✦ ✦ ✦
“I see... So that’s it, eh? Aha. I suspect you’re looking for a job and a place to stay, then?”
“No. For a way home,” I responded. “I don’t think there are presently any roads or sea routes I can take to get there, but I still want to try to find something. I just need to ask you one thing—is there a country to the north that abuts a large desert?”
“Hmm... A desert to the north, eh?” Captain Morgan thought a moment. “I’ve no idea myself, but some of the scholars and officials might know. Still, I’m not sure how accommodating they’d be. It says in the letter that you ‘took out a group of bandits with an amazing fire spell,’ but... While we’re grateful for your aid in ridding our country of the bandits that plague it, I don’t think that’s enough to convince our local scholars and officials to offer their aid. And so... would you be willing to aid us first, as to prove what you can do? In a few days, we’ll be embarking on a mission in collaboration with the Knights of the Silver Spear. Due to a shortage of manpower, they’ve had to ask divisions like ours to throw in with them. If you’re as powerful as Bronco claims, I think you could be very useful to us.”
“If this is about waging war with your neighbors, I’ll have to pass. I don’t want to get involved in anything that could make it hard for me to leave later.”
“No worries there. It’s not humans we’re fighting.” A small smile appeared on Morgan’s face. “We’re up against what we call... the Dark Lord of the North.”
...
“Whaaaaat?!” My sudden cry echoed throughout the room.
So, long story short... I slew the Dark Lord of the North.
“What?”
“Wait!”
“What the?!”
These astounded cries came from Captain Morgan, the bigwigs from the Knights of the Silver Spear, and all the others present. I let their reactions go in one ear and out the other as I investigated the area, keeping Gourry close at hand for any last-minute surprises.
Two days after departing Palbathos, we’d come upon a run-down fortress in the forest. They’d called it the stronghold of the Dark Lord of the North.
You may have put this together already, but this “Dark Lord of the North” that Captain Morgan and the others spoke of wasn’t the one we knew. Hearing the name had given me an initial shock, but I’d quickly realized the nature of the misunderstanding.
See, our Dark Lord of the North was a piece of Dark Lord Shabranigdu who’d destroyed Aqualord during the Incarnation War a thousand years back and now lay sealed in ice in the Kataart Mountains. But the folks in the outer lands, who’d been cut off from the inner lands just before the Incarnation War, had no way of knowing about that Dark Lord of the North, seeing as he hadn’t even existed until the final days of the war and all.
Hence, it was safe to assume that what Captain Morgan and company referred to as “the Dark Lord of the North” was really just some magic-wielding something-or-other that lived north of the capital. And, in point of fact...
“Looks like the sorcerer messed up the ritual and ended up setting his circle to auto-summon,” I said after investigating the large magic circle we found on the floor of a chamber deep inside the fortress.
The circle’s spell-writing had been done incorrectly, causing it to gather magic power from the surroundings over time and activate whenever it reached a certain level. I also spied a skeleton clad in caster’s robes in the corner of the room. He must have met with some kind of accident... or maybe he’d met his end when he lost control of one of his creatures. Word to the kids at home: summoning demons isn’t all fun and games!
So, yeah, the thing Captain Morgan and crew called “the Dark Lord of the North” turned out to be a single summoned brass demon. Easy pickings compared to the pure demons I’d tangled with in the past, though I wouldn’t exactly call it cannon fodder. You could defeat them with mundane weapons, but they had a tough hide, they were strong, and they could use attack spells.
The brass demon’s lackeys—or, I guess, just other creatures summoned alongside it—consisted of about ten or so lesser demons hanging around in the fortress. Lesser demons were weaker than brass demons in pretty much all respects, so your standard band of swordsmen could realistically deal with them so long as they knew what they were up against. Unfortunately, the people of the outer lands seemed to be clueless about attack spells, so they’d probably lost quite a few waves of men to the demons’ unfamiliar magics.
As a result, they’d dubbed this ominous foe the Dark Lord of the North.
On the way to the fortress, I’d chatted with the knights and guards. From that, I’d inferred that the so-called Knights of the Silver Spear had been ordered to slay the demon—and they were dragging the Fourth Division along to use as cannon fodder. So, knowing their necks were on the line, Captain Morgan had asked me and Gourry to lead the charge. But while Gourry and I knew demons could be dangerous, we were also pretty used to fighting them by now. After slaying the brass demon at the very end, we then destroyed the still-active summoning circle, and that was that. We made such quick work of ’em that I don’t even see the need to go into detail.
To Captain Morgan and the knights, though, the whole thing probably looked like the stuff of legends. The knights had surrounded the fortress at a distance, carefully judging their best moment to attack... Meanwhile, two drifters they’d sent in to draw fire just torched the bad guys lickety-split.