'The first to move loses.'
That was what the demon, a lord of the Demon lands, the being that called itself the Pure White Destroyer, thought.
Naturally, it was a statement about its view of and attitude toward the human called Enkrid.
The amusing part was, if that human called the Demon lands Destroyer had been clumsy, it would have been over once someone stepped forward and killed him.
'If we fight, the loss of strength is certain.'
One lord of the Demon lands had died, but the five remaining were still keeping one another in check. None could afford to waste strength carelessly.
It was the same as with Balrog. It wasn't that they had left him alive because they couldn't kill him. For now, that human had simply taken Balrog's place.
What was there to aim for here?
It had tried to lend strength in the fight against the Empire, but the sly bastards dividing this place among themselves would be waiting for the moment that human weakened.
So what was the result? They had scattered servants here and there and set things in motion with the intent of making him weaker, but nothing went the way any of them wanted.
"Do we fight?"
A subordinate asked. It was a castle built by gathering white stones and stacking them one by one. The Pure White Castle, where it stayed.
The place where the Pure White Destroyer stood now was the great hall of the castle it had made. Though it was called pure white, dust and the grime of time had settled over it, making it closer to pale gray.
Between the rows of columns, there were no stairs, only a single chair and one large thick rug made from monster hide.
"No, we do as we have been doing."
Even if you lost one, you gained one elsewhere. That was how those called demons fought.
***
There had been two servants that showed themselves when Enkrid came to Naurill, meaning two of the lords of the Demon-lands had reached out. The second demon frowned as well. What it had been aiming for was after Pure White made a move.
What it had intended to say was that it would expose Pure White's scheme and help kill it.
It had put real effort into this matter.
'He won't even listen to what I say?'
How dare he? It was difficult not to take offense. But it was too wasteful to step forward now. Which meant all it could do was watch.
The demon known by the epithet Burning Crow stroked one of its horns, then rose from its chair of bone.
The densely packed bird feathers covering its legs instead of fur brushed together with a dry rustling sound. It was a sound that made clear their texture differed from ordinary feathers.
Beyond those two, the Promiser of Plenty and the Outcast of Distrust had not even tried to speak at all, yet the servants they had planted in various places had been killed.
The last lord among them, the Father of the Dead, smacked its lips.
A strange balance of power had been established now. For the moment, it was difficult to lay a hand on a single human. Especially when there was now a swordsman inside the Demon lands causing havoc.
'An age of upheaval, is it.'
Just as it had been when it was born, perhaps now too was a time when the winds of change were beginning to blow.
Was this an opportunity?
'Ascension.'
Their long-cherished desire was the same. Ascension was like trying to force a body the size of a bear through the eye of a needle. That was how it felt to them. So there was no way all of them would make it.
Competition was fine, but the best method was to wipe out all the others before the chance for ascension arrived.
For that, no means were off limits. No method was off limits.
If everyone living on the continent had to die, then so be it.
If that alone had made it possible, the continent would already have been turned into a sea of fire long ago. By the same logic.
'If I can shake that human's mind.'
A few dead servants were nothing worth regretting.
'Even after seeing human malice, will you still sing a hymn?'
The demon asked, and waited for the answer.
***
Jaxon watched the man kneeling before him sob his eyes out.
"Please spare me. What crime did I commit to deserve this? Isn't this what everyone does? Huh? This was the only way to save my child."
Do you think there are more good people in this world, or more bad ones?
One day, his master had asked him that. Jaxon had not answered lightly. Only after thinking on it for two days had he finally replied, "I don't really know." His master had heard that and laughed out loud.
"Yeah, me neither."
That day, the urge to plant one solid hit on his master had surged in Jaxon's heart.
"If it looks like there are too many evil people, just cut down a few. That solves it."
His master's way of thinking had been bizarre, but refreshing. He lived exactly as someone who had made assassination his trade would live.
"If later on you walk a different path from mine, then you can approach it a different way."
Maybe his master had sensed from the beginning that he would not remain a mere assassin forever.
That thought of his master came back to him now. In front of him, a man who had tried to wipe out an entire family to save his own child was streaming tears.
Were those tears genuine? They looked genuine. He was not someone impressive enough to deceive Jaxon's senses. He was only a corrupted human who had greedily swallowed the honey handed to him by a demon.
"Have the whites of your eyes disappeared?"
Jaxon asked.
"What are you talking about?"
This man had gone beyond corruption and had been enthralled by an evil spirit. He had nurtured an evil spirit within himself. Jaxon's keen senses caught the formless thing settled inside the man, a being packed tight with malice.
The man looked baffled. Up until now, all he had done was sell information to demons and run errands for them in exchange for a few benefits.
Killed a few people? Well, that was only natural in an age like this, wasn't it? Was he the only one? Of course not. Killed weak children or women? No one knew about that—he had made sure no one knew.
Then didn't that mean he was innocent? Morality? Hey, what kind of nonsense was that? If you were strong, it was fine, and if you were weak, you suffered. Wasn't that the law of the world?
Those were the words pouring out from inside the man. Jaxon had not heard them, and yet it felt like he had.
The malice and selfishness lodged inside the man had grown greater and greater, and now he had reached the point where killing a few people no longer mattered.
Jaxon looked at the man without expression.
"Please."
The man begged. He put his child forward and begged to save his own life.
'Disgusting.'
That was Jaxon's honest feeling. When had this all begun? It had started with Kraiss's letter.
The first to move after receiving the letter had been Edin Molsen. He knew very well the weak point of the city called Lockfried.
"Assign all the Gilpin Guild people to me. If the soldiers enter, everyone will be too busy hiding who they are. We need eyes that can get in first, hide among the people, and watch. The Gilpin Guild is a group well suited to observing without drawing suspicion in that regard."
He laid out the purpose, the claim, and the reasoning in one breath. It was an excellent presentation of his opinion.
"Do so. If the troops push in immediately, we don't know what the bastards might do."
That was Abnaier's answer. In Kraiss's absence, he was one of the people holding command authority.
Leona had been part of the meeting as well, and everything being discussed concerned the city of Lockfried.
A city built with the rise and fall of the caravan and her entire life on the line.
A grave expression appeared on her face. If there were multiple servants of demons inside the city, there was no telling what might happen.
But standing around in anxiety and doing nothing was not an option either.
Abnaier went on.
"Call Sir Jaxon."
Kraiss had prepared for everything with almost pathological thoroughness. Because of his usual obsessive anxiety, he had already decided in advance what actions should be taken if something like this happened. In one sense it was remarkable, and in another it was obsession itself, but since it kept proving effective again and again, there was no choice but to praise his foresight. Then again, the reason those predictions kept landing true was that the enemy were beings that constantly did absurd things, so it was not something to admire without reservation.
"You'll need to infiltrate the city and take charge of the elimination operation."
Jaxon nodded readily.
Abnaier and Edin had firmly filled the gap left by Kraiss's absence.
Ten swordsmen called the elite even within Border Guard entered Lockfried, and Captain Vengeance of the city watch examined more closely those coming and going from Border Guard under the pretext of group training.
Meanwhile, the Gilpin Guild moved, and Jaxon slipped into Lockfried at night. Naturally, his subordinates went with him.
"There are several suspicious people. It takes too much time to verify them one by one."
That was the message delivered by the messenger Edin had sent.
"Then Sister Teresa should step in."
Audin said that. If he moved personally, the servants would be more likely to notice. Hiding himself and moving quietly would not be difficult, but Teresa and Jaxon would carry out the mission more silently. And that was exactly what they did.
"It's a night that makes me want to sing."
Even normally, Teresa would often cross over toward Lockfried or Greenpearl and delight people's ears by singing on the street.
She sang with faint divinity in her voice, and everyone who reacted to it was added to the list.
From there, the Dagger of Geor moved more actively. They checked everything about those under suspicion: small habits, tone of voice, the people they met.
And some of them they identified and killed with their own hands.
Then some others were dealt with by the ten swordsmen who had slipped in from Border Guard.
"How did you know?"
Among them were bastards whose fingernails had grown as long as fingers, and bastards clad head to toe in armor through relics tainted with demonic energy.
"Still softer than Sir Audin."
"Comparing them to him is nonsense in the first place."
Those ten swordsmen were under the Mad Order of Knights. They were men Ragna had personally beaten into shape and who had been trained by Audin.
Against people who had ruined their own bodies by being tainted with demonic energy, those men did not even have a proper fight on their hands.
A few servants who were unusually skillful or used spells were handled by Teresa.
On the Greenpearl side, Lawford and Pel culled the servants in much the same way and dealt with them. Since their grasp on that city was exceptional, it was not especially difficult.
In that process, one of the remaining servants was the one kneeling before Jaxon now.
"Forgiveness."
The speaking man's eyes rolled in circles. The skin of his face jutted and twisted, his eyes sliding downward, his lips yanking up toward the upper right. In that state, his mouth opened and revealed what lay inside.
"You won't even forgive someone like me? But you know someone like me is normal, don't you? That's how the world is. Seeing something good and praising it only happens because the one praising it is evil too, doesn't it? It's instinct. Humans, giants, all of them are the same! The same! The saaame!"
Jaxon swung his dagger imbued with Will and cut the back of the man's neck. Slash. Black smoke rose from the wound, and blood poured out as well.
Screeeech.
The evil spirit that had kept babbling to the very end faded away. Watching that, Jaxon thought of another man he had seen before meeting this one.
He had looked neat and tidy, a man who bought and sold old clothes.
"If killing me will let her live, then good. I'll die."
He looked at his unconscious fiancée. And he also understood that she had fallen under a spell cast by one of the demons' servants.
The woman lying collapsed was not a beauty who could shake an entire castle, but to him she was the other half of himself, a partner unlike any other in the world. The man proved it.
"If I die and she lives, then that's what I'll do."
There were no tears. Only firm resolve and unquestioning will were plain to see.
"They said if the person you love dies, you'll be freed from the curse. I'll die instead."
That was what the evil spirit had babbled just before he collapsed—more precisely, just before Jaxon appeared and struck the back of his neck to knock him out.
This one was not a servant, but a victim of one of the tricks pulled by a servant.
Jaxon said nothing and waited for Teresa.
This was not his field of expertise. If what that man had said truly was the only way to break the curse, if it really was the one and only way—
'Do you support dreams like that too?'
For no real reason, Jaxon asked that inwardly of someone who was not there.
Teresa soon arrived, placed a hand on her head, and sang. The evil spirit in her melted away and vanished like frost left in sunlight under the divinity carried in Teresa's song.
"Will she... be all right?"
The man had been stabbed in the abdomen, so blood was flowing from his stomach. It was not an immediately fatal wound, but instead of caring for it, he spoke only of her.
"She'll be all right, brother."
Teresa replied, then cast healing light over his abdomen as well.
Watching that, Jaxon felt he finally understood the answer to the question his master had once thrown at him.
'I don't need to know.'
He would live as he pleased anyway.
What did it matter whether there were more good people or more bad?
'Come to think of it.'
His captain already seemed to know the answer.
"Why are you trying to protect them?"
It had been a loaded question. It had come out naturally while watching a man who had roughly finished fighting, become a knight, and could live a more comfortable and better life if he wanted to, and yet still trained fiercely.
"There are a lot of good people in the world."
He did not look at only one side of the world. If he had seen bad things, then he had seen good things too.
Whether that balance had been equal, or whether one side had outweighed the other, Jaxon did not know.
But that man had already chosen his path. And Jaxon was the same.
'The captain is one thing, but...'
He enjoyed this now as well.
"Thank you."
The man wept as he gave thanks. He said it while looking straight at Jaxon.
"I hope you're happy."
Jaxon said that and turned away. On the way back, his master's daughter and his lover asked,
"Happy? I'd like that too, you know."
"Yeah. We will be too."
"I was joking. Why are you being serious?"
Jaxon smiled. The ice cold assassin now showed smiles easily.
"How is it that you keep getting more attractive? Forget any idea of going back to the lodgings tonight."
That was what had happened while Enkrid was killing one of Astrail's masters.