漫画大王

Chapter 4

Normally, one would describe such a situation as “incredibly lucky,” as people could only dream of being treated like that even once in their lives. However, I was merely disguising myself to appear as a human; in reality, I was just a powerless teenage demon hiding underneath a low-level Camouflage spell.

Yes, I guess you could say that I was... screwed.

Much like a cow being taken to a slaughterhouse, I was led out of the Demon King’s castle and arrived at the barracks of the human army, which was also where the commander-in-chief was. The Princess received care from numerous mages and priests, and the same treatment was administered to me.

Fortunately, I seemed to be fine receiving magic from the priests, and the curative spells the clerics cast on me didn’t have any adverse effects either. Thank goodness demons weren’t allergic to “holy” magic.

Of course, I already knew that there was no such thing as magic compatibility issues between demons and humans. If there had been something like that, I wouldn’t even have dared to be rescued by humans.

Not long after I had become a dirty mess, I was being crowded by many people who were cleaning and washing me up. The act of being cleaned by strangers was extremely embarrassing, but the fear of being instantly killed if I made one wrong move overwhelmed any other emotion.

If the mages had used any kind of dispelling magic on me, that might have undone the Camouflage spell, and that would have been the end of me. Fortunately, a significant number of troops were involved in searching the Demon King’s castle, and the majority of the mages appeared to be overwhelmed with taking care of the Princess alone.

However, the real issue was that Princess Charlotte either had a naturally kind heart, or she had simply fallen in love with me.

“Please, attend to him before me; he saved my life,” Charlotte said.

The problem was that she cared about me too much. Even though her condition was much worse, she kept instructing people to look after me first.

I bowed to the girl who had been my companion just moments ago as I responded, “Oh, no. No, Your Highness, I’m fine. I’m feeling very healthy.”

It was true, I genuinely did not have any injuries; all I had done was roll around on the ground a couple of times.

“No. You mentioned that you lost your memory. You must have suffered a severe curse or something,” she replied.

“Oh, no! No, I’m fine! My memories... y-yeah... it’s fine, it’s not a big deal!”

“How unfortunate,” she said pitifully.

‘Okay, I understand that you are a good person and you want to help me, but can’t you just leave me alone now?’ The single biscuit I had given her was reaping a ten-fold reward.

I convinced the nursing staff that there was nothing physically wrong with me, and all I wanted to do was to rest somewhere else. They listened to my plea and permitted me to lie down in one of the private rooms next to the barracks.

The situation had gotten a bit better, but not by that much; my life had been spared for just a little longer. It was as if I had escaped from a collapsing cave and had entered the tiger’s den instead.

[Event Completed – The Downfall]

[You have received 100 Achievement Points.]

I had somehow managed to clear the first quest.

***

The princess’s attention to me was persistent. After some essential emergency treatments were completed, she summoned me back to the barracks, where a massive feast was prepared.

“You probably haven’t eaten in a long time. Eat as much as you want,” she said. I could hear the smile in her voice.

“Oh? Y-yeah, okay,” I replied.

However, I felt uncomfortable to start eating anything, as there were too many eyes on me at that moment. The princess stared at me intently for a moment and seemed to understand my struggle.

She apparently got the impression that I was someone who could not eat while others were watching.

The princess quickly glanced at the surrounding guards, mages, and clerics.

“Everyone, wait outside,” she said.

“But, Your Highness...”

“Are you going to say that this place isn’t safe? Even though the Demon King has died?” the princess said softly.

All of them left the barracks at the princess’s gentle order, leaving just the princess and me.

“Let’s eat!” she exclaimed.

“Oh, huh? Oh, yes, yes, sure,” I said.

The princess picked up a roasted turkey leg with her bare hands, tore it apart, and began to gnaw on it.

“...”

Maybe she had dismissed everyone not for my sake, but because she didn’t want anyone to watch her eat.

“Oh, um... you should slow down. You might get a stomach ache if you eat so fast like that,” I suggested.

Certainly, if a person ate that much, that fast, after being starved for a couple of days, they would have some kind of issue with their stomach later on. Or maybe she was eating like that because she had a reliable cleric outside who could save her from any illness with their magic?

“You should hurry up and eat too.”

Well, she was definitely not listening to me.

***

Given the substantial meal laid out before us, I had enough time to organize my thoughts while the princess was munching away.

The prologue not only mentioned the Demon King Baalier\'s death but a previous event as well, one that continued into the prologue—the Great War. It was an all-out war for territory between the Demon Realm and humans.

This made sense because this was what triggered the hellish fight between the human army and the demon army in the first place.

The exact reasons for the war weren’t set, but the mission was clear—to conquer the Demon Realm. To counter this, King Baalier prepared and launched a vicious attack on the human alliance to force a surrender.

Baalier sent out his spies throughout the human forces and used them to kidnap key figures of the human alliance such as politicians, kings, warriors, magicians, and even families in an attempt to hinder their participation in the war. The most crucial hostages in this operation were the First Princess of the Gradias Empire and her mother.

Baalier succeeded in kidnapping the empress and the princess. However, if the emperor were to withdraw from the war, the vassal states would inevitably follow and surrender as well. Knowing that giving up on the Great War would be a significant mistake and stir up discontent amongst the populace, he had no choice but to participate in the all-out war against the Demon Realm. In the end, all the human hostages perished, and only the princess survived.

I think that’s how the story went....

‘No, this doesn’t seem right. Let me consider it again.’

Even though I wrote this novel, I honestly could not remember every sentence word for word. Especially the prologue, since it was the very first part I wrote.

The cute princess that was eating quite vigorously in front of my eyes wasn’t such a significant character in this story, as my novel was set in a school.

To be honest, I hadn’t even been aware of Princess Charlotte’s name. It’s not that I’d forgotten; I genuinely had no knowledge of it. I could recall most names, even the minor characters like Pedestrian 1, but not her. I had no recollection of the princess’s name.

Let’s think: I wrote a story that came to life. Therefore, every part of life in that world, even those I didn’t imagine or write about, had been implemented automatically.

Thus, it was a world I knew well, but at the same time, it was also a world full of mysteries and unknowns, things that I hadn’t explicitly written about. For example, the guards outside the door probably each had their own past and story, but I knew nothing about that. I guess all this was just the nature of what happens when a fictional world comes to life.

Therefore, in this world, there were undoubtedly events that were happening or had already happened that I hadn’t described or written about. There were definitely going to be things in the past, present, and future that I didn’t know about. But one thing I could be sure of was that whatever I had written was fact, and guaranteed to occur.

The emperor did abandon the hostages and carried on with the all-out war. If the Emperor had surrendered right away, the entire war with the Demon Realm would have collapsed, and if he had missed the great opportunity to conquer the demons’ territory solely because of the hostages, there was a possibility that the Empire itself would have disintegrated due to the opposition from many vassal states. These were the facts I knew.

However, even though the First Princess should have been a very significant figure in the main story, I’d never really written about her. It was mainly a wholesome daily-life school-themed story, so although some content involving the royal family appeared, that was about it.

But the First Princess was right in front of me, and I hadn’t written anything about her. I knew it was too late to be thinking this, but if I had known ahead of time that someone so important like the princess had survived the Great War, I would have forced her appearance into the main story.

Nonetheless, in spite of her significance to the plot, she did not appear in my version of the story.

The princess was bound to play a crucial role in the upcoming story, yet she did not appear anymore. It was strange that the First Princess—whom I, as the author, had no clue about—survived the Demon King’s abduction during the war and yet did not even appear once later on.

It was like I was considering my novel as some sort of history textbook, interpreting and analyzing my own piece of writing. Authors usually remained ignorant of the narrative’s gaps and the gray areas in their plot, but now, I found myself within one of those gray areas. Those gaps in the plot were being filled with things I didn’t know existed, and would continuously be filled as such.

As this world was now my reality, the missing details of the story had to be connected with the future I knew. I had to deduce how the gaps I’d left in the plot had been filled. I had to infer the missing pieces of the story with the knowledge I had about the future.

My job was to unravel this narrative bridge that had formed when my novel had become reality, and ultimately connect future events with the continuously changing current events. I had to come up with an answer in the midst of this puzzle-like narrative.

The Princess had been rescued, but she didn’t appear at all in the later narrative of the royal family.

There were two possible answers to this situation.

First, my act of saving the princess caused a butterfly effect and changed the story. The princess was supposed to just die in the prison cell, whether by suicide or from severe malnutrition. I mean, was the one small biscuit I gave her enough to save her from starvation? The chances of this being the correct answer were very unlikely, but it was still a possibility.

The second possibility was based on the assumption that an event could occur in my novel without my knowledge. The overall result was what I had written, but the process could have been anything. For example, if I wrote that event A happened, there might be an entirely different series of events that happened before resulting in event A.

Let’s say I wrote a part of the novel very irresponsibly, for example, if I said “Oh, this event all of a sudden just occurred!” But that event was so unexpected in the plot that when it became reality, there had to be some kind of supporting events to make that event rational. In other words, some form of causality adjustment had to take place to bridge the gap between the event and the plot.

The teleportation scrolls not working inside the Demon King’s castle would be an example of this.

If this were the case, I would be in a strange situation where I knew about the events that were going to happen but had no clue as to why and how they would occur.

Was this a punishment for writing so recklessly?

So in conclusion, if it wasn’t the case that my existence in this world altered any past events and therefore the latter of the two possibilities was true, there was only one possible situation that was going to occur sooner rather than later. The princess who shouldn’t be alive was going to either be killed, or die.

“Hey, why aren’t you eating?” the princess asked while naively chewing on her food.

***

Even in the everyday, casual novels, villains are also necessary. There might be one without any villains at all, but that’s an endeavor for the authors who are masters of their craft. That’s because the presence of a villain vastly simplifies the progression of the narrative. If people ask, “Hey, why did that villain do this and that?” You can simply respond with, “Because he’s a villain!” and generate a lot of easy-storytelling material from that alone.

Yes, I was one of those unskilled authors who couldn’t write a proper story without villains.

In The Demon King is Dead, the main villain is the imperial prince, Vertus de Gradias. There were actually more antagonists throughout the story, but they were all irrelevant when compared to the prince himself. Villains that appeared inside the school were all kinds of childish, but the prince...he was in a different league. He was a villain who was into conspiracies, murder, and other corrupt activities—the kind of character who would do anything to sabotage their opposition and become the emperor.

From Vertus’s perspective, the First Princess was nothing but an obstacle and disturbance to him. She was bound to get all the attention of the people as she had just survived being kidnapped by the demons, and considering her position as the First Princess, her status in the imperial succession hierarchy was similar to his as well.

The fact that the princess was still alive would surely make Vertus anxious and keep him on his toes, as he probably thought she was dead, and that he had one less rival to think about.

This meant that there was a high possibility that Princess Charlotte would soon be killed—either by Vertus himself or by his associates.

Hence, Charlotte would meet her demise and disappear from the story, as per the plot I knew. Her death would likely come soon, and there was even a possibility that she would die before she returned to the empire.

She was in imminent danger. I didn’t know how or when she was going to be attacked, but I was certain it was going to be soon.

In contrast, it seemed like the princess had fallen into a food coma and had entered a deep sleep after her extravagant meal.

Could I save this girl? My own life was in jeopardy, so was I even in the position to help her? It actually might have been better if she had died, as then I would have had the chance to escape without anyone noticing me.

The moment the thought of saving my own life at the cost of another’s crossed my mind, a chill ran down my spine. I was just an ordinary person. Obviously, this was not an ordinary situation, but I was still a normal human being on the inside. I could clearly sense this because I couldn’t resist the feeling of self-hate and guilt I got from thinking about such a horrible thing.

I had to think positively. Charlotte was the closest thing I had to an ally in this unpredictable situation. If she became my friend, she could help me tremendously, even in the face of unexpected events in the future.

The only time I could talk to her face-to-face was now. Once the meal was over, the guards were going to come back in, and then it would be too late to have any conversation with her.

How on earth was I supposed to tell her that her life was in extreme danger? And how could I explain why I knew all that?

Suddenly, Charlotte woke up, and after wiping away the grease from her lips, she gazed at me. Her innocent expression had vanished, and the look on her face was now cold and serious. The atmosphere suddenly shifted, and Charlotte’s voice became eerily hushed.

“Alright, listen carefully now,” Charlotte said, her demeanor deadly serious. “Our lives are in danger.”

To my surprise, she said the exact words I had wanted to say. Not only that, she didn’t just say that her life was in danger, but “our” lives.