Paimon

Paimon is the ninth of the seventy-two Demon Lords, queen of the succubi and head of the vast Mountain Faction — the largest of the three demon factions, and the one that holds itself apart from the wars of conquest. To the players of Dungeon Attack she was a famous obstacle: a flirtatious, theatrically vain succubus who hunted men in human cities, spared and enslaved the defeated rather than killing them, and stole the protagonist's first kiss even as she died. Dantalion remembers losing the game to her twice. The woman he meets in the flesh is far more dangerous than that illustration: behind the languid charm and the playful, archaic speech lives the sharpest political mind among the Demon Lords.

**The conviction (background)** What sets Paimon apart is a heresy. A Demon Lord can read the feelings of his own kind, and so every Lord — and every demon — takes it as natural law that a world ruled by Demon Lords is the ideal, with humans reduced to slaves beneath them. Paimon believed this too, once; few marched more eagerly in the early Crescent campaigns. But after watching humans bleed, grieve and reason exactly as demons do, she turned the question inside out: if the only thing that truly separates human from demon is the Lords' gift of reading emotion, then perhaps it is the Demon Lords themselves who are the aberration. The truly just world, she concluded, is not an absolute monarchy under the Lords but a democratic republic where humans, demons and the other races live as equals. This split her from her old comrade Barbatos for good and cleaved the Plains and Mountain Factions apart.

**The hidden hand (ch 38-150)** Paimon enters the story at a Walpurgis Night, formally demanding a hearing against the newcomer Dantalion — a probe that first marks her as a player of the great game. From there she works almost entirely from the shadows. Over centuries she had quietly built the Liberation Alliance, a secret republican network threaded through the human states, with the merchant Batavia Republic as its hidden heart. Her grand stratagem is a borrowed-knife scheme: let the monarchist Plains Faction and the monarchist human crowns bleed each other white in the Crescent wars while her Mountain Faction sides with the republicans, then reverse the whole board once both monarchist camps are spent. It was Paimon who fed the Habsburg third princess Elisabeth intelligence about the Crescent host, deliberately steering the human civil wars toward the outcome she wanted.

**Love and the trap (ch 314-401)** Drawn into Dantalion's orbit, Paimon does the one thing her ideology forbids: she falls in love. She refuses even to ask him for marriage, reasoning that binding him to her would cost him politically — putting his interests above her own. But when she learns he means to take seven archducal daughters as concubines, she breaks down, and in that dark corridor confesses that she now values him above herself, above the cause. Dantalion answers with a marriage proposal and a vow to carry her faith for her, to kill what she cannot and bear the sacrifices she cannot stomach. Her affinity locks to 100 — "a pure and noble love." It is also her death sentence.

**The murder (ch 400-401)** Barbatos has demanded Paimon's life as the price of agreeing to abolish slavery forever; Dantalion has agreed. In the same blood-soaked banquet where he turns a fake "capture" plot into a purge of the disloyal archdukes, he holds the radiant, grateful Paimon close — and drives a poisoned dagger into her neck and back. The moment she placed him above freedom for all, he tells her, she was already dead; this was her last chance, now gone. She dies in his arms with her hand on his cheek, her final words — "I love you… so don't cry, Dantalion" — a wound that never closes. He frames her death on the traitor archdukes' assassins, inherits her Liberation Alliance and, through Sitri, her Mountain Faction. In the novel's IF-ending, a different fate awaits her: there the hero Luke, doubting that a Demon Lord could love purely, runs her through with his own sword and is haunted by the deed forever.

Paimon wears two faces. The outer one is the succubus of legend: warm, teasing, theatrically vain, speaking in a soft, old-fashioned, sing-song manner and never hiding her love of humans and the other races. Beneath it is something rarer in the demon world — sincerity. Where every other Lord schemes and betrays, Paimon draws a clean line between friend and foe and treats allies as true kin rather than subjects, which is precisely why her Mountain Faction dwarfs Barbatos's Plains Faction. That same honesty is her undoing: she is the one Lord who lets a personal love outweigh her ideals, and Dantalion uses exactly that to destroy her.

As a high-ranking Demon Lord and queen of the succubi, Paimon commands the loyalty of the largest faction and the seductive arts of her race, but her true weapon is her mind. Dantalion rates her, alongside Barbatos, as one of the very sharpest players in the world — and the only Lord clever enough to see, in the IF-ending, that the real danger to demonkind was never the hero but the human ruler Elisabeth standing behind him. She thinks like a sovereign rather than a mere general: her century-spanning Liberation Alliance, her borrowed-knife wars, and her quiet manipulation of human princes all turn enemies' strength against itself without her ever taking the field.

Paimon is the moral and ideological mirror of the whole novel. She embodies the dream Dantalion claims to serve — a world freed from slavery and from the tyranny of the Lords — and her murder is the price he pays to make that dream real, the moment the story's cost-of-victory theme turns from politics into something that scars his soul. After her death she does not leave: Dantalion inherits her Liberation Alliance and her Mountain Faction, carries her bloodstained handkerchief as a relic, and frames his entire later revolution as her memorial. Her last words echo through the finale, among the burning portraits and the names of all he could not save.