The silence was so complete it was almost loud. Everything around him was white, so he couldn’t tell the floor apart from the ceiling and the walls.
Emperor Gelmed’s serpentine body, the Magimatic Castle Viovix, Rem’s and Shera’s retreating figures, the moist ground, the rain, the burning capital — it was all gone.
Just white as far as the eye could see.
“I’ve...been here before?” Diablo whispered.
He looked around. Where there once was nothing but a void a few moments ago now stood a man. He was clad in a thin cloth hanging from his shoulders. He was tall, gangly, and looked to be about thirty, with finely chiseled features that struck Diablo as somehow familiar.
“I never would have imagined...” the man said, parting his dry lips. “That someone in that world could ever defeat me.”
“Hm?” Diablo furrowed his brows, confused.
“I suppose that when I was faced with the Girl of the Vessel, my judgment was clouded...”
“Y-You!” Diablo’s eyes narrowed in realization. “You’re Emperor Gelmed?!”
Diablo guarded himself, but the man simply stood there, defenseless.
“You win,” he said. “No... This victory goes to both of you... I never imagined a Demon Lord would lend their help to a member of the races.”
The cracks on the Shining Wing Armor expanded little by little, and then splintered off into particles of light. Steadily, Diablo returned to his former appearance, losing his Krebskulm-like form. For a moment, Diablo dreaded that Klem might have disappeared here, but the particles soon reconverged, forming the body of a child. Her horns, her tail, and her long fluttering hair were all there.
Diablo wrapped his arms around her body.
“Klem! Klem!”
He called her name again and again, and the girl slowly opened her eyes.
“Mm...?” she voiced groggily.
“Are you all right?! Do you recognize me?!” Diablo asked her.
“...Aye,” she said weakly. “I see you’ve won.”
Did he win, though? The man he thought was Emperor Gelmed said the same thing.
“Hmph...” Klem scoffed in his arms. “But we were sent to a rather troublesome place.”
“You know what this place is?!” Diablo asked her, surprised.
Before Klem could answer, the man chuckled.
“A corridor!” he declared. “A corridor to other worlds. I find it hard to believe a transcendent like me could lose to a man ignorant enough not to know that.”
“...A corridor to another world?” Diablo asked.
“Hm,” Klem nodded. “Since you’re an outsider, you had to have passed through here at least once before. It’s this Demon Lord’s first time here, though.”
A long time ago, Diablo was summoned from his original world to this one in the form of his player character in the MMORPG Cross Reverie.
—It feels kind of familiar...but I can’t remember.
“Crossing between different worlds is most unusual,” Klem added, sensing his confusion. “It only makes sense your mind would be scrambled by it.”
Did she mean his memory was being faulty because of it?
“Can we go back?” Diablo asked.
“Do you mean to the world you were originally born in, or—” Klem began.
“I mean to the world where Rem and Shera are,” Diablo replied unflinchingly.
Klem regarded him with a somewhat bothered expression.
“This Demon Lord would love to go back, but...”
Both of them turned their eyes to Emperor Gelmed. The lanky man shrugged theatrically and spread his arms.
“A Demon Lord or a sorcerer won’t be able to do it. Only God’s miracles can allow passage through corridors to other worlds. Feel free to wander this place for all eternity, dreaming of your home worlds.”
“Are you a fool?!” Klem glared at him gravely. “If you die in a nonexistent place like this, your soul will never find salvation! You’ll only find a void more vast and bottomless than any world’s end here! That’s even worse than falling to Hell!”
But Emperor Gelmed’s expression remained unchanged. He was well aware of that.
“Demon Lord, you may know of the rules of the countless worlds and universes, but you know not of the lot of man. In order to surpass God, I made an oath, and I intended to fulfill it.”
Over his bony chest, right over his heart, letters of some kind were etched onto his flesh, but Diablo couldn’t read them. It probably wasn’t Lyferia’s text, anyway.
“You!” Klem’s eyes widened. “You promised the price of a thousand incarnations?!”
“To gain limitless power, I’ve atoned for countless sins! It was necessary, if I was to make my ambition a reality.”
“And what you wanted was to become that terrible monster?”
“I wanted to free this world from the yoke of the gods. I’d grown weary of being ruled over like cattle, of dancing in the palms of their hands.”
“You wanted to liberate the world from the gods...?” Diablo asked quizzically.
But, as seemed to often be the case with this man, the words of another failed to reach Emperor Gelmed’s ears.
“...And I reached it... I’d gained the power to ascend to godhood... But I couldn’t escape the shackles of mortality. Man will forever remain man, it seems...”
Diablo thought back to their battle. It didn’t feel like he fought someone who was “only human.” Gelmed was more monstrous than any creature he’d ever faced. Even when he joined forces with the most high-level party in all of Lyferia, they were still almost completely wiped out. Only through borrowing the power of the Demon Lord Krebskulm was he able to squeeze out a win.
And that monster he had faced now looked so...frail.
With a vacant expression, Emperor Gelmed again parted his cracked lips and spoke with a fleeting, fading voice.