Chapter 41

We arrived and Truck-kun was a nauseated platypus, exactly like we left him in the gacha Isekai.

“A platypus!” Nyarin remarked in mock surprise.

Truck-kun shuddered and his crystalline strands of white hair burst through the its scalp.

“Truck-kun the platypus!?” I echoed.

Truck-kun tore himself free of the small platypus illusion and surveyed our surroundings. It must have been a couple of months since the cannibals had attacked the demon lord’s disguised stronghold. The place was in ruins.

Nyarin looked concerned. “This Isekai was simple. Kill the demon lord to save the kingdom and it’s over. If the Isekai is still intact, then the demon lord must be alive.”

“So he’s alive somewhere. We just find him and kill him.”

Nyarin shook her head, ears swiveling about as she looked around us. “Listen carefully. We need to kill the demon lord to save the kingdom. If we kill him when he’s not threatening the kingdom it won’t be enough.”

Truck-kun nodded at that and lit his True Vision to search for the surviving demon lord.

I pulled out a big bag of baked goods from our Isekai. Nyarin took a red Christmas roll. I took a bread stick of Longeenuff.

“There,” Truck-kun said pointing west, “the demon lord is hiding out in a cave with some of his minions.”

So we walked about a half hour to a cave where the demon lord was crying into a hanky while surrounded by a platoon of skeleton warriors struggling to comfort him.

“There there,” the commander of the skeletons said, patting the demon lord on the shoulder of what was clearly his backup armor, “you keep crying like that you’ll rust your helmet. Then what will all of the other horrors of the deep say if they see that?”

“I don’t care! They all make fun of me anyway. I’m just a laughing stock.”

The demon lord noticed us and cowered to the back of the cave, which was pretty pathetic because he was three meters tall and it wasn’t a very big cave. He held up the plastic gacha ball in trembling hands. “Save me, sphere of power!”

Truck-kun shook his head. “We’ve come to restore you to power so that you can threaten these lands that are ripe for the taking, brave demon lord!”

The brave demon lord was sucking his thumb and shaking his head petulantly.

The chief skeleton warrior explained. “We’ve suffered a bit of a psychological regression. He won’t be up for killing the innocent and raising armies of darkness for a while. Poor lad.”

Truck-kun sighed at the ceiling and sat down, talking gently with the demon lord, who had found a blankie to wrap himself in. They were making good progress when I made the mistake of pulling some more snacks from the big bag of baked goods we had brought with us.

I pulled out a puking platypus, and the demon lord went apoplectic. “No, not a platypus. Somebody save me!”

Truck-kun glared at me. “Take the cheesy baked goods outside.”

Nyarin stuck her tongue out at him. “These aren’t cheesy. We won awards for these.”

But we left just as the demon lord was gushing to Truck-kun about the unfairness of life, how his mother never really loved him, and platypuses.

“I just wanted to raze a few capitals. Is starting a century of darkness and suffering too much to ask?”

“I think we really psychologically scarred the demon lord,” I said to Nyarin as we waited outside.

“The demon lord? I was there and I’m still psychologically scarred. Truck-kun the platypus, I choose you! And then you threw an unimaginably powerful Baku in a gacha ball and commented on it being super effective.”

We laughed.

The demon lord’s therapy session was stretching on, and it was inevitable that we’d have to talk.

“The next Isekai is the last,” I said, “do you think this one will take long?”

Nyarin shook her head. “The problem here is simple. Truck-kun will make sure we leave quickly. The last Isekai was the first one we brought you to, then you’ll be free.”

We were quiet for a while, and then the demon lord came out on wobbly knees, ready to conquer the world again.

He sniffled as Truck-kun told me it’d need to give him all of his powers back.

“Can I at least get the gacha ball back?”

“No, my sphere of power.” The demon lord clutched the plastic gacha ball, which looked like a tiny bead in his massive hands.

“We’ve agreed,” Truck-kun said in his most calm therapist voice, “that the ultimate horror of the pit gets to keep the sphere of power until he feels like his old evil self.”

The demon lord calmed his tears and nodded to Truck-kun. “You know, my father never appreciated how much I…”

Truck-kun waved the comment off impatiently. “Yeah, yeah. You had stunted development and a childhood that left you filling the void inside you with murder and depravity. We’ve talked about that. Hey, Seo, can you give him his powers back or do I need to help?”

I nodded. I would likely never be as good as Truck-kun with manipulating magic, and I’d never have any fraction of his power, but this was my mind and I’d gotten rather good with magic.

The fire of True Vision lit over my eyes. I could see my own power, and that of the demon lord. I saw the ebb and flow of magic around me, guided by the stars above and the leylines below. I gathered power as I prepared the spell.

But I just had to stop. “Could you maybe stop crying for a second?”

The demon lord sniffled. “I’m sorry, is that making your spell hard to complete?”

“Not exactly.”

“Oh, it’s distracting you from the spell?”

“No that either.”

“Then what?” the demon lord said, pausing from rubbing the cheek of his helmet with the gacha ball as a comfort mechanism.

“It’s just really annoying.”

The demon lord sniffed in a massive wad of snot and swallowed it loudly. “You’re just like my mother.” But thankfully he stopped crying.

I summoned all of the dark and forbidden powers I had received from the demon lord in exchange for the gacha ball. With a push I returned his power to him. The shadows around him became darker and began whispering the most terrible things.

The skeletons around the demon lord grew stronger, the red lights in their eyes becoming brighter and more threatening. The demon lord laughed. “I can be myself again. I’m going to go torture some villagers. Thank you so much for restoring my confidence and…”

“Hey, big guy, you’re a threat to this realm again?” asked Truck-kun.

“Oh, I am back! I’m the biggest, least weeping threat this realm has ever seen!”

Truck-kun snapped his fingers at me.

I used the power of the True Vision to push the demon lord and his army back into the cave. Then I collapsed it, crushing them all into a fine paste.

The world became fuzzy and I guided us to the final remaining Isekai and our freedom.