The First of All Demons
"I'm so happy I get to do the whole university thing with you, Oppa."
After a warm family breakfast had come to an end, the demon—or rather, Jia—and I were walking toward the bus stop together, headed for the first lectures of the new semester.
I was returning to my second year after my military service and my leave of absence, while Jia was starting over from her first year, so once we were on campus we'd be attending completely different classes and going our separate ways. Even so, the mere fact that she'd be going to university alongside me seemed to delight her, and she kept blooming into happy little smiles the whole way there.
Jia aside, I had to admit that the road back to campus after so long didn't feel bad at all. It had been ages since I'd last set foot there, and nostalgia and gladness crossed paths in my chest. It meant, after all, that I was back in an ordinary daily life—and at some point the feeling swelled into something close to being moved.
"Oppa, is the campus cafeteria any good?"
"It's decent enough."
Under a spring sun that hadn't quite burned off winter's chill, Jia walked beside me chattering away in that easy, familiar way, and I answered half-distractedly, more aware of the stares around us than of her questions.
Every step we took drew a flood of eyes toward us—toward the pair of us, though nearly a hundred percent of them were fixed on Jia. The men in particular had gone completely glassy-eyed over her beauty, right there in the middle of the street.
Is she some kind of celebrity?She's gorgeous.I want to date her.Should I ask for her number?I'd love to at least talk to her.A goddess.A model, surely. — A stream of praise from men and women alike trailed in our wake with every step. I'd grown up sick to death of hearing people gawk over and compliment Jia's looks, so I was used to it, but hearing it all again after so long stirred up strange old feelings.
It wasn't just her face, either—Jia had an impeccable sense of style. Today she wore a black long-sleeved knit with a beige corduroy miniskirt, and since the cold hadn't fully relented, black stockings with just the faintest sheen of skin showing through wrapped her lovely legs. A flawless outfit—understated, yet deliberately arranged to look casually put-together—and on a body like a sculpted work of divine art, it stood out all the more.
If she weren't my little sister, I had no doubt I'd be standing there slack-jawed just like every one of those men I was currently walking past.
"So… that guy over there… ugh."
…Tap, tap.
As a couple brushed past us and turned back for another look, I caught a fragment of the woman's voice—just a piece of whatever she'd been saying. At the very same moment, Jia stopped walking.
"…Hm?"
Puzzled, I stopped too and glanced over at her—and flinched. The smile she'd been wearing for me was gone, wiped clean away, and with a bone-chilling look in her eyes she was glaring at the backs of the couple who'd just passed us.
More precisely, she was drilling holes into the face of the woman who was giggling with her arm linked through her boyfriend's. That gaze was cold as a sheet of ice, and it frightened me enough that I asked carefully, "Jia… what's wrong?"
"…Nothing, Oppa."
Only then did Jia turn back to my face and smile. She fell into step beside me again as if nothing had happened, striking up conversation like before. An uneasy residue still clung to that look from moments ago, but something told me it was not a thing to be pried at, so I forced myself to wipe it from my mind.
"I remember now. That woman. The human."
I thought I heard Jia murmur something before we boarded the bus, but the sound of it pulling away from the stop swallowed the words, and I didn't catch them clearly.
Sitting side by side on the bus as it carried us smoothly toward campus, Jia—unexpectedly—didn't talk to me all that much. So much so that I found myself doubting whether her desperate craving for my love those few nights ago had been anything but a lie.
Strangely, I felt a flicker of disappointment at that, but I decided this distance was about right. Honestly, if she had treated me the way she had in her true form, I would have felt suffocated and pulled away from her.
Not knowing what could be so fascinating, she was gazing out the window at the passing scenery with the faintest smile on her lips. I hesitated for a while, watching her, before finally parting my own.
"Um…"
Jia's eyes widened slightly, and she turned her head toward me. "What is it, Oppa?" she asked, her voice bright with anticipation.
"There's something I want to ask… you. As a demon."
I glanced around one more time to confirm the bus was empty, then lowered my voice, letting the words trail off. We were in the back seats, so the driver couldn't hear us anyway—and even if he could, what I was about to say was hardly a normal conversation. He'd have thought we were spouting nonsense.
The demon's soft expression shifted; her eyelids sank halfway, and with those strange, tender, love-drunk eyes I'd seen that night, she began looking at me all over again.
"If it's something I know, I'll tell you anything. If there's something I don't know, I'll find out even if it costs me my life. For you, I'd do anything."
I had said only that I was curious about one thing, and the demon answered with abandon, as if ready to hand over her own beating heart. I hesitated once more, and then finally gave voice to the question I'd been turning over in bed for days.
"You… I mean, what are demons, exactly? Are you born in Hell?"
The demon tilted her head, falling into deep thought. She seemed to be chewing over the question carefully, wanting to answer me precisely.
"If you're asking how we define ourselves, we don't think of ourselves as the 'demons' that humans describe."
We.
So there were more demons than just Jia standing in front of me, then. The suspicion I'd only half-dared to entertain came stepping into reality, and tension crawled up my spine.
"What exactly do you mean by that?" I asked, careful to keep my voice steady even as my distrust sharpened it.
"'Demon' is just a name humans slapped onto us of their own accord. And since we don't even have a word for ourselves, we simply shrugged and accepted the label. But if the human concept of a demon doesn't actually fit what we are, then a great many things start to look different. For example—the idea that where there are demons, there must be angels. Or the idea that Hell must exist because that's where demons are born."
"So you're saying… there are no angels? No Hell?"
"That's right."
The demon nodded and answered crisply, and from that alone, several things clicked into place for me. In other words, only the name was the same—what demons actually were might bear no resemblance to the definition humans had invented on their own.
"But there are humans who treat us as enemies. They call themselves Knights."
"Knights?"
"It's what they call humans who have drunk from the Holy Grail. The Grail is a cruel thing—it ceaselessly produces a liquid called Holy Water. A human who drinks it gains transcendent power. Their physical abilities become dozens of times stronger than an ordinary person's, and they can even wield psychic abilities—making fire erupt from their hands, or moving things with their mind, things like that. But not just anyone can drink Holy Water, and even if they do, if the Grail hasn't chosen them, the water can kill them where they stand. The Grail is managed by a sect called the Altriam Order. You won't have heard of them. They're a religion, an organization that never shows itself on the world's surface, but behind the scenes they wield enough influence to bend the nations of the world to their will."
As the demon's explanation rolled on, I felt something soar up inside me—a giddy, boyish thrill. I kept listening, hanging on her every word.
"And there's exactly one reason they raise Knights by making humans drink from the Grail. To kill us. To kill demons."
Even as she described the organization built to destroy her own kind, the demon's voice never lost its brightness. On the contrary, it brimmed with happiness, with laughter. She'd been chasing my expression the whole time, terrified of missing a single reaction, smiling all the while. It seemed to please her enormously that her story was doing me some good.
"Why do they want to kill you…?"
"That's connected to why humans call us demons in the first place. Our existence is a harm to them. To survive, we devour humans—or we torment them. And from a human's point of view, we inevitably carry something crooked in us. Something warped. A distortion so deep there's no turning back from it."
Reading those words in reverse, it meant that the demon in front of me, too, carried some such twist inside her. Keeping my face carefully blank, I asked about the word that snagged on my mind. "Torment them?"
"To be precise, we torment them until it's over—and then we kill them. Even 'torment' is a tremendously sanitized way to put it. Torture? No… that's not quite right either. Every demon survives and lives its life differently, so there's no single word that could define it. But whatever form it takes, whatever method—one thing is always shared: we make humans suffer horribly. Looked at that way, I suppose we do match the human concept of what a demon is."
Gulp.
Hearing the dark edges of the being before me described by her own lips, fear crept up my chest and I swallowed without meaning to.
Whether she read that emotion in me or not, the demon laid her hand over the back of mine, leaned her face gently toward me, and murmured as if in a whisper. "Don't worry. How could I ever hurt the one I love? It won't happen—it can't happen. No other demon will ever hurt you either. As long as I'm at your side… there is nothing in this world that can harm or torment you."
The warmth of the demon's breath seemed to brush across my cheek and drift away.
"Then that means… you're… that strong, huh."
The demon kept gazing at me with that languid, melting smile for a long moment without answering—then seemed to register my words belatedly and replied. "Sorry, I got lost in you for a second there. …Demons are broadly divided into four ranks. Lower, Middle, Upper, and Archdemon. A Lower demon has a body several times—sometimes dozens of times—stronger than a powerful grown man. A slightly stronger specimen among them can reinforce its body, but that's the extent of it. Even a Lower demon, though, could bring down armed humans without ever needing to be a Knight. Middle is where things change. A Middle demon can wield abilities—breathing fire from its hands, exercising telekinesis, like I said before. An Upper demon is physically stronger still than a Middle one, wields deeper and more refined abilities, and in rare cases manifests an Authority."
"An Authority?"
"A transcendent power that ignores or twists the physical laws and concepts of this world. Stopping time, for example."
"…What?"
My voice rose before I could stop myself at that example. Stop… time?
"That's only an example. But there have been demons like that in the past. An Archdemon stands above the Upper ranks—there are only ten of them in this entire world. They possess not only abilities but Authorities as well, and among Archdemons, the strongest carry two Authorities apiece."
"Good God…"
Not only were there ten beings walking the earth who could stop time itself—some of them wielded two of those impossible powers at once?
"Th-then which one are… where do you fall?"
Curiosity got the better of me, and as I asked, the demon wriggled the hand she'd folded over the back of mine and smiled contentedly. She was still answering me earnestly, without ornament, but most of her attention seemed to have pooled entirely in our joined hands.
"I don't belong to any of them."
As if trying to memorize the shape of my fingers, she was now stroking the whole length of my thumb. Then my index finger… my middle finger… my ring finger… my little finger.
Watching her handle my hand like something precious, I strained my ears. Unlike the demon, every nerve I had was fixed on whatever she would say next.
"Even if every demon in this world rose up against me at once, none of them could defeat me."
The demon shifted her gaze, slowly lifted her head, and looked up at me with upturned eyes. "Because."
The corners of her mouth curling upward in twin smiles, the demon blurred for an instant—like static cracking across a screen—before snapping back into perfect form.
"Every demon in this world is a being that I myself made, long ago."
She raised my hand and pressed it against her own cheek, and whether the touch pleased her, the demon broke into the widest, brightest smile I had ever seen—pure, unhidden joy spilling out of her.