Part 5 of 8
“So stubborn.”
“Yep, I was born that way.”
Repeating the same exchange we had just moments before, we both end up grinning.
The boss doesn’t try to talk me out of it after that.
I’m sure he knew from the start that I wasn’t gonna agree to stay behind.
He only brought it up anyway to let me know that I had the option.
Honestly, a master ain’t supposed to be that thoughtful with a slave.
Although that sorta thing is exactly why I don’t mind bein’ a slave if this guy’s my master.
“Boss.”
“Hrm?”
“Thank ya kindly.”
“Uh-oh. Cut it out, will you? That sorta thing is bad luck to say before a battle.”
Since thanking folks specially and stuff like that the day before a battle makes it seem like you don’t expect to survive, it’s seen as bad luck by most.
But I still felt like I had to say it.
“Boss. If I start to hold you back out there, please don’t hesitate to toss me aside.”
“Now, look here—”
“My role is to make sure the hero’s party can fight without any worries, ain’t it? Then it ain’t right if I slow you down instead, eh?”
“…”
“So focus on the fight, not on me. And most of all, make sure Julius is safe.”
“…Got it.” The boss closes his eyes, crosses his arms, and reluctantly nods. “Guess we better get some rest, then.”
The boss has finished the last of his bottle, and the food’s all gone, too.
It’s getting late, so now’s the time when we should retire and start saving our strength for the battle.
“Suppose so.”
“Hawkin.”
As my boss stands up, he utters my name.
“This doesn’t change the fact that you’re important. People need you. Remember that.”
“…All right.”
With that, my boss leaves the room.
Even I’m not dull enough to miss the fact that he’s telling me in his roundabout way not to die.
“You too.”
I mutter a final response even though he’s already gone.
Fate.
The idea that our paths are determined for us from the moment we are born and we cannot stray from them.
For better or for worse, all things are decided by fate.
What a foolish way of thinking.
But while it is not fate per se, there does exist a certain flow of events that cannot be disobeyed.
I have spent my entire life fighting against that current.
Namely, I have been fighting to keep the demon race from hurtling toward destruction in the hopes that some of us might yet survive.
Certainly, I am now one of the eldest veterans among our people, but of course there was once a time when I, too, was young and inexperienced.
Even then, the demon race was already on the verge of extinction.
The everlasting war against the humans was driving us to ruin.
The difference in our populations is simply far too large.
Even if demons have higher stats than humans, this war has continued for so long that even the history books cannot pinpoint when it first began, so it was inevitable that the scales would begin to tip in favor of the race with numbers on its side.
If we continued fighting the humans, our loss was only a matter of time.
In fact, even if we did nothing, the demon race was already beyond the point of recovery.
All we could do was delay the inevitable.
And yet, no one but myself seemed to realize this.
No, perhaps some did realize it and refused to acknowledge the truth.
The future was already set in stone…
But it has still yet to pass.
This tragedy might be inevitable, but it would not happen in our generation.
To most, it must have been easier to simply continue on the same path.
Change is always difficult to accept, no matter the era.
And since the needed changes were based on acknowledging our eventual destruction, it is small wonder that other demons wanted to close their eyes to the truth.
Most of all, the Demon Lord would not allow any such change.
The Demon Lord is a puppet of the system.
A sacrifice, one might even say: a villainous scapegoat who must force the demons to continue fighting the humans.
I do pity those who carry the title of Demon Lord, for they are hated not only by our mortal enemy the humans but even by their fellow demons.
However, the demon race cannot ignore the Demon Lord’s influence, and so it is because of the Demon Lord that the demons are unable to stop the war against the humans.
The fate of the world takes precedence over the fate of the demon race.
I suppose that is only natural.
The world will continue to exist even if demons go extinct, but demons cannot survive without the world itself, so it is obvious which should be prioritized.
It is difficult to accept, as it forces us to walk the path of destruction, but in the grander scheme of things, that is a trifle.
The demons understand that, which is why we have always obeyed the Demon Lord, even if many of us were discontent about it.
We had no other choice.
Even I could only seek to minimize our losses while continuing the war, all the while burying my shameful feelings in my heart.
Was it my fate to simply sit and watch as my race continued marching toward its own destruction?
As I tried to fight against a current that I knew was irresistible, I was filled with anger, grief, and finally resignation.
But that all changed when an unexpected new era dawned: one without a demon lord.
The Demon Lord is the ruler of the demons and, at the same time, a mouthpiece for the system.
It is the Demon Lord’s sole purpose to inform the demons why they must continue to fight against the humans.
The truth is that demons are not simply obeying the powerful influence of the Demon Lord—we are swallowing our bitterness and continuing to fight because we have learned the terrible truth of the system.
Of course, that is only the case for the highest-ranking demons who can have an audience with the Demon Lord.
But that is more than enough.
Even now, I still remember the face of the previous Demon Lord, contorted with madness.
“We must atone…”
The previous Demon Lord repeated this often.
He changed drastically after gaining the title of Demon Lord.
Because of the Taboo Level-10 skill that came along with it, to be precise.
That Demon Lord looked more haggard by the day, sending us into battle and even fighting on the front lines himself, as if desperate to outrun something.
By now, very few people remain who know how gentle that man was before he became an overwhelming and fearsome demon lord.
But watching those changes firsthand made it difficult to write off the truths of the system he told us about as mere ravings of a madman.
Thus, the high-ranking demons obeyed him, and so those below them followed suit.
We had to, even knowing that it would one day mean the annihilation of our race.
That is how things were intended to be.
But then that Demon Lord vanished, and without a mouthpiece for the system leading them, the consciousness of demons began to change.
Many finally realized that we could not afford to keep fighting the humans.
Until then, the madness of the Demon Lord had pushed us into continuing the war, but without him leading us, we regained our senses.
Once there was no longer a demon lord shouting that the world would be in danger if the war did not continue, it was far more logical to worry about the more immediate danger before us than some far-off, hypothetical future.
And so, in an era without a demon lord, we refrained from fighting the humans more than necessary and focused on the recovery of our nation.
For once, time was on my side.
That was more than enough to bathe my half-broken glimmer of hope in a fresh wave of light.
Better yet, the next Demon Lord was almost certainly going to be yours truly.
With the Demon Lord missing, and knowing that I was the likely successor, we could focus on healing the demon race for two generations and improve our survivability a great deal.
Even still, it was simply delaying the inevitable.
And there was also the fearful possibility that I might change as my predecessor did once I became Demon Lord.
But I prepared for that possibility by instructing my trusted aides to lock me away and continue working toward the revival of our race if I was to drastically change. I even prepared a cell for my own confinement.
I wanted to be ready for every possibility.
But then I was stymied by a shock I could never have predicted.
If that alone was the issue, then I could simply call it a miscalculation, not a shock.
The system’s method of choosing a Demon Lord is unclear.
I was considered by many the most qualified, but that did not mean there were no other worthy candidates. Balto, for example, could have been a possibility.
But the Demon Lord who was selected was no one I had imagined.
In fact, it was no one I even knew of at all.
No, that is false. I had heard of them.
As a character in fairy tales, that is.
The most ancient Divine Beast who served the goddess: that is our current Demon Lord, Lady Ariel.
She was the stuff of legends, someone whose very existence I doubted.
Even if she once had, it seemed all the more impossible that she could have survived until modern times.
In fact, she has the appearance of a young girl, so who would believe her when she suddenly appeared calling herself the Demon Lord?
To be completely honest, my first reaction was one more of confusion than disbelief.
This unfamiliar child visited out of nowhere, declaring that she’d become the Demon Lord and even going so far as to claim that she was actually the Divine Beast from the legends? How absurd.
But she must have predicted that reaction, for she presented me with an Appraisal Stone and demanded that I Appraise her.
When I saw the results, I could no longer doubt her claims.
Her stats, all around 90,000 or above.
Her enormous list of various powerful skills.
They say that anyone whose stats surpass 1,000 is already in the realm of legends.
Only the smallest percentage of humans ever reach that mark, and even demons cannot do so easily, though our stats are naturally higher.
There have been a handful of exceptions, mostly heroes and demon lords, who achieved twice or possibly even three times that amount.
But I had never seen or even heard of anyone with five-digit numbers, let alone six.
Her number of skills, too, was several times that of any ordinary soldier.
But more frightening than even the number was the quality.
The higher a skill level grows, the harder it becomes to level it up further.
It can take half a lifetime of training to raise a single skill to its maximum level. Without natural talent, many people cannot manage it even once.
And there are some skills that are considered impossible to bring to the maximum, even if one does have the talent for it.
Yet, the number of skills she had at their highest level was unthinkable.
I was stunned.
I have never doubted my eyes so much as I did that day.
Nor have I ever felt such despair.
I did my best to predict and prepare for every possibility in my efforts to heal our race.
But Lady Ariel being appointed Demon Lord was beyond anything I could have imagined.
I had just begun to see the light at the end of the tunnel. But then I was plunged into the depths of darkness by Lady Ariel’s declaration of all-out war against the humans.
Past Demon Lords may have been the system’s scapegoat, but they still defended the existence of the demon race to the end.
But Lady Ariel had no qualms about tossing all that aside.
Lady Ariel was the Demon Lord, without a shadow of a doubt.
And to me, she was also the bringer of despair.
Her sheer individual strength makes her undoubtedly the strongest being in the world.
The only beings who could hope to stand against her would be administrators or the likes of Potimas.
With that awesome power, she threatens to chase us demons to our final end.
If that is not true despair, then what is?
We cannot deny her, lest she turn her fangs on us instead.
Lady Ariel would not hesitate to do so.
From the moment Lady Ariel became the Demon Lord, there were only two options left.
It had to be one or the other: wage all-out war against the humans as Lady Ariel demands or attempt to fight the Demon Lord herself.
I chose the latter.
Let me be frank: That was a mistake.
Who would I prefer to face: Lady Ariel or the entirety of humanity?
At a glance, some might assume that defeating one individual must surely be easier than taking on an entire race.
But no. That is undoubtedly wrong.
A demon lord or hero can easily take on an army alone.
That is what it means to have exponentially higher stats.
And Lady Ariel’s stats are easily ten times that of any other demon lord or hero.
An army? That would be nothing to her.
She could very likely destroy the entire world all on her own.
Even if the demon race was to somehow combine forces with humanity and challenge her, I cannot imagine how we would win.
If fighting Lady Ariel is the alternative, one would have better odds against all of humanity.
I understood that, and yet, I still made the wrong move.
I had no choice but to do so.
Even if we did defeat humanity, the demon race will eventually be destroyed as long as Lady Ariel is still the Demon Lord.
And this is no distant fate for future generations to fret over but a tragedy very much close at hand.
I continued to fight the current, trying to put off the destruction of demonkind by any means necessary.
That dark fate, which I once assumed would never occur in my lifetime, was now looming closer than ever before.
I could not accept that. To do otherwise would be to admit everything I have done in my life has been for naught.
Rationally, I knew it was ill-advised, but this was a matter beyond reason.
My situation was rapidly approaching checkmate.
I had to do something to try to avoid it, even if I knew it was the wrong move.
And as I expected, it did not end well.
My last-ditch scheme naturally ended in failure.
In fact, it was even worse than I could have predicted.
I worked to form a rebel army with the former Seventh Army Commander Warkis at the head, and I even involved Potimas, the contact who I thought had the best chance of dealing with Ariel.
My intention was to pit them against each other, but the rebel army was crushed before it could even be fully assembled, and Potimas withdrew before making any major contribution.
Far from fighting each other, Lady Ariel did not take a single step outside her castle.
She had no need to.
My plan failed to defeat Lady Ariel—it did not even move her one iota.
Worse yet, she knew that I was behind the rebel army and Potimas’s involvement.
With that, the only remaining path forward was to defeat the humans.
It was a small mercy that I was not killed on the spot.
…Though I am tempted to ask if that was truly a mercy?
As long as I am alive, I can do everything within my power to delay the demise of demonkind.
But that has become harder to accomplish than it ever was before.
As long as Lady Ariel is in charge, our extinction cannot be avoided.
Lady Ariel has lived since ancient times and is likely to survive far into the distant future.
And this nigh-immortal being continues to force the demon race into war.
Unavoidable destruction.
I could not stop it; I am not strong enough.
Is there any point in continuing to struggle, knowing that anything I try to do will end in vain?
Would it not have been a better end to be executed on the spot, my defeat made final?
There is no point in wondering.
I am alive.
My only option is to continue doing what I think is best.
Change becomes increasingly difficult with age.
Ultimately, I am sure I will simply go on fighting in vain against the current until I die.
There will be no glorious end awaiting me.
Better, then, to crawl onward through the mud, gnashing my teeth until my very last breath.
“……”
A certain man stands glowering at the fort in the distance.
“Calm down, Bloe.”
“I am calm, dammit.”
Despite his response, Bloe is tapping his foot impatiently.
No one could mistake this for a sign of composure.
“A foul mood will not improve our position. As a general, part of your job is to set a calm example for your subordinates. Look around you. Are your soldiers not worried enough as it is?”
Bloe scans the expressions of his men.
Clearly, his restlessness is only exacerbating their anxiety.
A leader’s state is reflected in his followers.
It is important to maintain a composed attitude and expression at all times.
“…My bad.”
Realizing his anxiety is having a negative effect on his soldiers, Bloe apologizes awkwardly.
“Well. It’s not as if your troops on the front line can see your pitiful state anyway.”
“Urgh!”
Bloe snarls to hide his shame.
Bloe’s Seventh Army and my First Army are currently attacking Fort Kusorion: a notably impregnable fortress anchoring humanity’s main line of defense and occupying a strategically crucial position as well.
Its importance is plain to see, considering how we are attacking with two armies, while all the other border forts have been assigned to one army each.
However, only the Seventh Army is actually attacking at the moment.
In a reckless manner that simply invites casualties, no less.
Of course, there will be a great deal of losses to our side following our current strategy.
Fort Kusorion is not the sort of place that can be conquered in one day. It has fended off demon invasions for many years, gaining countless expansions and improved fortifications along the way.
Conquering such a bastion would normally require several times their number, and even then, the fighting would carry on for months or even years.
But of course, the demon race does not have the population to field that large of an invasion force, and our advantage in stats does little in the face of an array of impenetrable walls.
And we are hardly in any position to commit to a years-long battle.
We have some supplies from subjecting our populace to high war taxation, but the humans undoubtedly have far more to spare, and our ability to produce more supplies is greatly limited.
And while we demons have enlisted far too much of our population to be sustainable as it is, the humans could easily call for aid from other countries and get any amount of reinforcements.
In short, we have no chance of winning a drawn-out battle.
Hence this short-term strategy.
However, our reckless attack is meeting with considerable resistance, and the Seventh Army’s losses are already heavy.
Their role is not to clear a path for us with a suicide attack.
No, the Seventh Army’s purpose is to serve as bait to draw out the enemy.
They will sustain heavy losses but will extract a price from the enemy.
Meanwhile, the First Army will reserve its strength until this fierce battle winds down.
My heart goes out to the Seventh Army for their sacrifice, but we have no other choice.
Bloe knows all this, too, which is why he is reluctantly going along with this strategy in spite of the cost.
The Seventh Army, after all, is composed of soldiers who were involved in the earlier rebellion.
Since the plot was discovered and crushed long before it could be put into action, they never actually got the chance to rebel. A minor quibble, but as a result, their leader, Warkis, was executed, while the soldiers were not punished.
…At least, not officially.
You can guess how the Seventh Army is truly being treated by the fact that they’ve been thrust onto the front lines as bait.
Essentially, these would-be rebel soldiers are the living dead, mere sacrificial pawns.
By entrusting them to Bloe, who has always opposed Lady Ariel, she has gathered all her dissenters in one unit.
Since Warkis and Nereo were executed, and I have expressed my submission to Lady Ariel, it should be clear to anyone with half a brain that to rebel against Lady Ariel is a fool’s errand.
Anyone who failed to understand that is now under Bloe’s command.
This is all very deliberate.
Whether Bloe tries to lead them into a rebellion or is forced to bow to Lady Ariel, she comes out on top regardless.
If they rebel, she can crush them as an example and use them to replenish the system’s energy; if they bend the knee, they will simply be crushed in battle instead.
So far, Bloe has been made to keep them all in check, wrangling them into an army just to sacrifice them here.
He is certainly a skilled leader.
But Bloe is too emotional and has been too open in his defiance of Lady Ariel.
It is both tragic and fitting that his idiocy has been used against him, forcing him to lead an army of sacrificial pawns.
But even backed into a corner and given such harrowing tasks, Bloe has continued to lead the Seventh Army with resolve.
He is a determined man and a passionate one.
Which is why he fears for the sacrificial Seventh Army from the bottom of his heart, mourns their deaths, and roils with anger and anxiety.
Hoping that they will draw out the enemy as quickly as possible.
“Bloe. It looks like they took the bait.”
And so I update him as soon as I notice.
“!”
“Get ready.”
Bloe looks up quickly, and I give him a fast order.
Their goal has been accomplished.
But that was only the first step.
We succeeded in luring out the enemy only at great loss to the Seventh Army.
And the real battle begins now.
We must defeat the enemy we’ve drawn into the open, or we cannot win.
“The hero’s arrived.”
The hero: humanity’s greatest hope.
We must strike him down here and crush the humans’ morale.
I could not defeat Lady Ariel, the Demon Lord.
And now I must make yet another risky wager.
But I have no choice but to gamble, even if the odds are stacked against me.
Just like Bloe, I am heading toward a disaster of my own making.
FORT KUSORION BATTLE THE KEY POINTS!
Welcome back to White Explains It All!
The Colonel and Deadbeat are attacking a fort surrounded by…nothing!
What? There’s gotta be something, you say?
Tsk, tsk, tsk.
The fact that there’s nothing is what’s so special about it!
A flat field with no special features means that it’s easy for troops to march through here.
Any spot easy for a big army to punch through is an important one!
For the human side, it’s a place where they have to hold the line no matter what. Otherwise, a whole army could waltz right on in.
They’ve gotta defend this place to the death, whatever happens to the other forts.
That’s Fort Kusorion in a nutshell!
Which is why we sent two whole armies to conquer this very important fort.
Same goes for the other side—it looks like the humans committed way more people to protecting this one.
On top of that, they’ve got their strongest fighting force of all at this fort: the hero.
So in one corner we’ve got the Colonel, who’s the strongest of all the regular demons, and in the other is the hero, the symbol of hope for humanity.
Talk about a big showdown.
You could even say that this battle will decide the outcome of the war.
Even I’m on the edge of my seat over here!
…Man, this fort’s got a pretty stupid-sounding name, though, huh?
I became an adventurer solely by chance.
Call it a coincidence if you like.
It just so happened that the fastest way for a no-name brat to earn money was working as an adventurer—that’s the only reason.
I was born in the middle of nowhere.
You couldn’t even call it a village. It was just a couple of run-down shacks bunched up in the same shabby place.
There were no walls to keep out monsters, just an almost useless fence made of some skinny twigs.
If the place was ever attacked by monsters or bandits, we’d all die.
But for some reason, no one ever tried to leave. Everyone assumed it’d somehow be fine, simply because it always had been.
As if that could possibly be true.
Since I seemed to be the only one who realized that, I left home at a young age and became an adventurer.
Sure, it was tough getting by at first.
I mean, I was just a kid.
An adventurer’s main job is culling monsters, but kids can’t manage that kind of thing.
When a monster kills humans, its level goes way up, and sometimes it’ll even evolve.
That’s why there are rules in place to keep adventurers from dying.
The role of the adventurers’ guild is to distribute appropriate jobs so that kids and newbies don’t take on anything they can’t handle.
Meaning while anyone can be an adventurer, not just anyone can earn money doing it.
The highest-paying jobs are monster hunts, but kids obviously aren’t allowed to do those, so I only got odd jobs and errands at first.
I ran around all day long, barely earning enough money to pay for food and lodging for the night.
And so it went for some time.
It’s not unusual for street urchins to become adventurers like I did.
In most cases, those kids can’t keep up that lifestyle for long and eventually resort to petty crimes like pickpocketing instead.
Sounds a bit stupid, but with one good pull, a skilled pickpocket could get the same amount of money it’d take a whole day’s worth of honest work to earn.
It’s no wonder so many kids end up choosing that path when they see how much less grueling it is.
Even if not all of them might make it to the next year.
Sure, pickpocketing might be an easy way to make money, but it’s at the cost of ruining the rest of your life.
Those kids made fun of me for sticking to honest hard work, but to me they were the stupid ones.
It’s not like I avoided pickpocketing because it’s bad, really. It just wasn’t worth it.
You might get money in the short term, but odds are you’d end up in prison in the long run.
Lots of them kept doing it anyway, with the groundless confidence that they’d never be caught, but that obviously wasn’t true.
Just like the folks in my hometown, they assumed they were special, and I have no idea why.
In the end, my hometown got destroyed by bandits, and every last one of the kids who were pickpockets got caught.
I never thought of myself as special. I just made a point of avoiding danger.
That’s the only difference between them and me.
Who’d have thought I would go on to be successful as an adventurer and end up in the hero’s party?
If you told me that when I was a kid, I never would’ve believed it.
Even now, no one’s as surprised as I am.
I became an adventurer by chance, but as it turns out, I guess I had a knack for it.
People call me an expert who can use all kinds of weapons, but when I think about how that happened, I can’t help laughing.
The only reason I’m good with a bunch of different weapons is because I didn’t have any of my own.
How would having no weapons lead to knowing how to use so many of them? That’s what most people ask when I tell them that. All it really means is that I used whatever I could get: hand-me-down weapons from older adventurers, broken ones that belonged in the scrap heap, stuff like that.
I didn’t have any money, after all.
Beggars can’t be choosers, so I just used anything and everything in reach.
Since they weren’t bought in a store or anything, nothing I laid my hands on lasted long, either, so I used whatever I could find for all it was worth.
Eventually, my earnings started to stabilize, and by the time I could afford to buy real weapons, I was experienced with all kinds of them.
If the young adventurers who look up to me ever found out the boring truth, they’d probably be heartbroken.
I’ve heard there’s a fad among the rookies to imitate me by using multiple weapons.
I dunno if that’s a good thing or a bad thing, though.
The advantages and disadvantages of using multiple weapons are obvious.
On the one hand, you can react to more situations.
Different kinds of attacks work on different monsters.
Cutting, impact, piercing, shock: Each one is more effective against certain foes and less effective against others.
If you can keep track of that and use the weapon best suited for your target, battles get a whole lot easier.
So what’s the downside? Your skills grow more slowly, you have to lug around a whole slew of bulky weapons, and it’s a pain keeping them all in good shape.
Obviously, the most effective way to raise a skill level is to pick a single kind of weapon and keep using it. If you use a bunch of different kinds, that just means more skills you have to level up, and you’ll be dividing your experience among them all.
If I had to have a sword fight with an adventurer who only uses swords, I’d probably be the one to lose.
Then there’s the bulkiness.
If you wanna switch weapons depending on the situation, that means you’ve got no choice but to carry a ton of them around at any given time.
That’s fine if you got a bag with Space Storage on it or something, but Space Magic items are really expensive.
There’s not much supply and a ton of demand, so they sell as soon as they hit the market, even when they’re priced super high.
Then the prices get even higher, so it’s a vicious cycle.
But I happen to have one that Hawkin got for a steal, so I can hit the battlefield without worrying about lugging around a ton of clunky weapons.
Until then, I put all that heavy stuff on my back…
I really owe Hawkin for that.
But even with that problem solved, I still have to maintain all these weapons constantly, and that isn’t cheap.
Weapons are tools that protect your life. If you neglect ’em and they break in battle, you could be in serious danger, so it’s important to keep them in tip-top shape at all times.
I had to use tons of broken secondhand weapons when I was starting out, so I know exactly how dangerous it can be, let me tell you.
Those experiences made me who I am now, but you’re better off using a proper weapon in the first place.
Wielding several proper weapons costs serious cash.
Buying them and maintaining them, too.
A weapon’s price is relative to its effectiveness.
When you’re an adventurer at my level, you gotta use some decent-quality stuff.
If I use a weapon that can’t hold up to my stats, I’ll have to replace it after every swing.
Stronger adventurers reap higher profits, but they have to spend more on equipment, too.
And on top of that, I gotta buy several different kinds of those pricey weapons.
It can’t just be expensive for no reason, either. I need an artisan I trust to craft ’em and make sure that’s the person who does maintenance on ’em, too.
Usually Hawkin takes care of that kind of thing.
When I was investigating a human-trafficking organization on a certain country’s request, I just happened to spot Hawkin for sale and bought him, but that’s frankly gotta be the best decision I ever made in my life.
Without Hawkin, I’d be bankrupt by now…
The reason I joined the hero’s party is because I sensed that I was starting to reach the limits of my solo career. That’s the truth.
But to the rest of the world, it seems like I reached the limits of my ability to fight solo and finally went looking for a group who could keep up with me.
There are a handful of adventurers who work solo, but most of them don’t get far.
Since this occupation means constantly dancing with death, it’s simply too risky to strike out on your own.
Unlike a party, where the other members can help out if one of them makes a mistake, the smallest misstep can mean death for a solo adventurer, and a foe that would be easy to defeat with teamwork is far more difficult to challenge alone.
All good reasons why most people team up with other adventurers of similar strength to form parties.
But I’ve always worked solo.
It’s not that I was particularly set on working alone or anything.
It’s just, when I started out, no one wanted to team up with a broke little kid.
So I kept working solo, and next thing I knew, I had reached A rank, and there were no other strong adventurers around me.
Just like the reason I became an adventurer, I stayed solo because of chance and nothing more.
But that was for the best.
With my strength, I can tackle most monsters alone.
I just have to avoid fighting any monsters I can’t handle.
The true limit of what I could accomplish in my solo career wasn’t decided by any lack of strength.
If anything, it’s because of a lack of money…
Adventurers earn money by defeating monsters, with the amount depending on the monster’s strength.
But powerful monsters worth a lot of money don’t appear all that often.
If you go to dangerous areas where ordinary people never set foot, you can find dangerous monsters of A rank and above, but few adventurers ever return from those places.
If a solo adventurer like me went somewhere like that, you can bet I wouldn’t come back in one piece.
Sure, I could maybe survive if I avoided being spotted by any monsters, but then I wouldn’t earn any money.
But it’s not good to overhunt the weaker monsters, either.
It’s important to keep their numbers low, but if you hunt them too much, you can wreck the fragile balance of the ecosystem and cause unintended consequences.
Best to keep the culling to a reasonable level.
With my strength, I don’t have to worry about not having enough to eat, but that strength also requires high-quality weapons that can hold up to heavy use. Multiple weapons, no less.
I might not be in danger of starving, but it costs a lot of money to maintain a proper stock of weapons.
It’s not easy to find requests that keep enough money rolling in.
The highest-paying requests involve defeating powerful monsters or working for a government.
A rank or not, as a solo adventurer, I wasn’t rolling in either kind of request.
Since there weren’t enough requests appropriate for my strength, I started falling into the red, which was why I felt I’d reached the limit of my solo career.
A pretty embarrassing limit, I gotta say.
Again, sorry for ruining the dreams of you young adventurers who looked up to me…
In any case, investigating that human-trafficking organization at the behest of some government or other and joining the anti–human trafficking force was exactly what I needed.
Governmental requests pay accordingly well, and the force was funded by many nations.
On top of that, the force consisted of elites from all over the world.
If everything went well, I might get invited to work for one of those countries.
With that in mind, I joined the force with Hawkin in tow.
Hawkin was purely worried about the young hero, but my reasons were much more pragmatic.
And when the force was disbanded, I ended up joining the hero’s party.
…That was a surprise to me, too.
I only spoke to Julius at the wrap-up banquet on a whim, a casual urge to give some life advice to the young boy who already carried so much responsibility.
Through our activities on the force, I got a good idea of young Julius’s nature.
To be honest, he seemed naive to me.
I’ve experienced a lot as an adventurer, both good and bad, so it was almost embarrassing to watch someone so earnest and simple…and concerning, too.
It’s not a bad thing to be honest.
We need people with a strong sense of justice.
But the truth is that the world’s problems can’t be fixed with sentiments alone.
Real adults have to be able to take the bad with the good in equal measure.
Those who are overly focused on chasing the good in this world can get crushed when they’re confronted with the dark and dirty.
It’s one thing if they can manage to pretend they didn’t see anything, but someone whose sense of justice is too strong might get heartbroken right then and there.
I suspect part of the reason Julius was in the anti–human trafficking organization force was for him to get exposed to the darkness early on, so that wouldn’t happen.
That night, I figured I’d give him a little advice while also feeling out whether he really understood that.
And what do you think he said?
“I learned in my time with the force how easily people can turn to the path of evil, too. But that’s exactly what my power is for.
“I am the hero, a symbol of hope for the people. An emblem of justice. And the enemy of evil. I’ll become the hope of humanity and show them that I’ll never let evil win.
“I am here. I am the hero. That’s what I want to let everyone know. As long as I do that, I’m sure the future will be full of hope.”
He clearly understood the dark and the light, but instead of turning a blind eye or being heartbroken, he declared that he would change the very darkness into light.
So this is what a hero’s supposed to be, I thought.
I understood then why he was the only person fit to be called the hero, even if he was just a kid.
And next thing I knew, I was offering my services to him.
Even now, I have no idea why I did that.
Or why Julius accepted without hesitation.
One way or another, that’s how I ended up as a member of the hero’s party.
You never know where life’s gonna take you.
But I don’t regret it for a second.
For one thing, a member of the hero’s party doesn’t have to worry about money.
I’ve been able to fight to my best ability without fear of going broke, although it’s mostly because Hawkin runs around taking care of everything.
And being in the hero’s party means a lot of fame, too.
What more could a guy want?
For a kid who started out practically as an orphan, I think I’ve gone further as an adventurer than I ever could’ve imagined.
I’m perfectly content.
Seems like I don’t have a whole lot of ambition, I guess.
I didn’t even become an A-rank adventurer because I wanted to get stronger or anything.
I was just trying to make my life a little better, struggling to get out of poverty, and next thing you know, that’s where I ended up.
As a member of the hero’s party, I’ve got more wealth and fame than I ever needed, so I’m not looking to get anything more than that.
People say I’m not greedy, but I don’t think that’s true.
I’ve got desires just like anyone else.
I wanna eat good food to my heart’s content and spend my nights with a good woman.
Having money makes me happy, and it feels good to have people fawn over me because of my fame.
But if you get too greedy or ambitious, that can lead to your own doom, so I don’t want anything more than what I’ve got.
Julius’s hyper-noble dedication to justice seems a little heavy to me, but I do think you have to live your life by a code.
Rules are made for a reason, and breaking them usually isn’t worth it.
I’m not noble and pure of heart—I just never break rules if it’s not worth the risk.
In that sense, I’m probably the only member of the hero’s party who isn’t a good and virtuous person.
Actually, no, I guess there’s Hyrince, too…
But I guess Julius probably needs someone who sees things from a different point of view.
Maybe he even keeps Hyrince close at hand because he realizes that.
Since I’m the oldest and all, I sometimes end up being like the teacher who guides the other members of the hero’s party.
At first, I didn’t think that suited me, but I’ve gotten used to it over the years.
So now I sorta feel like their guardian.
But that’s not a bad feeling.
…Maybe I’m getting soft as I grow older.
Back in the day, I probably would’ve died rather than watch over a bunch of brats.
The main reason I always worked solo is because there wasn’t anyone else around who was about the same level or strength as me, but it’s also because dealing with other people is a pain.
Where I come from, gossip and envy were all fairly common.
People sometimes suspected me of picking pockets, although it was always a false charge.
With that unpleasant history, I decided not to team up with anyone unless I knew I could really trust them.
And when it comes to Julius and the rest of the hero’s party, they’re so damn nice that there was never any doubt.
It’s like these guys have never even heard of jealousy or envy.
In that sense, I had nothing to worry about, but I wasn’t used to being in the position of relying on others or even guiding them.
But now I’ve gone so soft that I’ve even considering teaching young adventurers once I retire.
I’m getting old, all right.
Technically I’m still on the younger side, but as adventurers go, I’m undoubtedly a veteran by now.
It’s the nature of the job that you can’t do it for all that long.
The gradual weakening and slowing down that comes with age can make the difference between life and death in battle.
And it gets harder to balance your strength and earnings, just like what happened in my case.
If you get married and have kids, you obviously have to take care of them, too.
Once an adventurer reaches a certain age or level of strength, they usually start to look for a more stable line of work.
Many people even wash their hands of this dangerous job long before they reach that point.
The time has come for me to start thinking about what I’m gonna do when I quit being an adventurer, too.
Julius and the others are grown adults by now.
They’re strong enough that they’ll do just fine without me.
Once this all-important battle with the demons is over, I’ll begin looking for a successor and figure out what I’m gonna do with myself from now on.
I haven’t had much of a chance to form a deep connection with anyone over the years, so maybe I should look for a good woman, too.
But I guess I can take time to think about all that after I survive this fight.
We’ve been deployed to Fort Kusorion.
It’s the most important of all the major forts, making it a fitting place to be personally defended by Julius the hero, humanity’s trump card.
The enemy knows this, too, which is why they’re attacking so aggressively.
Our commanding officer shouts orders, and the soldiers hurry into action.
But even their resolute attempts at defense are being pushed back in the face of the demons’ almost self-destructive recklessness.
“Down you go!”
I kick a ladder that’s been propped against the wall of the fort.
The demon that was climbing it takes a tumble, too, but another ladder almost instantly appears just a few paces over.
By the time I knock that one over as well, the first one is already propped back up again.
There’s no end to it.
Nearby, another soldier deals with a similar situation, but the enemy proves too strong for him to push the ladder down; a fight breaks out as the first demon climbs onto the wall.
“Hiyah!”
Julius cuts down the demon with one strike.
“Healing, now!”
Little Miss Yaana uses Healing Magic to help the wounded recover.
“Get back!”
Hyrince raises his shield at the outer edge of the wall to repel an enemy spell that comes flying toward us from the distance.
“Here’s a little somethin’!”
Behind Hyrince’s shield, Hawkin tosses something down at the soldiers below the wall.
Judging by the resulting screams, it must’ve been some wildly dangerous item.
We’re holding down our section of the wall well enough, but there are just too many enemies.
Fort Kusorion is huge. With attacks coming from all sides, there’s no way we can cover everywhere at once on our own.
“Eek?!”
“Careful.”
The wall trembles, and Miss Yaana stumbles a little.
Julius quickly catches her and finds himself propping her up for a moment.
At a glance, it looks like they’re embracing, and they both certainly seem flustered.
But this is the hero’s party.
They’re not stupid enough to do something like that in the middle of a battle.
The two of them quickly separate and scan for the source of the tremor.
“…That’s not good,” Julius murmurs gravely.
Immediately, there’s another tremor at our feet.
It’s coming from a siege engine shaped like a massive pillar being smashed into the main gate.
“Dammit! What are the guards down there doing?!”
Hyrince curses, but I’m sure the soldiers aren’t slacking off, either.
They’re doing their best to stop the enemy from ramming the gate, but the siege engine has too much momentum to be stopped completely.
The demons draw back to drive the siege engine home again.
Defenders shoot magic at them to try to stop it, but even a direct hit doesn’t slow them down.
Even as they’re scorched by flames, electrocuted by lightning, and lose limbs to Earth Magic, the demons crash into the door once more.
“They broke through…”
I barely even notice that the words are coming out of my mouth.
The demons flood in through the shattered gate.
Of course, Fort Kusorion won’t fall just because a single door was broken down.
There are more layers of defense inside, and the attackers might even expose themselves to a pincer attack if they aren’t careful.
So there’s no need to panic just yet, but the fact that the famously impregnable Fort Kusorion has been breached at all is a considerable shock to our allies—which isn’t good when they were already intimidated by the demons’ viciously aggressive attacks.
At this rate, our side’s morale could take a serious blow.
“Julius, what’s our move?”
“…Let’s go.”
Julius hesitates for a moment, then starts running toward the front gate.
“We’re going to take care of things down there! Don’t worry! Just hold steady up here for now!”
With a brief call of encouragement to the soldiers, I follow on Julius’s heels.
If the soldiers up here started flagging because we left and that gave the enemy another opportunity to break through, our efforts would be completely wasted.
We need them to keep digging in their heels even after we leave.
The hero’s party rushes toward the gate, Julius leading the way.
When we reach the wall closest to it, Julius takes a running jump right into the fray.
“Haaaah!”
With momentum and gravity on his side, he brings his sword down on a group of enemies who are clumped up.
A boom echoes off the walls as Julius lands on the remains of an enemy soldier.
He’s annihilated the whole swathe of demons in a single attack.
Just like that, the enemies who made it inside the gate have all been wiped out.
Julius isn’t satisfied with that, though, and runs out through the broken gate.
“We’re going, too! Hang on!”
Hyrince scoops up Miss Yaana and jumps down after Julius.
I pick up Hawkin and follow in the same way.
Of course, it did occur to me to just leave Hawkin there. But after he showed me last night how determined he was, I couldn’t betray his trust.
I use Dimensional Maneuvering as I land to make sure it isn’t too rough on Hawkin.
Julius is already locked in battle with the enemy’s frontline troops—or rather, he’s already cutting right through them.
With every swing of Julius’s sword, another demon goes down.
Their stats are higher than ordinary humans’, but as the hero, Julius is even stronger.
I’m sure only a handful of the strongest demons could even hold their own in a fight against Julius.
…But I guess now isn’t the time to stand around being impressed.
“Don’t run off on your own!”
Hyrince catches up to Julius and raises his shield.
I come over to stand at Julius’s other side. “Let’s push them back right here and now.”
Charging into battle like this, both armies are bound to notice.
Our allies’ morale will improve when they see how dependable the hero is, while the enemy will falter in the face of the hero’s fearsome strength.
It’s better to set Julius loose on solid ground where he can fight to the fullest than have him defend a tiny section of the wall.
Julius seems to be in agreement with my plan, as he keeps pressing onward.
He slashes his way forward through the enemy as easily as if he’s cutting through an empty field.
I finish off any enemies Julius missed, while Hyrince protects Miss Yaana and Hawkin as we advance, the two of them supporting with long-distance attacks.
Our teamwork is in perfect sync.
We’ve never fought in such a huge battle before, but the cooperation we’ve polished fighting monsters and bandits is working perfectly here.
The enemy had a lot of momentum before, but now they’re definitely quaking in their boots.
“Out of the way!” Julius shouts. “We have no quarrel with any who turns back now!”
But none of the demons get ready to run away.
Why would they?
“Uh, Julius. I don’t think they’re gonna understand human language, yeah?”
Hyrince’s calm observation is right.
Demons speak their own language, after all…
Julius turns a little red with embarrassment.
An awkward silence ensues, even though we’re smack-dab in the middle of a battlefield.
“But it did work as a threat,” Yaana suggests encouragingly.
“Yeah, and your crazy strength is scarin’ ’em for sure.”
Hawkin is right, too: Even if they didn’t understand what Julius said, his power certainly requires no translation to be understood.
“It’d be great if they would take that as a cue to retreat…”
Julius makes a hopeful comment, but I’m sure he knows as well as the rest of us that’s not going to happen.
Even now, there’s a commotion spreading from the back of the enemies’ ranks.
“Julius, something’s coming.”
I’m sure he realizes that, but I warn him anyway.
The demons open up a path.
And an enemy on horseback appears.
“Hero! Prepare yourself!”
The mounted warrior shouts in human language, albeit a little falteringly, and slashes down with his sword.
Julius parries the blow head-on, but despite his attack failing, the fighter on horseback simply pulls his horse aside and gallops briefly away.
…This guy’s strong.
The fact that he wasn’t defeated in that exchange with Julius is more than enough proof.
Julius was able to defend himself but couldn’t counterattack.
Even if it was a sudden strike from a fighter on horseback, Julius is the hero, so the fact that he couldn’t turn the tables instantly means that the enemy must be powerful.
This has got to be one of the demon elites.
“?! Hyrince! Above us!”
Sensing something strange, I call out a warning to Hyrince.
Hyrince moves instantly, protecting Yaana with his shield from something raining down on her from above.
“Urgh!” he groans.
There’s the dull thud of a weapon crashing against the shield, but before the echoing dies down, the culprit has already escaped.
The damn thing’s fast.
I put away the ax I was holding and ready my bow instead.
The enemy, a giant birdlike monster, is flying through the air.
And riding on its back appears to be a man in the prime of his life.
This newcomer is bad news.
My Danger Perception gives me a shrill warning: That man is strong.
The warrior on horseback was already a formidable foe, but this guy is even worse.
“I am Bloe, Seventh Commander of the demon army. Let us do battle, Hero!”
The demon called Bloe introduces himself in human language and readies his sword.
“I am Julius the hero. I accept your challenge.”
Julius draws his blade as well.
“Hmph.”
On the other hand, the man on the flying mount looks at Bloe with something resembling exasperation.
“I suppose I shall introduce myself, too. I am Agner, First Commander of the demon army. Prepare to perish.”
In contrast to that Bloe guy’s stammering human language, this one speaks quite clearly.
I knew he had to be an elite of some kind, but to think they are both commanders…
They must have been aiming for the hero’s party, or specifically Julius the hero himself.
If they can defeat the hero, it will be a huge blow to the human race.
That must be their aim.
But the reverse is true, too.
If we can defeat two commanders in one battle, I’m sure it’ll have a serious effect on the demons.
Guess that means it’s time for a showdown.
“Julius! You take that one!”
“Right!”
I’m sure Julius can handle a commander on his own.
The problem is the other one.
“Hyrince! Protect Miss Yaana and Hawkin!”
“You know I will.”
“Missy, Hawkin, you’re on support duty.”
“Of course.”
“You got it!”
It’ll be four against one, but that might be our only chance.
Agner starts weaving magic.
I figured as much. The air is the perfect position to launch a long-distance attack.
Our only options are to either counter with long-distance attacks of our own or figure out a way to bring him down.
Whereas he can attack us however he wants.
On top of that, he can dodge in any direction, including up or down.
As long as he’s in midair, we’re at a disadvantage.
Part 5 of 8