Perhaps thanks to the commotion Yujin raised, Zigwell escaped on the way back without encountering a single enemy.
"L-Lord Zigwell……."
"Thank you! Thank you so much!"
The victims, reduced to skin and bone in a matter of days, shed dry tears and gave Zigwell their thanks.
But Zigwell couldn't simply accept those thanks.
Because someone else had done the largest part of the work.
"There is no need to thank me…… Hah. Never mind. From here, make your own way back. I cleared as many parasites along the route as I could, but hurry, just in case."
"And you, Lord Zigwell……?"
"There is someone I must wait for."
"U-understood!"
Trembling with fear that some other threat might find them on the road, the kidnapped nonetheless walked out across the desolate plain.
Steps only possible for people who had already crossed death's threshold many times over.
"……Can't I go with you, Boss?"
In the middle of it, the girl with the scarred cheek caught hold of Zigwell's hem and asked.
She knew.
That for now, being with Zigwell was the safest place to be.
Whether to call it cunning or clever.
What was certain was that it wasn't something a child of that age should know.
"……One of you I can manage. Do as you like."
"Thank you……."
Perhaps that alone released her tension, because the child leaned against the cave wall and softly closed her eyes.
Zigwell turned his eyes back toward the passage.
"When on earth does he intend to come out?"
A boy who had appeared as he pleased and helped him as he pleased.
He had confirmed the collapse at the passage's edge, so the boy should have been out by now.
"Surely he has not failed to escape……."
"What happens if I don't?"
"……Hah."
Once again the boy had poked his face out of the passage with that mischievous smile.
At that comical sight Zigwell let out a sigh of relief despite himself and snorted a laugh.
"You would become a lost child of the outer dimension. As far as is known, no one has ever come back alive."
"Wow. That was nearly a disaster. You saved me. The thread of magic power running back through the passage was yours, right?"
Fortunately the marks carved into the passage had done their job.
"On the way back the road was cut clean through. It was dizzying for a second, but the thread of magic power linked to the marks guided me out."
"It is a thing used now and then when exploring Outer-Dimensional Passages. Quite an expensive one."
"I owe you."
"……That is my line. What is that state you are in?"
The boy, now fully out of the passage, was covered head to toe in blood.
He wiped the blood off his face roughly and said.
"It isn't my blood, so don't worry."
"Did you kill all of them?"
"Well. Yeah."
"Some among them may have been wronged."
"Maybe. There were probably one or two who got swept up in it and just stood by while people were kidnapped."
"And you killed them anyway?"
"I don't think standing by is a crime. But bearing injustice done to others so patiently and then wanting mercy when your own turn comes around, isn't that greed?"
Hearing that, Zigwell stared into the boy's eyes.
And the boy likewise didn't avoid his gaze.
And Zigwell spoke the impression he had been holding all this time.
"You are twisted."
***
Twisted.
But Zigwell hadn't said it to blame the boy.
Quite the opposite.
It was closer to what a two-eyed man living among the one-eyed feels on first seeing his own kind.
Kinship, in other words.
He had first felt it four years ago.
From the moment he watched Yujin save the child now sleeping against the wall.
Executing justice while wearing that mask of a smile, the boy had been so flawless it felt mechanical.
And that, if anything, felt broken.
Because a person couldn't be like that.
He looked like someone born broken.
And the same was true of Zigwell himself.
The trait, Insight.
An ability Zigwell was born with, which finds the truth within another's words and actions.
Thanks to it he could distinguish every person's lies, and he was always forced to face only the world's "truth."
That was an abnormal thing.
Because everyone has moments when they want to turn their head away from the truth.
But Insight held its strict measure up to Zigwell, and he broke by degrees.
He was forced to face truths he never wanted to know, and forced to learn even of his lord's betrayal.
A man forced into truth.
And a man who practices justice like a compulsion.
Both are broken.
And so Zigwell felt as though he had met his own kind for the first time.
And so.
"Zigwell Fermund. That is my name."
Zigwell held out his hand.
"Yujin. The young master of this dungeon."
The boy grinned and took the handshake.
A handshake between two people twisted somewhere inside.
***
[Sudden Quest: Rescue the kidnapped vagrants!]
[Quest complete.]
[Rescued: 27/27]
[Reward: KP 800 granted.]
[Perfect clear bonus: KP 400 granted additionally!]
***
Zigwell's joining.
It was a matter Enoch had already permitted, but Zigwell still needed to be introduced to him.
I didn't sit in on that private meeting.
Because Zigwell had asked to face Enoch alone.
"……."
And Zigwell came out of Enoch's room looking somewhat as though his soul had left him.
"What's wrong?"
"……I had assumed he was no ordinary power, but."
Coming back to himself at my question, Zigwell gave me a strange look.
"Son and father alike, both twisted."
"Hey, where did that come from?"
"Never mind. More to the point, you took me in in order to open the dungeon up going forward, correct?"
"That's right. More precisely, the goal is to grow a faction."
"It will not be easy. In the Demon Realm, the seventy-second dungeon is treated as though it barely exists."
Something I'd wondered about before.
This dungeon is, after all, the historic site of the Heaven-Demon War.
Wouldn't there be a reason for a dungeon like that being neglected to this degree?
"It is a very old matter, and I was not there at the time, so I cannot be precise, but……."
By Zigwell's explanation, it happened because the seventy-second dungeon, having taken devastating damage, was judged to be doomed.
"Had exchange continued somehow it might be different, but the only one left in the dungeon now is the current Demon King, is he not?"
"Hm……."
"If that state continued for centuries…… then having no exchange at all is, in a sense, only natural."
A conclusion that lined up with Enoch's earlier remark that he didn't know how to run a dungeon.
"So how do the other dungeons interact?"
"They trade dungeon specialties through Demon Realm merchants, or join forces to resist Void parasite incursions."
"So our dungeon wasn't shunned for any specific reason?"
"That is so, but without something extraordinary, reopening exchange will not be easy either."
Fair enough.
After ignoring each other all this time, you can't suddenly become friends.
"Is there no method for that?"
"The easiest to think of is trade, naturally."
"Looking at the state of this dungeon, that doesn't sound easy either."
"Well. Something I have wondered about for a while: do you know anything about why this dungeon turned out like this?"
"Isn't it just because of the Heaven-Demon War?"
"That was fully five hundred years ago."
"Hm……."
Indeed.
Now that he said it, it was certainly strange.
"I am no expert on history, but I understand that before the war, the seventy-second dungeon was one of the most powerful dungeons there were."
"And yet it's this desolate…… Is it connected to the Void's invasions?"
"That is possible, but not certain. We must look into it properly. Is there no record relating to this dungeon's past?"
Well. I'd never tried to look, so I wouldn't know…….
"If you don't know, you ask."
"Ask whom?"
"Our dungeon's mascot."
"……?"
***
The splendid underground storeroom.
Blackie, the dream spirit who guards it, greeted me.
-What brings you here, yo!
"I came because I have something to ask."
-……Not interested, yo.
"It's about Father."
-What do you need, yo?
How can it be so consistent?
That expression without a trace of hesitation is a masterpiece.
"First things first. This is Blackie."
-Who said you could keep calling me that, yo?!
"And this is Zigwell. The strategist who's newly joined our dungeon."
"A pleasure, Mr. Blackie."
-I am not Blackie, yo!!
Blackie objected fiercely, but.
What am I supposed to do when there's no other name to call it?
Soothing it roughly as I introduced the two, I got to the point.
"I wanted to know if there are any volumes recording our dungeon. Any records left from before the Heaven-Demon War?"
-Records, yo? I do not know the details, but look over there, yo. There are ledgers and journals the former Demon King left behind, yo.
They really existed?
Unable to hide my surprise, I looked where Blackie pointed and saw a corner piled high with things.
-Those are what still remain, yo. Handle them carefully, yo.
"Okay. Thanks."
-Do not pet me as you please, yo!
For all that, its face had gone soft and mushy.
In any case, with Blackie's help we found the old books.
Five hundred years on, they had somehow escaped decay and kept their form.
"Quite a pile of them."
"If something went wrong, it would have been right before or right after the Heaven-Demon War."
"I shall search through them."
Perhaps because of Blackie's insistence that the former king's belongings not be handled carelessly, the shelf sat in a far corner of the storeroom.
There we carefully drew them out one by one and began to read.
Some were damaged past legibility, so we set aside the ones from which at least a minimum of information could be drawn.
How many volumes had we gone through?
Flutter.
"……?"
Out of one of the leather-bound booklets, the one thing made of paper fell free.
It was a photograph.
"They had this kind of technology five hundred years ago?"
Looking closely, I sensed faint magic power in it.
It had been specially processed.
"……."
And inside that photograph…… Demon Realm natives of various races stood together wearing mischievous smiles.
"This man is…… the former Demon King."
At the center stood an enormous man some three meters tall.
And beneath him.
"Pff."
A silver-haired boy staring straight ahead with an expressionless face.
It was Enoch by anyone's reckoning.
"He had no emotions even back then."
They say nothing is as fun as sneaking a look through someone else's album. So this was why.
Thinking I'd show it to Enoch later, I tucked the photograph away and opened the ledger again.
How much time passed after that?
Zigwell and I widened our eyes at almost exactly the same moment.
"Wait, this dungeon……."
"Was there originally a forest here?"
***
One routine had been added to Enoch's days, which had seen no great change in centuries.
The thirty minutes of teatime he took after rising and finishing his meal.
Into his room, where by rights only silence and fragrance should exist, Yujin had begun to come.
"……That's done."
Yujin, who had laid both hands over Enoch's outstretched one, opened his closed eyes and drew back.
At his fingertips, a faint trace of divine power lingered to the last before scattering.
Since the last magic power rampage.
Yujin had begun involving himself, bit by bit, in the war between magic power and divine power inside Enoch.
He led Enoch's magic power and attacked the divine power's weak points relentlessly.
Perhaps thanks to that, the bodily pain inflicted on him daily was gradually fading.
In overall figures it might not have been a large change.
But for such a change to come to a body that had only ever worsened, never improved, was a remarkable thing.
"In a few days you'll be able to manage it on your own, Father."
"It seems so. Thank you."
"It's nothing. By the way, what did you make of Zigwell?"
"He was ordinary."
"Ordinary?"
"Yes."
What did those words mean?
Yujin seemed to ponder it for a moment, then shrugged and spoke with his usual smile.
"I found this in the underground storeroom."
An old photograph came out of the boy's coat.
Enoch's eyes showed no particular change at the sight of it.
"……."
"Well, I figured it belongs in your room rather than buried in the underground storeroom. There's an empty frame over there, so put it in that. ……Though the frame is a bit big."
With that, Yujin set the photograph on the table and quietly left the room.
And Enoch went on staring blankly at it for a long while.
The lake within his heart, unmoved at first, slowly began to ripple.
How long had it been since the black tea went cold?
Then Enoch's mouth opened.
"I remember."
The identity of the feeling he felt now.
It was.
"So this was the photograph taken then."
Longing.
***
While searching through the ledgers and journals in the underground storeroom, Zigwell and I found an old map.
After spending several more days cross-checking the ledgers and journals against that map.
"It really was an incredibly dense forest."
"It was. And it says there was also a magic stone mine of considerable size."
Just as Zigwell had known, we learned that before the Heaven-Demon War this place had held abundant nature.
"So why did it end up like this?"
"Look here."
Astonishingly, the dungeon's desolation had begun before the Heaven-Demon War intensified.
"It says that from a certain point the circulation of magic power within the dungeon became twisted."
"And right before a proper investigation could be carried out, the Heaven-Demon War broke out……."
"The point where the twisting is suspected to have occurred would be here."
A place a fair distance from the mansion.
Somewhere even I had never been.
"I should go and take a look."
"Please do. I shall look for more material here in the meantime."
"I'll leave it to you."
That conversation was yesterday.
Today was the day to go to the place in question.
I packed simple rations in case of trouble and set out.
I ran across the desolate plain for a long stretch.
Only after about half a day did I reach my destination.
"Around here?"
I spread the map out and looked around.
Unlike the forested landscape on the map, what lay before me was the same old wasteland.
"By the map there should be a huge lake here."
However much I looked around, all I could see was a single enormous hill.
"Nothing unusual to be felt either…… this is difficult."
A sigh came out of me already.
Had too much time passed for any of this to be useful?
Maybe I'd misread the map.
As I swallowed the disappointment and turned to leave.
"Wait……."
Something felt familiar.
Thanks to my experience from before the regression, perhaps.
Things that differed from the usual had caught my eye on the way here.
"Come to think of it, I've come this far out and I haven't seen a Void parasite, let alone a demonic beast."
Tsss.
What was going on?
There might simply be no living things because there was no prey, but I decided to look around a little more.
Something was here.
Just as that feeling came.
RUMBLLLLLE—
"An earthquake?"
An untimely shaking.
I raised magic power at once and searched for the source of the change around me.
"What the."
At some point an enormous flow of magic power made itself felt.
The problem was that it resembled a refined spell formula, like Magic Arts.
When I turned my head toward its source.
"Whoa."
The hill that had been perfectly still until a moment ago shook, and the sand and dust heaped behind it began to scatter.
And what revealed itself from inside was.
"A turtle?"
An enormous turtle's shell.
With a side of deboning, no less.
[Sudden Quest: Resolve the twisting of magic power!]
[Quest Reward: KP.3,500]
"The Demon Realm really is amazing."
What I'd taken for an ordinary hill turned out to be a giant turtle's shell.
"And it's definitely hostile to me?"
The turtle's skull, now jutting out of the shell, was staring straight at me.
With vivid hostility pricking at my skin thrown in.
Though it was plainly a crisis, I didn't think of it as one.
Or more precisely, I had no room to think of it that way.
Beneath where the turtle had been settled.
There, the traces of a huge lake showed.
And at its center, a pit of considerable size.
Once I confirmed that mighty magic power was flowing out of it, a laugh came out of me on its own.
"Bingo."
The problem was how to deal with that giant turtle.
"If I'd known, I'd have played some Nint*ndo."
I wondered whether this was how the plumber felt facing the bipedal turtle who kept kidnapping the princess.