Chapter 255 — What If (3)
“…No wonder the Temple went berserk trying to kill me.”
[What did you say?]
“Nothing.”
Whatever.
There was no point feeling empty over something that had already happened.
Even if I had known, it wasn’t as though I would have chosen not to escape.
I let it pass and quietly asked another question.
“If they can sacrifice their own kind, I wonder why they leave one another alone.”
[Wellll… humans know that killing someone lets them take whatever property that person owned, but they don’t normally go around murdering people just for that, right? Maybe it’s like that?]
“…I believe that is because humans have social norms enforced by coercive power. Do demons possess laws or customs for maintaining order as well?”
[I don’t think they have social standards established by everyone agreeing together. But they have that, don’t they?]
That insane king who used himself as a wedge and nevertheless succeeded in linking one dimension to another.
[If someone like that banned demons from killing their own kind, everyone would have to follow it.]
“So that is the logic….”
I pictured Satan summoning all the demons and declaring, “No fighting each other.”
It was a little funny.
[Anyway, it’s still strange that the original owner of the body walked around hiding the Demonic Energy. Given that he spent five whole years collecting bodies to use as sacrifices, the contract probably happened before that… but is that even possible? He made a contract with a demon, yet kept his Demonic Energy hidden? If that were possible, Demon Contractors would have been living easy long ago.]
But my reality was too harsh to laugh over the image for long.
We dragged the conversation back from that side path.
There was still nothing resembling an answer.
[…Could the demon itself have hidden it?]
“I didn’t catch that.”
[Like I said last time, it’s almost impossible for a human alone to conceal Demonic Energy. But if the demon itself wanted to hide the Demonic Energy… then that changes the story. Yes. If the demon directly concealed the Demonic Energy, that changes things!]
Halfway through speaking, Yukgwi suddenly jerked the head up like Archimedes shouting Eureka.
[Yes, yes! That’s it! That has to be the answer!]
“…I still don’t understand.”
So calm down and explain.
I said it indirectly, but that got me nowhere.
[But why? What benefit would the demon gain from cooperating?]
“…I would like to understand that as well.”
[Ah. Ah, sorry.]
The second time, I said it plainly.
That worked.
Yukgwi apologized, lowered the head that had been held proudly upright, and tapped the moss with a fin.
[Once you’re talking about a Great Demon, changing the composition of the body doesn’t cause the same side effects. Meaning its body won’t become deformed like a human’s would, and it won’t suffer from the regenerative nature of Demonic Energy. Demonic Energy belongs to them in the first place.]
Yukgwi added that this did not mean there were no side effects whatsoever.
The demon would apparently become more vulnerable to external attacks, and maintaining the state for too long could cause internal damage from the backlash.
[So if the demon itself acted, concealing Demonic Energy wouldn’t be entirely impossible. However….]
“The issue is whether it had any reason to do so.”
[Exactly.]
I tapped my fingers as I considered the question Yukgwi had presented.
Now that we had come this far, I felt like there was something irritatingly close to the edge of my awareness.
“…First, the contract between the original owner of my body and the demon was made over five years ago. Correct?”
[He wouldn’t have started collecting sacrifices without making the contract first… so probably?]
“And using those collected sacrifices, they brought me here. Everything up to that point is confirmed fact.”
[Right?]
“…Why?”
[……?]
“I’m not asking out of self-pity about why it had to be me. That is something I would need to ask those bastards directly. What I mean now is… why did they bring in an outsider like me instead of reaching a conclusion between themselves?”
A contract was ultimately an agreement between two parties.
And agreements were ordinarily reached through compromise and negotiation.
Meaning those two had reached a mutual decision to “bring in a third party.”
“If there were something they intended to accomplish through me, I never received a single instruction. I wasn’t even told why I was placed into this body.”
The Main Story appeared after I had already acted, so calling it an instruction felt wrong.
If anything, it had been closer to a blindfold intended to prevent me from realizing this place was real.
If they had truly wanted me to kill Satan, they could simply have displayed a Main Quest blatantly telling me to kill Satan.
“Meanwhile, I was given several conveniences that helped me survive. For example, a bag that holds more than it appears able to, and equipment that does not break.”
I didn’t mention things like the status window and skills because they would be difficult to explain.
Those things had served as means of tricking me into believing this world was a game, but at the same time, they had undeniably helped me survive.
Then perhaps this itself… could be a meaningful clue.
[But what kind of benefit could your remaining alive and active possibly produce for them?]
Like someone who had realized something was buried beneath the ground they were digging through, I began feeling along the stones blocking my way one by one.
If I removed all of them, would the answer finally appear?
That shallow hope moved my lips without permission.
“For one thing, if I remain alive while failing to perceive the demon, my existence itself serves to suppress it…. Perhaps that is what the human side was aiming for. You have a general idea from the incident in Bemurchen, but the aftermath when it runs wild is simply too great.”
[I feel like you may be forcing the pieces together a little… but it isn’t impossible. Keep going.]
Forcing them together?
No.
This was probably correct.
I remembered the opening cinematic, now faint in my memory.
I didn’t want to believe that had been a lie as well.
“And the demon’s side….”
By contrast, I had nothing obvious to grasp onto regarding the demon.
What could it gain by handing control of the body to a third party and standing back to watch?
What, a screen through my special nature—the Concealment of Ignorance?
But that hadn’t hidden it completely.
I had been misunderstood as a demon and run into one disaster after another.
Even when I was nearly executed as a demon, from their perspective they had no choice but to watch helplessly unless some special trigger occurred.
Was that really beneficial?
“…I don’t know what exactly, but there must be some benefit. It would never have accepted a compromise like this and cooperated if there were nothing to gain.”
[That is true.]
“The problem is what that benefit actually is….”
I racked my brain trying to work out the demon’s possible gain.
Then suddenly, I looked back at the premise itself.
If my being alive and active created some sort of profit for them….
Then what happened in the opposite case?
“…I was thinking about this the wrong way.”
[……?]
“The important thing isn’t what benefit the demon can obtain from me—”
I reflected on my stubbornly tenacious life, which I had researched together with White Wind.
Then I thought of all the conveniences that made it easier for me to survive.
“What matters is what would cause them a loss.”
I didn’t know anything else.
But I had a feeling that if I died, you people would have a problem.
“If I die.”
[W-wait, what?]
Then maybe I could use this for a negotiation.
“If I die, please send my corpse to Inquisitor Daniel, who lives in Deurpumain.”
I gripped the dagger.
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* * *
Berserk stroked the piece of metal the turtle had left behind.
Because she could not understand the turtle’s voice, she had accepted it by reading the mood and assuming it was some sort of thank-you gift….
But she still did not know what it actually was.
“…Cold.”
Still, lacking knowledge did not mean she was incapable of recognizing the object’s value.
All the more so because this piece of metal was wrapped in coldness and wind that never faded.
The metal looked almost like a physical embodiment of her homeland—the glacial land that never melted.
“…Hmm.”
Come to think of it, she wondered what had happened to her homeland.
Her eyes slowly lowered at the memories surfacing for the first time in a long while.
When she had lived there, that snowy land had never changed, as though even time itself had frozen.
Then did that place remain filled with savage cold, death lying everywhere, and ruin creeping ever closer?
Were warriors still fighting meaningless battles there, killing in order to live?
Was that land where the weak were weeded out and the strong bent until they broke, where blood flowed endlessly, and yet everything remained only white—was it still the same?
『…You will pass through the Trial of the Glacier twenty times. That was the punishment we gave you. And you passed magnificently. You are free now.』
Still.
『You’re leaving? Well, fine. There is nothing binding you anymore, so if you want to, you may. We have no right to stop you.』
Did it still hold her sister?
『But remember. If you fail to die, you will certainly return. Just as we cannot abandon this land even as it grows drier and game grows scarcer by the year, you too will eventually come back here.』
Berserk squeezed the piece of metal, which only grew colder the longer she held it.
“They said the warriors of Norda were bound by a curse.”
Wise Birgir had already known.
As long as her sister remained buried there, Berserk would inevitably return.
Her escape would one day have to end.
“You were right.”
Yet she felt no pointless urge to rebel against the truth.
That was only natural after realizing that the longer she spent shaking her head because she did not want to face the truth, the harder it became for her instead.
“You were right.”
Which left only one choice.
It was time to go back.
Berserk rose.
Layer upon layer of cold began settling in the chest that had lost the reason it had spent so long roaming the south in search of.
* * *
Before plunging the blade into myself, I thought things through until the very last moment.
For example, I worried that the demon might emerge again once I was in danger of dying.
I worried that, contrary to my expectations, the life or death of this body might have nothing to do with their gains or losses.
I wondered what would happen if I really died.
Most of my thoughts were like that.
[W-wait, hey, hey!]
But I was already like a bird perched at the tip of a blade of grass.
There was nowhere left to retreat.
I steeled myself.
[Hey, hey! Even so—!]
“Please.”
Most importantly, I was certain of one thing.
Even in the worst-case scenario, I would die before the demon could seize control of this body.
After all, looking back on everything that had happened so far, there were obviously several restrictions on the demon taking over this body.
For example, perhaps Rage needed to activate and the Madness Gauge had to completely fill.
Or perhaps the demon could only deploy like a deus ex machina when the situation was truly beyond saving.
There appeared to be limitations like those.
And the “beyond saving” situations in question were not judged according to whether my own life was at risk.
That was an obvious conclusion.
My life had been on the verge of ending so many times, yet the demon had only appeared twice.
Then when did the demon descend?
Not when only my own life was at stake, but when the lives of far more people were on the line.
Perhaps the real Demon Knight compromised with the demon in order to save those people, sending the demon out in his place.
The clues I had gathered in Bemurchen made that almost certain.
Honestly, why would a demon have any reason to save humans—to save the Hero—unless something forced it to?
“Please just keep the request I made a moment ago.”
Anyway, for that reason, this gamble wasn’t such a bad deal.
Not even if it ended in my death.
The best outcome would be for dying to return me home.
But even if I died and failed to go back… well.
Wouldn’t it ultimately amount to the same thing?
If I couldn’t hide my Demonic Energy, I would spend my whole life being hunted and treated as an enemy.
I had no confidence I could endure that.
If that was the alternative, I would rather die while clinging to some hope.
[You really are….]
“I’m sorry.”
Therefore, even resorting to a method like this was by no means excessive.
『…Don’t ever do that again.』
I’m sorry.
An apology that would never reach anyone sank into the abyss.