Amidst the trees.

After agreeing to the Heroes’ request, I was now leading the way to the elven capital.

I stopped mid-step because I felt a tug on my cape, yet even after a few seconds of waiting, whoever wanted my attention had not spoken up. Thus, I turned around.

The mage girl still held my cape in her hand, an expression that shouted “I should not have done that” on her face, and the sword-wielder had his hand half stretched in her direction.

I tugged my cape from the mage’s grasp and shook my head. “I will not kill you for talking to me. Certainly there is no way I would grant the dust under my feet the right to speak to me, but I have given you a personal invitation. In a sense, I have lifted you above that dust.”

A lie. A complete, utter lie. In truth, I did not mind speaking to anyone, as long as they were not like a certain pair of useless goddesses or their shrine maidens, but I had an image to maintain, especially in front of a pair of Heroes who were supposed to fear me and the—

I looked over for a moment—

Almost religiously devoted Charlotte. Disappointing her or throwing aside her well-intentioned advice would wound my heart.

I decided to stop thinking about this topic and turned my attention back to the Hero, who had still not spoken up.

“I said, if you want to say something, say it.”

I turned on my heel and continued walking, which seemed to snap her out of her daze. She rushed forward a few steps and walked alongside me, though she had a hard time matching my pace. The sword-wielding Hero, in turn, matched her.

“Then, um,” the mage began, fidgeting with her hair, “if you’re getting payment from the goddesses, does that mean you, uh, know them?”

“Better than I would like.” I pointed to the symbol on my cheek. “A gift from Lady Gnome.”

A gasp of admiration left her mouth and her eyes sparkled—perhaps she had an interest for the divine that allowed her to overcome her fear? I did not care. “Amazing,” she said, “what’re they like?”

I froze in my steps and recalled the many good memories I had with the goddesses, each as adorable as the next.

Yes, good… memories… of the adorable…

“Brats.”

Although the elven guards almost shot me, they, fortunately for themselves, managed to restrain themselves, and we entered the capital without any other particular incidents.

Unlike I expected, we encountered one of the shrine maidens rather quickly—that is, she was the one to greet us at the doors of the capitol building.

“Lady Sylph and Lady Salamander would like to see you, Lord Astaroth. Really now, what did you do? For the first time in absolutely forever, they agreed on something. Well, they were still arguing, but—”

It seemed Sylph was already done with her nap. I raised a hand to get the shrine maiden to stop talking—she complied—and dug around a little for her name. “Aldefeno. Stop talking for a moment. If you are free enough to come and meet us, surely you have finished Asami’s training.”

She nodded several times. “Yupyup, her training’s done. She was pretty amazing, you know? She’s got a lot of talent. You should consider her for Lady Entropy’s shrine maiden. Even if not, she’d be a great—”

“Shut it and lead us to the goddesses.”

Still blabbering on, she lead us to Sylph and Salamander.

… That is, she lead us to the world tree, where for some reason, Sylph and Salamander were once more present. Salamander was happily chatting about something or other with her shrine maiden—Ilgri, I recalled after a moment—and next to them stood Asami, her hands clutched in front of her chest and her gaze pointed firmly at the ground.

Sylph, meanwhile, was not exactly ‘standing’—instead, she was on the ground, using the legendary world tree as a backrest. With her eyes closed, there was no reason to assume she was not once again napping. The scene gave her a particular defenseless, androgynous charm that failed to capture me.

Feno decided to ignore everyone except her own goddess and quickly went to wake Sylph up. I decided not to follow her example, and given she would probably be a while, I turned my attention to the other three.

“Lady Salamander, Ilgri,” I said, nodding. “I trust Asami’s training went well.”

“Yo, Lord Astaroth! I see you’ve got your Hero pets with ya, too. Yup! From what Ilgri’s tellin’ me, she’s ideal.”

“Indeed,” Ilgri said, nodding. “Feno might overstate things a little, but it’s true that Asami here could be a great shrine maiden, if you wanna go that path.”

Perhaps spending some time with Asami had warmed her up to me, by extension. Or something.

Asami, meanwhile, perked up the moment she heard my voice, and after a few moments of hesitation, she rushed over to me, her ears twitching and her face beaming with pride despite her dead eyes.

“Mister demon king!”

“Asami.” I stuck my hand under her cap and ruffled her hair, prompting her to look away with a blush on her face. After a few seconds, I retracted my hand.

Once more looking at the ground, she fixed her cap.

“A kid that young…?” the wielder of the god-sword whispered, eyeing the swords on Asami’s waist.

“It was either this or send her back to a village that offers children as tributes to the demon king.”

He did not look convinced—fair enough, since there was also the option of turning her into a maidservant or such—but I could not bring myself to care, and turned to the mage.

Judging from her whispers about ‘animal ears’ and ‘horns’, she was too focused on Asami’s appearance to care about her job. I decided to ignore her, too, and thus turned back to Salamander.

“In any case, Lady Salamander, about that absolutely revolting monstrosity one of your drakonids summoned…”

“Aw, don’t worry about that!” she responded, lightly punching me in the shoulder. “You beat it, right? No prob, no prob! Rather than that, do you wanna go drinking tonight? No one else wants to-”

I managed to bat away her hand before she could wrap her arm around my shoulder. “I have prior arrangements for tonight, so I am afraid I must decline.” For once, I was speaking my true feelings to one of the goddesses—I was not particularly a fan of drinking, but I did not dislike it, either, and seeing Salamander embarrass herself would have been quite amusing, indeed. “In that case, about my rewards…”

Having succeeded at waking up Sylph, Feno walked over.

“Mh,” Sylph said, lazily raising a hand. I took it as a greeting.

Salamander nodded in my direction. “Sure, now’s fine. You did solve the problem, technically, and you even helped out in some monster extermination. On a different note, I’ve been curious for a while now, but…”

She gestured towards the pair of Heroes behind me.

“What’s up with them? Since ya didn’t react to my earlier guess, don’t tell me they really are your pets?”

“Hey!”

“Sure, we cooperated with you, but I wish you didn’t just call us by a degrading nickname like that…”

“You will hurt their feelings, Lady Salamander. Please leave your jokes at that.” I shook my head as I looked at the apparently rather frail-hearted Heroes. So much for bravery. “It is fine to think of them as being here on my invitation. They are my… Yes, I suppose guests is the right word.”

Accepting guests while visiting someone else’s country was an absurd concept, but I did not particularly care.

“Ah, uh, by the way, Lord Astaroth,” the mage girl said, “you’ve been calling her ‘Lady Salamander’ for a while now, but do you mean…”

She looked almost as though she were about to propose a theory she herself found absurd.

“Yes indeed,” I said, placing my hand in front of my chest. “O ‘mighty’ Heroes, may I introduce you… To the lady of flames, goddess of fire, Salamander, and the mistress of the skies, goddess of wind, Sylph. To be more specific, the one with the drinking problem is Lady Salamander and the one with the sleeping problem is Lady Sylph.”

My theatrical pose, hands spread to either side as though to display the goddesses, also allowed me to stop one in her tracks should she choose to rush forwards.

That proved necessary not five seconds later.

“... Really?” the sword-wielder asked, raising an eyebrow.

Salamander had… more physical strength than I was expecting, what with her relative lack of muscle mass, but I somehow managed to prevent her from assaulting the Hero.

“Come now, Lady Salamander,” I said, throwing an arm around her shoulder just as she had tried to do to me. “Heroes are frail, you know? I would not want you to break him. That would trouble me. Yes?” With this little distance between our faces, it was not hard to show a wicked grin only to her while hiding my face from the Heroes. “You would not want to trouble me, would you?” I hissed between my teeth, “That would make Lady Entropy terribly unhappy…”

The trigger that caused her, finally, to burst away into flames and reappear a good five metres away was my finger, placed gently on her lips.

“Oh, you do underestimate me, Lady Salamander. I would not dare play the same trick twice.” I shook my head. “In any case, fragile as he is, I cannot disagree with the Hero’s assessment, you know? The first thing you did was invite me to drink, so you may not ring the right bells, so to speak…”

“You too, Lord Astaroth?!” For some reason, she looked legitimately indignant.

I decided to grasp the opportunity.

“If you wish to prove your position, you can simply grant me my reward, right?”

“I… Fair enough.”

Sylph seemed perfectly content to be taken along for the ride, judging from the fact that she simply held onto Feno’s sleeve and practically let herself be dragged as Ilgri guided us all to a room I had not yet visited.

“Ah, sorry,” Ilgri said, turning around in front of a certain gorgeous door. “The area ahead’s a sacred space. Normal people aren’t allowed in…”

I followed her example and turned around. “You lot,” I said, “keep an eye on the Heroes. Make sure they do not do anything stupid.”

They responded positively, so I followed Ilgri through the door.

The moment I stepped over the boundary, there was a clear sense of… change. Although the entire nation had felt far more connected to nature than to civilisation, this place in particular felt untouched by mortal hands, as though it was not the elves who had built this passage, but the trees had simply grown to take the shape of walls as though it was natural.

We passed through another door and into a room.

Lady Entropy’s shrine was one I visited often, but even though I was used to it, it still carried an air of sanctity to it.

In comparison, this room likely carried a similar air, but simply the fact that I had never been here made that feeling all too obvious.

“Amazing, mister demon king…”

It appeared Asami had followed us. Since no one had stopped her, and she had indeed been trained by the shrine maidens, I supposed it was fine.

“How is it?” Sylph said, taking the initiative for once and stepping forward. “Pretty, right? ‘N the carpet’s real soft, too…” She gestured to both the carpet on the floor and the tapestries on the walls, neither of which looked out of place despite being clearly man-made.

In the centre of the room stood a pair of thrones, facing each other, one wooden and one made of black stone. With a small hop, Sylph took place on the wooden throne, and Salamander followed suit and sat down on the other one.

Sylph beckoned me over with a lazy half-gesture, so I stood between the thrones while the pair of shrine maidens and Asami stood off to the side.

Sylph seemed to concentrate on something, and after perhaps twenty seconds—

Green in all directions. Clearly a divine realm.

Yet I could hardly even focus on that.

Say we posit, for a moment, that people have a ‘density’. The amount of presence they command, or such.

In a world like my old world, almost everyone had a ‘density’ of 1. Occasionally, there might have been a particularly charismatic or imposing person with a density of 2 or 3, but fundamentally, it never got that high.

In a world like this one, that rule did not hold.

A Hero held the power to sway the masses just by being a Hero. If one entered a room, there was no way anyone in the room would miss them. A 10, perhaps.

Someone like Sleehekt, I would have estimated at 20.

My Demon Generals at 100, perhaps. The same went for the two goddesses who had been accompanying me, both inside their shrine maidens and outside.

Myself, a conservative 250. Closer to 300, in my [True Demon Form].

Now, this is a lot of thought that I could not have possibly had at the time.

After all, right there in that space—

Salamander was a 500, and Sylph was at least a 1000.

Simply by standing there, she exuded pressure as though she wanted me dead.

And she was not even looking at me.

In order to fake composure, I immediately activated [Pokerface] and built a throne out of darkness to sit on.

Presumably, Lady Entropy had a similar feeling of presence to Sylph, if not even stronger, but the fact of the matter was that I spent a large part of my time with her, so I must have gotten used to her over time. In a similar vein, Gnome had a particular disarming charm to her, so it was nigh impossible to feel intimidated by her to begin with.

I felt like I could slightly understand Evyna, now, and then decided I had better things to think about.

Questions like ‘why did their thrones come with them’, ‘why are they so different here from in the mortal world’ and ‘which path of conversation would allow me to get out of here as soon as possible’ filled my mind.

I decided to ask the first two of those questions aloud.

“Ah, the thrones, is it?” Salamander responded, nodding. “They’re called Thousand Thrones. They’re like a… link between Atlas—the mortal world—and Akasha—the divine realms. Allow us to come and go.”

“But I do not recall Lady Entropy having a similar thing…”

“Ah. I said somethin’ similar before, right? She’s more powerful. She doesn’t need somethin’ like this, though she could probably make one.”

“Th-then, my other question…”

“Ahh, that. Right, right. Tell me, Lord Astaroth.”

Although I had not yet seen Salamander make this expression, I could not help but think it suited her. That ferocious grin, that is.

“Didya really think a little mortal shrine maiden could contain a whole god?”

A heat wave hit my face. Terribly unpleasant.

If I had not had access to [Pokerface], I would not have been able to look so composed.

“Well, that’s how it is,” she said, nodding to herself. “Even after ya sent us packin’, the result was still a pair of avatars, rather than full-fledged gods. What? Feelin’ scared in front of the true power of the divine?”

Was she trying to get back at me for earlier? In any case, it was sincerely unpleasant. I—admittedly a hypocritical thing—wished she could simply be just a little more mature.

“I would have my rewards, now,” I said, backing away from Salamander as far as I could without moving my throne.

“Hmph. Fine, fine. Lady Entropy’d get mad if I break you, anyway.”

A frighteningly realistic idea.

The two goddesses focused for a moment, just like Gnome had when she gave me a fragment of her divinity, and after perhaps a minute, their fragments—that is, a pair of orbs of light, one red and one green, entered my chest.

Like before, it felt like I was going to vomit. Unlike before, it was far worse—not only were there two at once, but I was also in the presence of two proper goddesses, one even more imposing than the other. I just managed to remain seated without buckling over.

«You have obtained a fragment of divinity.»

«You have obtained a “fragment of wind-attribute divinity”.»

A marking around my eyes and a ring on the little finger of my left hand, with the same peculiar tickling sensation as last time.

«You have obtained a fragment of divinity.»

«You have obtained a “fragment of fire-attribute divinity”.»

A marking on my right cheek, and a ring on my right middle finger.

Without a break, the voice of the world—GAME went on to describe my new powers.

«You have gained the skill [Fragment of Wind-Attribute Divinity]. You have inherited the power of the wind attribute. With just a speck of this power, the wind will blow to your will and the skies will follow your words. As you are incomplete as a god, it will have no effect on beings with self-awareness, and attempts to use this power on such beings is likely to earn you their ire. The more people profess their faith in you, the stronger you will grow.»

«You have gained the skill [Fragment of Fire-Attribute Divinity]. You have inherited the power of the fire attribute. With just a speck of this power, fires will light as you will and flame will submit to you. As you are incomplete as a god, it will have no effect on beings with self-awareness, and attempts to use this power on such beings is likely to earn you their ire. The more people profess their faith in you, the stronger you will grow.»

More useful abilities. The wind would blow in favourable directions both during travels and combat, wildfires would not spread as fast in my nation…

«The skill [Fragment of ∎▲z] has transformed into the skill [Fragment of Li▲-Attribute Divinity]. You have inherited the power of Li▲. With just a speck of this power, Li▲ will ⬜89Q& according to your will.»

Several seconds of silence.

“That…” I said after a moment, “am I correct in assuming that is ‘light’?”

The goddesses nodded with perplexed expressions. “Probably,” they said at roughly the same time.

«You have gained the skill [Seed of Chaos]. Passive: you have taken your first real steps towards becoming truly divine. If you nurture this little plant, surely it will one day bloom into a beautiful flower.»

Several more seconds of silence.

“More importantly!” Salamander said, forcing a laugh. “Look at your new powers!”

“Later. There was more, yes?”

“Ah, sure was,” Salamander said, pulling from somewhere—her outfit did not have any pockets, so I was not sure where—a half-purple, half-golden gemstone. Without a care in the world, she tossed it to me.

I caught it, and it disappeared.

«Goddess of Fire, Salamander has bestowed the Aspect of Divine Reinforcement unto you. As such, it is your prerogative to decide the Aspect’s fate.»

«Please state your preference.»

It was not even listing my options anymore, likely because it already knew my answer.

«Preference confirmed. Aspect of Divine Reinforcement turned back into Aspect of Improvement and given to Goddess of Darkness, Entropy.»

«Goddess of Darkness, Entropy has bestowed upon you the Aspect of Improvement. You will gain three skills.»

Wait one moment, I thought, and GAME waited. Can you delay this?

«Affirmative. Bestowment of skills can be delayed.»

Then do so.

«Understood. I will monitor you, so simply call my name and I will bestow the skills upon you.»

“Why’d you do that?” Salamander asked, tilting her head.

“Mhm.” Sylph nodded. “You wanna, get strong. Right? Then, why wait?”

“I cannot keep my subordinates waiting for too long.” In addition, I really, really wanted to get away from the pair’s true bodies. “That being the case, could we…”

“Mhm.” Once more, Sylph nodded. “Hup~”

Within the blink of an eye, we were back in the mortal world—

And I made eye contact with a butterfly-winged girl, not taller than the length of my hand and not twenty centimetres removed from my face.