by Fuse
Thus I decided to examine what nations generally did in times like these. Yohm and Elen’s gang wouldn’t know anything about politics or government. For something like this, Vester was my man. Soon, there was a knock on the door, followed by Diablo bringing the former dwarven minister into my chamber.
“I hear you called for me, sir?” he asked when he set eyes upon me. “And let me say, I am so glad to see you safe after all these calamities that befell us!”
Yeah, that ain’t the half of it. Not that they were over yet, either. I decided to cut straight to the point.
“You said it. But I wanted to ask you: How do human countries around here wage war against each other?”
“…Ah, you are curious about Farmus, then? That is a rather thorny issue to deal with.”
Vester then began discussing the rules of war with me.
First off, Western Nations countries that were members of the so-called Council of the West generally didn’t fight one another. Even if they did, it’d have to involve formal declarations of war and a litany of strict rules. Failure to adhere to those would put the full weight of the Council against you—meaning every other nation in that western region, pretty much.
What about nations not involved with the Council, though? Assorted scenarios could play out in that case, but basically, the Council never got involved no matter who won or lost. If one side engaged in behavior that was cruel and inhumane beyond reason, however, it would certainly torpedo that nation’s reputation within the Council. Just because rules didn’t apply to the other side, that didn’t mean you could do whatever you wanted. Trying to navigate the boundaries of this seemed like a big headache to me.
On the other hand, though, if you were invaded by another nation, that was a different story. You had the right to request rescue support from the Council, and that was one major reason why the Council had so many small kingdoms represented among its ranks.
Larger nations, such as the Dwarven Kingdom and the Eastern Empire (full name: Nasca Namrium Ulmeria United Eastern Empire), naturally weren’t involved with the Council. Get stormed by one of those outfits, and the Council was ready to handle that with a unified front—but if you’re the one storming them, the Council was totally hands-off. You might even get kicked out of the Council for needlessly riling a superpower like that.
Having it laid out for me like that, it sounded like the Council—this sort of United Nations–like presence in this world—was based pretty heavily around the idea of weaker nations helping one another out. Considering the ever-present threat of monsters, I suppose, people there had learned that wars among mankind were pointless.
Now I had some level of understanding to work with. Within that framework, the Kingdom of Farmus had staged a single-handed invasion of Tempest. Was this a holy war, involving the full will of the Western Holy Church? That was a thornier question.
“That’s exactly the issue,” Vester advised. “If Farmus had won or at least forced a stalemate, the Holy Church could’ve driven a litany of other nations to join the battle. The way things are now, though…”
…Yeah. It took one slime to wipe out the entirety of Farmus’s military force. We’re talking literally three survivors. It had to be one of the biggest routs in all of history. Plus, they invaded a country with ties to Blumund. Was it really worth picking a fight with a nation like ours? Beating us wouldn’t earn them anything; it wouldn’t make anyone move from one side to the other. And winning was a pretty big long shot from the start…
“So,” I said, “if the Holy Church abandons Farmus, is it safe to say no other human nation will be willing to stage a military operation against us?”
“The Dwarven Kingdom isn’t part of the Council, but they do keep up on their internal goings-on. From my perspective, I would not expect any moves from them at all.”
Well, huh. Maybe we’re in a better situation than I thought.
“Hee-hee-hee-hee-hee! I see, I see. Perhaps a show of force would be advisable against the Western Nations…”
“Hang on, Diablo. I have my own thoughts about that.”
“My pardons.”
“Nah, nah. I think I’m gonna ask you to make Farmus capitulate to us.”
“Ohhh! I would be glad to take that duty.”
I nodded at him as I thought this over. Once we had Veldora resurrected, the Western Nations and the Church would be essentially bound and gagged. We could use that opportunity to prove we weren’t their enemy. Farmus was probably going to get cut out of the Council before long, besides.
Report. I believe matters will proceed in the way you predict.
Good. With Raphael, Lord of Wisdom and all that backing me up, it had to be a sure thing.
Now, how were prisoners of war handled in this world? Unfortunately, even Vester didn’t have much to offer. Wars just weren’t that common, and POWs were generally exchanged for other prisoners, for money, or for other rights and privileges.
The idea of a nation taking a rival’s supreme leader prisoner was practically unheard of. Such a talentless king would quickly lose the faith of his people, no doubt, so I’d be surprised if anyone accused us of regicide or some other dirty deed like that. I suppose we could say that he died in battle, but it’d be much better to give him back alive, I think.
“All right. Thanks for the advice. I’m glad you’re here for us, Vester.”
“Oh, no, it’s nothing that impressive,” he replied, visibly blushing.
His personality had mellowed out considerably here in Tempest, making him kind of a cheerful, intelligent man with a darker side that occasionally rose to the surface, but blushing definitely did not fit his look. There’s nothing cute about a middle-aged guy acting all bashful. “Ah, I almost forgot: Is it all right if I report on these events to King Gazel?”
“Sure, no problem. Tell him to give me some feedback if he has any.”
Even if we tried to hide it, they’d find out in a flash. Better to just give him the whole, unvarnished truth.
“Very well. I will be off, then…”
He was still blushing when he took his leave. Then something clicked in my mind. Wait a second. What if he wasn’t being bashful at all? What if he was just that, you know, charmed by me? I did have my mask off.
Wait… No way…
Assorted concerning scenarios flashed through my mind. I’d just have to hope none of them came to fruition.
The moment Vester left the chamber:
Report. Analysis and Assessment of Unlimited Imprisonment is complete.
Well, perfect. Thanks, Raphael. Let’s go outside and get Veldora out of there pronto.
“I’ve got some business to take care of, so I’ll be gone for a bit. I don’t need anyone to accompany me. Shuna, show Diablo around town for me.”
“Very well. Take care.”
“Thank you for your consideration, Sir Rimuru.”
“No prob. See you later.”
Before long, I was deep inside the Sealed Cave—the very place where Veldora was being held, a region I didn’t even let Gabil and his army come near. Unleashing the dragon in the middle of town was likely to cause some, uh, consternation, so I went down here instead. Besides, even when sealed, the area around him was so dense with magicules that people couldn’t even come near the place.
For me, though, it was easy. It used to take several minutes to pin down the coordinates for Spatial Motion, but now it required no more than a passing thought to wrap it up. In an instant, the two points in space were connected, and a hole opened up before me. One hop was all it took to reach my destination.
Okay. Let’s review where we’re at right now.
I’ve evolved into a demon lord, and my skills have changed quite a bit as a result. Essentially, all those skills (Spatial Motion included) have been brought together under the same umbrella—an umbrella called Raphael, Lord of Wisdom—making them all much easier to use.
The ultimate skills Raphael’s powers involved (quoting f
rom him) were: Mind Accelerate, Analyze and Assess, Parallel Computation, Cast Cancel, All of Creation, Combine/Disassemble, and Ability Adjust. The unique skill Deviant, an old memento from Shizu, was gone, now integrated into Raphael’s own abilities. Maybe that was why he was a lot more talkative than my old partner?
Incorrect. That is unrelated.
So it wasn’t “just my imagination” this time. And that must mean… Ahhh, but let’s not pursue this right now.
By the way, Mind Accelerate lets me extend my rate of thinking by up to a million times. It’s a little hard to picture that with words alone, but crank it up, and it feels like time’s stopped for you. Thanks to all these skills, I could now trigger multiple magics at the same time, with no more than a fraction of a second’s delay between them. It was virtually incomparable with the Great Sage.
The ultimate skill Belzebuth, meanwhile, encompassed Predation, Stomach, Mimicry, Isolate, Rot, Soul Consume, and Food Chain. Soul Consume was a new power for me. Merciless, a power I thought could come in pretty handy, was subsumed into the others—a pity, but it was still active within Soul Consume. I still needed to break my target’s heart before I could take their soul, but it was pretty handy in practice anyway.
Another interesting thing was that Receive and Provide had merged into Food Chain. It set up this entire skill tree of sorts to tap into, with myself at the very peak. Monsters below me could provide their strength to back me up, and I could divert some of my own strength down to them. It was ridiculous—and even now, it was doing its thing, granting me access to the skills the town’s monsters picked up in their evolution. I was letting Raphael take care of all that for me.
That rounded out my skill set, and even I was shocked at how superpowered it was. There’s no way I could take full advantage of this stuff. Raphael himself was subject to Food Chain, too, placing him in the midst of an Ability Adjust. If these skills were gonna change all the time, why bother remembering them?
But enough about me. Let’s turn our attention to Veldora.
This has been a long time coming, hasn’t it? Nearly two years, in fact. But I was finally ready to keep my promise. I still needed to find a vessel of some kind for the guy, but I had a feeling one skill or another would take care of that for me.
I’m bustin’ you outta there, Veldora!!
Then I placed the order with Raphael.
The moment I did, a virtual tempest of magicules swirled around within my Stomach. If I hadn’t evolved Belzebuth, I’m not sure the Stomach would’ve been able to take the strain. It felt like a near-overwhelming gale had burst out of nowhere.
“I, the great and venerable Veldora, have returned!!”
“Venerable”? Dude, is this some new way of talking you developed while you were in here?
“Hey!” I said, trying to keep things light. “Long time no see! How you doin’?”
“…You seem to be treating this great resurrection of mine rather flippantly. But it came more quickly than I expected. I had anticipated a while longer.”
“Yeah, I’ll bet. Analyzing the Unlimited Imprisonment took a hell of a lot of time in itself. The way I was doing it, I’d probably need another hundred years or so, I’d guess. But then my Great Sage kind of evolved on me, so…”
“Evolved? No wonder, then. Even my unique skill Investigator told me to expect another century or so. All I could do was send the information I gleaned from the inside to your Sage, but the flow of data vastly accelerated itself out of nowhere, so I was wondering what was afoot. A skill evolving, though…? What happened there?”
I answered the question as best I could—I became a demon lord, my unique skill became an ultimate skill, the Sage became Raphael, and I’m one lean, mean, analyzin’ machine now.
“Ahhh… I see. And you’ve become a demon lord in the span of under two years?! An awakened demon lord is not some imposter pushover. Even I would have problems against such a foe!”
By “awakened,” I assumed he meant a true demon lord. When a potential seed goes through the Harvest Festival, that apparently “awakens” them—not that it really matters to me at this point.
“Yeah, well, um… What can I say, huh? I was always kind of like a genius, wasn’t I? Even back then. No regular dude would be reborn as a slime, after all. I kept on naming people, too, and that made me evolve really quickly. I mean, really, it was…easy.”
“…You’ve taken far too many risks, you fool. No wonder I noticed my magical energy being taken from me when I wasn’t paying attention. Whenever you lacked the energy to carry out your ridiculous naming sprees, you took what you needed automatically from me. Of all the foolish things! It was such a blow to my analysis performance that I feared it would extend my imprisonment. But your evolution saved us this time, then? Never did I ever anticipate anything of the sort!”
Huh? So… So I survived all those epic naming sessions mainly because of Veldora? I mean, I did think it was kind of weird, pulling off all these evolutions at what seemed like a minimum of risk. Definitely gotta knock off the naming jags in the future. Hell, no wonder the demon lords didn’t immediately set out to build a vast army for themselves. Now it made sense.
But what’s done is done. Let’s just call it all part of the plan, huh?
“I bet you didn’t. Well, I planned it that way the whole time. Did you receive any gift from my evolution, by the way? The World Language said something about everyone in my spiritual genealogy getting something…”
We should have been connected that way, too. But instead, I felt an audible huh? from my Thought Communication. Veldora fell silent for a bit.
Then:
“Ah! Ahhh! So this is an evolved skill! My unique skill Investigator has become the ultimate skill Faust, Lord of Investigation! The power to reach the ultimate truth, the final goal of my boundless research!!”
He sounded pretty excited about it, dancing around a bit in the cave. I dunno, maybe he’s the type who’s slow on the uptake. His teacher probably would’ve written “too inattentive” on his report card. But whatever.
“Oh, um, that’s great. A lot easier to evolve than you thought, huh?”
“You fool!” came the exasperated reply. “Not even I was aware of such phenomena. It is not a lot easier than I thought!”
No, I suppose not. True demon lords were a rarity, after all, and I suppose it wasn’t such a common thing.
We spent the next while catching up on stuff, sharing our knowledge with each other. Really, we could’ve spent all day down there, but I wanted to get Veldora out into the open sooner or later.
“Hey, so now that the seal’s gone and everything, you wanna go see what’s going on outside?”
“Ah, yes. But what will we do about a vessel to serve as my physical body?”
“I think we can find a way to make that happen, but there’s something I want you to promise me, all right?”
“Oh? What is that?”
“Your aura’s too huge. I want you to hold it back for me. We have human beings in town now, as well as a variety of weaker monsters. If you show up in resurrected form over there, it’s gonna wreck everything, won’t it?”
“…Ah. You really have become a king, haven’t you? All right. You have my word!”
Obtaining this firm promise was the whole reason I went so deep into this cave in the first place. I needed to be sure he could keep that crazy flow of magicules in check. Once I had his word, I unleashed my brand-new Enhanced Replication, or whatever it was called. This was the vessel I had in mind for Veldora—an exact duplicate of me, handsome face and everything.
…Well, huh. No wonder Vester fell for me. I had matured from before, taller and more grown-up. Bewitching, even. Must be the evolution affecting me.
“Hmm. Is that your intention…?”
“Yep. Use it as your vessel.”
“Gah-ha-ha-ha-ha! I see! Very well, then!”
With his blessing, I transplanted Veldora’s spiritual body—his heart,
as it were—from my Stomach to the Enhanced Replication. He didn’t even have an astral body at the moment, making the operation very unstable, although it’d gradually rebuild itself as part of Veldora’s spiritual life process. My Replication should be the final defense he needed for now…or so I thought.
Report. I have an important development to share.
Whatever Raphael had, it sounded important. Something to do with Veldora, perhaps.
Report. I have confirmed the establishment of a “soul corridor” between my master and the individual Veldora. After consuming the remains of the individual Veldora and analyzing them, I have obtained the ultimate skill Veldora, Lord of the Storm.
That was some pretty heady crap that Raphael was reporting on, as if it was the day’s weather. So shocking that I lost my words for a moment. Apparently, Belzebuth consumed the dregs of Veldora that remained in my Stomach, obtaining part of its powers for itself. This firmed up the link between our souls, transforming it into this new power.
The ultimate skill Veldora consisted of Summon Storm Dragon, Restore Storm Dragon, and a family of storm-related magic. Summon Storm Dragon called forth Veldora in dragon form, the way I remembered him. He was a spiritual life-form now, but once he was fully recovered, I should be able to summon him in that shape as well. I can summon only one dragon at a time; if I summon another, the first one disappears. Maybe I could take advantage of this for transport purposes? It seemed feasible.
Restore Storm Dragon copied Veldora’s memories into my own mind. In other words, if Veldora died for some reason, I could replace him—or, to put it another way, the “real” Veldora would reside within my own soul. That was what allowed me to summon him whenever I wanted, I suppose.