For a moment, Astaroth froze.
But soon he forced a very strained smile.
“Empty bravado! No matter who you are, there’s no way you feel nothing at all about your comrades!”
“Your smile looks more like bravado to me.”
Even as they spoke, Belphegor’s corpses stepped forward bit by bit.
They were corpses that, structurally speaking, should never have been able to stand—Belphegor had broken them himself. But even the parts ruined by his power had been reassembled. Of course, that reassembly was crude at best, only just enough that they could stand and walk.
“My subordinates died. Of course I feel a lot of things.”
Belphegor patted the shoulder of a corpse that had stood back up.
Smiling, he spoke softly.
—Go.
—Be of use to me even in death.
“Gggrrrrr—!!”
The corpses walked or ran, each at their own speed.
It was the fastest they could move.
Compared to the puppets, their movements were crude, and their numbers were small.
In practice, most of them were trampled and pierced by Astaroth’s puppets and had what little “life” they’d regained cut down again soon after.
In terms of numbers, it took about five corpses to barely bring down a single puppet.
And Belphegor raised that one puppet as a corpse again.
“......Hm.”
With that short sound, he nodded.
“You still insist on acting like you’re relaxed!”
The puppets rushed Belphegor again.
Belphegor had been short on corpses to begin with. Even if he raised a few more, they were quickly smashed apart again by the puppets.
Once the hastily raised wall of corpses vanished, the puppets launched their attacks at Belphegor again.
Shwish shwish shwik!
The puppets drove in sharp strikes.
Their coordinated attacks were excellent, a theoretically perfect sword path. At the very least, there was no room to dodge.
They were puppets whose offense and defense were filled in with no gaps at all.
KWA-AANG!
In the end, Belphegor dealt with the coordinated attacks by forcing his way through. Puppets toppled in droves under his straight punches. They soon resurrected as corpses again.
Seeing that, Astaroth snorted.
“Your mana isn’t infinite. If you keep fighting like that, you will never be able to defeat me!”
Belphegor did not answer.
His lips only moved slightly, as if he were thinking about something.
Astaroth spoke.
“It is when everything runs perfectly without issue that one finally finds peace. Only then does true sloth arrive. Sloth that will never waver or be broken, eternal sloth!”
This was the source of sloth that Astaroth possessed.
He dreamed of a world that operated perfectly without his intervention. A world in which he could rest forever.
That was why he had taken the seat of Sloth.
He had become the demon of sloth who was more diligent than anyone else.
“Yeah. I hope it comes.”
Belphegor spoke.
He understood Astaroth.
Once, he had dreamed the same dream himself.
“Belphegor, for one of the Seven Deadly Sins, you fight with shockingly meager methods. Just a staff and spells—nothing more.”
“And what else should I be doing?”
Belphegor shrugged.
His staff—right, there had been something like that. But right now, Belphegor’s hands were empty. The staff he had loved to use was probably rolling around somewhere in Manggot. When he lost to Frondier, the possession had been broken and he’d returned to the demon realm.
He really would have to get himself something nice and new.
“You lack means of attack. I’ve already seen every move you have, Belphegor!”
“That’s odd.”
Belphegor laughed.
“How did you see all my moves?”
He raised a single finger.
Once again, a corpse rose to its feet.
But this time there was only one.
Astaroth snorted.
“Ha! Are you already out of mana? To think the one once called the demon of Sloth amounts to only that much.”
Astaroth swept his hand. At the motion, the puppets charged.
The one corpse Belphegor had raised trembled as it pulled its body taut.
Shwik!
It dodged the thrust of the first puppet’s sword.
Kradk!
Then shattered the puppet’s head with its fist.
Srak—!
It wrenched away the sword and swept it horizontally, cleaving the oncoming puppets above and below.
“What......?”
For a moment, Astaroth was left dumbfounded.
Belphegor spoke.
“You got complacent, Astaroth. To think you’d forget coordinated attack, of all things.”
Belphegor grinned as he spoke. But Astaroth couldn’t understand his words.
Coordinated attacks were something you used when facing Belphegor’s actual body.
They were not something to be used against a single corpse.
So what had just happened?
‘That one corpse is different from all the others. I see! Belphegor must have poured all his mana into that single corpse!’
After roughly arriving at that guess, Astaroth rearranged his formation.
The puppets began to surround the corpse.
But the corpse didn’t wait for them to finish.
Tack!
It kicked the puppet on the far right. The puppet staggered, and the corpse drove its knee into the puppet’s head. Its movements were no longer those of an undead.
The corpse fought back, reacting to the attacks of the puppets around it. It still seemed about to be overwhelmed by sheer numbers, but after chopping down the necks of around three more puppets, its limbs were severed and it fell.
Cold sweat ran down Astaroth’s back, but he still forced a grin.
Belphegor must have used an extraordinary amount of mana on that one corpse. In that case, what Belphegor had left—
Drrrrrr!
“How?!”
As if betraying Astaroth’s expectations, the corpse rose yet again.
Astaroth bit his lip. Now, without saying a word, he ordered the puppets to smash the corpse. At the same time, he had a few others attack Belphegor, to prevent his mana from recovering.
Pwoom!
But of course, Belphegor was not someone a few puppets could do anything about. With a simple fireball, several puppets were instantly set ablaze and toppled. Unlike the flames he’d used earlier, this time the explosion had enough force that they wouldn’t be rising again so easily.
“Heh heh, they really are puppets.”
Belphegor laughed.
“Once the number of attack targets goes up, the precision of their coordinated attacks drops.”
“Kh......!”
Astaroth grimaced at Belphegor’s smile, then suddenly came to his senses and looked toward the corpse.
Right, the important thing was to destroy the corpse. There was no way he could keep producing undead of ❖ Nоvеl𝚒ght ❖ (Exclusive on Nоvеl𝚒ght) that caliber.
“......Huh?”
But the corpse was still standing. Not only that, it was fighting just fine.
It dealt with the puppets’ coordinated attacks and killed them one by one with certainty. Its movements were actually more polished than Belphegor’s.
As the scene shifted to the corpse driving the puppets back instead, Astaroth pulled the puppets back for the moment.
His mind grew tangled.
‘How is that possible? Proper thought should be impossible for an undead—how!’
“Astaroth.”
Belphegor’s voice cut off that line of thought.
“I enjoy sloth. And I imagine you do as well, since you’re the demon currently sitting in the seat of Sloth.”
“......What are you trying to say?”
“To enjoy that, you have to make it so things are fine even when you don’t do the things you’re supposed to.”
“Of course. That’s why I made puppets and built a perfectly functioning algorithm—”
“Yeah. That’s it.”
Belphegor snapped his fingers, as if to say Astaroth had answered correctly.
“You put an algorithm into your puppets. To make a system that runs perfectly even without you. Honestly, I was impressed. I didn’t think there’d be someone else out there who thought like me.”
“......More bravado. If you’d had this idea, then at your side there would already be—”
“Right. Puppets.”
Belphegor chuckled.
“If I hadn’t realized the problem, that is.”
“......What did you say?”
“The puppets you have show excellent coordinated attacks. As proof, I can’t break them with my own power. I have to force my way through using spells or aura. Like you said, if this situation continues, I’m the one whose mana will be drained dry.”
As Belphegor spoke, the corpse stood in front of him as if to protect him. Still completely intact.
“But you made two mistakes.”
Belphegor put a hand on the corpse’s shoulder, as if proud of it.
“The first is that in the end, an algorithm is just an algorithm. No matter how superb it is, if it can’t respond to each changing moment, an algorithm is meaningless. Above all, there’s a limit to the algorithm one individual can create.”
“Nonsense! Are you saying that in this short time you’ve seen through the entire algorithm I created for my puppets? That’s impossible!”
“Yeah, it is impossible. I told you, didn’t I? I have no way to break your coordinated attacks.”
At that, Belphegor lifted his darkened eyes and looked at Astaroth.
“Your second mistake.”
A current brushed lightly over Belphegor’s entire body.
Killing intent.
“You dared to use my subordinates.”
“......What?”
“I told you, didn’t I? I enjoy sloth. And to make it so I don’t have to do the things I’m supposed to, I need someone else to do those things for me.”
Only then did Astaroth remember.
A certain anecdote.
An anecdote so famous that anyone who knew Belphegor had heard it.
—Belphegor, the demon in charge of sloth, kept a subordinate beside him who recorded all his memories for him, to spare himself the hassle.
“Some handled chores in my place, some managed my finances, some even fought in my stead. I kept capable demons beside me, one by one, to do my work for me.”
“Any high-ranking demon would do that. And that’s the problem. Most demons are incompetent. It’s more useful for me to handle things myself.”
“Anyway, just listen.”
Belphegor moved his hand again. Once more, the corpse rose.
That made the corners of Astaroth’s eyes twitch. Having the timing snatched from him was annoying, but in the end, it still meant Belphegor had spent that much more mana.
“You’re misunderstanding something. The corpses I raised at the beginning and this corpse now—they’re no different.”
“......Ridiculous. Anyone can see it’s clearly a far higher-level undead.”
“Really? Is this what a high-level undead looks like to you?”
Belphegor pointed to his corpse.
A corpse with no proper armor or armament. Its limbs were intact, but that was all. A normal undead with little damage to the body.
“If this guy were a high-level undead, wouldn’t it be smashing your puppets in a single blow? If it really had that kind of overwhelming power.”
The corpse Belphegor commanded didn’t have such tremendous strength. It couldn’t destroy a puppet in one hit with just its bare hands or a kick.
It simply responded better.
It simply fought better.
“......!”
At that moment, Astaroth’s eyes flew open.
Belphegor spoke.
“Now do you get it? The demons in my army—when they die, the process of their lives flows into me. Put simply, you could call it experience points. And I can transfer those experience points into a corpse.”
As he spoke, Belphegor gestured to the other demons lying dead.
“And that’s true even when I call a corpse again. The experience stacks. So the more my corpses fight, the more they stand back up, the more experience they absorb. And since these aren’t even real demons but puppets, they can pick up something like an algorithm in no time.”
As for Belphegor himself, the various experience points flowed into him all separately, so he couldn’t produce a single consolidated “result” from them.
It was the corpses that produced the results.
Because they had no will or ego of their own, the accumulated experience points applied directly to combat experience.
Even if Belphegor himself didn’t know how to break the puppets’ coordinated attacks, the corpses he raised would.
“......No, that’s impossible!”
Astaroth denied it.
“Even if that’s true, there’s no way you could selectively absorb only the useful experiences! All sorts of negative things would be mixed in. Grief and suffering, even the horrific pain of dying itself! How in the world did you filter that out?!”
Belphegor’s eyes narrowed at that.
He asked,
“Why would I filter it out?”
“W–what?”
“Just like you said, when my subordinates die, I taste all the pain that comes with that. It’s the price of absorbing their experience points.”
Belphegor looked at his hands.
Pain lay at his fingertips.
Just a moment ago, every time one of his demons died, his body had screamed.
“Never heard that saying? That when a subordinate is hurt or injured, the leader feels just as much pain. That because the leader empathizes with that pain and suffers with them, the subordinates come to truly follow their commander.”
“......No, that’s—!”
“Just a load of pretty bullshit? Yeah, I agree.”
Heh heh, Belphegor laughed.
No matter how nice the words sounded, there was no way to truly feel what the ones who were hurt and injured, the ones who died, were going through. A moment of comfort only earned a moment of loyalty.
So Belphegor chose not to spout bullshit.
He chose to feel the pain of every demon under him, together with them when they died.
That was the contract of sloth.
“Oh, and.”
Belphegor pointed his finger at Astaroth.
No, that wasn’t it.
He pointed behind him.
“You shouldn’t just stand there spacing out.”
Thud!
Right after Belphegor’s words,
“Guh...... urk.......”
Astaroth felt a spike of agony in his back.
When he barely managed to twist his eyes, twist his head to look behind him—
A demon was impaling his back with a sword.
Its bloodshot eyes streaming with tears.
‘The thread......’
The thread was still hanging from above its head. In other words, it was one of Astaroth’s puppets.
However,
There was something in that demon that surpassed the control of the thread.
Belphegor spoke.
“You can feel pain just sitting still.”
The demons had sworn allegiance to Belphegor.
Sitting still, sometimes lying down, barely lifting a finger, they had carried out Belphegor’s orders at the cost of their lives.
Belphegor did not “roughly” feel their deaths.
He felt exactly the same pain they did. He simply endured it with the higher “rank” and “will” of his being.
Because they knew that was the contract.
“Astaroth, demon who sits in the seat of Sloth.”
Belphegor watched Astaroth slowly collapse with a cold gaze.
“What more did you expect beyond sloth?”
