by Fuse
“A-a vampire…?!”
“Silence, insect. I will judge you myself. Consider it an honor to die here!”
The next moment, beams of crimson light danced across the peak. His path of escape cut off, Laplace stood there helplessly as his body was torn to shreds.
………
……
…
Laplace took a moment to quiver as he retold the story.
“I tell you, it was downright scary. I thought that was it for me!”
“Um, yeah,” the boy replied, “but why wasn’t it?”
Kazalim merely smiled. “Like I told you. He doesn’t know how to die.”
“Oh, stop phrasing it that way. Anyone should have an escape plan and a decent amount of security backup during an op like that, y’know? But I’m telling you, I’ve just been dragged across the coals lately. Wish I could have something to brag about for a change!”
“Yeah, yeah. You know you’re a covert operative. If you’re fixin’ to be the hero in shining armor, maybe look for another line of work?”
“He’s right,” the boy agreed. “Laplace, the key to your job is completing your missions. How…gallant you look doing it hardly matters, does it?”
“No, true enough. It’s just, if I keep this up, I’m gonna start getting used to being a loser…”
“What’s the problem with that?”
“He said it. As long as you survive and win in the end, we have nothing to complain about.” Kazalim hardened her expression. “So what happened?”
Laplace nodded at her. “Right. There’s the rub. If this guy can overwhelm me that much, there’s no mistakin’ that he’s one strong dude. The question is, who is he? What’s a magic-born of that caliber doin’ in this supposedly high holy place? That’s the key to all this, and it could be enough to shake the very foundation of the Western Holy Church, huh?”
“A magic-born, huh…? And a high-level one, a vampire, conspiring with the Church…”
The boy nodded his agreement, unable to hide his surprise at this unexpected development.
“Whoever he is,” commented Kazalim, “he is dangerous. A man capable of defeating Laplace, to the best of my knowledge, would have to be far more than merely magic-born.”
“Yeah. I’m with ya there.”
“What do you mean?” the boy asked.
“Well, not to brag, but I’m not exactly a wimp, y’know? Even with the dryad I faced down before, if I seriously duked it out, I woulda won, y’know? I just fled ’cause I was on their home turf in the forest, and I didn’t want ’em callin’ for reinforcements on me. No real point going all out to try to kill ’er, either. But this foe was on another level, I tell you. It didn’t feel like some sub-demon lord to me—it felt like a full one, through ’n’ through. Someone like me, all I could do was run.”
Dryads were extremely powerful foes in forest lands, intrinsically capable of instant teleportation through the trees. The Plant Whisper skill let them “share” any and all information with others of their species, sending friends over to help their brethren anytime it was needed. This made them enough of a threat that Laplace opted to run away the last time he saw one, even though he could likely conquer one in a duel.
This guy, however, was different. “That was a monster,” Laplace declared. “Stronger than me, no doubt about it.”
The atmosphere in the room grew heavy.
“A demon lord, huh…? What do you think, Kazalim?”
Kazalim snorted. “I told you. He is dangerous. As far as I am aware, only one man could match that description.”
“Oh? Who’s that?”
“…The demon lord Valentine. One of the old guard, a man on par with myself during my glory years.”
“For real? ’Cause if he’s a match for you, I see I was totally right to flee. Lucky thing I trusted my instincts.”
Laplace shrugged. He had taken pains to break in when Hinata was away, only to stumble right up to a demon lord. The irony of it made him wince.
“…Hmm. A demon lord within the Church, huh? D’you think this Valentine’s actually the Holy Emperor, then?”
“Ooh, I dunno about that! You think a demon lord would raise a finger to protect humanity? President, what kind of guy was Valentine when you knew ’im?”
Kazalim closed her eyes and searched through her memories, tapping a graceful finger against her forehead as she recalled the vivid images of the past.
“This body may not show it,” she said, “but I’ve lived through three of the Great Wars that occur every five hundred years. Three of them. You can call me one of the old guard as well, but by the time I joined that club, there were already six demon lords ahead of me…”
As she put it, the demon lord Valentine had attained the title before Kazalim herself. His force was massive, more than worthy of the term vampire and the connotations of immortality weaved into it. To Kazalim, who had evolved from an elf (similarly known for longevity) to a walking dead, the thought of a vampire, the symbol of eternal life, also serving as a demon lord gave her pause.
“…To tell you the truth, Valentine and I have dueled to the death a few different times. It never reached a definitive conclusion, though. Once you reach our level, you can lay waste to an entire landscape without hurting yourselves at all. So instead, we adopted the tradition of talking over things and deciding by majority vote…and that led to the Walpurgis system. The fact that it takes three votes to convene one is a throwback to when there were still only seven demon lords in existence. Guess nobody cared enough to change it.”
She let out an elegant, ladylike chuckle. The juxtaposition between this and her other, masculine mannerisms was starting to unnerve the other two people in the room, not that she noticed. Then her face turned stony once more.
“And that’s why I feel safe in telling you this. That man, Valentine; he sees humans and demi-humans as nothing more than chattel. Even if the entire world was turned on its end, the idea of him serving as guardian is simply impossible.”
Laplace nodded his agreement as the boy thought over Kazalim’s assessment.
“All right. So maybe they forced some kind of agreement?”
“Are you listening to me, Laplace? Promises and agreements only work between two parties with equal force behind them.”
“Yeah…”
He didn’t seem too married to the idea himself.
“Plus,” the boy said, “I find it hard to believe that someone as closed-minded as Hinata would team up with a demon lord. I wonder if what Laplace ran into wasn’t a demon lord at all, but some magic-born whose name we are not aware of yet?”
“No,” Kazalim replied, “I do think that was Valentine. Those dancing beams of crimson light? That’s the giveaway. Valentine also goes by the name of Bloody Lord, and he can take blood and vaporize it into beams of magicules known as Bloodrays.”
As she put it, a Bloodray was a type of spread-fire particle cannon. By converting his own blood into magical particles, he was capable of firing it off in concentrated rays of force. The amount of magical power that process required meant it had to be a demon lord working it.
“So you’re saying that Laplace ran into the demon lord Valentine, and that Valentine would never willingly cooperate with human kingdoms. Wouldn’t that lend more credence to the theory that the Holy Emperor is Valentine?”
“Yeah,” muttered Laplace, “that would explain matters. I’d sincerely wonder how he managed to pull the wool over Hinata’s eyes, though.”
“Well,” Kazalim stated, “I suppose it remains the most convincing explanation we have. I do have my doubts and concerns about that… But the important thing is, we now know for a fact that Valentine, a demon lord, was lurking inside a domain that only the Holy Emperor has access to.”
“And you’re sure it’s him?” the boy pressed.
“I’m fully convinced. Laplace’s description matches my own memory, and from what I know about him, Valentine would never will
fully serve under someone else…”
“Yeah, there ain’t that many magic-born who could whip me, I don’t think. But if I’m dealin’ with the likes of this, well, I dunno how much more reconnaissance I’m capable of here.”
“Well,” the boy said, apparently convinced, “this is still pretty useful intelligence. Expertly done, Laplace.”
His face shined now, revealing traces of the joy he felt now that he had a tool powerful enough to potentially take down the Holy Church. There was a powerful demon lord among his enemy’s forces, but that didn’t seem to concern him at all. He was too busy thinking about what to do next with this intel to care. For him, formulating his next plan of action came as easily as figuring out the next epic prank to pull off on the kids next door.
“So that’s all the info I have for ya. But speakin’ of demon lords, what’s Clayman up to these days?”
The boy scowled at Laplace’s apparently unwelcome question, pulling his dark, shiny hair back with one hand. “Well,” he complained, “that wound up being a total failure.”
“Failure?”
“Yeah. Everything went fine up until we had Rimuru, that slime you mentioned, fight against Hinata. Then it all fell apart, pretty much…”
The boy briefed the others on how things unfolded. First, Clayman won over the demon lord Milim, thanks to the Orb of Domination the boy provided him. Once he did, they needed to test her out, to see just how deep the orb had put Milim in their thrall.
“So we tried to find a decent opponent to test her strength on. But instead of demon lords that we didn’t have much intel or even a location on, we picked Carillon, since he seemed to be the least intelligent out of them all.”
“Along the way,” Kazalim continued, “we thought we could have her destroy the capital of the Beast Kingdom of Eurazania. The city would’ve been packed with former enslaved humans, souls to harvest so I can become a true demon lord once more…”
He and the boy exchanged glances and sighed.
“We figured those souls would energize Clayman, too. Two birds with one stone.”
“But then Milim went out of control and declared war on the guy…”
And thanks to that, Carillon and the other targets had a weeklong head start to prepare for the battle—more than enough time to evacuate the capital.
“You know,” the boy reflected, “looking back at it, I guess it’s pretty hard to enthrall a demon lord with a magical item like that. You have to apply all these conditions to it, or else it’ll get all messed up.”
“I hope you would trust me more than that. They don’t call me the Curse Lord for show, I’ll have you know. That Orb of Domination was a perfectly crafted Artifact, one of my best pieces of work. It was Clayman who ruined everything.”
“Ah, no point dredging that up any longer. Anyway, we couldn’t collect any souls in the Beast Kingdom, so we decided to check things out in Farmus next.”
“Farmus? That kingdom?”
“Right. Thanks to that summoning ritual they invented, Farmus had a ton of otherworlders living there. I figured now was as good a time as any to pare down their forces a little. So I used a few back channels to give them intelligence on Tempest and whet the appetites of their greedy king and his advisers.”
“You wouldn’t believe how quickly they bit, either.”
That idea grew from Laplace’s previous report, back when their operation to make an orc lord into a malleable demon lord ran into setbacks. The idea was to whip Farmus up into enough of a frenzy to make them declare war on the Jura-Tempest Federation. With all the high-level magic-born in their ranks, Tempest surely had what it took to take out at least a few of Farmus’s otherworlders before going down for the count.
What’s more, Rimuru, lord of the monsters, was traveling abroad on his own business, and Clayman’s own minions had infiltrated Tempest lands. The boy had planned to use Rimuru as bait for Hinata; as far as he was concerned, this plan offered the best of both worlds.
“But then, well, nothing went according to plan. I mean, that slime Rimuru actually fled Hinata with his life intact. You can’t let your guard down around him for a moment. Kind of like you, Laplace.”
“Thanks for the compliment.”
“And as if that wasn’t bad enough…”
“By my prediction,” Kazalim continued, “that still wouldn’t be have been enough to keep Farmus from winning the war. If the monsters’ lord joined the battle, that would be another matter, but honestly speaking, it didn’t matter who won. We’d just work with the victors. The purpose of the war was to generate dead people—more souls to harvest. Then we could finally awaken our beloved Clayman to his true self. And then…”
And then it all fell apart. The entire Farmus force was wiped off the face of the earth by a single slime.
“It’s hard to believe, but it’s the truth,” the boy grumbled.
“In all the many times I’ve used my unique skill Schemer to formulate a plan,” the clearly angry Kazalim added, “I’ve never seen it go quite this far awry.”
“H-hang on a second! Just one slime? You pullin’ my leg? Did Farmus get caught that off guard, man?”
“I told you, you wouldn’t believe how quickly they bit. With a snap of the fingers, they had a force of twenty thousand knights and magicians on the ground. And just like that, they were all gone. We couldn’t confirm any survivors at all.”
“Whaa?! That’s ridiculous…”
The unlikeliness of it all had even Laplace at a loss for words.
“Oh, it hasn’t even begun to be ridiculous. Clayman surveyed the battlefield after it was over, and according to his report, there were absolutely no corpses left to be found. That could only mean a monster was summoned, or created, using the bodies as an offering.”
“If I cast Creation: Golem with that number of corpses,” Kazalim said, “I couldn’t even begin to guess what kind of monster would result. And not just corpses—the corpses of strong, well-trained fighters, in a battlefield laden with anguish and despair. The perfect casting environment! I would expect a sub-demon lord to result from it, at the very least.”
“Sounds like it. Although it’s the fact we couldn’t retrieve those souls that’s the worst of all. Clayman said there wasn’t a single one left floating around. So once again, we’ve failed to awaken him to the next level.”
The boy sighed in regret. He began to wonder whether conducting all these plans in parallel was coming back to bite him. He had focused on efficiency, only to put too many things into action at once—and once one tactic came undone, it affected everything else. Maybe, he thought, I was too greedy myself.
“So you’re sayin’ that this slime Rimuru sucked up all those souls for ’imself?”
“Is that some kind of joke, Laplace? No magic-born could do that! Not unless he is the seed of a demon lord.”
Kazalim was right. Even the most seasoned of wizards would have a hard time gathering twenty thousand souls and keeping them all under their control. Recklessly attempting that would cause the souls’ latent energies to unravel, quickly falling out of control. And even if it worked—
“Ha-ha-ha! No, I know what you mean, Laplace,” the boy said. “If he did snatch up twenty thousand souls, then he’ll have turned into one hell of a monster by now, eh? Was that what you were thinking?”
“Pretty much, yeah. Just a passing thought, really. Better not overthink it.”
Laplace’s mere suggestion caused them both to laugh at him. The concept was simply beyond comprehension.
Not even Kazalim knew the exact conditions required for making a potential demon lord into a “true” demon lord, although she could at least guess that it required a tremendous number of souls. They were currently limited to having Clayman experiment to see what results they got. Clayman had tried to experiment on the orc lord, of course, and everybody in the room knew how that turned out. And given that knowledge, the idea of something like a slime appearing out of nowhere and beco
ming a “true” demon lord was beyond even Kazalim’s imagination.
Laplace, of course, was absolutely correct, even if none of them knew it at the time. He began to wonder what kind of odyssey Clayman had been on while he was running for dear life from Valentine.
“So, ah, what’s Clayman up to right now?”
“Awaiting further orders,” said the boy. “At this point, we can’t do anything bolder than what we’re doing now. Luckily, Milim kept her end of the promise—she waited a week, and then she turned the Beast Kingdom into a field of ash. So we’re pulling back for now, to reconsider our strategy.”
“Oh? So things haven’t been a total failure, then?”
“Underestimate me at your peril, Laplace. I may have lost most of my force, but trickery remains my core asset.”
“It sure is. If everything went awry, even I would blow my top a little about that! So maybe things have been delayed a bit, but we did weaken the kingdom of Farmus tremendously. That pretty much puts the Western Nations in order, so it’ll be simple to seize them all.”
“And once that happens,” reflected Kazalim, “the Forest of Jura should provide a fine breakwater against the Eastern Empire.”
“Ah, I see, President. Negotiate with whichever side wins. Ain’t no need to destroy the monster nation at all, huh?”
That, in a way, was the true worth of the demon lord Kazalim’s Schemer ability. No matter how things turned out, she had a knack for concocting plans where her side wound up on top. Recalling that, Laplace was relieved to see Kazalim was still herself after all.
“Plus,” the boy continued, “with Milim defeating Carillon, we’ve proven that the Orb of Domination is an effective tool against this caliber of enemy. That’s all the force we’ll need to show. Beyond that, all we need to do is see how the other demon lords fall into place.”
“Precisely. That’s why I ordered Clayman to refrain from taking further action. The Eastern Empire’s going to do something either way—and with that comes our opportunity to recover some souls for ourselves.”