The last of the demons—the very one who, just a minute ago, had been pontificating with aristocratic haughtiness about humans being nothing but weeds—was now pitifully clawing at the blood-soaked earth. His robe, embroidered with silver threads—a facade of nobility draped over a predatory essence—was torn and stained with mud.
"I asked a question," the youth reminded him. His voice was even, devoid of the theatrical flair with which he had entered the battle. Now, it held only the cold will of a predator playing with its food. "Where is your boss? Where are the ones who can offer me a real fight, and not this circus sideshow with the fireworks?"
The demon wheezed. His eyes darted around, trying to find an escape, but his instincts screamed that there was none. The human before him radiated no mana. None at all. To demonic perception, Izayoi was a "blank space," a hole in the fabric of the universe. But that hole had just crushed an elite squad like insects.
"The Lord..." the demon rasped, the corner of his mouth twitching in an attempt to fake a sycophantic smile. "The Great Lord resides in End... in the far north... But you will never make it..."
"End. North," Izayoi nodded, accepting the intel. "Concise. Anyone closer?"
"The Generals..." the demon trembled. "Qual... The Sage of Decay... He is nearby... in the forests..."
The demon's eyes narrowed for a fraction of a second. A lie. Or a half-truth. Demons didn't give up their own out of fear; they gave them up to lure the enemy into a trap. This "Qual" was clearly not someone you wanted to meet unprepared.
"Qual, huh?" Izayoi tilted his head slightly. "Sounds like someone with hygiene issues. But thanks for the lead."
The grip on the throat tightened slightly.
"Wait..." the demon's voice became soft, vibrating with feigned sincerity. "Please, have mercy. We had no choice. The Lord forces us... I have a family too. A little daughter waiting for her father. Would you deprive a child of a parent?"
The knights standing in the distance flinched. Hans, the captain of the guard, gritted his teeth. These words—"family," "daughter"—struck at the most vulnerable points of the human soul.
But Izayoi didn't even blink. He tilted his head slightly, examining the creature before him like a biologist examining a bacterium under a microscope.
"Family?" he asked. "Curious. And what do you feel when you think of your daughter?"
"Love..." the demon answered quickly. Too quickly. "I feel... warmth? A desire to protect?"
He spoke the words as if shuffling through definition cards from a dictionary. In his eyes, behind the vertical pupils, there was emptiness. An absolute, cosmic vacuum. There was no fear for a "daughter," no love, not even an understanding of what he was saying. He was simply making sounds that, according to his experience, stopped the blade of a human sword.
Izayoi sighed. With disappointment and disgust.
"You're lying," he stated. "Not because you want to deceive. But because you don't even understand the meaning of the words you're using. To you, 'father' and 'daughter' are just a combination of sounds, a method to access a victim's pity."
The grip on the throat tightened further.
"You aren't evil. You're just predators that learned to mimic the voices of your prey to lure them closer. It's evolution, I get it. But..." Izayoi brought his face closer to the demon, and contempt flared in his violet eyes. "...It's still so human.."
He unclenched his fingers.
The demon, sensing freedom, immediately snarled. His hand darted to his belt for a dagger cursed with black magic. The reflex of a cornered rat—to stab in the back.
"Die, ape!"
BAM.
Izayoi's movement was short, almost lazy. The back of his hand met the creature's temple.
The demon's head jerked at an unnatural angle. The light in its eyes went out before it could even realize its mistake. The monster's body, stripped of the mana holding it together, began to disintegrate rapidly. Like burnt paper, flesh turned into black flakes of ash, which were immediately caught by the wind and carried away.
Izayoi wiped his hand on his trousers with a grimace, shaking off invisible dust.
"Words are a tool of reason," he threw into the void. "And you use them like a lockpick. A pathetic sight."
He turned toward the square.
The silence was dense. The villagers—those who had survived—looked at him not as a savior, but as a natural disaster that had, by a lucky chance, befallen their enemies.
Three knights, wounded and barely standing, stepped forward. The old warrior, the one who had spoken earlier, struggled to sheathe his sword. His hands were shaking, but his gaze was firm. He removed his helmet, revealing a gray head and a face crisscrossed with scars.
"We..." his voice cracked, and he coughed up blood. "We are grateful to you, traveler. Whoever you may be."
Izayoi shoved his hands into his pockets and walked past them, heading toward the destroyed well.
"Don't bother," he threw over his shoulder. "I'm no hero and no savior. I just can't stand it when the strong pick on the weak."
He looked around. The scene was depressing. Half the houses had turned into smoking ruins. Bodies of the fallen lay mixed with rubble. The crying of children, previously stifled by fear, now broke through, tearing the silence apart.
The old knight limped after him.
"I am the Captain of the Border Guard, Hans," he introduced himself, trying to maintain dignity despite his armor being pierced in two places. "This is the village of Taul. Or what's left of it. May I know the name of our savior?"
"Izayoi," the youth answered briefly. He walked up to a collapse where a fallen beam of a large house had blocked the street, cutting off the path to the surviving barns. "Just Izayoi."
"Master Izayoi... Are you some kind of special mage?" Hans asked cautiously, glancing warily at the youth's hands. "I have never seen anyone dispel fire magic with a simple wave of a hand. Even the King's court sorcerers use counter-spells and staves."
"Mage? No. I'm more of a..." he thought for a second, picking a word the locals would understand, "...power type."
He stopped in front of the rubble. The fallen beam of a massive communal house blocked the street, with stone masonry piled on top of it. Muffled, terrified sobs came from beneath the debris.
"Hey, anyone alive in there?" he shouted into the pile of rocks.
"Th-there..." a thin female voice came from the crowd. "There's a cellar... The Elder and the children hid there... But the entrance is buried..."
Hans shook his head doomfully.
"We'll need horses and ropes to move this. But the horses were killed by the demons. I fear by the time we clear the rubble... the air down there will run out."
Izayoi sighed. Loudly, theatrically.
"Why does everything always have to be so ass-backwards?" he grumbled, rolling up the sleeves of his blazer. "Horses, ropes... You guys love complicating simple things."
He braced his shoulder against the stone masonry. To an observer, it looked like a regular teenager deciding to lean against a wall.
Hans wanted to stop him, to say it was useless, that the stone weighed tons, but the words stuck in his throat.
The earth beneath Izayoi's feet creaked pitifully.
CR-R-R-UNCH!
The sound of granite grinding against granite cut through the air, making everyone cover their ears. The huge pile of debris—the beam, part of the roof, chunks of the wall—shuddered. And began to rise.
It defied common sense. It was unnatural. The youth's muscles didn't even bulge, he didn't turn red from exertion. He simply straightened up, holding the weight of a small house on his shoulders as if it were an empty cardboard box.
"Well?" he barked, turning his head to the frozen people. "Are you just going to stare all day?"
The stupor broke. People rushed to the opened passage. Women, men, even the wounded knights scrambled to clear the smaller stones, pulling terrified, dust-coughing children out of the dark cellar.
When the last child was saved, Izayoi stepped aside and dropped his burden with a crash. The ground shook so hard that roof tiles rained down from a neighboring building.
He brushed off his shoulder as if flicking away dandruff.
"That's that," he said, adjusting his collar. "Show's over."
By evening, the village had recovered somewhat. The dead were carried away, the wounded bandaged with whatever was available. Izayoi sat by a hastily lit fire on the edge of the square. He had been brought a bowl of some stew and a piece of extremely stale bread—all the survivors could find. The food was simple, bland, but he ate without complaint. Calories were calories.
Hans sat down next to him. The old knight looked a little better—his wounds were dressed, and he had drunk some herbal decoction. He stared into the fire for a long time, choosing his words.
"You're not from around here, kid," it wasn't a question, but a statement. Hans warmed his hands by the fire. "Your clothes, your speech... Your abnormal strength."
"I'm from far away," Izayoi answered evasively, biting into the bread. "Let's just say, from a country not on your maps."
"I figured that much," the knight chuckled, watching the youth demolish the hard bread. "You don't look like a mage—you have no staff, no grimoire. And you don't look like a warrior—no sword, no calluses from a hilt. You fight... differently. With brute force that a human shouldn't possess. Honestly, if I hadn't seen you defend us, I would have decided I was facing a demon in human skin. Humans can't do that. Even those who dedicated their lives to the sword."
"The less you know, the sounder you sleep, old man."
"Fair enough," Hans nodded. He was silent for a moment, then added more quietly, "You asked about the Demon Lord. Why? Do you want to join the Hero?"
Izayoi froze with his spoon halfway to his mouth.
"Hero?" he repeated. "You have an official hero here?"
"They say the King summoned brave souls," Hans shrugged. "But those are all rumors. Many tried, and many have already perished."
"No, I'm not looking for company," he answered aloud. "I'm just traveling. Studying the local sights. By the way, where are we geographically?"
Hans drew a curved line on the ground with a twig.
"We are here, on the border of the Central and Northern lands. Rigel Canyon is a day's journey west. If you go north, you'll enter Count Granat's territory. It's restless there right now. Demons are amassing forces. They say one of the Demon Lord's henchmen, Aura, is active."
"Aura..." Izayoi rolled the name on his tongue. "Sounds like a girl's name. Hope she's cuter than the freaks that were here."
Hans looked at him with a mix of horror and admiration.
"You're joking about a Sage of Destruction? Aura the Guillotine... She chops off her enemies' heads and makes them her immortal servants. That is not a woman you seek a meeting with."
Izayoi smirked, and in the reflection of the fire, his eyes flashed with dangerous violet flame.
"Immortal servants? Severed heads?" he stretched, cracking his back. "Well now, that's getting interesting. And here I was afraid all the local villains only knew how to throw fireballs."
He stood up and looked north, to where the stars were drowning in the blackness of the night.
"Thanks for dinner and the info, Hans."
"You're leaving?" the knight worried, seeing the youth rise. "It's night out. The walls are destroyed, but it's still better than the open forest. Stay. We... we'll find a place for you."
Izayoi looked around the square. Women with children huddled close to the fires, men gripped pitchforks, flinching at every rustle from the thicket. The village was defenseless. If he left now, any pack of wolves or a couple of surviving demons would stage a massacre here.
He scratched the back of his head, feigning thoughtfulness.
"Stay, you say?" he shifted his gaze to the dark, damp forest. "Well, the prospect of sleeping hugging tree roots doesn't exactly appeal to me, to be honest."
He adjusted his headphones and sat back down on the log.
"You talked me into it, Pops. I'll stay till morning. But deal is, breakfast is on you. And find me a spot far away from the snorers, I value silence."
Hans exhaled in relief, and for the first time that evening, a faint but genuine smile appeared on his face.
"It's a deal, kid."