Belgrieve’s eyes wandered as he stroked his beard. “So...does this mean that his experiments were a success?”
“Ange’s existence seems to be proof of that. I don’t feel the slightest bit of demonic presence from her.”
“Does that have anything to do with the fact that...you’re an elf?”
“I’m not sure... But of all the experiments I’ve seen, Ange is the only one I would consider a complete success, so it is quite likely. It might be related to how an elf’s mana differs from a human’s...” Satie reasoned, glancing towards Graham.
The old elf seemed to be deep in thought, and it was some time before he answered her. “The mana of elves is of a slightly different nature from that of humans. It should have a terrible affinity with the mana of demons.”
“As I recall, gramps, your holy sword absolutely despises demons and anything of the sort,” Percival said, glancing over to the wall where said blade remained completely silent. They had heard that it was overflowing with the pure mana of elves. Since it detested demons, it stood to reason that an elf should have poor compatibility with a demon.
Belgrieve furrowed his brow. “On the contrary... Maybe elven mana could work to neutralize some of the evil parts of the demon.”
“All we have is supposition. But if the only one to become a human child was born of an elf, then we can derive some meaning from that.”
It seemed even Graham could only offer conjecture.
Satie sighed and wrapped her arms around her knees. “But if some power held by elves is able to contain the power of demons...maybe I’ll be able to protect these children. That’s...encouraging.” She buried her face in her knees, her shoulders quivering once more. “It was a terrible sight... They were all tattered and bloody... A homunculus grows in the womb far more quickly than a normal child. They’d visibly grow within a single month, and there were girls whose bodies simply couldn’t keep up with it, and they died.”
Belgrieve gently patted Satie on the shoulders.
“If only I was a bit stronger, you know... And then, I’d...have saved a lot more of them,” she said, sniffling.
“You shouldn’t blame yourself for it. You did all you could, on your own.”
“Sorry... I thought I’d already processed these emotions. It’s all coming back to me now.”
Kasim roughly scratched his head. “Hmm... One thing isn’t clicking... If the real goal was to have demons he could freely control, there’s no way he’d have let Satie get away, and when she did, I think he would have tried a lot harder to find her... Schwartz doesn’t seem like the kind of guy who would slip up there, does he?”
“I don’t know his disposition myself, but... Well, that was quite the fumble for an archmage who left his name in the history books.”
“He’d be much less of a threat if he were prone to half measures.”
“We can’t entertain such a notion. This is the man who managed to seize the heart of the Rhodesian Empire, even if only temporarily.”
“That’s precisely my point. There’s just something wrong about how he handled the demon research—the part he should have been paying the most attention to. For all the ghastly things he was up to, he was strangely haphazard at the worst times. It is weird.”
“I mean, I get that...”
They were just spinning their wheels and getting nowhere now. It seemed Charlotte and Byaku knew nothing beyond the fact that the experiments were being conducted, and though Satie knew more about the experiments themselves, she had not been keyed in on whatever objective lay beyond them. No matter how much they discussed the matter, they could not escape the realm of pure conjecture. It was starting to feel a little pointless to them all.
Suddenly, Kasim seemed to recall something. “Come to think of it, Satie...didn’t you say you destroyed Solomon’s Key or something?”
“Hmm, that’s true... Oh, didn’t you say you were searching for it too, once upon a time?”
“Yeah, I was. Well, I wasn’t all that motivated, so I can’t say I was searching diligently.” Kasim explained how he had been searching for an enchanted item known as Solomon’s Key while working with another group of demon researchers but that his efforts had borne no fruit.
Percival furrowed his brow and cocked his head. “What is it, exactly?”
“It appeared as a small branch from an apple tree. But it was actually a powerful mana construct, and I had to layer my magic several times over and exert all my strength to finally break it.”
“What did you do with its broken remains?”
“I buried them in my constructed space. And without me around, that space will have collapsed in on itself.”
“I see. Then we don’t have to worry about that. I just thought that might be what Schwartz would start with.”
“That was a possibility, but only if the Key was still around.”
As Satie put it, Solomon’s Key was an item that anyone researching the demons would want to possess. There were old documents that stated it was what Solomon had once used to command his demons.
Satie, who had been paying close attention to Schwartz’s every move and heedless of the probability of failure and death, had intervened the moment before he obtained Solomon’s Key and snatched it away. As a result, it had never reached his vile hands.
Given that, it didn’t seem like there was anything Schwartz could do. His goal was unknown, but whatever that happened to be, Solomon’s Key was bound to be a major factor. Now that it had disappeared from this world and he was deprived of his base in the capital, it didn’t seem like he could make any drastic moves.
With a loud snapping noise, one of the newly added bits of wood had split in the fireplace. “In short, there doesn’t seem to be anything we have to worry too much about,” Percival concluded as he rearranged the wood with a poker.
“But, he’s...unfathomable. You can’t underestimate him!” Byaku said.