Floating in midair, Nanoda turned her somewhat vacant gaze toward the uninvited guest.
"I'm not sure why, but for the sake of the Demon Race's future — please, come back with me."
The mysterious hooded demon reached into their cloak and produced a cracked piece of stone. Their lips moved, murmuring an incantation under their breath: ■■■!
She hadn't caught the words. Nanoda moved to interrupt — and in that same instant felt her connection to the world's ambient mana sever completely. Trying to channel mana now was already too late. Her consciousness began to blur, her intended action ground to a halt. She looked down.
Her stomach was glowing. Runes burned through from within, surfacing on her skin in shimmering relief.
"...Oh, for f's sake." (Frieren's crude expression)*
It was the rune-inscribed stone fragment — the one intercepted from the barrier Böse had left behind. At the time she'd found no relevant information about it, so Nanoda had simply stored it inside her abdomen alongside the keepsake Yuna had given her. It hadn't occurred to her that she'd one day get played for a fool by some sly Old Six who spotted the opening.
The rune's radiance swelled and swallowed her whole. The limbs within her field of vision turned transparent. Nanoda closed her eyes, resigned. Her instincts told her she probably wasn't going to die.
Two streaks of silver-white light flashed past — and both the hooded demon and Nanoda vanished without a trace.
"Ugh..."
By the time the blinding glare faded, Macht — sprawled on the ground — finally managed to prop himself up on one arm. He looked around. He was alone.
"What on earth just happened? That demon was..."
Macht stared at the spot where the hooded figure had disappeared, lost in thought.
A brilliant flash of white light burst — and Schlacht materialized before a damaged stone stele, the rune-fragment still in hand. Seven demons stood arrayed around the stele.
"Didn't you say you were bringing an enemy back? So where is this enemy?"
The speaker was one of the Seven Sages of Destruction — Grausam the Miracle. And standing behind him, faces unreadable, were Macht, Aura, and the rest of the Seven Sages.
"What kind of enemy could possibly be so dangerous that you needed all of us to come deal with it in person? Where is it?"
Another of the Seven Sages spoke — Undying Böse, clad in his most beloved suit of armor, who had already laid down a barrier around the site long before their arrival.
Lurking throughout the surrounding woodland beyond were Aura's army of headless knights — hundreds, perhaps thousands of them.
Schlacht looked down at the stone fragment in his hand, now dim and lightless. He was silent for a moment. Then he closed his eyes, and his future-sight magic activated.
He was the all-knowing Schlacht — most trusted confidant of the Demon King, seer of thousands of years yet to come.
For a long while, he did not move.
When he finally opened his eyes, the brim of his hood and the long hair falling across half his face hung low. That perpetually composed face — unshaken through ages of plotting and war — showed, for the first time, a crack of genuine bewilderment. He murmured as if speaking to himself.
"It can't be wrong. I clearly brought it back with me. So why can't I see it anywhere in the future?"
Schlacht closed his eyes again, straining to peer into the infinitely branching paths of what was yet to come.
In the meantime, Macht — who had been leaning against a tree in silence — quietly slipped away without a word. One by one, the other Sages followed.
Aura let out a derisive snort. In her estimation, Schlacht was pulling everyone's leg — some elaborate prank at the Seven Sages' expense. Unprecedented as it was for his foresight and schemes to have any gap, he had thoroughly wasted her time, and she was nobody's fool. She didn't spare him so much as a glance, and marched off at the head of her army without looking back.
Only Grausam remained.
"This isn't like you, Schlacht. Not even in the Demon King's presence have you ever lost your composure like this."
Grausam shook his head. Then he too turned and left. As far as he was concerned, if the supposedly world-altering foe never showed up, there was no reason to stick around.
Schlacht stood alone for a long while, eyes closed, unmoving. Then — as if something had suddenly struck him — his eyes snapped open. He turned to look at the damaged stone stele.
The stele stood waist-high, its surface densely packed with strange, archaic characters. It radiated an aura of mystery and immense age, standing quietly in the earth as though it had weathered countless centuries in silence.
The rune fragment in his hand looked, unmistakably, as though it had been pried from the stele's missing corner.
"Could it be... that she didn't return to this point in time at all?"
A deep sense of foreboding rose in Schlacht's chest.
---
Deep inside a narrow, lightless mountain cave, a lit torch cast its glow along the winding tunnel and rough stone walls, its light stretching all the way down to a small bonfire burning in the depths below.
The dirt floor had been smoothed flat. Red "paint" — or something like it — had been used to scratch out a series of writhing stick figures across the stone. In the center, a line of text carved in unfinished strokes read: "I want to ■■..."
Whatever came after had been erased again and again until only a smeared blur remained, as though the author had revised it over and over, unable to find the right words to fill the void.
In the dim interplay of firelight and shadow, the silhouette of a head bearing two horns stretched across the unfinished mural on the wall.
A young demoness with long white hair that pooled to the floor sat cross-legged before the bonfire — less sitting, more slouching. The face that was usually stiff and unreadable broke, for the first time in ages, into the faintest trace of a smile. The corner of her mouth curled up, flashing a pair of adorable little fangs.
"I thought it was one of those old contemporaries coming to ambush me. Turns out it's just some leftover magic and residual mana."
She extended one pale hand, slender fingers spreading wide, and reached out toward the empty air before her — as though trying to pluck something from the nothingness beyond the flames.
"Get over here."
The bonfire before her shattered like a broken mirror. A thin thread of ashen-white something was drawn out of the void — and in an instant, refined and absorbed into the palm of her outstretched hand.
Unfamiliar memories surfaced. A hazy soul stirred awake.
"Ugh... my head is killing me..."
The young demoness who had been sitting there a moment ago slowly withdrew her extended hand and pressed it against her own forehead. Even her voice had shifted completely.
Nanoda's blurred consciousness returned to full clarity — like waking from a blackout. All she could remember was that she had just injured Macht, and then that hooded demon had suddenly appeared on the battlefield, holding a stone fragment uncannily similar to one she had previously acquired, recited an incantation — and she had vanished on the spot.
What kind of teleportation magic was that? Was she really just cosmically fated to keep running into teleportation magic?
Nanoda couldn't make sense of it. These were just muddle-headed guesses from a still-dazed mind.
She looked up and took in the surroundings — strange, yet with a faint, nagging familiarity. Her head felt heavy. She reached up to touch it — and felt a pair of horns.
The texture was familiar in her hand. Yes... these felt like her horns. And yet something was off. Wasn't she supposed to have a broken horn?
"Did I... time-travel again?"
"Time-travel? Now there's an interesting word for it."
One sentence followed the other with absolutely no logical connection — as though she were talking to herself, two voices in one body.
She realized something was wrong with her. And she froze.
____
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