TERNLF Vol. 3 Chapter 2 Part 1

◆Chapter 2◆

“Could you wait here a moment? I ought to inform the Demon King first that you have arrived.”

“I’d appreciate it.”

“Yes, please.”

At the top of the stairs was a room that resembled a small waiting chamber.

For an instant, I was thrown off by the lack of anything that looked like a door, but when Faura held her hand over part of the wall, a hole opened in it just like before.

According to Faura, the wall visible through that opening was the back of the throne.

Considering it was a throne meant to seat a body that enormous, its size spoke for itself.

I recalled the figure of the “Demon King” I had seen before losing consciousness, and a smile slipped onto my face.

“?”

Seeing that, Nikka tilted her head suspiciously.

She had probably found it strange that I was smiling when we were about to meet the fearsome Demon King.

But I already knew that the true identity of that Demon King was a machine that had existed in my former world.

“You may enter, Toa.”

The voice that reached us spoke in the same familiar manner I had been hearing this whole time.

“Shall we go, Nikka?”

“Y-Yes. This is nerve-racking.”

“It’ll be fine. That ‘Demon King’ isn’t going to snatch anyone up and eat them.”

I stepped out of the little room through the opening Faura had made in the wall.

From the very top of the towering backrest, I could see the back of the Demon King’s head, and I had to fight desperately to keep from bursting out laughing.

“Mr. Toa!”

“No, sorry, sorry.”

While being scolded by Nikka, I moved around the throne toward the front.

Apparently, this time I did not need to worry about being struck by that headache again.

“Demon King, thank you for granting me this audience.”

Dropping to one knee before the Demon King, I bowed my head reverently with the etiquette I had learned back when I was still a noble.

Nikka followed suit, and then the Demon King’s voice rang down from above us.

“Indeed. Now then, for what reason did you request an audience with me?”

I raised my head and answered the question frankly.

“To confirm whether the Demon King’s true identity was something I knew.”

“…My true identity? What could a human like you possibly know?”

A brief silence followed.

There was no trace of agitation in the voice that came after that.

So I continued and spoke the decisive words to him… no, to her.

“I already know, Faura. I know that you’re the one controlling the Demon King.”

“!?”

“Whaaat!?”

The moment I sensed obvious agitation from the Demon King, that is, from the external speaker of the MPPRD, something crashed loudly to the floor.

“W-wh-what are you talking about!? I am the Demon King! Do not lump me together with some maid named Faura!”

That was followed by a frantic denial, delivered with enough force to make the speaker howl with feedback.

“Then stay right there. I’m coming in.”

“R-Right there!?”

“Mr. Toa, what do you mean the Demon King is Faura!?”

“I’ll explain later. Just follow me.”

I ran over to the Demon King’s right leg.

Then I circled around behind it and searched for something.

“There it is. This is it.”

“What exactly is this?”

There was a panel there lined with buttons numbered from one to nine.

“It’s the button panel that opens the door to get inside the Demon King.”

“The Demon King has a door?”

Right in front of Nikka, who looked utterly unconvinced, I entered the numbers that had surfaced in my mind.

“Let’s see… 22431192…”

Then, as the finishing touch, I pressed a red button set slightly apart from the others.

“And… click.”

Shunk.

With a faint mechanical sound, an entrance large enough for one person to pass through opened in the Demon King’s leg.

Even I did not understand why I knew that password.

I simply felt, somehow, that I would know it. That was all.

I knew I ought to dig deeper into that memory.

But if I did, I would probably collapse again.

So for now, I felt I had no choice but to stop prying into the depths of my memory and move forward one step at a time, guided by what surfaced.

“W-Wow. An entrance really did appear!”

“Now then, let’s go meet Faura.”

“She’s inside this thing?”

“If my memory is right, yes.”

I led Nikka into the Demon King’s leg.

Inside was a cramped little chamber with enough room for maybe three adults, and aside from the entrance, there was no visible door.

“Let’s see… the control room… is it this?”

I pressed one of the several buttons inside the chamber.

Shunk.

This time, the entrance that had been open shut instantly.

That did not mean Nikka and I had been trapped inside the cramped space.

“Uh… isn’t this room moving?”

“It’s called an elevator. It’s like a little room that automatically carries you to your destination.”

“An elevator? I’ve never heard of that before.”

“I’m not surprised. I never expected to come across something like this in this world either.”

“Now it’s moving sideways!”

After rising once, it moved deeper inward.

Then it went up again, and this time to the right.

When people heard the word elevator, they tended to imagine something that only moved up and down, but in truth, elevators could also move diagonally or horizontally.

The elevator inside the MPPRD seemed to travel through a network of tubular passageways extending in every direction.

The inside of the elevator was a square chamber, but viewed from outside it was spherical, which allowed it to move through the interior without issue even when joints bent or extended.

“Mr. Toa, how do you even know all that?”

“…I don’t really know myself. It just feels like someone once explained it to me rather smugly… ngh.”

A stab of pain shot through my head, and I grimaced.

If I tried to remember any further, it felt as though I might collapse again.

“I’m sorry.”

“No, don’t worry about it. It seems I just can’t remember right now.”

I lightly patted Nikka on the shoulder and forced a smile.

By the time the elevator brought us to the control room, Faura was already gone, and only several monitors remained, displaying a full 360-degree view of the Demon King’s surroundings.

“…”

“She’s not here.”

While I searched for Faura, Nikka stood just a few steps past the automatic door, staring blankly into the control room.

A person from a world whose civilization, aside from the supernatural phenomenon of magic, was at a medieval to early modern level had just stepped into a place that was practically a solid mass of future technology.

It was not hard to imagine that the turmoil in her mind was far greater than her outward appearance suggested.

“Nikka?”

“…”

I called out to her, but she did not respond.

Judging by the way her eyes occasionally moved, she had not fainted, but it looked like she needed a little time before she could accept that this was real.

“For now, let’s look for Faura.”

Left with no other option, I decided to search the Demon King’s interior for her using several devices while following the trail of my memories.

In the course of checking things over, I learned the Demon King’s official designation.

“Multipurpose Pioneer Planetary Research Device No.13”

So that was its full name after all.

In other words, “MPPRD” was simply an acronym formed from the initials of that full designation.

As I accepted the information that surfaced naturally from my memories, I carefully sorted through it without thinking too deeply about it.

If I reached too far into the depths of my memory and blacked out again, that would be a serious problem.

As the name suggested, this thing had been created as a device to be sent in ahead of the development of an extraterrestrial planet.

The original machine this series had been based on had been deployed into harsh environments on Earth, such as volcanoes and the deep sea, where it had played an active role in gathering all kinds of data.

And as a result…

“Gah…!”

“Mr. Toa!?”

Hearing my voice as I clutched my head and crouched down, Nikka finally seemed to come back to herself.

“I’m… fine…”

A sudden headache had shot through me, and I hurriedly stopped pursuing that memory any further.

“A machine built to withstand lava and the pressure of the deep sea. If something like that got transported to another world, then I suppose attacks from this world’s magic would just bounce right off it…”

No matter how powerful magic might have been, it was still a small force compared to the threats of the natural world.

There was no way the Demon King, developed to endure even those threats, could lose to demons.

“Now then, now that I know what accounts for the Demon King’s strength, I need to find Faura.”

“Can you really find her?”

“Yeah. If my memory is right… there, found her.”

I operated the control panel and confirmed that there was a “bio-sign” in one of the rooms in the living quarters.

This thing had a pilot’s seat, but it was also equipped with a highly advanced AI capable of operating on its own.

So even without a pilot, as long as it was given instructions, it could act on its own judgment, gather the necessary data, and transmit it, but…

“If it got tossed into another world, there probably wouldn’t be anywhere left to send that data.”

I supposed there was a chance radio waves could cross the gap between dimensions and time itself, but the people receiving them would probably descend into utter chaos.

“Come on. Let’s go to Faura’s room.”

“Huh? Ms. Faura has a room inside the Demon King too!?”

We had just passed through Faura’s room in the castle a little while ago.

But that room had not felt lived in at all, which had struck me as odd… and now that the existence of the MPPRD had come to light, the reason was obvious.

“Faura probably lives inside this Demon King most of the time.”

Then, only when necessary, she must have used the hidden passage to move to her room in the Demon King’s Castle and acted, without a shred of awkwardness, as the “Demon King’s personal maid.”

“But can someone really live in a place like this?”

“If it’s the living quarters, it should have been designed so someone could keep living there for a long time without ever going outside.”

As I answered, I stepped out through the automatic door we had entered from and headed for the elevator.

I matched my pace to Nikka, who hurried after me from behind.

Then, while telling her what I remembered about the living quarters, I operated the elevator and moved toward the center of the Demon King’s abdomen, where the living quarters were located.

They were positioned there because it was the safest place, the farthest from the outer wall… or rather, the outer shell.

—

“We’re here. This is the place.”

A straight corridor stretched out beyond the open elevator doors.

Several doors were visible on either side.

“Which one is Ms. Faura’s room?”

“The bio-sign was in the third door on the left.”

Saying that, I stepped out of the elevator and walked over to the door.

Then I pressed the control panel beside it.

Shunk.

With that small sound, the door opened.

Just as I had expected, there did not seem to be any password set.

For Faura, the very idea of locking a room inside the Demon King probably had never even occurred to her.

“Hey. I’m here.”

The moment I stepped through the doorway, I called out to Faura, who was sitting on the bed farther inside, staring at me with a pale face.

“So you really came in…”

“I said I would, didn’t I? That aside, this is a nice room.”

Seeing the look on Faura’s face, as though she had given up on everything, I felt a faint twinge of guilt and tried to lighten the mood with a joke.

Apparently, it did not help at all.

“It’s no use. It’s all over…”

Faura leapt onto the bed, then pulled the fanciful-patterned blanket over her head and began trembling all over.

“Faura dear, calm down. We’re not here to do anything to you.”

“Even if you say that, I can’t believe you.”

“It’s okay. Mr. Toa just has a bit of a mean look in his eyes, but he’s actually a really kind person.”

Nikka spoke gently to Faura, who was trembling like a lamb.

Perhaps because of her childlike appearance, sometime along the way the way she addressed her had shifted from “Ms. Faura” to “Faura dear.”

Judging by appearances alone, they looked like a little girl and an older sister, but Faura was probably older.

There was no need to bring that up now, though, so I decided to wait for a bit and let Nikka soothe her.

More importantly, did I really have that mean a look in my eyes? That was news to me.

There were not many mirrors in this world, so I had never noticed… and after I was cast out to the frontier fortress, I had even less time to spare checking my reflection.

“You’ve got the eyes of someone who’s killed a lot of people.”

Faura said that while pointing at me through a gap in the blanket.

I had thought I was already used to dirtying my hands, but hearing that from Faura, who looked like a little girl, still struck a nerve.

And it was also true that, perhaps because some of my memories from my former life had started returning little by little, I had begun to feel a faint sense of guilt about it.

In my former life, even if the target had been a bad person, it had not been a world where killing people was allowed.

“Well… I think that only applies to bad people. Or when he’s protecting us.”

Yeah, yeah, just as Nikka said, I did not lay a hand on good people.

I had only brushed away the sparks that flew at me.

If I had not, I never would have survived in this world.

“…Really?”

“It’s true. Besides, Mr. Toa would never lay a hand on a child… I think.”

That was where she should have sounded certain.

Well, even if it was a child, if they crossed the line, I would still discipline them.

“Uugh… then what exactly did you come all the way here to do, Toa?”

Faura asked that with only her face poking out of the blanket like a turtle.

I carried one of the chairs in the room over to the side of the bed, sat down, and answered her.

“To confirm the memories inside me.”

“Memories?”

Faura tilted her head with a blank look on her face.

After glancing over at Nikka once, I opened my mouth, making a point of wearing as gentle an expression as possible so as not to frighten Faura.

“It seems I knew about this ‘Demon King.’”

“That’s a strange way of putting it, isn’t it?”

“I still don’t know why I knew it myself, so I can’t really explain it clearly.”

Without mentioning Cheki’s ability, I told her about the memories from my former life that had suddenly surfaced in my mind.

I told her that I had memories from another world, and that the Demon King was a machine from that other world, something like what this world would call a magic tool.

“—You’re saying this thing is a magic tool from another world?”

“That’s right.”

There was no point in talking about science and all that.

I explained it in a way that would be easy for Faura, and for Nikka too while I was at it, to understand.

That said, there was no need to teach them the detailed mechanics behind it.

For now, it was enough if they understood that the Demon King was a magic tool from another world, and that it had been made to investigate harsh environments.

Then…

“Hic…”

The moment she finished listening, tears spilled from Faura’s eyes and began soaking the blanket.

“Huh?”

“Faura dear?”

That reaction was so unexpected that both Nikka and I could only stare in confusion.

“Uugh… I thought Empipi was my one and only friend among the demons… and now you’re telling me Empipi wasn’t even a demon…!”

Faura’s sorrowful voice spilled out between sobs.

‘Empipi’… was that what she called this MPPRD?

When the AI had told her its model name, she had probably assumed that was the Demon King’s name.

And with those words, I finally understood.

All this time, Faura had believed the Demon King was one of her own kind, a fellow demon, and her best friend.

Now she had learned that its true identity was not another demon, but a magic tool that was not even a living creature.

Neither Nikka nor I could find anything to say to Faura as she remained huddled on the bed, crying, so all we could do was wait until she finally stopped.

—

“—Faura. What is wrong?”

It happened while I was watching Faura’s back as she kept crying in her room, sunk in regret over having said more than I should have.

Suddenly, an androgynous human voice came from out of nowhere.

No, I knew where it had come from.

It had to be from the speaker in the corner of the room.

“Your heart rate is abnormally elevated. Shall I dispatch a medical machine immediately?”

The owner of that voice was Empipi, that is, the MPPRD.

Empipi had a function that constantly monitored the state of its crews through a variety of sensors. If it detected an abnormality, it would inform the person in question and prompt them to take action.

What was more, if the person was in no state to respond or the situation required immediate attention, it also had a function that allowed it to dispatch a medical machine to the scene on its own judgment, administer first aid, and then carry out treatment in the infirmary.

It should also have been built to handle even unknown illnesses to a certain extent through machine learning.

“Faura. Are you in no condition to respond? If so, then at once—”

“I’m fine…”

“Faura dear!?”

Perhaps hearing Empipi’s voice helped. Faura lifted her face, her eyes red and streaked with tears, and answered the speaker in a nasal voice.

“I’m fine, Empipi. I was just a little shaken after hearing what you really are. My heart should calm down soon enough.”

“Understood. I will respect Faura’s judgment and limit myself to observation for the time being.”

“Mm. But if it still doesn’t settle down, then heal me like you did that time before.”

“As you wish.”

After that, Empipi’s voice no longer came from the speaker. Still, just as it had said, it was surely continuing to monitor her through its sensors.

I shifted my gaze from the sensor-like devices mounted in several places around the room back to Faura.

Faura looked at me, then bowed her head slightly.

“I’m sorry for losing my composure.”

“No, it was all my fault… I should have thought a little more before I spoke.”

“Faura dear, let’s wipe your face, all right?”

Nikka sitting on the bed and wiping Faura’s face with a handkerchief looked just like an older sister caring for her little sister, and for once, she seemed slightly more grown-up than usual.

“Is there a washroom here? And towels?”

“Beyond that door over there is the washroom and the bath. There should be towels there too.”

Pointing at one of the two doors side by side at the back of the room, Faura answered.

Nikka had probably thought she needed towels both to wash the handkerchief and to wipe Faura’s face.

And she was right. The handkerchief in Nikka’s hand was already a complete mess from Faura’s tears and snot.

There was no way she could wipe her clean with that.

“Then I’ll borrow the washroom.”

“The one next to it is the toilet, so do not mix them up.”

If it had been me, with my memories from my previous life, I could read the kanji “toilet” on the door.

But to Nikka, those were unknown characters.

If they had at least been in English, maybe she could have guessed their meaning from the resemblance to this world’s writing system. But in Japanese, there was no way Nikka could read them.

“This room really has everything, doesn’t it?”

“It does. There’s even a kitchen over there. Long ago, Empipi and I used to hunt monsters together, then cook the meat and eat it.”

“Could you show it to me later?”

“Of course. There’s even an amazing magic tool inside called a ‘refrigerator’—”

As they chatted about such trivial things, the anguish that had filled Faura’s face a little earlier gradually softened.

Maybe the reason Nikka had kept talking instead of heading straight to the washroom was because that had been exactly what she was aiming for.

“She was just like a saint.”

Was that not what that beastkin man had said while Nikka was treating him?

At the time, I had not thought much of it and had simply let it pass, but maybe, where I could not see her, she was able to heal not only people’s bodies but their hearts as well.

“…”

If that was the case, then it probably was not a good idea for me to insert myself into their conversation.

Thinking that, I sat down in one of the chairs by the table set installed in the middle of the room.

The table and chairs were fixed to the floor, which made them slightly awkward to use, but if they were not secured when the MPPRD moved, they would be dangerous, so it could not be helped.

“Though I guess that probably doesn’t matter anymore.”

As I watched over Nikka and Faura, I looked around the room again.

The sterile crew quarters I remembered and this room were nothing alike.

That was because the fixed furniture that had originally come with the room had all been decorated with beautiful cloth and little ornaments I had never seen before. They were probably Faura’s work.

And on top of that, there were rows of glass crafts and mysterious stuffed toys that she must have bought and collected.

Even the chair I was sitting on had something like a cushion laid over it, and the table was draped with a tablecloth, leaving no trace of sterility at all.

“She probably decorated it after she started living here in the Demon King’s Castle.”

I had heard that after the Demon King founded the nation and built this Demon King’s Castle, it had hardly ever left the castle at all.

“That just means the demons’ country was peaceful enough to allow that… but—”

In the shadow of that peace, I remembered the man who had secretly carried out his schemes for his own desires behind the Demon King’s, behind Faura’s, back, and my expression twisted slightly.

For a country that had known peace and no major problems until now, what Luchimada had done was the greatest crisis since its founding.

After all, it was serious enough that it could easily have escalated into a war between the dwarves, elves, and demons.

Even if it had been something one of her subordinates had done, the responsibility would still weigh upon Faura’s shoulders as king.

“And I can’t exactly say I have nothing to do with it either.”

Whatever the circumstances, it was unquestionably me who had brought this problem out into the open.

If the Demon King had truly been the sort of person I had heard about until now, I would have left the rest to them and intended not to involve myself any further.

But that was no longer the case, now that I knew the truth.

There was no way I could abandon Faura here and return to the Border Fortress as I had originally planned.

“Consider it my apology for making you cry. I’ll do something about this.”

Looking at Faura, whose face had already returned to its usual brightness, I made that vow and clenched my fist tightly.

—