[You have acquired a new trait.]
[Magic Power Resistance]
[You have acquired a new trait.]
[Divine Power Resistance]
[You have acquired a new trait.]
[Magic Power Understanding]
[You have acquired a new trait.]
[Divine Power Understanding]
[You have acquired a new trait.]
[Endurance]
[You have acquired a new trait.]
[Pain Tolerance]
[You have acquired a new……]
When I opened my eyes and got up, the system greeted me as if asking whether I'd slept well.
Countless notices I'd been too frantic to check while stopping Enoch's magic power rampage had piled up.
'No wonder it got more bearable partway through.'
About twenty-six hours.
That was how long it took to quell Enoch's magic power rampage.
Of course, the payment for that ordeal was far from small.
[Sub Quest: Calm the Demon King's rampage!]
[Quest complete.]
[Reward: KP 6,500 granted.]
[Perfect clear bonus: KP 500 granted additionally!]
All sorts of traits and a fair pile of KP had come in.
That much wasn't bad at all, but…….
"There's no way I could do that a second time……."
I cleared away every system window and looked around to find a familiar room.
A golem must have carried me here.
"Somehow I held out."
My last memory cut off at confirming that Enoch's magic power rampage was subsiding.
And judging by how quiet it was, the incident must have wrapped up well.
But if you asked whether that was the end of it, no.
'What I did was nothing more than first aid.'
The size of the divine power lurking inside Enoch was not on a level I could handle alone.
When I took a peek at its scale, wouldn't you know it.
It was on a level similar to the Pope I'd seen before the regression.
And even that was only a glimpse.
What I saw might well have been the tip of the iceberg.
'How on earth has that man stayed alive?'
So I'd had to settle for guiding Enoch's magic power, jabbing at the divine power's weak spots, and building an environment where the magic power held the upper hand.
I'd wager the two energies were waging war inside him even at this moment.
"This is hard……."
A sense of helplessness over what to do about it was already rolling in.
But it wasn't as bad as before.
At the very least I'd identified what the problem was.
Now I only had to find the method.
But this wasn't something I could do alone.
"Shall I go and see him?"
It was time to begin a talk with the man himself.
***
Me, and Enoch too.
It goes without saying, but neither of us had ever laid our own stories out for the other.
Because neither of us had the character for it.
"I do not recall well when it was."
And yet Enoch began to unwind his story.
"There was a great war with the Heavenly Realm, and I fought in it alongside the Demon King of that age."
The Heaven-Demon War, which I'd also read about in the underground storeroom.
Enoch had been on the scene after all.
What differed from my expectation was that Enoch had not yet ascended to the Demon King's throne back then.
"The Demon King of that age lost his life there, and many left the dungeon or walked the same road as the former Demon King."
That Enoch, left alone, took the dungeon and sat on the Demon King's throne was the natural order of things.
But here came the surprising part.
"However, I had no knowledge of dungeons. I too was a child picked up by the former Demon King."
He too had been a picked-up child.
No wonder he picked up and raised me and Blackie. Was he simply following his own experience?
The story continued.
"But I did not come through that war unharmed. I allowed a blow from a certain Heavenly Realm native."
"Did he happen to look like this?"
I never imagined I'd end up doing this.
I pulled the corners of both eyes into slits with my fingers, and Enoch stiffened for a moment before nodding.
……Belios.
So that bastard had been involved back then after all.
At the same time, a chill crawled over me.
Five hundred years.
A span of which even I had lived barely a tenth.
For all that dizzyingly distant time, the Heavenly Realm bastards had been preparing.
For the goal of the god's resurrection.
Just how deep does a scheme have to run for that to be possible?
'A prophecy, was it?'
The clue Belios had let slip before killing me.
Their plot most likely originated there.
"After that, divine power began to be generated in my body. It was the beginning of ceaseless pain."
"……."
A magic power rampage.
I know well how horrific that pain is.
As a newborn I suffered high fevers, and around the time I began walking on two legs a sharp pain would rise out of my heart.
Pain that arrived without warning, and the terror of not knowing when I'd die, made even me shake with fear every night.
And Enoch was undergoing a magic power rampage on a scale beyond any comparison to that.
"There was only one way to escape the pain."
Throwing away his emotions so as not to feel it.
His becoming this impassive was the natural result.
"But even that wasn't a complete solution."
Enoch nodded with an expressionless face.
Without my help, he would certainly have died by the time the next rampage came around.
Only then did the puzzle in my head feel like it was fitting together.
'Enoch being eroded by the Void must be connected to this divine power.'
And his rise to the Demon God's seat might have been the result of that erosion.
The Void I'd seen held that much rank.
"……."
Even after hearing the whole story.
I still couldn't entirely erase my preconceptions about Enoch.
However unavoidable his circumstances had been, I lived through the war he caused before the regression.
The thing they call PTSD.
The great war that began with the Demon Realm's ruin.
The horrors I saw and endured with my own eyes in that war will probably follow me like a shadow for the rest of my life, even if I return to Earth.
But negative feelings tend to be swept away by larger ones.
The name of that feeling was rage.
'The Heavenly Realm…….'
Enoch's death. The Demon Realm's collapse that began with it. And finally the great war.
In the end, the root of this entire situation pointed at a single dimension.
"……."
Rage at them, and disgust at myself for being so neatly used by them.
Those two feelings blew away every last lingering feeling I had about Enoch.
The back of my neck pulled tight enough that I wondered if I'd fall into qi deviation at this rate, but so what.
Say what you like, I was a Hero.
I hadn't lived an easy enough life to lose my grip over something like this.
GRIT—
The coppery taste of blood from my chewed lip brought me back to my senses.
In a world without dental implants, rather than grinding my teeth in rage, let me promise myself a punch to Belios's belly one day.
"How do you feel now?"
"The magic power still seethes."
As expected, the divine power hadn't disappeared entirely from Enoch's body.
Somewhere inside him it would still be steadily wrecking his body, like a parasitic worm.
"Whew……."
It bears saying again: that he had held back the beings of the Void for centuries in that condition was hard to believe.
Is that what it takes to become the Demon God in the future?
But I knew, and Enoch knew.
He would soon strike his limit.
A method had to be found before that happened.
"I can keep helping with the divine power itself. But it would only be a stopgap."
That held true even if the trait I'd gained, [Divine Power Understanding], reached S rank.
Moving an energy lodged in another person's body as one pleases is that difficult a thing.
"But it isn't as if there's no method at all."
Enoch had said there was no way left for him to grow, but that wasn't entirely so.
Only his personal growth had struck a wall.
Growing the dungeon itself was still possible.
A Demon King is deeply tied to his dungeon, and the more the dungeon grows, the higher the height the Demon King reaches.
"Though for now it's a distant prospect."
"Is that so."
"……."
That same utterly impassive tone.
It was frustrating enough to make me the impatient one.
"Do you believe what I'm saying?"
"I know it is not a lie."
With a being who has lived five hundred years saying that, I had nothing to add.
"But you don't know the method, Father."
"I do not."
"Neither do I."
What has to be admitted has to be admitted.
The dungeon knowledge I had was only fragments learned from books.
If I moved blindly, things could get more tangled than they already were.
"So we have to look for another way. Unlike until now, we may have to move more openly. So……."
And with that, I brought out the words I'd been thinking for quite a long time.
"We have to build a faction."
So that we wouldn't be swung about by outside wills.
And beyond that, so we could restore the dungeon and greatly improve Enoch's condition.
We had to find a way.
To that, Enoch answered with nothing more than a nod.
His face was as impassive as ever, but his gaze showed no intention of leaving me.
***
I'd spoken boldly, but the situation wasn't particularly good.
What kind of faction could be built here, in a place full of wasteland and Void parasites in the first place?
And with my poor grasp of the Demon Realm's ecosystem, the options open to me were woefully few.
But they say that even if the ground swallows you, there's a hole to climb out through.
I headed out of the mansion without a plan and scanned the area around the fortress.
"Ugh."
All I could see were the old walls and a mass of crumbling houses.
Walls riddled with holes that shrieked noisily when the wind blew, and roofs roughly stitched together from demonic beast hide.
The few pillars there were couldn't bear the weight of the years and were toppling one by one, while the buildings barely held their shape through makeshift repairs.
Astonishingly, that was proof that someone was living there.
The owners of the gazes I felt every single time I stepped outside the mansion.
Vagrants.
The Demon Realm's illegal immigrants.
Beings who came in as they pleased, without asking the dungeon master's permission, and secretly went on living.
-Many among them are criminals, so please refrain from approaching rashly.
That was what the golem managing the walls had told me back when I once tried to approach them.
Since Enoch had also been away from the mansion at the time and I didn't want to stir up needless trouble, I'd treated the vagrants as though they didn't exist.
Apparently there had been several attempts to steal and sell the golems, too.
Naturally, taking people like that into a faction would be a hasty judgment.
So why had I come all the way out here?
Simple.
Even a mudflat has its pearls.
Because one bastard I knew well from before the regression was hiding here.
'Zigwell.'
A man who would become the strategist of the Demon Realm Army in the future.
And a famous named character in the game.
He was the pearl I'd found.