“Hah… where is this!”
Reinhild shot up the moment he came to his senses.
Hadn’t he gotten up like this not long ago as well?
But that time he had only been acting, pretending to have lost his memory and collapsed, whereas this time he truly had no idea what had happened or how things had turned out.
He did not even know why he was lying under such a soft quilt on a wide bed.
“What happened?”
Reinhild clutched his throbbing head and tried to recall the situation just before he passed out.
He was sure… he had heard a voice before he lost consciousness.
“Aren’t you making things needlessly complicated?”
Right, someone had definitely said that…
“Have you woken up?”
“Gah, you scared me!”
Lost in his own imagination, Reinhild jumped in place at the sudden voice.
“Butler?”
Hugging the quilt as if to defend himself, Reinhild relaxed his guard when he confirmed who it was.
He had thought he saw wrong or was mistaken, but it really was the butler.
The very butler who had stayed by Reinhild’s side every day in the Demon King’s castle until he was sealed five hundred years ago.
Reinhild almost ran to him out of joy, but he held back.
A Demon King does not run at a retainer just because he is glad.
If the other person were Xion, that would be another story.
“Why do you have that expression, Lord Reinhild?”
“Because there is no way you would be here, and yet you are here…”
“What are you saying?”
The butler walked across the room and drew open the window curtains.
Swish.
The room must have been very high up, because nothing was visible outside the window but a gloomy sky.
“As the butler of the Demon King’s castle, if I would not be in the Demon King’s castle, then where should I be?”
“The Demon King’s castle…?”
Sitting there with a dazed face, Reinhild hurried to the window.
Pressing his forehead and nose to the pane, he peered out through the glass that would not open.
A familiar scene spread out beyond the window.
A dingy forest and ashen ground, countless owlbears bounding over it.
And miasma so thick he could see it wavering to the eye.
It was the Demon King’s castle.
“Why… why am I here…”
“Did you have a bad dream?”
“A dream?”
“Rest for a little while and I will prepare a meal.”
“…A dream?”
Instead of answering Reinhild’s question, the butler coldly closed the door and left the room.
“…A dream, you say?”
From where to where?
Reinhild unconsciously brought his hand to his chest.
He felt the luxurious, soft texture of a thin nightgown.
He had surely been wearing the thick winter clothes Xion made for him, so had the butler changed his clothes?
Because the fabric was thin, he could feel the scar on his chest even through the garment.
At least being pierced by the Hero’s Sword was not a dream.
If so, then Xion coming to the Demon King’s castle every day, Xion cooking for him, and him being deceived by the gods and sealed were not dreams either.
But after that?
Reinhild drew up the magic power that had gathered in his heart.
Perhaps since coming here miasma had accumulated, his magic power had increased compared to before, and beneath it he could faintly sense Xion’s presence.
“Phew.”
Reinhild let out a sigh of relief.
His time with Xion in Root was not a dream either.
“Then what on earth is supposed to be a dream?”
It seemed the butler’s nonsense had grown while they had not seen each other.
He could understand it.
As the butler, whose post was to assist the Demon King, had been left without a Demon King for as long as five hundred years, it was natural he had gone a bit off.
If Reinhild thought that the butler insisted on calling the pleasant memories in Root a dream just to keep him here, he could not say he entirely failed to understand the butler’s feelings.
But understanding and acceptance are separate things.
A Demon King does not accept every complaint just because he understands the other.
Regardless of how the butler felt, Reinhild decided to focus thoroughly on his own feelings.
“I need to go back to Root.”
In any case, in time he would no longer be a Demon King, and the butler would surely find his own way to live.
Reinhild opened the door with the intention of escaping before the butler returned.
Clack.
He had expected it, but it was locked.
“Hm.”
Windows built so that they could not be opened without breaking them, and a door bolted so tightly it would not open.
In his current state, Reinhild could force neither of them.
“Is the secret passage still here?”
Five hundred years is a long time, but considering there had been no other Demon King staying in this room in the meantime, perhaps the existence of the secret passage had never been discovered.
With an excited heart, Reinhild pulled back the carpet where the secret passage had been in the past.
“It is here!”
The secret passage Xion had made was still perfectly intact even now, five hundred years later.
The problem was…
“How do I get down this?”
In the past, Reinhild would have flown down in an instant.
As he was now, the only way to get down was to jump.
“If I jump, I will die, right?”
He did not want to die.
“Is there no way to get down without jumping?”
The human Xion, who could not fly, had carved footholds to climb up here, but the gaps between each foothold were quite wide.
It was clearly tailored to tall, long-limbed Xion.
Reinhild stretched his leg to test whether he could step on those footholds to descend, then gave up immediately.
“That will never work.”
Even Xion’s companion, who had climbed up this secret passage and swung the Hero’s Sword, had been quite short.
How on earth had he climbed this?
Knock, knock.
“Lord Reinhild. Pardon my intrusion.”
“Eek!”
At the sound of knocking, Reinhild quickly covered the opening with the carpet and jumped onto the bed.
“Are you all right?”
“I am fine.”
When the butler opened the door and entered the room, Reinhild was sprawled on the bed in a strange pose.
He rolled naturally half a turn to the very center of the bed and slipped under the quilt.
“Were you the one who brought me here?”
“For now, soothing your insides takes priority.”
Instead of answering Reinhild’s question, the butler handed him a drink in a large cup.
It was the same mysterious, sticky liquid the butler had diligently prepared when they had lived in the Demon King’s castle.
They said it was good for magic, but it did not taste good.
‘I want the cocoa Xion made me.’
Reinhild subtly pushed the cup aside.
“You must drink this to recover your magic quickly.”
“But it looks far too dreadful.”
“Lord Reinhild.”
“Fine.”
In the end, Reinhild had to empty the entire cup to escape the butler’s stern gaze.
“Ugh…”
He felt like throwing up.
Maybe because he had not had it in a long time, it tasted even more awful than he remembered.
“Well done. You must build your strength before the next Hero appears so that you can face him.”
“The next Hero?”
Without giving Reinhild time to ask, the butler left the room with the cup.
Why had the other demons, who had tried to kill the Demon King, gone out of their way to find him and bring him here?
What had they been doing all along, that only now they had discovered where Reinhild was?
Where had this feeble Hero gone that the butler was mentioning the next Hero?
He had many questions, but there were no demons willing to take them.
“What now?”
He needed to inform the butler that the Demon God had been deceiving everyone and ask for help.
The other demons had tried to kill him for being weak, because they worshiped only the strong, but the butler would be different.
After all, the butler was a demon bound to rules down to his bones, and his duty was to assist the Demon King.
“As long as I am the Demon King, he will take my side.”
But if it came to light that all of that was a false show created by the Demon God and the High God, would the butler still take Reinhild’s side then?
That he could not know.
“Until I make the butler fully mine, I had better hold my tongue.”
In any case, without the butler’s help he could not even escape this room.
Reinhild leaned comfortably back against the bed and thought of dozens of ways to make the butler his ally.
Lying down at ease and circulating his magic, he felt a current of magic different from before he had come here flowing through his body.
“Was it because of that demonic drink earlier?”
Xion had gone to the trouble of balancing the ratio of miasma and divine power, and at this rate the balance would be thrown off.
Reinhild closed his eyes and tried to expel the miasma before it could settle in his body.
Of course, it did not go as he wished.
Feeling resentful, Reinhild looked down at his two outstretched hands.
For some reason, his empty hands looked even emptier than usual.
He felt like he should be holding something…
“Ah, the Hero’s Sword!”
Come to think of it, there was the Hero’s Sword.
He had definitely been holding it until the very end, so where had it gone.
Had the butler put it away?
Well, the butler would have recognized what it was the instant he saw the sword, so he would not have left it there.
“I will have to ask the butler to return it when he comes.”
Thinking it nothing serious, Reinhild burrowed into the quilt.
“…”
A strange feeling came over him.
It did not seem the problem was the Hero’s Sword.
Frowning for a moment in thought, Reinhild suddenly sprang up again.
“My crystal!”
Along with everything he had been carrying vanishing, the crystal he could use to contact Xion had, of course, disappeared without a trace.
“I have to get it back.”
Reinhild clenched his fists and mustered all the magic he could, spreading it to fill the room.
It was the way to summon the butler.
“Did you call, Lord Reinhild?”
Not even three seconds after he spread his magic, the butler came to the room.
“Butler. Return the belongings I had before I came here.”
“What belongings do you mean?”
“My clothes and bag and the crystal that was inside.”
“I do not know what you are talking about.”
Frowning, the butler took a step toward Reinhild.
Feeling a chilly foreboding for some reason, Reinhild involuntarily drew his body back by as much as the butler had advanced.
“The luggage I was carrying…”
“Lord Reinhild had no particular luggage.”
“That cannot be.”
“Did you perhaps have a bad dream?”
“A dream?”
A surge welled up.
At that moment, Reinhild felt some unpleasant sensation sweep over his entire body.
He had no time to struggle free of that horrific aura. His body crumpled onto the bed.
He had not lost consciousness.
With unfocused eyes, Reinhild stared blankly into empty air.
“…A dream…”
So that is it. A dream.
It seemed he had been mistaken about something.
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