To The End (+ Author's Notes)

Quest details:

[There is a coloured picture of a brown wolf chained to a large cage in a forest. What appears to be an abandoned circus tent surrounds it.]

Eliminate the wolf at the north entrance of the Beginner's Forest.

Bounty: Twenty coins

- Astarea South Guildmaster's Office

----

Once Elspeth was ready to leave and had said her goodbyes ("They'll be alright without me - I'm basically replaceable anyway", she told Al dismissively), they set out for the north entrance.

They heard the wolf's chains clanking before it pounced upon Elspeth...but she held her staff in front of her so it bit into that.

She tossed her staff aside as Al came from behind, slamming a flat edge of his sword on to the wolf's head and then tossing a potion he'd had on hand at it.

A loud hoarse "You!" rang out, stopping Elspeth in her tracks. She had her right hand stretched out as if to launch an attack, but hadn't done anything.

Al looked at Elspeth. She looked back at him. It was neither of their voices (nor was it the travelling NPC's voice), so...then who yelled?

They both turned towards the wolf and couldn't believe what they saw - instead of the wolf, there was a human! (A human wearing the skin of a wolf and the basic clothing of warriors like Al's, but a human nonetheless.)

"You! Why'd you do that to me?" the former wolf growled at them, rubbing the back of his head gingerly. At full height, this man was slightly shorter than Al, but built more heavily than him too. This man also had a face covered in dirt and stubble.

Elspeth produced the quest sheet and showed it to him. He sniffed around like a dog, ignoring the quest sheet, going for Elspeth, Elspeth's staff and eventually snuck up close to Al and his sword, causing the white-haired swordsman to draw his sword even closer towards himself.

"That's the switch potion from the Demon King museum in the south of the continent," the swordsman hastily explained, looking at the contents of the vial he'd thrown and realising his error.

"Uhh...so what are we doing with this guy now?" Elspeth indicated the former wolf with a pointer finger. ("My name is Koichiro Ogami," the former wolf helpfully added.)

"It said 'eliminate', right? Not 'kill'?" Al mused. "Surely the South Guildmaster's gonna give us a reward for this?"

(...yes, as it turns out. According to the people at the Guild, removing the threat specified in the quest counts as "elimination".)

----

Considering Ogami had nowhere to go, he tagged alongside Elspeth and Al as they continued making their way across the Astarean continent to the north, where everyone else went. Elspeth kept sighing to herself and muttering there was no point in her continuing with the others since the wolf quest was over and it had just been a prerequisite to leave the tavern, but when she went to gather some food and then didn't show up for a while, that's when the mental alarm bells started to go off.

"She hasn't gone and injured herself somewhere, has she?" Ogami wondered aloud, putting himself on the scent as Al set up a campsite for the night. 

"Maybe she went back to the South Guildmaster's Tavern, where I found her?" Al suggested before Ogami went out of earshot.

Surely enough, Ogami followed the scent back towards the tavern and discovered Elspeth, peering into the building and observing a completely different girl in her place.

"There's something weird about all this," she told him when he told her what Al had suggested. "When I said I was replaceable, I didn't mean it that literally...or that fast."

They silently trekked their way back to Al's makeshift campsite, letting the rustling of leaves and the calls of wild birds fill in the empty space. Ogami occasionally bounded forward of the mage and tried to pull funny faces to try and cheer Elspeth up, but even though she smiled and laughed at everything he did, mentally, she seemed rather distant from everything.

----

A few days later, as they started to encounter enemies and terrains more suited to cooler climates, Elspeth dove into her bag for her resources more.

Al raised an eyebrow at her. "Weren't you meant to be from the north? You'll be a great help later."

Peering at a book Elspeth currently had in her hands, Ogami found some surprising content...

----

It has been well-documented that many Astarean heroes have been summoned from other worlds. Many of these heroes speak the language of a country they call "Japan", to the extent the Japanese language has seeped into Astarean culture as a whole. As a result, some of Forty's golems are (supposedly) of Japanese descent, including the first, Tsubame Saijou. Here are some of the basics of Japanese, so you too can understand this foreign influence...

----

"I don't need to be lectured on my own culture," he muttered, realising even though when the words left his mouth, there was a...the sensation could only be described as "blurriness"...when he tried to remember what life was like in Japan.

"Your-?" Oh no. Elspeth had caught on already.

However, before Ogami could cover up what he said with something else, she sat down on a rock. "If what you said is true, can I confide in you for a sec?"

"...go ahead, lady." (Ogami refused to use her name.)

"What if I told you I was an NPC in another life?"

Ogami spat in surprise. He'd heard the rumours, but then that would mean she was...

"Does Al know?" he asked as he quickly hid the offending ball of paper by kicking it away.

She shook her head. "He'll probably figure this out when he realises I'm not going to recognise anything in the north, even though that's where I'm meant to come from." Her blue eyes glazed over in worry.

----

Before Elspeth could reveal anything to Al, however, a winged girl with a red bobcut showed up just as they reached the Northern Guildmaster's Office (which...looked the same as the one in the South, come to think of it).

"Oh! Tsubame!" Ogami called out.

"You know her?" Al asked.

"She's the first familiar, right?" Ogami recalled. "Because she's a barn sparrow (tsubame)?"

Unfortunately for them, Ogami was correct. "I'm here to tell you the Demon King has officially resigned."

They looked at each other in concern. Welp, that was their whole journey cut short.

"Do you know where he is? I'd just like to personally ask him some things."

"Sure, I can bring you to him."

How was it that...easy?

----

She flew them over by summoning a whirlwind ("I'm not going to carry you all there myself!" she yelled when Ogami suggested doing something called a "princess carry") to the northeast part of the continent where the Demon King's lair was. There, indeed, was the blonde-haired "Demon King".

The first thing Al did was slug him in the face. Hard.

"What was that for?" the Demon King asked. Luckily, he didn't have the same resistance to physical attacks as Al did and was nursing his bright red right cheek with an armored hand.

"I've had so much trouble because I have your face!" Al was furious and on the verge of tears. "Did you also write me out of existence?"

All he got back were the Demon King's violet eyes silently asking, "What?" to him.

"You, the fortieth familiar, were made in my image. Of course you have my face." Al shrunk back, clinging on to his sword harder than ever. "As for 'writing you out of existence'...that's a quirk of all the familiars."

Elspeth and Ogami gasped as they put two and two together.

"So...is what Tsubame said true? If that's so, why are you resigning?" Elspeth asked him.

"My goals are complete. I created the perfect hero...and that hero just happened to look like me." He held up his hands in surrender, much like Al had done back at the South Guildmaster's Tavern. "You figured me out. Feel free to take me away in chains or whatever."

"C-Cory!" Al finally spat after some uncomfortable silence, prompting some incredulous looks from the others.

"What is it, my vassal?" The Demon King's facial expression morphed into one of stone-cold superiority - something close to disgust.

"To be honest, as soon as I became Alabaster, I knew something was up. I had memories of someone called 'Cory' who'd created me and I somehow kept getting ahold of ingredients for a forbidden potion popularised by the Demon King...A potion no one else has supposedly been able to recreate."

"Me too," Elspeth joined in. "When I became Elspeth, I had memories someone had cast me out, but not who."

"That would also explain the familiar smell, Al, and how I became human again," Ogami finally added. "It was the Demon King all along."

Suddenly, they stared at each other. "You're-?!"

Tsubame began to laugh, an odd chirping noise in the otherwise silence. "Oh, they've been hiding secrets from each other? That's cute." She stopped for a moment, supposedly for dramatic effect. "But I have my own revelation to make - I'm the Main Guildmaster."

With that, the matter was settled - Cory (real name "Corundum Alloyd") was sent off in handcuffs willingly. The trio swore themselves to secrecy about what they'd learnt and that was the end...

...or was it?

----

--- Author's Notes ----

* I think this story has almost everything I envisioned for the original iteration of Extra-Ore-Dinary and then more after that. Notable absences are a scene (originally Tsubame's intro scene) at a waterfall before the North Guild where Elspeth lost morale and then gained a huge power-up, plus a conflict with a flying rock monster (which means Al and Tsubame would be weak against it) and the fact "Extra-Ore-Dinary" was the name of the quartet's party. Extra-Ore-Dinary is meant to be my parody of the so-called "Narou-type stories" which were starting to be popular in 2019 when I began thinking it up, but in its final form in late October 2024, I think it's evolved beyond that (into a parody of a parody).
* I've left the ending open-ended for if this becomes popular enough to flesh out. For example, there are 5 Guilds, of which I only mentioned 3 in the story proper. From weakest to strongest, it's South, North, West, East and then Main (in the centre), hence the Main Guild dealing with the Demon King. (I also had extensive character profiles here along with these notes at one point, but then if I extend the story after this point, those would remove too much of the mystery...) Also, I feel like I don't nail endings very well and this story's position as a "fantastical mystery" meant it needed extra planning around making all the "clues" line up, so I was reluctant to release this story for about a week or two.
* At one point, the story was going to suddenly change so it broke the 4th wall with those epistolary elements, but while this was fun to implement for a bit, it wouldn't have fit the story's purpose as being popular in One Wish...
* I wrote most of the current Honeyfeed iteration of Familiar of Forty over about 12 hours and then split it into 3 chapters.