If I had to describe the Migurd tribe village in one word, it would be "abject poverty."
About a dozen houses.
The shape of the houses is hard to explain.
Imagine digging a hole in the ground and placing a turtle shell over it, and you'd get something close.
It really drove home how advanced the
That said, even if Asura Kingdom builders came to this land where there was no timber, they'd be just as helpless without materials.
I could see it from outside, but the fields had withered-leaf plants lined up in neat rows.
They looked like they were about to die, but were they okay?
The
Incidentally, at the edge of the field, there was a sinister-looking flower with fangs blooming — something like a Venus flytrap.
Whether it was a plant or an animal, it was grinding its jagged teeth with an eerie clatter.
I was pretty sure those were there to ward off pest animals that encroached on the fields.
At the far end of the village, girls who looked about middle-school age were gathered around a fire, doing something.
It looked kind of like a school field trip or something, but what they were actually doing was preparing a meal.
They cooked in one place and shared it among everyone.
There were almost no men around. Just young children playing.
Other than that, there was Royn, who had been the gatekeeper earlier, and the chief, more or less.
I was pretty sure the men went hunting while the women guarded the settlement.
That was how this kind of community worked.
So the men were probably out hunting.
"What kind of prey can you hunt around here?"
"Demons."
That answer was probably accurate, but it was a bit lacking in explanation. It was like asking a fisherman what they catch and getting "seafood" as a reply.
Well, I could just keep pressing for details.
"Um... the thing sitting on top of that house over there — is that a demon too?"
"That's a Giant King Land Turtle. The shell is hard, and the meat is good. The sinew makes bowstrings."
"Is that what you mainly hunt?"
"Yeah."
So the meat tasted good. But I couldn't really imagine a turtle that size. The shell on the biggest house looked like it was about twenty meters across.
While I was thinking about that,
The biggest building = the chief's house. That seemed to be universal across all worlds.
"Pardon the intrusion."
"Oh, w-welcome, thank you for coming..."
It was bigger on the inside than it looked from without.
Furs covered the floor, and colorful tapestries hung on the walls. In the center of the room was something like a sunken hearth, with a small fire burning that lit up the interior.
There were no partitions inside the house. When night fell, they probably just wrapped themselves in whatever fur was nearby and slept.
At the edges, swords and bows were laid out, making it abundantly clear these were a hunting people.
The two women who had followed the chief didn't come inside.
Why had they followed us all the way to the village entrance, then?
Oh well.
"All right, then — let's hear what you have to say."
Rox plopped himself down near the hearth and spoke.
Ruijerd sat across from him.
I sat cross-legged beside Ruijerd.
Eris, meanwhile, was standing there looking awkward.
"You sit on the floor inside the house too?"
"We sat on the floor all the time in sword practice, remember?"
"O-oh, that's true."
Eris wasn't the type to hesitate about sitting on the ground. But the gap between what she'd learned in etiquette class and what she was seeing now probably threw her off.
She had to be proper in front of others. But what she'd been taught didn't quite match, and that was confusing.
I just hoped it wouldn't have a negative impact on her etiquette when we got back...
--- Before discussing our future plans, I first laid out my personal information: name, age, occupation, address.
My relationship with Eris, and Eris's social standing.
I told them that I'd ended up in the Demon Continent without understanding why, and that I wanted to go home.
I kept quiet about the
"...and that's the situation."
" Hmm."
Rox listened and then stroked his chin in thought.
He had the look of a middle-school student stumped by a difficult problem.
"...Well, then."
While I was waiting for a conclusion, Eris started dozing off beside me. From the outside, she still seemed full of energy, but the unfamiliar journey must have worn her down physically. She'd stayed up pretty late last night too, from the looks of it.
She'd finally hit her limit.
"I'll listen to the rest of the conversation for you — go ahead and sleep."
"...Sleep? How am I supposed to do that?"
"Just wrap yourself in one of the furs around here."
"There's no pillow."
"Use my knee."
I said it in an Anpanman-like tone and patted my thigh.
"Wh-what do you mean, your knee...?"
"I'm saying you can use my knee as a pillow."
"...Really? Oh... thanks."
The usual Eris would probably have made some kind of fuss. But maybe her drowsiness was at maximum, because she didn't hesitate in the slightest and laid her head on my lap.
Her face was tense and her hands were clenched tight, but she closed her eyes and, within a few seconds, dropped off to sleep.
So she really had been exhausted.
I gently stroked her red hair.
She squirmed ticklishly.
Heh heh.
I suddenly felt a gaze on me.
"...What is it?"
Rox was looking at me with a warm, amused expression.
It was a little embarrassing.
"You two are quite close, aren't we?"
"You bet."
But we were still firmly in the no-touching zone. Our little lady had strong convictions about her chastity, and I respected that fully.
"So how do you plan on getting home?" Rox asked.
His question was the same one Ruijerd had asked.
"While earning money along the way, on foot."
"Just the two of you?"
"No — I'll earn the money myself."
I couldn't very well leave it to the sheltered Eris.
Well, on the topic of being sheltered, I was no better.
"They won't be alone. I'm going with them."
Ruijerd interjected.
A reassuring ally. But there was still the matter of the Man-God.
I wanted to trust him, of course I did, but maybe it was better to part ways here. I'd cut off any lingering worries at the source.
But how exactly should I turn him down?
"Ruijerd, what exactly do you intend to do by following them?"
While I was deliberating, Rox raised an objection.
Ruijerd frowned.
"There's no 'what exactly' about it. I'll protect the two of them and see them safely home."
The conversation wasn't quite connecting.
Rox sighed.
"You know you can't enter towns, right?"
"Hm...?"
Hm? He couldn't enter towns?
"What happens when you bring children near a town? Getting chased by guards and having an extermination squad assembled against you — was that a hundred years ago?"
A hundred years?
"But... I could wait outside the town by myself."
"And you'd know nothing of what happens inside? How irresponsible."
Rox looked exasperated.
Ruijerd clenched his teeth hard.
The Superd tribe was despised. That didn't change even on the Demon Continent.
But assembling an extermination squad seemed like overkill.
Were they treated as demons?
"If anything happened in town..."
"And then what?" Rox pressed.
"I would slaughter every person in town to save them."
His eyes were dead serious.
Scary. Way too scary.
This man really would do it. I could see that resolve radiating off him.
"When it comes to children, he loses all sense of proportion. Come to think of it, the reason he was accepted in this village was because he saved a child from a demon attack, wasn't it?"
"That's right."
"That was five years ago? Time sure flies..."
The chief let out a resigned sigh.
It was incredibly annoying even though he was sticking up for us. It looked like a smart-aleck middle schooler mocking how clueless adults were.
"But Ruijerd.
Can you really achieve your goal with that kind of forceful approach?"
"Hm...?"
Ruijerd furrowed his brow.
Goal.
This man apparently had some kind of goal.
"What goal would that be?"
I cut in and asked.
"It's simple. I want to erase the Superd tribe's bad reputation."
I almost said that was impossible.
Discrimination wasn't something one person could fix no matter how hard they tried. Even class-unit bullying couldn't be solved by one person.
And the persecution of the Superd tribe was rooted across the entire world.
It was like what would happen if the Eris of all people came face to face with a pre-meltdown beta.
How were you supposed to turn something that had been deemed evil since childhood into something good?
"But the story about them attacking friend and foe alike indiscriminately during the war — that's true, isn't it?"
"That—!"
"I know you say it's a bad reputation, but the fact that the Superd tribe is a frightening race..."
"Wrong! It's not a fact!"
Ruijerd grabbed me by the front of my shirt.
He was staring at me with terrifying eyes.
This was bad. I was starting to shake.
Wh-whoa...
"That was all Laplace's conspiracy! The Superd are not a terrifying race!"
Wh-what... what... what was he talking about?
Stop, you're scaring me.
The trembling wouldn't subside.
Wait — conspiracy?
Was this a conspiracy theory?
Laplace was a figure from four hundred years ago, right?
"W-what about Laplace?"
"He betrayed our loyalty!"
His grip weakened. I patted Ruijerd's arm.
He released my shirt.
But his hand was still trembling.
"That man... that man...!"
He ground his teeth together as he spoke.
"Could I hear the details of that story?"
"It's long."
"I don't mind."
From there, Ruijerd told me a story that could be called the dark side of history.
--- Laplace.
He was a hero who unified the demon race and won rights for demons from humanity.
The Superd tribe had come under Laplace's command at a very early stage.
The Superd tribe warrior corps.
They possessed extraordinary agility and fearsome tracking abilities.
With their overwhelming combat power, they served as Laplace's personal guard.
Their specialty was ambush and night raids.
The eye on their forehead acted like radar, letting them survey their surroundings.
They would never be ambushed themselves, and they always succeeded in their surprise and night attacks.
They were elite.
On the Demon Continent of that era, the name "Superd tribe" was spoken with a mixture of fear and respect.
Midway through the Laplace Campaign.
Right around when the invasion of the Central Continent was beginning, Laplace visited the warrior corps carrying a certain spear.
The Demon Spear.
Ruijerd never gave the spear's proper name.
He simply called it the Demon Spear.
Laplace bestowed it upon the warrior corps.
In appearance, it resembled the trident spears the Superd already wielded, but it was black and sinister — you could tell at a glance it was a demonic weapon.
Naturally, there were those within the corps who opposed it.
The spear was the Superd's soul.
They couldn't cast that aside to use something like this.
But it had been prepared by their lord Laplace.
In the end, Ruijerd, as the leader, was forced to compel everyone to use the spear.
Believing it was a demonstration of loyalty to Laplace.
"Huh? Leader?"
"Yeah — I was the leader of the Superd tribe's warrior corps."
"...How old are you now?"
"I stopped counting after five hundred."
"Oh, I see..."
Did the Roxy Dictionary mention that the Superd tribe were long-lived? I couldn't quite remember.
Oh well.
The Superd tribe warrior corps planted their own spears in a certain location and fought on with the Demon Spear.
The Demon Spear held tremendous power.
It multiplied the user's physical abilities several times over.
It nullified the magic used by humans.
Their senses became even sharper.
It brought an overwhelming sense of omnipotence.
And gradually, they transformed into beings that could only be called demons.
The more blood the Demon Spear drank, the darker it stained the soul of its wielder.
No one questioned it.
Everyone was being eroded mentally at roughly the same rate.
And then the tragedies began.
The warrior corps could no longer distinguish between friend and foe.
They began attacking everyone around them indiscriminately.
Old, young, male, female — it didn't matter. They showed no mercy, not even to children.
Without discrimination, they attacked anyone and everyone.
Ruijerd said he still remembered those memories with perfect clarity.
Before long, the demons were saying "the Superd tribe betrayed us," while the humans called them "demons without blood or tears."
Ruijerd and the others reportedly listened to these rumors with expressions of elation.
That was their honor.
Surrounded by enemies on all sides, the Superd tribe with their Demon Spears were nonetheless powerful.
No one could wipe out warriors who could defeat a thousand men each, and the warrior corps became the most feared group in the world.
But they weren't without attrition.
Opposed by both humans and demons alike, fighting day and night without respite, the Superd tribe warrior corps dwindled — one by one, their numbers shrank.
No one thought to question it.
Dying in battle — that was the supreme honor, and they were drunk on that belief.
Then, through rumor, they heard that a Superd settlement was under attack.
The location was Ruijerd's homeland.
It was a trap to lure out the Superd, but none of them were in any state to make a rational judgment.
The Superd tribe warrior corps attacked... the settlement they had returned to after so long.
People were there, so they had to kill them — that was what they thought.
Ruijerd killed his parents. He killed his wife. He killed his sisters.
And last of all, he stabbed his own child to death.
The child had been trained to become a Superd warrior.
It wasn't exactly a fight to the death, but at the end of the struggle, the child broke the Demon Spear.
In that instant, the pleasant dream ended.
And at the same time, the nightmare began.
There was something crunchy in his mouth.
When he realized it was his son's finger, Ruijerd spat it out.
He first considered suicide, then immediately dismissed the thought.
Before dying, there was something he had to do.
Even in death, there was an enemy he needed to tear apart.
At that moment, a demon army had surrounded the Superd settlement.
Only ten of them remained.
The warrior corps that had numbered nearly two hundred when they wielded the Demon Spear.
Those fierce, indomitable warriors.
There were only ten left.
Some had lost an arm, some an eye, some had the gem on their forehead shattered.
This was what had been made of the Superd warrior corps — ground down to this state.
Even then, battered and broken, they glared at the approaching thousand-strong extermination squad with defiant expressions.
They would die in vain — Ruijerd understood that.
First, Ruijerd shattered every last Demon Spear his comrades carried.
One by one, they came back to their senses, stunned.
Some mourned the family they had killed. Others wept bitterly.
But not a single one asked to be made to dream again.
There wasn't a single coward among them.
Every last one swore vengeance against Laplace.
Not a single person blamed Ruijerd.
They were no longer demons.
They were no longer warriors brimming with pride.
They were nothing but filthy vengeful ghosts.
What happened to the other ten, Ruijerd didn't know.
He said they were most certainly no longer alive.
Once you let go of the Demon Spear, the Superd were nothing more than somewhat strong warriors.
And without even their own familiar spears, fighting with borrowed weapons — there was no way they could have survived.
But Ruijerd broke through the siege.
He escaped, barely clinging to life.
And for three days and three nights, he hovered between life and death.
What Ruijerd had with him was his son's spear.
His son had broken the Demon Spear and used his own soul to protect Ruijerd.
And then.
After years of hiding, he finally succeeded in his revenge.
He had interfered in the battle between the Three Heroes who had slain the Demon God and Laplace, and managed to strike a blow of vengeance.
But even defeating Laplace didn't reset everything.
The Superd tribe continued to be persecuted, and several settlements other than the one destroyed by Ruijerd and his companions were also driven apart by persecution.
To help them escape, Ruijerd killed demons once more.
Whether the rest of the Superd tribe had been completely wiped out or had survived and built new villages somewhere — even Ruijerd didn't know.
He said he hadn't met another Superd on the Demon Continent in nearly three hundred years.
The postwar persecution of the Superd tribe had been ferociously brutal.
And Ruijerd's retaliation had been equally incandescent.
All of this was Laplace's fault.
"But the Superd tribe's bad reputation is also my responsibility.
Even if I'm the last one left, I want to erase this stigma at the very least."
That was how Ruijerd concluded.
--- His words were clumsy.
They were never meant to appeal to emotion.
But Ruijerd's frustration, his anger, his helplessness — every last feeling came through loud and clear.
If this was a fabrication, or if his manner of speaking and tone of voice were all an act, then I would respect Ruijerd in an entirely different way.
"That's a terrible story..."
If I took the tale at face value, then the idea that the Superd tribe was a terrifying race was wrong.
I didn't know why Laplace had given them the Demon Spear.
Maybe, thinking about the aftermath of the war, he had decided to make the Superd into scapegoats.
If that was the case, Laplace was the lowest kind of scum.
He should have at least said something to the Superd, who had been so loyal.
Even if you were going to make someone a scapegoat, there was no need to betray them in such an underhanded way.
"I understand.
I'll help however I can."
Somewhere in my heart, another version of me spoke up.
Did I really have that kind of leeway?
Was there really room to worry about someone else?
Wasn't I already barely keeping it together with my own problems?
The journey is tougher than you think, you know.
But my mouth wouldn't stop.
"I don't have any brilliant ideas, but if I, a human child, lend a hand, maybe something will change."
Of course, it wasn't just compassion and goodwill.
There was a calculating side to it too.
If his story was true, Ruijerd was powerful. He possessed strength on par with a hero.
And he was offering to protect us with that power.
At the very least, we wouldn't die to a demon attack on the road.
Bringing Ruijerd along meant security outside of towns, but anxiety inside them.
However, if that anxiety inside towns could be resolved, he'd be an invaluable asset.
After all, the man boasted that neither ambushes nor night raids could touch him.
The odds of being targeted by pickpockets or bandits in town would drop dramatically too.
And besides.
I couldn't quite explain it.
There was no basis for it whatsoever.
But Ruijerd was the kind of straightforward, simple man who couldn't tell a lie.
He was someone I could believe.
"I promise to do everything in my ability."
"O-oh."
Ruijerd looked surprised.
Maybe it was because the suspicion had faded from my eyes.
Whatever the reason.
I had decided to trust.
I'd been taken in just like that, over a single story.
Back in my previous life, I would have scoffed at sob stories.
And yet I'd bought in so easily.
That was how deeply it had resonated with me.
So what was wrong with that?
Even if I was being deceived.
"But is the Superd tribe really..."
"It's okay, Rox. We'll figure something out."
Outside of towns, he'd protect us. Inside towns, we'd protect him.
Give and take.
"Ruijerd. Starting tomorrow, I'm counting on you."
--- If I had one remaining worry, it was that this turn of events was probably exactly what the Man-God had planned.