I quietly narrowed my eyes and looked over the demonic beasts arrayed behind him.
'A good composition.'
Even a rough scan sketched out his tactics for me.
The most conspicuous among them was a demonic beast with thick antlers, a "War Deer."
Its sharp antlers could pierce steel, and the muscle across its body was like rock.
Its charge was strong enough to break most castle gates with ease, and its field of vision was wide enough that blind spots were hard to find.
A jack-of-all-trades sort of beast, and the formation had been built around it.
"I will beat you both to death here and say goodbye to this shithole dungeon forever."
He must have had that much confidence in the composition.
He grinned and muttered in the tone of a man who had already won.
'It is textbook to the point of having no personality, I'll give it that.'
Rather than playing along with his cheap provocation, I looked at Zigwell.
"I'll buy time. Go on ahead and rescue the kidnapped ones first."
"……Understood."
Anyone else would have refused at least once.
But Zigwell is an extremely objective sort.
He recognized at once that with his combat ability he would be a hindrance, never mind a help.
Naturally, Warmark's face, watching it unfold live, crumpled like a botched exam paper.
"Who said it would go that way?!"
"Who else? I did."
And with those words.
[Blink]
I closed the distance in one go, condensed magic power, and released it at the War Deer in the center of the formation.
KABOOOOM!
Unable to react at all to a fist that appeared out of thin air, the War Deer died with its skull bursting.
The aftershock rang through the passage, and Warmark's face filling with shock was the natural next step.
And not missing that opening, Zigwell activated his concealment artifact and vanished.
"Y-you bastard!"
Belatedly, Warmark tried to send the remaining beasts after Zigwell.
"……?!"
But his body locked up before he could give a single order.
Like a man startled into stopping halfway through a word.
The result of having just met my eyes.
"Wh-what……."
It isn't an ability that works so easily on those without reason, or on those with plenty of combat experience.
[You have acquired a new trait.]
[Intimidation (Grade F)]
My "rank," built across countless battlefields before the regression where I had both taken killing intent and poured it out, had clamped down on Warmark's throat in that instant.
Seizing the sliver of time in which the gap in rank and the killing intent I raised had frozen his body.
Zigwell succeeded in slipping out of the core room.
"You bastard……! How dare you!"
Right after, realizing anew that he had been frightened, Warmark's face flushed nicely.
His composition certainly had power that would be hard for me to handle.
For the version of me before I started talking with Enoch in earnest, that is.
"As it happens, I've learned a great deal recently. Shall we see how long those beasts you're so proud of can hold out?"
***
RUMBLLLLLE…….
Even with the tingling tremor ringing down from the floor above, Zigwell ran without pause.
'Has that young boy grown so strong?'
Running the corridor for a while made him realize anew that time had passed.
And naturally, it made him realize how idly he had spent that time himself.
'Warmark too. He grew rapidly stronger in that short span.'
He seemed to have grown strong in a fundamentally different way from Yujin, and this was information Zigwell had missed.
He must have felt some sense of crisis because of the boy who had been moving about so actively of late.
He had surely obtained that power by abnormal means.
Had Yujin not been there, Zigwell would have ended his life in that core room.
'That was dangerous…….'
And on the other hand, he was worried about the boy.
Because Warmark had grown far stronger than he had known.
Of course, he didn't think the boy would lose.
He had just seen with his own eyes how the strongest-looking beast had died.
But a strategist, no…… at the very least a man who had "been" a strategist, must always account for the worst case.
So Zigwell drew a magic tool from inside his coat.
"I never thought I would use this expensive thing in such a way. Still, it is doing its job."
He ran on for a while, carving marks at fixed intervals into the walls he passed.
At the sound of murmuring he hid himself again with the concealment artifact, and spotted the Warmark Family gathering after noticing the commotion.
"It's from the core room!"
"Move, now!"
Having apparently already heard word from outside, they gripped their weapons and began running toward the core room.
'Will he be all right?'
That worry came over him again, but.
"……."
Recalling that confident, manufactured smile, Zigwell moved on.
That smile, which made those who saw it believe…….
'It is broken.'
But precisely because of that.
He had saved those in peril in the past, and was saving them now.
Without any awareness of it, simply because it had to be done.
"……."
After that brief reverie, he arrived at his destination.
The prison holding the kidnapped had not been maintained in the slightest.
The hygiene was so low a pigsty would have looked clean by comparison, and those locked inside were in a wretched state.
They must not have been fed properly, because every one of them was skin and bone, and no hope showed in their eyes.
But.
Among them, Zigwell's eyes went to one little girl.
Her eyes were half dead, yet a craving for life came through in them plainly.
On the cheek of the girl, who shone more clearly than any adult there, a long scar ran especially deep.
"Boss……?"
"Fortunately, you are not dead yet."
"Did you come…… to save us?"
A child of about three, who by rights should have been charming her parents in their arms.
An age at which sense cannot yet have set in, yet there was not a trace of childish wheedling in those eyes.
Only the relief of having survived flickered across them.
'Yes.'
That is fine.
She survived, at least.
Surviving is enough.
Because then that boy will come to protect her, smiling as he does now.
"Once again…… he has saved you."
"Yes?"
The girl couldn't understand the words, but Zigwell merely wore the same smile as the boy.
"Everyone, prepare to leave."
***
From an age even younger than now.
I never hesitated to fight Void parasites stronger than myself.
Because I knew well that however lacking my own strength, it didn't matter how strong the enemy was, so long as I could stab their weak point and guard my own.
'And my greatest weapon is experience.'
Back when I was active as the Hero.
Having grown strong quickly through game knowledge, I reached one realization.
That no matter how strong I got, I could never be strong enough to protect everyone around me.
There were far too many enemies, and far too many allies to protect.
In the end the best I could do was kill even a few more of them.
So I became obsessed with efficiency.
I studied and analyzed ways to kill one more, faster and more surely.
That hasn't changed.
"The War Deer is notorious as a versatile beast. It's tricky to hunt, but that doesn't mean it has no weakness."
In fact, because of its wide field of vision, it tends to react a little slowly to sudden attacks.
Which is why it died to my Blink without managing a response.
"And the beast composition you put together follows the textbook far too closely."
Built around the War Deer, which has breakthrough power and defensive ability both.
With two nimble beasts to work the flanks and a sniper to attack from range.
A textbook composition like that is stable, but once a crack forms, its ability to repair that crack is markedly poor.
"Which is how it ended up like this."
GROOOAR—!
A tiger-like beast-type demonic beast pounced.
I shielded my body with magic power and endured the shock that still got through with Endurance and Pain Tolerance.
At the same time I released magic power at the point of contact.
CLANG!
With both of the beast's forelimbs bounced upward, I hammered a combination into its belly, now a wide-open highway.
Its organs burst, it vomited blood, and it died.
As I pressed on.
SWISH!
An explosive fruit fired by a plant-type demonic beast grazed past my head and set off a tremendous blast.
In that brief opening, a chimera beast charged on all fours and thrust its huge maw at me.
The mouth, the only feature left on its face, gaped open to chew my head whole, but.
"With a head that big, the center of gravity must be pitched forward."
I hooked its legs out from under it and shattered the spine of the beast that had planted its face in the floor.
About then, the plant-type beast fired another explosive fruit at my feet.
Having seen its earlier miss, it went for the blast radius instead of a direct hit.
The attack landed fairly effectively, but shielding my body with magic power was answer enough.
The plant beast didn't give up and spat out fruit again and again, but.
Hadn't I already seen the technique twice?
Existence Analysis began copying it in real time.
Magic Arts, which had risen to Grade E after Enoch's magic power rampage, assisted with fine magic power control.
"Something like this, I suppose."
I reconstructed the explosive fruit's firepower through the lens of Magic Arts.
The spell formula built together with Existence Analysis ran past my ankle to my toes.
And what my toe caught was a small stone.
Tap—
KABOOM!!
The spell formula carved itself into the lightly kicked stone, which flew at the plant-type beast and set off a grand explosion.
"Hm. The efficiency isn't great for the magic power it eats. No need to learn it. It only strains the body."
Leaving that assessment behind, I looked toward where the explosion had gone off.
Only the thick roots that had supported its upper body like human legs remained; above them, nothing.
The rest of the fight was one-sided.
With its core entirely gone, the remaining beasts were a rabble.
The same went for the reinforcements that burst in late.
And amid a scene strewn with countless corpses.
Warmark, the sole survivor, looked at me with the face of a man whose soul had left him.
"What, what the hell is this. You couldn't possibly have been this strong……."
Fair enough. Lately I'd been hunting farther out than the fortress surroundings, and he'd been living inside this passage.
Both of us lacked information.
Hence that face of his.
"You look like you've just witnessed someone cheating."
"Ch-cheating……. Yes, this is impossible! How did you get that kind of power in this little time? This, this is……."
"Isn't it the same for you? You paid a price to get stronger too. These beasts were plainly not ones you could handle."
"……Don't make me laugh. Do you have any idea what price I paid to get that power? This is my power! And you got that strong for the single reason that you're the Demon King's child!"
I neither denied nor confirmed it.
Half of it was true.
The reason I had survived until now was Enoch's help.
But growing this strong was for a different reason.
"I don't see what you have to feel so wronged about."
"What……?"
"I don't want to trot out the usual line. You were born different, so you have to work that much harder. Honestly, I'm sick of that kind of sanctimony."
"……."
"Life's complicated enough. Let's keep it simple. The story is simple. You made a choice, and now the price has come due."
"A price……?"
Just as I, who trusted only game knowledge and turned away from reality, was betrayed by the Heavenly Realm.
The reason Warmark met this ending is very simple too.
"You just turned your eyes away from the price you'd have to pay."
One thing I felt living as a Hero is that wicked people are not necessarily the ones who get punished.
Bastards who pocketed kickbacks even on losing battlefields.
Bastards mad for merit who spent soldiers like consumables.
Bastards who abandoned their comrades to save themselves even on battlefields they could have won…….
Every one of them ate well and lived well.
Still, some of them were punished, and they wore exactly the face Warmark wore now.
Why does this only happen to me! There are bastards packed wall to wall who lived more viciously than I did, so why only me!
"You just threw your weight around too much. With no real power, you couldn't even work out where the line you had to hold was."
The miscalculation of a bastard who reigned like an absolute ruler among vagrants.
How he had grabbed that much power I couldn't say, but he had badly underestimated the price he would have to bear.
"If you meant to live as a parasite in someone else's dungeon, you should have lived quiet as a dead mouse. You got noticed because you were out there kidnapping people."
"Don't give me that shit! Living quietly my whole life wouldn't change a damn thing!"
"True. Nothing changes. But that doesn't excuse bravado and recklessness, does it?"
"GRAAAAAH—!!"
With that shriek, his magic power began to thrash wildly.
Perhaps because every word of mine had dropped his sense of his own worth into the abyss.
Still linked to the corpses of the dead beasts, he absorbed all of their power into himself.
By anyone's reckoning it wasn't power he could handle all at once.
He probably meant to escape this crisis with a result close to a rampage.
"Tch."
"Gakh—?!"
I'm not an idiot. Did he think I would stand there blankly and watch?
Seizing the moment when he couldn't control the power he'd absorbed in one gulp, I closed in with Blink and drove a fist into his abdomen.
"Urgh, gakh!"
"Playtime ends here."
Through my fist I drove magic power into his body and crushed down the energy trying to rampage.
In the sheer purity of our magic power alone, the gap between us was vast.
Soon his body collapsed as though crumbling.
The site of a fight closer to a massacre.
Which is why the fight itself hadn't dragged on long.
The passage would be starting to collapse soon.
"Should I take this one with me?"
I hadn't killed Warmark yet.
Because if possible I wanted to identify whoever had been backing him.
By the look of it, things had diverged from the original history.
'There's no way Zigwell could have handled a bastard at this level alone.'
Warmark's ability as Zigwell described it on the way here wasn't even half of what it was now.
If I hadn't come along, Zigwell would have died here.
'It's as good as an anomaly.'
Whoever had backed him might well have been a Heavenly Realm pawn.
I grabbed his wrist and was about to drag him along when.
"Huh."
The body I was dragging suddenly grew heavy.
In that short span, heavy beyond anything my strength could manage.
"No."
When I looked at him, a dark blue energy was flowing up out of the floor.
The energy clamped around Warmark, and I belatedly raised magic power to block it, but.
"What…… the Void's energy?"
Nothing I did budged it in the slightest.
Only then did I realize what this was.
"Hah, so this is what the price was."
Existence Analysis analyzed the situation in an instant.
Possible only because parts of it resembled knowledge already in my memory.
'Sorcery.'
Those who borrow power from a spiritual being rather than wielding their own.
It was a phenomenon like the backlash suffered by sorcerers, who are bound to something as the price of using power.
In other words.
Warmark had made a contract with the Void.
And only now was he paying the price.
The Void, sensing his death, was probably enforcing that contract.
"What is this, Constantine?"
Like a deal with a devil, Warmark would simply be dragged off to the Void, body and soul both.
There was no way for me to stop it as I was.
That was how powerful the compulsion was.
"But I'm not the sort to leave future trouble behind."
I needed to rule out any chance of him showing up later as a troublesome enemy.
CRUNCH—!
Warmark's hairy skull was crushed flat under my foot, and with that his corpse was entirely eroded by the Void and vanished.
"No wonder he was using power that didn't suit his station."
To think he'd borrowed the Void's power.
'Not an entirely rare phenomenon, mind you.'
Before the regression I'd seen a few humans go over to the Void.
Most of those ended in unpleasant shapes.
Why did it only come to me now?
"It's a shame I can't look into the memories in his head, but……."
If I'd borrowed the power of Blackie, a dream spirit, I could have pulled the information out easily.
But I wasn't naive enough to dwell on what I'd missed.
And the passage's tremors had been anything but ordinary for a while now.
It had begun collapsing faster than expected, and there had been more enemies than expected, so I'd lost time.
"Let's just hurry out."