Selena finally calmed down and stood up.
The face revealed again was perfectly fine, as if she had never cried.
Frondier nodded at that.
Belphegor, on the other hand, tilted his head.
“So, that girl is coming with us too?”
“Yeah. She’s my guard.”
“Hm. That doesn’t really matter, but...”
Belphegor gazed intently at Selena and spoke.
“...I remember now. Jay. She’s that woman.”
“I’m surprised you remember.”
“Hahaha. A good woman is something you remember. It’s a basic refinement for a demon.”
What a trashy refinement.
However, Belphegor soon scratched his cheek as if troubled.
“But she came into Nastrond with a human body.”
“Is that a problem?”
For a moment, Frondier felt worried.
Was Nastrond dangerous for a human body, perhaps. Filled with poisonous miasma that must not be inhaled, or something like that.
“If it’s a problem, it’s a problem. She came in here alive when she shouldn’t have, so it’s a kind of foul play, isn’t it?”
When Belphegor said that.
Kieeeek─!
Screeeech!!
Bizarre cries, or perhaps screams, echoed through the air.
“This is the land of the dead. And among those, the worst. Frondier, do you know how obsessed the dead are with a living human body?”
“...Oh, I know very well.”
He had experienced it firsthand in Yerranhes. While accepting the mana of Helheim, how many stray spirits had he swallowed.
Kyaaaaak!!
Spirits similar to those wailed all at once, making a noise so loud it was hard to even describe.
Like gray-white clay swelling as it eats the air, the spirits, in groups, swallowed up all colors and rushed at Frondier and the others.
Watching the pouring spirits, Frondier spoke.
“So the problem with Selena being here is... that?”
“For the moment, yes.”
“If that’s all it is.”
Frondier took all of the spirits into his field of view.
Immediately after, he opened Ecleksis.
Thud─!
All the things that had been making every kind of sound, filling his vision and surging toward them, were burned away in an instant.
With no visible change, as if they had never existed from the beginning.
“No problem.”
“......”
At that sight, Selena stared with her mouth open in surprise, and Belphegor smiled in satisfaction.
“That’s what makes you the rightful king of demons.”
“Don’t call me something weird. I have no intention of becoming that.”
“Well, being king is a hassle.”
Khukhuk, Belphegor laughed, acting like a comrade who understood Frondier deeply.
Frondier looked at Belphegor with lowered eyes.
“Belphegor, what exactly is your goal?”
“I told you. Kill the Seven Deadly Sins and the chief gods. Then there’ll be no one above me. It’ll finally be my world.”
Hahaha, Belphegor laughed.
Belphegor, a demon, planned to kill everything above him and stand at the peak of demons. As a demon’s way of thinking, it wasn’t strange.
However, there were two problems with that.
“...If I really do grant that wish, what will you do then?”
“What do you mean, what will I do?”
“I’ll still be there.”
If Frondier really fulfilled Belphegor’s wish, there would still be one person above Belphegor. Frondier.
Would Belphegor be able to handle Frondier at that point.
“Ah, now that you mention it, that’s true. I hadn’t realized. This is serious.”
“......”
Belphegor played dumb.
There was no way he didn’t know. It was nonsense.
But that simply meant he had no intention of telling the truth, so Frondier let out a sigh.
“Right. In the end, I have to follow what you say anyway.”
“Right, right. Good attitude.”
Belphegor laughed and clapped his hands.
Clap.
“Now, I’ll explain the situation.”
Belphegor pointed upward with his finger.
“First, look at the sky.”
“The sky...?”
Frondier and Selena lifted their heads.
He called it a sky, but nothing like that could be seen. It was just pitch black.
“...Is it night?”
“No, probably.”
Selena’s eyes narrowed.
“There’s a ceiling.”
“A ceiling?”
Frondier asked again, and Belphegor looked at Selena in surprise.
“I’m amazed you can see that. It’s beyond human visual range.”
“...Mm, I am confident in my eyesight.”
Selena answered, a bit embarrassed.
Belphegor, truly surprised, raised his own head to look up as well. Muttering to himself, asking if that really was visible.
“In any case, as Jay said, there’s a ceiling here. It’s a characteristic of the world called Nastrond.”
“...You’re saying the entire world is like that?”
“Yeah. You could say it’s an enormous indoor space. It’s so big that we occasionally forget it’s indoors. They say that from the outside, it looks like something contained inside a massive fruit. I wouldn’t know, I’ve never seen it from outside.”
At that, Frondier looked around.
“For the entire world to be covered with a ceiling, it’s pretty bright.”
From the moment he arrived, he’d barely felt any limitation in his field of vision. His eyes weren’t as good as Selena’s, so the sky just looked like a night sky to him. He couldn’t see any stars, but that had been the case in the previous world too.
Belphegor spoke.
“This place is bright because the spirits wandering around give off light. This is the world of the dead. And unlike Helheim, not just any spirit comes here—only the truly heinous ones do. Spirits like that have pretty intense light.”
Unlike Helheim, where most of the dead go and live comparatively ordinary “lives,” Nastrond is where humans who have committed great sins come.
And the dragon Nidhogg rips them apart and kills them, then rips and ✧ NоvеIight ✧ (Original source) eats them again, over and over. It is, in every sense, hell in the truest meaning.
“...Wait, come to think of it, you killed Nidhogg.”
“Well, yeah.”
Belphegor spoke as if it were nothing, but it was astonishing.
And it was serious as well.
“Then what happens to the sinners here? Doesn’t that cause a problem?”
Originally, the spirits were sent here to have Nidhogg mete out punishment, but Nidhogg was gone.
Belphegor grinned.
“Yeah. That’s the crux.”
“What?”
“This is Nastrond. The very bottom of this world. Nidhogg ripping apart and killing the souls that come here is nothing but a pastime. The real work is something else.”
“What is it?”
“Gnawing on Yggdrasil.”
Frondier’s mouth fell open at that.
This matched the original myth: Nidhogg gnawing at Yggdrasil signified the overall flow of destruction inherent in Norse mythology.
But that Nidhogg was now gone.
“Frondier, thanks to Satan, I didn’t go to the hell I was originally supposed to, and came here instead. From the beginning, what do you think was the reason Satan sent me here?”
“...To make you meet Nidhogg?”
“Yeah. It was a deal with the gods. If I met Nidhogg, then at least for the time being, Yggdrasil would be safe. As long as I held out as long as possible, that is.”
This was only Belphegor’s conjecture, but it probably wasn’t far off.
“You probably already know that Satan made a deal with the gods. And that was quite some time ago. At the very least, Satan had shown signs of it since the monster war.”
“The monster war, you mean when humans first started putting up the barrier?”
Before Frondier was even born, monsters had invaded this land. The Empire’s territory had shrunk rapidly, but led by several powerhouses, they had held off the monsters and succeeded, in the meantime, in putting up the barrier.
It was so long ago that even the current emperor, Terst, had fought on the front lines.
Frondier spoke as if he remembered.
“Right, come to think of it, Bael and Marco said it. That the monster war was originally a plan led by Satan.”
“He enticed the monsters of the Abyss, gathered the monsters under them, and had them flood the Empire.”
Belphegor agreed and added on.
Feeling something off, Frondier spoke.
“...Back then, if demons had invaded the Empire along with the monsters, they could have destroyed it, but the one who stopped that was precisely...”
“Yeah, me.”
Belphegor readily admitted it.
Frondier asked.
“Why did you stop Satan? It’s awkward for a human like me to say, but back then, were you trying to protect humans?”
“Ah, that was...”
Belphegor lifted a finger as if about to explain, then gave a wry smile.
“Shall we say it was that?”
“You bastard.”
“In the end, it turned out that way, but the biggest reason was that the chances of demons swallowing the Empire weren’t one hundred percent.”
“...Even though it had been turned into a wasteland by monsters, you’re saying the demons couldn’t have eaten the Empire.”
“Because in exchange for becoming a wasteland, a large number of humans who had surpassed human limits appeared.”
Those were several heroes, with the Zodiacs at the forefront.
Just the twelve Zodiacs alone were threatening, and on top of that, Angfer de Roach and Terst were no ordinary men.
“It was a demon’s intuition. An intuition that demons might be the ones pressing the switch that triggered human awakening.”
“...Awakening.”
“Yeah. I mean Ecleksis.”
Gods, demons, humans.
In the present age, Ecleksis was something only humans could not use.
“So I stopped Satan. If you don’t even know Ecleksis exists, it’s hard to use, but once you know it, there’s always a risk of it awakening. On top of that, humans at the time were worn down by repeated battles with monsters, but that much, heroes had begun to bloom among them.”
If you stimulated such people one more time, there was a chance that one of them would manifest Ecleksis.
In the worst case, it would lead to a chain reaction, and a situation where multiple humans used Ecleksis could occur.
“Frondier, a demon’s contract isn’t all that different from divine power.”
“...Yeah. I’ve heard that.”
“The biggest difference is that gods try to grant divine power to strong humans, whereas demons try to make contracts with weak humans. That much, demons hate strong humans. Especially strong souls.”
A human who became aware of Ecleksis would never fall, unless it was truly their own will.
Because it meant they had come to know what their own soul was.
They would become souls that demons couldn’t handle.
“...I see. So that’s why.”
“So I told Satan.”
─A demon cannot kill a giant.
“After hearing that, Satan agreed and gave up on attacking humans. He judged that it was better to hide the existence of demons from humans to the very end. As a result, humans still believe that the monster war was solely an irregularity of monsters. They never found the shadow of demons there.”
And Belphegor had settled in the west of the continent of Falind, which would later become Manggot.
“I was originally a bit of an odd case even among the Seven Deadly Sins. While they were fighting their power struggles, I wasn’t interested in any of that. Or in becoming king, either.”
“...For the obvious reason.”
“Because it was a hassle.”
A line befitting the demon of Sloth.
“For someone like me, watching over the continent of Falind was at least a comfortable job. I can kill time anywhere, so I holed up in Manggot, and as that time grew long, I stopped keeping an eye on the situation in the demon realm.”
“But then,” Belphegor laughed,
“later I found out Satan had cooked up a bizarre operation. A plan to drag me down into the abyss.”
Contrary to the content.
Belphegor laughed as if he were genuinely amused.
As if the fact that his sloth had been stirred was enough in itself.
