In front of the phrase, a mass of messages had already piled up.
[Main Quest occurred.]
[Sub Quest occurred.]
[Sub Quest, ‘Riri’s Knight,’ completed.]
[Main Quest, ‘Demon of Agoris,’ completed.]
[Main Quest, ‘Constel’s Demon.......]
[Sub Quest, .......]
[Main.......]
So much that it was hard just to check them all.
Like when your internet connection comes back after being cut off, and all the messages that had been queued up come flooding in at once, they just kept scrolling upward.
"......"
Just from the titles, I could tell they were all events that had happened in the past. Seeing only the titles somehow made those memories resurface.
But so much had happened since then that the contents had kept getting updated on the smartwatch and naturally pushed back.
[Error occurred.]
That was the phrase I read first.
I read what came after it.
[Accumulated rewards from past Quests have exceeded the time limit. Reward calculation will be restarted.]
[Calculation complete.]
[Transcendent-rank reward will be granted.]
A Transcendent-rank reward, just like before.
Back then, I had subdued all of Indus’s leadership in a Quest, killed Heldre, and opened the possibility for Renzo’s turn to the good side. Including all of that, I’d been graded Transcendent.
So what would it be this time.
Or so I thought as I looked.
[Error occurred.]
"What?"
From that point on, it was so absurd that I let my voice slip out without realizing it.
[Cybel’s awakening has been confirmed.]
[Hestia’s joining has been confirmed.]
[Moirai’s death has been confirmed.]
[Opening of the World of Salvation has been confirmed.]
This time a whole new batch of notifications popped up.
They seemed to be different from the notifications about things I’d done in Quests; they weren’t linked to any quest.
After several such notifications passed,
[All the gears have meshed.]
The smartwatch’s messages shifted their tone from everything so far.
[Frondier de Roach.]
For the first time, a notification mentioned my name.
No, me─
[You must decide who you are.]
"!"
A message that seemed to know everything.
A chill ran down my spine.
On top of that, this tone. They were just sentences, but for some reason they made me think of Jeanne d’Arc.
[Having passed through everything that was arranged, you have arrived here.]
[You have completed all Quests except one.]
[Only one Quest now remains to you.]
"Only one?"
I muttered to myself.
It was probably just good timing, but.
[You already know this Quest.]
The message sounded like it was actually answering me.
And the message that surfaced.
[Main Quest: Fate Shift]
•Description: You know the final end where humanity is annihilated. Save humanity and change fate.
"......Ha."
A hollow laugh came out of me.
This Quest was the very first Quest I’d received when I came to this world.
The first Main Quest.
So this was my last Quest in the end?
Well, fine, let’s say I accept that.
"Then give me my reward."
We have something backlogged between us, don’t we.
***
Loki.
A giant of the previous age, and the central figure who opposed the gods.
Belphegor felt his presence from this lump.
"Good. Time to go see Satan."
As if that settled his business here,
Belphegor turned back without a shred of regret.
When he walked past Lazor and kept going, Lazor stared blankly at his back.
"What are you doing? Follow."
"Ah, yes. Yes."
Lazor awkwardly trailed after him.
Had they really come all this way just to put a hand on that lump once?
Judging from Belphegor’s behavior, it seemed that way.
"Are you really going to go to Satan?"
"Of course."
Belphegor nodded.
The corners of his mouth were still carrying a faint smile.
But his eyes were unexpectedly cold.
When Bael had pounced on Baalzebub.
The moment the two met each other’s eyes, what would happen next had already been decided.
‘Ecleksis!’
The demons’ powers fired toward each other.
The two forces collided, toppled, and expanded, trying to break each other’s balance.
Naturally,
Ruuuumble......!
they dragged both of them into the world of Pandemonium.
Ground where lava flowed and wraiths roamed. Innumerable blades falling from sky to earth.
Bael’s world.
Defiled statues and temples. Corpses lying upon them. Eyes that bled. Swarms of flies clinging to the corpses.
That was Baalzebub’s world.
"How foolish, Bael."
Baalzebub spoke. His already long hair came into Pandemonium and blew out endlessly.
"To choose to fight here."
Baalzebub’s chilling killing intent.
Even though he had lost a great deal of his power, it was different here.
Baalzebub had once been a god. At least within Pandemonium, his might was on a different level.
"......"
Bael silently pointed his hand at Baalzebub.
His world resonated with him and threw everything it had at Baalzebub.
Lava surged, blades hurtled, evil spirits rushed Baalzebub.
"Hmph."
Baalzebub watched the things coming at him with his arms folded.
Without moving a single finger,
THUD─
one of the statues on the temple brought its fist down.
That was all.
Whoosh.
That was enough to scatter everything coming at him like dust.
"Your world is pathetic, Bael."
Baalzebub glanced leisurely around.
Lava, wraiths, and those blades—are they guillotines? It was all just frightening images; the world wasn’t unified and remained unstable.
"Bael. You’re nothing but the scrap that broke off from me. You don’t have the vessel to contain a proper world."
"......Heh."
At Baalzebub’s blatant insult, Bael laughed.
Frondier had said something similar.
─You must be the king of Hell. In that case, this must be the scenery of that Hell. Isn’t that right? Which Hell are you talking about when you say it’s the one you reign over?
─This isn’t anywhere. Lava, grim reapers, noisy wailing wraiths, blades falling like a guillotine, corpses climbing up out of lava. There’s no way Hell could be this haphazard.
Bael had imitated Hell.
Because he was a king of Hell but didn’t know Hell.
Baalzebub, on the other hand, would know. He had the memories from when he’d been Baal.
But Bael was different.
When Baalzebub attempted to split his soul.
Bael had effectively been born at that moment.
"Pandemonium is a battlefield where each soul’s rank is measured."
Baalzebub said.
"You can’t defeat me here. You saw it just now. Your attacks don’t work on me."
Just as Baalzebub said. Every attack Bael could make in this world had been smashed by that one punch.
‘......Still, I suppose.’
He’s better than Frondier.
At least Baalzebub had gone through the motions of erasing the attacks that came at him.
Frondier had taken Bael’s attacks head-on and # Nоvеlight # worn a calm face like it was nothing.
That was true terror.
"You’re right, Baalzebub."
Bael said.
"You’ve lost power, and I’ve lost rank. As you say, I’m at a disadvantage here. If I wanted to defeat you, it would’ve been better to endure Ecleksis and fight you in reality."
As Bael spoke, he bent his knees.
He gazed down at the lava boiling under his feet for a moment, then plunged his hand into it.
Sssizzle─
A gruesome sound as his hand cooked in lava.
"......?"
Baalzebub watched because he found it strange.
Not so much because Bael’s actions were odd,
but because why was he injuring his own world?
"Because I know this is right."
Bael pulled his hand out of the lava. A hand that had not only cooked but burned away. He opened and closed his ruined hand.
"It doesn’t matter who wins or loses anymore. We have to go back to how we were."
Bael and Baalzebub. Two that originally should have been one.
Bael was saying that it was time to return to one.
"Even if that process means losing you?"
Baalzebub looked down at Bael with arrogant eyes.
The awareness that the original him was Baal belonged to Baalzebub. Bael had no such thing.
Baalzebub was certain he could never lose this fight.
"Yes."
That was why Bael spoke.
"Even if it means losing me. This is how it has to be."
"......Fine. In any case, this is Pandemonium. Unless one of us disappears, it’s a prison we’ll be trapped in forever."
Baalzebub’s eyes shone with light.
THUD! THOOOM!
Statues fell from the sky. Every one of them wore Baal’s form. Statues made long ago by those who worshiped him.
But now the statues bled, and everyone who had worshiped him lay as corpses.
SPLAT!
This time, what stabbed into the ground was a corpse.
No, it had been making odd noises until just before it reached the ground.
THUD! CRACK! SPLAT!
Corpses kept falling one after another.
No, they had been humans until just before they hit the ground.
Too many to count, they fell from the sky to the earth, making a dry sound that was neither a scream nor a shout.
The sound "ah."
The dried-out "ah" that they spat.
Those piled together as they fell,
Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah─
and the sound crashed onto the ground in a single heap and sprayed.
This was the gift of the Spirit Baal bestowed, tongues.
Death granted solely for the sake of worship.
Baal, god and demon.
Now his worship could only be accomplished through death.
‘Indeed.’
Bael watched as countless humans fell.
Humans who had actually existed once, some distant age ago.
Had they been bound to Baal’s world and trapped in a cycle of infinite falling worship?
‘At least this much should be what Hell looks like.’
THUD! CRACK!
The corpses kept falling and widened Baal’s domain.
Where the corpses landed turned into a strange domain of power that pushed back Bael’s scenery.
His lava, his wraiths, they simply couldn’t get close to the falling corpses.
"Are you prepared, Bael."
Rumble!
Right after Baalzebub spoke.
The corpses suddenly began to fall all around Bael.
"Ah, aah....... Aaaah......."
Among them, a few who hadn’t died twitched and crawled toward Bael.
They weren’t zombies. Even if they were illusions, they were still people.
They were just right on the verge of death.
"Ah......"
And before long, they went limp.
THUD!
Another human fell on top of them.
CRACK!
And another on top of that.
Humans right on the verge of death, stacked up like that.
The very smell of death was piling up around Bael.
"Aaaaaaaaaaah─"
And soon after.
Rrrrrumble.
Humans crashed over Bael from every side.
They covered every speck of light and swallowed Bael up.
Neither lava nor wraiths could push them back.
Bael sank into the darkness, gripped in the corpses’ hands.
‘As I thought.’
His world couldn’t defeat Baalzebub.
Just like Frondier had said.
His power was meager.
─Right now your Hell is still just an imitation. It’s nothing more than the old image humans have of it.
When Frondier had given him power.
Frondier had spoken to Bael, whose body was writhing in pain.
─Stop imitating.
Honestly, at the time, he had barely heard it because of the pain of mana being forced into him.
But now he understood.
─You are not Baal.
When Baal had attempted to split his soul, the part he had torn off as "the demonic part of himself" was Bael.
Because Baal had tried to become a god, Bael was the part he had discarded from the start as "not truly his."
So Bael didn’t need to cling to that either.
THUD─
"......?"
While Bael was being buried under the pouring corpses,
Baalzebub saw something strange.
'......The lava.'
The lava was disappearing.
The wraiths scattered, the cracked ground drew together again and began to close its gaps.
Was it because Bael was dying? Was his world fading away?
'......No. His domain isn’t shrinking.'
Baalzebub’s eyes narrowed.
At some point, the corpses he worshiped had stopped expanding their domain.
He had thought they would be able to devour Bael’s domain in short order.
'Why? He’s lost his rank as one of the Seven Deadly Sins. There’s no way he could be a match for me in Pandemonium.'
THUD! THOOOOM!
This time, blades.
The blades that had been falling from above like guillotines now lost their strength and dropped to the ground.
And then one of those blades fell toward Bael,
Sliiice─
and all the corpses surrounding Bael were cut away, revealing Bael, who had been buried.
"!"
"Baalzebub."
Bael spoke his name.
"Do you want to become Baal."
"......Of course. What are you talking about."
"Heh heh. Of course you do. Your original personality is Baal. That’s why you want to eat the me that was cut off."
Bael, demon of gluttony.
He was a demon who suffered from hunger, always wandering in search of something to gorge himself on.
But that hunger could never be filled.
Because it was a hole in his soul.
"But here’s the thing, Baalzebub. My position is different."
"What?"
"I’m the very demon he defined and cast off from Baal."
And then.
Shadows came creeping up behind Bael.
They weren’t just one or two, but many tens, many hundreds of eyes, each stepping forward.
A host.
This was Bael’s host.
"I am not one of the Seven Deadly Sins."
"You bastard......!"
Bael had finally drawn his host into his Ecleksis.
They clearly weren’t actual demons.
But in this soul-battle of Ecleksis, the fact that he could rouse the host he originally possessed meant that
Bael had decided what he was.
"I am Number One of the 72 Demons."
Bael’s host took heavy steps and each picked up one of the fallen guillotine blades. Those became their cherished weapons.
"Now our ranks should be more of a match."
