locations mattered little, it was better for the enemy's intelligence about the Free Trade City to spread slowly.
The Hundred Demons shared one another's memories, so the moment Miho arrived at Javelin County and came face to face with the Demon King, the other summoned spirits could alert me as well — which was precisely why I could afford this deliberate dallying.
"So the girl cannot attend to her master this time either?"
Miho wrapped me tightly in her arms, tail swaying, her expression wistful.
"I'm sorry. But this is something I can't avoid."
I stroked her hair in small consolation, and for a while we drifted silently through the open sky.
Some two or three hours had passed like that when, at last, we came upon the Demon King's army marching toward the Free Trade City.
At that pace, they would likely take about a week to arrive.
Unavoidable — the Free Trade City lay closest to the heart of the Barren Lands.
"Then, Miho — head on to Javelin County first. I'm counting on you."
"As you command, my lord."
I steadied my breathing and let my body settle atop Miho's back.
In this pitched battle, I had to inflict damage without resorting to a swift, decisive end.
A rough count with my eyes put their numbers at an army of thirty to forty thousand.
But the densest massing was, without exception, the monsters — in truth, only around ten thousand of them would be elite troops.
'Splitting their forces and still fielding that many elites. Absurd.'
Frankly, I could scarcely gauge how devastating the losses would be if we clashed with them in open battle right now.
'Shall we, then?'
Clouds streaked past, and the distance between us closed with unmistakable speed.
Far below, some of them must have noticed me — the great army's advance froze in an instant, and intercepting attacks came screaming toward my body to pierce it through.
I caught Excalibur in my grip, batted them aside with casual ease, and spoke.
"Night Parade of a Hundred Demons."
I did not call every one of the Hundred Demons to this sky.
What I summoned first was Dueoksini — and from the mist, the great bulk of him emerged, gathered me into his arms, and plummeted toward the ground.
Dueoksini's unique power, Gweryeongnansin, is the strength to make real what no human could ever comprehend as possible.
Falling from such a height, my body by all reason should have burst apart and died.
Boooom!
But Dueoksini twisted that very reason, and set me down with eyes brimming with resolve.
"So it's the human who struck at us from the sky first, the moment we were reborn."
"What staggering arrogance. Do you intend to fight this war alone?"
"I take it that blow you unleashed back then can't be used again?"
Listening to the varied jeers of the demon-kind who belonged to their elite forces through my sharpened hearing, I drove Excalibur into the ground and spoke once more.
"Night Parade of a Hundred Demons."
Across the Barren Lands beneath the settling dark, a white mist crept outward, summoning the remaining ninety-eight yokai.
I could have used the Astra I had employed back then here as well — but one does not swing a butcher's ox-slaying blade at chickens.
Yes, call this arrogance if you like.
It was my conviction that, at least in my eyes, the forces before me were more than sufficient.
Thud.
The monstrous wolf of Norse myth, Fenrir, padded to my side and crouched low.
To unleash his full power, there was no choice but to loosen Gleipnir, the binding wound around his body.
So I reached out and released it — and at that touch, Fenrir cast off his suppression, returning to his true form as the beast of the end.
In a war wagering the fate of one's entire kind, petty pretenses were unnecessary.
Gazing at the enemy's frozen front line, I fired the signal flare.
"Yeobalssangigaese — Strength to Uproot Mountains, Spirit to Shroud the World."
I poured into the swinging Excalibur force enough to tear a mountain loose, and a pressure vast enough to blanket the world.
Shraaak!
And so the insignificant monsters at the very front had their limbs pulped without so much as a chance to resist.
The blood spraying in all directions rose into the air at Bathory's will, and began its wild, whirling dance.
This was not war. It was a hunt.
And at the same time, it was not a hunt. It was a massacre.
Yes — together with the Hundred Demons,
beneath a moonlight still casting its cozy glow upon the breaking dawn, I dyed the earth red, and set a white moon within it.
A sight of one hundred invading forty thousand — not forty thousand invading one hundred.
Through the Yuki-onna's power, a blizzard whirled despite the autumn night, and snowflakes piled upon the ground.
And when the heat of the battlefield began to melt that snow, Jörmungandr swelled larger and larger still, carving a path straight through the ranks of monsters and demons alike.
"It's a simple neurotoxin! Ignore the serpent and———ghk!"
The demon who had warned the others not to be deceived by Jörmungandr — who, together with his brother Fenrir, drew every eye with that colossal frame — collapsed the moment he took his ninth step.
He had judged the venom itself to be a mild nerve poison, negligible for a creature of that size. He had been wrong.
True to the legend of the venom that slew Thor, god of thunder, Jörmungandr began carving through monsters and demons beyond number.
And where poison was concerned, Hydra could hardly be left out — alongside the Lamia now drawing ever closer, she too piled up mountains of corpses.
THWACK——!
At the front line, Dueoksini whipped his club about with savage fury, bending the world's reason to his whim — and his very presence was something else entirely.
Yet with the Nine-Tailed Fox — holder of the most overwhelming battle records among all the yokai of the East — absent, the West's showing was, relatively speaking, the dominant one.
And among them, the ones standing out unexpectedly were the seventy-two demons of Solomon.
"Is facing an enemy with your back turned not merely play, rather than war?"
The first-ranked of Solomon's seventy-two is Baal — but Baal, worshipped as a god across the Middle East and Asia Minor, could not be counted among the Hundred Demons.
Thus, here alone, Agares might as well have been the first-ranked demon in practice — and true to the noble who rules the eastern reaches of Hell, he summoned the legions under his command and carried out Rohen's orders with meticulous precision.
'……Not living up to his size, is he?'
The Western yokai's exploits unfolded one after another — yet when Rohen glimpsed the Sphinx, absurdly enormous of frame, swinging his tempered Excalibur, he let out a hollow laugh.
Far from crushing anything beneath that bulk, the beast lacked the martial power to back it up and was busy causing problems across the battlefield — a spectacle so pathetic it was almost funny.
In any case, withdrawing his gaze, Rohen — who had been carrying out his one-against-a-thousand slaughter with abilities he had yet to spend — realized the time had come to pull back as the dawn began to pale and the sky lightened.
'Quite a few names have been struck from the list, too.'
That they could slaughter without being ground down by sheer numbers — indeed, while holding the advantage — was thanks entirely to the high-ranked yokai who carried countless battle records behind them.
The yokai who had actually died, their names erased, were for the most part those with few legends to their names — lesser spirits, in a word.
But Rohen did not consider that level of loss a cost at all.
A true blow would only be the deaths of the high-ranked yokai.
No number of consonants and vowels could fill that absence — but the lesser spirits, at least, could be replaced again so long as the letters held out.
'If they knew this thought of mine, would they call me heartless?'
But the goal of this war was clear, and Rohen shook off the sentiment without wavering.
'Hm.'
It was difficult to calculate precisely, but a rough estimate put the remaining enemy at somewhere between ten and fifteen thousand.
Of those, the survivors were overwhelmingly the elite demons — meaning he had, in effect, done nothing but cut down rabble.
Even so, the blow dealt was no small one.
'The spoils remain unchanged, I take it — magic stones?'
Amid the flowing blood, countless magic stones glinted, vivid and unmistakable.
'Just in case……'
Barely had he stooped to pick one up when Caym came flapping down, whispering into his ear the information gleaned from Miho's shared memories.
Right on cue, the Hundred Demons had begun to fade away, following the sun that had risen to reveal itself.
Watching the demons charge in a general offensive at the sight, Rohen leisurely slipped away — through the spatial movement that had just become available again past midnight — and traveled to Javelin County.
The Demon King, descending eastward with a single subordinate in tow, judged that the overall geography had not changed drastically from the past.
Truthfully, by ordinary reasoning, splitting one's forces at this point would count as a blunder.
For from the Demon King's position, committing the entirety of his army to break through a single point, then capturing the humans as prisoners and extracting intelligence through interrogation was the safer, sounder strategy.
The reason he had not done so was that the captured humans stood no chance of yielding honest information.
No child, even, would believe a promise of survival in exchange for information once they had fallen into the Demon King's army's hands.
Knowing they would die regardless, they would far sooner stay silent — or feed the enemy falsehoods.
Even so, dividing his forces at this juncture carried real risk.
There was no telling at which point that human — the one who had displayed such terrifying power — was stationed.
Carelessness could see one of his great armies annihilated piecemeal.
"……We're breaking through, then?"
"Our choices cannot be allowed to narrow. If that human shows himself at another point, we break through there."
The reincarnated Demon King's army, like the Hundred Demons, could share one another's memories.
It was for that advantage that the Demon King had deliberately scattered his forces.
Better to take losses and repay them in full, he reasoned, than to waste away agonizing over where Rohen might be, paralyzed by limited options.
"My skin is peeling offff!"
"Don't cling to futile sentiment over dead skin."
The Demon King accelerated to the very limit of his speed, considering it all quite beyond comprehension.
Each time he did, the skin of the woman cradled in his arms failed to endure the velocity and flaked away, pattering to the ground below.
'……We've made contact.'
Through the shared memory, Rohen's figure came into view. The direction: due northwest.
"There's nothing left but bone!"
"Don't count your organs as gone, Barel!"
"Why are you the one acting wronged here?!"
All her flesh stripped away, Barel stared down at her spilling organs, then seized them in one hand with her gaunt, skinless fingers and swung them at the Demon King in a blow.
Each time she did, the stench of rot billowed — and with a body in the realm of the fleshless, his senses had grown correspondingly keen, so the Demon King's nose suffered for it and nothing more.
"This human has remarkable confidence, doesn't he? That first attack he showed us must have some restriction after all, I suppose."
"It would be stranger if it didn't. Otherwise, there'd be no reason he'd ever need to use anything else."
"That insufferable human from the past comes to mind."
"In any case — now that we've learned where this human is stationed, we break through as planned."
The memories streamed in real time. Watching the scene of Rohen's front line being mown down by Strength to Uproot Mountains, Spirit to Shroud the World, the Demon King concluded that the great army sent to the northwest would all but cease to exist.
Which meant this side would simply have to exact an equal price in return.
Seeing Barel tenderly gather what flesh remained to her and the organs still spilling loose, the Demon King seized her roughly by the nape and accelerated once more.
He could not reach the speed of light — but tearing along at nearly the speed of sound, the Demon King drew near the Second Defense Line of Javelin County just as the dawn began slowly to recede.
"……I don't much care for this reckless streak of yours."
With the skins pierced through again and again by needles sloughing off below his nape, and even the rotting organs swept away, all that naturally remained was bone.
Muttering over her own sorry state, Barel vented her grievances at the Demon King without a shred of restraint.
"They weren't even your organs and skin to begin with, and yet your pointless attachments run deep."
"You say that only because you cannot understand my possessiveness."
Her footsteps creaking, Barel draped her cloak over her body.
"Time to work, Barel."
"You needn't tell me. Do let there be plenty of humans with pretty organs and pretty skin."
Hobby: collector of bodies. Ability: a necromancer who commands corpses.
She possessed the single most effective ability for massacring a great army, which was why the Demon King — who had intended to move alone — had brought her along after all.
Naturally, being specialized for clashing with massed armies, she showed relative weakness in a one-on-one situation.
But that was a relative measure, not an absolute one.
Barel could link bodies the moment she chewed down and swallowed a morsel of her target's flesh.
Thus, when a body that could already be called a corpse seized and crushed the area around a victim's heart with her bare hand, the linked body died on the spot and fell into subservience to Barel.
And when those subjugated devoured others in turn, the infection spread as surely as night follows day — a demon who could carry out a massacre by nothing more than kneading the vicinity of a heart.
"Truly an incomprehensible hobby of yours."
The sight of her — snaring the human scouts who came out to survey, killing them, inspecting their innards and organs and skin, then collecting them — was one he could never quite grow accustomed to.
Her true form was a skeleton with nothing left but bone, so there was no actual need to stuff the harvested organs inside, stitch the skins together, and wear them inside-out as an outer hide.
But setting aside that grotesque hobby, she was a reliable subordinate — and so the Demon King made a show of patience, and waited quietly for her.