The Fervent Sand Baths

by Nagaharu Hibihana

  No wonder no one had been able to find it from above ground. The streams of sand probably looked like quicksand from the other side.

  Sunlight was filtering down from the spots where the sand fell. The demon lord’s castle, faintly visible from that light, felt unreal to me, like a dream or an illusion.

  I instinctively pinched my cheek, but it just hurt. I wasn’t dreaming. The reality of it all started seeping in.

  We had finally reached it— The demon lord’s kingdom, Hadesopolis.

  “Hey, brat! Move it!”

  Stupid fish, just let me bask in this for a while longer.

  Though I described it as a vortex, the slant wasn’t too harsh, so we were able to continue in our carriage without too much trouble. I let Roni take charge of the driver’s seat, while Rulitora and I walked outside the carriage, armed to the teeth. Rium was hovering above us on her flying disc.

  “Clena, is your MP alright?”

  “I should be fine... but don’t expect me to use any more spells.”

  The outside air was flowing in along with the sand, so we didn’t need the wind spirits for ventilation anymore. But Clena had been keeping those spirits around the entire time until we arrived here, so she had drained her MP to the point of exhaustion. We’d decided to let her rest inside the carriage for now.

  Our first order of business should be finding a place to rest ourselves. I asked Goldfish, who was still inside the basket by the driver’s seat,

  “Hey, Goldfish. Do you know any large buildings we could enter with our carriage?”

  “The demon lord’s castle.”

  “Besides that.”

  That was our final destination, so we wanted to take a breather before that.

  “The temple, then. It’s got a wide gate and there’s a courtyard within.”

  “You don’t mean... The temple of the Goddess of Darkness?”

  “I don’t see any other ones around, do you?”

  “Ceresopolis had temples for both the Goddess of Light and Goddess of Earth.”

  “This kingdom ain’t that blasphemous.”

  “...Is blasphemy the issue here?”

  “You tell me...”

  I looked at Rulitora, confused, but he just cocked his head at me. I mean, I didn’t think Ceres was blasphemous.

  “Anyway, just lead us to the temple.”

  “...Fine, fine.”

  We proceeded through the ruined city, led by Goldfish.

  “It’s not as run down as I thought it would be.”

  Once we entered the city, I was surprised by the good state most of the buildings were left in. The area under the dome must have been pretty well shielded from the weather over the years. Though that also meant human bones hadn’t eroded either, and were scattered all over the place.

  I glanced behind me to see if the girls were doing alright. Clena noticed me and sat up straight, hiding any apprehension. Roni over in the driver’s seat, however, looked nervous. Rium was stoically drifting above us, but looking closely, I noticed that she was avoiding looking down. I couldn’t blame her for being scared.

  Another thing that caught me by surprise was the aqueduct running beside the street—or rather, what used to be one. I looked inside to find sand running through it instead of water.

  According to Goldfish, magic had been used to circulate water throughout the city. That spell was still active today, and it was now circulating the falling sand instead of water. Goldfish theorized that this might have been preventing the streets from being buried under sand.

  Roni asked timidly from the driver’s seat, “Do you think the temple might be buried in sand?”

  “The temple’s completely roofed, including the courtyard, so it’s probably fine.”

  “It’s an indoor courtyard?”

  “Do ye think the temple of the Goddess of Darkness would allow sunshine into its gardens?”

  “...I guess not.”

  So that was how they showed their faith. When I thought about it, it made sense.

  Rulitora, who had taken the vanguard, called out to Goldfish without turning around.

  “With the state of these buildings, I can’t tell which is which... Are we on the right path to the temple?”

  “Dunno.”

  “What?!” Rulitora spun around, his voice in disarray.

  Rium came back down on her flying disc, and I impulsively faced his direction as well.

  “What do you mean, you don’t know?”

  “All’s I know is the way these streets were before everything came crashin’ down.

  I couldn’t tell ya where we are with the city like this.”

  “......”

  Rium was speechless. Though when I thought about it, we should have expected as much.

  I approached the carriage and asked Goldfish, “Then where are we headed now?”

  “If we head down the main street toward the demon lord’s castle, we should reach the city plaza. I should be able to remember how to get to the temple from there.”

  “Does the plaza have some sort of landmark?”

  “There’s a statue of the demon lord.”

  “I see.”

  In other words, if we didn’t know where we were right now, we just needed to get to a place we did know. I was uncertain whether the statue was still in one piece or not, but as long as the pedestal was still there, it should work as a landmark for the plaza.

  We advanced down the road for a while, but then a number of figures appeared before us.

  “...Residents?”

  “Of course not.” Clena took a jab at my inane question.

  Those figures weren’t humans, but human bones. They were armed with rusty hatchets and moss-covered clubs.

  “It’s my first time seeing something like this. Are they skeletons?”

  “Maybe they’re ghosts?”

  “There are spells to reanimate skeletons, but nobody’s around to do that here, so they must be ghosts.”

  So they were ghosts. I tried convincing myself that this was at least better than encountering zombies.

  As a Japanese person who believed that the deceased became “buddhas,” these guys would be tough opponents, but of course they wouldn’t be going easy on me.

  About a dozen skeletons slowly approached us, their jaws rattling. They were staring at us through their vacant eye sockets.

  Well, they probably couldn’t see us. But either way, they were definitely heading for us.

  I was worried about Clena. I had to take charge here.

  “Clena, stay inside the carriage. Rulitora and I can take care of this!”

  “...I understand. I heard that skeletons are pretty tough to beat, so be careful.” She knew she was in no condition to fight, and reluctantly nodded.

  “Let’s go, Rulitora!”

  “Understood!”

  At my words, Rulitora took up his glaive and sprinted forward. He closed the distance between him and the skeletons in no time, then smashed his glaive into several of them with the same vigor and blasted them to bits.

  Our opponents weren’t that strong. The only problem was their numbers.

  I, on the other hand, couldn’t bring myself to slice through human bone with my broadaxe, so I opted to use magic instead. It was time to summon some light spirits.

  I released the spirits of light, praying that they would guide the ghosts along the path to the Goddess. I may have just been meddling from the perspective of these former Hades residents, but I didn’t care.

  I launched a light spirit in an arc over Rulitora’s head and it circled around the skeleton, then attacked the skeleton’s skull. Of course, that wasn’t enough to beat it. I launched another five light spirits in its direction.

  The skeletons had their strength in numbers at first, but now they were trapped between my light spirits and Rulitora.

  “Yaarrgh!”

  Rulitora waved his glaive once more and sliced several more skeletons in half. They weren’t down
yet, though, and their upper halves started crawling toward Rulitora.

  Meanwhile, the skeleton whose skull I had cracked from behind remained on the ground, only twitching. I immediately shouted to Rulitora after seeing that.

  “Aim for their heads!”

  Instead of replying to me, Rulitora used his fist to slam into a nearby skeleton’s face. The skeleton’s skull met his fist with little resistance and broke into several pieces. The rest of its bones fell to the ground, clattering. It lay there completely still.

  So the skull was their core. I couldn’t even begin to figure out how it worked, but whatever controlled their movements was inside their skulls. Maybe it was the will of its former inhabitant, but they had attacked us without a warning, so I decided not to think too hard about it right now.

  “Let’s finish the rest of them off!”

  “Alright!”

  Rulitora flipped his glaive around so as to attack with the butt instead of the blade. I matched him by launching my remaining light spirits at the skeletons’ skulls. But then, perhaps lured by the sounds of battle, more skeletons appeared from behind the carriage.

  “Leave this to me...!”

  “Don’t step out of the carriage, Clena! I’ll go!”

  I couldn’t push Clena to fight while she was still recovering, but she probably wouldn’t have let herself stay put.

  I left the remaining skeletons in the front to Rulitora and dashed behind the carriage, broadaxe in hand. Fortunately, this broadaxe was built for smashing things. I swiftly crushed the skulls of the skeletons with surprisingly little recoil.

  The two of us kept fighting them off, and in the end we defeated about 30 skeletons. Once they were all gone, Clena jumped out of the carriage and called out to us in a worried voice.

  “...Are you alright?”

  “Yeah, no problem.”

  In reality, I felt pretty sick. I was still in shock from having to destroy so many human bones with my own hands. But I wouldn’t let it get to me since they had attacked us when we were simply walking down the street.

  They were monsters. I felt relieved thinking of them that way. Still, I decided to say my post-battle prayers more thoroughly than usual.

  “Rium, come down and ride inside the carriage. You too, Clena.”

  We needed to change our approach a little. I had Rium descend from her flying disc and sit beside Clena in the carriage.

  “Clena and Roni, you two watch the front. Rium, watch our back. You won’t be able to see enemies hiding in the shadows of the buildings from up in the air.”

  “I understand.”

  “Rulitora and I will walk on the left and right.”

  “Roger that.”

  We were now stationed in all directions. Roni needed to pay attention to driving and Clena was still exhausted, but we should be fine as long as Rulitora and I stayed alert.

  We proceeded in our new positions and encountered more skeletons. Fortunately, there were only five this time. Rulitora wiped all of them out with one roar and a swing through their skulls. We then slipped past the attacks of a few monsters and reached an open area at the end of the road. This was the plaza that Goldfish had talked about. This area hadn’t deteriorated, nor was any sand falling down from above, so the large statue in the center was still standing straight and tall.

  “So this is the statue of the demon lord you were talking about?”

  “Ah, yes... I know the road from here. Look up there to the right, there’s a shop with a display shelf outside it. Well, the remains of one, anyway.”

  “Oh yeah, I think I see it.”

  “That shop sold offerings, donated by worshipers. The street to the left of it leads directly to the temple.”

  “The earth temple in Ceresopolis had a shop like that, too. I guess it’s pretty common for temples to have a shop like that nearby?”

  “Anything wrong with that? It beats havin’ to offer that half-rotten food you brought.”

  “Well, you have a point.”

  We kept the conversation going as we proceeded according to Goldfish’s directions.

  We passed by the demon lord’s statue. The girls peered out from the carriage and looked up at the giant sculpture. It depicted a dignified man, well into his years and clad in armor.

  “...He has two legs, huh.”

  The first thing I looked for was whether he had a serpent’s lower half, but all I saw was two normal human legs. Maybe he was like those enemies in games who looked normal at the beginning, but changed into their true form in the middle of battle. Like, maybe his name would change from “Amann Naga” to “Something Naga.” Or perhaps Naga meant something entirely unrelated to the serpent deity.

  I didn’t know if I was going to get a meaningful answer out of him, but I tried asking Goldfish about it anyway.

  “Hey, what does Amann Naga mean?”

  “Hm? Well I don’t know every last detail, but apparently the demon lord’s family all used a certain word as part of their names. The ‘Amann’ part is that particular word, translated to the Hades language.”

  “And what about ‘Naga’?”

  “That was just his actual name.”

  So his name was really Naga?!

  “In the language of Hades, ‘amann’ means... ‘to believe,’ right?”

  “Ya know yer stuff, missy.”

  Clena had picked up a few things on the ancient Hades language from all her investigations on the desert kingdom.

  “It’s a word they used in rituals for the Goddess of Darkness.”

  “Mhmm. In the demon lord’s old world, one word could have multiple readings. So even if it weren’t pronounced as ‘believe,’ it still meant the same thing.”

  “Huh, what a complicated language.”

  “......” I was at a complete loss for words as I listened to their exchange.

  This was a man who was summoned to this world after his death, 400 to 500 years ago, and with the name “Believing Naga.” The man who was once feared as the “Demon Lord of the Sixth Heavenly Realm” had actually become a demon lord in another world.

  We left the plaza with the demon lord’s statue behind, while I was still overwhelmed at learning that the demon lord was actually Oda Nobunaga.

  On that note, the Five Great Demon Generals had all been summoned from the same time period, but unfortunately Goldfish didn’t know any of their real names. It seemed that after Nobunaga took the name of the demon lord Amann Naga, the rest of them took up nicknames such as the Dark Prince. The reason the rest of the 16 demon generals had nicknames was because of them as well. The thought of a Sengoku samurai calling himself the “Dark Prince” was a strange one indeed.

  He was Nobunaga’s son, but since he had so many of them, I couldn’t guess which one. The most famous three would be Nobutada, Nobukatsu, and Nobutaka.

  Putting that aside, we had finally reached the temple of the Goddess of Darkness—a mere shadow of its former self.

  “So this is the Goddess of Darkness’ temple...”

  “Choose yer words, mister hero.”

  The only temple in this city was the head temple for the Goddess of Darkness. I could picture it once being picturesque, but the light spirits revealed a layer of grime covering its walls and roof. The front gate was standing strong, but the windows were broken and the insides demolished. The windows weren’t glass, but wooden shutters.

  “Did the first sacred king do all this?”

  “This is the temple of the Goddess of Darkness. Of course he wouldn’t just leave it be.”

  “I can’t believe they had the time for that after coming here to fight the demon lord.”

  The temple was two stories tall, but oddly enough, only the windows on the first floor were broken. If the windows had shattered from the impact of the city sinking underground, then the second floor ones shouldn’t have remained unharmed. So someone must have done this on purpose... so they could break in.

  “Is it possible that people surv
ived after the city sunk, and looted the place?”

  The temple must have been storing emergency rations, so it made sense.

  “Yer talkin’ rubbish! It’s a temple, ain’t it?!”

  “That wouldn’t matter in times of crisis. Not to mention it was after the demon lord was defeated.”

  “Bah...”

  In other words, the Goddess of Darkness lost her authority after the demon lord’s defeat. Goldfish couldn’t think of a comeback, and grumbled at me in an agitated tone.

  “Well, we should take a look to see if we can camp inside instead of arguing. So let’s head in for now.”

  “No can do, gate won’t open.”

  Rulitora tried pushing the doors, but they wouldn’t budge. Well, if the gate could be opened so easily, then the windows would still be intact.

  “Guess we need to go through a window and open it from the inside. If it were just us then the windows would work, but we need to get the carriage inside, too.”

  Normally, Rium would be able to cross over on her flying disc, but everything in this temple, including the courtyard, was under a roof.

  “Roni and I will go, so wait out here.”

  “Y-yessir! Allow me to assist!”

  Just in case monsters were inside, I armed myself and chose Roni to come along, since she was the most agile. The desolate air around the temple was making her frightened, but she was still the most suited.

  “Don’t worry, Roni. Just hide behind me and let me know if you see anything suspicious.”

  “O-okay...”

  I patted her on the shoulder in encouragement, and then we crawled our way inside the temple. Rulitora should be able to handle protecting everyone else outside.

  The room we entered really looked like it was ransacked. I was reminded of the deserted houses I snuck into as a kid.

  Roni clung to my back in fear. But she was still surveying her surroundings carefully, so I trusted her to watch my back.

  “Looks like there are no monsters wandering around in here.”

  “P-please don’t say that, Sir Touya.”