((demon king=monster king. it's woman it's still call king))
The silence in Hoshimura was a physical weight, thick with ash and grief. Akari sat on the splintered steps of what was once the Adventurer's Guild hall, her head in her hands. The magical exhaustion had passed, leaving a deeper, more permanent emptiness. She was an A-rank mage, a pillar of this community. Now, the community was gone. The children she had taught simple light spells, the elderly she'd helped with warming charms… all gone. Takeshi and Kenji were organizing the few survivors—a handful of farmers and a blacksmith's apprentice—to gather the dead. It was grim, necessary work.
A glint of polished steel caught the smoky sunlight. A figure approached from the southern road, moving with a weary but determined grace. He was clad in masterfully crafted silverite armor, engraved with dwarf-forged runes that glowed with a soft, protective light. At his hip was a sword that hummed with contained power. He was Kaelen, and his return to his hometown was a decade too late.
He stopped at the edge of the devastation, his handsome, earnest face pale with horror. "By the High Father…" he whispered, his voice cracking.
Akari looked up. Her tear-streaked face, smudged with soot, initially showed no recognition. Then, her eyes widened. "K-Kaelen? Is that you?"
He rushed to her side, kneeling. "Akari. I came as soon as I heard about the migrations from the Dark Forest. I… I was too late." The guilt was a familiar cloak on his shoulders. He was the one who had left to seek greater power, to join the Hero's party. And while he had been away, his home had been erased.
"You're not late for the fight," Takeshi said, his voice rough as he walked over, wiping his blade clean. "That's been handled. By something else."
Kaelen stood, his brow furrowed. "Handled? The reports said it was a horde. A tide. What army stopped it?"
"No army," Akari said, her voice hollow. She pointed a trembling finger towards the pile of dust that was once the Gloom Bruin. "A monster. A… a thing. It was made of green slime, but it walked like a man. It held a black staff. It just… looked at the monsters, and they turned to dust. It didn't even make a sound."
Kaelen's blood ran cold. "Slime? That's not possible. There are no recorded slime-type monsters with intelligence, let alone bipedal ones. The bestiaries list them as mindless hazards." His training with the Hero's party had given him access to the most extensive libraries in the world. Nothing matched this description.
"We saw it," Kenji insisted, his youthful voice trembling. "It saved us. Then it looked at us… and it looked sad. And then it left."
"Sad?" Kaelen echoed, completely lost. A monster that displayed empathy after committing mass annihilation? It defied every logical category. His mind, trained for the clear-cut battle of Hero versus Demon King, struggled to compute it.
"It doesn't matter what it was," Akari said, her exhaustion finally overwhelming her. She began to sob, the dam breaking. "The children, Kaelen… little Suki… Hana… they're all gone. Everything is gone."
Kaelen pulled her into a hug, his own eyes stinging. He was a Half-Divine, a being touched by a celestial bloodline, standing on the evolutionary precipice between Humanity and Divinity. He possessed strength and speed beyond any normal man, a flicker of pre-cognitive instinct in battle, and a resilience that could shrug off spells that would incinerate others. But in that moment, facing the raw, human grief of his oldest friend, his nascent divinity felt utterly useless. He couldn't turn back time. He couldn't bring back the dead.
"We will rebuild," he promised, his voice thick with emotion. "I will send word to the capital. The Crown will send aid."
But his mind was already racing, the warrior in him taking over. A new, unknown variable. A "slime" of unimaginable power. Was it a servant of the Monster King? A rogue entity? Its actions didn't fit the pattern of the Demon King's forces, which sought corruption and subjugation, not this… clean, terrifying erasure.
As he comforted Akari, a new duty solidified within him. The Hero's party was dealing with the Demon King's main forces on the far-off front lines. That was a war he, the weakest of the seven, had been pulled from. Perhaps his purpose wasn't on the grand stage, but here, in the ashes. He had to find this "slime." He had to understand it. To classify it. And if it proved a threat to what little was left of his world, he would have to face it. His dwarf-forged sword felt heavy on his hip. He was a Half-Divine, a nascent hero. But the green slime had done what his entire party might have struggled with: it had ended a continent-scale threat in a single, silent moment. The thought was as terrifying as the devastation around him.