That was certainly a possibility I hadn’t considered... Naturally, my gaze turned to Corona, who’d been silent this whole time.
“...”
She didn’t seem particularly upset, but her face was pale, and her gaze was downcast.
“And there’s one more thing I know for certain about the Demon King,” the Spirit King added. “The Ruler’s Dungeon was made by one of the ancient Spirit Kings to seal away the Demon King. What’s more, someone tells me you’ve just escaped from there.”
As the king spoke, the door behind him opened, and two girls emerged.
“Lyun... Mio...”
“...”
“Rekka...”
Lyun said nothing, but Mio called my name in a concerned voice. For some reason, she and Lyun were wearing the same outfit now. But more importantly, she was shaking in fear.
“These two sisters told me about you.”
“...?”
The two were both wearing the same outfit, and Lyun’s halo was gone—evidently she could hide it like Iris could hide her tail—so they did kind of look alike, but I knew they weren’t related. I knew saying that, however, would just get both of them arrested, too. There was no way that would help, so I said nothing.
“I heard yesterday... that you came out from the Ruler’s Dungeon,” Lyun declared. Mio was hiding behind her back, looking at us like she wanted to say something.
Wait, Lyun heard that yesterday? Was it her that I’d heard outside of Corona’s door? The Spirit King must have taken our silence as affirmation, because his stern gaze grew even sharper.
“If the Demon King and his servants are behind the mana springs drying up, that would explain things.”
“Whoa, wait a second... Corona was in the Ruler’s Dungeon until just a few days ago! She can’t be responsible.”
Maybe that made it sound like I was admitting Corona was the Demon King, but if they were accusing us of something so ridiculous, I had to defend us.
“How could we trust the servants of the Demon King? Even if what you say is true, you subordinates could have done it.”
“We only arrived in this world four days ago.”
“It’s true that you wear strange clothes. Is this typical demon garb?”
Demons... So, the people here seemed to think we’d come from the demon world? With Corona in borrowed clothes from Tsumiki, we were all dressed in what we could consider normal for Earth. But to them, we were all wearing the same unusual thing. That was probably why they’d lumped us together like that and thought that we were the servants of the “Demon King.”
“I have many questions for the Demon King. Take them all to prison. See that they never leave it alive.”
The king ordered us to be taken away.
▽
I’d always thought of castle prisons as underground dungeons, but instead, we were kept up at the top of the palace. We were taken up another floor from where we met the king, but there was no staircase leading down anywhere.
Wait, I get it. Unless you could fly, you couldn’t escape. But with the mana handcuffs on, Lea couldn’t fly and neither could any normal sylpheed. They’d really thought this through, unfortunately.
We were separated from Corona and each given dingy prisoner’s clothes. Then we were all put in separate cells. Since we still had the mana handcuffs on, we could barely move. All there was to do was lie on the floor.
“Man... I always have the craziest experiences with you,” Tsumiki said.
“Sorry.”
“I wasn’t really asking for an apology.”
Then why did it sound like it?
“Still, what do we do now?”
“Hmm...”
I wasn’t sure what to tell Lea, who was talking to me from beyond the wall separating our cells. Really, there were two problems. One: how were we going to get out of here? Two: what were we going to do about Corona?
It seemed Corona was indeed the Demon King... That was a shocking reveal, but given the state we’d found her in, there was simply no way she’d had anything to do with what they were accusing her of with the mana spring. But even though I knew that, it didn’t look like there was much of a point in trying to convince the king and the soldiers. They didn’t really seem interested in evidence. There was no way they’d believe the Demon King wasn’t at fault.
So, should I just save her and run? It was the only option I seemed to have right now... but even if we did escape, what would happen to Lyun’s story? I couldn’t come up with an answer.
My thoughts, however, were interrupted when someone entered the prison and walked up to my cell.
“Is that you, Lyun?”
I could barely manage to move my head to look up at her through the bars. She was looking down at me with disgust in her eyes.
“...”
She was pulling Mio along behind her, and she still looked scared.
“Did you put your own clothes on Mio and say she was your sister so that they wouldn’t put her in prison?”
“That’s right,” Lyun said defiantly, as if trying to get a rise out of me.
That wasn’t really what I was mad about, though...
“Lyun... Mio... Why did you do this?”
“I learned that the Demon King had revived, so I told the Spirit King. That’s all.” She looked away a little. “Mio told me that you broke the Demon King’s seal. You deserved to be arrested.”
“We’re not from the demon world, and we’re not demons. We came from the same world Mio did. If you talked to her, you should know that, right?”
“I did... But she’s lost her memories, right? So maybe you lied to her. And if you can travel between worlds, maybe you could just go between the demon world and Earth as you please.”
“That’s...”
What Lyun was saying was crazy, but I didn’t have any way to disprove it.
“Either way, that woman really is the Demon King, right? If you really have nothing to do with her, you’ll be released eventually...”
Lyun sounded like she suspected us, but wasn’t entirely convinced. I could see it in the way she protected Mio, too. She didn’t really seem to think we were actually servants of the Demon King.
Corona, however, was a different matter. Lyun was absolutely sure she was the one responsible for drying up the mana spring and causing the Ghostdemon sickness to run rampant in Windsong Valley.
“Lyun?”
“...What?”
“Even if Corona was the Demon King, there’s no way she could have caused the mana spring to dry up.”
I then told her exactly how we’d found Corona and escaped the Ruler’s Dungeon.
“...See? Corona couldn’t have left, and she was so weak when we broke the seal that she collapsed. She didn’t have the energy to walk, much less do something evil like dry up the spring.”
“Shut up.” Lyun cut me off coldly. “She’s the Demon King. How can you believe her?”
The Demon King... The Demon King, huh? That was the problem. All the Demon King stood for to these people was pure evil. They were judging Corona off of that alone, without bothering to get to know her or anything about her. Granted, if someone had tried to introduce me to the Demon King and I didn’t know any better, I would’ve been just as quick to judge.
“Corona saved the world once.”
“What?”
“You know that Harissa is a sorcerer from Aburaamu, right?” I looked over towards Harissa’s cell. “Corona was summoned to Aburaamu by one of their summoners, and she saved their world. If the Demon King is pure evil, she isn’t the Demon King... She’s a hero.”
Maybe she was the Demon King who’d once threatened the spirit world. But that was a long time ago. She’d changed. Corona had become a hero.
She’d come back here after saving Aburaamu, and she hadn’t destroyed the world then. She even said she’d volunteered herself to be sealed away in the dungeon. If she’d been summoned to Aburaamu during the middle of her invasion of the spiri
t world, then maybe she’d agreed to be sealed away in order to stop the war? Half of that was just a guess on my part, but if nothing else...
“The Corona I know isn’t a bad person. I believe in what I saw.”
“Then what are you saying caused this?!” Lyun was yelling. “Are you saying it’s nobody’s fault? That the mana springs dried up on their own?! That the Ghostdemon sickness in Windsong Valley is natural? That my...!”
Lyun abruptly cut herself off and burst into tears. I was caught off guard by her sudden outburst, but at the same time, I could see why both she and the Spirit King were so eager to blame things on the Demon King.
Unfortunately, I didn’t know a lot about how this world worked. I knew on Earth, for instance, water traveled from rivers into the ocean, where it evaporated under the sun. That water vapor rose up into the sky, collected as clouds, and then tumbled back down to earth as rain. It collected in rivers, and then the whole process started over again.
But what if mana in this world wasn’t like that? Lyun had talked about purging mana in order to cure the sickness. There was also talk of “expending” mana to use magic. Even the plants also used mana to grow. But did they create mana via photosynthesis? Either way, the plants used mana to grow, make fruit, and spread seeds. And each of those seeds would need mana, too.
So, what happened if the mana here didn’t move in a cycle? What if it was used up forever once it came from the spring? That wouldn’t matter as long as there was an infinite supply coming from the spring. But now the spring had dried up. If that was because the spring had just run out of mana, what would become of the spirit world? There was only one answer: destruction.
This world couldn’t exist without the mana coming from the spring. The spirits’ astral bodies required it, and so did the plant life. If the basis of their whole food chain vanished, they’d have bigger problems than Ghostdemon sickness. It would be the end of the world.
And faced with that kind of crisis, they needed a reason for it. The Demon King dried up the spring. So, if they did something about the Demon King, the springs would come back to life. That’s what they believed because they needed hope. Maybe it was too easy to say that they were being selfish.
“...”
But I couldn’t do it.
“I don’t want to hear anything else you have to say.” Lyun looked away and pulled Mio closer. “Come on, Mio. I brought you here because you wanted to see Rekka. Hurry up and say what you need to so we can get back to the inn, okay?”
“Okay...”
Mio hesitantly stepped forward and kneeled down in front of my cell. She grabbed the vine bars and brought her face as close to mine as she could get it.
“I’m sorry... I didn’t realize this would happen... I told her about Corona when she asked me...”
“No, it’s okay. There was no way you would’ve known this would happen.”
I shook my head and told her not to let it bother her.
“...”
Mio then cast a quick glance back at Lyun. When she saw that she was looking the other way, she quickly slipped something through the bars into the shadows of my cell. It was Ellicia’s earring, which the guards had taken from me.
“...!”
With that earring, I could pass through walls!
“I told them it was mine, and they gave it back.”
Even if it was an item that gave you superpowers, it still just looked like normal jewelry. If Mio had said she’d lent it to me, or that I’d stolen it, and begged for it back, no one would have doubted her.
“Corona’s above... Your things are below...”
Mio whispered the bare minimum amount of information to me so that Corona wouldn’t hear, then stood up. When she saw that we were done, Lyun grabbed her by the hand and left the prison.
“Ngh... Rr...”
I forced my unresponsive limbs to move. I crawled my way to the earring and picked it up in my mouth. I wondered if it would really work if I wasn’t holding it properly... But thinking back on it, it had activated while it was in my pocket before.
All I could do was hope. This was my chance to escape.
But if we were all crawling on the ground like worms, they’d catch us and just drag us back. If we wanted a serious shot at this, I’d have to do something about the mana handcuffs that were sapping my energy.
But the only card I had to play was the wall walking ability the earring gave me. Without her strength, Lea couldn’t turn into Leviathan, so she couldn’t break them off... Wait, wall walking... When I’d passed through the wall in the Lord’s Dungeon, my legs had been in one room, my bottom torso in the wall, and my top half all the way out in the hallway... In other words, it was possible to pass body parts through a wall and not necessarily your whole body.
Could I try that? We’d used the wall walking ability to pass through ceilings and floors in the dungeon, too. We’d been calling it “wall walking” because it was convenient, but maybe you could use it to pass through anything? So, with any luck, I could just pass my wrists through the handcuffs...
Clatter!
The mana handcuffs fell to the floor.
“I’m so glad that worked...”
I sighed in relief. After waiting a few seconds for the strength to come back to my limbs, I stood up. Without a sound, I passed through the bars of my cell the same way and walked over to Lea’s.
“Rekka? How...”
“Shh...”
One by one, I removed everyone else’s handcuffs quietly so that the guards outside wouldn’t notice. I then explained that Mio had brought the earring to me.
“I see... So, Mio helped us out. What do we do now?”
“I guess we’ll have to escape first...”
It wouldn’t be easy to clear our names.
“For now, there’s just too much we don’t know. Like why the springs dried up, or what caused the Ghostdemon sickness... But we won’t be able to learn any of that in here.”
All I knew for sure was that the Namidares were the last hope for stories like this. If I didn’t act, this would come to a bad ending. And I couldn’t allow that. I didn’t know how I was supposed to save Windsong Valley or the spirit world, but knew I didn’t have time to waste in this cell.
For now, I needed to get out of the palace and away from the capital. I needed to keep going forward until I found a way to save the stories I’d gotten involved in. But there were two things that had to happen before that. No, three.
“First of all, we need to get our stuff back. Without Harissa’s staff, we won’t be able to leave this world. Then we need to save Corona... and if possible, take Lyun and Mio with us.”
It might be hard to persuade Lyun, though...
“Okay, off we go.”
There was no time to waste worrying about it. We quickly and stealthily got to work.
▽
Being able to partially pass through walls was surprisingly useful. I could poke my head through the floor and see what was below without anyone seeing me. If the room was empty, it was a breeze to take everyone with me to the floor below. And since I could look outside a room without being spotted, it made it easy to remain hidden. It also made it easy to take people by surprise.
The first place we headed was the room past the prison. That was where they kept prisoners’ belongings, as well as the interrogation tools they were going to use. Lea knocked out the guards as we searched for our stuff.
“Here we go,” I said.
Harissa’s staff, everyone’s clothes... even Hibiki’s glove. It was all there. These were the critical items we needed to return home. The only thing that was missing was the Hero’s Sword.
“You’d better not turn around, okay?”
“Right.”
Given the situation, we couldn’t exactly split up to go change, so we all changed out of our prisoner’s uniforms in the same room. Tsumiki, I’m really not going to turn around. You don’t need to tell me.
“Come on
, turn around already!”
Shut up, you predatory preschooler! Someone really needs to teach R to shut up one of these days. The sound of rustling clothing was already bad for my heart... No, it’s not like I was trying to listen!
Anyway, once we were all dressed and ready to go again, the next thing we did was use a combination of Harissa’s invisibility magic and my wall walking power to get to the top floor. It worked well, and we just knocked out the guards who seemed to notice anything suspicious. So between force and stealth, we managed to get to a heavily guarded cell on the top floor without raising any alarm. That was where we found Corona.
“Corona!”
“...Rekka?”
Harissa then dismissed the invisibility spell, so it must have looked to Corona like we’d appeared out of thin air. She sounded like she was pretty surprised.
“I’m impressed you made it out of your cell.”
“Mio helped. Come on, let’s get out of here.”
“...No, leave me here.”
“Okay, just hold on while I get you out... Wait, leave you here?!”
I shouted in bewilderment at what she said, and was immediately shushed by all the other girls. I quickly put my hand over my mouth and then turned back to Corona, making sure to speak in a whisper this time.
“What did you just say?”
“I said leave me here... I can’t cause any more trouble for you.” Corona looked down as she said that like she couldn’t meet my eyes.
“What are you talking about?! You’re not causing us any trouble!”
“I am the Demon King,” she whispered in a soft voice. “The Spirit King only suspected you because I hid who I really was.”
“...”
The fact that she’d been sealed in the Ruler’s Dungeon. The fact that she possessed the Demon Blade. Between what the Spirit King had said and Corona’s apology just now, I really had to accept at this point that she was the Demon King after all.
“Before you were a hero... you were the Demon King. Was that your secret?”
“Yes...”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
I didn’t mean for it to, but it probably sounded like I was blaming her. But still, I wanted to know what she was really feeling.
I Saved Too Many Girls and Caused the Apocalypse: Volume 7 Page 14