The Dogheaded Demon Lord
Satou here. Unlike when I was young, it now takes time for me to adapt and take action when faced with an unexpected situation. Fortunately, the saving grace is that young people tend to take this pause as an adult staying calm.
“Pardon me. I took advantage of your little summoning circle.”
The figure who appeared above the summoning circle was a gentleman a little less than six feet in height.
He wore a well-made three-piece white suit with a matching coat and held a three-foot-long walking stick in one of his white-gloved hands.
“Don’t mind me. I believe the floormaster you were looking for will be along shortly, so please do go on with your battle.”
He tucked his silk hat under his arm as he addressed Arisa in a familiar manner.
“No way…”
Standing next to me, Arisa clutched my arm with a trembling hand.
“A…d-demon lord…,” she whispered.
In that instant…
The gentleman’s gaze turned toward us.
His calm manner disappeared immediately, replaced by a murderous hatred that felt like it was freezing the very air around us.
His violet eyes were terribly cold, like a vicious blizzard.
Just looking into them gave me goose bumps.
If I hadn’t had “Fear Resistance,” I might have screamed on the spot.
“Hrmph. You can see it?”
He looked down at Arisa, his purple dog’s head glaring as if at a mere pebble in its path.
I stepped in front of her protectively as I skimmed his information in my AR display.
…Not good.
What I read there sent a wave of panic through my mind.
“Yes, as you observed, I am a demon lord.”
The Dogheaded Demon Lord continued to look down on us as he confirmed Arisa’s fears.
His name in my AR display read ?, and he had self-contradictory titles such as True Demon Lord , Demon Lord , Emancipator , Slaughterer , Savior , False God , and Enemy of the Gods .
He was only about half my level but still the highest level I had seen besides my own. Worse, I couldn’t view his skills. An enemy this powerful might be able to break through my defense magic, so I had to proceed carefully or my companions might be hurt.
Ideally, I wanted to get everyone to a safe place before dealing with this.
I murmured to Arisa, who was frozen with fear, and picked her up gently so I could get her away at any moment.
“But fear not—I have no inclination to dispose of you.”
The demon lord stroked his purple-furred chin as one might stroke a beard, speaking to us with the confidence of the truly powerful.
“I only wish to defeat the gods and their fanatic believers. I would take no satisfaction in stomping out riffraff, so please refrain from trying to challenge me, hmm?”
Strangely, my “Sense Danger” skill didn’t react.
He must actually be serious about not intending to attack us.
“Master, I’ll buy us some time—”
Arisa’s body glowed purple, and her orichalcum veil floated upward, exposing her lilac hair. I must’ve forgotten to rescind the permission I’d given her during the Lalakie incident.
“Arisa, wait.”
I quietly stopped her.
“Oh-ho, no wonder you could see through me.”
As the demon lord started to leave, he caught sight of Arisa’s hair and turned back toward us.
“A seedling child who carries God Fragments within her, hmm? Allow me to give you a piece of advice, then.”
“God Fragments”?
I remembered the small spheres of violet light that had appeared when I defeated the Undead King Zen and the demon lord called the Golden Boar Lord: strange glowing lights that spoke evil words in childlike voices.
Only a divine blade could touch those mysterious beings.
If I remembered right, those shards of light had indeed been called “fragments of a god.”
…Does that mean there’s some of those inside Arisa, too?!
I wanted to demand that he stop speaking nonsense, but unwelcome memories flashed through my mind.
The waves of purple light that engulfed her body whenever she used her Unique Skills.
The purple flash that appeared when the Undead King Zen, a reincarnation like Arisa, used his own Unique Skills.
And finally, the dark-purple aura when the demon lord I’d defeated in the ruins under the old capital, the Golden Boar Lord, used a Unique Skill.
They were all the same.
…Wait.
I remembered something strange Zen had said to me in his final moments.
“Destroy me, before I am completely transformed into a demon lord!”
And then there were the similarities with the Golden Boar Lord.
Could it be that these “God Fragments” were the source of supernatural Unique Skills, and at the same time…?
“No doubt you will figure out the truth eventually.”
While my mind was racing, the demon lord continued to speak.
“But do not despair, seedling child. Whether you give in to your emotions and lose all humanity to turn into a mad demon lord and be destroyed by a Hero or choose to become a rational demon lord like myself and fight against the world is entirely up to the strength of your spirit.”
…Seriously?
If what he said was true, then my fears were virtually right on the mark.
After all, there were items in this world like short horns and long horns that could turn humans into demons.
Then could God Fragments turn humans into demon lords in the same way?
“Although it’s also up to you whether to become a demon lord or avert your eyes from the truth and live the life of a human.”
For a demon lord, he was almost nice—or at least, giving a surprising amount of free advice.
But I would’ve preferred that Arisa never hear about this at all.
“Be careful of Heroes. They are Parion’s hunting dogs… Heh-heh-heh, hunting dogs. A strange thing to hear from me of all people.”
The Dogheaded Demon Lord chuckled.
Without taking my eyes off him, I gave a hand signal to Nana and the others behind me.
Immediately, Nana and Lulu started casting physical and magical protection on everyone.
The signal meant “a powerful enemy has appeared; be careful for your lives.”
I decided to speak to the demon lord to try and confirm a few things.
“May I ask you a question?”
“I will not lend an ear to the drivel of a mere manservant. If you wish to speak to me, you ought to at least reach the level of the child you hold.”
The demon lord looked at me for the first time then. I’d forgotten that the level in my social-networking tab was still around 30 or so; I’d have to update it to more like that of the rest of my group later.
“Hmm?”
Looking at me suspiciously, the demon lord frowned as if he’d noticed something.
He pressed his palm to his forehead, looking up toward the ceiling dramatically at a forty-five-degree angle. When he spoke to me, it was in a tired, irritated-sounding voice.
“What sort of whim would lead you to pretend to be human in a place like this?”
Could he tell somehow that I was level 310?
Even if so, it seemed rude to accuse me of pretending to be human.
“Enough playing around. I have far more important work to do, burning all the temples in this world to ashes…”
“The temples”…?
Like a flashback, the image of Sara’s dead body when the Golden Boar Lord had been resurrected came unbidden to my mind.
Then I thought of the head priestess’s and the other people of the Tenion Temple’s smiling faces.
You’re going to burn them down?!
I used “Warp” to jump over to Nana and push Arisa into her arms, then used “Warp” again to appear right in front of the demon lord, pressing a Holy Sword to his throat.
The tip of the blade stopped right before a sheet that had appeared in front of the demon lord, piercing through it ever so slightly.
This was an unusually short-tempered move for me. Maybe the attitude of Labyrinth City was rubbing off on me a little too much.
“…You’re as absurd as ever. How can you break through my Anti-Physical Shield that completely negates all physical attacks?”
“Sorry, but I’m afraid I can’t let that statement slide.”
Darn it, and here I thought we might actually be able to coexist with this demon lord. I shouldn’t have let my guard down just because he didn’t end all his sentences with some stupid word.
On top of that, I wished he would stop speaking to me like we were old acquaintances. I didn’t recall seeing the Dogheaded Demon Lord anywhere on my friend list.
“You would stop me from burning the temples?”
“That’s right.”
I started thinking up a plan to defeat the demon lord—no, it was too cramped in here. The others might get caught in the cross fire.
“Let’s step outside, shall we?”
I grabbed the demon lord’s coat and teleported to the Return seal slate I’d placed in the stone temple in the great desert.
I thought the demon lord would resist, but surprisingly, he came along with me.
Hot, sandy air whipped against my cheeks.
“Wh-who’s there?!”
Behind the demon lord, I heard a familiar voice.
Oh, crap.
I used my “Quick Change” skill to instantly transform into Nanashi the Hero, complete with the name and title to match.
The demon lord’s body was between us, so I was pretty sure she hadn’t seen my face, even if she might’ve glimpsed the rest of me.
Evidently, I’d accidentally arrived just as Miss Helmina of the Eight Swordsmen of Shiga and her knights were investigating the stone shrine as part of their mission in the desert.
“Urk, it’s a demon lord! R-run away!”
“D-demon lord?”
“““The Dogheaded Demon Lord!”””
“You mean the devil Doghead?!”
As soon as they heard the foxfolk officer’s warning, the Holy Knights and Miss Helmina all exclaimed in alarm.
“How noisy. Enough of this buffoonery…”
The demon lord snapped his fingers, and a barrage of magic crashed into the group.
The Holy Knights immediately raised their shields, but the shock waves sent them flying out of the shrine and down into the sand.
I brought out the City Core terminal I was keeping in Storage.
“Remove targets.”
“Order received. Removal commencing.”
I muttered an order to move Helmina and the rest of her group out of the territory and received a response in my mind from the City Core.
The lights on my radar disappeared, so I checked the map and saw that the dots indicating Helmina and the others had been moved to the mountain range bordering the Shiga Kingdom and the great desert.
“How magnanimous of you to feel pity for those fools.”
Noticing that I’d transported them away, the demon lord shook his head as if in disbelief.
To a demon lord like him, their lives must seem completely insignificant.
Just for the hell of it, I decided to try to talk him out of slaughtering all the people of the temples like he’d mentioned before.
“I don’t suppose you’d take back what you said before?”
“I’m afraid not. You might say it is my very reason for living. I became a demon lord solely to destroy the gods and their temples of puppets.”
Yeah, I was afraid of that.
Even though I’d gotten angry and drawn my sword on him before, I still would’ve preferred to talk this out and resolve things peacefully if at all possible.
But judging by the demon lord’s tone and attitude, that seemed impossible.
When the king of Lalakie, the kingdom of sorcery, told me the legends, he had said: The evil Dogheaded Demon Lord relentlessly targeted pious priests and priestesses, and he sought to burn all the temples in the world.
“Then I guess we have no choice but to fight…”
“Hmm. You’ll have killed me how many times now, then? But I shall still get in a few blows of my own from time to time. I do have my pride as the original demon lord who destroyed all the temples of the world some twenty thousand years ago, you know.”
So he already assumes he’s going to lose?
Even more important was the phrase “killed me how many times now.” So even if he got killed, he revived after a certain amount of time? I guess he could fight without reservations, then.
Well, if I can’t avoid a fight, then I’ll fight for all I’m worth.
If this guy was anything like the Golden Boar Lord I’d fought before, then he wouldn’t go down easily.
Without waiting around for a signal to start, I used the speedy Light Magic spell Laser to attack right away. I held back on using Condense to amplify it, since it wouldn’t be much of a surprise attack if I wasted time on multiple spells.
Laser was the high-accuracy spell that had once sliced up the giant monster fish Tobkezerra.
…What?
The laser curved away from the demon lord as if deliberately avoiding him, drilling a hole into the ground and sending up a spray of sand and dust.
Why did it miss?
“Have you forgotten? My Unique Skill Trickster renders any weapons or spells that involve marksmanship quite useless.”
This damn cheater.
I understood Arisa’s feelings a bit better now.
Maybe “Unique Skills” should be renamed as “cheat codes.”
However, I was honestly appreciative that the demon lord still seemed to be under some misunderstanding about my identity, since he went out of his way to explain the nature of his Unique Skill to me.
It was a pretty unfair skill to be sure, but it didn’t seem like it would have any effect if I just struck him directly or used area-of-effect magic. The Laser missing surprised me, but it wouldn’t matter if I mowed him down with a bigger blast.
“Now, if you’d be so kind as to indulge me… Summon Familiar.”
A purple light glinted in the demon lord’s eyes, and a huge magic circle appeared before him.
It looked a lot like the one the yellow-skinned demon had used in the old capital, so I waited to see if a whale or something might appear, but nothing happened.
Talk about anticlimactic.
“Something wrong?”
“My apologies. It appears that my familiars, the Flame Lord, the Sky Lord, the Sea Lord, and the Ground Lord have been sealed away.”
Oh yeah, Doghead’s four generals, huh?
Sorry, but I already defeated them all except the Ground Lord.
“Well, you’ll have to settle for something made up on the spot, then…”
With that, the demon lord pulled a tuft of fur from near his ear and blew on it so it scattered in the wind.
“Come to me, familiar.”
Each strand of fur turned into a purple dog, and they all attacked me on the spot.
What are you, the Monkey King?!
My AR display labeled the dogs charging at me through the air as ghost hounds . They were level 50 and could use some kind of decomposing breath attack.
Since that sounded potentially dangerous, I decided to wipe them all out at once with the intermediate attack spell Fire Storm. Unlike Forge, it had a nice wide attack range.
“Your strength is ridiculous as ever. One would never expect such power from the lesser spell Fire Circle. Which is exactly what makes you worth fighting.”
Hey, Fire Storm is an intermediate spell!
…Wait, huh?
After automatically making a silent retort, I noticed something a little ominous about the demon lord’s words.
Who in the world would mistake my Fire Storm for the lesser spell Fire Circle?
I could only imagine some kind of demon…
Feeling fed up, I changed my approach from “demon lord extermination” to “information gathering.”
It was best for everyone’s safety, and for the sake of my sightseeing life, to get as much information as I could from this demon lord.
Trying to gather intel on an opponent who I couldn’t afford to hold back against sounded next to impossible, but this guy seemed like the type to blab without too much prompting.
There were two main points I needed to ask him about.
The most important one was these God Fragments.
He had hinted that powerful negative emotions like despair could trigger transformation into a demon lord. Arisa’s emotions tended to have extreme highs and lows, so if there was any way to remove a God Fragment, I’d like to find out.
“Now, on to my next move.”
The demon lord summoned an enormous monster with the body of a lion and the head of an old man, rather strong at level 70. It charged right at me, and I used Dimension Cutter to absentmindedly slice it up.
“Just as I suspected, a manticore is no threat to you…”
The second point was the identity of the person he was mistaking me for.
I had a rough idea already, but it’d be good to know more about their nature, what kind of techniques they used, and so on.
I’d rather avoid fighting them if possible, but I had to be as prepared as possible just in case I needed to protect everyone someday.
“How about this, then?”
This time, twin giants made of flame and tornados attacked me from either side, so I used the spell Implosion to crush them both. Their levels were on the lower side at 60, but they both had high resistances, at least in theory.
“You never cease to exceed my expectations, my lord. That djinn and ifrit were aces in the hole that I stole from the high elves, you know.”
The demon lord was rambling about something or other, but it didn’t seem that important. I simply ignored him.
Maybe my best approach would be to beat him down and see if I could force him to promise not to lay a hand on the religious folks.
I know the devil can’t go back on his word, so I wonder if that applies to demon lords, too?
It’d be nice if we could go from enemies to friends after the battle, like in a shonen manga. Maybe he’d even show up when I was in trouble, like, The only one who gets to defeat you is me!
“Perhaps I should change my approach, then.”
He seemed to have decided that strong individual monsters weren’t having any effect, so he summoned hundreds of crimson scorpions into the desert next. Red dots began to fill up my radar.
Surprisingly enough, they were all around the same level as an areamaster or its spawn.
He summoned them in a circle around me. I thought they’d attack with their stingers or something, but instead they started shooting water bullets from their pincers like machine guns.
“They may be mere small fries to you now, but…”
The demon lord’s body glowed with purple light.
“…not if I do this. Berserker!”
The size of the water bullets grew bigger, and their rapid-fire speed went up, too.
Some of the scorpions grew larger and redder, and their backs opened up like a submarine launching a ballistic missile, shooting guided fireballs at me like heat-seeking missiles.
I quickly selected Remote Stun from the magic menu.
Target markers appeared in my AR view over the flying fireballs and water bullets, locking onto them in rapid succession.
The targeting was completed in an instant, and I dispatched every one of the projectiles with Remote Stun, then got rid of the scorpions themselves with the Laser and Condense combo.
I fended off the few fireballs that escaped to come toward me with Flexible Shield and my newly learned Flexible Sword.
If he was going to summon so many monsters, I’d prefer giant cows or giant pigs or something.
Couldn’t he take a hint from the yellow demon that summoned those whales? Ah, but no minotaurs or anything, please.
Still, I was surprised to see that all his summoning cost only about a third of the demon lord’s magic. Did he have a huge amount of MP, like 100,000 or something?
“My goodness… So even monsters summoned with Legion and strengthened with Berserker are still nothing more than goblins to you…”
The demon lord scowled down at the mountain of corpses my magic had created.
I guess he didn’t like that I’d arbitrarily beaten them with brute force because I was thinking about other things.
Okay, I better take this more seriously.
“Sorry. I was a little distracted.”
“Apologizing? Now, that is unusual. I was under the impression that you didn’t care what anyone thought of you except for little girls.”
Ugh! Another lolicon?!
Come to think of it, Miss Aaze did mention that demons and demon lords had never attacked the elves’ forests before.
Was it seriously because the person in question was a lolicon? I’d assumed they were afraid of the elves’ power.
Oops, no use letting myself get flustered. I had to change the subject to Arisa.
“I was surprised that you gave such friendly advice to the purple-haired girl before.”
“Reincarnations are hardly unusual, but I do pity any young girl who becomes your plaything.”
“If you pity her, you should just take the fragments out of her.”
“What, and kill her? I believe you are already aware that it would be impossible to remove the fragments for one who has only set one foot on the seat of the gods.”
Tch. So they can’t be removed, huh?
I clicked my tongue, disappointed that my guess was wrong. When I spoke to the head priestess of the Tenion Temple about getting rid of a Geis, she had mentioned something about Prayer Magic, so I would have to ask her if that could remove God Fragments.
“Shall we move on to the second round, then? Since you waited for my magic to fully recover, the least I can do is make it worth your while.”
The demon lord twirled his walking stick, transforming it into a polearm around ten feet long. It resembled a glaive, but the spearhead was a blade the size of a broadsword.
I produced a Holy Sword from Storage.
It’d be very inconvenient if the Holy Sword Claidheamh Soluis broke. In its place I used a reliable substitute—the Holy Sword Durandal. It didn’t cut quite as well as Excalibur, but its excellent balance made it easy to use. Besides, if the blade broke, I could always put it back in the scabbard and use the scripture <for eternity> to restore it, so I wasn’t as worried about nicking it.
My own handmade Holy Swords were getting closer to the power of God-given Holy Swords thanks to materials like orichalcum and the techniques I learned in the elf village, but I didn’t feel comfortable using them against a demon lord quite yet.
“What is going on? Between your earlier antics and now using a Hero’s weapon, you’re playing around far too much. Do you feel I am unworthy of your beloved Dimension Blade and Nihility Blade?”
Wow, those sound super dangerous.
Whoever the demon lord was mistaking me for, I hoped I never met them. If I had to fight them, I hoped it wouldn’t happen for another thousand years—no, that left too much room for error, so maybe after the Big Crunch.
“Then perhaps I should show you a move that will change your mind.”
Eight glowing spheres appeared around the demon lord, each a different color.
My “Sense Danger” skill gave me a warning immediately. It was a similar reaction to when the Hero’s companions tried to use an incantation before.
Maybe I should use Break Magic to get rid of them before things grow too dangerous, then?
I scrolled through my magic menu.
“First, the Flame Sword.”
Doghead jabbed the red sphere with his glaive, and the blade melted and re-formed into a three-foot-long mass of flame.
Wait, so that’s how you use it?
I got so distracted by the unexpected usage that I let my guard down for a second.
Immediately, the demon lord closed in on me.
He was fast—faster even than “Blink.”
His sharp attack seemed to cut through the very air, and I charged Durandal with magic to parry it, activating “Sacredblade.”
In the same moment, my “Sense Danger” skill activated powerfully.
Uh-oh.
Just as I was about to parry, I withdrew my sword and chose to dodge instead.
I still couldn’t completely avoid the flame blade, so I used Flexible Sword and Flexible Shield to block it.
“…They burned up?”
Flexible Sword and Flexible Shield were made up of Practical Magic pseudo-material. I had never seen them catch fire before.
“Ha! I created this blade around the notion of ‘combustion,’ but I never imagined it could burn your Godsdance Armor and Dragonsplitter!”
Apparently, the mystery man used similar techniques to Flexible Shield and my Flexible Sword.
I didn’t like the thought that we shared similar ideas. He might even have finished versions of spells I was still stuck trying to make.
Oops. Better not let my fears get the best of me.
“I’m pleasantly surprised that the Unique Skill Library I stole from the troll demon lord is such an excellent one.”
You can steal Unique Skills from other demon lords?
Based on what he was saying about Arisa, I assumed he had to kill them to do it.
Huh? Wait, why didn’t he try to steal Arisa’s, too, then?
I decided to try asking in the form of a challenge.
“Hmph, a borrowed technique from another demon lord? Why did you not steal from that girl as well, then?”
“I know the limits of my own vessel.”
As the demon lord answered me, the combustion effect on his glaive ran out, so he plunged it into a white sphere instead. According to my AR, this one had the effect annihilation .
“The nine Unique Skills I have now are likely the most this body can handle. If I try to acquire any more, no doubt the fragments would consume my very self and degenerate me into a mad demon lord.”
I see. So there’s a limit to how many you can learn.
Still, it was pretty amazing that he had nine Unique Skills. The boar lord had three, Arisa had two, and while I’d experienced only one of Zen’s firsthand, our conversations gave me the impression he had at least two or three.
Even compared to my four, this guy had way more than I expected.
I decided to block the demon lord’s glaive with Flexible Sword and Flexible Shield and try to destroy the other spheres with the Explosion spell.
First, I piled up layers of the Flexible Sword and Shield to try to block the white blade as it came toward me.
Shoot, this isn’t working.
The transparent swords and shields vanished as soon as the white light touched them.
Flexible Shield was able to hold up to the black dragon Hei Long’s breath attack, at least for a moment, but it didn’t even survive that long against this glaive.
At the last second, I changed the target of my Explosion spell to the demon lord and let it loose.
He predicted my move, though, and blocked my spell by creating a black curtain, which my AR labeled anti-magic .
Between that and the Anti-Physical Shield he mentioned, wouldn’t that make him basically untouchable?
Even the Golden Boar Lord had only a 99 percent resistance to physical damage and 90 percent to magical damage, so to go beyond that seemed ridiculously broken.
“…Tch.”
I clicked my tongue and thought about my next move.
Hoping he couldn’t use both effects at the same time, I produced a shotgun from Storage. The bullets were made the same way as the Holy Arrows that had played such a big role in defeating the boar lord, so I’d call them Holy Buckshot.
Before the smoke cleared from Explosion, I fired the shotgun at the demon lord.
While I was at it, I used the Acceleration Gate spell to speed up the bullet.
The magically charged Holy Buckshot reached the demon lord even faster than the sound.
Small, scalelike shields appeared in front of him to block it, but the Holy Buckshot blasted right through them and sank into the demon lord’s body.
A rain of blue bullets followed, punching holes in the demon lord’s lower body.
Fortunately, my hunch was correct that he couldn’t use anti-magic and Anti-Physical at the same time.
“Impressive…my lord.”
Even as he lost his lower half, the demon lord swung his glowing white glaive down at me.
I used the Holy Sword Durandal to strike its handle and avert the blow, but the part of it that touched the white light vanished.
If he had any way of shooting this light at me, I might’ve been in a bit of trouble. I was lucky that the effect didn’t extend to the whole handle.
I put Durandal away in Storage, since it had lost its tip, and brought out a Holy Sword that I’d made myself out of orichalcum.
The Holy Sword could probably be repaired with its scripture, but I didn’t want to leave myself open to attack in the process—I would take care of that later.
“Heh-heh. How typically eccentric of you to use an antique weapon like a gun!”
Hmm. So Mr. Final Boss is an eccentric weirdo.
I used more Holy Buckshot to take out the rest of the dangerous spheres created with Library.
“But you still haven’t seen the full extent of my powers.”
With his lower half missing, the demon lord floated in midair.
“If I use Legion and Library in combination with Berserker, I can do things like this, you see.”
Three purple lights flashed around the demon lord’s body.
At the same time, the sands of the desert began to form a strangely shaped monster.
Did he use Library to turn the sand into seeds of demons or something?
That seemed unfair, if you ask me.
The sand demons were each around the level of an intermediate demon, and their attack power was boosted 300 percent by berserker mode.
Glittering pieces of glass-like sand floated around them, probably to fend off my Laser attack.
It’d be silly to wait here for them to prepare, and I doubted I could get any materials from the sand demons anyway, so I decided to wipe them all out at once.
I moved up into the air a bit. On the ground, the sand demons threw spears made of swirling sand at me, but I was able to block those with Flexible Shield easily enough.
I lost about one shield every five hits or so; thankfully, their numbers were small.
All right, enough observation.
I produced some seawater from Storage in midair.
Then, with about a hundred school buildings’ worth of seawater as the target, I used the Water Magic spell Tidal Wave I’d recently learned from a scroll. The greater Water Magic spell Summon Tidal Wave could be used anywhere, but this intermediate version required a large water source like an ocean or a lake.
Some of it evaporated on touching the hot sand, but an overwhelmingly large amount crashed into the demons.
However, it only seemed to damage them, not destroy them completely.
“Oh-ho, he who rules over magic never ceases to amaze! Using a tidal wave in a desert! I would never conceive of such ideas!”
The demon lord exclaimed in exaggerated surprise and admiration. I kind of felt like I was being mocked.
Next, I used Ice Field on the sand demons submerged under the tidal wave to freeze them, then used Explosion to blow them to bits, ice and all.
I was worried that it wouldn’t affect them, since they were sand to begin with, but it seemed to do the trick.
“Ahhh, how refreshing. You’d never know we were in a desert.”
His lower half restored, the demon lord smugly took a deep, satisfied breath.
Clearly, the sand demons were just a distraction to buy time for him to regenerate.
I used Fire Storm to evaporate the ice and help set the stage for my next spell.
The steam created a thick cloud in the air. As it swirled and grew darker, lightning flashed within it, creating an atmosphere like the final battle between heaven and hell.
I had just about enough information now, but I figured I’d check once again if he was willing to relent.
“Let me ask one last time. Would you be willing to keep your hands off the temples and their people?”
“Not at all. This may be old news to you, but it’s imperative that I destroy all the temples, kill the priests and priestesses, and steal their believers in order to chip away at the power of the gods. Only after I have broken their illusion of being all-powerful by ridding them of the prayers and believers that grant them power will I be able to fight the gods themselves.”
I wonder if the gods in this world have affairs and cause bizarre incidents like Greek and Norse gods do?
“Why do you hate the gods so deeply?”
“Surely, you don’t need to ask that at this point. The gods see the people of this world only as cattle—no, as manure, even—for amplifying their power and helping them climb the ranks.”
The demon lord crossed his arms and drummed his fingers impatiently.
“If any culture that would inconvenience them begins to develop, they’ll start internal or external conflict in order to crush it, or even bring down cruel disasters that make people pray to the very gods that caused them.”
He smiled darkly, a spark of loathing in his eyes.
“They warn the people of coming disasters with oracles, but they do nothing to avert the crises themselves, only look on as the people pray to them for help. And only when their believers have fallen into despair do they deign to reach out a helping hand.”
The demon lord sighed and shook his head.
“It is only natural to wish to destroy such a farce and the incompetent pantheon that performs it, is it not?”
Although I knew I had to take a demon lord’s word with several grains of salt, he did have a point.
If there were Heroes and reincarnations in the past, the culture here probably could have developed more by now.
At the very least, it was unnatural that letterpress printing didn’t exist when paper was so common. And even if they couldn’t produce many airships, there could surely be more blimps, hot-air balloons, and the like, especially with Fire Magic users.
“I will free the people from the yoke of the foolish gods and show them what true freedom—”
As I was thinking it over, the demon lord kept speaking.
But then an unexpected intruder brought our conversation to a close.
“Who dares?!”
The demon lord shouted and unleashed a chant-less Fire Magic spell.
The massive blaze, just as strong as my Fire Storm, disappeared unnaturally when it reached a certain part of the sky.
…A distortion?
The outline of a human figure manifested in the air and began to fill itself in.
Soon, a young girl who seemed to be age five or six appeared.
…No, wait.
This was definitely no ordinary child.
The power I felt emanating from her far eclipsed even that of the demon lord.
As I looked at her, a strange feeling began to ripple through me, but it wasn’t fear or awe.
It was joy.
A mysterious sense of delight, like being reunited with a dear old friend.
All my AR display showed next to her was the words identity unknown .
I was sure I’d never met her before, yet somehow, her face looked familiar.
“To think you would have the nerve to show yourself before my lord! That’s not like you, cowardly Parion!”
Flame Spears the size of utility poles flew forth from the demon lord, but the girl simply waved her hand, and they disappeared.
So this was the goddess Parion, said to be the summoner of Heroes?
“You mustn’t listen to the lies of a demon lord, you know.”
Paying no mind to the demon lord’s attacks, the little girl looked down at me and smiled.
“Damn you, Parion!”
The demon lord created another explosion sphere, transformed the glaive’s blade, and sliced through the little girl, who burned away as if she’d been made of crepe paper.
Huh? Are gods really that weak?
“That’s not very polite, my dear Hero. This form is only a temporary trifle, meant to save you from being cajoled by this demon lord.”
As she chided me, the girl reappeared.
Was she reading my mind?
“You would call my lord a Hero?”
“Oh, be quiet for a moment.”
A painting appeared in the air, and the demon lord was sucked into it and sealed away.
Then I finally remembered where I’d seen her face before.
She was the same little girl who had waved at me from within a painting in the art museum in the old capital.
I’d thought it was just some kind of fantasy-world technique, but it was a real supernatural phenomenon—and a goddess, no less!
“Looks like you’ve finally remembered.”
Wait. If she greeted me then, did that mean she knows that I’m really Nanashi?
“Of course. I’ve been by your side this entire time, after all.”
Wow, so this goddess is stalking me?
“How rude. At least call me a guardian angel or spirit guide or something.”
Stop conversing with my inner monologue, please.
Oh, more importantly, I had a question to ask.
“Goddess, is it true that you’ve been suppressing the culture of this world, as the demon lord says?”
“Well, I, for one, have no interest in the activities of humans. You are always the only subject I’m interested in.”
I felt like she was trying to distract me. I attempted to press the subject.
“So you haven’t been controlling people’s minds to prevent them from propagating printing, hot-air balloons, and things like that?”
“Well, apparently, at least one of the gods did that. But why would someone want to prevent printing? Think back. What was the best-selling book of all time on Earth?”
The best-selling book… Ah, right.
Then why would a god want to prevent that?
“And have you been causing disasters, collecting worshippers on false pretenses, and things like that?”
“Not me, no, but it seems like some of the other gods have. They had trouble moderating natural disasters, so eventually they started sending their followers to war against one another, giving them floating islands to try and indirectly control the world, and so on, just for fun.”
She shrugged her tiny shoulders, as if none of this was her problem.
That did sound like something gods would do, but… For all that she’d dismissed the demon lord’s talk as nonsense, wasn’t she now confirming what he’d said?
“But that’s all become rarer since the evil god created the ‘demon lord’ system. Now that the evil god sends demon lords and demons to cause the proper amount of trouble, the gods don’t need to do anything themselves. They just lounge around comfortably and bask in the worship that comes flooding in.”
This didn’t seem right.
The young Goddess Parion who I’d read about in children’s books had gone around persuading kings to help people who were afraid of demons and demon lords, pleaded with the dragon god to learn the magic of Hero Summoning, and so on.
Her disinterest in the plights of humans, and strength to easily seal a demon lord, was a far cry from the legends I had learned about.
Maybe it was normal for there to be such a gap between expectation and reality, but the difference still really bothered me.
“Listen, my dear Hero. You just keep on being yourself, all right? Be strong enough that you can stand by my side.”
With that, she disappeared as if melting into the air.
> Title Acquired: Darling of the Goddess
“Graaah!”
The Dogheaded Demon Lord tore through the floating painting back into this dimension.
“You deceived me, you watchdog of the gods!”
“I didn’t really do anything. You’re the one who got the wrong idea.”
The demon lord was looking tattered after his ordeal in the painting, his gentlemanly composure gone.
He’d even gone from a five-foot-nine humanoid to a fifteen-foot-tall werewolf-like creature, as if he’d evolved in there.
From the way he was baring his fangs, he looked like he might jump me at any moment.
“Hey, demon lord.”
“Enough! Silence, watchdog!”
The demon lord yowled and unleashed a decomposing breath attack.
I blocked the lethal breath with Flexible Shield, but it barely lasted long enough for me to escape out of range with “Flashrunning.”
I really needed to learn the “Chant” skill so I could use greater magic, or I wouldn’t be able to block truly powerful attacks like these ones.
“Do you know what the biggest best-seller on Earth was?”
“Hmph. The Bible, correct? Or was it Quotations from Chairman Mao or the Koran, perhaps?”
I was surprised to find that the demon lord had an answer to my question.
He was right: Holy texts and other such books meant to spread ideas benefited most from the printing press.
The demon lord raised his claws like blades and imbued them with the annihilation effect from Library.
“Right. So then…”
I kept dodging the demon lord’s furious attacks, looking into his crazed and hateful eyes as I spoke.
“…Why don’t the gods here have the same amount of power as on Earth?”
“What do you—?”
The demon lord started to object, then trailed off mid-sentence. He must have realized what I was trying to say.
It was simple: If the gods’ goal was really to amass more followers, there ought to be more widespread religious nations and provinces.
Both the Shiga Kingdom and the Saga Empire had freedom of religion, probably influenced by all the Japanese reincarnations who had helped shape those lands.
In a world where gods clearly existed, it would make sense for whole countries to be backed by a particular god.
But as far as I knew, there weren’t any such religious lands except for the Parion Province, the Garleon Alliance, and the Tenion Republic. While all of them were important areas, they could hardly be called major powers.
If a country had a god supporting it, it wouldn’t be surprising for it to become a large, powerful nation, like the Lalakie dynasty that had once ruled the world.
At the very least, with a goddess who could easily seal a demon lord into a picture, it’d be simple enough to invade the Shiga Kingdom.
Getting back to the main point, it seemed to me that the gods would have no reason to want to prevent printing from being developed, since that would help spread religious materials on a large scale.
If anyone had cause to prevent that, it would be…
“So you’re saying that my lord is the one who’s been preventing culture from evolving?!”
“Yes, or maybe some other third party. But it makes more sense for someone who opposes the gods to prevent those advances from spreading, doesn’t it?”
“Unbelievable…”
Looks like he might be willing to listen to reason after all.
“Then the enemy I should really be fighting is…”
But as the demon lord spoke, purple light flooded out of his body and formed a dark-purple collar around the neck of his doglike head.
“What is the meaning of this?!”
The demon lord tried to grab the collar, but his hand went straight through.
It seemed to be made of the same substance as the God Fragments. Even with Library’s annihilation effect on his claws, the demon lord couldn’t damage it.
“It’s all coming back to me… Now I remember! I am his—”
As the demon lord started to shout, chains shot out from the collar and bound him hand and foot.
“Graaaaaah!”
Once the chains rendered him immobile, they began to crackle with purple lightning.
In my AR display, the demon lord’s health gauge went down rapidly.
Had the man behind the curtain been controlling him all along?
“Then WHAT have I been doing all THIS time? …Have these long YEARS of WAR been a mistAKE?!”
The demon lord howled through the torment of the chains and lightning.
Maybe it was my imagination, but his pronunciation seemed to be getting a little strange.
I remembered that before we started fighting, he mentioned that he’d been killed by this “evil god” or whoever on many occasions.
“GRRR, WHY did I slaughter those CRYING priestesses with MY own hands? What was the PURPOSE of SLAYING those naive peasants WHO refused to give up THEIR faith? WHYYYY?”
The demon lord wept tears of blood as he shouted in despair.
“I… I just WANTED to give freedom TO THE people who were SUFFERING in misery… Rhea…”
Dark-violet light flooded from the demon lord’s eyes and mouth, and his skin began to bubble.
Is it me, or does this look pretty bad?
He must be starting to turn into a mad demon lord because of the powerful emotions from realizing a terrible truth.
I had to get him back to his senses.
“Calm down, demon lord!”
Oh, geez. That’s not going to help.
I guess I’m freaking out a little bit, too.
“I am perfectly CALM. For I AM the original DEMON lord, who IS ALWAYS cool and COLLECTED!”
As he shouted, he started to grow larger and began to change from his werewolf-like form into a giant four-legged beast.
Wzzzaoooohyn.
Looking up at the moon in the afternoon sky, he howled with hatred and madness.
Just hearing it was enough to make me feel unsettled, too.
“Calm down! Don’t lose your head!”
I called out to him repeatedly, but he didn’t respond.
My words weren’t getting through to him anymore.
Then I guess I have no choice.
I’ll have to beat him up to bring him back to his right mind.
I used “Flashrunning” to attack him with Explosion from all directions, mixing in a few Holy Buckshot for good measure.
The ground below us was getting pretty messed up, but it was just sand, so the wind would probably blow it back to normal eventually.
On top of all that, I summoned 128 lightning bolts from the dark clouds using Call Thunder.
> Title Acquired: Violent Destroyer
> Title Acquired: Flash Archer
> Title Acquired: Dark Storm User
> Title Acquired: Tempest Conjurer
I got a bunch of nerdy fantasy-sounding names, but I didn’t have time to worry about those right now.
The demon lord seemed to see the Holy Buckshot as more of a threat than the magic; he used Anti-Physical to block the former, evidently counting on his scalelike shields and countless spawn to deal with the latter.
Even as he was on the verge of losing his sanity and becoming a mad demon lord, he seemed to be able to fight on pure instinct.
Wzzzaooooohyn.
As the demon lord howled, he shot out a blast of silver air.
The breath attack appeared to have the ice attribute attached, as it froze all the rocks and sand dunes around it. Then the newly frozen objects broke and fell apart in the wind.
This attack must be near absolute-zero temperatures.
“Oops, that was close.”
I dodged it with “Flashrunning,” but it gave me the shivers that he could launch a scary attack like that without any prior warning.
Awooooownnn.
The demon lord’s spawn attacked me with Magic Swords, but they were easy to avoid, since they weren’t the demon lord himself. Even if their swords had the annihilation effect from Library, it didn’t matter if they couldn’t hit me.
“Burn.”
Just like at the start of the fight, I used Fire Storm to burn the spawn away.
This time, though, no matter how many of them I burned or blew up, the demon lord kept bringing more with Legion and Summon Familiar. The only time I wanted unlimited refills like this was at a wanko soba restaurant, thanks.
“Eat this.”
I rained down Holy Buckshot overcharged with magic, hidden among the smoke and flames.
My attempts to knock some sense back into the demon lord went on for a while, but they weren’t yielding the desired results.
“Oh, shoot…”
I created 120 Acceleration Gates to speed up the Holy Buckshot, but it made them too powerful, and they tore through the demon lord’s body like a rain of blue lasers, evaporating him.
“Did I overdo it?”
I scratched my head.
But then I saw a purple shadow welling up from the blood on the sand, and the demon lord came back in his four-legged-beast form.
“Geh, leave it to a demon lord…”
I guess defeating him once wasn’t enough, just like with the Golden Boar Lord I’d faced off against before. Demon lords really didn’t go down by ordinary means.
“HA-HA… BWAH-HA-HA-HA-HA… This WORLD is BETTER OFF destroyed.”
Oh, he can talk again.
Maybe beating him up was working after all.
“GODS and PEOPLE and DEMONS and EVERYTHING… All SHALL BE EQUAL in death! Fenrir!”
Wait a second, demon lord, could you hold off on the dramatic self-destruction, please? Besides, I thought you were a dog, not a wolf.
“…What the?”
A dark-purple dome of light began to spread outward from the demon lord.
It swallowed him up in an instant and continued to slowly expand across the desert and the sky, while the wind began blowing toward it.
Looking closely, the sand and rocks appeared to be vanishing when they touched the dome, like sugar dissolving in water.
“Wait, seriously?”
I produced an iron spear from Storage and tossed it at the dome, but it evaporated starting from the spot where it touched the dome.
“Well, I’ll be damned…”
Anything that touched the dome was actually getting destroyed, not just disappearing from sight.
If this was similar to the annihilation effect from the Unique Skill Library, it might be difficult to counteract.
The wind that had started blowing was probably caused by the drop in atmospheric pressure as the air that touched the dome evaporated, too.
“This could be a bit of a problem.”
If left alone, this might actually manage to swallow up the whole world, exactly like he said.
The dome was moving slowly, but it was destroying the desert in a globe-like shape.
Wzzzaooooohyn.
The demon lord howled to the heavens inside the semitransparent globe.
Following his gaze upward, I saw the white full moon in the afternoon sky. Was he actually howling at the moon?
“All right, I can’t just stand around and watch. Let’s see what I can do about this.”
Muttering to myself, I opened my magic menu to search for a proper spell.
First I tried using Break Magic, but the spell itself evaporated on contact, so maybe this wasn’t exactly magic at all.
Next I tried Mana Drain to steal the MP from the dome, but sure enough, the MP evaporated, too.
Holy Buckshot and the concentrated Laser were absorbed into the dome with no effect.
A Holy Sword might put up more resistance, but going by the length of the blade, my body might get broken up before I could break through.
“I’m not looking to do a suicide attack here, so now what…?”
I squinted at the demon lord, who had activated Fenrir.
The semitransparent dome around him didn’t seem to move at a uniform speed; instead, it moved whenever the purple waves radiating from the demon lord reached the edge of the dome.
…Hmm?
Whenever the dome absorbed big boulders, the speed of its expansion slowed down.
“I guess it’s worth a try…”
I threw tons of rubble and seawater at the dome from Storage, and it slowed the expansion rate even further.
When it was hit with enough material at once, the dome’s destruction of physical mass couldn’t keep up, and it would temporarily contract.
“Maybe this will work, then?”
I double-checked to make sure there was no one on the map.
Sure enough, there weren’t any other people near the area, probably because of the torrential chaos we’d been causing for a while now. There were some monsters like scarab beetles and sand scorpions, but that wasn’t a big deal as long as no humanoid casualties were involved.
“First, let’s try to minimize the peripheral damage…”
I took out the City Core terminal from Storage, confirmed that I could execute my plan, and put it into action.
“Okay, and now…”
I opened my magic menu and selected a spell that I normally kept locked.
With the preparations in place, I looked back at the despairing outline of the demon lord who sought destruction.
“…Checkmate. I hope you can live your next life peacefully.”
I spoke, knowing full well that my words wouldn’t reach him, then unleashed the spell I’d selected.
Now that I’d put an end to everything, I used Return to teleport back to the border of the great desert.
“Wow, you can still see it from here…”
Even from such a great distance, the purple dome the demon lord had created was still faintly visible.
Using the Space Magic spell Clairvoyance, I saw that the dome had already expanded to a radius of over half a mile.
At this rate, things would play out exactly as the demon lord wanted.
But…
That wasn’t going to happen.
I looked up at the sky.
And before long, it descended.
Tearing through the clouds.
Leaving a trail of light behind it.
The asteroid came crashing down with a roar.
Meteor Shower—the ultimate spell that had destroyed the Valley of Dragons and killed the powerful dragon god.
Far in the distance, the huge meteorite crashed into the violet dome.
But even after absorbing such a gigantic object, the dome didn’t disappear.
Yeah, that’s what I expected.
More meteors came raining down toward the dome.
Whether they broke or dissolved, they just kept coming.
A total of nearly one thousand meteors crashed down onto the desert, until finally the purple light vanished into the bottom of the crater.
> Title Acquired: Demon Lord Slayer: Dogheaded Demon Lord
> Title Acquired: Earth-Rending Conjurer
> Title Acquired: Sky-Falling Conjurer
“…Whew, I’m glad that worked.”
Even the purple dome that destroyed everything it touched couldn’t hold up against such a barrage of huge meteors, and eventually the demon lord hidden inside it was exposed as well.
In the corner of my eye, my log was filling up at a frantic pace.
I must have destroyed all the enemies on the map and met the conditions for automatic loot recovery.
Deciding to look through the log later, I gazed up at the gold-tinged sky.
Fortunately, there was no fear of the sand that was kicked up by the meteor shower having negative effects on other areas. I’d used the City Cores under my control to put up a barrier that would keep the sandstorm within the desert.
The great desert was much larger than the handful of City Cores could control, so it was possible that a little sand would leak out, but I doubted that small amount would be too much of a problem for the other nations to deal with.
It’d certainly be better than a demon lord destroying everything.
“We lost?”
“That guy always gets in the way.”
“How mean!”
“Awww, I’m mad.”
“Weird, I feel dizzy.”
“Dizzy!”
“Woozy…”
“I’m gonna faint…”
“Can we go home? Let’s go home…”
I’m not letting you leave.
I made swift work of the purple lights that had appeared in the Meteor Shower crater—the God Fragments—by slashing them with a divine sword clad in a black aura.
This time, I watched the broken light pieces carefully and saw that they were sucked into the sword. Maybe it had some kind of sealing ability?
As I was thinking about it, the sword’s black aura wriggled like a living creature and started sucking up my magic power, so I quickly put it back in Storage.
I had to figure out a solution for this black aura, or I wouldn’t be able to have long battles with the divine sword.
Still…
Who would have guessed that those seemingly nefarious God Fragments were actually some kind of trap that resided in people’s bodies, giving them Unique Skills as bait only to eventually turn them into demon lords?
Either that or they didn’t actually hold any ill will at all, and the huge power just broke down its host and turned them into a demon lord on its own.
Regardless, using them lightly looked like a sure path to self-destruction.
I would have to order Arisa not to use her Unique Skills again, no matter what.
“…Hmm?”
A single child suddenly appeared before me.
His presence was indicated by a white light on my radar, and my AR displayed his name as Crow .
That name sounds familiar.
It was the same purple-haired dogfolk child who had appeared at the explorers’ guild.
Although, in fact, the hands that were visible beneath his tattered poncho looked human. So he wasn’t a dogfolk person—he just had a dog head.
What could that mean…?
“…You…”
Crow looked up at me.
On closer inspection, I could see the sand through his body.
Come to think of it, the explorers’ guild clerk had mentioned that he disappeared like a ghost.
“Thank…you.”
The young boy spoke in a muffled, staticky voice.
He seemed to be speaking Hallowed Language.
“The rest is up to you…”
With that cryptic statement, the boy named Crow disappeared as if his body had dissolved in the desert wind.
Based on what he had said, maybe he was the original form of the Dogheaded Demon Lord.
In fact, the purple-haired silhouette that I’d spotted in the mirage city might have been Crow’s soul, wandering around before he was revived as a demon lord.
If that was the case, the lack of miasma in Labyrinth City and its strange movements when we defeated the areamaster could have been omens of the demon lord’s revival, too.
Not that figuring this out now did me any good.
“Still… I wish he wouldn’t tell me so calmly that the rest is up to me.”
I guess I was under no obligation to take up whatever duty he was trying to bequeath to me.
Since he was a demon lord, he’d probably get revived on his own eventually.
It would have been nice if he passed on peacefully, but I doubt a demon lord would do anything so admirable.
It seemed like he’d returned to his senses now that the God Fragments had left him, so he could clean up after his own affairs.
As for me, I’d disposed of the demon lord and gathered most of the information I needed.
All that was left was to deal with this “man behind the curtain” character the demon lord had mentioned, who sort of seemed to be a higher-tier version of me…
To be honest, I didn’t want anything to do with him if possible. But if this were a game, defeating Doghead would definitely trigger some kind of final-boss event to start.
This world wasn’t really a game; it just had gamelike aspects, but it would probably still be wise to make preparations in case this enemy appeared eventually.
I could likely beat almost anyone with enough Meteor Showers, since that strategy had defeated even the strongest deity of all: the dragon god. But that would probably make me an enemy of the rest of the world. Besides, my other ace in the hole, the divine sword, wasn’t suited to lengthy battles.
Most likely, I had to develop some kind of spell or weapon that would do powerful damage to an individual.
But I didn’t have to do that right away.
For now, I had to get back to the others, since they were probably worried about me.
Perhaps they had even defeated the floormaster by now.
Just to be safe, I made sure that the remains of the meteors had been placed in my Storage as part of the loot auto-recovery before I went back to the labyrinth.
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