Okay, yeah, the sitch was looking pretty darn grim. What’s my next move?
“What now, Lina?! He’s really raring to go!” Gourry said nervously. And when he did...
“Lina?” Norst parroted with a scowl. “I thought it was Lita.”
“The mayor just got her name wrong!” Gourry shouted.
“Wait...” Norst thought a moment, then looked back at me in shock. “Are you Lina Inverse?!”
So not good! If he could put that together just by my first name and the fact that I knew Sherra, he had to know exactly who I was—someone with massive demon beef. If just hearing Sherra’s name spoken had been enough to make this guy throw away all pretense and trap us in this weird barrier thing, there was no way he was gonna let me go now that he’d realized who I was. And of course, there was also no way at this point I could just say “sorry, mistaken identity.”
How to get out, then? Before I could think of something... Norst sprang into action. Gourry and I braced ourselves for battle!
Except Norst’s big move turned out to be kneeling down in place, planting his hands on the floor, and screaming, “You gotta be kidding me!” His voice was chagrined. “There’s no way! No! Freaking! Way! All right, get a load of this! Yes, I do some evil! I am a demon, after all! A General, no less... It’s not like I have quotas, but I do have my rank and reputation to think of! I can’t just stand around doing nothing! So here I am, laying the most basic of basic groundwork, not even actually doing anything yet. And just as I’m starting to consider doing a teeny-tiny little bit of bad stuff, suddenly there’s a knock at my door! ‘Hello! Lina Inverse here to kick your ass if you don’t mind!’ Can you freaking believe it?! This is the absolute worst!”
Uh... I didn’t quite know what to say. That certainly wasn’t exactly the reaction I was expecting, especially from a high-ranked demon. I had to entertain the possibility it was some ruse to get me off guard... right?
Since I had to be ready to chant a spell at any time, Gourry spoke in my place. “Is Lina famous among you guys or something?”
“Huh?!” Norst looked up, slightly irked. “Is Lina famous among us?!” He sounded almost offended. “She defeated the incarnation of our Dark Lord, then took the Great One into her body and defeated Lord Hellmaster without any harm coming to her! Then she vanquished Lord Dynast and defeated yet another incarnation of our Dark Lord! What idiot doesn’t know her?! You think we demons have no sense of self-preservation?! That we never share information?!”
Apparently my fights with demons were paying dividends. Of course, when you lined them all up like that, it was hard to deny that—while luck definitely played a huge part in it all—I really had done a number on the demons, huh?
“Yes, she’s famous! Infamous, even! She’s a harbinger of doom to demonkind! The Demon Slayer herself! Demons step past out of clear revulsion!”
“Clear revulsion?!” I found myself shouting. I’d heard that said about me vis-a-vis dragons, but demons?
“Clear revulsion!” Norst insisted, puffing out his chest for some reason. “See, there are some demons who think we should have our revenge on you. But some of us in the more high-ranking set, myself included, feel like going out of our way to take a shot at you would just mean heavier losses! It’s better just to avoid you altogether.”
“So... you don’t want to fight her?” Gourry asked.
“Of course not!” Norst responded furiously. “If you ask me, it’s not even a simple matter of strength! We demons are just a bad match-up for the being known as Lina Inverse!”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I growled, unable to help feeling a little offended.
“There are those who believe that because the Great One briefly inhabited your body, some measure of that power still lingers within you... But what about everything before then, eh? The only answer is that you have some inexplicable quality—some kind of predestination or property that neither human nor demon logic can quantify! How are we to fight something as nebulous as that?! I say we can’t, so the best policy is to steer clear! Yet here you are! Right! Freaking! Here! No warning, no rhyme, no reason! You just bust down my door, happy as you please! What the hell am I supposed to do with that?!” After screaming his throat out, Norst suddenly straightened up and bowed low to us. “So I’m begging of you, spare me. Just this once! Please!”
“Um...” How was I supposed to respond to a demon so powerful that I wasn’t sure I could beat him with an entire army and a gang of sorcerers treating me like a litigious unsatisfied customer?
He seemed to take my lack of response as dissatisfaction and quickly spoke up again. “I know! How about this?! I’ll send you safe and sound to Latka, and I’ll willingly pack up and leave town! And on top of that, I promise not to lay a hand on humans for five—no, ten years! In exchange, you let me leave without a fight, and if we do happen to pass each other in some other city somewhere, we’ll both just look the other way! We won’t even make eye contact!”
He committed to that compromise all on his own. Just how scared of me is this guy? It was starting to get on my nerves, but I wasn’t inclined to press the issue. Insisting on a fight would be the opposite of what I’d hoped to achieve here, after all. “Okay. Agreed.”
“Hooray!” Norst exclaimed with an exaggerated expression of relief and a celebratory pose.
Grr...
“I’d better get while the getting’s good, then...”
“You’re one to talk about ‘good,’” I snarked.
Ignoring my snide comment, Norst... didn’t move, exactly, although he’d clearly done something, because the countless patterns swirling on the ceiling and floor began to rise before me until they consumed my vision entirely.
The next thing I knew, Gourry and I found ourselves in an unfamiliar town.
The wind blew. Wagons rattled along...
“Now...” I thought for a minute, then spoke back to the old man on the bench. “This isn’t the Latka that’s close to Zephyr City, is it?”
“Zephyr? Where’s that?” he replied.
Hoo boy... “Pray tell, then, what kingdom are we in right now?!”
“What kingdom?” The old man furrowed his brow in confusion. “This has always been the domain of Luzilte.”
That name didn’t ring a bell. A minor member of the Alliance of Coastal Nations, perhaps?
“Man... he really got us,” I said, scratching my head.
“What do you mean?” Gourry asked.
“Norst tricked us,” I explained knowingly. “He shunted us from his nowhere-space into a totally different city!”
“But... didn’t he say he’d send us back to where we came from?”
“Not specifically, no. He said, ‘I’ll send you to Latka.’ He let us think he meant the Latka City we came from, then sent us to a completely different Latka.” Sometimes totally unrelated cities ended up with the same name. Apparently this was one of those cases. “So he got out of fighting us, but he sure managed to set us back... Darn it.”
I’d played a little board game as a child, in which it was possible to land on a space just before the finish line that sent you all the way back to the start... but I’d never thought that would happen to me in real life. That said, it wasn’t like I was in any particular hurry to get home. I was just headed that way as part of my leisurely journey.
I addressed the old man again. “To tell the truth, we’re pretty lost... Could I ask if there’s a sorcerers’ council in this city?”
The old man scowled at us in confusion for a moment. “Never heard of one.”
“Then is there a large city nearby that does have a sorcerers’ council?” I tried asking instead.
“I’m sorry...” The wrinkle in the man’s brow deepened, and he spoke apologetically. “But I don’t know a thing about sorcerers’ councils.”
“Oh, I see.” I finally realized the nature of the misunderstanding.
As the name suggests, a sorcerers’ council was a group of sorcerers designed to assist others of the same profession. Most large cities had a branch, and they handled magic items and long-range communications with other branches. However, while a sorcerer like me got a lot of use out of such councils, they were beyond the ken of most folks who didn’t practice magic. This old gent likely couldn’t have cared less which cities did and didn’t have councils, so I was gonna have to get my info elsewhere.