EPILOGUE
THE DEEDS OF A DEMON LORD
Caligulio awoke to a warmth gently enveloping him.
Wh-where am I?
He had trouble remembering what he was doing before he came here. Panicking, he looked around, only to find himself resting in a somewhat large chamber.
Joining him was a young girl with bluish-silver hair, maybe twelve or thirteen years old and working on something with an angelic smile. Gazing at her from the side, he saw her holding her hand out above someone who was lying on their back. A dazzling light shot from her palm, pouring down upon the line of familiar-looking people on the ground.
Is that Krishna? No… Krishna was killed before my eyes, wasn’t he?
The haze instantly dissipated from his mind as all his memories came back. They were at war, invading the land of monsters.
Caligulio hurriedly shot up, attempting to shout something. But then he lost the ability to speak. Amazingly, the dead Krishna gently opened his eyes and looked right at him.
“…?!”
Just like Caligulio, Krishna seemed pretty confused about where he was. His eyes followed the silver-haired girl around, unable to parse what was happening. She kept up her mystery work, apparently not noticing they were awake.
Bernie and Jiwu were lying in front of her now, and next to them were Caligulio’s staff officers and aides.
What’s going on…? They were all killed, too…
In his clouded mind, Caligulio tried his best to calmly analyze the facts presented to him. But there was just no comprehending this. They were all dead; he was sure of that. Their chests weren’t heaving up and down—they couldn’t have been breathing. But when that girl put her hand over them, they magically came back to life, one after another. There were a dozen or so imperial officers gathered in this room, and before long, she finished treating them all.
Once she did, the girl gave a little satisfied nod and turned toward Caligulio.
“Hey. You awake? How’re you feeling? Can you remember your name?”
Her voice was casually unconcerned, but Caligulio didn’t mind. Her charming looks were one reason, but the sheer presence she projected told Caligulio that any resistance was verboten.
Still, he could not give her a reply. Neither could anyone else; they all kept their mouths shut, completely lost to what was transpiring. Even the Single Digits Bernie and Jiwu were listlessly staring into space.
Now the girl sensed that something was amiss with Caligulio. “Oh, did I mess something up?” she asked, looking troubled. “I’m pretty sure the spell went off without a hitch…”
From that, Caligulio realized they had all been subjected to some kind of magic. But what type?
…No. It can’t be. That’s ridiculous. Completely impossible. But…
But his body felt just fine.
…Wait. There was one thing off. The power that once flowed in him, practically bursting at the seams after he was awakened, was completely gone. All he could comprehend was that something awful was happening.
“…I’m sorry, are…? Aren’t we dead?”
That gingerly asked question must have helped the rest of the group clear their minds of any cobwebs. The light returned to their eyes as they sensed just how abnormal this situation was. They had all been murdered by a demon who called himself Diablo, that much was certain. The demon had no reason at all to keep them alive, either. That’s why Caligulio was wondering why he was breathing right now.
“Oh, you remember now? Can you tell me what your name is?”
“Y-yes. It’s Caligulio.”
Then a possibility flashed through his mind. Perhaps this girl might have saved Caligulio and his staff from that life-or-death situation. But was that even possible? Rescue from that hellhole was all but inconceivable. That demon was beyond powerful, ripping Caligulio up like a paper doll after he acquired that ultimate force—to say nothing of the Single Digits over there.
Nobody could beat a demon like that… Nobody except for the Heroes he had heard rumors about.
“Um, did—did you save all of us, perhaps? What—what happened to that evil demon?”
He finally dared to ask it. Then:
“You’d best watch your tone around Sir Rimuru.”
The booming voice was familiar. It was exactly like the one that belonged to that bloodcurdling demon. But an even more pressing issue was how he just mentioned Rimuru, the name of the demon lord Caligulio had set as their primary objective.
Now Diablo revealed himself to them all. A paroxysm of fear made Caligulio tremble, but the girl stopped the demon.
“Um, I think some of you might have the wrong idea about everything, so let me explain. Yes, you are all dead. All the troops you led are dead, too, and I sincerely doubt there are any survivors. So it’s not like I saved you guys or whatever. I did bring you back to life, though.”
“Keh-heh-heh-heh-heh… Truly an impressive, unheard-of spell. I won’t ask you to thank him for it, but you should at least be awed by Sir Rimuru’s sheer greatness.”
“…Huh?”
Caligulio could do little more than grunt at this incomprehensible explanation. But nobody was laughing at him.
“Can you quit with that act, Diablo?”
“My apologies. I simply want to spread the word about your magnificence to these poor, ignorant masses—”
“Yeah, and I’m telling you I don’t need you to!”
Nobody in the room had the energy to interrupt this little act. But after a while, the girl smiled at Caligulio.
“Anyway, looks like your memory is fine. Glad that whole ritual ended up working out.”
“U-um…”
“Okay, let’s start from the top. I’m Rimuru. The demon lord Rimuru. I’m kind of the king around here. Nice to meet you!”
Caligulio froze. So did all the other recently resurrected. As his brain parsed the words, and their meaning slowly dawned on him, his eyes opened fully, staring straight at the girl in front of him. This little girl was Rimuru? The enemy Caligulio and his fellows saw as an obstacle who must be eliminated? Part of the Octagram? That Rimuru? And judging by the context, Rimuru appeared to be the one who brought everyone back to life. This was Rimuru himself, smiling adorably, looking nothing like the sketches that were circulating.
But there was one other problem.
“Um, if I could ask you something…?”
“Hmm? What is it?”
Caligulio, despite his trepidation, soldiered on. “So you brought us all back to life?”
“Yep. That’s right.”
“How…how could you?”
“Well, the procedure’s kinda hard to explain, but like, your souls are—”
“No, no, I don’t mean that! I mean how could you revive us when we’re your sworn enemy?”
“Oh, is that what you meant?”
The girl—the demon lord Rimuru—looked a tad relieved. “It’s simple,” she blurted out. “The war’s still on, but you’ve all fallen into my hands. You’re my pawns now!”
And that’s why she brought them back to life? Caligulio stared blankly at her, unable to grasp her meaning. The demon lord Rimuru revived them? Who? Us?!
Astonishment, confusion, and fear filled his mind. The same was true for all the others who were recently revived in the chamber. And it would take quite a while before the dust settled.
I left the confused Caligulio and his gang in their room, full of all the real important folks from his army—the supreme officers who led the imperial invasion. Like I told him, I brought them back to life so I could use them as pawns—and yes, it was Raphael that offered up the idea.
………
……
…
Raising the dead…
Ever since Shion’s death, Raphael had been busying itself analyzing the structure of souls. Now it seemed like it was well on its way to figuring out almost all the principles.
Whether it belongs to a human being or a monster, all souls have a set quality and quantity. It is composed of matter known as data particles, and through managing and applying certain forces to them, it’s possible to control life and death to some extent.
The souls of plants and animals house only a very tiny amount of energy. Human souls, meanwhile, have tons and tons. We’ve already confirmed that a certain amount is given to everyone equally, and the ability to fully hardness that soul energy leads to the manifestation of soul powers—or what we call special skills. This data, engraved in your soul since birth, is the source of those powers.
So is the data written directly onto this energy? Not exactly. First, there’s the ego, a set of amorphous wavelengths within the soul, and the group of data particles that surrounds it. This is known as the heart, and that’s where all the data is stored. The crystallized energy that covers this heart is what we call the soul.
Our pseudo-souls were developed as a receptacle for the project of this very heart. Hearts housed within pseudo-souls like this have no energy of their own, but they do have egos. Without the power in one’s soul, the owner of the soul cannot use any skills, but they can take action with their egos.
So the way I revived Caligulio and his friends was by using pseudo-souls to substitute for their real ones. Basically, I took their souls, plucked the “hearts” out of them, and transplanted them into the pseudo-souls, along with the bare minimum amount of energy necessary to keep them going.
………
……
…
There was some concern about the success rate for this operation, but it looked like everything worked, which I was glad about. But it wasn’t without its problems.
First off, it weakens you a lot. Which, yeah, of course it does—I took all their soul energy out. I’ve taken their souls, and there’s no real reason for me to give them back, and I don’t see how they have any right to complain about it.
So thanks to that, they’re no longer able to invoke any skills. Even if skill data was written into their hearts, they can’t use it at all without enough soul energy. From now until the natural end of their lives, they’ve got no hope of learning or using a single skill.
It’ll also affect their magic-casting abilities, but that at least is something they oughtta be able to improve with practice. Once they get the hang of it to some extent, they’ll be able to tap into magic without using any soul power. Magic is a skill, but it’s also an art, and that means it’s possible to invoke it with the magicules in the air instead of those in your body. So arts are still available to them, as long as they train themselves enough to earn them. Unless they rely on their skills for everything in their lives, I think they’ll bounce back just fine.
So yeah, they can get superstrong again if they want to, but the quality of the energy involved isn’t what it once was, so they’re gonna hit limits sooner or later. Bear in mind, I only developed the pseudo-soul as a toy to help us play around in the labyrinth a little. I don’t want anyone to start expecting miracles from it.
Still, it worked well enough this time. I didn’t revive them for their own sakes but rather to prevent any hateful rumors about us from circulating. Whether you’d call them rumors is debatable, I suppose, but regardless.
I mean, if they attack us for their own selfish reasons and die as a result, that’s their fault and nobody else’s. I don’t have any obligation at all to resurrect them… But again, I don’t want to give myself a bad rep around the world. It’ll also save me from being hated by the average imperial citizen any more than necessary.
Good thing Raphael’s experiment worked, though. And since they’re all back to life and everything, I’m gonna have all these fancy higher-ups take responsibility for everything they did. They’re under Soei’s supervision right now, in fact. Also, I should note that despite being alive again, it’s still on a temporary basis at best. I’m willing to grant them a certain degree of freedom, but if anything comes up, we can trace ’em—no sweat. They’ll never be able to escape us.
So enough about them for now. I’m trying to get my work done as quickly as I can. Caligulio and the others were the test subjects to see if this procedure worked, and it did. Now it’s time to scale it up.
Before me lay the corpses of approximately seven hundred thousand imperial soldiers. We were inside the labyrinth, in Adalmann’s Floor 70 domain, just in case something funny happened.
I had collected as many bodies from the battle as I could, going out on the field and teleporting them all down here. Gobta, Geld, Gabil, and the assorted floor guardians joined me in the effort.
The corpses laid out here were all the ones who could still be revived. The imperial forces who deployed in front of Dwargon’s East gate were still there; that standoff remained ongoing. The nine hundred forty thousand who invaded the Forest of Jura were all killed in battle except for Misha, Lucius, and Raymond. Of these, over two hundred forty thousand were sadly unsalvageable. One reason why resurrection magic is said to be impossible is because you can’t re-create souls from thin air, but thanks to Testarossa and the other demons, we had these souls in safekeeping. As long as we had their bodies handy, we could resurrect them, but…
…well, not all of them had bodies left. Ultima’s Nuclear Flame kinda vaporized a lot of them, Testarossa’s Death Streak scrambled the DNA of a bunch of others, and Carrera’s Gravity Collapse turned a whole slew of people into piles of ash.
And even if we had a body, sometimes it still wasn’t possible. For one, if someone died because of sheer terror, the ego—the most important part of the body—was trashed and long gone, so we couldn’t do anything for them. Kanzis, killed by Kumara, was one example. I guess the fear literally broke his heart at the edge of death, so there were no data particles left in his soul. Not even Raphael could restore those, sadly, so there was nothing I could do for the guy. But that was fine. I wasn’t planning on reviving the likes of Kanzis anyway.
So as I said, two hundred forty thousand soldiers of the Empire were permanently dead… But hey, it was gonna be all of them originally, so they really oughtta count their blessings. I felt sorry for those who wouldn’t make it back, but sometimes that was just the way the cookie crumbled. I wasn’t an omnipotent god, you know. I couldn’t create something out nothing.
And…really, I don’t regret a thing about this. I do think the three demonesses went way too far, for sure, but this is war. If we let up too much and got burned because of it, it’d be so incredibly stupid. My people are the only thing that really matter to me, and if I have to weigh them against strangers I know nothing about, then I won’t hesitate to protect my people first. I’m not gonna go around like some saint, saying we should show compassion to invading enemies. If I was that much of a namby-pamby dolt, I’d be in no position to step up when we really did take damage.
That’s why I shouldn’t be concerned about the ones we can’t bring back to life. We shouldn’t… But still, I’ve got this indescribable sense of sorrow for them. I guess I’ve still retained my values from living in a nation as war-free as Japan all that time. It’s not regret, for sure, and I don’t think what I did was wrong…but it’s still not something I’m used to. I just can’t help but think it’d be nicer if we could all just live happily and peacefully without anyone having to die.
But still, I’m never going to show mercy to anyone who invades my domain. In fact, I’ll make it a point to terrorize them to the hilt. I suppose it’d be hypocritical of me to pray for those souls… So instead of the dead, let me say a silent prayer for those we’re able to bring back to life instead.
Sacred Birthday—deploy.
Caligulio and his staff, fresh out of their recuperation room, looked shocked at the scene before them. At this rate, I wasn’t sure they were gonna get any sleep. Not my problem, but…
Anyway, let’s get this over with. All the bodies have copied pseudo-souls installed in them. This is kind of an emergency, so I might as well make the most of my copies. It’s the only quick way to secure enough pseudo-souls for them all.
Their bodies were now restored and in clean, decent condition, thanks to Adalmann and his squad of advanced holy-magic-casters. They worked tirelessly for the sake of these enemy soldiers, and I was incredibly grateful to them. Of course, Adalmann doesn’t need to sleep anyway, so I think he put in the biggest effort of all. Honestly, I think it tired him out more than fighting in the battle. He really deserved some credit for that.
So all these clean bodies had pseudo-souls installed in them. I’m making it sound like a snap, but it goes without saying that it was only possible thanks to Raphael’s staggering computational power.
Next, I performed the Secret Art of Implantation, a sort of cousin to the Secret Art of Revival. I wasn’t regenerating a soul here, so I didn’t require nearly as much energy—but identifying every single individual body took a tremendous amount of computation. Raphael, once again, handled this—I was doing essentially nothing. Just standing here, really, meditating and leaving everything to that guy. The way he checked genetic information on the bodies against our soul records to instantly identify people was so amazing, I really should start calling it Professor Raphael. It was just so bizarrely complex, something I could never possibly imitate.
But to Caligulio and the others watching from the sidelines, it must’ve looked like I was doing everything myself. At some point, they started kowtowing to me—like they were worshipping me or something. You know that makes me feel super uncomfortable, right? I wish they’d stop doing it. You’ve so got the wrong idea about me… But until this Sacred Birthday was over, I couldn’t stop to complain.
So over the course of a single day and night, the Secret Art did its stuff while I awkwardly squirmed under all the attention. The result was the successful resurrection of around seven hundred thousand soldiers.
Floor 70 was lined with rows and rows of simple tents full of food for the revived soldiers. Even the most confused ones after their resurrections were now calm, and everyone was quietly concentrating on their meals, as if they were digesting their very lives.
They were enjoying a stew-like entrée—basically a bunch of veggies and meat cooked in a large pot—and it was hot and hearty. As the chaos subsided, and the soldiers came to accept their new reality, the soup left an impression on them that was difficult to put into words.
Caligulio was among the defeated soldiers, now feeling much less tense. He hadn’t even noticed his hunger until then—but as he basked in the feeling of the moment, he slowly realized, over and over again, that the demon lord Rimuru killed him and everybody he knew in the army.
Now, however, they were alive…although Rimuru called it a temporary life.
“Don’t worry; you’ll all be able to live out a perfectly average life span. You can fall in love, form a family, have children; whatever. But just remember: We’ve put some restrictions on all of you to keep you from doing anything bad to us! The curse on your souls will ensure that you’re never able to act against us again. I hope we’re all clear on that.”
That was part of the speech he gave once everyone calmed down. But Caligulio was sure that curse wasn’t necessary at all. Who would ever dare to repeat such foolish behavior a second time?
The disaster with Veldora several centuries ago left a deeply instilled sense of fear in all who witnessed it. But even if the dragon leveled a city and killed everyone in it, such a disaster could easily be replicated by human hands, too. Maybe that was why, despite this palpable fear, nobody thought that it could ever be conquered by some other, greater fear. Or maybe, if there were more initial survivors, that fundamental sense of fear could have been spread more, turning it into more of an inviolable thing… But that’d be the end of it.
This time, though, there was no mistaking matters.
I was once dead, but now I’ve been brought back to life.
…By the hands of an ungodly demon lord.
Bearing witness to such a ridiculous miracle, not a single person among them would ever dare to defy him.
We…no, I…was far too foolish.
It was a reminder that we all had gotten too big for our own good.
Or was that really even a demon lord in the first place? Caligulio’s doubts went that far. Krishna, meanwhile, was already worshipping Rimuru like a god only one night post-revival. Even now, he was watching him go around, eyes rapt; it was sheer idolatry. Of course, Caligulio was the first to worship him, so he wasn’t one to talk…
This “temporary life” the demon lord spoke of turned out not to be a problem, either. Yes, they had lost nearly all ability to fight, but not enough so to make life too difficult. They could still defeat monsters, at least up to a certain level. Maybe their powers were now insignificant to someone like the demon lord Rimuru, but to Caligulio and his companions, a few of them still had strength that’d rank close to an A.
They couldn’t use skills, and magic was proving to be tricky for them, but they still had their well-honed bodies. Plus, they’d be allowed to live out their natural life span until they became old and decrepit. That, Caligulio thought, was good enough—and that thought was shared by all seven hundred thousand of his comrades present.
With all the gratitude and awe going around, there was no way anyone would dare rebel against the demon lord Rimuru. It was a complete, utter, heartfelt defeat. Everyone wanted the fighting to just stop already. The Empire’s invasion was now over, and it ended in a complete failure.
epic rimuru killed and resurrected and now it’s being worshiped like a god too good