Chapter 188
The story continues off the page
The Last Dance Before Midnight
A masked dragon asks the lanternwright for one slow dance
The dimly lit conference room.
The only information anyone could glean in that space, where they could not even gauge one another’s identities, was that everyone present was a follower of the demonkin.
“Rumors about the Dopplers have spread throughout the continent.”
The person who raised the subject spoke in a displeased voice.
Doppler.
It was not a disguise that merely imitated a human like a doppelganger, but an infiltration type that became the actual person.
Dopplers had been deployed for ten years, and no one had noticed until their identities were exposed.
Those who clumsily claimed to be substitutes had their heads cut off when the person’s unique physical characteristics were used to prove otherwise.
“As the person in overall charge, do you have nothing to say?”
Someone brought up responsibility, drawing everyone’s attention.
The man seated in the position of overall authority had excessively pale skin.
“What is there for me to say?”
“Actions that defied our expectations have occurred several times now. Shouldn’t there be some kind of response to them?”
The pale man let out a derisive chuckle.
“Actions that defied expectations? What a hurtful thing to say. I already knew about it.”
“You already knew?”
An uncomfortable atmosphere filled the dark room.
The man wondered if there had been a misunderstanding, but he continued speaking.
“Yes, including Regent Ferda discovering the Doppler and attempting to devise a strategy based on it.”
“Does that mean it would be fair to say you simply stood by and watched?”
A follower challenged him in an accusatory tone.
The pale man tilted his head and asked him,
“Did you not pledge your loyalty for the sake of Godwin? For someone who did that, you seem awfully indignant over something so trivial.”
“I don’t care what happens to this continent. I am a follower of Godwin, after all. But I did not agree to cooperate in something like this just to reduce all the accomplishments we have achieved to nothing.”
“Is that so?”
The pale man raised a hand.
The speaker’s arm twisted in an instant.
Bang!
Crack!
“Aaaaagh!”
A weak shockwave twisted his hand, shattering the bones.
The pain of his severed nerves rang out in a thunderous scream.
He was Gokma, a mage who used magic that distorted space.
Gokma approached the man in an instant and drew a dagger.
No, it was not a dagger.
If one had ever set foot in a kitchen, one would have called it a kitchen knife.
Stab!
Gokma drove the kitchen knife into the arm that remained.
“Aaaaaagh!”
He slowly moved the kitchen knife buried deep inside.
The jagged, poorly sharpened edge tore along the grain of the skin.
“Aaaaaaaagh!!!”
Only agonized screams continued to echo.
After five minutes of merciless violence, he opened his mouth again.
“Do you have anything to say?”
“P-please, let me live……”
“Why do you want to live? You will die eventually, so wouldn’t it be better to die sooner?”
“Please……”
The man, defeated by the pain, begged Gokma.
As if bored, Gokma pulled out the kitchen knife and threw him aside.
He turned his head toward the meeting hall.
“Do you think any of you here are different?”
The bloodied kitchen knife pointed at them.
“You may loudly proclaim that you follow our father’s oblivion and are not afraid of something as trivial as death, but when you stand before death, you will all tuck your tails between your legs. Do you know why I am so certain?”
“……”
“Because you are all losers who were terrified of this life and fled in fear.”
“……”
“You defeated little piglets have eaten everything there was to eat, and now that you’re being sent to the slaughterhouse, you’re whining about why you weren’t told the date. What a joke.”
At Gokma’s words, the meeting hall fell silent as if frozen.
Gokma wiped the blood splattered across his face with a finger.
Still seated at the table, he said,
“Let me make this perfectly clear. I knew that Regent Ferda was prepared to take the blame in the Empire in order to weed out the demonkin. And it is also true that he did not inform Joseph Faust’s double, who had infiltrated the Empire in advance.”
He began wiping his kitchen knife on the clothes of the man seated beside him.
“Even though the existence of the Dopplers has been exposed, what is the Empire’s situation like right now? They have begun to suspect the identities of the nobles and priests, and everything is in chaos. To quell that chaos, they are blaming foreign powers. It will not only be demonkin followers who die; capable loyalists will also be caught up in the aftermath and perish.”
“……I see.”
“I understand.”
The plan was extreme, but it was not so unreasonable that it could not be understood.
With the Empire’s once-solid foundation now wavering, there was ample opportunity.
“Enjoy yourselves and have fun before you return to oblivion. Once you become just like the demonkin, you will learn how insignificant the joy you once knew truly was.”
Gokma waved his hand, and the secret council was dissolved.
He alone remained in the dark space.
“Do you trust them?”
No—a man who had been standing quietly in the darkness stepped forward and asked.
Gokma gave a dry laugh.
“What good would trusting those things do? Didn’t you just see what happened?”
“Yes. They cannot be trusted.”
“Even so, I believe that their fear is insignificant.”
Humans were beings who feared the unknown and ultimately surrendered to terror.
Having cooperated with the demonkin, they had already crossed a river they could never turn back from.
If they wanted to survive, their only choice was to pledge even greater loyalty to the demonkin.
“Then is the plan still intact?”
“Of course.”
“Even with Ferda, that variable, running rampant?”
Ferda Valdrova.
Now that the identity of the Dopplers, whose strength lay in their secrecy, had been exposed, people would be keeping them in mind.
It would no longer be easy to deploy them carelessly.
“I heard he blew off Elder Cypress’s arm.”
“An elder who suspects even falling leaves would not be a careless elf. He has done an excellent job.”
“It is not excellent. It is dangerous.”
Gokma entirely agreed.
Even so, it was not a problem for him.
“There is no need to respond.”
“Why not?”
“That man will become our king.”
“He will become the Demon King?”
The black giant reacted as though he did not understand.
Seeing his reaction, Gokma asked,
“Have you never seen the Demon King?”
“I have not.”
The Demon King’s castle stood at the end of the land once called the East.
Other than the demonkin created in the early days, few had ever seen the Demon King’s face.
In any case, what mattered was not the Demon King but his father, Godwin, so the Demon King’s existence held special significance only for humans.
“He decided to become the Demon King after the wife he loved died.”
“Trivial.”
“It is indeed a very trivial thing to us. But that emotion ultimately made him into a being that even we, who are called Malefic Stars, cannot surpass.”
Gokma smiled faintly.
“I believe in that power. I mean the despair brought about by love.”
“That would be impossible for now.”
“Yes. It is impossible for now.”
Gokma looked down at the map spread across the table.
“An opportunity will come to us someday. So we only need to slowly do what we have to do.”
“Then what are you planning to do from now on?”
“They say demons extend a hand to desperate humans.”
Gokma drove the kitchen knife into a spot on the map of the Serdes Continent.
It was a place that had recently been engaged in a tense confrontation with the Kingdom of Arken.
[Kingdom of Heinkel]
“Let’s take it before the demons get there first.”
* * *
Valdrova Castle.
“Here is the copy of the journal you requested some time ago.”
Lize handed Ferda a copy he had spent several days deciphering and transcribing.
“Is this the only one?”
“I delivered the same contents to Lady Eri—or rather, to Lady Erika.”
Eri and Erika.
The names of the Blue-Eyed Mage Tower Master and the Adventurers’ Guild’s Far Eastern Branch Director were not yet familiar to him, and he seemed confused.
“You’ve worked hard. I’ll look through it carefully.”
“Y-yes……”
Ferda first checked the section containing the list in the journal.
[Project: List of Participants in Erosion]
‘There are quite a lot of them.’
It listed not only high-ranking nobles, but even unnamed commoners, along with specific details about where they were.
Ferda was looking for only one name.
But as expected, it was not there.
‘Valdemar Golt is not demonkin.’
There were imperial nobles among the names as well, but none of them were people who could deal a blow to Valdemar.
There was no justification for ambushing him or driving him into a corner.
His interest quickly cooled.
Ferda continued reading the list as he thought.
‘What should I do with these bastards……?’
It would be satisfying to deal with them outright, but doing so would only leave the demonkin an escape route.
The ideal scenario was for a rat to carry its food back to its nest.
That way, he could burn every rat in the rat hole.
As Ferda considered how to proceed, Lize suddenly came back into view.
His fidgety movements.
Even a three-year-old could tell that he still had something to say.
“Um……”
“Yes.”
“What should I do now?”
Lize asked with a serious expression.
“What do you mean by what you should do……”
“There are so many questions. I wonder why I can read the script of an elf named Linne. I do not know whether my father knew about this, or why he never told me.”
“……”
“So I thought about it for a while. The more I thought about it, the more I found only possibilities I did not want to consider.”
Lize’s face was filled with guilt.
“The most likely reason I can read her unique script is that I inherited her blood.”
The Dark Elf Linne’s bloodline.
The possibility that he was her daughter—or rather, her son.
“Is that so?”
“Yes……”
“Then why do you look so guilty?”
“Because…… the person who would be my mother killed so many people and conducted so many experiments. I have lost the things she experimented on, too, so I wonder whether I even have the right to walk around with my head held high. Besides……”
Lize could not bring himself to continue, but Ferda understood.
Linne had betrayed her clan and fled the World Tree.
Even if it had been the Grand Chieftain’s order, Lize had ultimately turned his back on his clan as well.
Lize feared that he was walking the same path as her.
“Sharing a bloodline does not change the fact that you are strangers. There is no guarantee that you will follow the same path as Linne, the Dark Elf.”
“Thank you for saying that, but I cannot live while pretending I do not know.”
Lize took a deep breath.
Though it seemed his earnest nature was holding him back, determination rose in the face that had been weighed down by such a burden.
“So, after thinking it over in my own way, I would like to join the expedition led by Lady Erika.”
“The expedition?”
Lize nodded.
“Yes. No matter how much Dark Elves are treated as heretics, our roots are ultimately the same.”
Color returned to Lize’s face.
“I have admired them for a long time, too. There is an elf among the expedition members, isn’t there?”
“Beinhoff. He was a Forest Elf famous as a sharpshooter.”
“Yes. I cannot use a bow very well, but…… I can use magic, at least, so through this journey, I want to do the things I could not do while living inside the World Tree!”
Looking at him, Ferda felt as though he were seeing an adventurous girl brimming with curiosity rather than an eager young man.
He instinctively found himself worrying about Lize first.
“What kind of magic do you use?”
“I cannot use flashy offensive magic like Lady Eri…… I am not sure how to explain it……”
“Show me directly, and I will judge for myself.”
“Ah, yes!”
Lize quietly drew a rune and cast his magic.
As he watched the spells Lize had listed, Ferda became certain.
“You have focused mainly on healing and protection magic.”
“I learned them while helping people who had been ill for a long time. Are they really that poor?”
Poor?
‘He is a talent I would be desperate to take with us.’
It was common for priests to go on adventures under the pretext of making a pilgrimage.
Most of them were only Second- or Third-Circle priests who struggled even with healing, and reaching the Fourth Circle meant it was time for them to settle down.
The Fifth Circle went without saying.
Unless one made a huge donation to the church, employing high-grade personnel was out of the question.
By human standards, Lize had the skill of a mid-ranking Fourth-Circle priest.
‘On top of that, he has an affinity with spirits.’
Elves possessed stronger powers of communion and affinity than other races.
However, an elf had to be exceptional even among them to befriend spirits powerful enough to be called the nightmares of the World Tree.
‘He does not merely get along with them. He controls them.’
He himself was unaware of it, but anyone knowledgeable about magic could call it control.
Lize was controlling the spirits.
‘That means this elf’s mental resilience is flexible enough to withstand it.’
To be flexible meant not breaking.
It was the quality most needed in an expedition.
Ability was important in an expedition, but so was the composure to remain unshaken in any situation.
Even that composure could not remain unchanged for a hundred or ten thousand years.
People needed a place to lean on for a while, and Lize needed to become that deep-rooted pillar they could rely on.
“I think he would be fine, but Lady Erika, the Tower Master, makes the final decision, so I cannot interfere.”
“Is that so? Do you think Lady Erika will dislike me?”
The conflict between the High Elves and Iorga weighed on Lize’s mind.
To Ferda, it was a pointless worry.
“Even if you called them children of water lizards to their faces, she would let it slide.”
“Gasp! How could I ever say something so harsh……”
Lize’s face turned deathly pale, and he began to panic.
Leaving Lize to it, Ferda also fell into thought.
‘The Demon Lands…….’
Beyond the boundary of the Far East.
Ordinarily, Ferda’s role would have been to watch from behind and provide support.
That would have been more comfortable for both Erika and Ferda.
‘There is something beyond that boundary that can dispel my unease.’
The Grand Chieftain had told Ferda that the Demon King’s mana flowed through him.
The Demon King had loved someone and, through heartbreak, completed his existence.
Ferda was no different.
Ferda already knew how frightening emotions could be—how something as tiny as a snowball could roll down and grow until it became a massive boulder.
‘She loves this continent.’
He could not leave that continent she loved with another wound.
That was why he needed a way to keep from hurting her, even if such sorrow came.
That was why Ferda decided to join the expedition as well.
* * *
Valdrova was preparing to go outside.
She was more nervous than usual.
While working at the construction site yesterday, Erika, without her horns, had approached her and said,
-Tomorrow, I plan to brief the expedition members as a member of the expedition to the Demon Lands. Please clear your schedule and attend.
The expedition to the Demon Lands.
As an armored knight, the excitement and anxiety of meeting new people tightened around her heart.
She knew why she felt this way.
She simply did not want to think about it right now.
She deliberately ignored the feeling and forced her expression to look lively.
“Luri, I’m heading out, okay?”
“Have a safe trip.”
Her words sounded dry, but her expression did not.
That visibly displeased look.
It seemed to say, Why do you not maintain the dignity of a king, and why do you keep going out to get caught up in the games of those humans?
In the past, Valdrova would have been extremely conscious of that gaze, but she was different now.
‘I should buy something tasty on my way back.’
Valdrova now knew what she needed to do for Luri.
Whenever she brought something back, Luri would scold her, saying, ‘Are you trying to win me over with bribes like this?’ But he always ate it deliciously, wagging his tail back and forth.
To Valdrova, Luri was nothing less than an adorable chihuahua.
‘Nothing will happen.’
Let’s not be needlessly afraid of something new.
Repeating the words to herself, Valdrova stepped out through the main gate.