I hesitantly asked Jeanne, “You didn’t happen to eat… a kobold, by any chance, did you?”
When I did, Jeanne reacted with shock, quickly shaking her head, “Perish the thought! I only ate animal-like monsters! I wouldn’t go around eating demons, with their human-like bodies.”
“No, it’s just I’m not familiar with the distinction,” I said.
“…I see,” Jeanne said. “The Elfrieden Kingdom doesn’t share a border with the Demon Lord’s Domain, after all.”
Jeanne nodded, satisfied. “Very well. This is something of a side note, but allow me to provide you with the information our country has on the Demon Lord’s Domain, as well as demons and monsters.”
She began to slowly explain it all for me.
“First of all, even in our country, we have no information on why the Demon Lord’s Domain appeared,” said Jeanne. “Honestly, all that we can say is that one day, out of nowhere, it did.”
“So even the Empire doesn’t know…?” I asked.
“Yes,” said Jeanne. “So, in the Demon Lord’s Domain, there are aberrant creatures that form swarms, but which demonstrate no intelligence, violently devouring all life they come across, as well as those like the kobolds, which behave almost like well-ordered armies and have few differences from the races of mankind. In order to distinguish the two, we call the former monsters and the later demons.”
I’d heard that much from the former king, Albert.
In the northernmost reaches of the continent, a dimension called the “Demon World” had appeared, and monsters of many sizes and shapes had poured out, throwing the Northern Countries into chaos. The forces of mankind had formed an alliance and organized a punitive force to send in, but the attempt had ended in failure.
In the Demon World there were “monsters,” which had minimal (or, some would theorize, no) intelligence, as well as “demons,” who were intelligent and also powerful fighters. This loss had been inflicted on them by the demons. After that battle, mankind had lost the means to defend themselves against the monsters that appeared from the Demon World. The Northern Countries were laid waste one after another, and the monsters extended their range to cover all of what was now called the Demon Lord’s Domain.
When I explained what I had heard from Albert to her, Jeanne nodded, a somber look on her face. “That is correct. And the Gran Chaos Empire were the ones to lead that punitive force. The one who commanded it was the former emperor, our father.”
The Empire lead the punitive force, huh? I thought. Well, given they’re the strongest amongst the nations of mankind, I guess that should have been a given.
“Then, does that mean the Empire has made contact with the demons?” I asked.
“If you mean waged war against them… then yes,” said Jeanne. “Though, my sister and I being nine and seven at the time, we haven’t seen them ourselves. However, with the passage of time, and as we analyzed the statements of those who were touched by the menace of the Demon Lord’s Domain, the situation at the time has become clear to us.”
“What situation is that?” I asked.
“In the very beginning, when many countries perished, countless lives were lost, and an even greater number were displaced to become refugees,” Jeanne said, “all of those attacks were done by monsters.”
I said, “Monsters? There were no demons, then?”
“Yes. At that point, at least.” Jeanne paused to take a sip of her tea, looking down into her cup as she continued. “The first time demons were spotted was when they met the punitive force in battle. The punitive force was wiped out at the hands of those demons. After that, with our capacity to wage war diminished, mankind was unable to fend off the attacks of the monsters, and we were forced to pull back from a considerable stretch of territory.”
“So, in short, the creation of the Demon Lord’s Domain was a two-stage process?” I asked.
The first stage had been attacks by the monsters that had suddenly appeared. The second stage had been when the demons had destroyed the punitive force, and the weakened forces of mankind had been attacked by monsters. It had probably come some time later, but the attack that had driven Tomoe and the mystic wolves to become refugees had presumably been part of the second stage.
Jeanne nodded, continuing. “It seems the damages caused differed greatly between the monsters and demons. During the monster attacks in the first stage, I’ve heard it was a terrible sight to behold. The monsters spewed fire, burning cities to the ground, devouring soldiers and civilians alike, with no regard to their age or gender. I’ve heard that in the towns and villages they struck, there was nothing left but the messy scraps of their feasting.”
So, they were literal monsters, huh, I thought to myself. These monstrous beings swarmed over the land like locusts, and even mankind was no more than prey to them.
“Then, the second stage, the attack by the demons, was total war,” said Jeanne. “I hear that they acted in an organized fashion, crushing the punitive force with their overwhelming force of arms. Also, while they are few in number, we have statements from those who claim their villages were attacked by the demons. These situations vary, and in some cases, if they withdrew, they weren’t attacked any further, while in others, the demons raped and pillaged, carrying out massacres.”
“…Almost like one of the races of mankind, huh,” I said.
The way that the damages varied from place to place was one point on which that similarity was especially strong. Even within the same army, when there are both disciplined and undisciplined units, the situation post-occupation for each will be different. When we had occupied Van, I’d made an example of some soldiers in an attempt to keep the whole of my armies in line, but had I not, I can say with certainty that there would have been some who abused the civilian populace.
Monsters… and demons, huh… I thought.
“Where do you think the difference comes from?” I asked. “Did the demons evolve from the monsters?”
“‘They gained sentience by eating human brains!’…is what a bunch of religious types shouted about for a while… but that’s nonsense,” said Jeanne. “If that were the case, there would be a lot more demons out there. Ever since the battle lines bogged down into a stalemate, it’s only been the monsters that attacked us. Though, you could say that’s why we’ve been able to maintain the status quo.”
…In other words, we just don’t know what demons and monsters are really? I thought.
I said, “Come to think of it, when we were digging a sedimentation pond near Parnam, we found a whole lot of monster fossils. They were apparently from a stratum that would have been the surface more than a few thousand years ago.”
“What are these… ‘fossils’?” Jeanne asked.
Oh, that’s not common knowledge in this world yet? I thought.
“To put it simply, they’re bones left in the earth by living creatures that have died,” I said. “There are a lot of things that have an effect on the process, but the bones fossilize underground over a long, long period of time. However, even if the bones have only been underground for a few thousand years, they can still be called fossils.”
“I see… So does that mean there may have been monsters on the surface several thousand years ago?” Jeanne had a pensive look.