Chapter 5 — I’m Not Used to Talking to People, So I’m Not Very Good at It

When he awoke, Yogiri was alone in the carriage. Tomochika and the others must have left him to sleep. It didn't seem like they were moving, so the group was likely taking a break from their journey.

"It doesn't feel like I was out for that long..."

Still groggy, he glanced at his watch. It had been about half a day. Considering how tired he'd been, it wouldn't have been strange for him to have remained asleep for much longer. So the fact that he had woken up must have meant that he'd sensed the presence of death.

It wasn't severe enough that he needed to act immediately, but it felt like something that might come back to bite him later if he didn't deal with it now. The sense of danger was so faint, it was almost like looking through a mist.

Yogiri's understanding was that they'd been looking for a place to relax. Risley's objective had been to go to the capital to find him. Now that she had, there was no reason to hurry off anywhere else, but things were understandably chaotic around the capital at the moment. Staying in that area would have been inconvenient.

Yogiri stepped out of the carriage. They were in the wilderness, and there was a river nearby, along which numerous carriages had been parked. Large tents had been set up around them, so it looked as if a small settlement had sprung up. It reminded him of the traveling circuses he had seen in movies.

"I wish I knew what was going on. Guess I should ask someone."

The presence of death was slowly growing stronger. It hovered over the entire area, so whatever it was could potentially kill everyone in the vicinity. He could tell when someone was specifically targeting him, but that didn't seem to be the case here. It was more like the experience he'd had during his encounter with the Aggressor known as "the Darkness." It was hard to say whether it had personally intended him any harm, but everything the Darkness touched as it moved was transformed into dust and decay.

In short, something overwhelmingly powerful was nearby, but the chances of it actually reaching them were still fairly low. Yet the presence of death was getting stronger and stronger, which meant that the possibility was growing.

This looks bad, Yogiri thought. But if there's anything going on around Dannoura, Mokomoko will tell me.

He knew that Mokomoko would call in an instant if her descendant was in danger. Although the spirit's abilities seemed a bit inconsistent when it came to interacting with the physical world, he trusted her fully in her role as Tomochika's guardian. Even so, it was probably best to find them as soon as possible. He had been walking around for a while at this point and had yet to see any sign of them.

It sounded like there were people nearby, so he went in that direction. Making his way around the tents, he found Tomochika bound by glowing chains. Most of the others around her were in the same situation. Theodisia and Euphemia were fighting what appeared to be the enemy, although they looked like soldiers from the Kingdom of Manii.

"What's going on?"

His mind was still a little foggy, and he couldn't fully grasp the situation. But his number one priority was to help Tomochika.

As he approached, she turned to face him. "Takatou! Where have you been?!"

"I'm guessing that was rhetorical, but I was sleeping."

"Even with all this noise?!" He was indeed a deep sleeper. There wasn't much he could do about it.

Yogiri stepped around in front of her. She certainly wasn't an unpleasant sight. The way the chains wrapped around her torso did a good job of accentuating her chest. While they appeared to be magical, they seemed to have a physical element too.

"I think I might be into this."

"Stop staring at me and help!"

"But this is the first time I've seen a sight like this."

"If that's all you want, you can have your own showing later on, but for now just do something about it!"

Feeling like it was a wasted opportunity, Yogiri killed the chains binding her. They immediately dissipated. As expected, they hadn't been physical objects.

Tomochika was the only one who had been released. Freeing everyone else sounded like more work than it was worth. Yogiri's ability was fundamentally intended to kill living things. While he could certainly target anything that he cared to, his accuracy dropped when it came to inanimate objects. So killing the chains right in front of him was doable, but killing the chains that were binding the many half-demons scattered across a wide area in all sorts of positions all at once was a tougher proposition.

"Obviously, I've woken up in the middle of a bad situation. Can you tell me what's going on?"

The half-demons were being restrained by fetters made of light, a group of mounted soldiers had arrived, and while Theodisia and Euphemia were attacking them with vigor, their assault wasn't having any effect. He could see that much with his eyes, but it didn't explain why any of it was happening.

"These people have come to take back the half-demons," Tomochika said, going on to quickly summarize the rest. Perhaps luckily, the soldiers had yet to realize that Yogiri had appeared, so they weren't paying the two of them much attention. They seemed content to wait for the sisters to give up their attack.

"This is such a mess," Yogiri muttered, feeling torn. If they wanted to follow the law, these representatives of the Kingdom of Manii would know the rules best, but was the law acceptable in the first place? For someone like Yogiri, who had traveled there from a very different world and knew nothing of the history or needs of this place, he didn't have much of a position to argue from.

But if I have to pick a side...

He recalled the treatment of the half-demons in the tower. In order to extract magical energy more efficiently from them, they had been mutated and deformed to the point where they no longer looked like people. The ones who had subjected them to such horrific treatment had had their reasons, but it wasn't something that he was willing to forgive.

"I guess we should see about talking things through first."

"We already did that!"

"If they aren't as power-hungry as the Sages, it's worth trying."

"It annoys me that you think you could get through to them when we couldn't."

Yogiri walked over to Darian. Noticing his arrival, Theodisia and Euphemia broke off their attack, falling back to his side.

"Will you help us? We can't make any headway here. We've done everything we can, but it's useless."

"It's hard to believe there are humans who can withstand the power of an Origin Blood."

"Let me try talking to them."

Stopping a few meters away from the troop's leader, Yogiri looked straight at him. From Tomochika's description, he was the second prince. He certainly seemed the part.

"Since you've chosen this moment to show up, you must be their representative, right?"

"Representative? I don't know if I'm qualified." Yogiri supposed that's how it must have looked with him standing at the head of the group now.

"Have you given up yet? I'd really like to avoid violence, if possible. I would be most grateful if you would just return with us. Of course, we only intend to take the stolen half-demons back. The ones with no legal owners have no one to be returned to, after all."

His demeanor was calm and confident. He didn't seem to have any sense of guilt over what he was doing. He clearly didn't think that it was wrong.

"I'm not a fan of fighting either. So could you just leave us alone?"

"Hm. Do you not understand the situation you're in? You should be able to tell that your attacks aren't going to work on us."

"If our attacks don't work, and you don't attack us, we won't get anywhere."

"Is that supposed to be a negotiation tactic?" Tomochika commented as she came up beside him.

"I thought I'd give it a try, but I'm not used to talking to people, so I'm not very good at it."

"Then why did you volunteer to be a spokesperson?!" she replied, exasperated, although she knew well that he simply preferred not to attack someone who wasn't actively targeting him.

"I guess you don't quite understand the difference in strength between us. I have no choice, then." Darian stretched his right hand upwards. Light shot from it into the sky, drawing a complicated geometric formation in the air. It looked like a multilayered magic circle. The collection of letters and shapes expanded into a sphere, which then stretched downwards, becoming a column of light that covered a large area nearby. And then the chillingly massive, awe-inspiringly bright column vanished without a trace.

Everyone watching was bewildered. It was too quiet now. The land that had been there previously had vanished, but it was hard to trust their eyes even with the truth right in front of them. In place of the landscape was a vast emptiness, a hole so deep that they couldn't see the bottom. It was like the scenery had just been erased—like it had never existed at all.

Right. So, that's the feeling of death I was getting earlier, Yogiri thought. If they were hit with that magic directly, the entire half-demon camp would disappear in an instant, and the range was so large that there was no way they could escape.

The half-demons sank into despair. In the face of the prince's overwhelming power, they quickly lost the will to resist.

"I would expect nothing less of Lord Darian!"

"You just changed the whole landscape like it was nothing!"

"I guess we'll have to redraw our maps now, huh?"

"No, he was still going easy on them. After all, he let them see the magic circle so clearly."

"What part of that was 'going easy'?!"

"Do you really need to go that far for some half-demons? Oh, look, the poor things are frozen in fear now."

The soldiers were busy heaping praise on their leader. They had been silent up until then but were now openly and loudly applauding him.

"Seems like things are getting worse, doesn't it?" Tomochika observed.

"Yeah, they don't really strike you as professional soldiers, do they?"

When Darian had been the only one speaking, his men had maintained a solemn air. But once his subordinates started chattering amongst themselves, the atmosphere had changed completely.

"Now then, what do you say to that? Are you willing to come quietly?"

"I mean, that's nice as a demonstration and all, but you're planning on taking them alive, aren't you? So what's the point of showing us all that?"

"Well, this is a problem. Even after my demonstration, you still don't seem to understand the danger you're in."

"Give it up, Darian. They don't get that you're taking pity on them. They're the kind of idiots where you've gotta kill a few people in front of them first," one of the soldiers said, moving his horse up.

"But... Ah, I see. If we kill one of the half-demons who wasn't reported as stolen, it won't be an issue. The ones with no owners are basically wild animals, after all."

"No. This time it's my turn." Yogiri answered before Darian could take action.

"Your turn?"

"I can see that just telling you to go home won't work, so I'll have to kill whichever one of you is closest to me after the prince."

"Takatou! That's—"

"I know what you're going to say, but that's the best I can do."

Tomochika was probably going to argue that there was no real need to kill anyone. The soldiers hadn't actually harmed them yet. It was hard to say unequivocally that they were bad people. But taking the half-demons' side meant becoming an enemy of the kingdom, and that meant fighting the kingdom's army. While he would prefer to keep the damage to a minimum, if he tried to kill only parts of them like he had done with Lain, the threat that he posed would likely not be fully apparent, and he would be forced to continue. Even as a warning shot, he'd need to kill at least one person.

"Go for it. If you're going to kill someone, see if you can take me out!"

The man that had moved forward a moment before urged his horse another few steps ahead, stopping directly in front of Yogiri as if challenging him.

"Bring it on," he snorted. "What do you even think you can do? What could you possibly do against the invincible armor that Darian made—"

"Die." Yogiri pointed at the man as he spoke, making his intentions clear to everyone.

"Are you satisfied? Then..." Darian's voice abruptly cut off as the soldier fell from his horse.

The atmosphere changed at once. This development was beyond anything the soldiers had ever faced. Yogiri waited for the shock of it to work its way through the group. Killing them all would have been easy enough, but he had no desire to proactively harm people. Even if just a temporary solution, his only goal was to get them to leave.

"I can kill anyone just by thinking it. So please go."

You're not going to wipe them out? Mokomoko asked.

"If we leave the country, I'm sure they'll stop chasing us."

It could become more of a hassle later, but right now these people weren't specifically targeting him or Tomochika. He was reluctant to take them all out without further provocation.

"How dare you! What do you think you know about our Invincible Battalion?!"

"That you're clearly not invincible."

They must have understood the danger, but the troop didn't seem to consider retreat an option yet.

"Fine! There is no need for Lord Darian to dirty his own hands! My magic will—" a woman behind Darian shouted, but she was unable to finish. Just like the man before her, she promptly fell motionless from her horse.

"It should be obvious, but if you attack me, I'll fight back. Oh, and I won't attack anyone who tries to escape, so feel free to run away."

He had planned to carry out his demonstration with a single death, but nothing was ever easy.

Once again, Yogiri was reminded of his poor negotiating skills.