"Uuuggghhh..."
The rhythm of the road had changed. That was the first thing that managed to crawl through the thick fog clogging up Haviel’s brain. The sharp, spine-abusing rattling of the carriage wheels had mellowed into a slow, rolling sway.
It was nice. Better than nice, actually.
A soft groan escaped him as he burrowed deeper into whatever he was currently sleeping on, his eyes stubbornly refusing to open. It was soft, but not so soft that he sank into it. There was enough firmness beneath it to feel comfortable, certainly better than waking up pressed against a wooden carriage wall.
Still half unconscious and operating with absolutely zero self-preservation instincts, Haviel let out a content little sigh and reached out. His fingers caught hold of the fabric beneath him, bunching it into his fist as he shamelessly dragged himself a little closer for better neck support.
Then his mind finally started putting the pieces together.
Wait.
Something wasn’t right.
The fabric under his hand wasn’t cotton. It wasn’t velvet, either.
And the "pillow" under his cheek was... moving.
Haviel’s eyelids fluttered open.
The first thing his blurry vision registered was a jawline. Not just any jawline. A ridiculous jawline. The kind of jawline that looked like it had been handcrafted by a sculptor who’d gotten way too emotionally invested in the project.
Above that was a curtain of black hair and a face that, annoyingly, looked peaceful.
He was staring directly up at Jevon from an alarmingly low angle.
The Demon King was reclined against the carriage cushions, looking entirely too comfortable. Almost normal, honestly, if you ignored the faint silver glow that always seemed to cling to him.
For three whole seconds, Haviel’s exhausted brain completely disconnected from reality. Instead of panicking like a sane person, it supplied a completely useless observation.
Huh, no wonder he’s the main character of the novel.
Then Jevon’s eyes opened, and immediately locking onto Haviel’s frozen stare.
"Did you rest well?" Jevon asked.
Haviel could actually feel the vibration through his cheek because it was still resting flat against Jevon’s lap.
The realization smacked him right in the face. Somewhere during the midnight stretch, his entire upper body had migrated downward. He was literally using the supreme sovereign of the demon world as a personal mattress.
"Oh my god," Haviel gasped, his voice cracking violently as his nervous system fired every single emergency flare at once. He shot upright so fast his skull nearly collided with the carriage ceiling. "I am so... Your Majesty, I am incredibly, profoundly sorry, I don’t know how..."
"Though I suppose I don’t really need to ask." Jevon paused, his gaze drifting pointedly down toward his own thigh.
Haviel followed his look. And his soul instantly left his body.
Right there, on the King’s perfectly tailored trousers, was a small, damp, undeniably shiny circle. A puddle. A literal puddle of human drool, glistening right in the center of the royal lap.
"Two incidents," Jevon remarked. "In the span of two days."
Haviel’s hands flew to his mouth, his face exploding into a heat so intense he was certain his ears were about to start smoking. He grabbed his cuffs, then realized wiping it with his sleeve would probably make it ten times worse, then reached for a handkerchief he didn’t have. "I-I don’t... I swear I’m not a chronic drooler! Or... well, actually, maybe I am. But I honestly don’t know how I ended up down there. I was leaning against the window! Why didn’t you just push me away?"
Jevon raised a single eyebrow. "You would have preferred I dropped you onto the floor for?"
"No! No, the floor isn’t... I mean, the lap was...no, that’s not what I meant!" Haviel’s vocabulary completely collapsed. Desperate to mitigate the disaster, he gave up on finding a handkerchief and began frantically dabbing at the damp spot with the very edge of his cuff anyway, his movements pure, blind panic. "I just... I apologize for the property damage! I am so incredibly sorry. I’ll clean it, I can fix this, I really didn’t mean to... I am just so sorry..."
Before Jevon could terrify him any further, a sharp, rhythmic knock rattled the carriage door.
The latch clicked. The door swung outward, letting in a rush of cold air. Framed against the gray mist outside stood Jaeric and Sevrin.
Both of them froze instantly.
Haviel froze just as hard. It was only then, in the sudden glare of early morning light, that he realized his left hand was still extended outward, hovering barely two inches away from the wet spot on Jevon’s thigh. From an outside perspective, specifically from the perspective of two high-ranking demon, it looked exactly like the human bride had been caught mid-action, aiming directly for Jevon’s assets down there.
"It’s not what it looks like!" Haviel blurted out, pulling his hand back as if the fabric had caught fire. "We were just...there was an accident..."
Sevrin’s eyebrows climbed straight into his hairline. A small, knowing smirk twitched at the edge of his mouth, and he immediately looked up at the sky as if inspecting the weather. "Of course. Our mistake. We clearly interrupted an important matter. My apologies for the interruption."
Jaeric, on the other hand, looked like he wanted to turn his own sword on himself to avoid the awkwardness. He rigidly fixed his eyes on the carriage wheel, his posture so stiff he looked like a statue. "We have reached the border, Your Majesty."
Jevon didn’t blink. He didn’t smooth down his coat. He simply shifted his weight and gave a short, commanding nod. "Goid. Secure the perimeter."
"We made excellent time," Sevrin added, his eyes darting back down to give Haviel one more deeply amused glance. "The vanguard pushed through the night without a single pause. The human’s... stamina is commendable."
Haviel wanted the earth to open up and swallow him whole.
Jevon stepped out of the vehicle first, his massive frame effortlessly clearing the doorway. Haviel swallowed his burning embarrassment, adjusted his wrinkled tunic, and scrambled out after him, desperate to escape the suffocating confines of the cabin.
The moment his boots hit the ground, the air knocked the breath right out of his lungs.
It was different. Not just cold, but heavy. It felt thick, almost sulfurous, coating the back of his throat with a faint metallic tang. The ambient noise of the world had completely changed too, the rustle of the wind through the leaves didn’t sound like wind anymore. It sounded muffled, compressed, as if sound itself was being squeezed by some unseen atmospheric pressure.
Ahead of them lay the border. It wasn’t a wall. It wasn’t a neat line on a map. It was a vast, broken wasteland where the world seemed to simply give up.
The ground beneath his feet was gray, cracked into jagged, irregular fissures that looked like old scars. Sparse patches of pale, sickly grass grew at weird angles, and scattered across the ridges were ancient stone obelisks, markers carved with symbols so faded by time they looked like jagged teeth rising from the earth.
In the distance, the skeletal remains of collapsed towers stood against the pale morning sky, silent monuments to conflicts that had probably turned to dust centuries ago. The whole place felt utterly rejected. Not peaceful. Just... dead. Like the land itself was refusing to maintain its own infrastructure.
Haviel took a small, hesitant step forward, his knuckles whitening as he gripped his coat. "Is this... are we already there? Is this the Demon Realm?"
Jevon walked up beside him, his gaze sweeping over the desolate gray expanse with the cold familiarity of a man surveying his own front yard. "No. This is the neutral threshold. The borderland."
"I thought it would be a gate," Haviel murmured, his voice sounding thin and small against the vast silence. "Or a checkpoint. Not... an entire country of nothing."
"A line is easily crossed by an army," Jevon said smoothly, turning his head to look down at the human. "A wasteland forces them to calculate the cost of the march. From this position forward, the terrain is impassable by standard carriage."
Haviel blinked, looking around at the cracked earth. "Then how do we..."
He didn’t finish the sentence.
The air around Jevon suddenly warped, the gray light shifting as a heavy pressure dropped over the ridge. In absolute, terrifying silence, two massive, obsidian-black wings unfurled from behind the King’s shoulders, their dark, ribbed membranes cutting wide through the air and completely blocking out the morning sun.
Haviel stopped breathing.
Jevon turned fully toward him, his eyes burning with a sudden, brilliant intensity as he extended a single, broad hand across the space between them.
"From here," Jevon said, his voice carrying the absolute finality of the sky itself, "we fly."