I stood in silence in the middle of the flatlands that stretched across the northern part of the Human Kingdom near the border of the Demonkin Nation, awaiting the arrival of the Master named Doc, who I knew would be coming here with a company of demonkin soldiers dressed as bandits, as well as my older brother who he had turned into a monster.
“You may leave that pillar where you placed it,” Ellie said to some fairy maids a little distance behind me. “As for the other pillar, please move that fifty paces forward from its current position.”
“As you wish, Miss Ellie,” replied the lead fairy maid.
The pillars they were talking about were the same ones we had used in the capture of the flesh zombie, Cavaur, in the Dwarf Kingdom. The fairy maids were busily positioning the pillars around us to Ellie’s specifications, each pillar requiring several maids at a time to maneuver it. Although I highly doubted Doc would just come lumbering along in between a bunch of giant pillars if he noticed they’d been placed in an oddly specific pattern, which was why Ellie was going to make the pillars invisible once they were in place.
I wanted to help with the grunt work in order to take my mind off the agitation I was feeling about the mission, but Mei made sure I stayed put.
“Master Light, there is no need for you to assist in the preparations,” assured my head maid, who was standing close behind me with Aoyuki. “Plus, you must not deny the fairy maids the opportunity to complete this important task for you.”
Sure, I understood what she was saying, but I was too on edge to just sit under a parasol waiting for my long-lost brother to show up, so in the end, I chose to position myself on the farthest edge of the prairie and stare toward the horizon, where Doc’s army was supposedly on the move.
“Aoyuki, are you sure Doc and my big brother will be coming from this direction?” I asked, turning to my Genius Monster Tamer.
“Mrrow!” Aoyuki confirmed.
Right at that moment, Mera was tracking Doc’s movements using a certain skill she possessed, but because said skill required such a huge physical sacrifice on her part, we had left her behind on the bottom tier of the Abyss so she could recuperate. Aoyuki was in constant communication with Mera via an SR Telepathy card to confirm that Doc and his men were indeed still making their way toward us.
I thanked Aoyuki, then turned to Ellie and the fairy maids who had all lined up in front of me.
“Blessed Lord, we have finished setting up the teleportation obstruction barrier,” Ellie announced.
“Thanks, Ellie. And thanks to all of you too,” I said. “Now, like we talked about earlier, you’ll all return to the Abyss to take care of business there. We need you to hold the fort, Ellie.”
“Understood, Your Blessedness,” the superwitch replied. “I pray from the deepest reaches of my soul that you will be successful in this mission.”
Ellie and the fairy maids bowed to me, then made their way outside of the anti-teleportation barrier. Once they had exited the cancellation field, Ellie produced an SSR Teleportation card and translocated the group to the Abyss. After watching them go, I turned my gaze back to the horizon and toward Doc.
If Mera’s report and the documents Mei found in Doc’s lab are both correct, it’s basically beyond doubt that Doc has turned my brother into a monster, I thought. Even so...
I had no reason to doubt what my allies had told me. Mera had recounted seeing someone who had looked just like my brother among Doc’s troops, even going as far as using her shape-shifting abilities to reproduce exactly what she had seen, and there was no denying that the face she recreated looked an awful lot like Els, my missing older brother.
Even so, there’s a chance I’m completely wrong about this, I thought. After all, there was always the possibility that Doc had simply created a monster that looked a lot like Els by sheer coincidence, and my big brother was, in fact, living a peaceful life far from these plains.
I sighed quietly. The logical side of my brain was telling me that I was being absurd even entertaining the idea, but I couldn’t help latching on to the possibility, however faint, that I might be totally wrong. In fact, I wanted to latch on to it. I wanted something—anything—to give me some hope that what I was about to face wasn’t real.
However, a short while after Ellie and the fairy maids had left for the Abyss, the harsh reality I was dreading appeared on the horizon. Doc’s team spotted us and rushed headlong to our position without even noticing the invisible pillars. And due to the speed of their approach, I got to see with my own eyes that there really was someone who looked exactly like my brother among their ranks. I’d heard all the intelligence about Els’s fate from my allies and thought I had steeled my emotions to deal with this very moment, but on seeing my brother in the flesh, I felt my last crumb of hope shatter into jagged shards inside my heart.
“Els...” I whispered. “I can’t believe this is you.” I felt a darkness sweep across my soul as I watched my brother charging toward me.