Only one hero is chosen per generation.
So how could a human who was not Xion show up wielding the hero’s power?
‘Don’t tell me Xion actually…’
No. Impossible.
It was absurd.
Even if you’re the hero, you can’t lend your power to someone else.
If that were possible, Reinhild would have tossed the Demon King’s power to his butler whenever he got bored—“stay imprisoned in my stead”—and gone out to play.
“Oh, that’s not a bad idea.”
It was an excellent method, but when he pictured Xion coming while the butler was the Demon King, his feelings turned complicated.
He imagined Xion doing to the butler what he had done to himself.
He became very displeased.
That wouldn’t do. Something about it felt extremely wrong… anyway, none of that would do.
Suddenly in a foul mood, Reinhild grabbed an innocent pillow and hurled it toward the secret passage.
While cursing the Xion in his imagination.
“That would never happen.”
Reinhild lay back down on the bed.
Whether Demon King’s power or hero’s power, what one possesses cannot be passed to another. Once fixed, the two remain Demon King and hero for life.
They can never be anything else.
Not until one of them dies.
Kuo-ooo—!
Kyaa-aaah—!
“What?”
At the sudden noise, Reinhild pressed up against the window that wouldn’t open and looked outside.
In the burning forest, owlbears were fleeing with shrieks.
“Fire?”
In all his decades, Reinhild had never once seen the forest surrounding the Demon King’s castle catch fire. Not just Reinhild, every Demon King before him would say the same.
Naturally because the “forest” here wasn’t made of “trees.”
The trees and grass that formed the forest, even the clouds drifting in the sky, there wasn’t a single thing composed in the “natural” forms humans imagined.
All of it was closer to miasma compressed into shapes resembling the human world.
“Can a mass of miasma burn?”
No matter how he thought about it, it was impossible.
Even if a tree made of miasma looked exactly like an ordinary tree, with a tangible shape and weight so you could chop it down with an axe—it would not burn when set alight.
Unless you poured holy power into it.
“Holy power!”
Why hadn’t he thought of that?
That wasn’t fire. It was holy power.
The phenomenon of holy power colliding with miasma and throwing off sparks only looked like spreading flames.
Reinhild started and bolted outside.
The situation on the ground was far worse than it looked from the Demon King’s castle. A gigantic vortex of fire seemed to be swallowing the forest.
Half the owlbears fled to the opposite side of the woods, but the other half were swept up in the blaze as they were. Where the masses of miasma vanished leaving only smoke, the only things left were the corpses of owlbears who had died in agony.
‘I have to put it out.’
He had to extinguish it right now.
If the flames of holy power spread to the Demon King’s castle, the place would be gone in an instant.
Without a trace.
“Fire! Wooow!”
“You idiot, that’s not mere fire. It’s holy-power flame. Can’t you tell? Run!”
“If it touches you, you die. You’ll melt to the bone!”
“If you don’t want to die in excruciating pain, get out of here!”
The demons, realizing the commotion, fled in a panic.
If he were caught in those flames, even Reinhild could be annihilated in an instant.
‘I have to put it out.’
He was, after all, the Demon King.
Since the day he was born as the Demon King… Indeed, even after the hero was born, he had never exerted this much power, but he could do it.
Reinhild took a deep breath and rose into the air.
Getting away from the flames and up into a place thick with miasma, it became easier to breathe.
“Hoo.”
Reinhild spread his clenched fists and thrust them toward the holy-power fire.
There was only one chance.
Sprinkling a little miasma over the flames wouldn’t snuff out a fire that massive. He had to unleash overwhelming mana and end it all at once.
Thinking there would be no second chance, Reinhild detonated his mana toward the holy-power blaze.
Until not a single trace of the holy-power flames remained.
Throb.
The spot pierced by the hero’s sword throbbed as if seared by fire.
The wound hadn’t reopened, yet could it hurt this much?
He felt nauseated, his belly and chest burning and aching.
‘What is this?’
He felt like he might vomit at any moment, but he couldn’t stop.
Reinhild screwed his eyes shut and wrung out his mana with all his might.
It felt as if something had seized his limbs and clamped down on the flow of mana. His breathing grew labored.
“Ha… huff…”
At last, releasing the breath he’d been holding back, Reinhild clutched his left breast hard.
His heart was pounding as if it would burst.
When Xion had changed his bandages a while ago, his heart might have hammered this hard as well. That, perhaps, had been because he was furious at having shown the hero such a defenseless sight as the Demon King.
“Haa… ha…”
But this sensation was a little different.
His breath was a bit more ragged, more constricted than then.
“Kh….”
Grimacing at the steadily intensifying pain, Reinhild dug his nails into his flesh as he gripped his chest.
He must not show weakness.
The demons were still watching him from below.
Swallowing his groans back down his throat, Reinhild straightened his back. Forcing strength into his face so his eyes wouldn’t close, he looked down on the demons as if nothing were wrong.
Simply enduring the pain, he ended up wearing a chilly expression that seemed to sneer at the demons trying to flee this place.
“Uwaaaaaa!”
“Demon King! Demon King!”
“The Demon King has wiped out the filthy flames!”
“Waaaaa!”
Even the owlbears who did not extend favor to other races bellowed “Kuo-oo!” toward Reinhild as if in salute.
Feigning composure, Reinhild flew off and hid himself within the scorched forest.
From far off, the demons’ cheers still echoed.
Only when he reached a place where no eyes could find him did Reinhild collapse onto the ground.
“Phew, I might live.”
He closed his eyes and drank in the miasma, and the trembling in his body subsided.
‘So it was a shortage of miasma.’
He was all right now.
He hadn’t shown a weak face before the demons, and he had cleanly resolved the problem. This was flawless enough to avoid even the butler’s nagging.
‘Is this what it’s normally like after you extinguish holy-power fire?’
Reinhild recalled the many books he had read while shut up in the castle waiting for Xion’s birth.
He also recalled passages written by Demon Kings of ages past, but none of it was especially helpful.
After all, none of them had ever released their mana to extinguish a holy-power fire of this scale.
Come to think of it, it was odd.
In all those long ages, had none of the heroes who fought the Demon King ever thought to burn down the Demon King’s castle entirely?
Not even once?
Surely, yes.
Not every hero was righteous and upright by human standards.
Look at Xion. Doesn’t he sometimes act more like a demon than a demon? Humanity was a race with extreme differences from person to person.
Among heroes, there must have been those who thought it more just to burn everything here to the ground, rather than fight a fair duel with the Demon King within fixed rules.
If today were the first time such a fire had occurred, it wasn’t that no one had ever thought to set this place ablaze. They had been unable to.
Because even a hero cannot recklessly emit this volume of holy power.
‘You’d need an astronomical amount of holy power to bring fire down on this place. Even if a hero wrung himself dry to the point of death, he’d barely manage to produce a flame…’
At that thought, Reinhild’s eyes flew wide.
‘Don’t tell me the humans forced Xion to sacrifice himself!’
If you wrung every last drop of the god’s power from the hero’s body, you could create a blaze like this.
It was obvious. The humans had used Xion!
‘I have to go to Xion.’
Of course, not to help him… that would be thoroughly unbecoming of a Demon King.
This was simply… yes. Since the hero was apparently about to die, he would go watch and laugh in his face.
And while he was at it, if there were humans around who were tormenting Xion, he’d dispose of them. Eliminating humans was the Demon King’s duty.
Reinhild hauled his aching body upright. He didn’t have the energy to lift himself with mana, so he began walking slowly.
‘The human world… it’s been a while.’
He had kept waiting in the Demon King’s castle, since he never knew when Xion might come, but now he was personally setting out to find him.
But it wasn’t strange. It was natural for the Demon King to appear in the capital and strike terror into humans.
So this was simply Reinhild doing his job.
He couldn’t wipe the smile from his face as he imagined what expression Xion would wear upon seeing Reinhild himself venture out from the castle.
By the time he walked to the edge of the forest, most of the mana he had depleted had recovered. Feeling the pleasant flow of mana rapidly filling his whole body again, beginning with his heart, Reinhild boldly stepped out beyond the forest.
With a single step, at the very moment he put his body outside the Demon King’s domain, an unpleasant sensation slammed into him.
“…Huh?”
Reinhild coughed blood on the spot.
Even as he watched the red soak into the ground, he had no idea what had happened.
“Uh…”
His vision slowly blurred.
Reinhild’s body rolled across the earth.
Leave a Reply