Kwoooooo─!!
Ortos’s remaining head opened its mouth toward Frondier. Frondier lightly leapt up, dodging those teeth—
Crunch!
Ortos bit down right on its own dead head.
“Huh?”
While Frondier stared in surprise,
Squelch!!
Ortos tore its own neck apart down to the base and threw the severed head aside.
That head was already dead anyway, only weighing it down unnecessarily.
Up to that point, it had also been part of its attack on Frondier, so there was nothing to hinder the process.
Crack, crackle!
Then Ortos twisted its neck once, and the head that had been slightly off-center made a strange sound as it slowly moved to the middle. Soon, Ortos had a huge wound around its nape, but looked as though it had always had just one head.
“Oh, that’s some spirit!”
Whoosh─!
Boom!
Frondier lightly tossed Mjölnir. Ortos, despite its size, moved with unbelievable agility and avoided the hammer. Instead, Mjölnir struck the ground, leaving a crater deep enough to cause a mild earthquake.
'Ortos’s other name, Orthros. The meaning is “swift,” isn’t it. Truly remarkable speed.'
Most animals inevitably grow sluggish as they get bigger. The larger they are, the less their muscle strength can proportionally support their overall body mass.
However, Ortos was no ordinary beast or monster. The creatures of the Abyss easily ignored such principles. Especially in this world where Ki exists, such defiance of common sense was hardly surprising.
Yet Ortos’s speed was extraordinary even accounting for that irrationality.
Boom!
All it did was leap, but the ground erupted with an explosive sound.
With a single rush, its teeth came within a hair’s breadth of Frondier.
“Huup!”
Crunch!
In the spot where Frondier had just stepped back, Ortos bit into the ground, as if devouring it whole.
'If it had another head left, that might have been dangerous.'
Fortunately, he had killed one head in the first strike. Two heads meant it could’ve attacked in combination—or one could have defended while the other struck.
“Well then.”
Swish!
Frondier stretched out his arm.
At that motion, Ortos momentarily froze. Its keen senses reacted first, making it spring sideways.
Slash!
The judgment was correct. The Mjölnir Frondier had thrown earlier returned to his hand.
Had it stayed still, the returning hammer would have impaled its body again.
But the next attack—
“The first death was because you let your guard down.”
Crackle, crackle-crash!!
Mjölnir crackled with lightning and surged with power.
“How about this time?”
At Frondier’s first step, Ortos had lost a head.
Fully aware of that, Ortos now preemptively activated its high-speed movement.
Kwagwagwagwang!!
Thunderous sounds roared in every direction as its massive body moved too fast for the human eye to follow.
Frondier, too, could only track its position by intuition; his eyes couldn’t keep up. The enormous body moving at that velocity looked like a stretched sheet of cloth.
Simultaneously, Ortos began to compress powerful Aura within its body.
Outwardly it resembled a dog—now that it had only one head, it looked no different from a large hound.
The attack that came to mind for such a shape would be teeth or claws, yet Ortos could actually project its Aura outward as well.
From its mouth burst waves of dense Aura. For quadrupedal monsters of Ortos’s caliber, this was common, but Ortos’s power was especially overwhelming.
Charging Aura while darting around at high speed, it released Aura blasts faster than the eye could follow—attacks that allowed no time to dodge after sighting them.
In the meantime, Frondier thought,
'So it’s waiting for me to throw it, huh.'
Ortos might have had other ways to attack first, but after Frondier dodged twice, it realized its strikes could miss.
That being the case, waiting to evade the hammer and then counterattack was safer.
'Well, there are plenty of other weapons I could use to pressure it.'
Frondier had many means of attack, most of which he hadn’t even shown Ortos yet.
But there was something he wanted to try.
To be exact, something he wanted to confirm.
Spell deployment.
Mana crystal—Heukcheon—activate.
Lightning magic overlap—fixed.
Frondier original.
Black Lightning.
Mjölnir was originally a hammer that summoned and emitted lightning.
At first, it didn’t possess such a property, but after passing through Hestia’s Furnace, its power was awakened.
Still, Mjölnir itself is not lightning—it merely controls it.
'Ortos probably believes the first head died because it let its guard down.'
That might even be true.
And Ortos surely thought it had dodged the second Mjölnir completely.
It can be avoided—the first strike only hit because of negligence.
It assumed both attacks were “the same.”
'So, I need to confirm it.'
The attack Frondier was about to unleash—
—was that same strike which had killed Ortos’s first head.
Spell fusion.
Black Lightning, Mjölnir.
Frondier original.
Designation...
......???
“Ah.”
He hadn’t named it.
Swish!
Frondier threw Mjölnir anyway.
Swoosh—
Mjölnir flew, just like when it launched the Spear of Black Lightning.
Flash—!
Kwooooom!!!
In an instant, Ortos—darting at high speed all around—was pierced midair.
“Gah—kgh—grrgh...!”
Thud!
Then the Aura compressed inside Ortos’s body exploded, pulping its insides.
“Hm...?”
Frondier sensed something had detonated inside Ortos.
It wasn’t what he expected, so he tilted his head slightly.
“I told you.”
The completely dead Ortos lay collapsed. To make sure, Frondier nudged its head with his boot.
“Just die and stay dead.”
***
Frondier had slain Ortos—virtually unscathed.
However, the greatest gain for the party wasn’t that Ortos was dead.
It was that the demons who had devised a plan to kill Frondier were almost completely wiped out by Pielot,
and—
[......So that’s how it went down.]
—the arrival of Gregory.
“......Hmm.”
Much of Frondier’s past victories had relied on exploiting information asymmetry.
He hid his own power, and the knowledge he possessed.
But now, well past the point his “game knowledge” could help him, Frondier no longer knew how the future would unfold, and much of his ability had already been exposed to others.
That’s precisely why Frondier understood the importance of information—he had escaped death several times thanks to it.
And his most vital informant was, needless to say, Gregory.
“Dierre extracted intel from Marco, I «N.o.v.e.l.i.g.h.t» see.”
[But Marco is a demon who lies easily. Demons in general do, but he’s among the worst. What Dierre pulled from him might also be false.]
“No way.”
Frondier denied it flatly.
“Dierre’s convinced that the information he got is authentic. That’s all the proof I need—it’s real.”
[......Well, if you’re that sure, I’ll leave it there.]
Frondier nodded once, then gathered his thoughts.
'So Marco joined under Satan because he foresaw the coming war?'
Bael, and the other demons led by him—Frondier had first encountered them during that attack from Agoris on the Falind continent.
That had happened because Belphegor had withdrawn from this land, and Bael saw it as the greatest opportunity for demons.
But it was impossible to predict Belphegor’s retreat. Frondier, after all, was a clear irregularity to gods, demons, and humans alike.
'So Dierre suspected they had an original plan, huh. Makes sense.'
The demons’ original operation—
—to return to the Demon Realm without touching the Falind continent.
It was a reckless, near-impossible plan with low odds of success, abandoned entirely once Belphegor withdrew, leading to that desperate attack on Falind...
“......Tch.”
Frondier clicked his tongue.
He’d reached nearly the same conclusion as Dierre.
'The gods don’t distinguish between demons. Whether the 72 Demons or the Seven Deadly Sins—they’re all just demons.'
The reason the gods made no distinction was simple.
Neither side had a clear king.
Arald had so desired a King of Demons—and now Frondier finally understood what that absence truly meant.
Whether demons clashed or united, from a god’s perspective there was no reason to differentiate them.
“......Bael’s walking a tightrope.”
[A tightrope?]
“Yeah. I get it now—what’s happening here in Palma.”
At Frondier’s words, Elodie, who had been watching, asked,
“You mean the demons pretending to be gods found a way to avoid war with the gods?”
“No—the opposite.”
“The opposite?”
“No, to be precise... how should I put it...”
Frondier sighed, scratching his head.
“Bael is using this war to lure Satan in.”
“......Huh?”
“To be exact, he’s drawing all the demons in the Demon Realm. Since it was Satan who trapped them in Agoris in the first place, it’s the same thing as pulling Satan himself.”
Elodie still didn’t quite grasp it.
But Riri, being a demon herself, and Arald, who knew roughly how the Demon Realm worked, understood first.
Arald spoke.
“When a demon pretends to be a god, it’s effectively a declaration of war against the gods. Both demons and gods understand that, which is why demons never impersonate gods.”
Then Riri added,
“But what demons don’t think about is that the gods don’t distinguish among demons.”
Frondier replied,
“So if a demon provokes the gods, then from the gods’ viewpoint, it’s ‘the demons as a whole’ that are hostile.”
Whether they’re demons of the Demon Realm or those in Agoris—
Whether of the 72 Demons or the Seven Deadly Sins—
To the gods, they’re all the same.
“In other words, Bael has committed blasphemy against the gods, placing his own life—and the lives of all the Sins—on the scales.”
“...If it were a lesser demon’s doing, it might be brushed off as a minor incident. But for Bael, the one hailed as the highest of the 72 Demons, the gods cannot simply overlook it.”
“So it’s not the gods or the humans who want to stop what’s happening in Palma. It’s the other demons—those still in the Demon Realm. Especially Satan.”
Bael had placed every demon’s life on the balance, using it to threaten Satan.
'If you want to avoid war with the gods, then open the gate to the Demon Realm before it’s too late.'
'Open the entrance for us to return.'
“Will the gods notice Palma first, or will Satan respond before they do?”
Frondier recalled something.
The three demons he’d met before coming here—
They were Astaroth’s subordinates, one of the Seven Deadly Sins.
'Was their real objective not me, but to meet Bael?'
And this battle—the enemies moving as though they knew the party’s full strength.
Somewhere among the demons’ exchanges, information about Frondier was leaking.
They were using Frondier and his entire group as pieces in their own bargaining.
“......Heh.”
At that blatant provocation, Frondier laughed.
“When whales fight, the shrimp’s back bursts. Guess that’s us.”
“Uh? Whale? Shrimp?”
A saying from his previous world—puzzling to those who didn’t know it.
But soon enough, they would understand.
They would learn exactly what that proverb meant.
“It’s so blatant, it’s almost refreshing.”
And also—who the shrimp was.
