by Fuse
With a quick casting of Dominate Space, we were on our way. Once we reached the village, we quickly spotted the insectoids Apito and Zegion. When I first saved his life, Apito was maybe around a foot long, but now he had grown to nearly twenty inches. It was great to see that guy in good health. Zegion, meanwhile, was at well over two feet and strong enough that a lot of monsters knew better than to pick a fight. Of course, there weren’t any monsters around here that were hostile to Zegion anyway, so there’s no real way to gauge his power. I told it not to do anything too risky, so it probably hasn’t. Unlike Gobta and Gabil, it knew its limits and didn’t get all carried away over everything.
Apito flitted right up once it spotted me, happily providing me with some honey. Ah, thanks! The perfect medicine. Let’s have a li’l taste of that… Mm. Yep. That most rare of cure-alls—and it tastes real good, too.
“Hey, whoa, um, Rimuru— Er, Sir Rimuru? I wanted to ask you something.”
I looked toward Ramiris. She looked freaked out.
“What?”
“Those insects… Are those army wasps?”
“Hmm? I dunno.”
“You don’t know?!”
Ramiris gave me the most exaggerated double take I ever saw. So what if they’re army wasps?
(Sir Rimuru,) Apito telepathically said to me, (it is as that person says. I am a queen wasp, the highest of the army wasp order. Would you like me to summon my queendom?)
Whoa, that sounds pretty fancy. I think we can go without that for now, though.
(You can save it for when this village is under attack. If you want your friends around here, I’m sure you can talk that over with the treants.)
(I’ll refrain for now, then,) Apito said, wings thrumming in what sounded like a happy buzz as it flew off. It sounded quite pretty, if a bit chainsaw-like and lethal. Are army wasps pretty dangerous beasts, then? I doubt it. Apito, collecting honey for me and everything, hardly seemed hostile at all.
Plus, Zegion was there, too, giving me a shy salute as it followed after Apito. Maybe that guy was the king of the insects or something—it certainly felt kind of regal. I was pretty sure it’d only grow in strength. Maybe evolve, even. If so, I’d love to have that guy join my team.
Turning around, I saw Ramiris with her mouth agape, while Treyni was doing her best to console her.
“Yeah, you’re right. I guess they are army wasps. Plus, one’s a queen.”
“I heard them! I mean, you… Ugh. Never mind. You can do just about anything, can’t you? And that other one… I mean, I really don’t think it could be, but…”
She wasn’t making much coherent sense. I ignored her. No time to deal with it, and besides, if it was Ramiris, it couldn’t be that important.
We had reached our destination—a dryas, the holy tree that was Treyni’s “main” body.
I took out my completed project from my Stomach. It was an orb, dull in color. No sheen, no glow to it—but you could absolutely feel the power.
What was I going to use it for? Well, Treyni—and all dryads—were descendants of fairies, a form of spiritual life that could take on physical form by combining themselves with plants. They could freely release their spiritual bodies and use magicules to create temporary corpuses to live in. Their “real” bodies, however, were these dryas trees.
The Walpurgis Council was going to be held in some kind of special dimension, so Treyni might not be able to get in. So I decided to conduct a bit of large-scale surgery on her so she’d be able to move around in her “real” body. Unlike Beretta, which had no physical form in this world, Treyni had a corpus. As a result, we needed to transfer the “core” within her from her current body to the new one, much like a golem becoming established in its own form.
I had an idea of what this new core could be. It was a chaos core, one that can only be made with certain materials under certain conditions, and that orb I just took out would be the vessel for this core. In a way, it was like extracting magicules from the magic stones that can be taken from the cores of monsters. It’s hard to make these retain no element at all, so I went through many failures before I created this. I also needed several other materials to make this orb, so I spent nearly all of yesterday gathering them.
Making a chaos core required an equal mixture of spiritual and mystical force inside this vessel. With Beretta I could’ve just filled them with both in equal quantities and densities, but it wasn’t so simple with Treyni. She would have to inject the orb with her own spiritual energy herself, while I put in mystical force that had been mixed to an exactly proportionate density and size.
Now it was time to get to work, and that meant it was time for Raphael to shine. With my signal, Treyni began to turn her body into spiritual matter and let it flow into the orb, without a moment’s hesitation. I injected the mystical force alongside her, not missing a beat. This was precision work, but it proceeded with no calculation errors.
The dryas lost its life force, visibly withering before me. Alongside that, the orb began to blink on and off, almost like a pulse. Light and darkness traced a spiral inside it—and then, the orb began to shine a light shade of green. The flickering of life was thriving inside.
Report. The individual Treyni’s element has mixed into it, but construction of the chaos core is successful.
It had all gone as planned.
“Okay, it worked. This orb is now Treyni’s main body.”
(Thank you so much, Sir Rimuru!)
“Yeah, thanks, Rimuru! Now I can take Treyni here along with me!”
“You should be safe with that, yeah. But… Hmm…”
Treyni would no longer be separate from her main body, so she wouldn’t have issues traveling across dimensions anymore. But something still seemed missing.
“Treyni, do you mind if I take this tree that used to be your body?”
“Of course not. Use it however you like.”
I thanked her, then got straight to work.
“What’re you gonna use it for?”
“You’ll see!”
I cut down the tree, working the wood, creating precision parts with it to form a human shape.
(Oh! Ohhhhh! Is this…? Are you gonna…?!)
Ramiris quickly understood what I was up to. She was right—I thought I would make a replacement body for Treyni, using the dryas that was imbued with her magical force.
Three hours later, the doll-like figure I had been working on all afternoon was complete. Its core was reinforced with magisteel, the surface made of fully polished wood. It felt remarkably comfortable to the touch—a very fine piece of work.
“Oh, is this…?”
Even Treyni, who rarely expressed surprise at anything, couldn’t hide her excitement.
“What do you think? Pretty good, huh? You can use this as your body if you want.”
I didn’t need to ask. Ramiris was overjoyed, but Treyni needed no encouragement from her. She thanked me profusely and installed herself in her new body. From that moment, the wooden doll became Treyni’s new corpus. It was the world’s first fully mobile dryad.
From the moment the chaos core—the heart of any monster, you could say—entered the doll, magic force surged out of it, penetrating and filling every grain on the surface. Then, amazingly, the white grains faded, no longer standing out, turning as intricate and detailed as human skin. Perhaps more beautiful, even. A beauty that goes beyond humanity.
Unlike with Beretta, I didn’t work from a skeletal frame for the face. I simply carved the head to look the way Treyni looked. But once her orb was in there, its expression grew as soft as anyone you met on the street. It was wood, but the mouth still moved, and the eyes blinked. I have no idea what was driving that. “Because she’s a monster” was my only real guess. This body was kind of herself, once, so maybe it was more compatible than most cases.
Either way, that pie-in-the-sky surgery of mine was a greater success than I ever could’ve guessed.
And for some reason
, she was stronger now, too.
My mystical aura, injected into the orb so perfectly by Raphael’s fine-tuned work, had produced a chaos orb that worked in exact harmony with Treyni’s spiritual force. It was the equivalent of doubling her magicule stores. I think taking in the holy and demon elements earned her some new skills, too. She struck a greater presence than Shion, who boasted the most magical force out of us all. Definitely stronger than the Orc Disaster. Not up to the demon lord Carillon, but I could feel a different type of sheer awesomeness from her.
I think it could bring her to disaster level, the venerable S rank. Of course, she’d still be Special A for now, a calamity-level threat, due to not actually being a demon lord. The Guild-crafted ranking system really couldn’t deal with special-case magic-born like this. Personally I’d feel safe calling her a sub-demon lord.
Between the dryas, the doll, and the dryad, we had here a creature that was worthy of awakening into a demon lord someday. That’s the kind of powerful magic-born Treyni was now—and among other things, it let her join Ramiris on the trip.
I’ll bet even Raphael was surprised by that one!
Understood. It was all according to plan.
See? Totally surprised. No need to be a sore loser about it.
…
Raphael had nothing to counter me with.
With that mental victory in hand, we all said good-bye to Treyni’s sisters, Traya and Doreth. They had been watching the whole surgery, looking incredibly jealous. I suppose I should do the same thing for them, as thanks for all their work watching over the Forest of Jura…but that would have to wait. We could consider that after we were all back safe from Walpurgis. I didn’t want to lose Jura’s guardians because they were too busy doting on Ramiris, besides.
Well, we were now on our way back to town, and I’d now done all the preparing I could. Looking up, I realized there was no moon in the sky, the stars twinkling at me. Today was a new moon, wasn’t it? And soon, under this beautiful night sky, the bell for the first round would ring out.
With the stars behind me, I set off for my battlefield.
INTERLUDE
THE DEMON LORDS
The demon lord Clayman awaited the appointed hour, a glass of wine in his hand. The Walpurgis Council was tonight, and as a mixture of anger and happiness danced across his face, he thought over a few things.
First, the bad news.
Ignoring the warnings of his friend Laplace, he had advanced his forces into the Beast Kingdom of Eurazania. But they had failed to discover even a single citizen left there. The effort had gone to waste.
The briefing from his commander Yamza drove him into a fit of rage. But until they knew why this happened, giving further orders would be careless. Instead, Clayman decided to gather his forces together and carefully continue the search.
What they found was a group of stragglers, frantically attempting to flee the kingdom. Upon being advised of them, Clayman immediately ordered an attack, sending scouts to the area to search for anyone else hidden nearby. They eventually found several hundred civilians in hiding, but as they attempted to dispatch them all, they immediately ran away.
Finding this suspect, the army conducted further investigation, only to discover that a larger group of some several thousand refugees was fleeing toward the Forest of Jura. The small group of several hundred was just bait to help the rest of them flee.
Those insolent…!
Now Clayman knew why there was nobody left living in the Beast Kingdom. They had undergone a mass emigration to Tempest, relying upon Rimuru for their continued survival. The stragglers were also on to the Clayman force’s activity, fleeing the area once the bait was taken.
He wanted to have those souls safely hunted and collected before Walpurgis, but it just wasn’t going to happen. He had to admit that now, and it made him deeply unhappy.
“Yamza, the Council is about to begin. I want your entire force to chase them down before I return. Kill every last one of them and bring the survivors before me!”
“I swear to you it shall happen, sir!”
He nodded, but it did nothing to overturn the fact that he wouldn’t be awakening tonight. It annoyed Clayman terribly as he closed the magical link.
Meanwhile, there was good news to be had.
Using his feelers in the ground—electric signals and natural geomagnetism—he was constantly gathering information. Nobody had been fully aware of this power yet, giving Clayman free rein over a vast array of data. It was what allowed him to enjoy the alias of Marionette Master.
At the time he gained this skill, it permitted him to interact only with people or things within his line of vision. Now, however, thanks to ceaseless training and effort, it had become the keystone force of his entire empire. This unique skill—Manipulator, it was called—converted information into encrypted communications as it conducted surveillance over a wide area. Deploying a member of his team to an area allowed them to function as his eyes and ears to gather intelligence.
It was this vast network that informed him that Veldora, the Storm Dragon, had revived. This, in itself, was not welcome news—but the human beings who had spoken with the Storm Dragon and apparently survived the experience had some very fascinating things to say.
According to conversations surreptitiously heard from adventurer types leaving the monster town, Rimuru, self-styled leader of the forest, hadn’t defeated the Farmus force at all. The missing army was the result of the Storm Dragon’s resurrection—and since he had only just been reborn, the dragon’s stores of magicules were largely lost, emptied out as it raged upon Farmus’s army. That explained why there was no massive onrush of magicules around the Forest of Jura, as one would expect from such a cataclysmic event. That these adventurers lived to tell the tale was another sure indicator.
If the Storm Dragon Veldora was alive once more, there was no way Clayman, a demon lord, wouldn’t have picked up on that. The rumors must have been true, then—he lost his magic force during the battle with Farmus.
These two pieces of news conflicted Clayman.
It would be a simple matter to slay that dragon right now. I may even be able to add him to my cache of pawns…
A tantalizing fantasy. The dragon has been using the town the monsters built as his personal den, it seemed, and it was hard to gather information in that area…but he felt no need for concern. Those empty stores of magicules wouldn’t rebuild themselves in two or three days. After Walpurgis, he’d have all the time in the world to snare him.
And if all else fails, I can simply send Milim after him. For now, though…
It was time to concentrate on the Council.
Or perhaps, if Clayman hadn’t been over-reliant upon Milim’s strength…he might have noticed all the points that didn’t quite add up.
The fact that there wasn’t a single enemy casualty yet. The force, reportedly scattered all across the Beast Kingdom, was now gathered together. Both pieces of information were too important for someone as careful as Clayman to overlook. But it wasn’t Clayman on the ground—it was Yamza. And Clayman’s mind was too full of the upcoming Council to notice. That was how vital this Walpurgis was.
Out of nowhere, Ramiris—a demon lord who preferred to remain incognito, cooped up in her labyrinth, most of the time—asked for Rimuru, the subject of the meeting, to be extended an invite as a supplementary condition. Clayman hadn’t accounted for that possibility; it prevented him from making a snap judgment. But as he groused over it, the others quickly agreed to the suggestion, making it impossible to stage any resistance.
Still, this could lead to good things for him.
It’s better this way. Now we’ve unmasked Rimuru’s true nature. I was almost fooled into believing that he leveled the Farmus military by himself…but there’s no hiding the truth.
Clayman grinned. If Rimuru was joining the Council, he should consider himself welcome. There, before all the other demon lords, he’d know exactly how powerless he r
eally is.
A mere slime, borrowing the majesty of a dragon for his boasts! I hope you consider it an honor to be crushed by my own hands!
He went back to fantasizing about his own future glories. And that was why he missed it. Those small yet glaring inconsistencies out on the battlefield.
“…You be careful, too, okay, Clayman? Now’s not the time to be too reckless.”
His friend’s words flashed across his mind. Now, a small sense of unease was taking root. The nagging feeling that he had missed something. But he laughed it off.
Don’t you worry, Laplace. I will win this…
He drained his wineglass, as if to wash the anxiety away.
It was with a somber gloom that Frey prepared for the Council. Things were in a constant state of flux. The original plan had all but gone by the wayside. She didn’t expect any of this, and now it was all too unclear how things would shake out.
But she wasn’t nervous. She was aware of her limits, and she always made decisions based on cold, hard facts. That was how the Sky Queen always acted. If all went well, then fine. If not…she would have to prepare to make the right move herself.
It all began with a certain promise. In order to defeat Charybdis, she had accepted an offer from Clayman. In exchange, she agreed to take one request from him.
………
……
…
Several months ago, Milim visited Frey’s domain. She didn’t exactly slip in unnoticed. There was a loud bang! as she shoved the doors open and ran into the room.
Frey didn’t bat an eye. Milim always acted like this. When she felt that massive aura—one Milim never bothered to hide—she knew it had to be her.
“Hey, Frey! Beautiful day out, huh?!”
She beamed at her, playing around with her beautiful platinum-pink hair to show it off. Was Frey busy at the moment? Who cares?
