77. A Deal With The Demon

“It is no use.”

The instant I gave the order, a flash of bewilderment crossed Eligos’s face, but she gathered herself again almost at once.

“Did you truly believe those down there would serve you as their master in earnest?”

Just as she’d said, not one of them moved.

“Shouldn’t we be doing something?”

“It’s not even an order from Lady Lillian, though.”

“Well, that’s true.”

The young spearmen only muttered among themselves, none of them rash enough to actually act.

“No. We’re not fighting. So settle down.”

The cavalrymen, too, just clung to their beloved mounts and waited to see which way the wind would blow.

“H-he says to kill him?”

“…Isn’t he just testing us, maybe?”

These were the archers, the first of the lot to give up on resisting me. For them, an order to put me to death was a hard thing to swallow.

“You see? The situation has changed. I am telling you to look well at the sorry state you are in now.”

“And what state would that be?”

When I asked, Eligos clicked her tongue and answered.

“Tch. Did I not tell you? Your body and soul are collapsing. They are no fools. Strictly speaking, they are clever — for they are the sort who cling to whatever is strong, only for as long as it stays strong.”

“Fair enough. Even I wouldn’t want some guy dangling helplessly from these floppy vines to be my master.”

“Just so. And so, now—”

“But see, that’s only what I would think.”

From the very start, the ones I’d expected to obey my command had never been them.

“Because they aren’t me.”

Eligos hurriedly turned her head to follow my gaze.

“All of you — fire!”

At Sylvia’s resolute command, the mage corps raised their staves as one. Fire bolts, frost bolts, lightning bolts… magic of every color came surging toward me.

“—?!”

Flustered, Eligos swung her black spear in a hurry, batting the incoming bolts aside. But her power to read the future locked onto only one target at a time, and against ten mages loosing spells each on a different beat, she alone was hopelessly outmatched.

— Fwooosh—!

The last lightning bolt slipped past the shaft of her spear and flew dead straight for the point between my brows. The violet glare flooded my vision, and I didn’t have the strength left to dodge.

— Ting—!

With a clear, crisp ring, the bolt ricocheted away.

“Just as I thought. My guess was right.”

A gossamer-thin veil of red shimmered around my body, rippling faintly. It seemed to be the same kind of thing as the red barrier that had so easily turned aside Seraphina’s attack back in the waiting room.

“A guess, you say?”

“Earlier, you said it to us yourself — that this place would no longer allow any harm to come to us.”

“And what of it?”

“Doesn’t that strike you as odd? You didn’t say I will protect you — you said this place will protect you. The Fifteenth Demon Realm may well be Eligos’s, but people don’t usually refer to themselves as a place, do they?”

Eligos said nothing. She only watched me, her expression unreadable.

In the meantime, I answered Eve’s flood of urgent prodding.

From that, I’d reached one conclusion.

“Every being in the Fifteenth Demon Realm — Eligos included — is incapable of taking any hostile action against us.”

I climbed down from Lillian’s vines, which had been holding me up, then drew the blade at my waist, and laid it against Eligos’s neck.

“Which means that even if I tried to lop your head clean off, like this — you couldn’t stop me.”

Maybe because the reasoning held, Eligos offered no resistance. She didn’t so much as flinch when my blade nicked her neck and drew the faintest trace of blood.

“Now then — shall we try making a deal again?”

“…You truly are out of your mind.”

“I get told that fairly often.”

“Is that why you talk the way you do, as well? You cannot seem to decide whether to talk down to me or to speak with respect — it wavers back and forth without end.”

“Our positions have switched now, so naturally my tone shifts with them. I can take your head off whenever I please… but it’s not as though I particularly want to, you see.”

I withdrew the blade at my leisure and slid it back into its sheath.

“Just as you surmised, the Fifteenth Demon Realm has recognized you as the victor and me as the vanquished. Should you wish it, I must die, and no matter what I do, I cannot resist you… and yet.”

Eligos calmly smoothed down Abigor’s mane and went on.

“There is one mistake you have made. You let me examine your body. You will die soon. That is a hopeless fact that will not change though you kill me ten times, a hundred times over.”

Was it just my imagination? Her crimson eyes seemed to glow an even deeper red.

“The only path by which you may live is to become my kin. You have not so much as the span of a single cup of tea left before your body falls apart. So tell me — how exactly have our positions changed?”

Eve’s follow-up jab only proved how right Eligos was.

“I’m not going to die.”

“You are bluffing.”

“No. I’m going to have you hand the Fifteenth Demon Realm over to me, become the master of this place myself, and come back to life.”

“…At this point I find myself genuinely curious. What in the world are you so certain of? Why do you imagine I would surrender all that I am to a mortal like you? Come — let me hear it.”

“Bael.”

The moment that name dropped, Eligos’s shoulders flinched, plain to see.

“Master of the First Demon Realm, and King of the Demon Realm. You told me that Bael gave you the black horse Abigor as a gift, but—”

“…”

“—as far as I’m aware, that’s not the case at all.”

Eligos’s eyes shook, beyond her control.

“…You — how does a wretch like you come to know that?”

“That, I can’t tell you.”

I smiled and tossed out my final offer.

“Hand the Fifteenth Demon Realm over to me. Do that, and I’ll add a new fragrance — one called Bael — to your perfume collection.”

“…Bael?”

Eligos’s voice trembled.

“You would give me… Bael?”

“You said it yourself — your ambition is to lock away every evil in the world in this place. If so, then sooner or later you’ll have to capture Bael, and you know perfectly well you can’t manage that on your own, don’t you?”

Eligos being master of the Fifteenth Demon Realm didn’t make her the fifteenth strongest of the seventy-two demons. The numbering was only a matter of sequence, not a ranking of strength.

But Bael alone was different. He ranked among the top three strongest of all the demons.

And yet she’d called him a friend? What did she take me for, some bumpkin she could put one over on?

“So follow me. If you don’t want to serve me as your master, then don’t. Call me ‘you’ as an equal, call me the bastard you’d love to kill — whatever suits you. I’ll do as I please too. But obey my commands. When it’s time to fight, I’m telling you — fight like you mean it.”

I hammered the last nail home while she deliberated.

“It’s not as if I want loyalty from you anyway. And really — it’s not as though you’re such a good person yourself, is it? You don’t only round up and cage rotten types like that shield-bearer from earlier, after all.”

At my barbed words, Eligos slowly climbed down from Abigor’s back.

“As you say, I have not taken in only the garbage who abandon their comrades. But I cannot claim there is a single good soul among those I have received. Even that mage there, who obeys your every word so meekly, I caught trying to steal my treasure.”

The mage she meant was Sylvia. I still hadn’t heard the whole story of why Sylvia had ended up imprisoned here.

“Whether Sylvia is a wicked person or not is something I’ll judge for myself from here on. And to my eyes, you’re already wicked enough.”

At my firm words, Eligos stared at me blankly, then broke into a short, hearty laugh, tinged with a hollow sort of resignation.

“Is that so? It seems I, too, am a demon to the very marrow after all.”

She lowered herself onto one knee before me.

“You asked me of my ambition. Then — what is yours?”

“To clear this entire world. Flawlessly.”

“Grander even than my own ambition to collect every evil.”

“That’s right. So follow me, and you’ll come to meet every last villain this world has to offer.”

“…Now that is a thrilling prospect.”

Eligos lifted her head a little and smiled. A demonic smile. No, the kind of smile only a demon could wear.

She closed her hand around empty air, and a single sheet of black parchment appeared. Lifting a fingertip, she carved letters into it in blood.

“You’re more meticulous than you look.”

“Hmph. Did you think you would carry off my property as easily as that? This is the handing over of demon territory. A price to match must be made certain.”

Eligos held out the parchment she’d inscribed in her own blood.

“Should you fail, your soul will be my plaything for all eternity. Will you sign even so?”

I sank my teeth lightly into my index finger.

“Gladly.”

Then I pressed my hand flat against the parchment.

The instant the declaration sounded, the whole arena spewed out a blood-red light, as if it were vomiting blood. From the sky, a pillar of pitch-black light descended and crashed down over me.

“Arden!!”

Lillian screamed and reached out to grab me, but that colossal surge of power had already swallowed me whole.

When the black light that had filled my vision slowly cleared, Eligos bowed at the waist.

“The Fifteenth Demon Realm is yours now.”

“Yeah? Then—”

But I never managed to finish.

The instant the taut thread of tension snapped, every protective barrier holding my body together collapsed at once.

“—Kugh! Ngh — AAAAARGH!”

A searing, monstrous agony unlike anything I had ever felt, the kind that made death itself seem a mercy by comparison, tore my brain to shreds. Splintered shards of bone scraped at my blood vessels, and my burned-out muscles screamed. Somewhere in that inescapable flood of sensation, my consciousness abruptly went black.

Ah.

I died.

Out of the darkness, my consciousness slowly surfaced. My last memory was nothing but the blood-red sight of the arena caving in on every side, and an agony that had felt like my brain melting.

So I… came back to life?

The first thing I noticed was how light my body felt. The bones that had been broken no longer screamed; the burned-out muscles no longer trembled. Even the crushing weight of the death sentence that had tormented me so mercilessly seemed to have lifted, as if it had all been a lie.

When I slowly opened my eyes, I was looking up at the familiar ceiling of the arena waiting room.

“Young Master, are you all right?”

There was a tangle of countless emotions woven into the voice that called me ‘Young Master.’

If it had been Elli, she’d have come flinging herself at me, bawling her eyes out.

“You’ve only just come back to life. You’re surely still dazed, so please stay lying down.”

But the voice tickling at my ear now and the gaze resting on me were far lower and calmer than that.

How terribly unfamiliar.

Sylvia was looking down at me, chestnut-haired and the very picture of refined grace. Her expression neat and composed, without the slightest trace of disorder, she stroked my hair with a touch as careful and tender as if she were handling a freshly bloomed petal.

I went to sit up, then froze at a strange sense of emptiness.

“…What exactly is going on here?”

A cool draft slid across my whole body. Under nothing but a single ragged mat, I was, in a word, stark naked. Not a stitch on me.

“Ah, that’s… The moment you received the Fifteenth Demon Realm, you collapsed as if you’d fainted. It’s already been three whole days. You’d lost so much blood in that time that your clothes were all stuck fast to you, so there was no choice but to… take them all off.”

Sylvia flushed and looked away.

Shivering in the chill, I gathered up the fresh clothes laid out beside me and pulled them on. The scars that had covered my chest and arms were gone without a trace, and only now did it truly sink in that I’d become master of the Fifteenth Demon Realm and come back to life.

“Three days, huh… I was out longer than I’d thought.”

I finished dressing and got to my feet. My body brimmed with more vitality than even my prime had ever held, and yet, for some reason, a nameless emptiness lingered in one corner of my chest.

It didn’t take long to realize why.

Ever since I’d taken over this body, there had been one boisterous voice that never once left my side, and now I couldn’t hear it at all.

There was no answer.

Instead, a cold red message I’d never once seen in my life came flying across my vision and lodged there like a dagger.