A Difference in Sponsor

Nero didn’t have the luxury of amnesia. “I ate them,” he told me when we stopped for the night. His healer (Anna) sat with us, but she didn’t react in the slightest to the news. As Bode had said, the healers had mostly already figured it out, and they understood the necessity of it.

“I know,” I said.

Nero hung his head. “The option said ‘save two people.’ I didn’t know that it meant ‘save two people from me.’ I didn’t know that would happen.”

Part of me wanted to point out that he’d have eaten them anyway. It wasn’t a nice thought, but it was the truth. I’d expected from the beginning that he would be willing to turn to forcing her to commit cannibalism if it meant saving Alicia, which would necessarily involve him doing the same. However, you could be right in that your words were true and still be wrong for saying them. This was one of those times, so I swallowed that impulse and instead told him, “Alicia and Clara would have died if you hadn’t made them eat. No matter how awful it was, the only alternative was starvation.”

He nodded miserably. “I know… but…” He looked at me and managed a small smile. “But, hey, you turned out to be a cute kid. How’s it feel being the new Fay?”

I kicked him and got scolded by Anna the healer.

“If Alicia remembers, she’s going to leave,” Nero said suddenly. “I… I attacked her. It was to make her eat, but I attacked her. She couldn’t see. It was dark. She thought I was a monster, but I’m sure once she thinks about it, she’ll realize that it was me.”

That would be, admittedly, a hard thing to get past for most people. Was Alicia one of them? Nero knew her best, but he was also too close to the situation, so I didn’t know whether his judgment could be trusted.

Heather reached out and patted his hand. “I don’t believe my Master will hate you. She may be uneasy for some time, but she knows that you would only ever have done that to protect her.”

Nero smiled at her and thanked her, but I caught the flicker of pain in his expression. Whatever the truth of it might be, he didn’t think that it was quite that simple.

When it came time to sleep, Nero pulled me into his arms and hugged me like I was a stuffed animal. On one hand, I thought this was something I shouldn't let him get used to. It was one thing now, while he was still a teenager, but it'd only get weirder as he got older. On the other hand, though, I was glad that he didn't treat me any differently now that I wasn't a cat. I decided to allow it for the time being. He needed comfort more than he needed societal norms right now. Justice must have sensed this, too, because while he normally slept with Heather, he spent the night propped up with his wings shielding Nero and me from the world.

(I was happy for Justice to notice that, even though he normally was the one to go to Heather, now that he was staying near Nero, Heather came and curled up at his side, despite it leaving her slightly further away from Alicia. It was nice to have the confirmation that she cared just as much as he did.)

Starting on the eleventh floor, we came across two new types of monsters. I no longer sensed Shadows, and while the Meat Heaps still lumbered about, many of them were eaten by the other two monster types on the floor. One was called Allseeing Eyes, and they were about what one would expect from such a name: jellyfish-esque creatures covered in eyes that floated through the air and suddenly expanded huge mouths to eat their prey. The adventurers seemed thrilled to have proper monsters to fight.

Allseeing Eyes fought mostly with sharp, cutting attacks from their tentacles and powerful blasts of dark magic from their eyes. The former made them a bit of a pain to get near, but they were resistant to magic, so the parties Heavenly Principles and Shark Attack put in most of the work fighting them. Witches Five and Please Daddy were more magic-focused teams, so they hung back against the Allseeing Eyes.

The other monsters were, to my surprise. Demon Cats. I understood immediately why no one had pegged me as one of those and had instead assumed I was a Shadow Cat. Demon Cats in the wild (or dungeons, as the case may be) looked the same, but they were the size of elephants. Of course, no one looked at the housecat-sized thing and thought it was the same creature. Demon Cats weren't particularly strong or weak against anything other than light magic, so fighting them was something of a free-for-all.

Since there weren’t any more Shadows to eat, I didn’t have any more use to the party. That was fine with me. I spent most of my time with Nero, telling him about what had happened, but Yuulen called me over sometimes to pry for answers about Demons that I simply didn’t possess. That didn’t seem to dissuade her, though. In fact, she seemed enthused at learning what aspects of being a Demon were instinctual, like my ability to eat Shadows, and which were learned, like, apparently, our dislike of promises.

"Most Demons will refuse to promise anything," she told me, looking annoyingly smug for some reason, "and those who do make promises always spend forever nitpicking about the details first." 

I wondered if maybe this wasn't a kind of bias. Maybe people only bothered Assessing people who annoyed them, and when they found Demons by doing this, they decided all Demons were annoying. I thought about Fyth. He'd been annoyed at having to promise me a favor, but I thought it was the owing a favor part that bothered him.

Clara woke up next. “Dad?” she asked as she took in her surroundings. She saw her summon, Jeanie, and smiled. They had a very sweet reunion, and she and Maxwell cried all over each other. I watched from a little way away, feeling bittersweet. I was glad Maxwell's daughter was alright, but I missed my own daughter. I hoped she was doing well. 

Then, Clara saw Nero. For a moment, she looked relieved, but a moment was all it was. Then fear suffused her features, and she screamed. “No! No! Stay away from me! Stay away from Marie! Don’t touch us!”

Nero flinched away from her, but she started kicking and flailing and screaming 'no' so loudly it echoed through the entire floor. 

“Illusion!”

I wasn’t the one to cast it. Clara froze, looking around wildly, then she slowly calmed. She clung to Maxwell and cried quietly. "Don't let him get us," she whispered over and over as her father rubbed comforting circles on her back. 

Anna stepped forward with a sigh. “I cannot keep her from seeing you for very long. Nero, Maxwell, I apologize, but I have to insist that you stay on opposite sides of the group from each other. The middle of a dungeon is not the place to address psychological trauma.”

Nero bowed his head. “Got it.” He sent an apologetic look toward Maxwell, who awkwardly returned it, and trudged away from them.

“Maybe we should keep Alicia away from me, too,” he murmured.

Sure enough, when Alicia woke up a few hours later, she didn’t look for Nero. Instead, she despondently stared at the floor for several minutes, then asked to be set down. She moved far away from both Nero and Clara and stayed there for the rest of the journey. Heather followed her, looking anxiously back toward us as she did.

My Master was a nice person. Seeing that neither girl wanted to be anywhere near him, he moved to the head of the group. It was more dangerous, since we were up where most of the fighting was happening, but any one of these A-ranked groups would be capable of protecting us perfectly well. With four of them here, anywhere was fine.

At least Yuulen was happy to talk with us. So was the leader of Please Daddy. Bode didn't like us much, but he didn't say anything either, so it wasn't bad. We never spoke to Heavenly Principles, but in fairness, no one else really did, either. I got the feeling they weren't well-liked.

It took a while, but at last, we were almost out of the dungeon. Two of the teams were fighting the guardian, and while the look of it had changed greatly, there was still a slide out of the dungeon. We’d tried seeing if it would work without defeating the guardian, but it was a slide that went up, and that apparently required activation, so we had to defeat the guardian first.

The guardian was an evolved version of the Allseeing Eyes. No one knew what it was called - even Yuulen didn't have any information on it in any of her notebooks - but it generally just seemed to be bigger, with more tentacles. We kept half an eye on the fight as we talked with Yuulen.

“So you became a Demon, and it turned you into some food-gathering thing?” Yuulen asked. She was writing everything in her notebook. I peeked over her shoulder. The notebook had the Adventurer Guild’s information on every member of this entire group, along with a truly terrifying number of extra details.

Nero nodded. “I needed food. It was all I could think about. Even now, I’m still starving. I mean, not literally, but…” He hunched his shoulders in and clenched his fists. “I hate it. I can’t stop thinking about food.”

I handed him more meat automatically. I'd been parceling it out to him anytime he mentioned the hunger, but it didn't seem to really satisfy him. “I don’t feel that way at all. I wonder why?”

Yuulen chuckled and proudly threw out her arms. “I will tell you why!” She pointed dramatically at Nero. “It is because of that title!”

Nero blinked. “What?”

Yuulen pointed at her book. Naturally, she’d gotten Bode to assess Nero against my wishes. Of course, she had. “Nascent Demon Lord.” She jabbed her finger at her book a few more times as though that would get her point across any better. “That! Is! Not! A! Thing!”

“But it’s right there,” I said.

“And you! Agent of Fyth? That’s not a thing either! I know every title! Neither of those exists!”

“But they do. Because they’re right here.”

Yuulen huffed loudly and rolled her eyes. “Yes, clearly, but they shouldn’t be. I don’t know what yours is about, but my theory is that Nero was in the process of transitioning to a Demon Lord, and you tore him out of it before he could finish. That is why he is a ‘nacsent’ Demon Lord now instead of a full Demon Lord.”

I glared at her. “That doesn’t explain a thing about him being hungry.”

“Oh.” Yuulen shrugged, all fire gone from her tone now that we'd departed from the subject she cared about. “Well, everyone knows that going from Candidate to the next step requires a massive amount of resources. Whether it’s the Hero or the Demon Lord, people are going to die. A lot of them. Their lives go into creating the title.”

Nero and I stared, aghast. “What ‘everyone?’” Nero demanded. “This is the first I’m hearing about it!”

Yuulen blinked at us. “Oh, well, everyone who does the research anyway. I guess it’s true that no one ever mentions it, since it is kind of a downer to think that the price of Heroes is lives.”

“How could people not realize that? How could anyone possibly hide that?” I asked.

“Ah, well, normally those evolutions happen during war, you know? It’s only natural for lots of people to die there, and the Candidate in question doesn’t have to specifically kill the people. They just need to absorb their souls.” Yuulen flipped through her notebook, sighed, and moved to dig through what looked like thin air. Apparently, she had some manner of Inventory, too. She finally cried out in triumph and pulled out an identical notebook, then opened it to a specific page for us to read. 

“See here? These are the records of the appearances of all the Heroes and Demon Lords we have information about. Only three have appeared outside of battles, right? One was in the middle of a massive fire, one was a serial killer to begin with, and one happened off on an island, so we don’t really know what happened. Quite frankly, it’s far more surprising that you’ve managed not to eat all of us than that you happened to eat a handful of people while trapped in a dungeon. Of course you’re starving.”

That was… horrifying. And kind of disgusting, really.

From behind us, there was a soft sound. Nero and I turned to see Alicia standing there with Heather. Her head was lowered, and we couldn’t see her expression.

“Alicia,” Nero started, but he faltered.

“Nero,” she said quietly, “I’m sorry.”

“Huh?”

Alicia lifted her head, and I was startled to see tears streaming down her cheeks. “I’m sorry, Nero. I… God told me. He told me that if I became a Hero, I could choose to save you. But I’d have to consume everyone else.” She sobbed, burying her face in her hands. “I couldn’t decide! I knew I needed to, but I couldn’t! And so you - because I was too scared to do it, you - I’m so sorry. It’s my fault.”

I could barely absorb what she was saying. Nero, however, seemed to have understood the most important part. “You don’t hate me?” he asked.

“What?”

“I attacked you. You don’t hate me?”

Alicia shook her head violently. “No! It was supposed to be me. I’m the one who was supposed to make that decision. I could never hate you for making the decision I failed to make.”

Nero bit his lip, looking hesitant. “I didn’t really make that decision, though. I didn’t know what would happen. I just knew I was choosing to save you and Clara. I just knew that the two of you would live even if I didn’t.”

Alicia’s eyes went wide. “That… that wasn’t the choice I had. I knew I'd have to... to eat everyone else. I could only save you, and… I wasn’t allowed to die in that exchange.”

Yuulen watched them both, enthralled, and wrote everything down. “Is this the difference between a Hero and a Demon Lord?” she murmured.

No. It’s only the difference in sponsor, Fyth said, sounding disgusted.

I stiffened and looked around, but I couldn’t see him. He was only in my mind. I relaxed again as I watched Nero and Alicia make up. She hugged him, still crying, and Nero hugged her back, looking relieved.

“Incoming!”

My whole body jolted as though struck, and turned toward the shout. The guardian was shooting lasers every which way from its eyes. Large sections of the cavern walls disappeared with every hit, though I didn't see any heading in our direction. What the hell were lasers doing in a fantasy world anyway? Well, I suppose that kind of attack wasn’t uncommon for eye monsters, actually, but still, this was a very annoying sci-fi look in the middle of my isekai fantasy life. Please read the room, eye monsters.

I was mostly just annoyed. If you had to have lasers, couldn’t you have them be more like beams of fire or something instead of disintegratey beams of insta-gone?

“We’d better back up,” Yuulen started to say. Then she looked at me and paled. “Oh.”

“Oh?” I looked down, following the line of her gaze. There was a gaping hole in my chest and, I realized slowly, the faint smell of burning skin. Even if I didn’t bleed, this seemed bad. I swayed. 'Oh' was right. I heard Nero and Alicia’s voices shouting my name.

Everything went black.