My Castle received another visitor… no, it did not.
It is not that there was no reincarnated Hero. His spear was simply pointed elsewhere.
"Haaah. How very foolish."
The Hero who ought to have come here had used the Goddess's Gift he received at reincarnation, [The Power to Have Any One Wish Granted], to wish for "a super amazing skill I'd never think of myself"—and had acquired a skill called [Storage], capable of evolving into [Dimensional Storage].
But because [Storage] was a dud skill and all he had, he was thrown out of his Hero party, and his country exiled him on the grounds that he had fraudulently claimed Hero status and taken state support without the ability to back it up.
This exiled Hero used money he had absconded with to buy slaves in a neighboring country, had those slaves fight to farm experience for him, and only when [Storage] evolved into [Dimensional Storage] did he finally grasp what his skill was worth.
[Dimensional Storage] not only lets you put in and take out an unlimited number of possessions—it lets you freely withdraw any item you want, whether or not you ever obtained it.
Which is, at that point, the divine-grade feat of producing matter out of nothing.
The exiled Hero had lured the party that cast him out into a trap and wiped them out, and had then slipped into the royal castle to take his revenge on the country as well.
Wrapped in a cloak that turned him invisible, he glided deeper inside and put a hand to the door of the king's chamber.
And slowly opened it.
"Welcome, Hero."
What lay beyond the door to the king's chamber was this: the throne room of My Castle.
I had joined the two across space, naturally.
The unexpected greeting confused him, but he apparently still believed his invisible self had gone unnoticed, because he crept forward on soft feet.
It must have been obvious at a glance that I was not the king.
After all, I was in a white T-shirt and black shorts—the kind of outfit that would rank at the bottom even among commoners. And younger than him, besides.
Except that I was seated with my legs crossed in an expensive-looking chair that was unmistakably a throne, right elbow propped on the armrest, right cheek resting on my hand.
"For the record, I can see you."
He did not believe me, so I set the invisibility cloak on fire, and he hurriedly threw it off.
This Hero was indifferent to appearances; he had simply bought whatever looked serviceable at armor shops and put it on. He lacked the head to think through the performance or design of armor he might otherwise have withdrawn from Dimensional Storage himself.
It suited his droopy-eyed pig face well enough.
"What is this? Isn't this the king's chamber? Who are you? Where's the king?"
"This is the Demon Realm. You were summoned to another world as a Hero and yet you never came, so I brought you here by force."
"Huh? Why?! It's got nothing to do with you. Stay out of my way."
This one is rotten right the way through.
When he completed his revenge on the party that exiled him, he had screamed in ecstasy: "Serves you right! Serves you riiiiight!"
And he had intended to spit a parting line at the king—"It's too late to beg me to come back now"—before killing him.
Oh dear. He even prepared the line in advance.
"You know that's a grudge you have no right to, don't you? You seem to think the people who exiled you were small-minded—but you didn't realize [Storage] evolves into [Dimensional Storage] either. You said 'I'm the baggage guy' and never fought at all, which is why you got no experience. In the end it was your own blunder. You brought it on yourself."
"What was I supposed to do?! It never occurred to me a skill could evolve!"
"Trace it back and it's because you wished for something 'I'd never think of myself' that you ended up with a skill beyond your station. All you had to do was use the Goddess's Gift after actually thinking with your own head."
The Hero ground his teeth. He could not find the words to answer.
Knowing that, I waited, at leisure. If I spoke, he would only feel relieved.
After a solid five minutes of silence, he finally opened his mouth.
"The past doesn't matter anymore. The dud skill [Storage] has evolved into the strongest skill, [Dimensional Storage]. I'm going to discipline this world. This is reform."
"Reform, my foot. Don't put a righteous face on a petty criminal with a misplaced grudge. Somebody who buys slaves in bulk with stolen money and money he pulled out of another dimension isn't a Hero or anything close to it."
"No, I am a Hero. I treat my slaves well, and they're happier with me, so every one I bought is one I saved."
An idiotic excuse—except that he does not offer it as an excuse. He means it. Astonishing, isn't it.
"You bought nothing but docile, pretty girls. You do not get to say that. Stuffed to the brim with ulterior motive and acting like you did them a favor on top of it—appalling. You skipped every man, every girl who wasn't beautiful, and every adult woman. You are a customer of a slave trader and nothing else. Don't you ever say you saved anyone."
"The selection was a coincidence."
"Then I'll change your slaves into grubby middle-aged men."
"Huh?"
He opened his status window and swiped through to view his slaves' entries.
They were displayed as middle-aged men.
He froze. He stayed vacant for a while, then—convinced only the display had changed—withdrew the slaves he had been keeping stashed in [Dimensional Storage].
"You've got to be kidding…"
Potbellied middle-aged men came trudging out of the other-dimensional space.
Five of them.
He froze all over again.
"Oh deeear, that stiiings, doesn't it, little boy? Go on, go on—take your revenge on me too. Take it, and then spit out your 'serves you right.'"
"Damn you! It's too late to apologize now!"
He thrust a hand into the other-dimensional space and drew out a large tubular weapon.
A rocket launcher. He fired it at me without hesitation.
The round went off with a roar, struck a transparent wall, and filled the view with black smoke and another roar.
This Hero normally fights in coordination with his slaves—yet the moment their appearance became middle-aged men, he stopped looking at them entirely. He did not even check whether anything inside had changed.
And the fact that no matter what I do he never asks "what are you?" shows with perfect clarity that he genuinely sees nothing but himself.
In any case, I had the middle-aged slaves cease to exist. The Hero was staring through the black smoke to see what had become of me and did not so much as notice. Though he would not have reacted even if he had.
The smoke cleared, and seeing me unharmed he switched to a futuristic-looking gun, loosing beam after beam. Every beam met the transparent wall in front of me and ceased to exist.
"You're embarrassing yourself. That's enough."
I dropped the monolith on Nation D first.
A twenty-kilometer black object cut to the shape of Nation D. With that in place, the territory of Nation D was rendered wholly unusable.
And onto the top of that Nation D monolith I teleported the exiled revenge-and-serves-you-right Hero, exiling him from the surface of the world.
Having first stripped him of [Dimensional Storage], naturally.
The options available to him number two: starve to death, or reach the edge of the monolith and die on the way down.