79. An Outing After A Thousand Years

We decided to head outside first. We couldn’t stay shut up in here forever.

“It’s over this way.”

Eligos led us to the exit, which lay in the waiting room across from the one we’d been using. A black portal shimmered before our eyes.

“By the way, Arden.”

“What is it, Sis?”

“I’m just trying to make sure I understood right — you’ve become the master of the arena now… no, of the Fifteenth Demon Realm, haven’t you? Right?”

“Well, yeah — that’s how it worked out.”

“But is it really okay for the master to leave this place empty? What if those bastards who stole the knight’s body come storming back in here while we’re away?”

She had a point. The entrance to the Abyss had originally been sealed off by a barrier that Kairon, the head of the house, had set up, yet those people already had a track record of breaching that wall and slipping inside. Even Eligos, the true master, hadn’t realized there were intruders at all until well after the fact. The security really was a mess.

When I had no ready answer to Lillian’s question, Eligos spoke up.

“Do not trouble yourself over that, O Saintess. The true aim of those wicked ones was never me.”

Somewhere along the line Lillian had become a ‘Saintess,’ and yet everyone but me looked as if they didn’t question it in the slightest. It didn’t matter right now, so I let it slide.

“While my body was taken from me, I was able to overhear their conversation. There were many bizarre words I had never heard in all my life, so I could not grasp it perfectly… but one thing was certain. They said that this time, without fail, they had to kill ‘Arden.’”

Every eye turned toward me. I’d already known all of it, so it barely registered.

“Yeah, that’s apparently the story. It really was dangerous, too.”

“The being they made manifest by borrowing my body was, they claimed, the ‘most powerful future me’ that I could never reach by my own strength alone. It was an unbelievable tale… but seeing the combat strength I had never been capable of before, I had no choice but to admit it.”

All of a sudden Eligos was really hyping herself up. I couldn’t let that one pass.

“You were strong, sure, but it wasn’t like you were some wall I couldn’t get past or anything.”

“…That wounds me, in its own way.”

My blunt reply made her violet eyes waver, just slightly. Sorry, but it was the plain truth. Beta had made a whole fuss over ‘Peak Eligos’ or whatever, but the thing hadn’t actually been all that powerful.

“You can get stronger. I’ll help you.”

Eligos nodded, gloom written on her face.

“All right, let’s actually get going now. We’ve got a lot to do once we reach the house.”

At that, Eligos suddenly started to fidget, then asked,

“…But do I really just place my hand here, and that is it?”

“Huh?”

“Don’t tell me you’ve never once gone outside?”

“Ever since I became master of the Fifteenth Demon Realm, I have not left this place a single time.”

“How long has that been?”

“Reckoned by the human concept of time… roughly a thousand years, perhaps.”

A thousand years.

To think she’d spent all that time shut up inside this arena. Now it all made sense: why she spoke in such an old-fashioned way, why her personality was ever so slightly warped. If anything, it was a miracle she’d kept this much of her sanity.

“You just touch it and it’ll launch you up to the surface on its own. Come on, hurry up and go.”

The instant the words left my mouth, Eligos stepped up to the portal. But like someone standing at the edge of a bungee-jump platform, she only wriggled her toes and dithered there for ages.

“An outing after a thousand years — my heart is racing. Is the air outside still clear? Or perhaps…”

“Ugh, come on!”

Unable to bear the frustration any longer, I grabbed Eligos by the shoulder and shoved her straight into the portal.

“Wagh?! Wai—!”

Eligos screamed as her form vanished into the black light.

“All right, next.”

I turned around and herded the rest of the group along. We Koreans are a hurry-hurry people; we can’t stand letting things drag.

The plain stretched out barren and empty, like it held nothing at all. At its center the earth gaped open like a hideous, torn-up wound, and around the pit three enormous greatswords stood driven deep into the ground, marking the points of a triangle. By rights the blue light pouring from those blades should have woven a barrier over the pit, but now they were nothing more than cold lumps of iron.

Big Sis Lillian and I drove the greatswords we’d pulled out back into their places.

— Ku-goong—!

A heavy tremor rolled through the ground as the swords settled back into their old slots, but the blue wall we’d been counting on never came. When we’d pulled them free, dark-red demonic energy had erupted from these blades; now the pit held nothing but an uneasy silence.

“…What do we do? Looks like it doesn’t just come back when you plug them in.”

Big Sis Lillian glanced around, flustered. If the barrier stayed down, the low-tier demons spilling out of this place might threaten the house, and that worry had settled into her eyes.

Just then Eligos, who’d been watching from behind, spoke up in a bored voice.

“What is there to fret over so? You yourself subjugated every last low-tier demon in this place, did you not?”

“I got the ones I could see, but I can’t be sure that’s all of them.”

Eligos’s lips curled into a mocking smile.

“That much will be enough. At any rate, it will take that garbage a month or so to swell their numbers and revive.”

“Revive? Are they your kin too, Lady Eligos?”

Eligos gave a displeased snort at Lillian’s question.

“As if. They are low creatures, trash to be found anywhere in the Demon Realm. Vermin with not the slightest interest in my will. When they judge themselves to hold the numerical advantage, they fling themselves forward without a care… but while their comrades lie slaughtered to the last and the stench of corpses fills the air, you may be sure they will do nothing but keep their heads down and flee.”

“So you don’t manage them separately, then?”

“My interest lies solely in collecting the wicked; I have none for low, filthy things like those. That is why I stationed this fellow here — so that, should it ever come to that, their filthy feet would never reach me.”

Eligos’s gaze turned to Devil, the Doberman curled up in the corner with his tail tucked. Whatever had become of his dignity as Cerberus, mid-boss of the second gate, a single glance from her flattened him to the ground.

To think it picked a fight against this.

First the spearmen, now this. Did Lillian’s words carry some power I didn’t know about? Maybe the Cult of Lillian hadn’t sprung up for nothing after all.

In any case, before we set off, I fired the signal flare I’d been given up into the sky.

“The coachman will spot this flare soon and come to fetch us.”

“Finally, home!”

“Yahoo!”

Lillian and Elli clasped each other’s hands and whooped with delight. I watched them for a moment, then looked away.

“You’re aware of this already, I’m sure, but the place we’re heading to now is the house I belong to. The place where my father — the one who disturbed your Fifteenth Demon Realm every single month — sits as its head.”

We’d come this time for the heir’s trial, but before that it had been Kairon who’d shown up in person. That was exactly why Sylvia and the rest of the minions had caught on the moment someone mentioned ‘the man like a lion’ and trembled all over.

Eligos’s reaction, though, was rather indifferent.

“That I do know, as you say… but it is no longer any concern of mine, is it? The master of the Fifteenth Demon Realm is you now.”

“Well, that’s true enough.”

“Ever since your head of house took over its management, the wicked have stopped coming entirely. Only now do I grasp the reason. With that brutish head’s barrier strung across the entrance, what wicked ones could ever have broken through?”

I was about to ask another question, then cut myself off.

Maybe Kairon’s aim was never Eligos to begin with.

It made me wonder whether Kairon, who’d managed the Abyss on the Empire’s orders, had known all along that a being as high-ranking as Eligos would never carelessly cross the boundary, barrier or no barrier. What he’d been wary of, perhaps, was the flood of uncontrolled low-tier demons.

Far off, I saw the household carriage racing our way. The coachman spotted us and came scrambling over in a panic, shouting.

“Young Master Arden!”

He sprinted up in one breath, then stopped dead at the sight of the bizarre procession lined up behind me. And no wonder. There was Eligos, who for all the world looked like some mysterious woman with a rare shade of violet hair, and Sylvia the mage, giving off her strangely eerie aura.

“Woof!”

And on top of all that, there was a dog he’d never seen before.

“…Your numbers have grown quite a bit, I see?”

“A few things happened inside, that’s all.”

At my answer the coachman fell silent for a long moment, his gaze sweeping back and forth between me and the new faces. Then, in a very cautious, very solemn voice, he spoke.

“…It seems you’ve gained something far more important than the seat of the heir.”

“What? What’s that supposed to—”

Before I could even ask what he meant by the out-of-nowhere remark, the rims of his eyes went faintly red. He seemed to have drawn his own conclusion already.

“There’s nothing whatsoever to be ashamed of in having lost to Young Master Valerian, who returned ahead of you. He has lived far longer than you, Young Master Arden, and over those long years the times he’s swung his sword must number several million more. Perhaps… it was only the natural outcome.”

Ah.

Only then did the situation click. Seraphina, Valerian, and Lucius, the ones who’d left ahead of us, must have gone home without telling a soul what had happened inside.

Before I could even explain, the coachman’s consolation-laced monologue rolled on.

“I agonized thousands of times over what words of comfort I should offer when you came out, but I was a fool. Seeing your face now, it seems I was the one more fixated on the result. To wear such a refreshed, clean face — one that looks utterly without regret or lingering attachment…”

No, that’s just because I literally got resurrected in a piping-hot new body a moment ago.

The coachman flung the carriage door open with grave resolve and declared,

“I shall convey you home in perfect comfort, without a single jolt. On the honor of this coachman of House Arne!”

True to the coachman’s bold promise, the carriage rolled along without a single jolt. But the atmosphere inside it was another matter entirely, more precarious than any jolt could ever be.

“Young Master, your shoulders look awfully stiff — shall I knead them for you? Or perhaps a lap pillow…”

“Move aside, Miss Sylvia. Attending to the Young Master is the duty of his exclusive maid — mine.”

A crackling standoff was unfolding between Sylvia and Elli, the two of them pressed in on either side of me. Sylvia slyly raked her eyes over the muscle of my arm and smacked her lips, while Elli glared at her like she’d hurl her out the window that very instant.

“…Grrrk, gri-iind.”

And to top it off, Leo, crammed into the corner, was glaring at me like he wanted me dead. He gingerly stroked the livid blue-black bruises Big Sis Lillian had left when she’d subdued him, yet not for one second did his eyes leave me.

Hey, what am I supposed to do if you glare at me like that.

The more devotedly Elli waited on me to keep from losing to Sylvia, the harder the veins stood out around Leo’s eyes, and the thicker his jealousy toward me grew.

“…The air is stifling. To think the surface I have come out to after a thousand years is nothing but the inside of some wooden box.”

Eligos kept up her lofty posture, as though the scenery of the surface world held no interest for her whatsoever. And in the corner farthest from her, scrunched into the very bottom of the carriage floor, Devil lay crushed and trembling.

“Heheh, what an absolute spectacle.”

Lillian, who’d been watching the whole thing with riveted interest, couldn’t hold it in and burst out laughing.

“When we get to the house and show them this scene, won’t everyone clutch the backs of their necks and keel right over?”

“…Maybe so.”

I dragged a hand down my face and turned to look out the window.

Every last one of them at my side was a piece of work. If Eve had been here too, would she have burst out laughing like Lillian? Or would she have watched Leo’s reaction and taken it all gravely to heart? There was no way to know.

Because Eve still gave no reply.

“Where are you going?!”

“Young Master!”

Leaving Elli’s and Sylvia’s voices behind me, I leapt down from the carriage.

Looked like I’d need to run a while and cool my head a bit.