"......!"
Hearing Belphegor’s story, the Seven Deadly Sins fell silent.
Satan’s face hardened.
"You, so......."
"Yeah. I told you. This is part of the contract."
Belphegor hadn’t lied.
From the very beginning, there hadn’t been any such thing as malice in him.
He had simply had to do this.
"I’ve actually been on the giants’ side. For quite a while now. Loki told me. The owner of Weaving can choose whether to pass it on or not."
"......You believe that? Even if you side with the giants, there’s no guarantee Frondier will stop the inheritance,"
"Right. There isn’t."
But as Belphegor was now, he had no choice but to believe Loki.
No one but the owner of Weaving can possess complete information about it.
In the first place, even the owner themselves doesn’t know how to properly use the skill at the start, and it’s a unique skill that might appear once in a generation at best.
That’s why the information gap is overwhelmingly in Loki’s favor.
"So I already knew back then that Weaving would be inherited."
That fact meant that another war between humans and gods would happen.
If he wanted to sever his contract with Loki, Belphegor had to stand on humanity’s side in the next war.
It wasn’t a matter of whether or not he obtained Loki’s soul; it was a matter of undoing this shackle that limited his freedom every time a holder of Weaving appeared.
"Even if my freedom is restricted, it’s not that powerful. As long as I’m not moving personally, I can do pretty much whatever I want."
Just one thing.
Attacking the owner of Weaving themselves was a different story.
"It was like that when I fought Frondier. The contract orders me to help the owner of Weaving, and I was rebelling against it head-on. Rather than my power being restricted, it felt like my fate was. And in the end, I lost."
Belphegor definitely acknowledged Frondier’s strength. Even without the contract, who knows whether he would have won back then.
But Belphegor knew, and Frondier himself must have felt, that all kinds of luck had been at work in Frondier’s victory.
"Frondier’s combat method back then was to force his opponent into a binary choice. Whether he knew it or not, that style of fighting was the optimal condition for my shackle to take effect."
Frondier kept leading Belphegor, through psychological warfare, to pick the other side.
But the final moment had been pure luck. And that was when the contract’s effect had manifested.
"But, well."
Belphegor let out a short laugh.
"At least up until I came face to face with Frondier, I was still on the demons’ side."
"......What did you say? Now you say that?"
Asmodeus asked.
Belphegor answered.
"If Weaving is a skill that continues to be inherited, then there’s no need for the very next holder to be the one who topples the gods. It didn’t necessarily have to be Frondier."
If he failed, then the next, and then the next after that.
The shackle was annoying, but that was all. For Belphegor, it wasn’t a contract that posed that big a problem.
"I’m the demon of Sloth, you know? Even if there’s some restriction, if it’s just waiting, that’s not hard for me."
That was probably the only mistake Loki had made. Out of all the demons he could have picked, it had to be Belphegor. You could call it a mistake, but it was more like sheer bad luck.
"But the problem was somewhere else."
Then Belphegor looked at Satan.
"And that problem was you, Satan."
"Me?"
"Yeah. I knew the moment I saw Frondier using Weaving."
Up until he used Weaving, the Frondier in front of Belphegor had only been a fake whose soul had been swapped with the original’s.
Demons distinguish others by their souls. He knew immediately that the Frondier he was facing had a different soul from the Frondier he’d granted Sloth to as an infant.
But that Frondier used Weaving.
When he saw that, a single point of doubt connected in Belphegor’s mind at the time.
'Satan.'
The one who had asked him to bestow Sloth on Frondier was none other than Satan.
At that moment, Belphegor’s thoughts accelerated rapidly.
'Satan knew Frondier would use Weaving. Before Frondier even acquired the Weaving skill. That’s telling me two things.'
First, Satan also knew about the "inheritance" of Weaving.
Second, if he knew about future events, then Satan was connected to the Moirai.
It wasn’t strange for Satan to approach the gods. He’d always been that way.
But the fact that approach had succeeded was a different matter.
'Up until now, the gods never tried to negotiate with demons. Whether it was Satan or whoever. Even Baal in his prime, who was half a god, half a demon, had only ever been used by Odin.'
But this time was different.
Satan’s negotiations had gone through.
Either his long-suffering, desperate advances on the gods had finally worked, or else.
'......The gods had a reason they couldn’t help but negotiate with demons. And Frondier is at the center of it.'
And if that connected to the war with the giants.
Belphegor had needed to confirm it.
─Frondier. Killing you as you are now would be an easy task for me.
Back in the past, when he fought Frondier, Belphegor had said,
─Why side with the Empire?
─Why do you insist on choosing the side ‘where the most humans are alive’?
─Why do you insist on prolonging human tragedy?
Belphegor had asked.
How much did Frondier know about the truth of this world?
─Frondier, do you want humans to continue living?
─Do you really believe that’s happiness for humans?
At the time, Frondier clearly didn’t understand everything Belphegor was saying.
But he hadn’t denied it either. He had surely grasped the rough outline.
At the very least, he wasn’t some idiot who only swung his strength around, unaware that the gods were playing with him.
So when Belphegor saw Frondier grasp a version of Excalibur that was infinitely close to the real thing.
When, even if only temporarily, he took into his hands magical power that surpassed that of a Seven Deadly Sin.
─If it’s this guy, he could become the next hero of humanity......
─No, that’s a useless thought. Even if Frondier truly is a hero.
That was what he’d thought.
"Hey, Satan."
Belphegor addressed Satan.
"So in the end, why did you ask me to bestow Sloth on Frondier?"
"......What are you asking? You already know. Because I was wary of him."
"Yeah. That’s a fair answer."
Belphegor nodded with a smile.
"But it’s not enough."
"......!"
"That’s the reason I came all the way here in person, Satan."
Tap.
Belphegor made a light leap.
He closed a tremendous distance as if a bird had flapped its wings once, and stood right in front of Satan’s eyes.
"Lord Belphegor, it’s dangerous!"
The Four Knights shouted.
"Yeah. If I die, avenge me."
Belphegor gave an answer that wasn’t an answer at all, and then,
"Satan, at first I thought so too. That you’d obtained information that Frondier would acquire Weaving, and that you’d helped during the course of your negotiations with the Moirai. But when I thought about it, something felt off."
"......What did?"
"The gods already had a countermeasure prepared for ‘Weaving,’ didn’t they?"
"!"
That’s right.
Thanatos’s trigger.
Thanatos had prepared to kill the skill holder ✧ NоvеIight ✧ (Original source) when Weaving appeared in reality.
The gods were already ready. There was no need at all for Satan to come begging Belphegor for help.
"Even if that trigger failed, I don’t see the gods sticking their hands out to demons. Besides, you and I are both among the Seven Deadly Sins. Having to go through both of us would be far too much burden on the gods."
It wasn’t strange for Satan to push for talks with the gods.
That was the trap that made it hard to feel anything off about their negotiations.
But the gods’ position should have been completely different.
"You had another bargaining chip you brought to the gods, didn’t you?"
"......."
Satan closed his mouth.
Even if it meant being found out that he was hiding something, he would never reveal the contents. That was his resolve.
Belphegor tilted his gaze lazily.
"From what I can see, I’d say you realized it while you were creating the Metamorph Catastrophe."
The Metamorph Catastrophe made from Loki’s remains.
The only way Satan could have gotten ahead of Belphegor and the other gods in terms of information was through that.
And in fact, during his research, Satan had learned about "inheritance."
But had he really only discovered the inheritance?
"We were pretty close, right, Satan."
"......."
He no longer reacted to light provocation.
Belphegor chuckled softly and continued.
"During the last war."
"......."
But his eyes were telling.
Satan wasn’t avoiding his gaze.
"One of the biggest reasons Manggot failed was the ‘second Frondier.’"
"......!"
"That was the Metamorph Catastrophe, wasn’t it?"
Mei, who had imitated Frondier. Because of that, most of Manggot’s forces gathered in one place, and Frondier, who predicted the location, discovered them and annihilated them.
"In the end, when you showed up at the Imperial Palace, that was the start of everything going wrong. At the time, I wondered why you were making such a fuss just because one test subject had slipped into the human world."
Mei was Satan’s only successful product of the Metamorph Catastrophe project.
Every other one aside from Mei had been a failure.
And now that Mei was currently by Frondier’s side.
"Mind telling me? Just what’s so bad about the two of them being together."
Belphegor stared into Satan’s eyes, flushed red with rage.
"What in the world is going to happen that even the gods agreed to negotiate with you when they heard it."
***
Olympus.
The battle between Hestia’s forces and the gods continued.
Naturally, Hestia was at a disadvantage.
"Ugh......!"
Right now, most of the Twelve Gods aside from Hestia were on Zeus’s side, and Zeus himself had entered the fray.
Hestia was a high-ranked god, but not one suited for battle.
From the start, Hestia had had no intention of winning; her goal was to delay the advance of the gods toward the human world via Bifröst as long as possible.
In other words, she was stalling for time. But even that alone was costing her a great deal of blood.
And then.
"Everyone, out of the way!!"
A god’s enormous voice shook Mount Olympus.
Thanatos.
The moment she saw him, the despair Hestia felt was beyond words.
Thanatos was a god you couldn’t easily meet, but she knew more than anyone that he was Frondier’s enemy.
It’s over now. That was what she thought, when,
Fwoooosh!
He flew off toward somewhere without so much as a glance around him.
"......?"
Everyone looked at that sight in bewilderment.
Judging from the direction, his destination was probably Yggdrasil.
For some reason, Thanatos was urgently heading for Yggdrasil.
All the lesser gods shrank back at his murderous voice. Hestia was too far away, and too busy facing off with the other gods, to stop him.
But all of them,
Felt an immense sense of wrongness at Thanatos’s appearance and opened their eyes wide.
'......Thanatos?'
Zeus, observing him, furrowed his brow.
'What happened to his arm?'
