A Hero Party? No—a Sex Party
"…You're awake."
Waking the Hero—who, left to himself, would sleep straight through until noon—was as much a part of my daily routine as drawing breath. I had kept to it for nearly every day of the past three years, and when the routine finally broke, the jolt was small and strangely sharp.
So even this man knows what tension is, with the Demon King's Castle staring him in the face.
Private feeling must have made me write him off as more of a lost cause than he was. I went toward him meaning to reconsider, and only then, up close, did I catch the exhaustion on his face—something I hadn't been able to see from a distance.
"…You didn't rise early. You never slept at all, did you?"
"…Yeah. Those three wouldn't leave me alone."
The Hero snorted and jerked his chin at the tent behind him. From inside came the soft, even breathing of three people who had yet to wake.
Only a moment ago I had thought a little better of him. I wanted to stab out my own eyes for it—eyes narrower than buttonholes. I had known exactly what kind of man he was. Why had I let myself hope?
"Then rest today, and tomorrow we can—"
"No. We go now."
"Now?"
"Whoever's waiting in there, I'm going to win anyway. Today or tomorrow—doesn't make a difference."
The certainty in his voice was not empty bravado. Everyone who had ever met the Hero agreed on the same verdict: his character was badly flawed, but his power was something no one alive could match. If he meant to go now, I had nothing worth saying to stop him. I wanted this adventure that barely deserved the name over and done with just as badly as he did.
"Ladies! Up, now!"
He hauled the three of them out of what could hardly have been a full night's sleep, already badgering them to hurry. His sudden zeal was not, I suspected, born of any wish to end humanity's suffering.
It was only a rumor, but word had it the Demon King was a woman—and where that rumor went, another clung fast to its heels: that she was a beauty beyond compare. No doubt the thought of a woman he had yet to lay eyes on had set the lecher's blood alight. As far as I was concerned, it hardly mattered. My mercy did not run deep enough to spare sympathy for the enemy commander who had tormented us all this time.
The Hero's lovers gathered their clothes of their own accord and crawled, unhurried, out of the tent. First to emerge was, ironically, the one who ought to have taken the longest: Lady Melia, eldest daughter of a ducal house. Born to a knightly family, she went everywhere wrapped in thick plate, and yet she had never once stepped onto the front line.
"Elang. Up before the rest of us again."
"Yes. Today is the last day, after all."
"Mm. Today will be remembered for as long as the kingdom stands. See that you attend the Hero properly."
Blunt as a command, and graceless with it—but among the Hero's lovers, she was the least unbearable. She made demands of me from time to time, yet she never asked for anything I could not grant.
"Of course. And I trust you will keep watch from the rear, as usual, my lady."
By keep watch, I meant standing well clear and looking on while the rest of us fought. Whether she missed the barb or simply let it pass, Melia answered all the same.
"…Very well. I'll do my part."
She was still nodding when the Saintess came shuffling out of the tent, vestments cut scandalously deep at the breast and the thigh. I remembered a prostitute I had once seen in a brothel in a demon village, dressed in much the same way. Alencia claimed the cut was a disguise for slipping into demon settlements. Anyone—a child, even—could tell from her everyday conduct that the claim was a lie.
The Holy Saintess Alencia hated demons. Not in any ordinary sense. She hated them past the point where hatred could be governed. Once, in a village, a child had clung to her, and she had beaten the child without mercy. We had nearly been exposed because of it, and spent a miserable stretch of days in hiding.
"You're awake, Saintess."
"Yes. Did you sleep peacefully, Lord Elang? Today feels like a blessed day, brimful of divine grace. About what I asked of you yesterday…"
"They were fully dry, so I folded them and put them away."
"Splendid. If the other mages were even half the man you are, Lord Elang, the coming of the divine kingdom would have been hastened by a thousand years. Such a pity."
She spoke as if I had granted some grand request. All I had done yesterday was the laundry. No prayer existed that would wash a garment clean, so the clothes the women wore from day to day—and their underthings—I laundered myself with magic. Alencia's had abandoned any pretense of being underwear. They were lewd scraps of cloth, and their durability matched their look: wretched. Washing them took more care than anything else in the pile.
…And yesterday, that was still smeared on them.
The thought alone sent a shudder through me. Even so, she was one of the better ones. If Melia was the least rotten of the Hero's lovers in character, then Alencia was, without question, the most capable. She never fought on the front herself, but given what a Saintess was meant to be, that was only natural. Whatever else might be said of her, she had not earned the title in bed. Her healing was genuinely exceptional.
Melia, whose character was the least bad, and Saintess Alencia, whose temperament was the least bad.
And then…
"Haaahm~."
Speak of an orc and it comes. Karin, middling on both counts, yawned her way out.
In the royal capital and at the academy she passed for a prodigy of learning. In the Demon Realm, and on a battlefield, that learning was of no use whatsoever—and her magic was nothing remarkable either. Dead weight, if I was being honest. She had followed us this far for one reason only.
The Hero. She had likely forced the march on herself for fear that Melia or Alencia might grow closer to him than she was.
When it was decided that I would go with him into the Demon Realm, word arrived from home.
Aid Lady Karin in secret.
Even the house that was supposed to stand by me and understand me was not on my side. I despaired, lightly, all over again.
"You're awake."
"…Mm."
Karin answered without really answering and brushed past me toward the Hero. Three years had passed since the journey began, and I had done nothing for her in particular. I hadn't wanted to. More than that, there had simply been nothing to do.
"Hero."
I finished striking the tent and called to him. Already flanked by the Saintess on one side and Karin on the other, he turned with an arrogant look.
"What?"
"Shall we go?"
"Yeah. Time to go…. So today's the last day, huh."
He lifted his eyes to the sky, looking almost wistful. For all the complaining he usually did, had the thought of an ending stirred something in him after all?
"Finally. The end of this fucking primitive wasteland."
"……."
Apparently not.
A vulgar line, for the words that closed an adventure—but with that, we began our march on the Demon King's Castle.
"How many of them are there?"
"…A great many."
It was no answer at all. Even from a distance the castle was unmistakable, and the host wrapped around it was so vast that hundreds of thousands would have been a joke.
Those were not mere meat shields. Years of war had driven large-scale attack magic to unprecedented heights, and still there was a reason armies kept throwing soldiers in by the tens of thousands. The Hero's blade could split the sky, and no common sword or spear could so much as mark his flesh—but a war still could not be fought on the strength of the Hero alone.
The reason was Strategic Magic, the art that had advanced alongside those massed attack spells through the long war: a linked working that took the soldiers' lives as collateral. Bind their life force together with high-order magic, and even a conscripted farmer could fight at the level of a near-knight. As dust gathers into a mountain, small strengths gathered could bring down a great one. The demon races spent those lives without hesitation. Soldiers, to them, could always be replaced, and so magic bought with soldiers' blood was used without restraint.
"…Shall we choose another day?"
Soldiers, even soldiers under Strategic Magic, I could handle alone. The problem was the Demon King holding the castle—and the confidant, his or hers, who by rumor had been granted power directly from that throne.
At the castle's highest point a vast power churned, darkening everything around it as if the sun itself had come down to earth. Beneath it shimmered a lesser light, still far greater than anything on the scale of a legion commander. That would be the confidant I knew only by hearsay. Two of them. And gathering so many soldiers could only mean that one among them was adept at Strategic Magic. One at a time, perhaps I could manage. With that many lives offered up as fuel, facing two high-ranking demons alone was more than I could do.
"…You can at least hold, right?"
"Not for long."
Even if I poured everything into defense, against opponents of that caliber thirty minutes was the most I could hope for. Say as much, though, and he would charge at once, so I deliberately cut the figure and told him ten.
"Ten minutes? That's plenty."
"No, I—"
I had miscalculated. I should have whined that I could last a minute at best.
"Hero, at least be cautious—"
"I'm going!!"
Before I could get another word out he kicked off the ground, and in the next instant he was already at the castle's very gates. Hero and stonework threw up a towering cloud of dust, and the two great lights, slow to grasp what was happening, flared.
"Son of a bitch…"
I launched myself after him. Lacking, perhaps, the nerve to throw themselves into a fight between Hero and Demon King, the two lights descended toward me instead: a pink-haired succubus, and an armored knight built on a scale that had to clear six and a half feet. The knight said nothing. The succubus stared as if someone had struck her across the back of the head, and spoke in blank disbelief.
"…Don't tell me the two of you came alone?"
"We came as five."
"Then why are there two of you?"
"The other three are window dressing."
"What?"
Thinking about it, our party had more of the Hero's women in it than fighters. What kind of hero party was this? It was a sex party. Swallowing the urge to shout as much, I triggered the magic I had prepared for this day.
Cast to its full strength through an incantation laid down in advance, the spell split the castle off from everything beyond it. The place was now a perfect isolation field. Until the mana ran dry, no one could enter, and no one could leave.
Both of them seemed to understand at once. Neither showed the slightest intent to attack. They looked, if anything, indifferent to the whole situation.
"…You're not going to come at me?"
I had already layered dozens of defensive spells in secret and made ready to strike, so their lukewarm attitude struck me as deeply suspicious. The armored knight stayed silent. The pink-haired succubus scratched her head with an awkward smile.
What was that supposed to mean? The answer came a moment later.
"We're not fighting."
"…What?"
"You came to kill that bastard for us. Why would we fight? We're just here to watch."
"……?"
This, I had not expected.