by Aneko Yusagi
“All right guy, if you don’t start talking, I’m going to stomp on this thing.”
“No! Nooooo!”
The veins on the guy’s head stood out as he screamed.
He sure was quick to anger. Was this little string of beads really that important?
Back in my own world there were religious groups that were fanatical enough to go to war. These guys must have been like that.
“Well, well.”
I slowly lowered my foot until it was almost touching the rosary, and then raised it again. Then I pretended to step on it again, raising my foot at the last moment. I did it over and over.
“You demon! Our God will never forgive your behavior!”
“What do I care what your God does? Now tell me why you tried to kill the princess. No? Are your beliefs so flimsy?
“Ugh…”
“Are you just going to let me, a DEMON, stomp on your precious little rosary? Your God must be very understanding.”
It was the reverse of the Japanese fumie. If they really believed I was a demon, they had no choice but to stop me.
“If you tell me the truth, I won’t step on it.”
“I won’t be manipulated by you!”
“Too bad.”
I ground the rosary under my heal, crushing it into the ground.
“Nooooooooooo!”
Hmm, what’s he going to do? I should probably clear up the first misunderstanding.
“Hey Princess? Who are these guys? Are they knights?”
“I… Um…”
She was still visibly shaken by the attempt on her life. Her face was pale, and she was trembling.
“Mel! Master and me are here so it’s okay!”
“Filo.”
Mel recovered her senses and turned to me, whispering.
“Um… These men are father’s knights.”
“The Trash… You mean he wanted to kill me so badly he would sacrifice his own daughter?”
Unbelievable. Did he really hate me that much?
“I… Um… I don’t think so.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t think my father knows about this. When he plays strategy games, he’s super smart—my mother can’t even beat him. If this were his plan, it would be perfect. This plan, honestly, my mother wouldn’t approve of it.”
“I think you’ve got that backwards.”
From where I was standing, it all looked pretty bad. I guess we couldn’t expect much from the mother either.
“This seems like something my sister would think of. It’s just like mother said. We’ll have to keep an eye on her.”
Hmm… I might have been reading too much into it, but it sounded like there was some bad blood between these sisters.
“So you think it was your sister?”
She was an heiress to the throne, so there was a motive for her to try and get rid of her sister—the younger one was apparently first in line. The Bitch would know that, and a plan like this certainly wasn’t below her.
“She might want the throne. She’d have to get rid of me to get it.”
“That does sound like something she would do.”
“I wouldn’t put it past her.
“My sister, from a young age, has loved bringing ruin to people. My mother has said that she would do anything to get what she wants.”
It sounded like, at the very least, she had a handle on the basics.
“But father doesn’t understand that. He keeps saying that she’s serious, and good.”
So the Trash trusted her. The younger princess wasn’t taking his words at face value.
“Maybe the king just doesn’t want you to inherit everything?”
“That’s not it.”
“Why not?”
“Because mother is in charge of choosing a successor. And mother does not trust my sister.”
“Mother… Your mother… is that the woman with the purple hair, the one who walked with you and said, ‘Zir’?”
“That was a double—they pretend to be her in public.”
“A double? So I guess she looked like that.”
I couldn’t forget how purple her hair had been.
“Yeah. Well, the double looks just like her but talks kind of strangely.”
“Huh.”
“Because she’s the queen, way more powerful than the king.”
There she was again, whispering big news like it was nothing.
“What was that?”
“Her mother is more powerful than her father.”
“Huh?”
“Mr. Naofumi, Melromarc is a matrilineal country. I just found out recently myself.”
Raphtalia jumped in, adding more information as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.
What did this mean? It meant the Trash had married into the royal family!
“What are you laughing for, Mr. Naofumi?”
“How could I not laugh? That Trash had to marry into the royal family! Ahaha!”
“Master, you look like you are having a good time.”
“Don’t speak ill of my father!”
“Why not? He hung you out to dry.”
“He did not! Wahhhhhh!”
Uh oh, the younger princess burst into tears and started battering me with her little fists.
Ha! She’d been acting like an adult this whole time. But now she let her guard down. She was just a little kid.
I mean, when we first met her I knew she was a kid. But now I knew that she really did act her age.
And yet, she was speaking differently than she had when we first met. If she were a princess, she’d have to conduct herself with honor when she was in public. I guess what I’m saying is that this whining, crying little girl was the REAL younger princess.
“It’s not right to laugh at a crying child.”
“She’s basically the same age you are!”
Had Raphtalia forgotten that she had behaved the same way only two months ago?
That explained her relationship with Filo then—it was her chance to be the big sister.
It also explained why she was giving the Trash more than his fair share of the benefit of the doubt. It would be easy to get a bunch of religious fanatics to kill me—they already had the motive, and he could easily deny involvement. Even if he wasn’t involved, the explanation of the Bitch trying to secure the throne for herself made perfect sense.
“Mr. Naofumi…”
“I know!”
Raphtalia was starting to get angry, so I decided to behave more seriously.
“Is there some way for us to clear our names, and also to protect the life of the younger princess?”
Honestly, I don’t see why I needed to protect the progeny of the Trash and or his Bitch daughter’s sister. I didn’t like the fact that they shared blood. But I couldn’t just leave her there, and I couldn’t kill her.
Even still, I could sympathize with her plight. Betrayed by her own family and left to die in a pit of despair. I knew how that felt. Hm… There must be some way…
“The queen… Do you know where your mother is?”
That was my first idea. If the queen didn’t know what the Trash was up to, we could find her and explain the situation.
She had more power than he did, so if we could get her on our side then that would solve the issue.
If we went that route, the younger princess would be an important bargaining chip.
If we could just keep her alive, she would be of use to us. She seemed intelligent enough for decent conversation. The only problem would be if the queen were just as stupid as the king. If so, she wouldn’t believe anything I said.
“I don’t know where she is. But, but Mother said that she wanted me to be friends with the Shield Hero.”
“And you know that she wasn’t involved in this?”
That was a possibility we couldn’t rule out. Giving her youngest daughter the right of succession might have been part of her plan to find and kill me.
“Uh…”
“Don’t cry, Mel! Imma help you! I promise!”
The princess had started crying again, so Filo comforted her.
“Hey, don’t you promise her anything!”
“But Master… I… I want to help her!”
“No.”
“But I want to help! I want to help!”
“Ugh! Shut up already!”
Dammit. I was getting a bad feeling about all this. What was happening?
We went back and forth a few times before I noticed that the knights were laughing.
“Looks like the demon has finally learned his place.”
“Shut up. I don’t have time to deal with you losers right now.”
“That’s not true. This means we have fulfilled our purpose.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“The death of the princess would guarantee the public’s opinion of you, demon, but even without her death there is no major problem. There must be a huge price on your head by now.”
Yeah, well. I suppose I should have expected that much.
“You can assassinate a member of the royal family and flee to another country, but don’t think that you won’t be followed!”
“Wait. I don’t understand why you had to murder the princess before my eyes.”
If they were trying to frame me for her death, why bother with all this? The Bitch framed me just by pointing at me, and everyone believed her. But they wanted to bring the younger princess out into the middle of nowhere, kill her, and then frame me for it? Why did they bother actually catching up with us when they could have killed her any time?
Then I remembered the knight in the back with the crystal ball. Most of the knights in the back row had managed to escape. What if… What if that ball had functioned as some sort of camera?
“Shield Demon, your murder of the young princess is now well known all throughout the land. You have nowhere to hide, nowhere to run.”
I was starting to get it. The last time, they tried to frame me in their own country, but they went too far and weren’t able to make it stick. If I had run to another country, they wouldn’t be able to call for my forced removal. What it would lead to is my exile in another country—and that would give me an opportunity to recruit sympathizers.
But this time was different.
They had a crystal ball that contained a scene of me leaping at the princess. That would be all the proof they were likely to need. They could easily show it to any neighboring countries, and it would put an end to any domestic revolts they might face.
Wow, honestly, I was pretty impressed. So that brings me to my main options.
Option 1
Leave the princess and be on my way.
The knights that the Trash sends after her will kill her, and that will give the crown all the cause it needs to go after me. The queen would put a huge bounty on my head. The word would spread to neighboring countries, and someone would always be after me.
I’d be in real danger when the next wave came. They’d arrest me when I teleported to the scene.
Option 2
Take the princess back to the Trash King and explain the situation to him.
It would save the life of the princess, but then we’d have to deal with the Trash. I wonder if he would try to charge me with kidnapping. Basically, it would save the princess, but I couldn’t guarantee my innocence would be accepted.
The Queen might step in to save me—but we didn’t know where she was, so we couldn’t go meet her. We would have to wait for her to come to us. We certainly had no obligation to put ourselves in that kind of situation. And if the Queen was the one pulling the strings this whole time, then that would be the end of us all.
Option 3
We run back to the castle and kill the Trash ourselves.
My crime and sins would be absolute and known to all, so the church and knights would hunt me down and kill me.
Considering the possibility of failure, the risk was probably too high.
“Whatever we do, I can’t prove my innocence!”
Why did the Trash and his family have to go so far out of their way to make me miserable?
“Ahaha! This will be the end of the Shield Demon. Now you will suffer for threatening our church.”
“Shut up!”
I ordered Filo to eat them, and they finally learned to shut up. I could have killed them, but it wouldn’t matter—some of them had already escaped. With their crystal ball in hand, I was soon to be charged with murder. Even still, the Church of the Three Heroes…
The Church of the Three Heroes is a church with three heroes. So, that must be what the name meant.
The symbol of the three weapons showed how much they valued their afterlives.
But something didn’t make sense.
There were supposed to be four legendary weapons, the sword, spear, bow, AND shield.
Not only were the knights trying to frame me every chance they got, but apparently the church was against the shield as well.
That must explain why, when I first found myself in this world, none of the assembled adventurers volunteered to travel with me.
If the crown had gathered the adventurers, then it was safe to assume they picked people they felt they could trust.
Thinking back on the large church in town, and the behavior of the knights here, it was evident that the church held a lot of power in Melromarc. If the church said that the shield was a demon, the people were sure to go along with it.
Why would anyone, of their own free will, volunteer to team up with a demon? It didn’t matter if they knew me or had all the information of not. Any little push would do it.
If all this were true, it would explain the nasty looks I got everywhere I went.
The fanatical zealotry of these knights made sense in that context, as they were under control of both the Crown and the church.
Thinking back on it all, they had been acting strangely towards me even before the Bitch had me framed for rape. They intentionally ignored me and then convicted me without a shred of evidence, both of which would be easier with the power of a church behind you. The people didn’t need evidence when it came to me. If I were accused of something bad, they’d accept the accusation because I was already a demon in their eyes.
When I’d gone to see the Dragon Hourglass, the sisters had been cold, treating me like an enemy from the get-go. That was all the proof I needed.
I was starting to understand what the Trash was up to.
If he wanted to keep his position, he would have to treat the Shield Hero differently than he treated the other heroes. Over the last month or so, the public was starting to think that maybe the Shield Hero wasn’t actually all that bad. I’d acted as the bird-god saint and travelled all over the place. I’d saved people. Lately, even in Castle Town, people had been more polite to me than they had been.
It had to do with the teaching of the church—it just had to.
All they had to say was that the three heroes had been threatened, and that wouldn’t exactly be a lie. That was why they used their trump card, the princess next in line for the throne.
All this was just a guess. And it wasn’t going to clear my name.
Still, running to another country…
Then I remembered what the guy from the weapon shop had said.
I think he’d said that the citizens of Siltvelt were demi-human supremacists. That would mean that they probably didn’t have close relations with Melromarc. If we took the princess, the heiress of Melromarc there to force negotiations, the queen would have to show her face.
Sure, I was a human, so I wasn’t likely to receive a very warm welcome. But Raphtalia was with us. It might be the perfect hideout.
By the way, Siltvelt was to the northeast, and Shieldfreeden was to the southeast. But I would have to cross through two other countries to get there. Like I’d learned earlier, they were pretty far away. I’d just have to press forward a
nd hope that something turned up.
“All right, we’re going to go to Siltvelt for now. There might be a way for us to set all this straight—if we can get there.”
“That’s the demi-human country, right?”
Raphtalia nodded.
“Um…”
The younger princess muttered, unsure of what to say.
“What is it?”
“Oh… nothing.”
“Fine. Raphtalia, once we arrive, I’m leaving all the negotiations up to you.”
“Understood!”
“All right, Princess—you should come with us, for your own good. I promise to protect you, so relax. If you don’t want to die, come with us.”
“Okay.”
The princess slowly climbed up into our carriage, but she didn’t look very happy. I had no problem with good kids that couldn’t understand what was going on. Just like this. But it might be a good opportunity to teach her about her Trash and Bitch, to teach her about how dirty and fallen the world really was. She would have to live or die with us, so if our fates were linked, she’d better learn about the world.
She was still a kid. If I could teach her the truth, slowly, then she’d come to see things my way.
“Yay! Mel and me are together again!”
“Yes. Thank you, Filo.”
Filo was thrilled that she was getting the chance to travel with her friend.
“So what is the Queen up to? Why did she leave the kingdom?”
“She’s always traveling to maintain our diplomatic relations. I used to go with her.”
“Really… Diplomacy, huh? And what about us?”
“Mother said she wanted me to go meet with Father, and to look for the Shield Hero and to befriend him. She works so hard every day to keep us from going to war. She said the waves have made the world crazy, and that I needed to be home to protect Melromarc.”
From the way Mel described her, she seemed way more reasonable than the Trash. That is, if she wasn’t secretly behind all of it. Even still, all this was based on the word of a child, one who came to us for a fight to protect the Trash.
We hid the fainted knights in a nearby grove and cautiously turned our sights on Siltvelt.
