Demon King Daimaou: Volume 8 Read online

  Prologue

  In this empire, the Emperor held no power at all. His only job was to live in a huge, beautiful palace in a forest at the center of the capital, and spend his life praying for the citizens of the Empire.

  But the people of the Empire had always loved their rulers, and the current Emperor (or Empress, rather), Kazuko, was especially beloved. Special measures were taken to ensure that she maintained the form of a charming, beautiful young girl. Her mannerisms were artful and elegant, and every time she opened her mouth, her words were wise and insightful.

  Thus, while Kazuko had no political power, she certainly did not lack for influence; a single word from her could drive the people to action. That was why there were careful restrictions on what she was allowed to publicly say, and careful measures were taken to ensure that her private life was kept from the public eye.

  As a result, Kazuko had many secrets. Some of them were small, and some of them were big, but the biggest of them all was kept a secret even from the nation’s high priests. The only ones who knew her secret were the highest ranking members of the royal guard, and a single young girl.

  The secret was this: Kazuko had a twin. And of course, the young girl who knew it was her elder sister.

  The Imperial family had a number of strange customs. One of them was that if the family ever gave birth to twins, the eldest was to lose her right of ascension to the throne, and be raised in secret to serve as a replacement for her younger sister, should it ever be needed. The imperial family’s servants faithfully followed these rules, and raised Kazuko’s older sister in a hidden room in the palace.

  The elder sister was never even given a name, for she too was Kazuko.

  “I’m Kazuko? But then, who is she?”

  The young girl was looking out at a brightly lit room in the palace, holding a doll she’d been given as a toy. In that room was another girl with the same face as her, sitting at a tiny desk and being taught to read by her instructor.

  “She is also Kazuko,” the Liradan who took care of her said.

  “But why am I not allowed to talk to her?”

  “Because that’s what the rules say.”

  “But why am I not allowed to study, like she is?”

  “You will learn the things she studies very shortly. But all you’ll have to do is use a machine. There will be no need for you to work hard or study.”

  “Hmmm... So it’s easier for me, huh? But she has to work hard.”

  The girl laughed as she spoke. But later, when she grew up and began to understand more about the world around her, she learned just how unnatural her life was. At regular intervals, the Empress’s memories would be transferred into her mind. She would believe, without the slightest doubt, that she was Empress Kazuko. But there was another Empress in the palace, one that she could only stare at. It was a strange feeling, one that nobody but her had ever experienced.

  After a while, the girl ceased to understand at all who she was. To make matters worse, the girl was forbidden to communicate with anyone but a small group of Liradans. When she tried to escape from the carefully hidden room that made up her entire world, the Liradans would always find her and bring her back.

  The girl had never spoken to anyone, but her counterpart, Empress Kazuko, interacted with any number of people at the palace daily. And all those memories were implanted in the girl — she knew the names and faces of all the world’s leaders and the nation’s high priests, but none of them had the slightest idea that she existed.

  The girl had no one who could prove to her who she was. And in that respect, the Liradans were useless. Whenever she asked them, they could never give her a real answer to her question.

  But the girl never went insane, and she never killed herself. The best medical technology in the world made sure of it. Regular injections of psychotropic drugs ensured her mental stability, and just like the real Kazuko, her body was altered to be exceptionally long-lived.

  Her empty life went on and on, far longer than she would have wanted it to, and eventually, she stopped thinking about who she was. She was a creature of the shadows, ignored by everyone; the polar opposite of the Empress of the land of the rising sun.

  Eventually she just stopped thinking about it, and just accepted that this was who she was. And in doing so, she ceased to think of herself as human, and began to think of herself as a kind of ghost. As a ghost, she spent her days looking down on the world from above. A formless observer, an empty vessel to be filled with data.

  But all of that changed when she began to study magic.

  When Empress Kazuko grew up and began to study magic, the young girl did as well. But their differing personalities resulted in them learning distinctly different kinds of magic. The Empress was able to master most magic easily, but the other Kazuko displayed very little talent. There was one spell, however, that she had a strange talent for: a secret magic possessed only by the imperial family, that almost no one else in the Empire had been able to master: the ability to possess the minds of multiple targets at once. Perhaps it came from the fact that she thought of herself as a ghost.

  The girl devoted all her energies to mastering this strange magic, and eventually came to realize what an incredible power she possessed. She could take control of any number of mindless tools without even touching them, and if she limited herself to a single target, she could even take over a sentient Liradan.

  Her only guards were Liradans — if she wanted to, she could escape. She was shocked and overjoyed when she realized this, and began to think about the best way to put an end to her imprisonment. But her joy faded in a matter of minutes.

  There was nothing for her to do. She was no one. She wasn’t even human. No one would ever give her a role to fulfill. By taking over a doll or a Liradan, she could become anybody she wanted. But there was no “real” her left that could go out into the outside world.

  But that began to change when one of the dolls she used to observe the world outside found a strange man. The man didn’t exist in any of the past data. He was no one, too. But he knew all sorts of very strange things, and while she’d never found out how he did it, he’d risen to the top of the magical intelligence organization known as CMID-8.

  The girl decided to make contact with the man. She wasn’t interested in his work, but she was interested in him.

  The man called himself Boichiro Yamato. She told him the truth about who she was, and what her circumstances were, and he listened to her sincerely.

  That was the day she decided to leave. She decided to join CMID-8, and moved her hideout from the palace to a small condominium.

  That was the day the girl got a name of her own.

  Her name was 2V.

  1 - A New God?

  After the students returned from Virtual Phase Space, Constant Magical Academy was in a state of panic. Korone, the Liradan that served as Akuto Sai’s observer, had suddenly shot him with a cannon.

  The compact laser beam she’d fired from the beam weapon she kept in her bag was powerful enough to slice a human body in half; it was clearly an act of attempted murder.

  To make matters worse, Akuto was injured. He’d been attacked by Zero in VPS, where he couldn’t use his body’s recovery abilities, and he was almost dead. An attack on him in such a state couldn’t possibly be written off as one of Korone’s frequent bad jokes.

  All the students there were too shocked by her sudden action to move. Everybody had noticed there was something wrong with Korone, but it was also clear that there was something wrong with everything else, too. In the distance, below them in the city, they could see black towers of smoke rising up.

  “Every Liradan in the city has gone out of
control...” one of the students whispered as he looked at the breaking news displayed on his student handbook. “Then...”

  All eyes turned to Korone. Everyone began to step away from her.

  Korone was still holding her beam weapon at her side as she began to walk down the path the students made by backing away from her. At the end of the path, Akuto was lying on the ground. Keena Soga and Fujiko Eto were leaning over him with expressions of shock.

  “Wh-What happened?”

  “S-Stop it, Korone...”

  But Korone didn’t seem to hear them. She was still walking forward with the barrel of her gun pointed towards Akuto.

  “I cannot kill humans. Please move to the side.”

  Keena was shielding Akuto’s body from Korone as she leaned over, and this had evidently stopped her from firing.

  Fujiko’s expression froze when she heard Korone’s words. “...It looks like she didn’t go crazy and lose control.”

  “Is somebody controlling her, then?” Keena whispered. But there was nobody there to answer.

  Korone walked up to the both of them silently, and looked down at them.

  “C-Come on... If you can talk, tell us why you’re doing this!” Keena said with a quavering voice.

  Korone put her gun back in her bag. For a moment, Keena smiled.

  “W-Whew...”

  But then Korone spoke again. “I am doing this in order to eliminate the current Demon King.”

  Keena couldn’t speak. And then Korone took out a thin rod from her bag. Fujiko looked at it in terror; she knew immediately that it was a melee combat weapon. It was shaped like a sword, with a stick for a blade.

  “This is a stun stick. It will enable me to remove any resistance without resorting to lethal measures. Resistance is not advised.” Korone ran her hand along the stun stick, and it lit up with electricity.

  “Looks like we’ll have to fight...” There was sweat on Fujiko’s face. She’d just fought Korone inside VPS, even if it was just a game. She knew that if Korone was serious, she could move far faster than a human could react. “This... might be a problem.”

  It was worse than a problem. It was a lethal situation. None of the other students would want to try to fight back against Korone. In a melee fight, the only other person she could count on was Junko Hattori, but when she finally saw the class rep in the corner of her eye, she seemed to be in some kind of state of shock.

  “If I only had a moment’s opening, I might be able to do something...” Fujiko tried to find an opening in Korone’s movements, but failed.

  “If you refuse to move, you will be eliminated.” Korone raised the stun stick.

  “No!” Keena clung tightly to Akuto’s body. Fujiko closed her eyes, ready to face the end.

  Just then, a shock wave violently shook the air around them.

  “...What was that?” Fujiko opened her eyes and looked around.

  Korone was frozen, her body twitching slightly. “Aaaaaaaaaaaaaa....” Her voice sounded like a broken tape recorder, and she wasn’t moving at all.

  Fujiko had no idea what had just happened, but this was just the distraction she needed.

  “Cerberus!” she shouted.

  A demon beast came bounding out from the school building in answer to her call. It was a huge dog monster, with three heads. She’d trained it before to listen to her commands, and now it was her favorite.

  The beast picked up Akuto’s body with one of its mouths, then jerked its head to flip him onto its back. Keena was still clinging tightly and refusing to let go, so she went with him. Fujiko leapt on the beast’s back as well. She ordered the beast away from the schoolyard, but when she realized that Junko was still too shaken to move, she ordered the Cerberus to put her on its back too.

  “Hyah!” The shock of being picked up by a giant dog mouth and flung upwards brought Junko back to her senses.

  “Fujiko, what are we going to do now?” she asked as she looked into her eyes.

  “We have to run. We still don’t know what’s going on. The only thing I can say with certainty right now is that this ‘First Demon King’ we saw inside the game is what made Korone go crazy.” Fujiko started to make the Cerberus run from Korone.

  “Wh-Where are we going to run to? Ackie’s tough, but he’ll need time to get better, right?” Keena said, worried.

  “We don’t have a lot of options. Our best choice now is to go to one of the black mages’ hidden villages.” She said “now,” but the tone of her voice made it clear that she’d been planning on this for a while.

  “Hidden villages?” Keena asked, surprised.

  “That’s right. There’s a spot where some of the black mages I’ve been dealing with make their home. It’s a little out of the way, but that’s what makes it a perfect place for us to hide.”

  Junko raised her voice in objection. “Fujiko, that sounds like you’re admitting he’s the Demon King...”

  “Of course I am,” Fujiko said, as if she was surprised there was any question about it at all.

  Junko looked uncertain. “I don’t know if that’s what’s best for him...”

  “We’re not in a position to worry about that now. If every Liradan in the country is under that thing’s control, the whole empire’s been taken over.”

  Junko didn’t seem to have anything to say in response to that.

  “And if it has, the only ones who can fight back are the black mages. We’re rebels anyway.” Fujiko grinned. Then she turned to look behind the Cerberus. “We don’t have time to talk about it, either.”

  Korone had recovered, and was skating across the ground towards them.

  “Tch... But even if that’s true, I can’t go to a black mage village...” Junko said, pained at the thought. She looked from the unconscious Akuto to behind them, then back again. After glancing over and over at Akuto, she looked sad for a moment, and then jumped off of the Cerberus’s back.

  “I’ll hold off Korone!”

  “...If we get separated here, I won’t be able to tell you where the village is!” Fujiko said as Junko began to recede into the distance.

  But Junko didn’t look back.

  “Get out of here!” She raised her katana up high.

  Meanwhile, Korone skated closer and closer.

  “Yah!” With a short cry, Junko brought down her sword.

  But in the next instant, Korone’s stun stick landed square on her stomach. There was a sharp sound of crackling electricity.

  “Gwah!” Junko grunted and passed out cold.

  From the Cerberus’s back, Keena gasped in surprise at Korone’s merciless blow. “Even if she was serious, normally Korone would tell a joke right now...!”

  Korone knocked Junko out without a single sarcastic remark, however, and continued to follow after them. She was moving faster than the dog could run, and before long she was right at its tail.

  “But this time, I can fight back!” Fujiko raised her hand to cast a spell.

  But then she lowered it, confused. The mana wasn’t coming to her hand.

  “What? My magic...”

  “You can’t use it?” Keena asked in surprise.

  “Have the gods gone out of control too...?” Fujiko gasped just as Korone jumped up, holding her stun stick out as she attacked from above.

  “Fine then...!” Fujiko tried to use the code for black magic — magic that wasn’t controlled by the gods — but Korone was just a little bit faster. “I won’t make it in time...!”

  Fujiko’s eyes went wide with fear, but then the same strange phenomenon struck Korone again. Her body began to vibrate, and she fell from the sky like she’d suddenly passed out.

  “Again? I’m glad it saved me, but... what just happened?” Fujiko asked, when suddenly the Cerberus began to drop in speed. “What’s wrong?” Fujiko looked forward again to see Keena pointing to the front.

  “There’s someone there...” Keena said. On the hill away from the school, where the Cerberus had fled to, there was a
single girl standing. She held some sort of box in her hands.

  “Who is it?” Fujiko tensed up for a fight, but the girl waved as if she recognized them.

  “You’re Fujiko Eto, right? If you’re running away, can you let me on? I’ll explain later,” the girl said cheerfully.

  Fujiko looked suspicious for a second, of course, but when she heard the girl — Yoshie Kita — say her next words, her mouth fell open in surprise.

  “I’m sure this will come as a surprise, but this isn’t our first meeting. I was Yoshihiko inside the game.” “...So that was what happened, then?” Fujiko nodded, satisfied, and let her on the Cerberus. She turned her eyes towards the box that Yoshie was holding. There was a cord coming out of it connected to an antenna that was pointing towards Korone.

  “This came with the VPS generator I used. It was supposed to be a way to vibrate the mana in the air to make a barrier, but I made some quick adjustments to make it directional,” Yoshie explained.

  “So wherever you point that thing, the mana will vibrate and keep anyone in its path from moving, huh?” Fujiko said.

  Yoshie nodded. “That’s right. It looks like the gods aren’t giving anyone permission to use magic, but machines work just fine. So this is all we can count on right now. But I can only use it a little at a time, or the machine will just overheat and burn out. All it can do is buy us some time...”

  While Yoshie sighed, Fujiko just smiled. “As long as you can buy us a little time with it, we can get away. I’m no machine, but I’ve got magic I can use without the help of the gods. I can use black magic.”

  “Woooah! That’s great. I’m counting on you, then!” Yoshie clapped her hands together.

  Fujiko grinned and said,

  “You make it sound easy, but it’s not....Bring the darkness of my heart to the world!”

  Fujiko chanted the words to focus her mind, and a dark aura flowed out from her body into the surrounding air. No, it looked like an aura, but it was black mana. The mana was warping the light around her, and making it look like it was pitch black. The dark cloak of mana quickly spread out over a hundred-meter radius.