80. A Reason To Grow Stronger

The night had grown deep. The only sounds breaking the silence of the vast forest were the crackle of the campfire and the occasional chirp of an insect somewhere in the grass.

Maybe it was from leaping off the carriage and running myself ragged, but while my head had cleared, my stomach was honestly complaining about how empty it was.

“Young Master, please stay seated. This sort of thing is my job.”

The coachman flatly refused my offer to help set up camp. He rolled up the sleeve stitched with the family crest and strolled off alone, unhurried, into the thick underbrush.

“Are you sure it’s all right not to go after him?”

Elli stared at the spot where he’d disappeared, worry in her eyes. Sending him off into the dark forest alone and unarmed seemed to weigh on her.

“Don’t worry. He might just look like some potbellied old man, but he’s served at Father’s side for over ten years.”
“Whoa, really?”
“Of course. He was around even before I left home. Though back then he was a lot spryer than he is now. More hair, taller, too… Time really is a frightening thing. Honestly, when I came back home and saw the old man was still with the house, I was floored.”
“Why?”

At my question, Lillian answered as though it were the most obvious thing in the world.

“Because he’s incredibly strong.”
“Strong?”

That earned me a look of plain surprise.

“How do you not know that? The old man used to be the grand commander of our house.”
“…If you mean the house’s Knight Commander, isn’t that Sir Bato, the examiner of the Trial of Arms?”
“Old Bato’s the Knight Commander, sure. But you know how it is. Old Bato’s long past the age to still be on active duty. These days he’s running on sheer passion alone. Things like this make me think Father’s got a surprisingly straitlaced streak to him.”

True enough. Bato was far too old to be called Knight Commander. The head of the house knew how long the man had given to the family and said nothing about it, so I supposed everyone else just let it slide.

“And what does that have to do with him being straitlaced?”
“Well, the very first thing I was ever taught was to call him not ‘Papa’ but ‘Father.’”
“…Yeah, that’s pretty straitlaced, all right.”
“Anyway, there’s always been a rumor that when it comes to raw fighting strength, that coachman is a cut above Sir Bato. Probably still true even now… yeah, looking at that, I’d say I’m right.”

The moment I turned to follow where Lillian was pointing into the forest, my jaw dropped. The coachman was walking back toward us with an enormous wild boar, easily twice his own size, slung over one shoulder. He had plainly caught it bare-handed, without so much as a weapon, and its neck was snapped clean.

“I’ll have the meal ready in no time, so please wait just a moment.”

.

.

.

His hands were a wonder to watch. The way he skinned the hide and broke the carcass down into cuts with a single dagger was plainly not the work of a man who’d done it once or twice.

“This part still has too much blood in it — too gamey, not fit for you to eat, Young Master. And this cut is tough enough to make your jaw ache, so it’d be better off thrown to that dog over there.”

The tough lump of meat the coachman tossed aside without a second thought flopped down in front of Devil. Normally his pride would have had him growling, but this time he read the room, quietly chewed it up and swallowed.

“Young Master, this is seriously incredible! The juices just—!”

Grease smeared all around her mouth, Sylvia tore into the roasted meat and blurted out her praise. Her appetite was the same whether down in the Demon Realm or up here on the surface. Watching her eat like this called to mind the others I’d left behind at the arena.

“Are the girls back there eating as well as you are?”

Sylvia paused her chewing for a moment and looked at me.

“They’ll be wolfing down every last scrap they can get, I’d bet. All they ever had at the arena was dried-out, withered bread. Still, thanks to the vegetables you left behind, Young Master, they’ll get by just fine.”

“Correction, please, Sylvia. Arden didn’t do a thing. Those vegetables were all grown with my magic!”

Lillian, chomping away at her own meat beside us, cut in. Sylvia wiped the grease from her mouth and answered with a bright little smile.

“Of course. We’re most grateful to you of all, my lady.”

“Yeah, yeah. Big Sis is just the greatest.”

At my flat, dry retort, Lillian let out a snort of laughter.

“Heheh, what can I do if it’s the truth? And I passed my ‘secret soup recipe’ down to them perfectly before we left, so don’t you worry too much.”
“Okay, that part I’m a little envious of.”
“I’m not telling you!”

And so, amid the childish bickering, the warm and convivial meal wound down. Before we knew it the night had deepened, and it was time for us to turn in one by one.

“Young Master, I’ll stay up through the night and keep watch. Rest easy and sleep.”

The coachman dug in his heels again, but the rest of us piled on to stop him. We couldn’t very well disregard the old soldier’s stamina, not after he’d driven the carriage the whole way up to the surface.

“Understood. I’ll do as you say, Young Master.”

In the end, hounded by everyone’s insistence, the coachman threw up both hands in surrender and lay down to sleep.

“I’ll take the first watch.”

I volunteered for the first shift of the night watch because my head had gotten fairly tangled and I felt the need to sort it out. Contrary to my plan, though, Eligos raised her hand.

“I shall stay with you.”

There were no real grounds to refuse, so I nodded. We lit a campfire a little ways off from where the others slept and sat down side by side.

With my stomach full and everything quiet around us, I finally had a moment’s ease to take another careful look at the woman beside me. Shining violet hair, smoldering red eyes, and a noble air that matched her stiff, old-fashioned way of speaking.

…She is a beauty, I’ll give her that.

Back in my game-playing days, why had the developers never shown this exquisite character to the players?

She’d have been wildly popular.

Even I was seeing Eligos’s bare face for the first time, but more than that, I’d never once dreamed she was a ‘woman.’ In the game, her voice had been an unmistakably gruff man’s.

Were that massive frame and the heavy full-body armor themselves some kind of device meant to hide her gender?

“You have something on your mind, it seems.”

As I kept stealing glances, Eligos spoke, her tone indifferent, her gaze fixed on the burning logs.

“Yeah. Was it that obvious?”
“You had no intention of hiding it anyway, had you? If there is something you wish to ask, then ask.”

With her permission given, I decided to lay out the questions I’d been holding inside.

“I’d like to hear the details about the intruders. Things were so urgent that we never got to have a proper talk about it.”
“I believe I told you all of it last time. By what means, I cannot say, but they invaded my Demon Realm, and just how they seized my body is something I myself do not fully understand. By the time I opened my eyes, I had simply already lost control of it.”
“That part’s fine. It’s all in the past anyway, and those bastards will show up in front of us again.”
“Did you not strike them down?”
“I did. But they’re sure to come back. Because I’m still alive.”
“I find myself curious just what you did to make them so hung up on you.”
“You’re telling me.”

Lillian, sure. With that cheat-tier ability of hers to extract DV, of course she’d sit at the top of their kill list. But what on earth had they seen in Arden to fixate on him this hard? A fair stretch of time had passed since I’d taken over his body, and I still hadn’t found a single notable, defining quirk that Arden himself possessed.

“From the look on your face, it seems you truly do not know why they hound you.”
“No, I don’t. Lady Eligos, do you think you might be able to tell?”
“That…”

She looked me over slowly, from head to toe.

“Your bone structure is not bad.”

And just like that, she’d sized me up.

This might be a little embarrassing.

I felt needlessly self-conscious.

“…How should I know? How could I possibly know?”

At last, her appraisal finished, Eligos bared her teeth in a grin, and only then did I realize this was her own brand of joke.

“A life of being hunted by someone forever, without ever knowing why. What rotten luck.”
“That is not so.”
“What isn’t?”
“I mean that your luck is not bad at all. Quite the opposite, in fact. Listen well.”

I met her red eyes as they bored into me and nodded, to show I was ready to hear her out.

“This time, you struck them down splendidly. Whether it was your first time or not, I cannot say — but that does not matter. Do you know why?”
“Because they’ll keep showing up in front of me?”
“Just so. Will those who retreated this time come back the same as before? Never. They will return stronger, by whatever means they can, all to flay the skin from your body.”
“Skin-flaying villains, huh. I’m curious how that turns into a story about good luck.”
“Why, because you have now gained a reason to grow stronger for the rest of your life. You were born a human, and I a demon, yet we both chose the path of the swordsman — one who lives for the blade. Look a little deeper down that road, and I walk the path of a knight who holds the ambition to lock away every evil in the world. But what of you? To my eyes, you did not yet seem to have decided exactly which road you would walk.”

Just as she said, I’d only ever carried the vague goal of becoming a strong swordsman, and right now I was at a loss for which way to go. I said nothing for a good long while, until Eligos broke into a grin.

“Agonize over it, endlessly. That agonizing, too, is how you will grow.”

The campfire crackled and popped, burning the night away. It struck me that if someone lost happened to be near, they might catch the firelight and find their way to us. And if they did, wouldn’t this campfire have become a kind of path for them?

“I asked whether you had questions, and yet I am the only one who has done any asking. Unburden yourself of your curiosity. I promise — I will answer faithfully, as far as I am able to tell you.”

I’d taken the watch to put my head in order, and yet this demon had thoroughly muddled my thoughts and now sat gazing at me without a care in the world. I looked once at the campfire’s flames, once at her smile, and spoke.

“Originally I’d meant to ask what got you started collecting villains, and how you became master of the Fifteenth Demon Realm — but it’s fine now.”
“Have you stopped being curious?”
“I was curious, so I’d meant to ask — but as we talked, I came to understand it on my own.”
“Oh? Is that so?”
“Yeah. Whatever the reason behind it, locking away all the evil in the world is a good thing, isn’t it?”
“It is.”
“So let me ask something else instead. Why are you following me? It’s not like you actually believe I’ll hand over ‘Bael’ to you after I beat him down, right?”

My voice settled low into the stillness of the night.

“But I truly came along believing your word that you would capture Bael and deliver him to me. Was that, too, a lie?”
“It wasn’t a lie. I will beat Bael. It’s just that to hand him over, I’d have to keep from killing him — and whether I can manage that is what worries me.”

All at once Eligos shot to her feet and crossed to me.

“Now and then you make the sort of grand declarations no being of this world would ever dare utter. What astonishes me is that there is not the slightest feeling of good or evil in your eyes when you do.”
“Feelings of good or evil?”
“Humans are forever defining themselves as good or wicked. But that is a foolish thing. For wickedness is mixed into goodness, and goodness dwells within wickedness. And yet in you, there was none of that.”
“…None of it?”
“I will not ask how you came to know of the bond between Bael and me.”

My own reflection in her eyes wore a conflicted look.

“But killing Bael is something no one — no one at all — should ever speak of. Not even as a joke.”

“Why’s that?”
“Because the one you speak of killing is none other than Bael.”
“Is it because he’s a Great Demon?”

Eligos leaned her face in until I felt the breath from her nose against my skin.

“You truly are astonishing. Even now there is not a trace of any feeling of good or evil in you. Only the sense that you have ‘merely stated something obvious.’”
“…I had no idea you could even read human emotions.”

We were close enough that anyone watching might have gotten the wrong idea. For someone like me, who’d never once been in a relationship, the distance was dangerously, fatally small, and yet I couldn’t find a single throb in my heart, not the faintest flutter of excitement toward her.

“On top of that, it seems you do not see me as a woman. Could it be…”

I braced myself for her next words as I never had before.

“Do you prefer men?”