Where Did My Body Go
At my declaration, every one of them went dumb, as if someone had packed their mouths shut.
Say it outright — that I meant to throw the Holy Sword away — and these people would grab my ankles. Conveniently, the idiots had a record behind them. They'd put on a suitable show of grief, and then I'd be gone.
"What are you talking about? The Hero's party is finished?"
"It means exactly what I said. I don't have the qualifications to be the Hero. If anyone does, it's you, Carn — so tirelessly devoted to the party's bonding, day and night. You're the one fit for it. If it hadn't been me, the Hero would have been you."
He would have done it anyway, even if it hadn't been him. To me the Holy Sword was nothing but a hindrance. Fine. Hand it to Carn and make him labor for the kingdom in proportion to everything he'd failed to do. A man who called himself a prince ought to manage at least that much. Let him grind like a dog.
"Th-that. You saw that?"
"Wait. You're saying the Hero — the Hero himself — stood there and watched?"
The Hero stood there and watched, they said. As if watching would have meant a thing. Set beside killing the Demon King, it was pathetic beyond words. The incompetence these bastards had put on display would make excellent grounds for quitting.
"Ugh. I don't know."
"Pathetic. Utterly pathetic. Time left to move forward, and the only thought in your heads is to slink around behind everyone else, carrying on like that."
Not one of them could answer.
"I'll be plain. You're in the way."
And they truly were. Did they think catching the Demon King was easy? How long was I supposed to endure them obstructing me while they drowned in their own lust? Better to hand the thing over. Leave me out of it, and the rest of them had excellent teamwork — in every sense of the word. Without me, they'd manage. Surely even that one wouldn't keep playing around once the Holy Sword was in his hands. However much of a layabout Carn was, he wouldn't cast aside a Hero's duty if the sword came to him.
"D-do you really think the Church will just stand by?"
Eris shot it back, her brow twitching.
"Better this than playing Hero while I drag dead weight. You go your way. I'll go mine. We each walk our own road, and everyone is comfortable. Carn. You got something to say?"
"You have always been like this. Forever conducting yourself as if you alone were exceptional, charging ahead with your eyes on nothing but the road."
The excuse Carn spat out was laughable.
Yes. That was the grievance. I understood, after a fashion. They had their circumstances. We simply moved differently. I ran looking at nothing but what lay ahead. They were scavenger stock — the sort who, mid-sprint, spotted something edible off to the side and stopped to pick it up.
"Because all I do is catch the Demon King."
"You never look back. Not even a little. We're the ones who can't keep up with you."
"That's right. Isn't it a bit strange to lay all the blame on us?"
Maybe so. I hadn't looked back once. But even so — was it strange for a Hero to set out to kill the Demon King, and to follow that single aim and nothing else? I was throwing the Holy Sword away. Why so many words?
"I feel the same. I don't fit with people who mean to amble along and rest when they please. My purpose is to end the Age of Night, not to sprawl somewhere soft and take my ease. So."
I'd end it here.
I flung the Holy Sword at Carn and turned my back. Voices rose behind me, picking the argument apart. So what. Not my concern. They could spit curses until they were hoarse. The lofty sorts — the ones who actually moved the world — already knew my temperament.
I truly hadn't thought it would turn out like this.
Thump.
How far had I walked? I'd tossed the Holy Sword to Carn as if discarding it and walked away, and before long a pain began to seep into my heart. I didn't even know where I was. My heart started to clench.
A memory surfaced — something some grand personage, from a kingdom whose name I couldn't recall, had once said. If the Hero abandoned his duty, he would die. I'd only given a hollow laugh back then. Don't tell me this was how it worked.
Surely not, I'd told myself. Surely not. And then I'd forgotten. I'd never meant to abandon a Hero's duty. I'd only decided I couldn't keep the Holy Sword and remain with them. Powerful as the sword was, it had gotten in the way of what I had to do. The party got in the way of the journey to bring down the Demon King. Sword and party alike had bound me, and blocked me from doing what I wanted.
My legs folded under me.
Wasn't this a bit much — treating a Hero who'd worked like a dog this way?
Thump.
The clench grew worse. This might be — no. This was nearly certain. I was going to die. So I wouldn't get to kill the Demon King? I'd run all this way with nothing in my head but that, and I was going to collapse here?
A voice I missed — one I'd heard long ago — circled at my ear.
Thump. Thump. Thump.
Ah. So I'd failed.
I didn't make it far. I clutched my chest and fell. A deep abyss closed over me — darkness, like the vast and hideous dark of the demon realm the Demon King ruled — and my consciousness sank with it.
Hero Tati cast the Holy Sword aside and vanished. The party waited, certain he'd be back before long. He did not return.
"He really left."
"Th-this can't be."
The Saintess shook her head, her brow drawn tight.
"What's wrong, Saintess?"
"If the Hero forsakes a Hero's duty, it becomes a grave matter. The Goddess will be angered."
"They say he dies."
"Then he truly quit being the Hero?"
Death was all but certain. When Lucia's face turned grave after Saintess Eris's, Carn's own expression soured.
"You're telling me Tati doesn't know?"
"No. He knows. The royal house and the Church both make certain the Hero is made aware of it."
"I was the one who all but became the Hero before he appeared, and I was told then. Tati was told as well. Of that, I am certain."
"Then he hated being with us so much he was willing to throw his life away."
So he had steeled himself for everything. He would not be turned according to their will.
"Or perhaps he simply wanted the rest of you to suffer a little."
The Hero's party could not wipe the unsettled look from their faces. Thinking on it now, there was something not unlike guilt. At the start, the Hero had at least nagged them to handle the rear support. From a certain day onward he had treated them as people who were not there, and he had stopped calling them into battle. He had not even reported them to the kingdom. Had it truly come to throwing his life away?
From here on, the Hero's party was a Hero's party with no Hero.
The women carried at least a sliver of guilt. Carn closed his fist around the Holy Sword.
Carn knew Tati. He knew how obsessed the man was with slaying the Demon King, and he knew his character. Hero Tati had not given up on them. From the very beginning he had seen them as nothing but extras — heads to fill out a count — and he had always gone on ahead alone. Carn, who had meant to idle about with the women out of sheer spite toward Tati, had grown furious at the way Tati ignored him. That was why Carn hated Tati. And this time, Tati had simply thrown everything away and run. A man that obsessed with the Demon King would not have cast the Holy Sword aside unless a contingency was already in place.
"You think I can't manage without you?"
A faint light spilled from the Holy Sword in Carn's grip.
An ancient kingdom was swallowed by a vast abyss and by darkness. It vanished, leaving an enormous scar upon the earth, and darkness and the abyss spread until they covered the continent. From that darkness the demonkin were born, and born with them was a king to rule the dark. He was called the Demon King.
The age ruled by that king of pitch black and the abyss was named the Age of Night. Depending on the era, and on the country, the time of the Demon King's rule was also called the Age of the Abyss, or the Dark Age.
As if to command humanity to stand against this night, the being humans worshipped as the Goddess bestowed upon them a Holy Sword meant to kill the Demon King. The one who wielded that sword was the Hero.
Only a Hero chosen by the Holy Sword could end the Age of Night. And a Hero who let go of the Holy Sword of his own will lost the qualification of Hero — and died.
"Yes. That's how it had to be."
Dying without ever killing the Demon King struck me as a truly wretched end. I'd meant to take the Demon King down even if I weren't the Hero, and yet the Holy Sword and the Goddess — killing a Hero just because he'd walked away — were absolute bastards. I'd thought so, at least, up until the moment my consciousness sank.
Had heaven granted me a chance? A whim of the Goddess?
"I was supposed to die. Why am I alive?"
Had a necromancer brought me back? A lich? I'd become a former Hero. There was no particular reason to revive me, and there shouldn't have been materials fit for the job — and yet.
My head rang, hollow. Was I alive? Was I dead? My thoughts didn't seem to be turning properly yet.
I forced my head up, and something — how to put it — spilled down in heavy strands.
"Hm? Was my hair this color?"
Why was it indigo? My hair hadn't been like this. Something was wrong. Had it ever been this soft?
And the skin — what was this? And this feeling coming from my chest. Had I built muscle like that?
No. To call it muscle was absurd. It was like a woman's breasts.
No. They were breasts.
I wanted to deny it, but these were unmistakably breasts. Not muscle I'd trained. A cleavage, plain as anything, with a valley in it. The chest that ought to have been scarred from a life of daily brawls was swollen, in every sense that mattered. Not hard. Not a scrap of muscle in it. Soft, and plenty large.
And why was my waist so narrow? Why did my lower half feel as if something were missing?
Of the two sexes humans insisted on sorting themselves into — man and woman — I seemed to have ended up in the body they classed as a woman's.
Something had definitely happened to this body.
Fuck.
Who did this? Which bastard put a sex-change spell on me? That succubus bitch who'd lunged at me trying to get a fuck and gotten herself laid out flat? Or the Arbiter, the one who fiddled with people's fates? Either way, the worst possible option.
A grating screech — the iron door in front of me seemed to open, and some bastard appeared.
"Kehehe. Awake, are you?"
The hell was that. A pig. You couldn't have told him from an orc.
"Awake, obviously. Who are you? What did you do to my body?"
"Keh-heh. Kahahaha! What did I do, he says. A special top-grade piece like you — those exalted gentlemen are awfully fond of that sort. We could hardly go spoiling your first time all rough and careless, now could we?"
That was all the pig offered before he turned and went back out.
A taunt? Had the man just chosen a creative way to die? For now, he didn't seem to be the one who'd put me in this state. A bastard built to call an orc his brother would never have thought of turning me into a woman to sell. If he'd had power like that, he wouldn't have been peddling slaves in the first place.
Fine. I'd decided. I wasn't even the Hero anymore, so it hardly mattered what I did to that thing. I was going to kill the bastard.
Before that, though — the situation as it stood.
"Caught by slavers, then. Or if not that..."
The place I'd collapsed, out of my senses, had been a forest. Judging from that, this was bandit country. And if the man-orc was to be believed, they hadn't laid a hand on my body. I hadn't seen a mirror, so I couldn't be sure, but I apparently had the sort of looks slave merchants would call premium grade.
So. To put it in order.
Death
→ Alive as a woman, for reasons unknown
→ Kidnapped
What kind of causality was that?
Well. Trust my life to be a wretched one.