My Castle received its first visitors.
A party of four: Hero, Warrior, Mage, Priest.
A textbook Hero party.
My Castle is, as a rule, occupied by me and one pet Mofu and no one else.
Which is why a Hero party can walk straight into my throne room.
I was on the throne with my legs crossed, running my hands through the fluffy coat of the Mofu on my lap, when the doors of the throne room banged open.
"You're the Demon Lord, aren't you?"
"Your head is too high. Learn how to address me."
At my words, the boy in the gleaming golden armor who had put the rude question to me was slammed flat against the floor.
He was the linchpin of the party. The Hero.
The Hero got up holding his nose and put the question to me again.
"Begging your pardon, but might you be His Lordship the Demon Lord?"
I had altered the Hero's nature such that he could only address me in polite speech.
"I am myself. I am [The Omniscient, Omnipotent, Strongest, Invincible, Absolutely Superior One], and no being that exists can defeat me."
I answered him kindly, and the Hero—leveling a double-edged longsword with a wing-shaped hilt—snorted and talked back.
"You don't know that until we try. Give up, and that's when the game is over!"
To which I replied:
"There it iiiiiiis! The guy who recites a secondhand line with a smug little face! Oof, ouch, did somebody get inspired by a manga? Is copying other people all you can do? Do you have a core of your own at all? If you want to look cool, try producing one or two original words. Ah, but you can't, can you. You haven't got the head for it, which is exactly why you parrot other people's lines. Isn't that riiiight, lit-tle boy?"
The Hero's mouth opened and closed, and his clenched fists shook. He wanted to answer back, but the only words that would come to him were borrowed from somebody else.
He looked at the floor and gave up.
"Oh, great. Now the Hero's gone quiet! What are we supposed to do here?"
This from the Mage, a woman in a black robe, tapping her staff against her shoulder as she complained.
"You and the Hero will never speak again."
I said it, and so the Hero and the Mage lost the power of speech forever.
While the two of them went pale and floundered at the suddenness of it, the Priest, a woman in white habit, stepped firmly forward.
"Um—why are you attacking the human lands? Is coexistence really impossible?"
Sentiments and lines exactly matching her class and her appearance—and no awareness whatsoever that her words and her conduct did not match each other at all.
How very foolish.
"You lot slaughtered a whole lot of harmless Mofu on the way here, didn't you? Thirty-five today alone. Four thousand two hundred and six in total. Funny words coming from people who one-sidedly massacred an enemy that never fought back."
At this the Priest's face went blank, as if she had been caught off guard, and the words stuck in her throat.
Oh dear. Was this the first time it had occurred to her that what she had been doing as casually as eating a meal was an act of cruelty? It tells you a great deal about how much thought she gives to anything.
Ah, foolish. So very foolish.
The last of them, the Warrior, put a hand on her shoulder and stepped forward.
Encased head to foot in rugged steel plate, longsword at the hip, greatshield on the back.
Heavy gear, so he moved slowly.
"We defeat every monster that appears in front of us. Demonkind attack civilians too, so it cuts both ways. That is simply what war is."
He steps forward playing it cool, and that is what he has to say.
Does he imagine that was thoughtful?
"You say 'defeat' to soften it, but you killed them, didn't you? And the reason you killed Mofu was to farm experience points. It had nothing to do with being at war, or with you soberly weighing the state of the world. Could you not dress it up to suit yourself?"
The Warrior shut his mouth.
When someone reads your past memories, digs your subconscious out of them, and hits the mark dead center, shutting up is about all that is left to you.
So I pressed the point with all four of them.
"Look—aren't you embarrassed, coming at one person mob-handed to deliver a condescending, completely off-target lecture? In the end, if I don't do as you say, you'll beat me into it. And you're playing the good guys on top of that? Isn't that a bit much? It's absolutely bizarre, isn't it? If that's the plan, skip the extras and just attack me without a word."
Not one member of the Hero's party opened their mouth after that. They lined up abreast and silently readied their weapons.
The sharpness in their eyes was less a sense of justice than pure resentment.
"Incidentally, I look down on all of you enormously. Ugh, what a bother. I don't particularly want to trouble myself over small fry like you. Maybe I'll have the Mofu fight instead. It'd be a fine chance to avenge its own kind, after all."
I enhanced the Mofu on my lap and tossed it out in front of them.
Round little eyes. A nose like a paw pad. A small, toothless mouth. A fluffy, steamed-bun body covered in soft pure-white fur.
That was what squared up to the Hero's party and signaled its intent to fight.
"…………"
"Everyone—go!"
Since the Hero could not speak, the Warrior gave the order in his place.
The Hero moved first.
A two-handed diagonal slash, an immediate horizontal sweep, then the sword hauled up on the momentum and brought down with everything he had.
The Mofu slipped through every line of the blade like a leaf on the wind, then used the Hero's head as a springboard and leapt high.
The Mage loosed flame from her staff.
[Hellfire of the Deepest Pit], the highest-output spell of the fire school.
Not, properly speaking, a spell one casts indoors—but the Mofu inhaled the entire roaring mass of dark red fire. And then, by way of returning it, breathed it straight back out.
The Warrior moved in front of the Mage and braced the greatshield.
The Priest layered a support spell on him to raise his magic defense.
"Did we hold?"
When the Mofu's fire stopped, the Warrior dropped to one knee and let the half-melted greatshield fall clanging to the floor.
The Priest cast healing on him.
"Pu!"
The instant the Mofu gave that one cry, a great hole opened in the Priest's stomach.
It had punched through her in a bullet-fast charge.
"Priest!"
The Warrior rushed to the falling Priest and was engulfed. The Mofu had breathed [Hellfire of the Deepest Pit] out of its mouth.
Where the Warrior had been, there remained only a pool of molten, red-glowing metal.
"Pu!"
The Hero was groping in the pouch at his hip with his left hand, trying to get an item out, when the Mofu came in on another high-speed charge and bit.
It tore the pouch away along with his hand and swallowed both.
"Aaaaaaagh! My hand—my haaaaaand!"
I wanted to hear that scream, so I had given the Hero his voice back.
The blood coming out of his wrist looked like water from a hose with a thumb over the end.
Having apparently given up on attacking a Mofu that absorbed magic, the Mage turned her staff on me.
The Mofu sprang at her at once and clamped itself over her face.
Unable to see or breathe, she fought to tear it off—but the Mofu's fur stiffened into hedgehog spines and she could not get a grip on it.
"I'll save you… Don't move…"
The Hero raised the sword in his right hand. Still fastened to the Mage's face, the Mofu fired its fur at him.
Infinite needles. The moment a volley leaves, the fur grows back, and out it goes again. It can repeat this forever.
The Hero took needles across his whole body and dropped the sword. He shielded his face with his right arm and went on taking them everywhere else.
The golden armor came apart, and before long the needles were punching through it into flesh.
When the Hero went down, the Mage went down too.
She had suffocated and died before he did.
(You… what in the world are you…)
The Hero's inward murmur, an instant before the end.
His body was no longer in any condition to speak.
He looked up at me with the last of his strength, and kind soul that I am, I answered him.
"I told you at the start. I am [The Omniscient, Omnipotent, Strongest, Invincible, Absolutely Superior One]. And frankly, the presumption of something like you addressing me at all."
As a finishing touch, I dropped an enormous monolith on Nation A, the party's homeland.
A monolith: a black object twenty kilometers tall, its base cut to the shape of the country.
It admits no interference of any kind. Which is to say, the land it lands on becomes permanently unusable.
I dropped it onto Nation A the way you seat a piece into a jigsaw map, and crushed everything that existed there.
People, of course, and animals and plants, buildings, mountains, rivers, lakes—all of it flattened out of existence, with the monolith occupying the space down to one kilometer below sea level.
"Right. That's one."
I intend to keep crushing them one country at a time, so do look forward to it!