A Third Way

Souma tried not to make eye contact with Selina, who was still grinning at him expectantly through her fingers. Nodding solemnly, he clapped his hands together, and worked himself up to his feet. He swatted the dust off the back of his trousers, and stretched his arms up over his head.

"Well, it's getting late, so I'll be heading off-"

"H-hey! Where are you going? Didn't you hear me?"

Souma tried his best not to make a face. "Of course, Your Highness, but the thing is I just remembered I had-"

"You don't believe me!"

"I don't not believe you. It's just..."

"I am the Demon Lord!" Selina stomped her foot and put her fists firmly on her waist.

She certainly didn't seem like the Demon Lord. Though if she was it might start explaining what had happened when she first arrived. Souma looked behind Selina at the destroyed and charred pillars.

That's right, when she first showed up she was completely different.

"I don't know, shouldn't the Demon Lord be a little..." Souma waved his hands about vaguely. "Taller?"

"I am tall! For someone my age!"

"How old are you?"

Selina puffed out her chest proudly. "Ageless."

I shouldn't have bothered.

"I see. You're just pretending to be the Demon Lord," Souma clarified.

"I'm not pretending! It's my unique skill!"

"Unique skill?" Souma was taken aback. "You have one of those?"

"It's been in my family for generations. All the way back to the first Demon Lord! Probably!"

"What on earth does that kind of unique skill even do?"

"How readily you forget, human! My divine form has already graced your eyes once already!" Selina pointed around the smashed room. "My unique skill bestows upon me the ability to gain all the strength, abilities, and charm of the original Demon Lord for a little bit!"

"A little bit?"

"About a minute."

"Just a minute!?"

"Well if I get better at it, I'll be able to use it longer!" Selina folded her arms. "It also lets me know when the summoned are coming. And where they'll be."

So that was how she found them. Something else clicked in place for Souma.

"Hang on, you mean we're not the first humans to come here?"

"Oh no, it's been going since the time of the first Demon Lord, a thousand years ago."

"That long? How often does this happen?"

"Not very often."

"Every few years?"

"The last time was a hundred years ago."

"So the last time you ever saw a human was..."

"T-this is my first time," Selina muttered into her cloak, looking bashfully to one side. "The last time it happened, my grandfather was the Demon Lord. Way before I was born."

Souma breathed out a little sigh. He knew that fundamentally she had been trying to kill him just a little while ago, but looking at her now, fidgeting with her cloak, it was hard to stay mad at her. It almost felt like if made too big a deal out of it, he'd be the one who came off looking like the bad guy.

"So I guess what this means is, the Demon Lord all the others are out to kill, that's you."

"Mm," Selina nodded slightly and looked up at him, as though she was expecting him to do somehting about it. Just a little, Souma was caught off guard by how bright her eyes were when the light from outside hit them, and turned his face away. He stomped off quickly towards one of the windows and stuck his head outside.

"W-well, supposedly they want to kill you!" He yelled over his shoulder.

"That's normally that's the way it goes. Every hundred years or so, a group of humans appears and tries to kill someone in my family. For some reason they always make a pilgrimage to Hantarl first though."

"That's where the quest said you are."

"Oh... That explains a lot then. But I don't think we've lived in Hantarl for generations. It's far too cold. Maybe there are some distant relatives there," Seline seemed momentarily lost in thought.

Souma went back to looking out the window. It was starting to get dark. Before long it would be night, and then... And then he wasn't sure.

Not only had they been summoned to another world by somebody who hadn't been there to meet them, it looked like they might already have vanished a thousand years ago. Everything about this situation just kept getting worse and worse.

I need a plan. I can't just stay here forever.

But the prospect of wandering out of the tower didn't seem that inviting either. Ever since he'd accepted this was a different world, he'd been filled with a giddy sort of excitement. But when push came to shove, what was he actually supposed to do next? He'd been camping a few times, but he wasn't sure he felt confident venturing out alone into the wilds with no supplies. And when he looked outside he could see an awful lot of wilds between here and the closest signs of life.

Things would have been easier if I was with the others...

What were they even doing now? He wondered briefly about Ami, and that look on her face while the others had pulled her away. They probably thought he was dead. Maybe that wasn't such a terrible thing. At least Tenka would feel a little better.

"What's going to happen to the people who came with me?" Souma asked.

"Mm? The summoned will travel to the ancient dungeons, looking for lost artifacts that probably don't exist and learning how to use their unique skills. If I'm lucky, they'll all die."

"If you're not?"

"Then they keep getting more and more powerful until they get to Hantarl. Then they'll slowly make their back down here, killing anyone they run into until they find me." She shuddered. "It'll be a massacre."

Souma rubbed his temples. "That sounds dire. If this is such a big deal, why are you here on your own? Shouldn't you have an army or something?"

"That's..." Selina looked to one side and muttered something into her cloak.

"What was that?"

"I said nobody believes us! " Selina's cheeks went red. For the second time, Souma tried to remember that not too long ago she'd been a rampaging war machine. "The last time the summoned appeared was a hundred years ago, and... Barely anyone believes they're a real thing. Nobody even believes that the Demon Lord exists."

Souma had to admit it made sense. Where he came from, even the most mundane trivia was obsessively recorded and shared, but people were quick to forget things they'd rather not. In this medieval fantasy world where the volume of recorded information couldn't possibly have been even a fraction of that, it seemed entirely plausible that unhappy memories could be lost between a few generations.

"Still, it makes no sense. Why would they just kill everybody they came across?"

"It's the unique skills. My grandfather told me that's why the summoned are so dangerous. The more powerful their skills become, the more they..." She scrunched up her face, looking for the right words. "They more they control the person. If your friends get all the way to Hantarl, they won't be the same. They'll just be living versions of their skills."

Souma felt a chill. He didn't want to accept it so easily, but when he reached inside himself, he could tell there was something to what she was saying. He could feel his own unique skill, almost as though he could take it with his hands. Cold like glass. Powerful. Something that had been a part of him before he came to this world, but also something that shouldn't have been there.

"And if that happens?"

"If that happens, the only one that can stop them is the Demon Lord. Either by killing them, or..."

Selina looked down into her cloak again.

"Right. So when you learned we were going to appear, you came here to kill us right away, before we had a chance to become more powerful."

"S-sorry."

"Well it's not like I don't get where you're coming from." Now that his head had cooled down, Souma stepped away from the window and leaned against the wall. "So they all die. Or they go crazy and start murdering whoever they come across until they can go home."

Either way you looked at it, the outcome wasn't great.

If they all died, then she'd die too.

It wasn't like he owed her anything. And it wasn't like he expected doing anything to help her out would be reciprocated. And maybe it was cold of him to only focus on her, given there had been maybe twenty others in the group. But if he was being honest with himself, he didn't much care what happened to everybody else. The idea of Ami dying though, left a bad taste in his mouth.

"Isn't there a third way?" Souma scratched the back of his head. "Some way of sending them back they came from? Before the dungeons kill them, or they go crazy?"

"We could kill them?"

"I said without them dying, you gremlin."

"I'm not a gremlin. And..." She pursed her lips for a moment. "Maybe... My grandfather used to tell me stories of chasing after the summoned. In every dungeon he went to, there was always a magic circuit."

Souma looked over and pointed at the giant stone door, now firmly shut. "That thing, right? The glowing blue thing that was in that room."

Selina nodded. "Sure! I've never seen one before, but probably that!"

This gremlin... Just roll with it.

"Alright, so a magic circuit, in each dungeon."

"My grandfather never really figured out exactly what they were for, but he said they had more magical energy than anything he'd ever seen. He thought they might be connected to how the summoned teleport from one place to another."

"So maybe they could also send everybody back home?"

Selina shrugged. "Not that anybody really knows how magic circuits work, but it's all I can think of. I mean, not that it matters. Even if those circuits can send the summoned back home, you'd have to catch up with them first."

"Doesn't your unique skill let you know where they are?"

Selina shook her head sadly. "I know where the summoned will be when they appear in our world. I don't know where they go after that."

"Then how did your grandfather chase them?"

"Wherever the summoned go, they cause trouble, so he just followed the rumors. Usually by the time he got there they were long gone, though. He didn't catch up with them until they were almost at Hantarl."

"What did he do then?"

"Nothing. They were all dead."

Souma frowned. This was already starting to sound like more responsibility than he wanted. And chasing after the others in the hopes that they might be able to send them back didn't sound like a great idea. Still, it was better than doing nothing. Though if they didn't know where the others even were, then-

Welcome, brave warrior, to the Altoria Dungeon!

Souma stared down silently at the lilac screen that had popped up in front of him.

Surely not...

He was still getting messages? Had the system leading the others forgotten to take him off the mailing list? Was it just expected that the summoned would stick together? Was it going to send him an update whenever they did something?

"Selina."

"Meow!?" Selina jumped, apparently having been caught off guard.

What is she, a cat?

"Are we in Altoria Dungeon right now?"

She tilted her head at him. "Altoria? No, but it's not too far off. Why?"

Souma grinned. "I think I might know where the-"

"Ahh! How tall is this blasted tower!"

"Quit you griping! I told you I saw something flashing up here!"

Both Souma and Selina froze at the sound of voices echoing up into the chamber. They came from the smaller door on the other end of the room. The one that Selina had blasted through to get in, half hanging off its hinges, edges charred black.

"Friends of yours?" Souma asked quietly.

"I don't have... No." Selina finished smoothly, glancing off into the corner of the hall.

She was about to say something there...

Souma looked about quickly for a good place to hide, but the space was just too open. Hoping the rubble would keep whoever was coming distracted until he knew whether they were hostile or not, he pulled Selina behind one of the columns. Almost before they were hidden, two large men heaved themselves up over the threshold and let out tired breaths.

"That was way too many steps." The first one complained.

"And what the hell happened to this door?" The second one muttered.

Souma stared at them from behind the pillar, his eyes wide.

Both men were scarily grizzled, their faces covered in scars. They wore well beaten armor, pieced together from bits of leather, fur, and iron. From their hips hung vicious looking curved swords.

Most off-putting, they both had rabbit ears.

It wasn't the ears themselves. Souma had known, or maybe it would be better to say he had wanted, to run into this sort of thing sooner or later. But he had quite been hoping they'd be stuck to the heads of cute girls. On the other hand, these animal-eared muscle men looked like they could have ripped his arms off.

"Rabbit Clan Bandits," Selina hissed. She'd wormed her way under his chin and was peaking out from beneath him. "This is bad, human. Really bad. If those animals see us, we're as good as dead."

It seemed as though no matter what their next action was, it would have to involve dealing with those two first.