Ventorino Kingdom - Negotiation (3)
Puk!
"Kehk…!"
From the shadow of the rubble that had suddenly collapsed, the Dark Elf Shurette sprang out and drove her blade straight through his heart.
"Oh! Shurette! Nicely done! I forgive you for your earlier rudeness!"
Relieved to have saved time, Eldrif praised her with evident delight. Yet Shurette’s face remained expressionless. He didn’t like that at all, and muttered to himself that he would have to punish her after all.
"Shurette. Shurti."
"Yes."
"Yes, Master!"
Another Dark Elf appeared beside Shurette. She was livelier than her sister, with bright, sparkling eyes—the twin sister Shurti.
"I’m going to kill that damned Demon Prince. You two chase down the human royals."
"Yes, understo—"
"I’m sorry, but that won’t be possible."
Cutting off Shurti just as she was about to answer loudly, Shurette refused Eldrif’s order.
"??"
"Eh, sis?"
"Has this bitch slave finally lost her mind...? Since when do you refuse an order? As expected, a slave girl who isn’t even a demon—"
Shurette’s face, which had been blank until now, turned cold as ice, and she interrupted him once more. It was a completely different expression, and a completely different voice from the calm, obedient replies she had given only moments before.
"Shut up."
"W-what?"
"Sis, what are you doing!"
Ignoring her bewildered twin as she tried to restrain her, Shurette sneered at Eldrif.
"Good work. Your role ends here."
"What the hell are you talking about, you crazy bitch...? Ha! The bastard who just died. His attitude was strange too."
Realizing the truth only belatedly, Eldrif let out a dry laugh.
"You were a double spy?"
"W-whaaat?"
"At least your head still works. That’s right."
Shurette had been a spy planted by Eldrif inside the Demon Army. At least, that was what Eldrif believed. Through her, he had always been able to obtain useful information about the Demon Army.
The fact that the Demon Prince Valdes was coming to the Ventorino Kingdom to sign a peace agreement with the humans, and the route they would use to strike here—everything had come from her.
"Since when...?"
"What, you’re still not done talking?"
Valdes suddenly appeared among the three demons. Only after hearing his voice did Eldrif finally notice him, and his face twisted in annoyance. It was a mistake. Faced with an unexpected turn, his field of vision had narrowed.
"You half-blood bastard... It was all you! All of it was your doing!!"
At his accusatory scream, Valdes gave a snort of laughter.
"You only figured that out now? For the head of a faction, you’re awfully stupid."
"You, you fucking bastard...!!"
Eldrif’s face turned bright red. The Demon Prince was mocking the leader of the rebel faction.
"You go on and on about pure blood this, pure blood that, and yet you trusted a Dark Elf? If it’s important information, cross-checking it should be mandatory, don’t you think? Well, I suppose you did filter out everyone else."
"You damn bastard! I’ll kill you right now! What are you doing!! Finish off that half-blood bastard at once— ...huh?"
As he looked around and shouted at his subordinates, Eldrif’s face went deathly pale. And rightly so. The dozens of demons he had personally selected and brought here were all lying on the ground. He didn’t even need to check. They were all already dead.
"......"
"You’re really a complete idiot, aren’t you? I came over here after fighting those guys, so did you really think they’d still be alive?"
"N-no way... To think, a mere half-blood...! A half-blood of uncertain parentage, and yet why—!"
Eldrif screamed in despair.
He had been overjoyed when he’d lost the Dark Elf slave he had bought merely because he needed a servant, only to find her again. As expected, he had thought that inferior Dark Elves were a slave race. When Shurette, the spy planted inside the Demon Army, had said she was joining the intelligence unit, he had believed fortune was smiling upon him.
Even while she was bringing back one piece of Demon Army intelligence after another, he had thought the Demon King who lost to humans was a fool, and that the demons who had accepted a half-demon as their heir were idiots. But no—it was not the fools and idiots who had been wrong. It was him.
"Damn it! You fucking—!! Shurti! Shurtiii!!"
"Yes, Master!!"
Shivering, the Dark Elf sister who had remained silent all this time answered loudly. Unlike her sister Shurette, Shurti was truly, bone-deep, his slave.
"Kill those two at once!! I’ll help you!!"
"Yes, understood!!"
Even at the order to kill her own sister, she drew her dagger without hesitation.
"Shurette. You can handle her, right?"
"Yes, of course. As you command, my lord."
Shurti was trying to kill her sister, but Shurette had no intention of doing that. After all, her poor younger sister had been made a slave by a pure-blood supremacist demon and taught to see herself as worthless.
She had already received permission from her own lord. In any case, they needed to take at least one or two demons alive if they wanted to thoroughly scramble the information they had leaked, and those demons were going to be Shurti and herself.
"How dare you betray Master... I won’t forgive you, even if you are my sister."
"Do whatever you want. In the end..."
If I capture you, my lord will heal you himself.
Swallowing the rest of her words, the twin Dark Elves’ daggers clashed.
"Well then, shall we settle this too? The other side should be wrapped up soon enough."
"Kuh...!"
Eldrif clenched his teeth.
The situation was bad. According to the original plan, he had intended to use most of his important forces to quickly kill the human royals and Valdes, then join the rest of his subordinates who were buying time and slaughter the humans.
But most of those crucial forces had been killed by Valdes. With the subordinates left to him, he could not even properly handle the humans. Dragging things out would make Valdes’s position worse too, but the power he had shown just now was far beyond anything Eldrif had heard.
No, wait. The information about him came from Shurette too, didn’t it?! That damn Dark Elf bitch...!
His gaze drifted, without his even realizing it, toward where the sisters were battling. And Valdes was not the kind of man who would miss that.
"Already losing focus?"
Kwaang!
"Gahhh!"
A heavy slash smashed the spot where Eldrif had been standing. He had barely avoided it, and if he had been a fraction slower, he would have lost a leg.
"Take this!!"
Rolling miserably across the ground, he hurled a barrage of mana bullets from his hand. Each one carried formidable power, but to Valdes, they were meaningless.
Before Eldrif could even think of his next move, every mana bullet was sliced in half and exploded in midair.
An overwhelming sword strike.
It was swordsmanship that could not even be compared to the human guard captain who had just died. Eldrif realized that Valdes possessed martial strength at least on the level of a Four Heavenly Kings candidate. Even if he compared them purely by raw force, they were similar, but Eldrif knew very well that he had no chance of winning.
After all, all he had was mana comparable to that of a Four Heavenly Kings candidate. That was all. His power might rival theirs, but he had no technique to use it with. No swordsmanship, no magic, no special abilities.
He had not used only mana bullets when facing Heik.
"You were only ever that much, which is why you got stuck as a Four Heavenly Kings candidate. Your philosophy aside, that is."
"Shut up! I-I’m! I’m of noble demon blood! Why should I—!!"
"I know. You do have noble blood. For demons who can inherit their parents’ power so strongly, having a strong father and mother is one of the greatest blessings. But..."
Valdes’s sword sliced through the air.
Swish──
"?! "
"...if you don’t temper that power, then you’re just a big tree."
"Y-you’re talking nonsense... cough...!"
Eldrif was sure he had blocked it. He had raised a wall of mana all around himself. Compared to magic bullets, it was less efficient, but the defensive power born of such enormous mana was tremendous.
And yet he had been cut. Valdes had simply swung a sword that wasn’t even wrapped in mana through the air, and still his body had been severed along with the wall of mana.
"You have to process wood to make all sorts of things out of it. That’s why you were eliminated when they picked the new Four Heavenly Kings."
"You... son of a... bitch...!"
"Annoying, aren’t you."
Swish!
Valdes finished him by cutting off Eldrif’s neck. That was the end of it. The pure-blood demon who had been born with noble blood and aimed for the throne of the Demon King without ever even joining the war lost his body to just two swings of the Demon Prince’s sword.
"Hmm, then I should make it look like he fell here first."
Clang! Clatter-clang! Clang!!
"How dare you! How dare you! How daaaare you!! You killed Master!! That bastard!! He killed Master!! Master!! Mastreeeerrr—!!!"
"Shut up."
"Sis, moveeeee!!"
The twin Dark Elves’ sisterly fight still hadn’t ended, but with Eldrif dead, Shurti lost her reason. Even if she had tried to keep her head, she would have been in rough shape; with her mind completely gone, she would be caught in no time.
What mattered more to Valdes was falsifying the traces. No matter how much he wanted to make his name known, he did not want word spreading that he had personally killed the enemy’s leader. It would be better if people believed the guard captain had died in a desperate last stand that took the enemy down with him.
To do that, he needed to inflict wounds on the guard captain’s corpse with mana bullets and erase the dagger marks. Since it wasn’t anyone he knew anyway, he felt no hesitation about damaging the body.
"That should do it, more or less."
After using magic and his sword to manipulate the scene further, Valdes turned toward the now-silent area. There, Shurette was waiting for him after subduing Shurti and knocking her unconscious.
"Thank you for your hard work."
"You did well too. Has it been about ten years since you became a double spy? It can’t have been easy, serving as the intelligence chief too."
"Not at all. It was all by my own choice, was it not?"
Valdes gave a light nod.
Twelve years ago, he had picked up a Dark Elf girl on the street. Literally.
While suppressing the pure-blood rebel faction, Shurette had lost her way, wandered until she collapsed, and Valdes had happened to find her. He had taken her to the Demon Castle and healed her.
When she came to, the Dark Elf asked him to save her younger sister in exchange for her loyalty, along with vengeance. Interested in her, he accepted her loyalty contract exactly as she wanted. He even invoked contract magic, because he couldn’t trust her so easily.
After spending two years under him, Shurette returned to the rebel faction as a spy, and based on the story that she had been with the Demon Army during her disappearance, she later returned to the Demon Army and worked there as a double spy.
Amusingly, the rebels never suggested that Shurette prove she wasn’t a spy by using contract magic. A few of them did raise suspicions and propose it, but Eldrif was the first to step forward and refuse. His reason was that Dark Elf slaves were not pure-blood demons and therefore counted as objects rather than demons, and no demon foolish enough to make a contract with an object would exist.
After that, Shurette rose all the way to become the commander of the intelligence unit in the Demon Army, while also becoming one of the very few people who knew Valdes had infiltrated the continent. In other words, Valdes and the Demon King trusted her that much.
"Did you drug her?"
"Yes, my lord. She won’t wake for a while."
"Good."
He thought saving the royal party from the demon attack alone would not be enough merit. So what he needed was a captive to torture for information. For that, Shurti—who could run her mouth uselessly—needed to stay quiet for a while.
"Then sorry, but you’ll have to take a few hits."
"Of course."
A demon prisoner couldn’t remain unscathed. Shurti had already been injured here and there by her sister Shurette. Nothing serious, but the kind of damage that could never be told at a glance. A disguise carrying her sister’s feelings for her younger sibling.
After inflicting a few appropriate wounds on Shurette, Valdes cut himself as well. Mana bullets, daggers, spears, swords, elemental magic—he made it look as if he had suffered wounds from countless demons, blatantly showing that he had gone through an enormous amount of hardship.
"Uwah~ then I guess I’ll take a little nap."
Shurette, the loyal Dark Elf subordinate of Valdes, had already knocked herself out on her own. The only one still fully conscious here was him. And before long, he too drifted off to sleep quietly, as though he had collapsed from sheer exhaustion.
"Haaah! Haaah!"
Please... please...! Captain!!
Jurina, the vice-captain of the guard, ran at full speed. Waking the instincts of her horse beastman blood, which she rarely used, she kicked off the earth with all the strength she had. Her destination was the place where Captain Heik was fighting. The man she loved had gone to rescue the king’s party, guided by the half-demon.
If the banquet hall had been attacked, it was obvious the royals were the target. Naturally, the strongest enemy would appear there, and it made sense for the guard captain Heik to go that way.
But for some reason, Jurina felt an unshakable dread. And that dread was now driving every ounce of strength she had into her legs.
Captain Heik was strong. Strong enough to rank among the top ten in the kingdom, at the very least. He possessed amazing swordsmanship, even if his mana control was a little lacking. But she was uneasy. The enemy was a demon. And for a brief moment, she had felt a chilling presence from the direction Heik had run.
Please, Captain... stay alive....
"P-please—!!"
Bang.
...Ah.
Jurina could see it.
The corpse of Captain Heik, lying in the middle of a multitude of demon corpses.
A-ah, ah, ah, ahhhhhhh......
Tap, tap.
The demon corpses and the fiercely disguised traces of battle didn’t even register in her eyes. To Jurina, only her beloved man existed. Walking weakly toward his body, she collapsed to her knees and clutched him in her arms, wailing in grief.
And then she found something strange.
"T-this is...?"
Traces as if he had desperately tried to leave something behind.
Bloodstains cut off in the middle of writing a code.
