A Rarity in This World — A Demon Lord's

The twins' cries reached Elma.

For a beat she nearly turned her horse on impulse.

She didn't. If she did, Salman's resolve would be wasted. Everything would be wasted.

"— Aaaaaaagh—!"

By then her horse had nearly cleared Mūzeg's encirclement. The shout had nothing to do with the breakthrough. It was anger and grief, in one sound.

"— Anyone!"

Anyone, anyone at all.

"Save him!!"

No one in the world held out a hand to a Demon Lord. The world was that cruel. She knew.

Even so —

"Even one person —!"

The horse drove forward, cut down the last of the cavalrymen blocking her —

"— Is there nobody?!"

— and broke through.

In the same instant —

---

"There is. I'll save him. You — save His Highness."

---

— at the moment her face came up.

A small body of riders flashed past her, moving in the opposite direction.

"—"

Her voice didn't come.

Neither did anyone else's.

A dozen-some cavalry — riding back against the path her column had just cut — were charging into the Mūzeg formation.

She watched them go, and turned to look back at the field, the line they had passed leaving still ringing in her head.

A great roar was rising over there.

"—"

Still no words.

She couldn't yet read the situation.

---

"Captain! A new force!"

Salman, just as he was raising an arm in a feint, heard the Mūzeg shout.

"What?!"

A second voice. Close.

The Mūzeg infantrymen at the front still had their spears on him, but their attention was plainly behind them.

"Coming!"

He turned his head and looked past them.

A man one step from death is, frankly, beyond being startled by anything else; he could afford to wait for whatever was coming with something close to clean curiosity. The fact that his own brain was still functioning at all, in the moment, was the surprise.

The new noise arrived as a great voice —

"Out of the way! Out — of — the — way!!"

A man's deep yell.

After the voice came riders. Not Mūzeg.

Veteran-looking men in rugged armour. Faces of men ready, frankly, to take an ogre's head.

"Oi, oi, oi —"

Salman had no idea what was happening. But that they had to be his rescuers — he understood in an instant. A rising smile despite everything.

In the next beat his eyes met one of the riders'.

A man past middle age. Old man, by appearance. The bearing in him, however, was not old.

"We open the road! Run, young one!"

"Hah! I don't really get what's happening — only thing I can say is thanks!"

"That's enough! If you don't go, we don't go!"

"All right! Then follow, old man! I'll take the offer and run on ahead!"

He moved.

The Mūzeg spears around him, rebooting from the disruption, lunged on reflex.

He swatted them aside with his fists and broke forward. Anything that wasn't fatal he ignored.

A spear sank into him. He kept running.

Where the older man had charged in, a small gap had been forced open in the Mūzeg line. The other riders — the older man's comrades — were holding the gap with whirling spears, using the bodies of their horses themselves as shields, every motion desperate in the cleanest sense of the word.

The line was overwhelmed by sheer count. Yet somehow they kept the corridor — exactly wide enough for one man to pass — open.

He ran through it without thinking.

Having accepted his death, the possibility of life was eerily bright. He wanted it.

No more reasoning. Just instinct. Just running.

— He cleared.

---

Elma's column came into view.

The instant he was through, a horse came up in front of him. The twins on it. They had a hand each on the reins, steering it not particularly well.

"Sa-al!!" "Big brother!"

"Ha — pick one of those, brats."

Joking through it; he sprang into the saddle, took the reins, set the twins firmly in front of him, and kicked the horse.

Behind him, Mūzeg voices rose in pursuit.

"Don't!" "Idiots!"

— the twins had thrown formulae and dropped them.

So he kept his eyes forward.

First: regroup with the column. Reset. With this they had at least secured a route east toward Lemuse. The picture was still being chased by overwhelming force, but they had cleared the bare-minimum line.

After that, wait for Merea and Noel. Plan the rest. Merea, alone, would clear that cavalry no problem with the lightning-and-wind kit. That was the only reason Salman had let him go solo.

He reached Elma's group. Noel, a moment later, came in from another angle — the dragon had circled wide. Probably Merea had used him as a draw to peel some cavalry off. Marked but not seriously hurt.

That settled — Salman finally got round to the older man and his riders. His saviours. Rare in this world. A Demon Lord's hero.

"Hey, old man — you—"

He turned, voice already on the line, looking back —

"—"

— they were not there.

---

Around the time Salman miraculously cleared the Mūzeg line and rejoined the others, Merea was on a land dragon's back.

The third dragon, the one that had broken away to charge the column. Merea had caught it at speed before its sprint peaked, hauled himself onto the moving body, kicked the dragoon off the saddle, and shoved himself up to the dragon's head.

"You weren't trained for anything, were you—"

The dragon, even with its rider gone, had not stopped. If anything, sensing Merea on its back, it had begun to thrash.

He tried Dragon Tongue. The dragon either didn't hear or wouldn't.

"Calm down—"

Even in that state it kept running. The last command from the dragoon was apparently still sitting in the head. He didn't know how Mūzeg had subjugated it, but the loyalty in the last command was, in itself, a dragon trait.

Steadying his footing on the swaying back, he caught sight of where the dragon was charging, and saw —

— Through. They're through.

The column had cleared the encirclement. Relief first.

But — leaving the dragon under him alive any longer would not end well.

— Not happening.

The repeated big-formula use was leaving fatigue on his body, but seeing his comrades safe revived more than that.

— I can still move.

"Spell deploying—"

The 〈Resplendent Sword of the Water God (Seura Euras)〉 manifested in his right hand again.

And —

"— Forgive me. — No. Hate me, fully."

He whispered it.

Merea brought the blade down at the base of the dragon's neck.

---

He had, in the end, taken all three dragons out of the war. A feat that, by any measure, did not belong to a single human's repertoire.

But the engagement wasn't over. He couldn't stay satisfied here.

He launched off the falling, twitching body of the dragon to clear the collapse. The view widened.

The dragon had been running toward the column, so the column was close. With the 〈Six Wings of the Wind God (Van Ester)〉 he could rejoin them. He confirmed that, then took the moment of altitude to scan Mūzeg's position from above.

— Mūzeg.

The black banner-emblems standing prominently. Even so, the cavalry, having lost the dragons and had the column slip past, had stopped chasing — they were re-forming.

The plan had failed.

The column had secured an east route. Still being pursued by overwhelming numbers, of course. But better than encircled, by orders of magnitude.

The cavalry was, plainly, re-forming for a second push.

From above, the count was sobering.

— Not a thousand. — But this many just from the units that engaged us is a lot.

Reinforcements would come, almost certainly. Pursuit was about to scale. He prayed, briefly, that no further dragons were coming.

Then —

— What's that?

He spotted some odd zones of motion inside the Mūzeg formation. A few clusters of cavalry tightly packed around something on the ground, clearly active. He couldn't tell what they were doing.

He sharpened.

Eventually the detail came in.

— Are they… spearing the ground?

That was what it looked like. Stacked into a knot, repeatedly driving spears into the dirt.

Some sort of plan? An animal hidden in the ground? A flicker of fear that one of the column had been caught — but he'd just confirmed the column's count. They were all there.

He activated the 〈Six Wings〉. The descending arc from his dragon-launch had nearly bottomed; he was dropping below useful altitude, but he'd reach the column.

Last look back. The spearing still bothered him.

A long stretch of his neck —

— and he caught, on the spear-tips lifting out of the ground, red.

Blood?

— and at the spot where the spears were going in, what looked very much like a human hand.

— Hh.

He told himself it was a trick of the light. Even so, a chill ran through him.

In the next moment the altitude dropped further; the detail was gone.

Forward — the faces of the column came into focus.

---

"You're all right?!"

He came in on wind-wings at violent speed, kicking up a wall of dust as he braked in front of the column.

His arrival was, on the column's side, another moment of relief. On his side, however, there was an unsettled note. Breath still rough, eyes scanning every face.

"…Yes," Salman said, brief.

Merea exhaled. — Good. Trick of the light, after all.

Then he caught Salman's state.

"Salman? What's wrong?"

Salman was bleeding from many cuts, but nothing visibly fatal.

Yet his eyes were empty.

Salman was looking back. Toward the Mūzeg formation. Merea followed the look.

"Did the dragon's screaming get through to them, maybe."

The Mūzeg cavalry was, indeed, holding off the next push. Edging slightly forward; the column edging slightly back. Move-when-they-move posture.

"…Merea. On your way here — did you see anyone you didn't recognise?"

"Anyone I didn't recognise?"

Merea couldn't follow.

"…Yeah. Just now I —"

A grief-loaded look, full at Merea.

"— got saved. By cavalry. Not Mūzeg's."

Merea hadn't picked any of that up. He'd been entirely on the dragons.

That a force he didn't recognise had saved a Demon Lord was, given their context, on its face surprising. But Salman was not lying.

He believed it instantly — and then a hypothesis clicked.

— No.

A rolling shudder up through his body. He had no formal grounding for the idea, but the suspicions stitched themselves together in one motion into a clean outline.

— That thing back there —

Salman caught the change on Merea's face.

"You saw something."

"…"

"You saw something! Merea!"

There was bottomless grief in Salman's eyes. Bottomless. The aloof Salman's face was, in this instant, on the verge of breaking.

Merea, in the same beat, had every question he was holding answered by Salman's tone.

So —

"…"

He couldn't speak.

---

That thing that had looked like a human hand — probably wasn't a trick of the light.

---

Someone had charged in to save Salman. Someone the Mūzeg force, having lost their target, had then —

"*— Aaagh! What is that?! What is that?! What did we do?! Because of me, again because of me! People died! All because of this Demon Lord word!! — Aaaaaaaaaagh—!"

Salman screamed.

He had read Merea's eyes and put it together.

He was crying.

Hands braced on both knees, holding himself up — refusing, in front of the enemy, to fall.

The line cut. The shout went on, ripping through Merea's ears.

And inside Merea, the shout was, in real time, becoming a trigger.

The monster's fangs were starting to take their full shape.

Sharp. Large. Wrong.