“How can this be happening to me?” Diablo bemoaned. He was in his study, cradling his head in despair.
The reason he found himself in this predicament was quite simple: The Wicked Witch of the Tower had made the switch from sworn enemy of the Demonkin Nation to its supreme ruler, even if only provisionally. The witch had assumed power by getting rid of the fake C—the Master who had destroyed the palace and done considerable damage to the rest of the capital—and obtained a proxy letter handwritten by Prince Voros personally.
As she settled into her temporary reign, the Wicked Witch used her own funds and resources to provide relief for all the residents, whether they be demon or human. Thanks to her assistance, even some of the demons joined the liberated humans in praising her as “the Great Witch of the Tower.” Those demons had lost their homes and their sources of food, and had been injured when the fake C was resurrected. The tower witch provided them with food, clothing, and healing services free of charge, and led projects to restore all the buildings, so it was only natural that the demons who’d been rescued would start viewing the witch as worthy of reverence.
The Wicked Witch introduced her “Absolute Autonomy for Humans” edict throughout the Demonkin Nation, backed up by her proxy letter and her hundred-strong dragon army. At first, the demon aristocrats objected to the idea of setting the human slaves free, but the sight of dragons flying overhead, blotting out the afternoon sun soon put an end to those protests. Most of the would-be rebels had gotten the message that if they attempted an uprising against the witch, hellfire would rain down and destroy everything.
One demon noble who decided to call her bluff found himself made an example of when dragons breathed fire on his estate, leaving only a crater where a mansion had once stood. The attack killed the noble but left no trace of his corpse to collect, and the slaves who had been in his fiefdom were relocated to the Great Tower. As for the territory itself, it descended into turmoil as potential successors fought over who had the right to take over the domain. Normally, the monarch of the Demonkin Nation would forcefully annex the land and hand it over to another fiefdom, or assign a new lord to the leaderless domain, but since the bedridden king had perished in the palace explosion, and his regent, Prince Voros, hadn’t been seen since the incident, it had all turned into a bit of a free-for-all.
The Wicked Witch explained to the skeptics that Voros had formally awarded her proxy rights to rule the kingdom in exchange for her help in vanquishing the fake C. According to the witch’s words, even she didn’t know where Voros had disappeared to after he was last sighted fleeing the royal capital with his retinue. The soldiers who had survived the blast at the castle had all witnessed the prince absconding, which helped to corroborate this cover story, when Voros had in fact been captured and was doomed to spend eternity suffering in the deepest recesses of the Abyss. But that was beside the point.
After the Wicked Witch had killed the recalcitrant noble, the rest of the demon aristocracy (who all seemed to value their lives) fell into line. Of course, news of this mass capitulation was spread far and wide so that it would eventually reach Diablo’s ears. As Light’s team had anticipated, the demon’s head throbbed painfully with despair when he heard.
“I wasn’t intending to wage war against the witch either,” Diablo said to himself. “But according to all the information I have on her, she might be the worst thing to ever happen to me...”
At the emergency summit in the Principality of the Nine, Diablo had encountered a masked boy he believed greatly resembled Light. Despite his best efforts since then, he had been unable to find definitive proof that this boy was indeed the same human he had left for dead in the Abyss years earlier. Just in case, he had decided to send messages to the other former members of the Concord of the Tribes to warn them of the possibility of Light still being alive, which was done less as a favor to his former partymates than as a way to find someone to scapegoat if the opportunity should present itself. But in a bizarre twist, he found out later that, aside from Drago the dragonute and Santor the centaur, all of the other past members of his clandestine party had vanished without a trace.
“So not only did I encounter a boy who might be Light at that summit,” Diablo wailed, “but Drago and Santor are the only ones from that party who haven’t disappeared. This cannot be a coincidence, no matter how I try to interpret this information!”
The boy adventurer who looked a lot like Light had seemingly become active at around the same time that the Wicked Witch first appeared in the Elven Queendom. It was also around this time that Garou, Sasha, Sionne, Naano, and Oboro started disappearing into thin air, one after another. Furthermore, the timeline seemed to overlap with the Wicked Witch’s toppling of the Elven Queendom, the Dark Elf Islands, and the Beast Folk Federation. The witch had also found friendly nations in the Dwarf Kingdom and the Onifolk Archipelago, forged an alliance with the Human Kingdom, and expanded the reach of her Absolute Autonomy decree.
“Was Light able to survive by the skin of his teeth because he met that witch in the Abyss?” Diablo wondered aloud. “Did he win the witch’s favor, and is now exacting revenge on all of us who were in the party with her backing?”
Diablo wished he could reject this theory outright as being patently ridiculous, but too many pieces of the puzzle fell neatly into place to readily dismiss it.
“So he took revenge on Garou and the rest of them while conquering entire nations on the side?” Diablo summarized. “No, that can’t possibly be true.”
The idea that Light could be vanquishing nations as some kind of series of side quests to his primary mission—his vendetta against his old partymates—was entirely farcical on the face of it, to the point where Diablo had to force himself to shake his head to forget he’d even considered the idea. However, he still needed to confront a gigantic problem that had reared its head.
“The witch is coming to visit my fiefdom!” Diablo cried out in dismay.
He had received a notice informing him that the Wicked Witch was scheduled to visit his domain for an official inspection, and due to her role as the new regent in place of the absentee prince, he was in no position to refuse. If he did, he would suffer the same fate as the previous demon aristocrat who defied the witch.
Diablo’s power level was only slightly above 400, which was the same as it had been when he was in the Concord of the Tribes. Due to his reward of a peerage following his stint in the party, he had seen no reason to level up, since he already had plenty of influence. Therefore, if a hundred dragons swooped down and torched his manor with him inside, he wouldn’t have the resistance stats to survive.
“Not a single one of the soldiers I conscripted has returned either,” he grumbled. “That means I won’t even have a fighting force to combat the witch if the need arises.”
Voros had coerced Diablo into lending him soldiers from his domain to join the latest cross-border raids led by Doc and Goh, but while their tour of duty should have been long since over by this point, not one soldier had returned to Diablo’s fiefdom. And following the news that Voros had apparently absconded from the kingdom, there wasn’t even anybody he could inquire about the whereabouts of his troops. That said, it was unlikely those soldiers could provide any sort of protection against the might of one hundred dragons anyway.
“I hope I’m not the next target of his retribution, after Garou and the others,” Diablo worried. He reminded himself that the whole notion of the mysterious boy adventurer at the summit really being Light in disguise, and that he was carrying out a vendetta while allied with the Wicked Witch, was simply a hunch only loosely supported by odd bits of raw intel he had compiled. There was no irrefutable proof Light was still alive.
“Light was a lowly inferior. There’s no possible way he could’ve survived in the Abyss after tripping that teleportation trap,” Diablo reasoned. “And all those who have vanished were worthless and incompetent anyway! They likely lost their lives by overextending their meager talents while out on dangerous quests. That must be what happened to them!” Reassuring himself in this way finally gave him the energy to take action.
“I-In any case, I must do everything I can to ensure the Wicked Witch feels welcome while she is here,” he told himself. “No matter how powerful she might be, the witch is still an inferior with no civilization or culture to speak of. I will simply offer her cuisine and wine the likes of which her ill-bred kind have never tasted, and surround her with men so handsome, no inferior could ever hope to compare. Yes, I’ll have them wait on her hand and foot!”
Diablo contemplated this course of action some more. “Then again, perhaps the witch isn’t into men at all. In that case, I should hire some women and maybe even some children, just in case her proclivities lean in those directions.”
Diablo marched out of his study, his mind still fixated on ways to give the Wicked Witch the red carpet treatment. At that time, Diablo never imagined the witch’s visit would bring him face-to-face with his past.