The heart of Kieran Tragella Sylvam, member of the Elven Council, burned with righteous, sinful hatred.

In the past, he had once been lost in the dark, endless labyrinth called self-doubt. At that time, he had heard the voice of his beloved master.

No—he had been allowed to hear his beloved master’s voice. Where the other elves had called Kieran gloomy, his beloved master had praised his realism. Where the other elves had said they’d be depressed if they had to listen to Kieran for too long, his beloved master had listened and listened.

If it weren’t for his beloved master, Kieran would’ve ended himself months, years, decades ago. Thus, he had decided to dedicate his body, his soul, his everything to his master.

Using the power his beloved master granted him, he would pave the way for his master’s entry into the world and subjugate those who would think to oppose such an awful, auspicious event.

Using those gifts, he sowed the seeds of chaos wherever he could.

And yet, this accursed demon.

Calling itself the ‘demon king’, it said it’d ‘help’.

Calling itself an ‘envoy of Lady Entropy’, it claimed to be here at Sylph’s request.

Although she had never even looked Kieran’s way, she acknowledged this damned monster…

A deep-rooted hatred of Sylph burrowed its way into Kieran’s heart, and it was there to stay.

In just a few minutes, this so-called ‘demon king’ managed to calm down the conference room.

Now, if that had been all, it would have been fine.

After all, being forcibly suppressed by a monster that had appeared out of nowhere, even if it had the goddesses’ approval, would easily have given birth to feelings of hatred and a cycle of revenge.

And yet. And yet. And yet!

As if it wasn’t enough to disturb Kieran’s well thought-out, hastily drafted plans this much, the creature planned to do more?!

Kieran’s plan was perfect, and yet…?!

It made use of the fact that the drakonids would soon have to pass through the forest, even if Kieran did not quite grasp why that was.

First, set up a protective pact with the Treants living in the forest the drakonids would have to pass through. This would force an immediate conflict.

Well, a similar pact would have been formed without his interference in due time…

Then, get someone with a deep resentment of drakonids—that is, Aelrie—into a position of political influence. This would, of course, fan the flames.

Though, he was originally aiming for President, not Vice President…

Keep himself in the background by remaining a regular council member, rather than someone with a great deal of influence. This would help him escape suspicion, so he could keep orchestrating from amongst the shadows.

This, at least, he had succeeded at.

And then, implant into the forest a single, very special spirit granted to him by his beloved master. A darkness spirit that refused to be tamed no matter the circumstance, at least until it found its ‘true king’—something that didn’t exist. There was no one who could lord over a creature that was simultaneously so chaotic and so orderly.

The presence of such a spirit would cause unrest, nay, chaos amongst Kieran’s fellow elves.

But from what he could tell from the other elves’ mutterings—he himself had long lost the ability to see spirits—the thing liked the demon. Well, this would not be a major issue.

With these plans, he had accelerated several decades’ worth of conflict into just a few weeks, and with perhaps another few months, he could cause a war between the elves and the drakonids.

And yet.

And yet!

And yet!

Waving away objections with outrageous words like “Anyone who objects will be expelled,” and unreasonable claims like “I believe you can do it, even if it’ll prove difficult.”

Where was this fucking demon getting his confidence?!

It wouldn’t be able to stand two seconds against the full might of the forest, even with the help of its “allies”—slaves, no doubt—so it should learn its place!

Not good, not good, calm down, Kieran thought to himself, forcing calmness into his raging heart. With a heart like a still sea full of winds and waves, he stalked the demon’s words like a tiger stalks its prey.

“... and from now on, you imbeciles will get along with one another, whether you want to or not.”

An opening.

Kieran stood up, gathering nigh everyone’s attention—including that bastard of a demon.

“What if I don’t want to?” he said, a provoking glare on his face.

He himself admitted it was a juvenile response, but he would do anything to-

“Khg!”

All of a sudden, he couldn’t breathe.

Before he had even realised what was happening, a dark red rope was bound around his throat, restricting his airflow.

If he had to describe it, it felt oddly wet and sticky—though he was not in any position to be thinking about any such things.

“Well,” the demon said, the upper half of his face cloaked in shadows that had not been there a moment ago, “I would say, perhaps, something akin to this.”

Kieran struggled to free himself and tugged at the robe, but his hands passed through it as though it were liquid. He also noticed it left an irony smell on his hands.

With just a few strides, the demon was right before him. With his gloved hand, he simply, casually, as though picking up a piece of luggage he was not particularly fond of—

Grabbed Kieran’s face in a claw hold.

The rope loosened enough for Kieran to breathe, and even speak. “Don’t touch me, you son of a—”

Once more, the rope tightened, returning him to his state of struggling to breathe.

“Silence,” the demon said, no, hissed as he tightened his grip. “I may be polite in tone, but ever since I have entered this room—nay, since I have arrived in this forest you call a nation, I have not made a single request. I have laid out conditions, and I have given orders. That is all. And ‘you will get along’ was an order. Do you understand, worm? Please consider the value of the air you breathe and the calories you consume before you speak next time.”

A sharp pain took hold of every last part of Kieran’s consciousness. Like he were a child on a battlefield, he opened his mouth to scream, but no sound would leave his mouth—

He dropped to the floor as the demon loosened his grip and the rope fell apart, staining Kieran’s clothes with blood both his own and not. Two seconds passed as he sat there, slumped over.

“Wh-What are you doing?!” Kieran said, finally returning to his senses and addressing the elven guards in the room. “It tried to kill me! Apprehend it at once!”

The demon scoffed. “Not at all. I was just teaching you that your life is worth less than my shoes.”

On the other hand, the guards—

Obviously didn’t move.

“Attack him?” one of the guards replied, his legs trembling. “I’m deeply sorry, sir, but I’m not interested in committing suicide by throwing myself at this overwhelming mass of power.”

This guard was actually quite well-off. Most of them were on the ground, and a few were even sobbing. In a sense, this was only natural.

After all, the ones who could take the job of guard were only the most powerful warriors amongst even the elves—in other words, the cream of the crop. Those who were most sensitive to mana. And the demon’s earlier outburst was probably akin to an explosion of mana.

Kieran clicked his tongue, shook his head, and made his way back onto his feet. “Then, I’ll just have to do it myself…” he muttered to himself, lightly spreading mana into the environment. He composed a magic circle in his mind, focused all his thoughts on it, sent it into the environment, and—

“Oh mighty spirits of fire, I call upon you! [Spirit Flame]!”

—Nothing happened. Of course not. The poor, poor spirits had fled a long time ago.

“L… Lord Kieran, are you alright?” another member of the council asked, looking into Kieran’s eyes with honest concern in his gaze.

“I-I’m fine, I’m fine,” Kieran said, “I just… Need to be alone for a while.”

No one objected as he left the room, sending a last hateful glare in the demon’s direction.

Idrais’s heart was gripped by fear.

The strongest fear he’d ever felt.

The fear that his plan to get his tribe to go to war with the elves, which he had been concocting for years, would be crushed into the dirt.

The fear that his beloved master would be unable to join him in this miserable, wonderful world.

The fear that his master’s gifts would go to waste.

But his strongest fear was not from reason—no, exactly the opposite. The strongest fear he currently felt was born from his instincts.

He feared this demon. He feared the demon finding out about Idrais’s true allegiance, he feared the demon’s claws, he feared death at the hands of the demon, he feared a fate worse than death with no death permitted at the demon’s behest.

He feared that the demon might be stronger than the heretical power Idrais had received, which had been strong enough to slay a pair of dragons.

The mana from the demon’s body overwhelmed the poor, poor drakonid’s senses and triggered an immediate fight or flight response. This was of course multiplied severalfold when the demon displayed his awesome might against that moron of an elf.

Idrais wanted out. Now.

I can’t run, he told himself, the thing will kill me before I take five steps. He repeated such thoughts every waking second, yet he was still just barely able to prevent himself from sprinting away at top speed. In the end, he stood frozen on the spot, shuffling his feet to and fro as his chest was slowly covered in a cold sweat.

He had no space to pay mind to his sticky hair, racking his brain for a solution to this predicament.

That is, he was searching for a way to get away while drawing as little attention as possible. His nervous glancing—a due part of the process—did not appear to go unnoticed, since Salamander sent him a friendly wave and an encouraging smile.

Got to find a way out of here.

Having calmed down a little, Idrais started thinking once more, and applied his unreasonable logic to the situation at hand.

The room contained several exits, but among those, there was only one that would not attract suspicion—that is, only one exit that was not something along the lines of a window.

The door, right behind the demon.

An excuse, an excuse…

In his maddened state of mind, only one came to mind. Half hoping the demon wouldn’t notice, he raised his hand.

The demon looked at him, gestured. “Speak,” he said.

Several times, the words got stuck in Idrais’s throat, and just when he had given up, he managed to say it.

“I… I need to use the bathroom,” he said, directing his gaze firmly at the floor.

The demon’s face expressed utter disbelief, supported by pillars of ridicule and disdain. Idrais almost thought he would die just from the demon’s glare.

“Leave,” the demon hissed after a few moments of silence, “and do not bother coming back.”

Covered in the reluctant laughter of drakonids and elves alike, Idrais drooped away.

Kieran returned to his residence—a complex of rooms within the Tree’s Roots.

He hurled his beret into a corner, and hurled an insult at the corner as well, for good measure. Seconds afterwards, several more curses and profanities left his mouth, leaving him red-faced and angrier than ever.

Despite his light weight, he sat himself down behind his desk with enough force to make the chair creak. Then he slammed his fist down, shaking his head.

With noticeably more care, he took in his hands the pages scattered about the table—the pages which, with meticulously rushed steps, described many of the things his beloved master had taught him.

“Even though it was a perfect plan!”

He tore apart the first few pages and slumped over the table.

“Kh…”

A deeply superficial madness came over him at the same time the grunt of frustration left his mouth, and his eyes gleamed blindingly black.

“Fine, then!”

From who-knows-where, he pulled forth a set of robes, which he put on with practised movements. Then he swept much of the paper off his desk, leaving only a few pages, a single blank sheet, and an ink pot with feather pen.

“If the spirits are such scaredy-cats, and the guards are too cowardly, I’ll do it myself!”

He wrote and wrote and wrote, deep into the night, cramming squiggle after squiggle onto the paper, layering magic circle upon magic circle, until the whole page was blotted black, and even then he kept going, all the while muttering blasphemous prayers—

He collapsed with the sound of a warped chime.

As soon as possible, Idrais left the building, flapped his wings, and set off to the nearby drakonid encampment. His instincts told him to flee further, further, as far away from the demon as possible, but the thought of letting down his master managed to soothe his fears and replace them with nonsensical reason, which guided him to his tent.

Avoiding the detection of his brethren, he stepped inside and sat down on his bed, then wrapped his wings around himself and covered his face with his hands.

And then, under his breath, he—

“Shiiiiiiiiiit.”

He shook his head, moved his hands from his face to his hair, stared blankly forward, and repeated himself.

He stood up, taking a look around the inside of his tent, desperate to come up with something. “A plan, a plan,” he muttered to himself, walking over to his personal belongings, haphazardly stacked in a corner.

From that pile of assorted junk, he extracted a pack of paper. One by one, he started looking through the pages.

“No. Nope… Ha, as if. No way…”

The various monsters described were no good on principle. After all, Idrais was entirely certain there was no monster in this world that could beat that thing—what’s more, his instincts told him anything below grade 7 would be turned against him. And if there were a way to call forth a rank 8 or higher monster, he wouldn’t have had to do all this planning to begin with.

The spells… Were also no good. Even if he expended all of his life force, the ones he could cast were entirely too weak—he had never been a particularly powerful mage—and the rest were unuseable.

Relying on his master’s gifts was also impossible, since they were specifically tuned to dragonkilling.

Like that, he burned through what must’ve been half the paper in the blink of an eye.

He was about to give up when the sound of a garbled bell drew his eyes to a certain page.

“The way to summon my beloved master directly…”

The instant he comprehended the words he spoke, he snatched up the page and clutched it to his chest. Seconds later, he realised he was drenching it in sweat and peeled it off.

“I need to get to work…”

From who-knows-where, he produced a robe, after which he gathered a select few pages from the whole stack, set the timers on a few artifacts in his tent and left, his eyes glowing an obscuring white, feverish, blasphemous devotion running through the synapses of his mind.

In a desolate land, covered in snow, stood a majestic castle, made of ice.

With a crown formed of that very same ice on its head, a skeleton stood, robe fluttering in the wind. Its skull chattered with a sound perhaps akin to laughter.

“Richard,” the skeleton—Philia, said, the blue flames in her empty sockets piercing the statue’s face and gazing into his very soul.

The animated statue that had once been a Hero found it still could not speak, so, unwilling not to respond, he nodded and saluted.

“Due to certain circumstances,” the frigid queen continued, “I will be unable to produce any more mannequins.”

An expression of regret entered Richard’s face.

“Don’t even pretend you care,” Philia said, “you can barely understand my words, let alone be disappointed by them.”

At these abusive words, his cheeks flushed blue.

Philia observed the masochistic statue for all of two seconds.

“It will be easy for a background actor like you to bring those I have produced into enemy territory.” She turned away solemnly.

His cheeks flushed further.

In response to his lack of movement, however, a spectral tentacle emerged from Philia’s palm and slapped him across the face, accompanied by the sound of a distorted bell.

“That was your cue,” Philia said, walking away as she shook her head.