“It was delicious.”
“I am glad to hear that.”
Belze ate a lot.
From her usual appearance, she looks like she is satisfied with just a single piece of white bread, but in reality, she is probably always fighting hunger.
That is only natural if you look at her daily amount of movement.
There is no way she wouldn’t get hungry after walking around mountain paths this much.
By the time all the plates and glasses were empty, Belze suddenly looked up at the sky.
Smoke from the campfire rose into a starry sky without a single cloud. Belze’s gaze followed it up.
The refined smoke of cherry tree bark lingered faintly in the air.
“By the way, Pino. Was the last dish intentional?”
“……What do you mean?”
“You let the blood of the beast flow freely into the river and scattered the fragrant cherry smoke all around. This is practically saying, ‘Please find me.'”
……Eh?
Before I knew it, the atmosphere had turned strange.
The sounds of birds and insects that had been echoing around us fell silent, and instead, I felt gazes coming from everywhere.
And they probably realized that I had noticed them, too.
Emerging one after another from bushes all around were skinny, slender silhouettes holding swords or hammers in one hand—
They were monsters with stone-like or corpse-like skin.
“Um, who are these people…?”
“They are dark subhumans, probably fairy subhumans similar toimps and goblins. But their bodies are larger than I know. They must have mutated.”
In that case, they definitely cannot be friendly.
They readied their respective weapons and made threatening, rumbling sounds deep in their throats.
This is bad. Did I mess up?
“……I am sorry. If I may offer an excuse, I did not intend for this. I was not cooking with the goal of calling them here—”
“What are you apologizing for? I am praising you.”
“Ha?”
“Well done luring those guys out.”
Even though enemies were approaching, Belze sat leisurely and sipped from her almost empty wine glass.
“Listen here. Those are mutated monsters. They are a new species that should not normally exist… in other words, they are bundles of information. Depending on the case, they might even be related to recent events.”
“Ah.”
“Why do you look like this does not concern you? If I were alone, they would have been on guard and would not have come out. Your overly defenseless behavior made the monsters let down their guard.”
……Is that really praise?
“Well done, Pino.”
It seemed she was praising me from the bottom of her heart.
At that moment, facing the monsters that looked ready to attack all at once, Belze slowly stood up and said,
“Pino, come here.”
She pulled me close.
The battle situation shifted at the same time.
Triggered by Belze’s movement, the monsters leaped forward.
Before I could even cry out, “Whoa,” Belze smoothly pulled her foot out of her right high-heeled shoe.
She lifted her spotless, slender foot and took a stance, a gesture resembling drawing a sword. And then—
“Giant Boar, Muscle Enhancement.”
—She swung that single leg.
It was a tremendous amount of power.
It was a blow where the sound exploded with a delay right after the impact.
The subhumans who leaped forward had their necks cleanly sliced off.
The damp ground was peeled back raw by the intense wind pressure, and further behind, a huge boulder soaring like a hill was sliced away halfway.
“No matter how weak and unknown a monster is, you should still try to eat it. Strength that matches you is scattered everywhere like this.”
It was worth going out today as well, Belze said calmly.
……She probably protected me from the impact, but Belze held my body tightly for a while.
On top of that, the gesture of roughing up and stroking my hair made me think she really mistook me for a dog or something.
Then, releasing me as if she suddenly realized, she continued speaking as though nothing had happened.
“Pino. Do not go forward, stay back.”
“Eh?”
“It is not over yet.”
As if to back up Belze’s warning, the ground shook.
It came from the depths of the darkness.
Without hesitation, it trampled over the bodies of the blown-away subhumans, knocked down trees, and walked with a solid physique on four legs.
One was a red-skinned giant beast.
And the other was a cavalryman in black armor riding on that beast.
“……Is that a person?”
“A little different. That is a demon.”
“A demon?”
Now that I think about it, I remembered.
The sparkling hero had said that there were sighting information of high-ranking demons around here.
“Demons. Unlike ordinary subhumans, this refers to powerful monsters that artificially acquired human forms later in life. They somehow manage to make unrelated types of monsters obey them and form herds. I do not understand the logic.”
“……So that is why they are called a ‘demon race’?”
Not just a demon person, but a demon race.
The natural enemy of humanity that brings scattered monsters together into a single clan.
In that case, the subhumans from earlier and the red beast that demon is riding are also—
Thinking that far, I suddenly wondered.
“Princess Belze. About that red beast over there…”
“Ah.”
“Is that also a monster born from some kind of mutation?”
Aside from walking on four legs, it was difficult to determine what kind of skeletal structure that beast even had.
That was because it had a body that looked ridiculously plump and elastic.
Muscles that had swollen to an excessive degree covered and enveloped its skeletal structure like armor, even blocking its eyes and mouth.
However, somewhere intuitively, I understood.
It is armor made of bright red muscles.
That is the color of meat that has hypertrophied so much on the inside that it broke through its original skin and came out.
In other words, that monster was not red from the beginning, but some other creature transformed into a demon by the demon race—
For example, a black bull.
“……You have good intuition. It seems this is going to end with a bad aftertaste.”
Nodding as she said that, Belze patted my shoulder once to encourage me.
Then, as if to check her answers, she spoke to the black knight atop the beast.
“Demon, let me ask you directly. You seem to be keeping a fine mount, but didn’t you steal that from the spirits of the forest?”
“──Yeah. That’s right. I borrowed it from the earth spirits, the gnomes.”
The knight answered with some distorted vocalization.
Unfortunately, it seemed our intuition was correct.
“For a hundred years, this lived under the spirits, and its body was invaded by vast magic power. Even without granting my power, it would have turned into a fiend eventually.”
“……Are you saying it is not your fault?”
“No. This resisted. It struggled, not wanting to become a fiend. That is why I gave its back a push.”
The black knight chuckled deep inside his armor.
It soon swelled up and turned into an unstoppable, boisterous burst of laughter.
Beneath the knight, the red beast made its muscle fibers twitch and stamp the ground hard enough to shake it.
“Pino. The request this time is to find the cow. If we survive this and report it to the gnomes, the request will be completed. Are you fine with that?”
To Belze’s words, I—
“No.”
Reflexively voiced my disagreement.
“Princess Belze. Let us eat that.”
“……Ha?”
“It is a cow. If it has turned into a fiend and will no longer return, we should put it down and eat it before it harms people. That is how we mourn it.”
Belze looked at me as if she were startled.
“……Are you serious?”
“I am serious.”
“You intend to do this without even confirming it with the gnomes, who are its masters?”
“Yes. Let us do it. If we let it escape here, there might not be a next time. Or by giving it time, that cow might add even more sins of murder. Besides… I heard that spirits love their work.”
The red cow was huffing aggressively.
It shook its entire body’s muscles with shudders, and it looked like it was suffering in agony.
“Her Royal Highness Princess Belze. If you are the ‘walking court,’ I am a court cook. My job is to offer meals for Her Highness. There is no way the spirits would not accept that.”
“……What an outrageous logic.”
Belze directed a heavy, dumbfounded gaze at me.
Even I do not know why I started saying something like this.
Perhaps it was a leftover habit from my previous life.
Eat it all. Mourn it by eating.
Not wasting life is precisely the courtesy toward life.
“Seeing you start cooking calmly amidst the fires of war burning down the village… At that point, I already knew. You are out of your mind.”
“Is that so?”
“But I like that about you. Since it cannot be helped, I will grant your wish. That is the capability of being a master.”
Belze smiled faintly and took a step forward.
The black knight laughed boisterously and raised his one-handed sword.
Clinging to that sword was a veil-like flow of black magic power.
“Are we done talking, human?”
“Yeah. It has been decided that I will kill you.”
“Ridiculous! How presumptuous of a mere human. My magic is ‘Zetsuei’—shadows that cut down magic like a sword and reject magic like a shield, combining offense and defense in one! Until today, aside from the Demon King himself, no one has ever left a scratch on my body—”
“Enough with the small talk.”
──As if cutting off the black knight’s words, before I knew it, Belze had closed the distance.
It was truly in the blink of an eye, an instant.
Not even allowing the black knight to hastily enter a defensive posture, Belze had already swung her leg.
“Muscle Enhancement × All-Type Chaos Full Burst—”
“Dragon Scale.”
Ah, she used it, I thought.
Belze’s toe was shining.
Crawling on her skin were beautiful aurora-colored scales.
The ultimate weapon she usually does not bring out because of poor fuel efficiency—ancient dragon scales.
By the time I recognized it, the match was already decided.
The toe of her blade had already been swung like an iai strike.
It sliced everything down. Tearing ‘Zetsuei’, which swayed like a ribbon to protect the black knight, into pieces like paper, it carved the black knight’s body into shreds.
The black knight let out an anticlimactic final voice:
“Eh?”
It was neither a scream nor agony, just a simple question mark.
…The black steel armor, sliced into rings without a sound, rolled heavily on the ground a little later.
A large amount of blood and flesh fragments overflowed from the inside; what race it originally was inside is now impossible to tell.
“I killed the demon. Next, next.”
Belze landed in front of the collapsed corpse, and as if to say she was no longer interested in him, her eyes stared intently only at the remaining red cow.
“Um, Princess Belze.”
“What?”
“The opponent just now was a high-ranking demon, right? You warned the hero so much that it would be troublesome…”
“Yeah. I suppose so.”
It looked like a one-hit kill, though.
To my question, Belze answered brightly.
“The only reason I am not the hero of this era is simply because I do not meet the conditions to be a hero. If evaluated solely by ability, I am twice as strong as the hero.”
Was that a joke, or serious?
“More importantly, Pino, next is the cow. Is there anything we should be careful about?”
“Y-Yeah, once we put it down, we will drain the blood immediately!”
“Understood.”
Anyway, we begin the battle for mourning.