Part 54:
The Miner Zeleburgs Beelzebub
ELISE LAY ON THE FLOOR, trussed up à la shovel (you know, that thing poor Alice was often subjected to.) After her defeat, she had attempted to flee through astral space but quickly tumbled back into the real world because Alan had preemptively dug an extradimensional trap hole.
“Wait a minute! How can you possibly dig a hole in metaphysical dimensions?!”
Gosh, I really do like this woman, Catria thought, relieved to hear the fake princess’s entirely logical complaint. She sipped her tea peacefully. It truly is wonderful having someone else around to play the straight woman.
“Now then, it’s about time we put an end to their plans.” Alan regripped his shovel while he went back to scanning through the complete collection of Zeleburg’s plans.
Elise managed to shake off her confusion and laughed. “I’m telling you, it’s impossible! The mission plan is protected by a lock that can only be opened with Lord Zeleburg’s blood.”
“No problem. I can whip up as much of that as we need.”
“Huh?” Blink, blink, blinky (the sound of a confused Elise blinking.) “You can…create it?”
“Yeah. I only need to use the demon Lord of Flies, Beelzebub.”
“What? Wait. Hold all the horses. Seriously, just hold everything!” Sweat beaded Elise’s forehead. What’s with this guy? I don’t understand a thing he says.
However, Elise did understand that this strange man had managed to both interfere with her astral teleportation and neutralize her Destruction Ray. She was in no position to dismiss his existence or chalk his babble up to nonsense.
“Alan… I don’t understand,” said Catria. “How does using Beelzebub help us? Explain.”
“Oh, oh! I wanna know too, Sir Miner, shovel!” Lithisia said, smiling and hopping up and down.
Alan nodded. “It’s simple. Zeleburg and Beelzebub share the sounds ‘ze,’ ‘l,’ and ‘b.’”
Ten excruciatingly long seconds passed. Then thirty. Catria could no longer hold in her thoughts. Elise’s confusion accelerated to Mach speeds. Lithisia simply stared at Alan. As if by some unseen signal, the three of them cried out at the exact same time:
“So what?!”
“So what?!”
“Scopmazing calcushovelings! (Amazing, Sir Miner! Your calculations are perfect!)”
One person failed to fall in synch with the others, but it’s okay to put that aside.
“How are you even planning to get Beelzebub’s blood or whatever?!” Catria wailed.
The demon lord Beelzebub, though a subordinate to Asmodeus, was undoubtedly still a lord of Hell.
“Well, obviously, by going to Hell and defeating him.”
Alan tapped his shovel against the ground, Shovelporting instantly. He then commenced a direct assault on Beelzebub’s castle, located in the alternate dimension of Goriol, said demon lord’s territory. With his shovel, Alan broke down the anti-instant teleportation defense walls and wiped the floor with Beelzebub’s ghouls. At the end of a long and hard-fought battle, Alan fired his Wave Motion Shovel Blast at point-blank range into Beelzebub’s massive body, skewering the demon, who let out a cry of pain and vanished. (He had fled into yet another dimension.) At the floor before Alan’s feet, blue blood pooled. Alan scooped it up with his shovel.
Approximately one minute after this process had originally started, Alan returned.
“I’m back. I have some of Beelzebub’s blood.”
“Wow, you were so fast, shovel!”
“What the hell? (What the hell?)”
Elise was a ball of confusion, so Alan showed her a small bottle filled with the blue blood. The label read: “Beelzebub’s blood.”
“Here, you see? Now first, I use my shovel to extract the unnecessary two ‘b’ sounds from the end of his name. I then pickle the ‘b’ sounds in the blood in order to extract the ‘b’ element from them.” Shoof, shoof, shoof. “Hrm, looks good. Drink this, Catria.”
“I refuse with every fiber of my being.”
“I’ll drink it,” said Lithisia. Shovechug! (Shovechug!)
The label on the bottle suddenly changed. Now it said: “Beelz’s blood.” The pickled ‘b’ sounds were, according to Lithisia, delicious.
“Next we mix in the blood of the ghouls I defeated in Goriol. What sort of sound does a ghoul make?”
“Oh, oh! I know! ‘Urg’!”
The label suddenly changed again. Now it said: “Beelzurg’s blood.” The contents had turned ever so slightly green.
“Last but not least, we stir it up with my shovel to fix the order.”
“Almost there, shovel!”
The label changed a final time. Now it said: “Zeleburg’s blood.”
Seriously?
“And voila. Should be nice and rich.”
“It really came out perfectly, shovel!”
With that, Alan poured “Zeleburg’s blood” over his shovel and waved it over the mission manual.
“Conceptual interference detected. Lord Zeleburg’s blood detected. Perfect level of richness. Undoubtedly the real deal,” the manual said.
This identification system sucked.
Alan proceeded to dig a hole in the manual—a hole in the mission plan, so to speak. He changed the plan as such: at the start of the battle, the supreme commander, Zalbag, would immediately charge into the fray alone and be captured, leading to victory for the Holy Shovel Knights in their first battle against the forces of Zeleburg. This would occur two hours hence.
“Um, Catria?! What the hell’s going on?! Seriously! Is this for real?!” Elise cried out, on the verge of a total breakdown.
Ah, she’s a goner, thought Catria. “Don’t ask me. I don’t want to know.”
With the demons’ plan in tatters, Elise stared on in confusion, wracked by chills, throat shaking, and drenched in sweat. Catria knew this feeling.
Wait, this can’t be! It can’t! Elise shot Alan a terrified look. “You… It can’t be… Are you… Are you a God-class entity?!”
“Pardon?” Alan tilted his head. He stuck his shovel into the dirt and held it straight. “Not at all. I’m Alan. Just a regular old miner.”
Many, many seconds passed. Time itself seemed to stop, and no one so much as twitched a muscle.
Then Elise screamed a scream so loud that perhaps the whole world could hear it. “THERE’S NO WAY SOMEONE LIKE YOU IS JUST A MINER!!!”
The fake princess’s pure, agonized bewilderment inspired a deep sense of nostalgia within Catria.
This is so nice…
And thus was how the leader of the Eight Demon Generals, Elise of the Reflection, took her first step to the greatest fall.