"......Devil-kin of some standing, are we? The lower floors' masters are famous for being hard to move — what brings you all the way up to the fifth?"
"What other reason would there be? We came to plant a flag in ownerless land, by the Demon King's command."
The man answered the question Moor put to him after one deep breath. His voice was as cold and straight-driven as his pallid skin.
Some of the paladins were seized by an even greater terror at that voice. A few dropped to their knees where they stood; the weaker-hearted fainted.
Demon Kings.
The collective term for the seven devils who reign in Hell.
The world built on the order they sit atop is called lawful evil, and their strength is said to rival a dragon's.
Officially, there are two recorded instances of them descending into the Fifth-Layer World.
"Ownerless land...... unbelievable."
Moor smiled bitterly and set a cigarette between his lips.
The Fifth-Layer World, with the dragons gone and its ruling species with them.
It told you exactly what the beings of other worlds thought of this place.
"Moor! This is no time to be taking it easy!"
Over at the lake, meanwhile, the ice cracked on despite Leo's reinforcement with the Benediction Arts, and demons finally began coming through.
Leo wanted nothing more than to run from the presences at her back — but she crushed that instinct, focused on the enemy in front of her, and poured in more mana.
KA-BOOM—!
Las assessed the situation. He concluded that the devils in front of them had summoned the demons behind. Which meant dealing with the two devils, as the source of the summoning, would end it.
So he fired a Depth 5 golden sphere at the pair at once.
But the woman of the two swatted the golden sphere aside with her left hand, entirely at her ease. And then she charged in fast, going for Las's head.
Ran filled the sword in his hand with silver energy.
His companions were all sorcerers — releasing the silver energy would poison his own side. And their enemy wasn't a sorcerer either. Whether the silver energy would even work was anyone's guess.
Marcel-Style
Glacier Cleave.
Ran gritted his teeth and swung as hard as anything he could manage in that instant.
"Aagh!"
Ran's blade smashed into the female devil mid-flight toward Las. A dull sound came with it, and the devil's head caved in as she went over backward.
Force beyond what he'd expected.
Ran reset his stance and looked at his sword. Wrapped in silver energy, the blade was glowing — and entirely undamaged.
'So it's this. No wonder everyone was in such a state over that weakling.'
Ran felt again just how remarkable the rare-metal weapon he'd picked up last time was. And in the same breath, something struck him as strange.
The enemy was not a sorcerer. A being from another dimension. Mana simply did not exist in her.
And yet part of the devil's shattered skull was damaged as if mana had frozen there under the silver energy.
A strange situation — but there was no time to dwell on it. The male devil in front of them was trampling the fallen paladins underfoot.
Las and Moor sprayed sorcery of every kind to stop him, and it did nothing.
The male devil broke the binding sorcery laid on him as easily as if it were nothing at all. When a strong attack landed, an arm or a leg would occasionally come off — and regenerate on the spot.
Amid all that, Las's golden sorcery at least seemed to have some stopping power.
"Everyone who can still move — run, all of you!"
At Moor's shout, the surviving paladins began fleeing, one and two at a time.
"Goddamn it!"
A one-sided slaughter. Seeing the horror of it, Ran leveled his sword toward the male devil, intending to join Moor and Las.
"Ran! You stay on the one you were fighting!"
At the same moment as Moor's shout, a chill went through Ran, and he twisted his sword back in against his body.
It let him block the female devil's straight punch, driven deep toward his center.
"Good instincts."
The head he'd thought crushed was perfectly intact. She threw another punch, fast.
Ran barely evaded and answered her extended arm with a straight punch of his own, shattering it completely. Once again the silver energy reacted where the devil's fist broke, and crystals formed.
And once again her arm regenerated. The female devil took two more of Ran's attacks and simply repaired herself, as if none of it were worth noting.
"Moor! This is endless — teleport, do something!"
Ran's eyes went back and forth between the paladins escaping and the demons crawling out of the lake.
"This lake — meaning near a Great Wild. It isn't easy."
Moor swung his muzzle toward the demons and fired mana rounds. And moved in closer to Ran as he did.
"You're lying."
As Moor came near, Ran said it with a scowl.
"True. But Ran — I'm a paladin. You shouldn't go making a liar out of a man."
Moor smiled faintly and cast. Black mana gathered around him, drawing a great circle on the ground.
"Las! Leo! Nearly everyone's out. Wrap it up and get over here!"
With the teleport ready, Moor called to Las and Leo. Both turned at once, wearing very brief looks of blank surprise. And then, also at once, they ran for Moor.
While Las and Leo moved inside the teleport array, Moor kept the demons and devils in check with mana rounds.
"Right, we're leaving."
Moor drew a cigarette from his coat. And set it between his lips.
"Running away?"
"Of course."
Moor smiled at the male devil's question and lit the cigarette.
The moment it caught, the teleport triggered, and all four vanished from the spot.
***
"Where is this? Ah!"
The landscape at their arrival was a little unfamiliar. Ran looked around the moment he landed. A green hill filled his view. Looking further, he spotted the base camp they had originally set out from, somewhat beyond where they had come down.
"Why are we this far out?"
"I teleported several people out of a Great Wild. Cut me some slack."
Moor answered Ran's grumbling with a mild smile. The two started walking slowly toward base camp, Las and Leo following behind.
Leo didn't care for the way Ran spoke to Moor. In truth, an ordinary mage could not have teleported out of that place at all. But Moor had managed it, and Leo was grateful for it.
Ran, apparently, saw it entirely differently, and had started grumbling instead. She was about to say something about it — but the man in question only laughed it off, so she swallowed the words.
After a long walk, they neared base camp.
The sounds of the wounded in pain rang out from every direction.
"Oh! There you are! I knew you'd make it."
Knight-Captain Rom spotted the four walking in from a distance and came over gladly. The moment he came into view, Moor burned his cigarette down to nothing and made it disappear.
"I heard about it — that you covered everyone else's backs to the very last."
Rom's voice was buoyant, presumably from the relief of seeing them. But his posture and his face were deeply worn.
"Ah, yes, that's right. Did the ones who left ahead of us arrive safely?"
"They did, thanks to you. Come inside for now. I was worried; this is a relief."
Moor felt somewhat reassured by Rom's answer. They had bought as much time as they could, but the distance from the battle to base camp was considerable. An ambush along the way would have been dangerous.
Base camp. Stepping into the largest room in it, they found others already seated. Most were from the Order, with some priests and paladins among them.
"Right! Everyone who's coming is here, so we need to decide what to do next."
The people in the room each gave their opinions, based on what they had seen and investigated.
An assault by countless demons. The people in that room could now understand why the Imperial Army had never managed even a proper response.
But they were paladins, and beyond the Benediction Arts they had no obvious countermeasure either.
Each of them said their piece, and no clear solution emerged. And in all of it, Moor's group were the only ones who had encountered a devil rather than a demon. The overloud room fell quiet when Moor moved to speak.
"To begin with. This incident is a Sage-related case."
Everyone was focused on Moor's opinion, and what he said was nothing at all like what they expected.
"What are you talking about, out of nowhere? A Sage?"
Every face turned to Moor, uncomprehending. Las and Leo, who had been there with him, looked especially stunned.
"Idiots, the lot of them — every last one."
The room had gone overloud again.
Ran scowled, as if the whole situation irritated him. Moor glanced at him and smiled faintly. Fortunately, the noise in the room meant only Moor had heard what Ran said.
"I'm afraid I don't follow. Weren't you right there with us? Countless demons came crawling up out of that lake. Devils on top of that. This is plainly an incident connected to Hell. Drag it out any longer and the entire lake will be contaminated and uninhabitable."
Las spoke forcefully, his eyes on Moor.
Demon or devil, the places where they appear are generally rendered uninhabitable for some time by their mana.
Privately, he had hoped Moor — whose word carried weight — would rally the room quickly and call for subjugating the devils they had just met.
When something else entirely came out of Moor's mouth, disappointment raised his voice.
"That's exactly my point. How many days is it since this incident began?"
"Sir?"
The sudden question left Las slightly thrown. The people in the room began to focus on the exchange.
"I don't know precisely, but more than two weeks. And in all that time only people have died — I've seen no contamination of the lake or the forest."
Moor felt every eye in the room swing to him again, and pushed past it to go on.
While Moor talked, Ran, apparently out of patience, quietly left the room. Moor glanced after him but made no move to stop him.
"But what we met was unmistakably a real demon. And the four of you said you met not only demons but devils. Doesn't that suggest they crossed over through a window together with the demons?"
A woman in the Order's paladin uniform, like Moor's, raised a hand and spoke.
"It won't have been a window, to start with."
Las shook his head as he listened. His eyes, too, had drifted naturally after Ran on his way out.
"If only part of their power had come through a window, no corpse would remain — they would have gone back through it. But every one of them, without exception, left a body."
"Then what in God's name is it?!"
The Knight-Captain raised his voice at the endless, fruitless discussion.
"A summoning that uses living people as the medium."
"What did you say?"
Moor picked up from Las to answer the Knight-Captain. Every eye in the room went wide and turned to him.
It was the traditional method.
In the past, a great many devil-worshippers summoned devil-kin using the living as offerings.
But after the existence of windows came to light, few chose that method.
"Then...... the ones we killed, believing them enemies—?"
The people there grasped what Moor was saying on instinct. And their reason refused it.
"Your guess will be right. They were people originally, made into that by someone's sorcery."
The room stirred at Moor's answer. At the thought of having killed innocent lives — perhaps even comrades — one paladin began to pray. And then, one and two at a time, the number of them grew.
Watching people shut their mouths and fold their hands in prayer while the problem stood unsolved, Moor felt an aversion rise in him that he couldn't quite name.
"Then would the same be true of the devils we saw?"
Las's question relieved that aversion.
"I can't be certain — we never fully killed them. But when Ran encountered the devils, he said he smelled a Sage. And they reacted to Ran's silver energy as well."
Las's face said he found that hard to follow.
"Ran can smell a Sage's traces. Because of the curse laid on him, most likely. And their reacting to the silver energy means there is mana in their bodies."
Mana belongs to dragons by origin. Devil-kin have none. That they nonetheless reacted to Ran's silver energy suggested mana had been deeply involved in the process of summoning them.
"Then that may be why they had resistance to my sorcery."
Las had developed his own original golden sorcery for the sole purpose of killing devil-kin. He took no small pride in it. And it had shaken him considerably that, unlike every devil-kin he had met before, these had defended against it with ease.
The same was true for Leo.
"Whatever the cause, if we're to prevent further casualties, it's obvious that subjugating those devils has to be the first priority."
Las delivered his position to Moor in a voice full of conviction.
"Las, solving the symptom matters — but we need to focus on solving the cause."
Moor said it with a faint smile, and Las didn't grasp his meaning.
"Which is all the more reason to deal with the devils quickly......"
"No. In this land, the only being capable of wielding sorcery this brutal — of summoning demons and devils — is a Sage."
Moor spoke to the room in a voice that carried certainty.