Dead Weight
A sense that everything had finally been resolved settled over Seona, and with it came a deep relief.
Ever since learning that the secrets he had kept buried had only made his parents suffer more, the only resolve left in him was to start treating himself as someone worth protecting.
That pitch-black night and the long gray dawn were already behind them. Somewhere along the way, the sun had begun to rise.
For the first time, he realized that the sun of the Demon Realm could shine just as brightly as Earth's.
The expedition would be here soon.
The expedition's situation was grim.
Getting this far had cost them most of their combat strength. What remained was largely noncombat personnel.
Roughly two hundred fighters left, and three hundred noncombatants. They had set out with combat troops outnumbering the rest three to one, but the dead had piled so high that even the ratio itself had collapsed into imbalance.
They had gathered a fair number of Awakened with healing abilities, but the unidentified assailants who kept striking them never gave anyone the chance to tend the wounded. They simply attacked.
No one had imagined they would run into enemies like these right at the threshold of a succubus's domain.
As deputy commander, she had no choice. To save at least the noncombatants, she had peeled off half the remaining fighters and thrown them across the enemy's path as a living barricade.
If the other hundred and fifty could just escort the rest safely back to Earth, that would be enough.
Considering how strong Mina had become since her promotion to expedition commander, even if those bastards forced their way into the estate to wipe out the noncombatants and their remaining escort, the woman who had already infiltrated ahead of them would handle it.
All that was left for her was to pin the enemy down for as long as she could.
For the ones who still had a way home…
When the expedition reached the estate and found the gates already standing open, confusion flickered across their faces—but the pursuers hard on their heels left no room to dwell on it.
Looking into the grounds beyond, all they felt was the promise of safety, and the fragile hope that a Gate might finally take them home to Earth.
From atop the walls, Mina watched the expedition she had brought with her.
With her sensory enhancement pushed high enough to sharpen her vision, she took them in at a single glance.
The deputy commander was nowhere to be seen.
Nearly half the combat force was missing as well.
Something had gone wrong. There was no other explanation.
She dropped from the wall and put the question to the first troops through the gate.
"This is Expedition Commander Mina. Where are the deputy commander and the rest of the force?"
The sight of her leaping down from above startled the expedition members, but once they recognized the face of the commander they knew, they dragged air into their burning lungs and reported.
"The ones who've been ambushing us hit our hidden camp in the valley. The deputy commander stayed behind to hold them. We pushed ahead to reach the estate by the agreed time."
Hearing that, Mina understood exactly what kind of end the deputy commander was walking toward.
In her heart, she offered a silent salute to the deputy and every combatant who had stayed behind to buy the others a chance to live.
"We're short on time, so I'm assuming full command. We move for the Gate."
If they were hit again in the heart of a demon city, protecting the expedition would become nearly impossible.
They needed a Gate open and a path back to Earth as soon as humanly possible.
The lord of the estate had already prepared one. All that remained was to form the troops up and move.
It would not take those bastards long to finish off the deputy commander and the fighters left with her…
Mina arrived at the Gate with the combat troops.
She was already sorting out the noncombatants and sending them through to Earth first.
The estate lord had been short on time.
Only a single small Gate stood open.
That meant there was no guarantee the assailants would stay away long enough for the entire expedition to escape.
Mina had no choice. She would push the noncombatants through first, then hold the line beside her fighters and try to stop whatever came for them.
As if to prove her judgment right, the moment most of the noncombatants had cleared the Gate, the assailants showed themselves.
She still did not know who these bastards were—the ones who had hounded them every step of the way—but they were no longer a match for her.
Seven of them had already died on her blade before the valley was even in sight.
Seven out of thirty.
It might not have sounded like many, but the last one had been split clean in two by a single stroke of her sword.
At the beginning they had traded blow after blow with her. Once they learned she could kill them in a single exchange, they had stopped showing themselves at all—until now. Something must have made them desperate. They had abandoned the hit-and-run attrition that had been bleeding her force dry and chosen the city streets as a battlefield with no room left to retreat.
They looked like people who had already made peace with dying.
The thirty Royal Knights had received their orders and been organized into a small detachment.
Their longest-serving commander was carrying out the writ exactly as written: annihilate the armed human force that had invaded the Demon Realm, seize their leader, and deliver that leader to the Council's interrogation chamber.
The enemy's numbers had been too great at first, so they had chosen a strategy of slow attrition.
There had been no true powerhouses among them. A frontal assault by elites of their caliber would have worked, but the losses would have been unacceptable, so they had prepared this approach instead.
Then the situation began to change.
The enemy commander was strong—strong the way a demon steeped in magic was strong.
Strong enough to stand among high-ranking demons like themselves. Knights sent forward to nibble at the edges of the force never even managed a proper clash of blades before their heads left their shoulders.
After that they had tried to avoid the woman entirely and simply reduce the enemy's combat strength—only for seven more of their own to die at the hands of that human woman they took for the leader, a woman who seemed to grow stronger by the hour.
How powerful she had become by now was beyond imagining.
If they let these people escape, the commander herself would be demoted and her comrades executed.
The Council's position was already precarious.
Fail even a task this small, and political currents would sweep them up and brand them rebels without a second thought.
Then the only way left to prove her own innocence would be an assignment to purge the high-ranking demons who had actually risen in revolt.
She would be shoved to the front lines of a rebellion and left there to rot, while her comrades were put to death without so much as a chance to speak.
This was a fight they could not walk away from.
And then something caught the Royal Knight commander's eye.
A boy whose face looked startlingly like that leader's.
Family. It had to be.
They must have kept him hidden with obsessive care; not once during any of the ambushes had he been spotted.
With looks that distinctive, there was no way she would have forgotten him if she had seen him even once.
Especially not when he shared a face with the woman who had been killing her people.
If they had gone to such lengths to conceal him, he was precious enough. As a hostage, his value would be more than enough.
The estate lord already knew who the attackers were.
Royal Knights.
The hands and blades of the royal bloodline descended from the Demon King—and the sword of the Council.
People one must never defy.
If word of this situation reached the Council, he and his household would be tangled up with the rebels and executed alongside them.
But if he closed the Gate now, Mina would take his head herself.
Caught between the blade and the wall, the lord finally abandoned the open Gate and fled.
They would have had a hard time spotting him anyway.
He had pulled a hood low over his face so that even his own people would not see him ushering humans back to Earth.
If censure came after this was over, there was only one way out.
Shift the blame onto someone else.
And in that moment, Miel rose in the lord's mind.
His youngest daughter, locked in the underground dungeon, scheduled for execution tomorrow.
Better she die usefully than die for nothing.
With that thought, the lord fled toward his castle—
fast, before the Royal Knights could lay eyes on him.
She sent fifteen Royal Knights to tear through the evacuating humans.
The remaining seven, herself included, she ordered to scatter and engage the combat force.
Among them, she was the most seasoned and the fastest. While the others struck the fighting line, she meant to seize the boy who looked so much like the human leader as a hostage.
It was a task only someone who could stand at the very tip of the spear could attempt.
She snapped her blade out at the human fighter in front of her.
He never even reacted. His body came apart in two pieces.
Without breaking stride she swept her sword left and right through the split corpse and cut down the humans standing in the next rank.
Thrusting, slashing, reducing people to meat soaked in their own blood, she drove forward.
The leader would be tied up with the fifteen she had sent ahead on guerrilla strikes. It would take time before that woman could come for them.
Those fifteen would almost certainly die. She knew that.
But failure meant death for all of them.
The only path left for the seven of them was to take the boy hostage and drag at least the expedition commander back to the Council's interrogation chamber.
By the time the thought finished forming, most of the humans in front of her were already gone.
A clear path had opened straight to the boy.
She seized the opening and launched her body forward.
Whether it was terror at the slaughter she had just carved through them, or something else—even knowing she was charging straight for the human boy, not a single person stepped into her way.
It was always like that.
One's own life was simply worth more than anyone else's. That was only natural.
All that remained was to take the boy and confirm with her own hands whether he was valuable enough to serve as a hostage.
The end of the battle was drawing near.
The completion of her orders was waiting.