Good morning.
It's morning.
Unfortunately, I can't use the adjective "refreshing" to describe it.
Where I slept last night was, thankfully, an intact house in the elven village.
The kind of house you'd see in a fantasy story — a treehouse carved out of the inside of a tree.
Treehouse? Yeah, well, that's not wrong. Probably.
Quite fantasy and fancy.
And fairytale-ish.
Normally I hole up in My Home when I sleep, but when you're shown something like this, you kinda want to stay a night, right?
But unfortunately, it wasn't all that comfortable.
After all, we're in a postwar situation.
Thanks to
Straight up, it reeks of smoke.
Even though the house is pretty far from the burned-out area, the smell still drifts over, you know?
On top of that, this place was originally inhabited by elves.
That alone makes your stomach churn a little.
And I personally killed the former residents.
It's not that I'm scared of ghosts or grudges or anything like that, but still, the vibe just isn't great.
Conclusion: Before any talk about the house's comfort, the timing was just too bad.
If I were staying overnight on a vacation or something, it'd be a different story, but this isn't that kind of situation.
The sleep was bad, and the dreams were worse.
You'd think after finishing such a huge job, I'd at least get a good night's sleep.
But that huge job was the mass slaughter of elves, so naturally, waking up in high spirits wasn't really in the cards.
The massive undertaking of wiping out the elven village.
Its purpose, of course, was to kill Potimas.
This planet ended up in this insanely messed-up state mostly because of him.
Taking down the root cause and correcting the distortion as much as possible — that was this job's objective.
Well, there's also the angle of it being between Potimas and the Demon King, in terms of their old grudge.
I honestly have mixed feelings about having left Potimas's elimination to the Demon King.
In the battle against Potimas, the Demon King finally got his wish and landed the killing blow.
But the cost was enormous.
The Demon King's body was left nearly unable to fight from the backlash of the battle.
And it's not just that.
More important than that, even — the Demon King's remaining lifespan has been drastically reduced.
The Demon King had originally taken on the role of Demon King after foreseeing the limit of his own soul.
The Demon King is physically immortal, but his soul was already approaching its end.
He had predicted that he would die in the near future.
That said, that's from the perception of a Demon King who's lived an absurdly long time.
By ordinary human standards, he should still have had plenty of time left.
And yet, the battle with Potimas burned through it all at once.
Looking at the Demon King now, it seems like he could die at any moment.
When I see that, I can't help but wonder if it was really okay to let him fight Potimas.
Shouldn't I have firmly refused, even if it was the Demon King's own request?
But at the same time, I also think about how the Demon King taking on Potimas meant I didn't have to waste energy unnecessarily.
It was a hard-won victory that the Demon King nearly died for, and here I am trying to quantify it in numbers.
I really am garbage sometimes.
Self-loathing.
Anyway, let me get my mind right.
What's done is done.
I'll reflect on it.
But I won't regret it.
Regretting means denying who you were up to that point.
No matter what happens, you accept it, turn it into fuel, and keep moving forward.
Now then.
Let me go check on the prisoners before moving ahead.
The ones captured in this battle were Yamada-kun and his party of Heroes.
Along with the reincarnators who'd been held — under the guise of "protection" — in this elven village.
And the sole surviving elf: Teacher.
That's it.
Basically, almost all reincarnators.
I already killed all the elves.
Elves are a race based on Potimas's clones.
Potimas has clones, and those clones along with humans modified into elves — or their descendants — make up the race called elves.
Apparently, the elves had been abducting people even before they started kidnapping reincarnators.
They'd take the abducted people, convert them into elves, and have them produce children with Potimas's clones.
Potimas's clones alone would create too much genetic imbalance.
The children born from that process were raised as elves.
By nature, the vast majority of elves are blood relatives of Potimas.
Not so much a race as a bloodline?
Well, that's why it's generally better to eradicate the elves entirely.
The exceptions are Teacher and the half-elves.
Teacher, obviously. But going after the half-elves too would be a pain.
My eyes aren't omnipotent.
There are places my sight doesn't reach, and things I miss.
Ideally, I'd eradicate all the elves, but taking out every last one outside this village would be back-breaking work.
If a few slip through the cracks, well, it is what it is.
So I decided to ignore the ones who'd left the village and gone their own way, unrelated to the elves.
Which means I'm also ignoring the half-elf in Yamada-kun's party.
That half-elf apparently died once, but no harm, no foul.
It's fine since they came back to life.
Yamada-kun apparently collapsed because of it, but I didn't do anything!
I didn't!
No matter what happened, it's not my fault!
...Right?
I'm kinda scared to find out what happened to Yamada-kun, but I really should go look, huh?
It's probably my fault that Yamada-kun collapsed.
Right?
He probably hit Taboo Overflow, didn't he?
What if I go to check on him and he's gone insane...?
Ugh, scary.
Also, don't I need to explain things to the other reincarnators?
Can I just dump that on Oni-kun?
Opening my mouth sounds exhausting.
In a way, there's a quest ahead with a higher difficulty than taking the elven village.
This is depressing.
Well, I'll go see what's what for now.