That’s what Aqua had said as she held her knees and looked up at the moon, and it just wouldn’t leave me alone.
“Shut up! I don’t care if you want to go home; I need to get this whole thing off my back! I need to be able to return you to Heaven like a defective toy if I want to!”
“Like a defective what, you tsundere NEET?! You could at least stand to admit your true feelings at a time like this!” Aqua made to strangle me, but I darted back out of the way. Meanwhile, Mitsurugi and his entourage were really getting into it.
“Fio. Cremea. I want you to both relax. Even if we lose this battle, we’ll go get stronger, and then we can come back here someday. I know how long you’ve worried. I know how hard you’ve worked to keep up with me, raising your levels whenever you could… Thank you so much for sticking with me to the very end. Let’s beat the Demon King and go home. Together!”
Oops, sounded like that was the end of his speech. I guess whatever he’d said was really moving or something, because the spear wielder and the Thief were nodding, teary-eyed. I wondered distantly which one was Fio and which one was Cremea.
But anyway, more important things.
“Aqua, you understand the plan, right? If anyone dies, the fighting stops. We collect the body and teleport out of there. I need you to resist your instincts on this one. Don’t go running over to resurrect them the moment they drop, understand? If somebody gets an attack in on you while you’re doing the resurrection, it’s all over. First teleport, then resurrection, got it? Because if you die on us, we’ve got nothing.”
As long as we had Aqua with us, then even if the worst should happen… Well, it wasn’t the worst that could happen. The question was whether Aqua, who tended to make a beeline for anyone injured or killed without thinking about anything else, would remember what I’d told her in the heat of battle…
“You can stop repeating yourself, Kazuma. I understand perfectly well. You just need to trust me. Still, I can’t help feeling a bit bad about this one. And not like normal—like you might shuffle off the mortal coil, but whatever. It’s like…this is going to be one we can’t take back.”
“Stop it, moron—that’s enough out of you! Why do you like death flags so much?! Today of all days, just do what I tell you, all right? Even if somebody dies, do not pop out in front. Your job is support from a nice, safe location. As long as you’re alive and we can collect the bodies, then we can make do. You understand me?”
Aqua nodded. I finally felt like I had repeated myself enough times that even with her famous inability to read a situation, I thought we would be okay.
“Have you finished your little chat?” Megumin asked. “All right, a little something for each of you from me. Starting with Kazuma—I’m giving some of this back to you, just in case it becomes necessary.” She reached into the backpack she’d been carting around so carefully and started handing out manatite to everyone who could use magic. First, she pressed five of the crystals on me. Then she took out a single stone for Yunyun.
“Wow! I’ve never seen such a big piece of manatite! Are you sure? Can I really have…? H-hey, Megumin! Hey, come on! If you’re going to give it to me, then give it already!”
Megumin wasn’t letting go of the rock. “This is a precious gift I received from Kazuma,” she said. “Use it thoughtfully, all right? Seriously, save it for when you really, truly need it. For I my very self received it as a gift!”
“Yeah, fine, I get it; you’re happy to have a present—you don’t need to brag about it! I’ll be careful with it, I promise!” Yunyun, finally in possession of the manatite chunk, looked at it with her eyes sparkling.
Aqua watched the scene, brimming with anticipation. “Neat, Megumin! Where’s my piece?”
“You don’t need one, do you, Aqua? We’ve been together for quite a long time, yet I’ve never known you to run out of MP, so— Hey! What are you doing? This is very precious stuff! Anyway, if I gave you some manatite, you wouldn’t even use it; you’d just sell it!”
I ignored the tug-of-war over the manatite that had started between the two, instead putting my own pieces away in my pouch and taking up position once more in the shadow of the door. I activated Sense Foe and was greeted with a veritable barrage of dangerous auras on the other side.
Ahhh. I’d figured that if the Demon King could strengthen his minions, he would just keep them all at his side. But the knights we’d faced in this room were essentially the overflow from his chamber.
Darkness, standing beside me, started to smile at me—now, of all moments! “Kazuma… Do you remember when I joined this party? You said that you and Aqua might not look like much but that you swore you were going to defeat the Demon King. I never envisioned it happening quite like this…”
Geez, I couldn’t believe she actually remembered that. “Quit it! Going all memory lane at a moment like this is a death flag for sure. At least pick something fun, something to get me in the spirit. You know, like tell me that if I defeat the Demon King, you’ll let me have a harem so that I can leave plenty of successors to the hero’s bloodline.”
“Y-you hopeless man… To the bitter end…! No. I suppose this is perfectly like you. Wait… If you defeat the Demon King? If you…defeat…” Suddenly her expression went from a wry smile to one of shock. “Ahhh! Kazuma, do you still have that ring?! The one you stole from Iris when you snuck into the castle?”
Whoa, hold on! “Pipe down—Mitsurugi’s right here! That doesn’t even matter anyway; why would you bring it up?”
“N-no, it does matter. I can’t ignore what I just heard… You snuck into the castle and stole a ring from Lady Iris?” Mitsurugi, who had been standing behind me and Darkness getting his gear ready and had apparently heard everything, looked at me like he had some sort of objection to raise.
“How he got it doesn’t matter now!” Darkness exclaimed. “The ring matters! You still have it, don’t you?!”
“Yes! Yes, I still have it. It’s back in my room at the mansion, in the same place I keep my precious ero books.” That was my little sister’s cherished ring, after all. I wouldn’t want anything to happen to it. I kept it safely in a box with my other valuables.
“Your—! You can’t keep the royal family’s ring with a bunch of porn! Listen to me! You have to let somebody else strike the final blow against the Demon King! Hrm… But if Mitsurugi was to do it, that could be problematic, too… Arrrgh! I’ll take the arch-fiend’s head myself!”
“What’s gotten into you? Trying to grab the glory all of a sudden? You always pretend not to care about money, but now you’re showing your true, greedy colors, you bankrupt noble!”
“I’m not worried about anything as basic as money! I don’t care who does it, as long as it’s not you or Mitsurugi!”
Megumin raised her hand. “In that case, I call dibs on the title of Slayer of the Demon King.”
“Don’t make things any more complicated than they already are, Megumin! You can’t use Explosion indoors anyway! Trust me, if Kazuma defeats the Demon King, you’ll regret it just as much as I will! Say something to him, Aqua!”
“That doesn’t bother me nearly as much as that armor of yours, Darkness. It’s gotten awfully cruel-looking since I saw you last. It seems to me like it’s cursed. But I’ll break it for you. Although that might cause the armor to disappear…”
Darkness grabbed Aqua before she could launch into her curse-breaking spell, slapping a hand over her mouth to keep her from intoning any magic.
How was it that we were standing one door away from the final battle, and yet we were just wasting our time bickering?
“If our combined efforts can take the Demon King down the normal way, then it doesn’t matter if I don’t assassinate him. You know what we’re getting ourselves into, though, right? As far as I know, Darkness, no one in Axel has better stamina or Magic Resistance than you do. If even you can’t withstand the Demon King’s attacks, I don’t think there’s anyone who will be able to take him down.”
If even Darkness’s endurance and Aqua’s healing powers weren’t enough to protect us from the Demon King, then we had no choice but to give up on fighting fair; we’d have to resort to having Megumin drop explosions on him from a distance. And that would work only if the Demon King was willing to stick around in this castle now that the barrier was gone.
Oops. Darkness was smacking my chest with the flat of her fist and giving me a little smile. “I might not be good for anything else, but for protection, you can count on me.” It was a strange moment for the normally helpless, retiring Crusader. Until this point, Darkness had always been something of an unsung hero, serving as our shield. If she could have had it together like this more often, instead of getting all pant-pant or turning impatient and angry, I might even have been able to muster an earnest word of thanks.
“I’ve always pursued the path of the female knight, but I never imagined my dream of being sexually tortured by the Demon King might actually come true. Kazuma… You have my profound thanks.”
“I was about to say something similar, but, um…I take it back.”
Aqua, Megumin, Darkness—to the bitter, bitter end, they had to be this way…
As we waited for Aqua to finish buffing all of us, I looked at each of the others in turn and nodded.