episode_0027

“Warrior, warrior! Woof!”

The dog king was chasing after me. He wasn’t even a real dog…

Ah, I think Suin said that the characteristics of that race are quite strong. Come to think of it, it could be that kind of person. Especially if he’s a king, the blood of the original race would be even stronger…

To my eyes, it looked more like a tail wagging towards power.

In the first place, there’s no way someone who’s as big as the king of a race would openly express that they want to be friends with someone like that. Hey, no way.

I had a momentary suspicion because of what I had seen at the Demon King’s Castle, but that was that, and the Ken Clan were just allies, so I quickly erased the suspicion from my mind.

Oh, what a stupid thought I had again…

Anyway, since it was still awkward to just stay still, I decided to continue my conversation with the King of Dogs.

“You said you needed the seat of the Four Heavenly Kings, why is that?”

“… Big, to be honest, woof… Do you know what the current state of the Kyeonjok is?

“What is the state of the tribe? Are they all annihilated? Are all men, women, old and young injured and the labor force gone?”

The dagger coming out of Leah’s mouth stabbed the King of Dogs.

“Kkiing… That, that too… but something else.”

“Something else?”

“Yeah, what comes to your mind first when you hear the word ‘dog’, woof?”

If you say dog… hmm.

“There was a pet dog named Pippi that the flower shop owner raised. It reminds me of him.”

“Why do you call me noona instead of unnie, huh?”

-…Snap.

A vein or two appeared on Leah’s face.

“You called me a real man last time, didn’t you, King Gyeon?”

“I say I’m a real man, regardless of whether I’m a man or not!”

I’m a man.

Leah wanted to scream, but thinking about it carefully, she was wearing women’s underwear right now and thinking about who was acting like a woman to Abel in the first place, it was clear that only the Dog King’s pure doubts would come back.

‘No, when I think about it, it’s unfair? I just… just.’

Leah didn’t really have anything to say in rebuttal, so she quickly spoke up and decided to change the subject.

It’s been a long time since I’ve gently folded up the fact that I used to be a man and sealed it away in a corner of my heart.

…Since the King of the Dogs did not have the intelligence to see through that, the topic gently moved on to the current state of the Dog Clan.

“Anyway, so what’s the status of the Kyeonjok?”

“That’s exactly what you said, woof! A pet dog, a pet dog.”

“Hmm?”

The King of Gyeon continued speaking with an enraged expression. He seemed to have forgotten that he had been growling at him just a few hours ago, and he thought that he was really careless in asking for advice.

” Blunt fangs and claws! Where did the wildness of dogs disappear? Our species began to gradually lose its fighting ability, just like our ancestors. Even its will! ”

In short, it meant that the number of people who wanted to become warriors was decreasing exponentially. No, even the warriors who were already there might have been gradually losing their skills.

“The dog… is slowly dying.”

Even for ordinary races, a decline in national defense power is fatal. What about the Ken tribe, a fighting race that survives through battles? It is no exaggeration to say that they are literally dying.

“That’s it, Woof! Even… The condition for our alliance with the Demon Tribe is ‘support of warriors’ in times of emergency, so if things continue like this… the Ken Tribe will be slaughtered the moment they are forcibly mobilized according to the contract. Woof…”

I didn’t know that far ahead, but the situation was definitely quite serious.

“…You seem like a good king.”

The kings I knew were only faithful to extorting money, regardless of what happened to those under them. The fact that he could be so sincere to his country and worry so much about his own people shows that he was a good king.

Of course, relatively speaking. A good king would have to have all three: military power, intelligence, and virtue, but considering that in these end times, there are many people who don’t have even one…

And in terms of ability, the Ken clan has always had a king based on military force, and if you look at the reputation of the Ken kings that I have heard from across the empire, he is objectively outstanding in ability as a king within the Ken clan. Of course, this is not by human standards.

Abel?

To be honest, I like this guy Abel, but let’s be honest.

That… usually, he openly colludes with others – of course, there are many circumstances behind it, most of which are related to me, and I know that only a few key figures openly plan the war – but he starts the war with the intention of losing from the beginning, and he appoints parachuted people to the Four Heavenly Kings, the highest positions besides the Demon King, and he drives his own direct subordinates into the stakes. Doesn’t that make him a good ruler by the standards of any race?

If this seemed like a good ruler, he should have had his eyesight checked. And while my eyesight wasn’t perfect, I wasn’t blind.

He may be a good ‘person’, but he is not a good ruler even if he is beaten to death.

However, apart from that, I felt like I didn’t really understand what the decline of the Jian Clan and the position of the Four Heavenly Kings had to do with each other.

“Woof, that’s… It’s faster to see it than to explain it in words, woof…”

As the King of Dogs answered, it would be better to see it for yourself rather than listening to what the King of Dogs said and asking for other people’s opinions.

Judging by the pungent smell of blood and the screams of the sick, it seemed like we were almost there.

“Bone smell.”

“?”

“I smell bones and blood. Aren’t there any warriors?”

“Bone smell? …I don’t know. There’s nothing much to catch around here either.”

“…Am I mistaken? Then let’s keep going!”

*****

The training ground is quite small to accommodate all of the Kyeonjok who were absentmindedly attending to treatment, so they went to see the Kyeonjok’s condition.

There were about a hundred warriors who responded to the call and showed up at the training ground. Even among them, half were muscular and lacking in proper training, while the other half were wrinkled old men who were already past their twilight years.

I already knew from King Jian’s words, but seeing it for myself showed that the problem was no small matter.

“There’s nothing more to see. I can tell just by looking at your eyes. Both your fighting spirit and your body have aged.”

“No matter what, saying that in front of someone’s eyes might be considered an insult.”

“So what? They themselves aren’t denying it.”

And the fact that they didn’t deny it means that they were even more convinced. There were some uncomfortable looks, but in the end, not a single person objected verbally.

“Is this all there is to a warrior, King?”

Oh, most of them were probably killed by the attackers who claimed to be Abel. But even taking that into account, this number was too small.

“…That’s right.”

“No, really? Why on earth?”

The Ken clan is a race with many warriors, with 99% of the remaining members being warriors, excluding children. That’s their ‘tradition’. But just the Ken clans I’ve seen while passing by, there were easily hundreds? Of course, they may all have become patients… Even considering that, there were too few.

The Ken clan is a fairly large race. They can be placed as a ‘faction’ along with succubi, vampires, imps… and all of their strength comes from their fighting prowess.

Even though Salty Abel massacred the Ken Clan, it was only the size of a ‘vacant lot’. It was far from the Ken Clan’s residence. … It was a terrible massacre to say it was just that, but it cannot represent the number of warriors, which is only about 100 people now.

“King? By any chance…”

“What you think is right.”

Unless the number of warriors had been reduced to a crazy degree in the first place.

“…You weren’t planning on revealing it originally, were you?”

That would be true, because if what I thought was true, the King of the Dogs would have tried to cut off the only source of income for the Dogs, the mercenaries of war, just by reporting this fact. Of course, that wouldn’t have happened, so it’s right to think that he changed his mind in the middle.

“Right, woof.”

“The number of warriors in the Kyeon clan was decreasing from the beginning.”

The population of the Ken tribe is approximately 50 thousand.

Roughly judging by the size of the vacant lot and the number of injured, the total number of injured and dead is estimated to be around 7,000.

Then, why didn’t the people who were left out of the 43,000, except for the children, come?

The answer comes from the size of the training ground.

In short, the Jian tribe was ruined. Completely ruined.

I don’t know how many of those 7,000 are warriors, but the 100 or so who came out to the training grounds now (and of those, about 50 are untrained, paid Lupins, so in reality, they’re all 50 old people) are all the warriors left. Up until now, since meeting me, Abel has been concentrating all his energy on spending time with me, reducing the number of battles and leaving attacks on the human side to assassinations of key figures, a small elite, or his subordinate demons, but there’s no way that can continue.

If Abel starts a proper war just once under the command of the Goddess, the Ken tribe, who were forcibly mobilized according to the contract with the ancestors’ demon tribe, will become minced meat and become extinct.

What on earth did they do to make that warrior race like that? It’s not like the King of the Dogs is corrupt! It’s like they got hit directly by an internal enemy…

Ah, the enemy within.

This is what made the Kyeonjok like this.

My head spun. In an instant, the puzzle of all these things came together.

There is an enemy within the tribe. The enemy’s background is unclear. The goddess… why? It would be faster to have Abel, who holds my life by the leash, swing his sword.

I don’t know how the enemy did it, but they probably used political tricks to exponentially reduce the number of warriors. Perhaps the reason King Jian talked about being one of the Four Heavenly Kings was related to this.

As a result, the construction was in a shoddy state, like a swindler’s bread that looked sound on the outside.

If things had gone as they were, it wouldn’t have taken much longer. Still, there were a few thousand of them who were proper warriors. That meant that even the King of the Dogs still had some time to put everything back to normal.

That was means that it is not now.

Fortunately or unfortunately for the enemy within, someone impersonating Abel launched an attack and the few thousand remaining Ken clan troops were all turned into pieces of meat.

Because of that, the Ken clan has now completely lost hope. Perhaps this is why the Ken King got so angry that he rushed at Abel.

So now the question is who the enemy within is, and there was no need to think about the answer any further. Of course, he would have been madly opposed to the King of Dogs, so wouldn’t the King of Dogs know?

“Who is the culprit?”

Even though he had whispered something in his ear without a word, the King of Gyeon frowned for a moment as if he had understood, and then quickly pointed towards the door with his chin.

At the door, a heavily built, heavily wounded man of the Ken clan was walking towards them, who secretly resembled the Ken King. It certainly wasn’t a mistake.

*****

(??? point in time)

“You were hasty, Demon King. Why on earth did you do that?”

It’s been a long time since Galvein has attacked me. Well, I don’t really have anything to say. It was my fault. If Galvein hadn’t come to me in a hurry via teleport and set up a cover, I would have definitely been caught.

Even if the mouth of the ‘Former King of Dogs’ is blocked by killing him, Rhea’s memories will not be touched due to the involvement of the God of Libra.

“Thank you, Galvein. It would have been dangerous without you.”

I knew it, but there was no tension in my blue eyes. Could it be that the arrogance that killed Leah when she was Noah was coming back? I cringed for a moment in disgust, but soon I rationalized it and felt at ease.

I was just trying to retrieve the first key to find the ‘Ark’, but the moment I made eye contact with that son of a bitch, my sword went out in anger.

It would be a relief if I could just tear him apart, but I couldn’t even do that properly. Even if it weren’t for the artifact handed down from the damned Ken clan, I would have ripped out his heart so he wouldn’t try to make a fool of himself like last time.

For a moment, I lost my senses and just ran wild like an animal. No… I had to kill them anyway. Cancer cells can’t be left alone for long.

“…Please…put away your anger…”

My anger, which was even stronger than that of Abel, must have been so strong that my eyes would have turned white for a moment. However, I, who had let out that anger, said, “Ah,” and took it back, saying, “Sorry,” without thinking much of it.

“Go back to the Demon King’s Castle with the key. Abel will know about it, so hide it as much as possible.”

“…Okay.”

Galvein teleported away from the place, almost as if he was running away. Although he tried to hide his anger on the outside, Galvein knew all too well that it was not wise to stay near someone who was angry.