by Okina Baba
Although I already have the Status Condition Nullification skill, so I’m not going to!
Okay. So. I just have to tell him “no.”
Here I go.
I’m gonna say it.
I’m gonna count down from ten, then I’m gonna say it.
Ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one.
“It’s all right, Merazophis. I’m sure she’s not going to listen to you.”
Just as I was starting to open my mouth, Vampy cut in with Telepathy.
Mera seemed to give up, too, and looked away from me with a sigh.
Ah, dang it.
All that tiny amount of effort for nothing.
Yeah. That’s pretty much how these things tend to go.
It takes a comparatively large amount of time and effort for me to say even a single word.
But nobody seems to understand that.
In the end, even if I try to say something, I usually get shut down like this.
As a result, I have yet to manage a proper conversation.
I finally have a human mouth, but I never get the chance to speak!
But if I can get by without speaking, I guess it’s no big deal.
Mera and Vampy are looking the other way now, so I go back to my cooking.
The meat is ready, so I put it between two slices of bread with some vegetables and hand it to my other fellow traveler.
“Thanks.” The Demon Lord, Ariel, accepts the sandwich with a guileless grin.
Can you believe this?
This girl who looks like she’s in her early teens is actually a demon lord?
And she’s so strong that she could wipe me out with a single punch?
Not long ago, we were playing a pretty deadly game of tag, where I would’ve died if she caught me.
Why am I traveling with someone like that?
It’s a mystery.
I make a meat and vegetable sandwich for myself, too, and start eating it.
Mmmm! Juicy!
This oddball little group started traveling together after a revolt in the town that Vampy’s dad was running.
To sum up that situation, her father’s territory lost a war against a neighboring country, and the town fell.
Then a bunch of other stuff happened, and the four of us ended up joining together.
Yeah, I know. It doesn’t make any sense, does it?
I don’t get it, either!
How did this happen?!
I mean, I understand Vampy and Mera coming with me, I guess.
To be honest, I am just a tiny bit to blame for the fact that those two lost their family and home.
But the town, or rather the whole country of Sariella, had always been at odds with their neighbors, the state of Ohts.
As it turns out, though, Ohts just so happens to be the location of an entrance to the Great Elroe Labyrinth.
Which also makes it the place where I totally blew away a fortress when I first escaped from the labyrinth…
Sariella, on the other hand, follows a religion that worships a certain spider as a Divine Beast.
Yeah, I got super-worshipped and stuff.
So then Ohts was all like, Excuse me? You guys are worshipping a monster who blew up our friggin’ fortress? You wanna go or what?
And Sariella was like, Shut up, losers! Let’s go—we can take this outside!
Something like that anyway.
I still can’t believe they actually went to war, though. This world is crazy!
Ha-ha-ha. It’s really not funny, is it?
Unreal.
It’s like, I dunno, dude.
I guess the truth is, I feel bad that my moving into the neighborhood wound up causing that town so much trouble.
I mean, Sariella and Ohts were already kinda at each other’s throats, so I get that they sorta used me as an excuse to finally go at it… But at the same time, it’s not like I don’t feel any guilt over it.
All this means that I can’t exactly turn my back on the baby and Mera when they’ve lost everything.
It’s not as if the blame lies squarely on my shoulders or anything, but I’m still willing to look after them a bit.
But then we have our other fellow traveler, the Demon Lord, Ariel.
I really don’t understand how I ended up traveling with her.
She’s a demon lord, and we used to be mortal enemies, so why are we working together?!
It doesn’t make a lick of sense!
But no. To be fair, I guess I do actually know how it happened.
We had finally reached what was essentially a stalemate where neither of us could touch the other, so we figured this way, we could keep an eye on each other.
That’s right. My battle with the Demon Lord isn’t really over.
We’re both watching and waiting for our chance, so it’s more like a temporary truce.
Or I guess you could call it a cold war.
For my part, I simply can’t beat the Demon Lord unless I get much, much stronger.
On the other hand, the Demon Lord doesn’t know the secret behind my quasi-immortality, and she wants to prevent her army from taking more casualties.
In the end, we reluctantly agreed to a cease-fire.
Although when she originally proposed this agreement, my quasi-immortality was sort of restricted, so I didn’t really have any choice but to agree.
See, the secret to my “immortality” is a combination of the actual Immortality skill and my egg-revival technique, in which I use my Egg-Laying skill and then transfer my consciousness into an egg as a sort of pseudo-reincarnation.
As a result, I basically can’t be killed.
The Immortality skill, as the name implies, makes it so that I can’t die within the system of this world.
However, there are a few loopholes to that rule.
That’s why I’ve supplemented it with egg revival.
Even if something bypasses the Immortality skill and destroys my body, I can abandon that body and be revived.
With this combo in place, I pretty much can’t die, period.
Buuut when the Demon Lord suggested the truce, I’d already used up all my eggs at the time, so I couldn’t actually use egg revival.
Moreover, the Demon Lord has a way to get around my Immortality skill.
I didn’t really have any choice but to say yes!
Luckily, I managed to set up some new eggs after that, so I don’t have to worry about getting killed anymore.
Nonetheless, there are certain advantages to working with the Demon Lord.
I’m looking forward to having her on my side in battle.
Battle against the elves, to be exact.
See, the reason I started hanging around Vampy’s dad’s town in the first place was that I found out the elves were targeting the baby.
Or, to be exact, because apparently every one of my Parallel Minds hates elves for some reason.
They were all eating Mother’s soul a while back, and it seems like they wound up absorbing some of her thoughts and memories, too.
At any rate, I wound up in a fight to the death against this elf called Potimas, who was attacking the baby bloodsucker.
Things got crazy, for various reasons.
He was wicked strong, and also turned out to be a robot, and he deactivated my skills and stats somehow.
Man, I seriously thought I was gonna die there.
If the Demon Lord hadn’t barged into the middle, I might’ve been in serious trouble.
And since I’m now traveling with Vampy, who’ll potentially be targeted by that Potimas guy again, I can’t say I mind having the Demon Lord around to protect us.
She seems to hate the elves, too, or rather, it’s probably because she hates the elves that Mother hated them, so if Potimas shows up, she’ll most likely fight him of her own accord.
But even besides that, there was no point in continuing my fruitless fight against the Demon Lord.
Neither of us
really has a reason to fight each other anymore, to be honest.
The only reason I was revolting against the Demon Lord, or rather her subordinate Mother, was because Mother used her Kin Control skill to try to manipulate me.
In the end, once my Parallel Minds had eaten away at her soul instead, I was able to finish her off myself.
The Demon Lord came to deal with me in response to Mother’s distress call, but when one of my Parallel Minds—formerly body brain—started leeching her soul, too, she got her own personal reason to fight me.
But now, she seems to have fused with my former body brain somehow.
It’s apparently a result of her fighting against the threat of assimilation as her soul was eaten. So now, while she’s basically still the Demon Lord deep down, she’s a new being who’s inherited the thoughts and wills of two entities.
Since they fused, she doesn’t have to fear being taken over anymore, so that means she’s got no more reason to attack me.
That being said, we still hold grudges against each other.
But put another way, aside from those little grudges, we don’t have any reason to fight anymore.
There’s nothing in it for either of us if we keep going at it.
I guess we could actually turn this truce into a full-blown alliance.
But there’s no need to rush the decision.
As long as the Demon Lord doesn’t figure out the secret to my Immortality and come up with a countermeasure, my life isn’t in danger.
That’s not the kind of thing you can pull off in a day or two.
Actually, can she do it at all?
Even I can’t think of a good way around it.
Besides, Immortality skill aside, how would she ever figure out my egg-revival method?
This means I have plenty of time.
I only have to decide what to do at some point.
That doesn’t mean I plan to take it easy the whole time, though.
I’m still working on my skills and stats every day so I’m ready to deal with the Demon Lord and Potimas at any moment.
In fact, my Spartan training of Vampy started out as part of that plan.
See, I was thinking, it’d be nice if I could get the same Puppet User skill the Demon Lord has, but I don’t have any puppets and… Oh wait, there’s a good one right there!
This led to me moving Vampy around with my thread.
When I did that, the baby’s skills and stats started going up like crazy, which was amusing to me, so I kinda started turning it into a raising-sim-game type of thing.
It’s like, oh man, our little girl’s getting so strong! Let’s keep it going!
Of course, both the baby herself and her guardian, Mera, strongly objected at first, but the Demon Lord generously gave them a very optimistic explanation that managed to convince them, so they go along with it now even if they’d really rather not.
From their perspective, I’m currently raising Vampy’s stats and skills because it’s the best thing for her future!
How could I possibly admit that it started simply because I wanted to earn a title, and then I kept doing it because I’m bored and it’s sorta fun?
But ever since the Demon Lord convinced them, I’m happy because I can amuse myself, and Vampy is happy because she can get stronger. Isn’t that a win-win?
I’m too tongue-tied to ever talk them into it, so I’m grateful for what the Demon Lord did. I never thought I’d say that, especially in a situation like this.
It almost makes me think that maybe she really does want to make amends.
I guess fusing with my former body brain means she’s totally devoted to me now!
“Huh? That’s weird. For some reason, I suddenly feel annoyed.”
The Demon Lord frowns and tilts her head uncertainly as she stuffs her face with the sandwich I made.
She’s a real mystery.
Thus, our less-than-friendly lunchtime comes to an end.
Ahhh, that was tasty.
Not for Vampy and Mera, who look pretty unhappy after enduring their nasty poisoned meal, but never mind them.
“Oof!”
Now that break time is over, we can get back to our super-fun death march!
I attach thread to the baby’s body, stand her up, and start forcing her to walk again.
If you really want to get strong, you can’t waste a single minute.
You won’t get anywhere unless you’re constantly building yourself up!
Theeere you go. Coochie-coochie-coo. Good baby.
Her little face looks incredibly displeased as I walk her, but I know for a fact that doing this will improve her skills and stats.
A little pain and suffering is worth it if it means you’ll get stronger, right?
Incidentally, I’m training all the time to improve my skills, too.
Or rather, my Parallel Minds are.
That’s right. Since they got kinda weird after devouring Mother’s soul, I used the egg-revival method to kick them out of my body into brand-new ones, where I guess they’ve been training and improving our skills of their own accord.
That’s all well and good, but it seems like they’ve been spending my skill points to acquire new skills, too.
I keep discovering new skills I’ve never seen before.
For instance, the spell I used to light that cooking fire was Fire Magic, which one of my Parallel Minds acquired without even asking.
Fire Magic. Fire’s my biggest weakness, so I’m sure that must’ve cost tons of skill points…
Sure enough, I check my stash of skill points and it has gone down a whole lot.
I want to complain, but our souls don’t seem to be connected to the same network anymore, maybe because they have their own points.
Also, I acquired the Telepathy skill at some point, so I’m guessing they can’t communicate among themselves via their souls anymore, either, right?
That means the only way to lodge a complaint would be to go see them directly, but I don’t know exactly where they are right now.
They’re probably somewhere in the Great Elroe Labyrinth, but I have no idea beyond that.
It’s not like I want to take my eyes off the Demon Lord just to go see them anyway.
I can’t really complain, and they are improving my skills, so I guess we’ll call it even.
The improvements they make to their skills seem to reflect back on mine, too. The more they train, the more my skills go up.
If I can improve my skills without even lifting a finger, I assume that’s a good thing, right?
I don’t exactly love that they’re deciding stuff on their own, but I guess I’ll be the adult here and give them a pass.
Mm-hmm. As long as they don’t do anything crazy.
They won’t, right?
Of course not… I hope.
I’m getting a bad feeling about this, but I’m sure it’s only my imagination.
Yeah, let’s go with that.
MEETING OF THE PARALLEL MINDS #1: WE’VE GOT SKILLS!
“Let’s get some skills!”
“All of ’em! Gimme every skill!”
“Erm, well, we can’t get all of them.”
“Well, let’s at least pin down the different magic skills.”
“Agreed.”
“Wait a second. Fire Magic costs ten thousand skill points?!”
“Ten thousand? LOL!”
“Goes to show how bad we are with fire.”
“Boop!”
“You did it anyway?!”
“Never give up! Never surrender!”
“That’s the kinda line people say right before dying!”
“Well, we’ve got it now. But what are we gonna do with it? The level-one spell is just ‘Ember.’”
“And I bet it’s gonna take a looot of work to level it up…”
“Never ask questions!”
“I don’t think that’s part of the quote…”
THE OLD MAN GOES ON A JOURNEY
But it amounts to nothing more than a pittance, a far cry from what I am picturing.
In my mind, of course, I am imagining that being.
The spider I saw in the Great Elroe Labyrinth.
Compared to that wondrous creature’s mastery of magic, which bordered on artistry, my skills are crude and inadequate.
Is this all the strongest mage in the Empire—the world, even—amounts to in the end?
I cannot accept that.
I must be the strongest.
My magic must go further than anyone else’s.
Otherwise…
“Ronandt, you are the world’s strongest mage and I the world’s strongest swordsman. If we are together, especially with the hero in the mix, we need fear nothing. Certainly not the likes of demons. You and I have the strength to protect the Empire and the world.”
It was the previous sword-king who had spoken those words.
He was my dear friend and comrade.
From a young age, we swore to protect the Empire together.
And yet, one day, he vanished. Without a word, even to me.
The disappearance of the man said to be a god of swordsmanship cast a shadow of fear not just on the Empire but on all of humanity.
Which is why I must…
“Master Ronaaandt. My butt hurts.”
“Mind your manners, child. You are a girl, technically speaking, are you not? You mustn’t talk that way.”
As we clunk along in the rattling carriage, the girl sitting next to me, Aurel, shamelessly complains.
Still, I suppose it’s only natural that she would become sore after sitting in this uncomfortable carriage for so long. I have the Pain Nullification skill, so it matters not to me, but Aurel is unlikely to enjoy the benefit of anything similar.
“Whaddaya mean, ‘technically speaking’? Sure is a rude thing to say to such a lovely lady, if you ask me, pal!”
“Foolishness. There is little difference between man and woman, especially at such a young age. That is what makes it a mere technicality. If you wish to be treated as a lady, perhaps you ought to act accordingly.”
“Hmph!” Aurel grunts irritably.
Aurel is a child who is meant to be my attendant.
Her age is seven, or perhaps eight?
Either way, it matters not. She is still but a child.