Meanwhile, the Hero's Party
To reach the Demon King's Castle, walled in by mountains, there was no path that did not first pass through the Cursed Forest.
"It's already been a week."
Exhaustion sat plain on the hero Riel's face. Sweat had soaked her through, and the gear she wore was grimy from a full week of wandering lost among the trees.
"Riel... do you think we will ever reach the Demon King's Castle?"
The saint Iris was in scarcely better shape. Her pure-white holy vestments had long since gone dark with grass stains and mud. Anxiety filled her face, and her hands trembled hard enough to see.
"E-even now, we ought to go back to Kyle...! If we explain everything, he will understand. He will accept it!!"
When Iris cried out as if in a fit, Riel seized her shaking shoulders and held them fast. Little by little the trembling in her body stilled, but her hollow eyes were already swallowed by fear. She looked less like a saint than a girl frightened out of her wits.
—Smack.
"Get a hold of yourself, Iris."
Iris's cheek snapped aside. She clutched the place she had been struck and bowed her head, and, avoiding Riel's eyes, she forced out a voice that barely crawled free.
"I-I'm sorry..."
"Now, now. Don't be so hard on her."
Lapis, the one they called the Archmage, slipped between them to mediate. Riel had no patience for Iris in a panic, but she nodded reluctantly and took a step back. A moment later she sensed something wrong and looked at Lapis.
"Lapis, are you all right?"
"No. I'm in pretty bad shape myself."
Riel peered beneath the wide brim of the hat, and Lapis's face came into view, drained white. Her color was awful. There was no blood in it at all; she might as well have been a patient on her sickbed. She clutched her own shoulder as if it hurt and let out a broken sob.
"Hhk... It's starting to hurt so badly it gives me chills."
"It is the Necronomicon, isn't it?"
"Yeah. Probably. ...The backlash from the cursed gear must be catching up with me."
The Necronomicon was the book Lapis carried against her chest. Power from the outer gods dwelled in its pages, and with that power a curse that harmed its user. Kyle used to call the thing a penalty. There were several kinds. In Lapis's case, the penalty was pain.
"Uuugh..."
It came over her again. Tears gathered at the corners of eyes that were usually full of mischief, and she knit her brow and clutched at herself as if she could hold the pain in by force.
"We can't stay like this. It's too dangerous."
Watching the two of them come apart, Riel knew they had to get out of this place as soon as they could. Her expression grave, she looked around. Dense forest packed every direction and breathed out a gloomy air, and front or back, left or right, the same scenery met her eyes and pressed in on the mind.
"...But how do we get out?"
Cursed or not, she had thought that if they simply followed the map in a single direction, an exit would present itself. That had been a miscalculation. The curse laid over the wood was vicious beyond anything she had imagined. Whichever path they took, they ended where they had begun. Marks cut into the trees meant nothing. Footprints meant nothing. Whenever they came back to themselves, the same view was waiting.
Stifled past bearing, she had even tried shouting, only for the echo to return not from one place but from every direction at once. That, too, seemed part of the curse. Keeping any true sense of direction here looked impossible.
"I know I shouldn't rely on you anymore. And still, it isn't easy."
Riel looked up into the dark night sky and thought of a boy. If Kyle had been with them, simply walking would have carried them through the forest. There would have been no week of wandering, and no need to be eaten alive by the penalties on their equipment and writhe like this. Half a day's stroll, light as a picnic, and they would have reached the Demon King's Castle. She understood now, with painful clarity, just how much she had leaned on him all this time.
"I hate myself like this, Kyle."
She bit her lip until she tasted blood, trying to shake the thought loose — and in that instant a bewitching voice drifted in from somewhere.
"Oh my...? And what might you all be doing here?"
"Lilith..."
A woman descended, batlike wings beating, and even another woman would have had to admit the youthful beauty of her was enough to steal the breath. She looked over the hero's party and pinched her own cheek with innocent playfulness. Between strands of pink hair, a suggestive expression slipped softly into view.
"Did you come to see me, by any chance?"
"They said the curse on this forest was a nasty piece of work. Figures you were behind it, Lilith."
"Well, it is the forest I manage. I may not look it, but I am an executive of the Demon King's army."
Lilith swayed the heart-shaped tail peculiar to succubi and looked the party over. Something felt off. She tilted her head.
"Where did that monstrous man go?"
"You don't need to know."
"Hmm. I think I do, though?"
She winked one eye.
"It's rather an important matter for me."
The monstrous man Lilith meant was Kyle. As an executive of the Demon King's army and the Succubus Queen, her chief weapon was the curse. To the woman known also as the Queen of Curses, Kyle's Curse Immunity was as good as a natural enemy.
"Don't tell me you had a lovers' quarrel?"
Lilith smiled, playful, but the hero's party said nothing.
"...For real?"
"Nothing like that happened."
"Then I'll just check."
Her body blurred like mist and blew away on the wind.
—Slip.
The Lilith who had vanished was suddenly at Riel's back. With a suggestive hand she stroked waist and thigh, and when the nape of Riel's neck flinched she did not miss it. She leaned in and drew a long breath along her scent.
"Sniff, sniff."
"Y-you crazy bitch..."
Startled, Riel swung her sword in a rush, but Lilith's form was already gone. She appeared again behind Iris, and behind Lapis, and did the very same thing.
"Nnh..."
"Hmm."
Iris answered with a sensitive shiver; Lapis was a little more dry. Lilith studied both their faces and tilted her head, puzzled.
"Huh? That's strange... All three of you are maidens, so it doesn't look like a lovers' quarrel after all."
True to a succubus, she could read another's chastity by scent alone. She turned that suggestive smile back on the hero's party.
"Kyle, was it? That man must still be a virgin too."
"I'll cut you so you can't run that mouth anymore."
—Shing!
Riel's sword darted for Lilith, but the blade only split empty air. An afterimage was all that remained where it had cut.
What a pain.
She had felt it before: the woman was miserable to fight. Illusion curses that lied to the five senses, dream curses that reached straight into the mind — and if Kyle, the one who was her natural counter, was anywhere nearby, she never showed herself at all. She was not the sort to do people serious harm, so the danger stayed low, but she was strangely irritating. She got under the skin.
"I'll help too, Riel."
Blizzard Storm
6th Tier
Lapis cast with her face twisted in pain. The vast mana won through her contract with the outer gods spread from her fingertips and turned to ice. Icicles the size of a person rose above her head, then crashed down on Lilith like a storm.
"Oh my, 6th Tier magic. You really do live up to being an Archmage."
Lilith let out a sigh of admiration at high magic that even within the Demon King's army only a few could use.
"But if it doesn't hit, it's no use at all, is it?"
She yawned and murmured a short incantation.
Phantasma
A huge icicle pierced Lilith's body in an instant. Or so they thought. Her form scattered and vanished like an illusion, then showed itself somewhere else entirely. Hundreds of icicles poured down without pause, and the result never changed. Every time an attack touched her, Lilith disappeared like a mirage and appeared again elsewhere.
"Hehe. Without that man, the rest of you really aren't much."
Lilith smiled brightly and made a small gesture. Above her hand, a magic circle of a crimson pentagram rose.
Lapides
The petrification curse flew for Riel and Lapis. The two of them ought to have turned to stone on the spot, yet they stood perfectly whole, as if nothing had happened at all. Startled, Lilith blinked.
"Huh? I only cast it as a joke, so why aren't you turning to stone?"
Superhuman or not, it was a curse that should have made stone of them for at least a moment. She looked them over, puzzled, then seemed to understand and clapped her hands.
"Aha. You're already under the sway of other curses."
Her eyes went to the things that carried curses to rival her own: Gram, the strongest of magic swords, and the Necronomicon, grimoire of the outer gods. The powerful curses dwelling in them had canceled the petrification outright. Displeasure crossed Lilith's face, and she clicked her tongue.
"Tch. Boring. I think I'll be heading back."
She had never meant to fight the hero's party in earnest. Someone had trespassed on a place she managed, and she had only come to look. If she got serious she could have gifted them a curse or two, but she had no wish to waste her strength. Kyle might be missing, yet handling those three alone would be tiring. When it came to skill, they were the real thing.
Lilith spread her batlike wings wide and made ready to leap for the sky. The hero's party did not look as if they had the strength left to break the Cursed Forest, and if she left them as they were, they seemed likely to wear themselves out and turn back on their own.
—Ssk.
She glanced at the edge of Riel's sword leveled at her throat.
"Please don't be a nuisance. You know I won't die anyway!"
"I know that. It's just that we have to reach the Demon King's Castle."
"And if you do this, do you think I'll say yes and politely show you the way?"
"No. You wouldn't."
Magic sword or not, it was no great threat to Lilith. Irritated, she caught the blade and pushed it aside.
"Then why are you doing this...?"
"There's something I want to ask."
"If it's interesting, I'll answer."
As if the whole affair bored her, she twirled a lock of her hair around her finger.
"Have you ever seen the being called the Demon King?"
At Riel's question, Lilith's eyes went wide. Then she seemed to remember, and revulsion twisted her face.
"Well... I have seen it, yes..."
"When you saw it, what was it like?"
"I see."
Lilith looked at Riel with interest. A deep despair lay across the hero's face.
"So you saw it."
Back when Kyle had been investigating in the village, Riel had met the Demon King on the battlefield. It had been a single instant — a span so short it could be called a blink — but she had understood. That was not a being a human could do anything about.