Chương 69: We Interrogated the Elf

POV: The Dark Lord, Milo Miles"HAHAHA, s-stahahahahap, I-I yield! I yield!" The elf who had been so haughty moments ago was laughing like a madwoman now, head thrown back against the post as Nyx's fingers danced along the soles of her bare feet.

"Hm? So will you tell us everything then? What made you come here?" Nyx stopped. She then stood up and walked around behind her.

"I honestly don't know, I was just instructed to scout and— eek!" Before the poor girl could finish, Nyx glided her fingers down from the inside of her elbow, deliberately slow, and came to rest in the hollow of her underarms.

"Pfft! H-hehehehe—" Giggles leaked out of her in little bursts. She shoved her legs forward, heels scrabbling at the boards, to absolutely no effect.

"Be honest, you racist elf." Nyx began to circle one fingernail, agonizingly slow, tracing the hollow. The elf tried to hold it in, legs shoving forward against nothing, eyes screwed shut, cheeks puffed out, breath coming in ragged snorts through her nose. A valiant effort. Naturally, Nyx did not stop. She simply circled with the other finger. Beside me, Evelisse was quiet; she was gripping her own elbows, arms crossed tight over her chest. Her mouth was pressed into a thin line.

She would flinch from time to time when the elf's laughter intensified, likely shuddering at the thought of her being put under the same situation as the elf. The elf lasted three more seconds. Then her head snapped back against the post, one heel drumming uselessly on the boards, and she stopped being able to breathe in and laugh at the same time, high, cracked sounds tearing out of her between gasps. I felt bad for suggesting this, but what else could I do? Pain wouldn't work.

She had dared us to do it, likely having some tricks up her sleeve or maybe she had been trained to withstand all sorts of pain. Plus, it would have made me the classic, heartless villain and Evelisse would never have approved of it. At least this one was painless… in a way, and I did not expect it to be so effective.

"Ffffuuu, ahahahahaha! I'll tell you everything! Heheheverything, just stahahahap!" The elf finally broke. Nyx dragged a chair out and sat down in front of the elf. The girl was breathing hard, like she'd just finished a sprint, her face flushed and her hair messy from all the thrashing. She's still tied to the pillar.

"So," Nyx draped one arm over the back of the chair, slouched and utterly at ease.

"Tell us everything. Starting with why you're here." It was not a dignified way to sit, but I supposed she thought the sprawl asserted some kind of dominance. Lunessa murmured for Evelisse to bring the elf some water, and she did, uncapping a waterskin and holding it up to the girl's mouth. The elf hesitated, eyeing it warily, then gave in and gulped it down." Pwaah." She came up for air, panting.

"Fine. It's true I wasn't told everything. The elder only sent me to observe—" Nyx's expression shifted, just slightly, and the elf went rigid, her earlier ordeal clearly flashing back to her all at once.

"B-but there've been talks!" she added in a rush.

"Among some of the elves. About the prophecy. So it has to be connected to that somehow!"

"Prophecy?" Nyx tilted her head against the chair. Beside me, I leaned in toward Evelisse.

"Do you know anything about elven prophecies?"

"No." She kept her voice low.

"As I said, the elves keep to themselves. Almost nothing is known about them. This is the first I'm hearing they even have prophecies."

"Tell us about this prophecy," Nyx said.

"Does it involve the Dark Lord?" The elf's mouth worked, but nothing came out. She went quiet for a few seconds, thinking, which Nyx visibly did not care for.

"Are you stalling? Or are you sitting there inventing lies for us?" Nyx's tone flattened.

"Let me be clear, you houseplant-obsessed creature. We are not afraid of your friends. Let them come. We'll thrash every last one of them. Do you honestly think you elves could stand against the Dark Lord? If you could beat him on your own, why would Lycora bother with a Hero at all? Your bluffs are useless." The elf's face wavered.

"Now talk." Nyx pushed up out of the chair.

"And if you can't manage that, maybe you'd rather laugh some more."

"O-okay, okay!" The girl flinched back against the pillar.

"Look, I don't fully understand what it means. But I can recite it for you." She drew a breath, then–"I vannar en sûdha an-rista thagra na anwe, trî kaneth úilweth, a darvon úthelu, a na maren—""Stop right there." Nyx cut a hand through the air.

"What the hell are you saying?"

"It's the prophecy. In the ancient elven tongue."

"And you expect us to understand the ancient elven language?" The elf smirked, some of her nerve creeping back.

"Oh? You can't? Of course, what else would I expect from a lowly dem— eep!" Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon. Before she could finish, Nyx's leg shot out, and she wriggled her toes against one of the elf's bound, bare soles. The girl's whole body convulsed, a strangled shriek tearing out of her.

"You were saying?" Nyx said.

"N-nothing! I'll—I'll translate it. I'll translate." And after a bit of coaxing, she did. Line by line, she rendered the whole thing into a language we could follow, and Lunessa took it down on a scrap of paper. She seemed to have brought half a stationer's shop with her, thank God. When it was done, it read: He who comes from the dark shall sow terror upon the world, Through slaughter without mercy, and ruin without end, And by the holy sword shall he be felled, as all before him were felled.

But there shall come one from that same dark who breaks the loop. And the devil shall be the salvation of the elven lands. For a long moment, nobody said anything. I read the last two lines again. And I got the distinct, uncomfortable feeling that everyone standing on that porch had just turned to look at me.

"So…I'm the one who's supposed to save the elven lands?" I asked the elf.

"And why the elven lands, specifically?"

"Beats me." She shrugged as much as the ropes allowed.

"That's probably why they sent me to observe you. To check whether you fit the pattern."

"Pattern?"

"You mean the part about breaking the loop?" Lunessa said.

"Right, that." The elf nodded.

"We elves are sheltered, but we're not blind; we have ways of gathering information. And with this prophecy in mind, the elders noticed something. There'd been barely any mass destruction, even a week after you appeared."

"Which is a sharp departure from the Dark Lords before him," Lunessa said.

"They had caused much more widespread terror by then."

"Yeah, I suppose so." The elf's eyes flicked to me, unimpressed.

"Though, now that I've actually seen him, I'm fairly sure it's just plain incompetence." I couldn't fully deny that completely, but it still stung. Maybe I'd been pathetic early on, but these last few days, I felt like I'd been pulling real weight; I saved everyone at the dungeon and the mountain, enabling us to get the rare materials we needed, and, for the record, this elf had only gave us all these info because of the interrogation method I came up with, half-jokingly, but it worked.

Still, being tangled up in a prophecy did raise an interesting possibility. If I was somehow tied to this, then maybe... maybe I got to be something like a Hero after all. That sounded amazing. It would finally hand me an actual purpose in this world, instead of just surviving one day to the next.

"Hey, slow destruction or not, I still fit the prophecy!"

"Yes," Nyx said flatly.

"You might be the one. Or you might not. It doesn't actually say much."

"So... now what?"

"Now," the elf said, "you untie me and let me go report to the elders. I've told you everything I know."

"We still have questions for you," Nyx said.

"What?" The elf jerked against the ropes.

"That's cheating! We had a deal!"

"A deal." Nyx rose and walked over to her.

"The deal was that you answer whatever we ask. Not one question. All of them. Once you've answered everything, maybe we untie you. Letting you leave is another conversation entirely." She leaned in close.

"And we're not stupid, by the way. We can pick this whole place up and move it, so your friends would need to hunt us down from scratch, whatever clever little tricks they've got." Her voice dropped.

"You're with us now." The elf froze, the color draining out of her face. Nyx straightened back up.

"Now, if you'll excuse us, we've got things to discuss. Luke, keep an eye on her. Feel free to freeze her if she gets loud." Luke lifted an arm with a bright little smile and toddled over on small, quick steps to stand directly in front of the elf. Then her three eyes widened, all of them fixing on the girl at once, unblinking, in perfect focus. The elf stared back at the Cerberus-child now inches from her face, and swallowed.

Back in the living room, we took seats in the same arrangement as before; me between Nyx and Evelisse, Lunessa and Mel across from us. Evelisse recounted the morning: the elf appearing, Luke striking her down, the chase through the forest, the capture, the porch.

Then Lunessa recapped the essentials of what the elf had given us, that the elves had their own means of gathering information, enough to have pinpointed the Dark Lord's location, and that the girl had been sent specifically to determine whether I was the prophesied savior of the elven lands. And so far, the pattern fit. Every Dark Lord before me had been cut down by the Mooncleave, and here was one whose trail of destruction was far slower than any of the previous Dark Lords.

But the prophecy had called me the devil. That was the part that stood out for me.

"Are devils the same thing as Dark Lords?" I asked. Nyx considered it.

"No. Devils, demons, we've usually got horns, wings, that sort of thing. Like me. You're still human, albeit one that's much stronger than any of the other races."

"Then maybe I'm not the one in the prophecy after all? Has there ever been a devil or demon Dark Lord?"

"I've never heard of one. The last Dark Lord and the one before were human," Evelisse said.

"I don't think so either." Nyx paused, and then her eyes went wide, like something had just landed on her.

"What? You thought of something?"

"N-no. No. Nothing." She looked away, and kept looking away, her gaze fixed on anything that wasn't me. That was strange, but I decided to not pursue it further, since I did have something nagging me.

"But doesn't the whole thing seem off? Do elves even have their own gods? Or do they worship Lord Luminaryn like everyone else? Because I can't picture Lord Luminaryn being the type to hand out prophecies like this. I mean, the devil saving the world?" I'd been turning this over ever since the elf first mentioned prophecies. Nyx had told me before that the people of Lycora worshipped a single deity, Lord Luminaryn, and that this god was run by whoever held its account back in the Afterport.

Which, at present, meant Lulu. And from what I'd seen of Lulu, she was not the prophecy-issuing type. A prophecy about some smug Hero collecting a harem, sure, that I could somewhat believe in, but a Dark Lord rising up to save the elves? That didn't fit her at all.

"I agree. I can't see Lord Luminaryn making that prophecy," Evelisse said.

"It would mean the Church's teachings were wrong on some fundamental level. And if a prophecy like that had existed for any length of time, the Church would surely know of it."

"So does that mean there's another god?" I asked.

"I... don't know." Evelisse frowned.

"This is the first I've ever had to consider the possibility. The elves are simply too closed off. No one's ever been able to learn much of anything about them." I glanced at Nyx, hoping for some flicker of recognition, some hint she might know more. But she only stared down at the empty tabletop. She'd gone quiet the moment the devil discussion started, and she hadn't come back from it.

If the elves worshipped a different deity, then, by the same logic Nyx had laid out, there had to be someone operating that account too. Nyx had never once mentioned such a thing to me, which meant either she'd forgotten it, or she genuinely didn't know it existed. If it was the latter, then this went deeper than any of us had guessed. The game might not be just Lulu's. There may be players we couldn't even see, or maybe this world just had mechanisms that even the ones in the Afterport did not know of.

There was really only one way to get to the bottom of it.

"Can we just... go to the elven kingdom?" I said.