Chapter 20
Takako said this calmly.
Looking around at the people screaming, the adventurers were already rushing one after another to face the Bloody Buffas and fight them, their battle cries almost matching the screams in number.
They had certainly been startled when the monsters suddenly fell from the sky, but everyone seemed to be handling things without much trouble. Damage aside, it looked as though it wouldn’t take long to bring the situation completely under control.
'Kukuku... Fuhahaha! Not bad, humans! But you can only feel safe for a little while longer... Today was merely a test run! And a declaration of war... The Demon King’s army will bring you humans under its control!'
Immediately afterward, a voice rang out, as if speaking directly into their minds.
Alice and Takako immediately looked up at the flock of monstrous birds. Standing atop one of them and looking down at the city was a male demon in a black robe, with long silver hair and two unmistakable horns jutting forward.
"Oh... Is that perhaps your father?"
"No... My father isn’t that young, and his hair isn’t silver. More importantly, why is a demon invoking the Demon King’s name here...?"
Takako asked, looking a little troubled, but Alice hurriedly denied it.
But Alice couldn’t hide her own confusion. The man might simply have been invoking the Demon King’s name, but it was undeniably a demon who had just declared war on humanity.
'Fear, humans...! The Demon King has finally begun taking action to annihilate humanity. You will be ruled by the Demon King, in name and in fact... for all eternity!'
"Man... I’m starving. And bored. Hurry back already."
After Takako and Alice went out, Kagami had nothing to do, so he was sprawled across the bed. He bitterly regretted not going to the baths with them—or at least eating first and then going to sleep.
Valman was always bustling, day and night, so even now, in the middle of the night, he could probably have found something to do outside. But then he might run into Takako and Alice on their way back, which would be a pain, so Kagami stayed put and waited.
"Something fun’s going on as always. That’s Valman for you. Cows raining from the sky and all."
Lying there, Kagami caught sight of the view outside through the bay window and chuckled. Cows were plummeting from the sky one after another. He couldn’t help wondering what kind of event this was supposed to be.
"After seeing this, black Wagyu is a sure thing for dinner tonight... No, Alice is with us, so maybe I should downgrade a little... No, but she probably hasn’t ever had black Wagyu, so maybe I should go with that after all..."
Kagami had immediately recognized the falling monsters as Bloody Buffas. That was why he figured it was just a prank: dropping such low-level monsters into a city full of adventurers.
He’d thought someone like Takako-chan, a Martial Artist, was tossing them into the air and letting them fall, but a moment later, he changed his mind.
"Grrr... Rroooooar!"
"Huh? That’s incredibly annoying."
A Bloody Buffa had smashed through the inn’s ceiling and landed in Kagami’s room—right beside his bed, no less.
"Ugh... I wonder how much it’ll cost to repair this."
More concerned about the damage to the ceiling than the Bloody Buffa that had landed right in front of him, Kagami looked up at the sky. He saw black monstrous birds—presumably the ones dropping the Bloody Buffas—flying everywhere, nearly filling the sky, and furrowed his brow.
"So it wasn’t Takako-chan throwing them... It’s the monsters?"
Black monstrous birds flew across the sky. Of all the monsters Kagami knew, only one fit the description: the Hellcrow, a Level 138 monster that flew around the Demon King’s castle.
Why were they flocking together here? There were plenty of things to wonder about, like why monsters that normally lived in different places were working together. But the first thing Kagami thought was...
"A flying piggy bank."
He was thinking about money.
Hellcrows were flying monsters that rarely came down to the ground. They were also intelligent and only attacked opponents they knew they could defeat, so Kagami hardly ever encountered them.
But Hellcrows liked to eat shiny gems and stored them inside their bodies. Perhaps because of that, they were rare monsters that dropped a large amount of money and gems when defeated.
"There they are! One, two, three, four, five, six... Every last one of them’s got a nice fat belly!"
At that moment, Kagami’s thoughts shifted to figuring out how to defeat the Hellcrows flying through the sky. The inn’s repair bill no longer mattered. He could just pay it with the money he got from killing them.
The fact that Hellcrows and Bloody Buffas had come attacking in a group only made Kagami feel grateful. He was actually glad they’d come.
'Kukuku... Fuhahaha! Not bad, humans! But you can only feel safe for a little while longer... Today was merely a test run! And a declaration of war... The Demon King’s army will bring you humans under its control!'
Immediately afterward, a mysterious shout rang directly inside Kagami’s head.
'Fear, humans...! The Demon King has finally begun taking action to annihilate humanity. You will be ruled by the Demon King, in name and in fact... for all eternity!'
"What the hell is he talking about?"
Kagami felt disgusted by the voice that had suddenly appeared. He knew the Demon King—and, for that matter, the Demon King’s daughter. Because he knew them, he could tell the voice’s owner, probably a demon, was putting words in the Demon King’s mouth. It irritated him a little.
"Grrrrooooar! Rroooooar!"
Just then, the Bloody Buffa bellowed as if to announce its presence, and Kagami turned to look at it.
"Perfect."
"Grr? Grr...!?"
A moment later, Kagami grabbed one of the horns jutting from the Bloody Buffa with one hand and lightly lifted it. Supporting the monster’s massive body with his other hand, he then hurled it into the sky with all his strength.
The Bloody Buffa shot straight upward, bigger and faster than a cannonball. It slammed into a flying Hellcrow, and the bird’s body transformed into money.
Likewise, a Hellcrow struck directly by a Bloody Buffa transformed into money and a large quantity of gems, which scattered through the air.
"Damn! Someone else might pick those up!"
But if he let them get away, all his effort would be for nothing, so Kagami jumped outside through the broken ceiling. He began searching for Takako while hurling any Bloody Buffas he found into the sky.
'...Huh?'
Meanwhile, the demon man standing atop a Hellcrow high above was bewildered, a strand of snot hanging from his nose. He had no idea what had happened to the Hellcrow, which had been killed in an instant.