The Hero Summoning and the Demon King's Descent (3)
"Haa... I actually used my strength for once in a long while. Ugh, my sugar's dropping. Hey. Bring me something sweet—anything."
"Yes, Goddess."
After ordering her adjutant archangel around, the Goddess once again looked down at the lower world.
She was the youngest of seven siblings.
Their parent, the Creator God—who might as well have been the parent of the whole family—had used up most of his power creating the world. Even so, whenever he recovered enough strength, he would make one of his divine children.
And so, after an immeasurably long time, the youngest of them was born. Not long after that, fallen gods began appearing from beyond the dimensions. Fortunately, the Creator God responded quickly and they were driven back almost at once, but the Creator God, having spent too much power, fell into a deep sleep to recover.
After that, the six siblings, excluding her, began fighting among themselves over who would become the supreme deity. They forged alliances, betrayed one another, and waged a fierce war of gods.
Yet no one paid any attention to her, the baby of the family who had only just been born.
She was too weak to be of any help, and not wicked enough to kill off her own siblings. As a result, she was left completely alone, quietly watching the battles of her divine brothers and sisters.
And in the end, everyone lost.
The six gods all fell asleep like the Creator God, leaving her as the sole deity remaining in the Heavenly Realm.
In the end, she had become the chief goddess of the continent without meaning to.
But because she had been left behind—unintentionally, by the Creator God and by her sibling gods—right after her birth, she had never properly grown up.
To put it bluntly, she had no manners.
"Damn it, hey!"
"Y-yes!"
"I said bring me something sweet, who told you to bring me a strawberry shake?! It has to be at least a mint-choco shake! Mint choco shaaaake!!"
"S-sorry! I'll go change it right now!"
"God, this is so fucking annoying. Hey, you, get lost and bring me another girl."
"Y-yes! Understood!"
"Fuck, I said only once, asshole, you're being too loud!"
But the archangel, already flying far away, gave no reply.
"That pisses me off. What an idiot. Haa... I don't know why the angels these days have all gotten so lame. Maybe it's time I cracked down on discipline?"
After cursing out the adjutant and the other angels for a while, the Goddess turned her head to change her mood.
The lower world. The continent.
Watching that place was one of her few hobbies, and by far the one she devoted the most attention to.
The creatures of the continent, the beings fashioned by the gods who lived there, were adorable to her. Humans and dragons created by the Creator God. Elves created by her eldest brother. Dwarves created by her second brother. Beastfolk created by her second sister. Monsters created by her third brother. The various minor races created by her third sister. Among them all, she especially liked humans.
"Heeheehee."
Right now, she was watching the two Heroes she had gathered together with the scraps of power she'd hoarded up so carefully that she wouldn't fall asleep from the strain.
More precisely, she was watching the male one, the younger brother.
Jinhyuk Kang.
"Aaah, they're exactly the same♡"
Heart-shaped pupils practically bloomed in the Goddess's eyes.
Then his twin sister, Yuri, approached Jinhyuk, and her image drifted into the Goddess's line of sight as well.
"Hmm, as for this one..."
A sigh slipped out of her on its own.
If she had not been Jinhyuk's twin, there would have been no reason to summon her too. Twins bickered, sure, but they were still close, and beneath all that they quietly cared for one another. The insults they traded were a kind of sign of intimacy.
The Goddess had no intention of sending Jinhyuk back to his original world. That was why she had brought along Yuri, the sister he treasured so much. Because of that, it had taken twenty-three more years to gather the power needed to summon Jinhyuk.
"...No, wait. If I think about it, they both have this world's blood mixed in them, so wouldn't that make them dual-dimensional? This side is their original world too, right? Yeah, yeah, that's it."
Consoling herself with that logic, the Goddess lost herself in her voyeuristic little pastime.
No matter how many times she looked, Jinhyuk was the spitting image of his grandfather. He did have a little of that woman's feel to him, but that was still well within acceptable bounds. Yuri, on the other hand, looked a little more like that woman than the grandfather, which was why the Goddess did not care much for her.
"Has it been a thousand and twenty years, give or take? Heh. That really was a long time."
With a satisfied feeling, the Goddess drifted into her memories.
She liked most of the races on the continent, but there was one race she hated.
The demons.
She truly hated the demons created by her eldest sister. They were annoying. They were hateful.
It had not always been that way.
An incident about a thousand years ago was what made the Goddess despise the demons and erect a vast barrier around the Demon Realm.
Before that incident, the demon race had not been all that dangerous. They had no real desire to conquer the continent, nor did they possess the strength to do so. They could not even unite within their own small territory and lived divided among many tribes.
Then a demon rose to power—one so dangerous he was called the Demon King.
With astonishing force, the Demon King united the demons and attempted to conquer the continent. Under that overwhelming power, more than half the continent had fallen beneath his feet in less than two years. At the time, the Church of the Goddess existed, but the Holy Kingdom did not.
The priests could use Holy Power, which had a powerful effect against demons. But their influence was weak, and so was their authority. Then, as the demons began to rampage unchecked, people started relying on the priests, and their power grew.
Even so, that was not enough to stand against the Demon King. In the end, the priests prayed to the Goddess they served. Please, save them.
If the demons unified the continent, that did not mean the other races would be exterminated. But the Goddess loved humans more than the others, and among them she especially liked the priests who faithfully worshipped her and prayed to her. So she brought a decently handsome human from another dimension and made him her Hero.
The Hero faithfully carried out his duty.
He trained and grew stronger, overcame crises with his companions, and hardened his heart into strength by grieving over someone's sacrifice. The Goddess, who had watched him most closely during that dazzling rise to heroism, had eventually fallen in love with him.
She had even intended to bring him to the Heavenly Realm and make him her husband once he defeated the Demon King, but then a massive accident had happened.
The Hero arrived at the Demon King's castle a little too early and sent his companions escaping while he engaged the Demon King in an endless battle. The Demon King was strong, but the Hero was no pushover either. Armed with the blessings he had received from the Goddess and the holy sword, he fought the Demon King for three days and three nights before he was defeated.
Even so, the Hero did not die.
After that long battle.
It was because the Demon King—she—had fallen in love with the Hero herself.
The Goddess, watching the Demon King's confession, was utterly dumbfounded. That was why she had been a beat too late in trying to save the Hero. In that brief instant, the Hero accepted the confession. In fact, he said he had also fallen for the Demon King at first sight, and that was why he had not been able to fight at full strength.
The Goddess had no idea what the hell had just happened.
While she was standing there, letting out a hollow laugh in disbelief, the Demon King and the Hero ran off somewhere on the continent together. And there, growing even stronger, they ended up crossing dimensions and vanishing into another world altogether.
From that moment on, the Goddess hated demons.
First, she spent a vast amount of power to install a barrier across the seas of the Demon Realm, limiting the paths they could take.
Then she searched for the two of them somewhere beyond the dimensions.
The Goddess began using most of her power to track them down. It took her a full nine hundred years just to find them. By then, both of them were dead, and their daughter had long since grown up and was living her own life.
She decided to wait a little longer. At last, their daughter married another man and gave birth to twins: Jinhyuk Kang, who looked exactly like his maternal grandfather, and his twin sister, Yuri Kang.
From that point on, the Goddess began gathering the power to summon the two of them. Up until then, whenever enough power had accumulated, those damned demons would invade the continent again, and she would have to waste her strength on summoning a Hero, granting blessings, and delivering prophecies.
Even when she was almost done gathering enough, the demons caused trouble again. So this time she simply delivered a rough prophecy, telling them to make an ordinary human with some talent into a Hero. Naturally, there was no holy sword or blessings or any of the support she had given past Heroes. Since the prophecy was half-assed, it took a long time to find the Hero and the Saintess died too, but the Goddess did not care.
What mattered more was the real Hero, Jinhyuk Kang.
While spying on him across the dimensions, she noticed that Jinhyuk cared about his sister, and so she gathered a little more power to bring her along as well.
Just then, something strange seemed to be happening on the continent too. She did not have time to check closely, because she needed to summon the two Heroes and grant them blessings and protection. But even so, those were the same demons that had been smashed to pieces eighteen years ago.
The Demon King from back then was still alive, but there was obviously not much they could do. Weak demons like that would be no match for Jinhyuk Kang and Yuri Kang; they would be enough to defeat them and become heroes.
And after that...
"Heh heh heh. Heeheehee."
Just imagining it made her happy.
"Maybe about a year? Two years? After waiting that long, what’s one or two more?"
This time, she even had a plan to keep him from falling for some weird woman. That would cost a fair bit of power too, but for love, it was a perfectly reasonable expense.
"Hmm~ For the wedding cake, a mint choco cake that looks like my hair would be nice, right? Ah...! Hurry up and pass already... huh?"
The Goddess, looking down at the lower world, suddenly flinched.
She hurriedly shifted her gaze from the far left of the continent all the way to the right.
Having found it tedious to search one human at a time whenever she wanted to look in on someone, the Goddess had implanted a kind of bookmark and tracking function into a few important figures. The Demon King was one of them. After the war, it seemed the Demon King had found a man somewhere, but since she was still female, the Goddess could not let her guard down.
But that Demon King's location had moved out of the Demon King's castle.
And not just that—out of the Demon Realm entirely.
"W-what? What the hell is she doing there?"
Had she already come this far?
The Demon King had passed beyond the continent's roads and was already at the border of the Ventorino Kingdom.
"That girl! That girl! Damn it, why the hell is she there again?! Augh! So annoying! Should I give a prophecy? No, but I don't have enough power... If I use any more, I might fall asleep... No way. I can't do that. But I also can't abandon the plan for Jinhyuk... Dammit! This is driving me fucking insane! Why did that bitch crawl out of her own house—!!"
"......"
"......"
The girl with deep red hair was flustered.
After going to her father's supposed grave—though even that was only a guess—and getting lost and suffering through a long ordeal, she had barely made it back to the Ventorino Kingdom. She was in a border region, but from here on she could ride a carriage or follow a merchant caravan as hired escort work, so there was no need to worry about getting lost again.
Since there were no escort jobs this time, she had paid for a carriage.
But some woman kept staring at her.
"......"
It was a woman she had never seen before.
More than that, she had only recently left home, so there was no reason for her to have any grievance or connection with anyone here. At the very least, she was certain she had done nothing to earn hatred.
And yet the woman was clearly glaring at her face.
What on earth is this?
So the girl stared right back at her.
She was beautiful. More beautiful than any woman she had ever seen. Her looks were so striking that she could have been one of the heavenborn who served the Goddess—or, on the contrary, a demon.
Her hair was the same deep red as the girl's own, but it was long, unlike the girl's, which had been cut short for convenience and ease of movement.
She also looked old-fashioned. Elegant. At a glance, she was not the sort of person who gave off an ordinary air. Her clothes were luxurious, and her hair and skin seemed very well cared for.
Probably some runaway noblewoman.
It was not only her who thought so; the people around them were avoiding the woman too. They were afraid of getting dragged into some trouble if they got involved carelessly. The girl wanted to avoid her as well, but that looked unlikely to work. So she decided to go straight up and ask.
"Um... is there something on my face?"
"......"
"Or... do you know me?"
"......"
Even after the questions, the woman said nothing, only crossing her arms and glaring at her. Just as the girl began to feel awkward and lower her head, a voice that seemed to belong to the woman finally came out.
"What... are you?"
"...Huh?"
"No, that was the wrong question. What is your relationship to the Hero?"
"!?"
The girl jumped in shock.
"Uh... um... I-I mean... d-did you perhaps... a-are you acquainted with the Hero...?"
Not knowing what else to say, she stammered and ended up asking a question instead of answering one.
"I was the one who asked first, wasn't I? What an impolite little wench."
Even her tone was old-fashioned. Overwhelmed by the strange pressure coming from her, the girl apologized.
"S-sorry..."
"No, that's enough. So. What is your answer to my question?"
"W-well..."
The girl found herself unconsciously scanning the carriage around them. Every eye in that cramped interior had turned toward the two of them, caught up in the interesting scene. She wondered if it was really wise to talk freely in a place like this. Even if she was a fool, she knew that much. Her mother had told her to be careful.
"Hmm."
Noticing this, the beauty snapped her fingers lightly, and at once the sounds around them went quiet.
"Oh?"
"I've used a soundproofing spell, so no one will hear us."
"Ah. I see. Um... well, it's just that..."
It felt as though she had been spellbound by something.
From her mother's last words to everything else she knew, the girl poured it all out before the beauty.
"Haa... so that was the worst-case scenario I had feared. I was so sure my first child would absolutely be born by my own hands..."
"M-me? First child?"
"To think he actually went and caused an accident. And he doesn't even know it... no, if he doesn't know, should I just let it go? Hmm, how troublesome."
"U-um? Hello?"
"This can't be helped. But I really can't stand it. Even if there are a few problems, I'll make sure to..."
The beauty smiled in a strangely sensual way and traced the girl's lips with her eyes. Despite being the same sex, the sight was so erotic that the girl shuddered without meaning to.
"So that's why I kept wanting a son, huh? It was all for this. Heh. Heh heh heh."
"Wha...?"
"Ah, I suppose I'll have to erase your memory."
Snap.
With another flick of her fingers, the soundproofing spell vanished. And after that, no one in the carriage paid the slightest attention to her, nor would they remember her at all.