The Hero's Party? No—a Whorehouse Party.
"Please, eat."
I filled a bowl to the brim with stew made from the meat of some nameless magical beast and held it out to the Hero sitting across from me.
"Ah. Sure."
That was all the answer I got. He took the bowl without so much as glancing my way. His eyes were always on his lover. Even this living hell, where the very desire for sleep had worn thin, seemed powerless to overcome his lust.
...Must be nice, overflowing with energy.
I swallowed the sneer and picked up my own bowl. The taste was better than I had expected. I admired it in secret and emptied the whole thing in a moment.
In truth, I wanted nothing to do with the meat of a beast I could not even name. There was no helping it. Tomorrow would be our party's last day—the day we cut down the Demon King and put a period on a journey three years long.
How did I ever end up this far...
Elang Meister.
I was a disciple of the five Magic Tower Masters, and there was nothing glorious about the reason I had joined the Hero's Party. As with most of the world's stupid decisions, politics had its fingers all through my deployment. I turned in a step ahead of the others and, one last time, looked back on that day.
"The engagement's off."
Perhaps it was because I had already felt it coming, in some way that made too much sense. At the flat voice announcing the break, I was able to answer just as flatly, without surprise and without anger.
"...So it came to this after all."
A few days earlier, when the Hero came to inspect the Academy, I had seen my fiancée, Karin, with him. She claimed she had only shown him around the grounds, but from that moment I felt a strange current running between the two of them. I did not want to seem obsessive, so I swallowed the urge to press her and chose to believe her instead.
Because I loved her.
Political marriage or not, I had loved her from the first moment I saw her. To Karin, though, I had apparently been nothing more than a link for tying two houses together. In the eyes that told me of the break so calmly, there was no sorrow, no anger, no regret. Nothing at all.
"...If you're the one telling me, then the families have already spoken."
"That's right. The viscount stepped aside more readily than you'd think."
"May I take it that His Lordship the Count agreed as well?"
"Yeah. It's a chance to make ties with both the Temple and the royal house. He said that if the other party is the Hero, a broken engagement is something he can stomach easily enough."
"...I see."
"You're taking this calmly. Didn't expect that."
In my head I tore the Hero's body apart, over and over. It never showed on my face. My rage had been so extreme that my thoughts had simply stopped.
"...Because getting angry wouldn't let me do anything."
"Listen to you, talking like some monk. Did you attain enlightenment?"
"If I threw myself at the Hero now, nothing would change. It would only get worse."
The Hero was a man bestowed by the gods. No one knew his true name, or what sort of person he had been before, but the mark of a god was carved into his hand. If I killed a man like that—murdered him, assassinated him—what would become of me and my house? It would not end at mere excommunication. We would be branded humanity's enemy, second only to the demonkin, and hunted without mercy until the last of us was dead.
Not that I believed I could manage it in the first place.
"Honestly, our engagement was a problem from the start."
"......"
"A viscount's house and a count's house. The ranks never really matched, did they? Father seemed to be betting on your future, but lately you haven't exactly produced any results."
A week ago I had succeeded in mastering every branch of spirit magic—magic no one could learn unless they were a mage on the level of a Tower Master. I had told her so, and I had even received a letter of congratulations in reply...
"Did you perhaps have someone else write the letter you sent me?"
"...Huh?"
The look on her face—struck dead center, as if to ask how I knew—felt like a blow to the back of the head. What, then, had that moment been, when her reply had made me so happy? What had it meant, that resolve to become a man worthy of Karin? I could no longer even tell why I had become a mage at all.
"...I'll take my leave first."
The moment I rose and turned my back, the tears I had failed to hold burst free. I did not want to be the pathetic man who cried on top of everything else. I killed the sound of my breathing, feigned composure, and hurried my steps—and from behind me came Karin's voice.
"That we were engaged!! Don't tell the Hero. He's surprisingly jealous."
"......"
Even at a moment like this, she was worried only for herself. Standing before that Karin, my disillusionment only deepened. I could not answer. If I spoke now, she would hear this ragged breath, this voice thick with tears. I gave a short nod and quickened my pace.
When I returned to my room, the strength went out of my legs, and the tears I had been holding back poured out like a burst dam.
I cried.
I cried, and cried, and kept on crying. I shed so many tears that day that if I had gathered them all, I suspect they would have equaled every tear I had ever shed before.
For three days I shut myself in my room and took neither food nor water, and the thing that finally drove me back out was, absurdly, a meal. I was too hungry. Once I put something—anything—into my mouth, my situation struck me as so ridiculous that this time I burst out laughing.
Perhaps it was a childish wish to make her regret throwing me away. Whatever the reason, I drove myself even harder in my training. If what had once set my will to research ablaze was my love for Karin, what moved me now was jealousy and hatred toward the Hero. Between researching, proving, and mastering, I had at some point become a mage who surpassed even my masters.
In that same span the Hero led the fronts in every region to victory and cemented his place all the more firmly as a symbol of hope. I had become an archmage acknowledged by all, and yet from that day the difference between us had not narrowed by a hair. If anything, the gap had only widened.
Should I give up now?
When that thought filled me, the state requested a deployment—of me, or more precisely, of the Magic Tower. Too many mages had died in the last battle, and we were to go out in their place. I had no real combat experience, and more than that, I had neither loyalty nor cause to join a war of that sort. But under pressure from the state, and checked by masters who saw my rate of growth as a danger, I was sent to the battlefield.
Leading volunteer student-soldiers, I arrived at the front and met the Hero and Karin again. It had been about two years. With me and the students in the fight, the situation on the line improved considerably—enough, at least, to catch our breath.
At first the Hero was glad I had come. Then he heard from somewhere that Karin and I had once been engaged, and he began to treat me openly as his inferior. He even made a show, none too subtly, of taking his pleasure in Karin's body where I could see. Saying a mage ought to train his body as well, he demanded a spar with wooden swords out of nowhere. Naturally I was beaten so badly that day I could not lift a spoon, and I had to convalesce for days. I hardly need to say that my absence dealt the front a heavy blow.
Somehow we raised the line again, and we realized things could not go on as they were. If we kept burning through our supplies, the demonkin would someday break the front and pour through. There were so many of them that people said they harvested soldiers from their fields, for many of their races were simply prolific. Feeling the limit of holding the line, we made a plan not to maintain the situation, but to break it.
That plan was the assassination of the Demon King. We would strike into the demons' territory and kill the one who could be called the root of all of this. A thing like that gained nothing by drawing attention, so a small suicide squad was formed. People called it the Hero's Party. It was an effort to conjure even a little hopeful atmosphere, though someone sneered and asked if we were off on a pleasure trip.
The party was, first of all, myself and the Hero. Added to that was Lady Melia, eldest daughter of a ducal house, who had even less combat experience than I did. Then Alencia of the Holy Kingdom, the Holy Saintess of healing, who for the sake of her safety had never once taken the field. And Karin, who insisted on coming along under the pretext of keeping the Hero's mind and body at ease.
When I first heard the roster, I thought it was a magnificent piece of sarcasm meant to mock the Hero's lust. They were serious. I was so dumbfounded that I asked why, and the answer that came back was a sight to behold.
"They're women."
"Pardon?"
"You know he goes mad if he can't have it for even a single day. So we sent women along with him."
"...Then who is supposed to deal with the Demon King?"
"Isn't it enough to send the Hero by himself anyway? He's strong. Absurdly strong."
It was not wrong, so I had nothing to say against it. As a person he was deeply flawed, but that power, at least, even I acknowledged. In truth, had he not been strong, his head would have left his shoulders long ago for the way he toyed with other men's wives and daughters.
And so our journey began.
The role assigned to me was the party's mage—and also its escort, its local negotiator, its cook, its maid, and its guide. Until we set out I had never done a day's housework in my life, so I never imagined I would become the one who kept house. Now I could cook, after a fashion, even a magical beast I was seeing for the first time, and in dealing with the locals I had learned tobacco and liquor, things I had never touched before.
Unexpectedly, the Demon Realm was a place where people lived. They did not reject us outright for being human, and there were times we used a large village as our base. There I studied a new system of magic, unlike humanity's, and achieved something of my own. Even so, the gap between me and the Hero refused to close. Just as there is, in truth, an immense distance between one star and the next, an invisible gulf certainly existed between us.
And yet, strangely, I did not want to give up.
Time passed that way, and three years later we arrived at the very foot of the Demon King's Castle.
Tomorrow, everything would end.
Thinking of the freedom we would at last take hold of after a great war that had turned heaven and earth upside down, I closed my eyes.