TRANSCONTINENTAL JOURNEY PROGRESS REPORT
“Okay. Say ‘aaaah.’”
“““““Aaaah.”””””
“Now say ‘eeee.’”
“““““Eeeee.”””””
A chorus of young girls’ voices echoes across the barren wasteland.
They’re not actually singing, but when you hear a bunch of people repeating things in unison, it sort of sounds like a song, doesn’t it?
And no, don’t point out that none of them are human. That’s rude.
Right now, we’re in the middle of a huge wasteland in the cluster of small countries north of Sariella.
When we arrived at the initial destination of our little journey, the capital of Sariella, Vampy and Mera decided to leave their homeland behind and go to the demon territory.
These two were driven out of their hometown by a war with the Word of God religion and Potimas’s machinations.
The fact that they’re both vampires, not humans, probably played a big role in their decision to take things a step further and leave their home behind.
Vampy is a Progenitor who was born as a vampire, and Mera was turned into one when Vampy drank his blood.
If they want to live in the human world without anyone protecting them, they’ll have to hide that fact.
That’s why they decided to follow their protector, the Demon Lord, into demon territory. That decision took guts, if you ask me.
It’s been about a year since they made that decision.
We headed straight north from the capital of Sariella and crossed the border.
It’s been a pretty peaceful journey since we left the capital, without any notable incidents.
In fact, the biggest incident since we started this journey was my Parallel Minds going rogue.
I kept bracing myself for Potimas to attack, but he hasn’t. Things are going so smoothly, it’s almost anticlimactic.
Still, we can’t let our guard down.
Just to be safe, we’ve been avoiding any regular routes where we might be seen, taking the roads less traveled, to the point where there aren’t even any roads.
People don’t normally cross through this wasteland, so it’s a perfect place for us to travel.
It’s easy to see why nobody else is here when you look up at the sky.
Countless black shadows fly about in the air.
Birds? You wish.
Some of them look a bit like birds, but most resemble reptiles.
A bunch actually look like feathered dinosaurs, so somewhere between birds and reptiles, I guess.
The creatures flying through the air are wyrms or maybe even dragons.
They’re the rulers of this wasteland.
Yeah. With that many wyrms and dragons loitering in these parts, it’s no wonder humans don’t set foot in this place.
A single dragon or higher-ranked wyrm could destroy an entire army of humans.
The only people who would be reckless enough to walk into this nightmare territory must either be suicidal or hoping to go down in history as legends.
But we’re neither of those things.
Because we’ve got a demon lord, who happens to be far stronger than any dragon.
If she felt like it, the Demon Lord could probably wipe out all the dragons flying overhead without breaking a sweat.
Dragons can wipe out an entire army of humans, and the Demon Lord can wipe out an entire army of dragons.
This is just getting stupid.
Even power creep should have a limit, if you ask me.
But that being said, we’ve got Vampy and Mera in our entourage.
If we got caught in a cataclysmic battle between the Demon Lord and the dragons, those two might not survive.
Of course, it’s highly possible that the Demon Lord could protect them both while defeating all the dragons. But there’s no need to get into a dangerous situation like that deliberately.
Before we entered the wasteland, the Demon Lord yelled to the dragons, “We’re just passing through!”
I don’t know whether they heard that and understood her or not, but they’ve only been flying around above us the entire time, not paying us any mind.
Maybe they decided to keep an eye on us but not interfere unless they had to.
With that, we get to dodge a pointless battle and avoid the possibility of Vampy and Mera dying.
Plus, this way the dragons won’t have to be totally obliterated.
Fighting wouldn’t benefit either party, so they made the right call there.
And so we’re just walking along normally, not bothering the native wildlife, either.
Maybe crooning as we walk isn’t really normal, but don’t worry about that.
There’s a reason for this chorus, okay?
Otherwise we wouldn’t be doing it.
To clarify, what we’re doing is vocal training.
The baby bloodsucker’s gotten so big, she can barely be called a baby anymore.
Guess you could say she’s evolved into a toddler.
But there’s one little problem.
Since she’s been using Telepathy to communicate this whole time, she’s not very good at speaking out loud.
She’s a little vampire girl with a lisp.
I guess that has appeal for a very specific audience.
Considering her physical age, it’s not that weird for her to have a lisp, but in her case, it could be a bit of a problem.
On top of using Telepathy instead of talking, she’s never screamed and cried like a normal baby, so her vocal cords are close to unused.
It’s led to a vicious cycle: She can’t fix her lisp, so she gets embarrassed and uses Telepathy, which means her vocal cords continue to go unused.
If it keeps up like this, we can’t expect her lisp to simply go away with age.
The solution we hurriedly came up with was these vocal training exercises.
Watching a little toddler traipse through a wasteland while shouting weird phrases is surreal.
But it actually seems to be fairly effective.
For the vocal training and for her stats.
Generally, stats go up more as you utilize them, but there are limits to that.
To really get results, you have to do training that most people will find hard or even painful.
And the Vampy’s starting as a baby, the lowest physical form imaginable.
For her, even just walking is a tall order, which means it made her stats go up like crazy.
I mean, most babies at this age haven’t even learned to walk yet, never mind doing it all day.
No wonder her stats went up so fast at first.
But at this point, since they’re so high, walking alone isn’t enough to raise them much anymore.
Walking for a whole day isn’t even a challenge for her now, making this the perfect time to add another element.
That’s why I’ve got her doing vocal exercises as she walks now.
This training requires a lot of deep inhaling and exhaling, so if you do it while you’re already exercising, it can get really hard to breathe.
It might even be sort of like the high-altitude training some athletes do.
On top of that, I’ve got her practicing what little magic she’s capable of while she walks, and all that multitasking is raising her Parallel Minds skill, too.
That’s the reason our weird little procession is making so much noise as we walk.
Now, have you noticed anything strange about my little update so far?
Bingo. Vampy’s voice alone wouldn’t make a chorus.
As it happens, she’s not the only one participating in this training.
There are four other girls practicing along with her.
Or four monsters, to be exact.
It’s the four puppet spiders, the Demon Lord’s underlings.
As the name implies, they’re spider monsters that control puppetlike dolls.
Their actual bodies are tiny spiders, but they use these puppets made of thread to fight. Pretty crazy stuff.
The thing is, these puppets used to look like the drabbest mannequins. But I’ve done so much magical modding on them that now you’d totally think they were human, at least from a distance.
Once I was satisfied with their looks, I tried my hand at crafting some vocal cords for them, but that ended up being fairly difficult, so I was stuck for a while.
Heh-heh. But I finally got it done!
It was hard.
It was so hard…
But I think I nailed it!
I spent the past year in an endless cycle of trial and error until I finally produced these vocal cords.
Even now, they don’t function all that well.
You’ve gotta make the thread vibrate to produce something that sounds like a human voice, but accomplishing that is no walk in the park.
Even a single syllable takes a lot of effort.
That’s how the puppet spiders started doing vocal training alongside Vampy.
They still seem to have a lot of trouble with even simple sounds, so it’ll probably be a long time before they can speak smoothly. They seem determined though, so I’m sure they’ll get there eventually.
I figure I can keep trying to improve the artificial vocal cords, too.
By the way, the puppet spiders used to get summoned only when the Demon Lord and the others went into town, but these days they’re with us all the time.
Maybe the Demon Lord got sick of summoning and dismissing them over and over.
Whatever the reason, the percentage of girls in this group has certainly skyrocketed.
Congrats, Mera! You’ve got yourself a harem!
Although there isn’t a single normal human girl in the bunch.
I’m a half-human, half-spider arachne; the Demon Lord is…a demon lord; the puppet spiders look cute but they’re still just spiders on the inside; and the baby bloodsucker is a toddler.
Okay, yeah. That’s not much of a harem.
Plus, Mera’s master, Vampy, is always keeping an eye on him, so he has to be careful.
Frankly, if she gets any more attached to Mera, she’ll officially be a crazy stalker girlfriend.
She already starts glaring whenever he interacts with the other girls.
Not to mention, her Jealousy skill level’s been going up.
Jealousy evolves from the Spite skill, and it’s already level 2.
“Sophia, don’t get so worked up, okay? You have to make sure you don’t raise that skill. The Seven Deadly Sins skills can have a serious effect on your mind, so it’s bad news all ’round. Just stay calm, all right? Why is it going up so fast anyway? Those skills are supposed to be really hard to level up…”
That’s what the Demon Lord had to say on the matter.
Apparently, Vampy’s Jealousy skill is a lesser form of the Seven Deadly Sins skill Envy.
The Demon Lord says the Seven Deadly Sins skills are supposed to be hard to level up, but the baby bloodsucker’s making crazy progress.
That can’t be good…
Her poor servant can’t sleep because of the weight of his master’s love.
Hang in there, bud!
Luckily, Mera has a very serious personality and hasn’t shown any interest in relationships with women, so Vampy hasn’t flipped her lid yet.
If Mera was more of a womanizer, we might all be in big trouble.
He’s maintaining a healthy distance between master and servant, even when the bloodsucker keeps shooting him weird looks, so everything seems to be all right.
I mean, she is a toddler, so it’s not like there’s anything to worry about in the first place.
Good thing Mera isn’t a creep who goes after little girls.
Speaking of the non-creep, he’s actually walking silently in front of me right now.
A heavy thudding sound rings out as he walks along, leaving literal footprints in the bedrock.
I’m applying heavy pressure on him with my Repellent Evil Eye. That’s why his feet sink into the rock with every step.
As you may have guessed, this is for Mera’s training.
Mera’s stats are higher than Vampy’s.
It’s only natural, since he’s an adult man who was recently turned into a vampire, while she’s still an toddler.
On top of that, he hasn’t missed a single day of training on this journey, so he gets stronger every day.
That’s why he has to resort to measures like this or his stats won’t go up much.
Even shouting while he walks, the way Vampy and company are doing, wouldn’t raise his stats much.
Plus, he doesn’t need vocal training in the first place.
Hence the Repellent Evil Eye weight training.
This is way more intensive than the vocal exercises, so his stats have been going up at a decent clip.
They’re about as good as the average monster’s at this point.
Compared to his stats, though, his skills have been ranking up preeeetty slowly.
Like, they’ve certainly grown, but when you compare them to my overpowered Pride skill’s high-speed leveling, it’s not very impressive.
But even I’ve hit a bit of a wall.
I haven’t had many chances to fight monsters on this journey, so my level hasn’t gone up, and my stats and skill levels are so high that they barely budge anymore.
If I want to level up at this point, I’d basically have to slaughter enough creatures to wipe out an entire freaking ecosystem.
No wonder my level hasn’t gone up.
Since the Demon Lord and I have a ceasefire now, it’s not that big of a deal, but I can’t help feeling impatient after getting stuck like this.
My ultimate goal is to be strong enough to defeat the Demon Lord or Potimas, but it doesn’t look like I’ll be accomplishing either of those goals anytime soon.
I’ve been working on some strategies to deal with Potimas, so I might be able to hold my own against him, but I still don’t feel like I could take on the Demon Lord.
“Say ‘oooo.’”
“““““Oooo.”””””
At the moment, said Demon Lord is happily leading the chorus made up of the baby bloodsucker and the puppet spiders.
Looks like she’s having a great time.
Kinda easygoing for a demon lord, isn’t she?
If she looked a little older, she could be mistaken for the host of a children’s TV show or something.
But unfortunately, the Demon Lord looks like a little— Huh?! I just got a chill!
Um… I should probably cut that train of thought off there.
That particular topic strikes a nerve with the Demon Lord.
Now she’s looking right at me, with a smile that’s 200 percent scarier than before.
Sorry, sorry. I wasn’t thinking about anything, I swear.
I deeefinitely wasn’t thinking about how the Demon Lord looks like a little kid.
I think I just saw the Demon Lord’s grin widen a little, but I’m sure I’m only imagining things.
Yeah. Let’s go with that.
Oh yikes, now even the baby bloodsucker and the puppet spiders look scared.
Let’s try not to frighten the children, okay?
A thousand pardons, Madam Demon Lord, but I would be most appreciative if you could forget about me and focus on the kids. Many thanks.
I don’t know if my silent plea got through to her, but the Demon Lord goes back to leading the chorus as if nothing happened.
Whew. That was close.
As you can see, my relationship with the Demon Lord hasn’t changed much.
On the surface, we don’t act like enemies, but sometimes we push each other’s buttons.
That’s the kind of tentative situation we’re in right now.
But it’s not like we’re seriously provoking each other.
Once in a while, I can tell that the Demon Lord is testing the waters, trying to figure out how I’m feeling.
My guess is she’s decided it benefits her more to have me as an ally than to kill me, so she’s trying to close the distance between us little by little.
Although it’s hard to say whether that’s working or not.
I mean, I’m definitely down for whatever if it means I don’t have to pointlessly risk my life fighting her, but that doesn’t mean I can trust her completely.
Basically, I think we both want to find a middle ground, but neither of us can quite commit to getting closer to each other.
Vampy, Mera, the Demon Lord, the puppet spiders.
We’re all traveling together with our own thoughts and feelings.
Overall, the journey’s going pretty well.
We haven’t been attacked by the elves like we feared.
But I know for a fact that Potimas isn’t just sitting around twiddling his thumbs.
“So who exactly is Potimas?”
At some point, Vampy finally asks the Demon Lord the million-dollar question.
“A piece of garbage,” the Demon Lord replies immediately.
Okay, you know that’s not what she was asking. (Everyone else likely had the same internal reaction.)
I’m almost sure the Demon Lord is aware of that, too, though.
Oh, but maybe she wasn’t being sarcastic. Maybe that was actually just the first answer that came to mind.
“That’s not what I’m asking…,” Vampy responds finally.
Her expression is priceless: I know is written all over her face.
I guess she’s well aware that Potimas is scum.
I mean, he did kill both her parents and tried to kill her, too.
It’s only natural that she’d want to know more about him.
To Vampy, Potimas is a mortal enemy who killed her parents and plans to kill her next. She has every right to know who he is.
Still, the Demon Lord doesn’t answer right away.
She stays silent for a while, looking pensive.
How much should I tell her?
I’m sure that’s what the Demon Lord was thinking.
I want to know more about Potimas, too, so I wait for the reply.
Since my Taboo skill is maxed out, I have some idea of what Potimas might be.
The Demon Lord was once worshipped by the Goddess religion as the goddess’s divine beast.
But Potimas knows her and even has the nerve to treat her like a child.
Plus, he had a mechanical body, which absolutely shouldn’t be a thing in this world.
If I put together all the pieces, I can guess what he really is.
Still, I’d rather hear the truth from the Demon Lord, who obviously knows the facts.
“All right. White seems interested, too, so I guess I’ll tell you the whole story.” The Demon Lord glances at me, then sighs. “But there’s no going back once you’ve heard this. That guy’s no ordinary villain. He’s a threat to this entire world, as rich as that sounds coming from a demon lord. Once you find out what he really is, you won’t be able to live peacefully in this world anymore. Well, I guess you could, but I’m sure it would weigh on your heart. Now, I can tell you the basic, most harmless facts about him, but that’s not what you want to know, is it? If you really want to learn everything, make absolutely certain you’re prepared to hear what I have to say.”
The Demon Lord’s serious attitude seems to catch Vampy by surprise.
She didn’t ask about Potimas out of casual curiosity, of course.
But she probably wasn’t expecting to hear that the information would change her worldview, either.
Vampy hesitates for just a moment, looks at Mera, and finally seems to make up her mind.
“Please tell me.”
Seeing her determination, the Demon Lord nods once and begins to speak.
“Potimas Harrifenas. That’s his full name. He’s the patriarch of the elves—the head honcho, basically. Elves are one of the demi-human races in this world… Although the only humanoid races are humans, demons, and elves, so I guess the term demi-human might not be appropriate. Now, what’s special about the elves is that their life spans are ridiculously long. Demons live two or three times longer than humans, but elves live more than ten times longer. They grow a lot slower as a result, about half as quickly as humans do. Once they reach their prime, their bodies stop growing, and after that they slooowly start to age. But the aging process varies among elves: Some get older gradually over the years while others barely change at all, then suddenly age very quickly toward the end of their life spans. But either way, they stick around for a ludicrous amount of time.”
These basic facts about elves might be common knowledge to the Demon Lord and Mera, who are from this world, but they’re new to Vampy and me.
Elves existed only in fiction back on Earth.
“Since they grow more slowly than humans, they tend to compensate for that by learning magic. When a body’s still growing, its physical stats are hard to raise, but magic-related stats have nothing to do with the body, so they can be trained whenever. Oh, but you’re an exception, Sophia. Of course your stats are gonna go up, since you’ve been doing this crazy training as a baby.”
The baby bloodsucker screws up her face, unable to respond.
“Once elves become adults, their physical stats can grow normally like a human’s. But by that point, it’s easier to get strong by focusing on magic stats rather than going out of their way to raise their weak physical attributes, so most elves just stick to magic. That’s why elves are generally thought to be better at magic than humans and demons but physically weaker. Doesn’t mean they’re actually all that weak, though.”
Most elves focus on honing their strengths instead of covering their weaknesses, which was how they got that reputation.
“Most elves sequester themselves in a village located in the Great Garam Forest. That forest is swarming with strong monsters, so no normal human could ever reach the village. Even if they did make it, there’s a powerful barrier around the place, so they wouldn’t be able to get in. That’s why people hardly ever meet elves. There are some elves outside the village, of course, but not many, and they don’t really like interacting with non-elves. Even if you see one, they’d probably never talk to you. Elves look down on both humans and demons, ’cause they’re super-stuck-up.”
To summarize, elves have really long life spans, are good at magic, mostly stay in the forest, and don’t like other races.
In other words, they’re not much different from how elves were usually depicted in pop fiction back on Earth.
Could that really be a coincidence?
“Now, all of that is just society’s common knowledge about elves. The rest is the part you guys probably want to know. I’ll ask again: Are you sure you want to hear it?”
Vampy nods silently.
“All right. I guess I’ll talk about the machines first. The concept is probably already familiar to White and Sophia, but it might not be clear to Merazophis. A machine is the crystallization of highly advanced science and technology… No, you probably don’t understand that, either, so I’ll break it down a little more. Basically, it’s a device that can produce magic-like phenomena without using magic. That’s a machine. Get it?”
That was a pretty rough explanation, all right.
I’m not sure if was enough for Mera to get it, but he doesn’t comment, although maybe he’s just being polite.
But I guess it’s not weird to have a hard time explaining machines to someone who doesn’t know the first thing about them.
Even if you tried to start with the basics, that would still require some technical knowledge, so it would wind up taking ages to explain.
It’s not really the point of this discussion, so maybe it was actually for the best to just glaze over it as a mystery object that makes magic-like stuff happen without using magic.
“The elves are the only race in this world with access to these machines. They have all the materials, the knowledge, and the techniques.”
Yeah, I figured.
Potimas’s cyborg body made that obvious.
“As for how advanced their engineering is, it’s probably ahead of Earth at this point.”
Vampy’s eyes widen at that.
I can’t say I blame her. Who would guess that super-advanced technology exists in a world that seems so stereotypically fantasy based?
But Vampy saw Potimas’s cyborg body as well as I did. She must have an idea that this might be the case.
Still, I guess hearing it out loud surprised her.
It must be surprising and confusing if you don’t have prior knowledge like I do. Most people would be shocked by the fact that something like that exists in this world.
…Unless the reasoning wasn’t actually as strange as you had been led to believe.
“So Potimas has been using this technology to operate behind the scenes. But to be honest, I don’t know why he’s targeting you specifically, Sophia. From what I’ve heard, he attacked you knowing you’re a reincarnation, so it’s probably got something to do with that. But I have no idea what he stands to gain from killing reincarnations, so I can’t say for sure. In fact, we don’t even know if he really intended to kill you. I got the impression he was planning something else at first.”
Like the Demon Lord, I have some doubts about Potimas’s motives.
If he wanted to kill Vampy, there were plenty of other ways to do that.
He probably could have killed her regardless of my interference, if that was really all he intended to do.
But since that didn’t happen, he must not have planned to kill her at first.
But knowing that doesn’t mean I have any idea what his original goal was. Potimas’s reasons for going after Vampy are still a mystery.
“Um, why do the elves have technology like that?” Vampy asks.
Yeah, that’s a reasonable question.
In this stereotypical fantasy world, the elves’ machines stick out like a sore thumb.
It’s perfectly normal to wonder about it.
“Weird, isn’t it? This world’s civilizations are way less developed than Earth, but the elves have access to technology way more advanced than anything you’d find on Earth. From your point of view, the elves are probably like O-parts, right?”
O-parts… As in, “out-of-place artifacts,” right? What a fitting phrase.
“But it’s actually the opposite.” The Demon Lord shrugs.
Mera and Vampy don’t seem to understand what she means.
“Technology needs a foundation in order to develop. Without someone bringing knowledge from the future or something, it’s impossible for technology to suddenly advance out of nowhere. People make tools out of sticks, then advance to stone tools, then improve even further with bronzeware. Bronze leads to iron, allowing for more complex tools, which leads to gears, then steam engines, then circuits. It all has to happen in order. So the elves’ technology must have developed like that, too, right? But they couldn’t have done all that alone. It’s not entirely impossible, but they hardly ever make contact with other races, and they don’t have enough land and resources. Elves should barely be able to preserve civilization, never mind advance it.”
Civilizations develop over time, by accumulating history.
No genius stuck in the Stone Age is suddenly gonna skip right to inventing the semiconductor.
In fact, it’d be creepy if that did happen. What would be going on in that person’s head?
“What I’m saying is, the elves couldn’t have developed such complex technology by themselves. There would have to be others who had the same technology. At least, under normal circumstances.”
Mera is the first one to give a gasp of realization.
“I see. So that’s why you said it’s the opposite…?” he murmurs.
A question mark practically appears over Vampy’s head.
…She’s a little dumb, isn’t she?
“That’s right. It’s the opposite. The elves haven’t independently created highly advanced technology. It’s simply that everyone else has moved backward. That’s the reality of this world.”
Finally, Vampy finally seems to get it.
“Long, long ago, this world had technology far more advanced than that of Earth. But they made a grave mistake and headed down the path of destruction. In doing so, they lost all their technology in the process, and everyone but the elves went into a cultural backslide.”
It’s not that the elves are advanced. It’s that everyone else has fallen behind.
That’s why the word “opposite” came up.
The Demon Lord has just revealed part of the truth of this world.
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