A Certain Truth's Scent

By this point, Merea had naturally come to the feeling that Demon Lords had to remain independent — independent of Lemuse, and of Mūzeg.

It wasn't that he didn't trust Lemuse.

The Lemusans were putting their bodies on the line for the Demon Lords; Hasim's resolve, in person, had landed clean.

Hasim might be running it all for Lemuse first — that was, for the king of a country, normal; Merea had no complaint with it.

Above everything, regardless of where Hasim's most-weighted intent sat, the simple fact in front of him — they are putting lives on the line to save us — was a thing he was not going to play down.

But — that didn't mean Merea would bend the words of the contract he and Hasim had cut into a shape that suited him.

This is an equal trade.

That line had a quiet pull — it almost begged you to lean on it.

Lean too far, though, and the result wouldn't be good.

Hasim, who had said it, had almost certainly known that — and chosen the line accordingly.

Read what's underneath. That kind of air was on him.

— Acceptance, and… holding-at-arm's-length.

Merea now saw the meaning under the line cleanly.

— Unlike Mūzeg, we'll trade with you as equals.

One layer was the surface read — acceptance.

The other —

— Equal — therefore no protection.

— a kind of holding away.

It was because that prerequisite was in the line that the each saves the other dynamic could exist.

Demon Lords, by now, belonged to a Demon Lord community of their own.

A people, and a land, both called Demon Lord.

A distinction that had been thin at the start, after a long maturation, had separated cleanly.

To assimilate with Lemuse from here would take a long time.

A presence external to a country's beliefs and a people's pride builds bonds more fragilely than the stuff that's been inside from the start. Connection is harder to form.

It isn't logic, the spirits used to say.

And in an age of war, that very difference becomes a choke point.

Hasim, almost certainly, knew it. And Leilas — the one who built the older Lemusan pride that Hasim was now trying to hoist again — had known it too.

— It's not going to be that easy.

That a country was even willing to trade was already a great deal.

But precisely because the trade was meant in earnest, Demon Lords had to stand alone.

— Without ever letting go of hope toward the outside, mind.

If they shut themselves in and pushed everything else away, they'd be sliding back toward the oldest, most vicious Demon Lords.

That, too, had to be avoided.

— Difficult thing, isn't it. Leilas. Flander.

Merea was feeling, in real time, that he stood at a fork in Demon-Lord-as-a-way-of-life.

The more he turned it over, the more the ideas and prejudices stuck to the word Demon Lord circled in his head.

A Demon Lord is a country.

A Demon Lord is a people.

Demon Lords are a single collective called Demon Lord.

So where, then, should that collective be pointed.

Survive. He understood that. But that alone trips somewhere.

Without choosing, somewhere, what Demon-Lord-in-this-world believes, the moment they survive they fly apart in the air.

And the moment to choose the belief — was now.

---

Right here, where 〈Mūzeg〉 — which is hunting Demon Lords — and 〈Lemuse〉 — which is sheltering them — both stood at the same time.

---

He'd heard Lemuse's intent.

He'd understood the belief.

So —

What about Mūzeg?

— Elma, especially, would probably be furious — "you idiot."

Even so, he had to hear Mūzeg's words too.

He had to hear, from the mouth of the man currently shining as Mūzeg's symbol of the age, the country's intent in standing against Demon Lords.

Only then could the Demon Lords raise the real, settled rebel banner against Mūzeg.

— Walk on your own feet.

Walk in shoes someone else built and your line of sight goes slightly off.

— I want to know.

As a Demon Lord, as Merea Mea, as a resident of this world — he didn't want to be blind. He couldn't be.

— So let me ask.

Serius Brad Mūzeg.

You who stand at the centre of the world — let me hear you.

Why — do you hunt Demon Lords?

Toward what end have you chased pure victory and pure dominion?

Then and now: has Mūzeg's pride changed?

For that matter — where did Mūzeg start from?

Above all —

— Your own thinking.

That, it seemed to him, was part of the role of being head of this independent collective called the Demon Lords.

"For that, I'll offer up this body of mine. I'm interested too in the capability of the man called the favoured child of the age. If it comes to it, I'll cross fists — and after that, I'll give you peace. But —"

— Once. Just once.

He whispered it inside, and pushed his pace harder.

Without realising it, he had overtaken the leading edge of Mūzeg's retreating mass and his view had opened.

Grey hair streaming in the wind — clean and visible.

He would arrive in a moment.

---

"Hahaha — the strategist on the other side plays a sly hand."

Serius Brad Mūzeg had finally arrived at the field tens of minutes behind Hasim.

"That said — the craft of it deserves credit. If our cavalry made movements like that, I, too, would catch the gap and play exactly that hand. — Now, I'd like to remember the face, but… too far. Can't see clearly."

Unlike Hasim, Serius had not noticed the identity of the enemy commander.

He had seen the white banner and noted the force as Lemusan, but couldn't make out the commander's face.

"It's likely the brown-haired man, but that hair colour is found everywhere."

If he had caught the distinct aqua-blue eyes, Serius might have realised that man was someone he had once stood across from.

But Serius didn't know Hasim's true name; that the man was Lemusan royalty, that he had risen — by coup — to king, was not a thing he could know.

The two had not, yet, met.

"Let it be. — This one comes first."

Instead, Serius locked his focus on the direction the white-light cannon had been fired from.

What was pulling his attention more, just now, was the Demon God over there.

"That was a reverse formula, no question. — Damn you, Flander — so he really did slip onto the mountain alive. He must have been quite lively, considering the dose of poison they fed him."

Serius looked toward Merea, watching the figure more carefully now.

He had already, in the white-light-cannon exchange just past, read two of Merea's traits. Not yet proof, but he was about eighty percent sure he had it right.

"The black-obsidian three tails are gone. — Mihai, that's correct, isn't it?"

"Yes — until just before the white light cannon was stopped, three tails were on his back. I believe it firmly."

"Those are the Three Tails of the Earth God. Made of Godstone (Kusers). They don't fall apart under ordinary impact, they shape-change easily, and what makes them especially difficult is that they act as if alive."

"Like the 〈Flame Emperor〉's Crimson Flames of Life, perhaps?"

"Not strictly living the way those are."

Serius answered Mihai's question on a flat note.

Mihai pressed the next question. He stood beside Serius, never forward of him — a step back, his bewitching blond hair lifting in the wind.

"By the way — the Godstone (Kusers) you mentioned: is that the same Godstone the 〈Stone Emperor〉 was said to have used?"

"— Yes. But the order's reversed, Mihai. The Stone Emperor's Godstone adapted the Earth God's earlier formula. The base material for that Godstone is what the Earth God produced — Divine Soil (Lyrisis). Said to have been a rainbow-coloured soil that responded to human will."

"That's a fairy tale."

"I think so too. I can't suppress a real respect for the poetic talent of the ancients. Anyway — possibly because of that, the soil was originally used for agriculture rather than combat. Naturally enough, anything that useful, those around will want. After that — war, by the usual route."

"I see. — In any case, the fact that those three tails are gone —"

Mihai pulled the topic back on track.

Serius nodded, taking the cue.

"It's a hypothesis. But it's probably right. He can't run a reverse formula and three Demon-Lord formulae at the same time."

"…I see."

Reads it that quickly, Mihai thought.

If the prediction were already in hand, then catching it from the small change just now was, with allowance, fair.

But here, ordinarily, the eye goes first to the white light cannon was stopped, and concentration doesn't spread that evenly. Mihai's certainly didn't.

The shock that the cannon was stopped — and that a very similar black light was shot back — pulled all his thinking that way.

"I run several Demon Lord finished formulae myself, so I know — those aren't things one casts two of, simultaneously. The fact that he's running White Lightning and Wind Wings concurrently is, on its own, strange. One could call that, all on its own, proof of his spec —"

Serius's face soured for a beat, then went flat again.

"Even so, I'm sceptical. Beast, monster, Demon God — the labels, in contrast to us, are not wrong. But it's also a problem to over-fear him. — False hide, as they say. Fear is, of all the things that cloud the eye, the closest to hand and the most powerful. I know. Under that fear, the substance disappears very easily. But if you keep the awareness of that up at all times, the gaps in the fear become available to you."

"For ordinary people, taking off that kind of tinted lens is, in itself, hard work."

Mihai said it with a small shrug.

A line offered for the several-hundred ordinary who got measured against Serius. Mihai included.

"Granted, on a thin handful of facts I might not have peeled the lens off cleanly, either. The thing that made the scepticism easy was finding a common-man side in him."

Hair grey in the wind, Serius spoke.

"If I hadn't heard he had no fangs, the question of whether he was even human might still have been hazy. …That particular piece of information is, I see, now defunct."

By the time he had reached a point from which he could read that the engagement had begun, what he had seen was a great black snake-like tail throwing men through the air.

The detail wasn't legible at the distance, but a normal man hit by that dies.

Knowing the tail's owner was the Demon God —

"— He grew his fangs."

— the prediction wrote itself.

Serius had, originally, feared exactly that.

Strangely — by now, he had no surprise about it.

Rather, with killing on a battlefield is normal now slotted neatly inside the providence he subscribed to, the Demon God's otherness had thinned.

"I'm the abnormal one, perhaps. Slot a thing into battlefield and suddenly everything looks workable."

Battlefield is home ground.

Combat is what he was good at.

Not impossible he was running on the field's elevation — but —

"It will work, one way or the other."

Looking at Merea, that was Serius's read.

"Ah — and, captain."

His attention shifted from Mihai to the man standing on the opposite side.

One of the spell-corps men he had brought from the mountain and onward to here. Their captain.

There were visible wounds on him. He had insisted on being on this field of his own will.

"The second and third white-light cannon shots — you adjusted the output slightly between them, correct?"

"Yes, without fail. The third shot was fired at slightly reduced output."

"Good. Then the other hypothesis is also confirmed. That one rested more on intuition than on the no fangs read, but the captain's report carried a noise that didn't sit right. — His Reverse Formula is not the same thing as Flander Crow's."

Serius was a terrifying man.

The reason the Three Kings and Hasim spoke of him in the same emphatic register was about to show itself again.

"It's an imitation."

The observational power Serius had — almost as if it were riding on a god's whisper —

"He can only fire back the formula he was hit by, at the same scale he was hit at."

— had already pulled the shape of Merea's Reverse Formula into the open.

Three shots. And — since the first had been aimed at Elma — really only two informative ones.

That he had read it from those two, even with prior information on hand, was something only Serius would have done.

"If it were Flander Crow, he would have caught the third shot's lower output and fired Black Light Cannon back at the second-shot's scale. That would punch through to us cleanly."

If that had happened, of course, Serius had been ready to use a defensive formula. The actual outcome was a clean cancel.

Meaning —

"He doesn't really master the 〈Magic Eyes of the Technique God〉. Or the bandwidth was being eaten by the Demon Lord formulae. Running signed major formulae of the natural-system gods is, on its own, threat enough — but the Magic Eyes of the Technique God should have been the first priority."

Serius believed the 〈Magic Eyes of the Technique God〉 was, of all of it, the most useful capability.

There was a reason for that.

"That kind of power is beyond you."

Not simply because the ability stood out.

A more specific reason.

"Those eyes —"

---

"— must return to my clan's hands."

---

Serius Brad Mūzeg held a specific feeling toward Flander Crow.

A complex feeling, mixed of respect, scorn, contempt, and other things.