As stated before, Cain had been a web novel producer.
It was a position where he encountered a great many stories.
Among those works, there were plenty of possession stories.
Some were novel, and some were cliché.
They each had all sorts of content and charms.
And in the process, there was one thing he naturally came to understand.
‘Changing cause and effect is quite dangerous.’
What is meant to happen will, in the end, inevitably happen.
If you stop it using something you know,
then some other thing you don’t know about will break out.
You’re a possessor. Why cling to the original flow?
Because you don’t know how far that change will reach.
Because it means cutting away your own advantage as a forerunner.
‘I tried not to do that as much as possible.’
But in the end, that was how possession stories always went.
Even if you didn’t want to change things, you had to if you wanted to live.
A human being values their own life above all else.
Even knowing that what he was doing now would bring change,
when he was about to die, when he felt like he was going insane,
did it make any sense to cling only to the original flow?
“Cain.”
“Oh my. Your Highness. It’s been a while.”
His voice sounded as if he were fawning,
but instead of rubbing his palms together servilely,
crack, crack—
his joints greeted him with an eerie chorus of pops.
“…”
Gulp—
The prince forcibly held back his trembling body.
He remembered. The memory of being beaten like a dog in the past.
If there was something more terrifying than psychological fear,
it was the education of pain remembered by the body.
“What is it?”
He tried hard to speak with dignity, like a prince.
“Oh my. Are we the sort of people who only see each other when something has happened?”
While killing demons, he had felt it. Ah, this isn’t good.
These people aren’t feeling enough of a sense of crisis.
Kill fewer of them. Hold back. I told you, this will complicate things.
They keep getting the wrong idea. They keep indulging in delusions.
The empire’s second prince before him, Wilhelm, was just such a case.
A foolish man who kept straying because the situation seemed fine.
A man who would become one of the traitors who brought down the empire.
“We’re the sort of people who only see each other when something has…. No. Sorry.”
So he had beaten him. Beaten him to the brink of death.
Royalty? With demons everywhere before their eyes, did bloodline matter?
Wilhelm has fallen to a demon’s temptation and lost his reason!
To restore him to his senses, we must apply physical shock!
In the end, at Cain’s persuasion, everyone thought, Is that so? and let it pass.
What was publicly known was the process of treating the temptation.
But the truth was “re-humanization” for the sake of mental reform.
“Indeed, isn’t that right?”
That day, Wilhelm had seen clearly what death was.
A demon? No. This human before his eyes was death.
Cain. He pretended otherwise, but he was quite literally a mad dog.
A man you had to pray to God about the moment his eyes flipped.
After being beaten by him for three days and nights, Wilhelm realized.
Aah! I was wrong! It was all my fault!
Anything was fine, he would do anything, so he just wanted the beating to stop!
“I just went to the area near the border.”
“Ahh… I heard about that. Mm. I did.”
Hadn’t they said the magic circle administrators had been thrown into an uproar?
Apparently, he had shown up out of nowhere and demanded to be sent to the border.
Personal information and an entry-exit register were essential for administrators.
They had to confirm who he was and ask their superiors.
Then he had smiled brightly and answered them with his fist.
Saying the higher-ups would fully understand the situation too.
The result? Every last one of them ended up hospitalized.
“From the administrators’ perspective, they were just doing their jobs, Cain.”
“Does it make sense that they didn’t know my face? They call me a mad dog, don’t they? They were just trying to push back once. I’m. Huh? I’m an administrator of this important magic circle. How dare some lowly commoner of unknown origin! Go receive permission and come back, you wretch!”
“…”
“—They didn’t say that directly. But people have a certain atmosphere, don’t they? It came through.”
“So you beat them.”
“Yes.”
“Even so, that’s a bit…”
“It’s called the crime of offending my mood.”
A madman. A truly madman. What kind of deranged bastard was this?
Wilhelm wanted to flee from Cain even now.
But contrary to his reason, Wilhelm’s body moved differently.
Haha! He laughed, saying, The administrators were in the wrong!
He was doing everything he could to stay in Cain’s good graces.
Because Cain was the empire’s finest blade and greatest force?
Because he was the perfect person for killing demons?
‘If only that were the reason.’
There was only one reason. It was because that human was a mad dog.
No one had even the faintest idea what he might do.
If he were always insane, everyone would at least devise a way to eliminate him.
Usually, he seemed extremely rational and mild-mannered,
but then his eyes would suddenly flip and he would go berserk, making him impossible to deal with.
‘Most of all… it hurts too much. He’s too frightening.’
Wilhelm thought the nickname God’s Right Hand was truly well made.
The moment you were hit once, you’d go, Aaaah! and start calling for God.
What was even more frightening was that your bones did not break and your organs did not burst.
It simply hurt. It hurt enough to make you want to die.
You did not faint. It hurt so much you could not even faint.
Wilhelm had had to endure such violence for three days and nights.
“The important thing isn’t the administrators. Don’t try to change the subject.”
“S-sorry. Say what you wanted to say. I’ll listen carefully.”
“When I went there, the knights weren’t fighting. Do you have any idea why?”
“…”
This was the crossroads between life and death. He had to think carefully.
He had to grasp the intent behind that mad dog’s question.
Was he really asking because he didn’t know the reason?
‘No way.’
He was a mad dog, but he was absolutely not a stupid dog.
If he had only been insane with no sense, he would have died long ago.
He knew when to bite and when not to bite.
He distinguished between those he could bite and those he could not yet bite.
That Cain was now opening his jaws wide.
If Wilhelm did not put something in there for him to chew on,
he would say he would start by chewing on Wilhelm’s head.
“Most likely… the knight orders were trying to choose the place where they would fight.”
“Choosing the place where they would fight.”
“Military merit isn’t simply about the number of times, is it, Cain? More attention. Greater influence. Many knights are of noble birth, so they’re sensitive to such things.”
Rescuing a defense unit made up of conscripts,
and saving a major water source responsible for an entire region.
There was no need to explain which would be the more dazzling achievement.
“They have too much leisure. At the party, too. Do they think all the demons have dropped dead?”
“Mm. I think that may be because of you. Ah, I absolutely don’t mean that sarcastically. I mean it literally.”
Power struggles when the demons were not all dead?
It seemed impossible, but the reason that impossible thing had become possible
was the man before his eyes. Cain. It was because of that human.
“Cain. You killed demons too well. You appeared every time there was a crisis, and you always won.”
Since the demons’ appearance, the continent had faced many crises.
But ironically, there had never been a crisis on the brink of annihilation.
Because each time, the Demon Slayer had descended upon the battlefield.
The one demons begged to spare them. The human above demons.
Undefeated. Invincible. Legend. Myth. All sorts of embarrassing titles.
But they were not excessive. Frighteningly enough, they were plain facts.
“Everyone has gained leeway. And leeway in the midst of crisis is reason enough to harbor other thoughts.”
“Interesting.”
“Something similar happened before, didn’t it? They fought each other over who would bring down the demon forces weakened thanks to you. In the end, you killed every last one of them and made it as if it had never happened, but still.”
Mm. So in the end, all of this is because of me.
I see. I was the problem all along. That’s what it was.
“It seems I worked too hard killing demons.”
“Cain?”
“I was wrong. Yes. I’m the one who deserves to die.”
“No. That’s not it. Why would you? If anything, I. We were the ones in the wrong! We were wrong, without a doubt!”
He felt uneasy. Ominous. A chill ran down his spine.
That human was suddenly starting self-criticism?
What on earth was he going to do? What was he going to say?
“From now on, I’ll have to work hard at things other than killing demons too.”
“No. There’s no need. Cain. You just kill demons. I’ll do something about the rest. Hm? Killing demons alone is hard enough. It’s tiring, isn’t it?”
“Did you just say I find killing demons hard?”
He had only meant that Cain did not need to take on other work too.
But it ended up sounding like,
You’re a weakling who gets exhausted just from killing demons, aren’t you?
—and cold sweat began to flow.
“In Your Highness’s eyes, I looked like that kind of pathetic idiot.”
“No! Absolutely not! What I meant was, that. There’s no need to go out of your way to handle headache-inducing matters too…”
“My head does not ache. I never drag things out long enough for my head to ache.”
An old saying. If your head is bad, your body suffers.
“Do you know what that means if you put it another way, Your Highness?”
If your body is good enough, you have no need to use your head at all.
At Cain’s explanation, Wilhelm was left speechless.
Why did those words change into that?!
“Ah. There’s one more. If you write the character for endurance three times, you can avoid murder.”
“The character for endurance? Cain. I truly don’t understand what you’re saying…”
“When did I tell you to understand?”
His manner of speaking to the prince suddenly became informal.
Considering the class system, it was something he could be killed for on the spot.
But Wilhelm had no leisure to say anything.
It was coming. Damn it. That terrifying madness was coming.
“I thought about it. I really have endured a lot, you know? If the demons had seen it, they’d have claimed it was species discrimination.”
“That’s only natural…”
“But looking at how things are going, it can be interpreted differently too.”
Once you’ve written endurance three times, from then on, they’re kill marks.
“Your Highness. You know very well how important I consider fighting demons, don’t you?”
“Of course, Cain. Of course I do.”
“The state of the home front can’t be like this. Like this, I can’t fight the demons with peace of mind.”
There was no change in his refusal to yield the demons before his eyes.
After all, it was hard to find anything more worthwhile than killing demons.
But that did not mean he had to kill every demon himself.
Even a mad dog had to rest. Was there any need to roll around like an actual dog?
Even if he could not carry them, they should do at least one person’s worth. Half a person’s worth, at least.
So.
“It’s time to begin normalization, isn’t it?”
“Normalization…?”
“What you went through, Your Highness.”
The arrogant, insolent personality that had trusted in royal blood
had been transformed into a completely different person in three days.
Cain’s special medicine: there is nothing violence cannot fix.
“We’re starting mental reconditioning.”
***
The demon war had changed a great many things.
One example was the knight orders’ garrisons.
In the past, most had stayed in castles.
Now, they waited in the field just in case.
Fighting demons was something conscripts could do as well.
But defeating demons was a knight’s work.
“Commander. A request for support has come in from nearby.”
“The demon bastards appeared?”
Tch. The commander clicked his tongue and lay back.
“Send an appropriate number, with a senior knight or something.”
At a glance, the reason for this personnel arrangement was obvious.
Find out whether it was a battlefield where they could win glorious merit.
If not, handle it yourselves; if it is, call us.
Not all, but many knight orders were like this.
“But, Commander. Judging from how urgently they requested support, it seems there are many of them.”
“And if we go and it turns out to be those idiots exaggerating, it’s a wasted trip.”
“They asked us to please come within two hours at the latest…”
“These bastards dare to notify knights of a time limit?”
They did have to go. If they did not respond, the problem would grow.
But they could be late. Various issues could arise.
In the end, far more than two hours passed.
Only after more than four hours did the knight order arrive at their destination.
What sort of demons had appeared to cause all this?
“You’re here.”
Instead of demons, one man was sitting there.
That voice. That face. And that ominous aura.
They had seen him somewhere. Who was he? Who was he again?
“You’re two hours late.”
“Cain?”
“The Demon Slayer?”
“God’s Right Hand?”
That mad dog Cain—why was he here?
“Let’s see. It’s 120 minutes, so 7,200 seconds…”
From now on, whenever they heard demons had appeared,
he would make them run out like Pavlov’s dogs.
The method was simple. It could not be more straightforward.
“Let’s keep it neat. Exactly seven thousand hits per person.”
He only had to beat it into their bodies. Into their souls.