What I Can Do
Jemma wrapped her arms around me as I clung desperately to her, and began to speak in that voice of hers.
“Even though I am a demon beast, I too despise this world.”
She spoke to me, the one whose guilt over Tia’s grave wounds from that war had never faded, the one who had finally broken down and thrown herself at Jemma in utter desperation.
“I could never become as strong as the Demon King, nor could I hold fast to a noble ideal the way Hayes did.”
She held me tightly.
“In the end, I was nothing more than a pitiful, insignificant demon beast…”
Stripping away the mask of the flawless attendant she had always worn, she spoke as the demon beast Jemma, as the living being Jemma—her voice so beautiful it seemed more human than any human’s.
“Yet even someone like me had something I could do.”
Her hands gently cradled and stroked my head as I sat beside Tia.
“The position the Demon King granted me—I have been waiting only for the day I could make it shine brilliantly.”
Slowly releasing me, she looked straight into my eyes.
“Though I am nothing but a lowly demon beast who can never become anything greater, the Demon King commanded even someone like me to do what I wished…”
Her gaze was like that of someone looking upon a savior, her voice trembling with urgency.
“Therefore, your loyal servant Jemma will commit one final act of rebellion against the Demon King—for your sake.”
She spoke with a voice full of anguish. I was no different from her. No—I was even more worthless, a mere human who could do nothing at all. In the moments that mattered most, I was nothing but one powerless human.
“That is why I will show you everything about the demon race.”
Jemma continued.
“The highest office once held by my previous master, Lady Gematria—the position the Demon King bestowed upon me as her successor: Gatekeeper of the Grand Stone Coffin.”
She told me.
“Until I met you… I lived with my eyes shut, simply surviving, never knowing what to do with this sorrowful, uneasy heart.”
She spoke of why she had chosen me.
“Humans were the mortal enemies of the demon race, yet even though I never actively rejected them, I could never fully sever the chain of hatred.”
She took both my hands, met my eyes, and let tears fall.
“But you were different.”
She cried out about me.
“You were very different from Hayes, but the words you spoke to me after we met were enough to strike my heart and completely melt the ice that had frozen it over.”
The sight of a human trying to understand the demon race, refusing to give up no matter what hardships came, had shaken Jemma’s heart.
“I think I have always been waiting for this moment—the moment I would meet you.”
Jemma pressed a fist to her chest, tears streaming down her face. Calming her trembling heart, she smiled faintly and pleaded,
“So please… become my new king.”
She was asking me.
“My lord who will be reborn—Lady Karia.”
Her eyes were filled with sincerity. A sincerity that no words could sway, a sincerity that no illusion could turn away.
“Even if your ideal can never be realized… I still wish to remain by your side as you chase it to the very end.”
Jemma cried out to me, begging me to take her with me. To that future. The future I had longed for.
“Therefore, you must become our savior as you walk toward that ideal.”
Do not break.
“Even if you become a moth that rushes into the flames, or a Prometheus who brings a great blaze to the torch of ideals.”
Do not break over something so small.
“To us demon beasts and demons, you have always been a brilliant light.”
Tia had fallen and showed no sign of waking. It was because of me. Yet Tia would rise again. So do not worry—pursue your ideal. Do not waver, do not break. Rise again, stronger than before. This is your chance; strike even harder. Therefore—
“Look at me, Lady Karia.”
Jemma cried out desperately.
“Walk forward with me, Lady Karia—”
Better to plot rebellion and be killed by Tia than to remain broken here.
“My promised king, Lady Karia…”
Until now I had been unable to decide, but Jemma’s long-awaited savior had been me all along. The difference between Hayes and me was that I was human. Because I was a mere human who could do nothing, Jemma had finally been able to make her decision. She cried out to me with desperate need.
“……”
Yet as I listened to her heartfelt plea, my trembling eyes drifted toward Tia. She was breathing, but her eyes remained closed, and that coldness still lingered in her palm. Death. Death loomed over her. Was this truly the right thing for me to do? Jemma had her own reasons, but… was it right for me, whom Tia had trusted, to do this?
But Jemma was still holding my hands.
“……”
I tore my gaze from Tia and looked into Jemma’s eyes. In those eyes, brimming with all the desperation and lifelong yearning she had carried, I began to understand why she was crying. Jemma, too, believed it was too late. She believed that if not now, the chance would never come again. When Tia told her to live as she wished, it had surely meant to do so where she would not be seen. In Jemma’s own life, filled with suffering much like mine—perhaps even more cruelly—she had found me strange: a human who understood the demon race and sought harmony with them. That strangeness had gradually felt like fate, and she had become captivated by me.
And now, for the sake of that conviction, she was trying to make me king. Yet betraying Tia—the one she had lived with like family far longer than I had—was something far more difficult than anything I had done when I abandoned my comrades and accepted this life, no matter how strong her conviction.
“……”
So what Jemma had said to me was an act of courage equal to a broken hero rising again on shattered limbs to face a mighty foe. Perhaps even greater courage than that. Therefore—
“…All right.”
I slowly embraced Jemma, who had knelt before me, and drew her into my arms.
“I will become your king…”
I set aside, for a moment, my crumbling heart, my guilt, my sense of sin, and my powerlessness, and looked at her.
“……”
Upon hearing my answer, Jemma stiffened for a moment, then clutched my arms tightly and buried herself deeper into my embrace, sobbing.
“Lady Karia… Lady Karia……”
“So show me,” I asked, willing to become her king. “Show me everything about the demon race that you spoke of.”
In the end, even Tia had been brought to the brink of life and death. Nothing remained for me now… No—only my loyal attendant, my one and only confidant, my beloved Jemma. To face the existence Jemma had sworn to show me in order to make me king, I asked her.
Still nestled in my arms, sniffling and weeping, Jemma buried her face deeper for a moment, took a deep breath, then lifted her head and cried out,
“……Let us go, my lord.”
As I began to follow Jemma out of the room, I hesitated. Even now, my attachment to Tia remained strong. Tia was still a precious person to me, like a stake driven into my heart, no different from the loved ones of my glorious past. I could not deny it. I looked back at her sleeping form once more.
“……”
But I knew this was an opportunity. A tremendous opportunity that Jemma had risked her life to create.
“…I’ll be back.”
So I turned my back on the sleeping Tia. I turned my back on the Demon King. Since when had it been this way? We had always been fated to end like this. So I had to believe that this moment, this time, had finally arrived. Even though she now faced a merciless death in a defenseless state, even though it had happened because of me—I would not betray her. Rather than doing nothing for her and simply grieving her eventual death someday, betraying her now to find a way to help her was hundreds, thousands of times better. Therefore—
“See you again, Demon King…”
I began walking away with Jemma. Dozens of attendants Jemma had stationed in advance lined both sides of the path, bowing their heads in silence as if seeing us off, wishing us safe passage. Among them were those I had been closest to. I squeezed my eyes shut for a moment, then said,
“…Let’s go, Jemma.”
I stepped forward again. As we passed them, they entered the room to begin the nursing they had been unable to do because of me. I moved onward.
“…I will become your king.”
I advanced, supported by my special confidant Jemma, feeling boundless gratitude toward her for giving me the chance to do something—anything. Leaving behind the other attendants who were departing, I headed deeper than the Demon King’s castle’s underground, deeper than the Demon Realm’s graveyard where all the dead of the Demon King’s castle slept. Step by step, we began to walk with determined strides. To protect Tia, to protect the Demon King, to protect all demons and all humanity, I was going to be reborn as another Demon King, a new king. Jemma and I did not speak. My face held only firm resolve and the determination to completely kill the powerless version of myself, as I followed Jemma, who burned with even fiercer conviction, through the deepest parts of the Demon King’s castle—past hidden spiral staircases that could lead to the surface, through more complex passages, through places like cracks in giant stones and steep descents that could be called cliffs, through caverns no longer worthy of being called the Demon King’s castle—until at last—
“……”
A massive gate appeared before us.
“……”
At the end of the cavern stood a gate so enormous that even the castle’s main gate, adorned with stone carvings that seemed to contain the entire history of the Demon Realm, looked trivial by comparison.
“We have arrived, my king.”
Jemma finally spoke.
“This is the place where Lady Gematria and I first met, where she took me in.”
It was the place where Jemma had begun her glorious life in the Demon King’s castle, and—
“And it is the place where the Demon King was born.”
She told me that this was where Tia, the Demon King, had been born. I swallowed dryly.
“…If you have finished preparing your heart, please say so.”
At Jemma’s gentle, considerate voice, I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and answered without a single moment of hesitation,
“That preparation ended the moment I left Tia.”
I stepped toward the gate and placed both hands upon it. The gate seemed to recognize me, and rather than rejecting me, it felt as though it possessed a will of its own. My arms moved of their own accord, pushing the gate open. With a heavy rumble, scattering dust, the gate began to move, slowly revealing the hidden space beyond until it was fully open, pressed against the opposite wall, bathing the interior in light.
“……”
And what I saw beyond that gate, with my heart now hardened, was—
“……What in the world is this…”
A massive, rotting eye surrounded by twelve tentacles growing from the floor in a circle. What shocked me most was—
“……”
Its overwhelming size. I had already felt an unspoken pressure from the gate’s size, but the space inside was impossibly vast. At its center, embedded in the ground, the rotting eye and the supporting flesh looked like some indescribable cosmic entity, evoking a primal, astronomical terror. Yet even amid that primal fear, something felt wrong about the entity’s condition. Its body, including the tentacles, was riddled with holes and destruction, as if it had been repeatedly attacked, and everything except the eye was so damaged it could no longer function.
“……”
Amid that strangeness, I carefully stepped inside and examined the colossal being. This was what Jemma had wanted to show me—the entirety of the demon race. The foundation of the demon race that Gematria had tried to protect.
“……That being was called the Transcendent.”
As I slowly approached, Jemma explained.
“I do not know much about it either, but… there is one thing the Demon King told me.”
Stopping right in front of the rotting eye, she continued,
“The corpse known as the Transcendent will one day respond to the appearance of a brilliant being who will change the world like a comet… and bestow a blessing.”
Jemma finished speaking and stepped back, watching over me so that only I could touch it.
“I have already attempted contact with the Transcendent, but I have been repeatedly rejected…”
I met her gaze for a moment.
“So… I pray for your good fortune.”
She clasped her hands tightly, closed her eyes, and began to pray for me.
“……Right.”
Whether I was rejected here or harmed because of my human body, nothing remained for me now anyway.
“I have already bet everything on this gamble long ago.”
Even if this contact brought an uncertain future, I had placed everything on the table for this gamble long ago. All that remained for me now were humanity, the demon race, the unconscious Demon King, my special confidant Jemma, and finally—everything that made up who I was. That was all.
“……”
I stopped before the entity, spread my palm wide, and reached toward the eye.
At that moment—
【 I have been waiting for you. 】