Chapter 28

Chapter One The Prophet Humanity is fated to end at the hand of the Demon Lord. I have seen this for myself many times over and in many different forms. As a priestess and retainer of the goddess who opposes the Demon Lord, I was granted a particular skill: World Revision. Whenever I die, the world automatically resets to a set time. This will repeat until the root cause of my death is averted—until the Demon Lord’s defeat, to speak of it plainly. It is the Hero’s role to vanquish the Demon Lord, and it is the Prophet’s duty to guide them. This so-called Prophet, however, is but an illusion created by my hands. Nobody can say who the Hero is. I have repeated this world many times in search of the Hero who will defeat our existential threat. By the time I learned of one particular man, I had already lost count of my time loops. I first heard his name from a wizened old knight charged with protecting a large town named Arkand. “That Leonard was one worthless adventurer, that’s for sure,” he said to the person I was attempting to guide as the Hero. “Adventurers” referred to people who worked odd jobs. They did anything if they were paid appropriately for it, from helping on farms to slaying monsters. To be perfectly honest, it was not a very glamorous job. Very few adventurers had the capacity to slay powerful monsters, and it was difficult for them to find work. Most of the valiant, battle-worthy individuals had perished in the clash against the Demon Lord’s army in Malika. Leonard was apparently one of the few adventurers who’d lived to tell the tale. His companions had also survived, and together they’d made a name for themselves as one of the rare parties that could take on difficult requests. “They came to Arkand looking for coin. The town was under attack by the Demon Lord’s army at the time, but we were managing to scrape by with our knights and soldiers, plus the adventurers we hired. We all worked together, you see. That’s when Leonard’s party showed up,” said the knight. “They demanded ten times the going rate and talked a big game about defeating the demon assaulting our town. It was practically a threat since they said they’d do nothing unless we paid up. And they got away with their greed because Arkand was in such a tight spot. There were other adventurers willing to fight for the town pro bono, you know? The demons are our common enemy. We should all be working together to fight them, don’t you agree?” The Hero nodded deeply. “But still, Leonard’s group was one of the lucky few to survive that battle in Malika. They definitely had the skills. Not to mention that the demon targeting our town was an absolute monster. In the end, our governor swallowed Leonard’s demands and tasked him with felling the demon. He was our last line of hope. Looking strictly at the results, he did do the job. The demon went down. But…” The knight shook his head wearily. “…his strategy was to use the town—use us—as decoys. While we fought desperately for our lives, he laid low outside of town and waited for his chance to strike the demon down. He did it just when the town fell and the Demon Lord’s army assumed victory was theirs. “It wasn’t a bad strategy, I’ll give him that. But do you know how many knights, soldiers, and adventurers had to die for him to pull that off? We lost more than half our ranks, my son among them. Meanwhile, all of Leonard’s party members survived. I wouldn’t have told them to die for us, of course, but they came out of it with barely a scratch. If only they’d taken on the demon sooner, all those people wouldn’t have had to perish. I asked him about that, and you know what he said? ‘Our job was to kill the demon, not save the town.’” The knight’s gaze wandered. He looked nowhere in particular—or perhaps at the future that might have been. “I know. It’s misplaced anger. But it doesn’t sit right with me. Everyone in town was mourning, and his party just collected their reward and flew the coop. Only thing they said was that they’d finished their business here. They didn’t show any pity for the bereaved families or offer any donations for rebuilding the town, those heartless curs. Sure, they were skilled adventurers, but you wouldn’t want people like them in your party. It would besmirch the Hero’s name.” “Yeah. You have a point,” said the Hero. His expression was glum, indicating his disappointment in this Leonard fellow. For anyone looking for a reward, there was plenty of incentive to become the Hero. Whoever succeeded in defeating the Demon Lord would become king upon their return. But that was something of a fairy tale. In truth, the Hero’s journey was not so glamorous—it was steeped in grueling trials and danger. If they took down one demon, another would surface in its place. However many challenges this Hero overcame, the next would be just as exhausting. Even if someone was in it for the praise, the payoff was simply not worth it. I was looking for a selfless Hero. Not because selflessness was part of the job description, but because they wouldn’t be able to withstand the journey otherwise. I suspected this Leonard person had the right approach for a human being. He sought fair compensation for his work. He focused on his own gain, even if it meant neglecting others. In a way, it was a necessary part of life. But this wasn’t enough to be the Hero. So I struck Leonard off my list of potential Heroes and forgot about him for a while. The next time I heard about Leonard, I was guiding a different Hero. “There’s this guy named Leonard. Survivor of the battle when the Kingdom of Malika fell. He’s famous for being one of the few adventurers who’s got the skills.” The person who mentioned this was an influential merchant from a town named Erdelia. “I’d welcome any skilled comrades…,” said the Hero. He showed interest in Leonard, which stood to reason given he was attempting to fight the Demon Lord. It didn’t hurt to have strong companions in numbers. “Oh, no, I’d think twice if I were you,” the merchant cautioned. “He’s a greedy scoundrel. Wouldn’t stop getting in my face about money. I was in trouble, you see, because I couldn’t get out of a country under the Demon Lord’s control. That’s when Leonard and his friends showed up. As grateful as I am to them for killing the monsters and clearing a path, he demanded four hundred gold coins for his reward.” “Four hundred!” The Hero’s jaw dropped at this amount. He had a few dozen gold coins on his person, by my reckoning. This was enough to fund a traveler’s lifestyle for several years. Four hundred coins would have been difficult for even a nobleman to procure. “Yes, it was a total rip-off. I suspect he asked for such an outrageous sum because there weren’t any other adventurers around who could help me. It really made me worry about how I could pay it off.” The merchant gave a self-effacing smile. “And it doesn’t end there. When I was hiding in the village, I met this boy. He was the only one left after the other residents had evacuated. He was a poor, unfortunate soul—the same age as my daughter, and he had lost both his parents. So I suggested we escape together, figuring it wouldn’t be much trouble for Leonard to accommodate a single child. But that thug demanded extra payment for the boy. Fifty gold coins, would you believe?! What a shameless pig.” “Fifty gold coins for a single child…” The Hero grimaced. It was impossible to have faith in people of the mercantile persuasion. The demons who formed the backbone of the Demon Lord’s army were not mindless monsters—they possessed greater physical and magical strength than the average human, and they were more intelligent to boot. They would use money to entice and trap people if they saw fit. Because of this, the Hero and his companions needed the willpower to focus on defeating the Demon Lord, come what may. It was not a simple matter of brute force winning the day. “You see what I mean, Sir Hero? Sure, Leonard had the skills. But he had absolutely no moral backbone. This might be ironic for me to say as a merchant, but money was the only thing that moved him. He would be a terrible fit for your party, alas.” The conversation ended there. The Hero had been looking for party members, and that story was enough to disqualify Leonard. The Hero left for another town in search of companions. In my capacity as the Prophet, I provided the man with a list of names, which he used to pick his party. In the end, however, this Hero perished on the journey. Throughout my many loops, I heard of Leonard’s poor reputation on numerous occasions. “Apparently, there’s this adventurer named Leonard. In exchange for slaying monsters for a village called Gastan, he took their crops.” This story reached my ears when I was guiding yet another Hero. The speaker on this occasion was a soldier. He brought up Leonard as a way of praising the Hero. “Sometimes, you get those adventurers who slay monsters when you don’t ask for it, then demand a ridiculous fee for their trouble. It’s bad tactics, if you ask me. The monsters are enemies of humanity—if you come across them, you slay them, no questions asked. Demanding money for it is all kinds of messed up. Although to be fair, we soldiers can be complacent. We do slay monsters on request, but sometimes they slip past us. That’s where the opportunists come in.” The soldier shrugged apologetically. “But I must say, Sir Hero, you could not be more different from Leonard. You slay monsters to help people in need, even the powerful monsters we can’t touch. I respect that about you.” “What did you mean when you said he took the crops?” the Hero asked. “I’m not familiar with all the details myself, but I hear the village of Gastan is in a region that produces surplus grain, which they provide as rations to the soldiers on the battlefront. Unfortunately, the wagons they used to transport the grain were attacked on many occasions by monsters, or something like that. I suspect the Demon Lord’s army was deliberately cutting off the supply chains, a common thing in war. That doesn’t make it easy to handle, though. Since the supplies have to travel a long way, it’s impossible to predict just when an attack will happen. We don’t have the soldiers to escort every single wagon, so the villages and the kingdom aren’t able to do much about it. Leonard took advantage of that predicament. When the village chief asked the adventurers to do the job, he demanded ten times the going rate.” “Ten times?!” The Hero was bewildered. This Hero had experience as an adventurer, so he knew exactly how excessive that demand was. The knight in Arkand had also mentioned the “ten times” figure. At any rate, Leonard had a habit of overcharging. “Crazy, right? When the village chief insisted he couldn’t pay it, Leonard apparently took the job anyway. And he actually did take down the demon orchestrating the attacks. He’s a piece of work, but he has the skills, I’ll give him that.” The soldier scowled. “The problem came afterward. Leonard tried to swipe the grain and carry it off somewhere. His idea was to sell it to some merchant at an inflated price on the black market. Given the times we live in, you certainly can sell grain for a lot of money, but depriving the soldiers fighting the Demon Lord’s army of their rations… It’s downright criminal, no two ways about it,” he said with a shake of his head and a deep sigh. The Hero frowned, displaying his disapproval. I suspected that as a fellow adventurer, he could not stand for it. This was far from the first time I’d heard of Leonard. Just like all the other times, I had to shake my head at the lows he was willing to stoop to. “That Leonard guy kicked the bucket, I hear.” Dozens of loops later, the Hero I was guiding visited a tavern, where he heard this new gossip from a drunkard. Although the Hero himself appeared to be uninterested, I kept my ears open. “He went all the way into the Demon Lord’s territory and got offed by a demon. He only took that crazy job because his eyes were on the money, apparently. A fitting end for a money-grubber like him,” the drunk said with a sneer. The others in the tavern must have been aware of Leonard’s less-than-sterling reputation, because they all laughed and drank to his death. Not a single person mourned him. I myself thought he’d died in much the same way he had lived, though I did think it was a little surprising that a man everyone agreed was skilled, and who had actually defeated many demons throughout his infamous career, had perished in such an anticlimactic fashion. I found myself a little curious about what sort of man he was, but either way, he never struck me as worthy of being the Hero.