Chương 89: Roadtrip

"You can't be serious!" yelled Craig.

"She..." Ortho didn't even speak, a glance in the man's direction being enough to silence him. Unfortunately, that meant the snort of laughter that escaped me as I read his appraisal results was clearly audible. His full name was Craig Slecher, and the appraisal description literally described him as having 'no redeeming features'. What was he doing here, then?

"Well?" Ortho asked, turning back to me.

"I don't have enough information to decide. Why are you at war? Who started it?" If the humans had attacked first, there was no way I was helping them.

"I suppose it's natural that the Goddess' chosen would have a strong sense of justice. Very well. I understand you have had nothing about our situation explained?" Kevin shook his head before I could answer.

"Blaming the war on one side or the other would be... unfair," said Ortho, which I didn't feel was a great start.

"Rather, the blame belongs entirely with one person. The vast majority of the demons have no free will, and those that should do have it utterly suppressed. For example, those fox people you seem to be fond of are branded at birth, permanently enslaving them to the red dragon that created them.

Given that it is impossible for a 'friendly' member of their race to exist, you should be able to understand the reaction to having a hundred of them suddenly appear within the most heavily guarded location on the continent." Oh. When he said not to blame either side, I thought there was going to be some complicated history, with no-one thinking they were in the wrong. But the story was actually even worse than that...

"So you're under attack by a slave army? All controlled by the demon lord? Forced to attack you even if they don't want to?"

"Precisely. He believes that all life should be carefully curated and controlled. Humanity, with its freedom and... unpredictability, is anathema to him. Only the dragons aid him of their free will, so your claim about the demon lord being a dragon himself is plausible." If that claim was true, I certainly wouldn't mind hunting down the demon lord. I certainly intended to confirm it, though; I wasn't going to take the humans at their word.

"Fine. Where is he? Let's get this over with." Kevin and Craig boggled in surprise, but Ortho just sighed and pointed to an area of the map.

"His lair is there."

"You can't be serious!" exclaimed Kevin.

"Fight the demon lord alone, without the sword of the Goddess? That's impossible!"

"Why? If she wants to go, who are we to stop her?" asked Craig, his smug satisfaction making it obvious he expected me to die out there.

"Certainly, you need more information before you depart. And you appear to have picked up useful information of your own in the months you spent in the... what did you call it?"

"Arx sanctus, the place was called." This time it was Kevin and Ortho who boggled, while Craig looked confused, obviously not recognising the name.

"A trial from the Goddess..." whispered Kevin, proving that he did, in fact, have access to the full standard vocal range. Ortho recovered quickly, returning to his normal focus, questioning me on what I'd seen in the dungeon and filling in details of the demon forces in turn. Everything from the dungeon that was labelled as daemonium was what Ortho had described as having no will of their own, so perhaps the unnaturalness of the abyss hadn't been due to the proximity to floor six after all.

The fox-kin were enslaved, not with collars but with soul magic. Even the multi-armed blobs were a part of the demon army, along with all the actual monsters. My pet murder tree was apparently a common resident of swamps on the other lobe of the continent. I had, apparently, been trained against everything I was likely to encounter. Once again, I was left wondering how much the Goddess had planned out. On the human side were, well, humans. There were no elves or dwarfs in this world.

The humans stood alone against the demon tide. And any intelligent creature that wasn't human was referred to as a demon, so in these people's parlance, the fox-kin really were demons.

"Okay," I said when I'd learnt what I could.

"Next question; how do I fly there without your side blasting me out of the sky?"

"Fly low and avoid settlements, or ride a horse, although I admit that flight will be far faster. You'll want to take a horse through the front, though. Try to cross that with your wings on display, and the army will shoot first and ask questions later. I'll give you a letter of passage to get you through."

"Hang on," said Craig, interrupting.

"You're actually going to do this? You're going to trust her? She burnt down the castle!"

"Would you prefer I try to have her detained? Given her crime of high treason, obviously immediate execution would be warranted. Given that she apparently survived a direct hit from Judgement, I foresee logistical difficulties carrying it out, but I'm sure we could manage. Of course, Katie would very likely resist, so we'd have to throw the remainder of the royal guard at the task, along with everyone else we had available.

I imagine we'd suffer considerable losses, and the survivors would be inflicted with the divine curse. The loss of forces, as well as the loss of the hero, would no doubt condemn us to eventual defeat at the hands of the demons, but at least justice will have been served." Support the author by searching for the original publication of this novel.

"Exactly," I said.

"The sensible thing to do would be to wait for me to beat the demon lord for you, and then poison my drink or something during the victory celebrations." That comment earned me stares from all three. It wasn't as if I was going to admit being immune to poisons, though, so they were welcome to stare. And if Craig decided to carry out my plan and got upset when I didn't die, that was his fault.

"What about provisions?" I asked. I wasn't used to needing them, but there was a difference between being teleported a floor or two when I died and ending up on the opposite side of the continent, so I was going to need to do my best not to die. In turn, that meant I'd need to remember how sleeping and eating worked. Eww, and pooping. Was I going to need to poop again? Gross. It wasn't like I had toilet paper in my item box.

That shrine maiden class would have been handy for locating respawn points in enemy territory...

"We can load up a pack with water and rations, but there's a limit to how much you can carry. You'll need to find fresh water sources as you go."

"Actually, carrying capacity isn't an issue," I said, materialising a bag of water.

"I have plenty of water already, but not much food." That once again earned me a complete trio of stares.

"Spatial storage magic?" muttered Kevin.

"But there was no evocation, and I couldn't even pick up the mana flows. I've never seen magic so clean." My cheats didn't half make me feel smug sometimes.

"I've been eating almost nothing but raw meat recently. All I want is some fruit, or something cooked. My storage magic will even keep it hot."" Temporal storage?!" exclaimed Kevin, switching back to his original volume.

"So this is the power of a hero." I ended up with dry rations anyway, because Ortho wanted me to leave immediately and military rations were all they had available. Biscuits, nuts and other things that were selected for ease of preservation and energy density rather than taste. There were some rather pointed comments about how maybe I could have got something better had I not burnt down the castle kitchens, but I'd take what I could get.

With my fire breath, I could start a campfire and do some cooking of my own, right? How badly wrong could it go? I'd just need to try it somewhere that had no castles in the vicinity. While one set of runners went to collect together my provisions, another alerted the guards that there would soon be something that looked very much like a small, humanoid dragon flying overhead, and to please not attack it, and Ortho wrote me a letter of passage through the battlefront and located a few maps for me to bring.

My minimap was cool, but it was limited in range, and didn't show areas I'd not visited before.

"One last question," I started, while I waited for them to come back.

"Do you have statues of the Goddess around? In this sort of position." I gave an example, with hands outstretched. I could even replicate the wings.

"The Goddess' shrines? Yes, there's plenty of them around, in quiet, out of the way locations in the wilderness. Mostly rather run down these days—for some reason they weather unnaturally quickly—but they're around. You'd need to ask locals for exact locations. There aren't any inside the capital." Perfect. More respawn locations, and if they're run down enough, quest rewards. I had a good collection of scorpion demon mana crystals ready to go, each worth five to six thousand mana.

With the guards suitably informed, and my item box containing a non-zero amount of what I would classify as 'food', rather than simply things I shoved into my mouth out of necessity, I spread my wings wide and took to the sky. The former castle had been built on the top of a gently sloping hill, its defensive wall forming a perfect circle around the peak. A city sprawled out on the lower slopes and around the base, far larger than any settlement I had seen in the dungeon.

Structures were larger the closer they were to the top of the hill, so the centre must be the rich district. I could see another wall in the distance, but there were further houses even outside that, densely packed at first, but later spaced out as the urban sprawl gave way to farmland. I flew west, over the castle's defensive wall, then the mansions of the rich. That was followed by tall town-houses, then smaller homes. Once over the city wall, I could see the structures were nothing more than wooden hovels.

The slums of the city, not even defended by the wall, and offensive enough to my olfactory perception that I needed to take some extra height. No-one attacked me, which was nice. While some of the caverns back in the dungeon had been impressively sized, nothing beat flying around under the actual sky. Suffocation nullification advanced to level 22 Okay, maybe I'd gone a little too high.

Following Ortho's advice, I dropped back down and flew at barely head height above the ground, ensuring I wouldn't be visible at a distance, zipping along parallel to a road that headed west, running from the capital all the way to the frontier territories. Accelerated through my use of body reinforcement, I was looking at a ten-hour travel time.

Not bad for crossing half a continent, but I could have gone faster if I could fly higher and not have to worry about slamming into a sudden unexpected tree or other obstacle. As it was, I was still seen, albeit not by anyone who had a chance to do anything about it before I vanished. Still, I hoped Ortho was sending word behind me, or there would be a lot of panic going on. There was the occasional villager foraging, travellers camping away from the road or fetching firewood, hunters out looking for prey.

A group of men in mismatched leather armour, with clubs and poor quality short swords at their sides, three of them with large sacks over their shoulders, one of which was moaning.... Okay, that last one probably warranted investigation.

"Hi," I called, landing in front of them.

"A demon!" they answered, drawing their weapons and tossing the sacks aside. The moaning one grunted.

"I'm not a demon, actually," I said, swapping out my leather armour for my nightie to save it from getting damaged.

"Arrr!" grunted one of the men as he swung his sword, which shattered against my scales.

"I was just wondering if you were bandits?" I asked, flicking him away as the others made their attempt.

"Wait!" yelled one of the maybe-bandits.

"The demon isn't hostile. I apologise for the behaviour of my over-eager colleagues there. Could it be you have work for some poor, desperate villagers that are just trying to make ends meet?"

"That definitely sounds like a euphemism for bandits. You have some merchandise in those sacks?"

"Why? You hungry?" asked the presumed leader of this group of poor, starving villagers.

"We might be willing to part with them, for a bit of coin," he continued, untying the larger of the silent bags and pulling it down to reveal the bloodied, gagged head of an unconscious thirty-something year old human male.

"Mmm!" exclaimed the one wriggling sack in response to the talk about being eaten.

"So, just to be clear, because I really don't want to make a mistake here; they are some random villagers that you bashed over the head and kidnapped, with intent to sell. And there's definitely no legitimate reason why you're walking around away from the road carrying people in sacks?"

"Well, that's a rather ugly way of phrasing it, but yes. That more or less covers it."

"Right," I nodded, pulling a sword out of item box and decapitating him in a single fluid movement. The others didn't survive much longer.

"Perhaps you missed the bit where I said I wasn't a demon?" I suggested to their corpses as I untied the previously wriggling sack, which for some reason had suddenly gone very quiet indeed.