—I have taken the wrong path. But I am happy now. In the end, I was fulfilled.
—Lord Geld, I…I will take your name, and your will. May you rest in peace.
—Indeed. There is no need for you to suffer any longer. You did not warn your father, and no one will blame you for that. I am here precisely because he survived, back then. And your crimes will disappear as well.
—Yes, my lord. By the name I have taken up, I swear to protect the one who has taken all our sins for himself.
—Indeed… I trust you will.
✦ ✦ ✦
All the magic I put into that sent me into a deep sleep again. I suppose the exact level of consciousness I retained depended on how much magic I spent.
I felt like I had some kind of weird dream, but I couldn’t remember what it was. You’d think I would—I don’t need to sleep any longer, so any dream was bound to be pretty valuable. Couldn’t do much about it then, though.
I awoke to a situation that I probably should have expected by now. There were two thousand soldiers in front of me, now high orcs. Still ranked C-plus, since they were stronger than the rabble, I guess.
Geld, though…
“My loyalty is forever yours, my lord!!” he shouted as I groggily tried to get it together. I cursed him for being so damn ceremonious about everything.
Let’s see. He had evolved into… Whoa, an orc king? That’s pretty much the same level as an orc lord, isn’t it? Hmm. About what I figured. They were functionally identical, but Geld wasn’t as creepy.
He had also gained the unique skill Gourmet, which granted him abilities like Stomach, Receive, and Provide. The latter two were restricted to his own race, but apparently all two thousand of his troops had access to that Stomach. Maybe they could use that to transport supplies to faraway places? What a goofy skill. It could turn the entire transit industry on its side, to say nothing of military supply lines. The only limitation was volume, not type of item. It could store about as much as I could, but it couldn’t hold anything too big—in other words, about the size of an orc itself. A suit of armor was about all it could take in at once. (My Stomach had no such limitation.)
The ability to make his men consume the corpses of their comrades was gone, thankfully. No need any longer, I imagined. Not much point retaining a skill if the user didn’t want it, besides. The magical energy in him had also ballooned to the point where he was easily an A rank on the level of Benimaru.
Overall, if the demon lord Geld hadn’t lost his mind, he probably would’ve wound up turning into a magic-born person like this, a combination of reasoned intelligence and overwhelming presence. I was glad to have more powerful people on my side, but would it really pay for him to follow someone like me? I reminded him that this wasn’t exactly a salaried position, but Geld simply smiled and said that was no problem.
Well, if he said so. I’d feed and clothe him, at least. And if he decided to strike down his own path later, that was fine. I kinda doubted he ever would, though.
Thus, the Grand Naming Project ended.
✦ ✦ ✦
Before I took my leave, I decided to wish the lizardman chief a fond good-bye.
“Hey. Sorry we never really got a chance to talk amid all this nonsense. Hope we can keep this ship sailing smoothly, huh, Chief?”
“Ah, hello there, Sir Rimuru! There’s no need to call me Chief like that. It puts me on edge to hear it from you!” he exclaimed in surprise.
I knew the monsters had other ways of identifying themselves, but I wasn’t delicate enough to pick up on that junk. His not having a name really annoyed me.
“Well, yeah, but… I know. You’re Gabil’s father, right? Why don’t you try calling yourself Abil, or something?”
I always had a tendency to blurt out whatever was on my mind like that.
“What?!” he exclaimed, half in shock.
And so, in the midst of a little friendly chitchat, it came to pass that I named the lord of all the lizardmen who walked the earth. Not every lizardman who existed—ugh, nothing that big again. Just the chief, I figured, and maybe others later, as kind of a reward for their exploits in battle or whatever.
That I inadvertently transformed him into a dragonewt just because he didn’t like “Chief,” well, who’da thunk?
✦ ✦ ✦
Everything was now well and truly wrapped up. Only about three weeks had passed, but I felt like I was now a battle-hardened veteran. Really, I’m pretty sure I fought harder than anybody else in the marshes. These death matches were really trying on a body.
Let’s just go home and relax a bit.
✦ ✦ ✦
Gabil was marched up to his father—Abil, the chief.
✦ ✦ ✦
He had been hauled off to jail the moment the battle had ended, given one morning meal and one evening meal a day, and otherwise nobody said anything to him. That had continued for two weeks straight. His crime of rebellion was obvious to all, and he had accepted this punishment without complaint. He had had the best of intentions when he did the deed, but the results had almost brought the lizardmen to the brink of extinction.
This was all his fault. He recognized that, and he could neither make excuses for it nor intended to. He figured he would receive the death penalty, and the thought did not particularly bother him.
But when he closed his eyes, he could remember the incident. It was more shocking to him than anything; and it made the betrayal of the one who believed in him seem like a petty detail by comparison.
It was the magic-born disguised as a human being completely dominating him, and then taking on the demon lord himself. Even now, he could perfectly recall the sweet little child, his silvery hair flowing in the wind. It almost moved Gabil to tears, the sight of this creature standing strong to protect him. Any pain and anger he felt at Gelmud for turning his back on him was immediately whisked away.
All that Gabil had left was his near-worshipful adulation for this creature. But what was even more shocking was the way he then transformed into a slime. The very slime he had dismissed as a low-level piece of garbage. That’s right—low level. He was, but he wasn’t, too. That slime was special. Not in a “unique” or a “named” way. Even more special than that.
If he ever got the chance, Gabil wanted to ask: Why did you help me? This slime named Rimuru had no reason to rescue this worthless, completely bamboozled lizardman, this utter buffoon. It was the one thing Gabil thought about for those two weeks.