The New Gate

“What about you, what happened in that country?”

After a while, Shin asked this question to Filma and Sety.

He hadn’t heard about what had happened to them yet.

“Pretty much what I said during the Mind Chat the other day. We were teleported to a normal coast, but the country we visited to understand where we were was under demons’ attack, we were really surprised.”

Sety noticed the demons’ presence first and secretly traced it back to the mastermind.

The most unexpected thing was that the demon was hiding in the throne room. Based on the number of presences, they thought it had taken control of the king and his close retainers, but it was making them kill each other instead.

Sety stopped the spell at the last moment, but the king and his subordinates thought they were under attack and surrounded them. When Sety and Filma showed that they had incapacitated their opponents without wounding them, the king and his subordinates finally agreed to listen to them.

Most of the people in the throne room were affected by mental manipulation status effects like 【Confusion】 and 【Charm】, so after removing the debuffs they finally realized what was going on.

“I don’t know what would have happened without Sety. I can take care of myself, but I’m not good at healing others.”

“I’m specialized in offense though.”

Sety was a support character specialized in buffing allies and offensive magic. Having high INT also boosted the effects of healing magic so, thanks to her high MP as a Mage, she was one of the best healers in their party.

When Shin formed a support character party he put Filma, Girard, and Shibaid in front and Sety as rear support. Shin and Schnee attacked, supported, or healed depending on the enemy type.

Filma did not attack the enemy to attract their attention, like Shibaid, nor did she attack them at high speed to confuse them like Girard. She was a unique kind of fighter who maintained a steady offensive revolving around HP-draining attacks.

Because of this, she was skilled in healing herself, but not others.

If Filma had been with Shibaid instead, they might not have been able to fully heal the victims of mental manipulating status ailments.

“After that, well, we healed every single person with a status ailment and checked suspicious places, people, and items. Sety was a savior, let me tell you.”

Magic spells could be adjusted to work in various ways. Filma, being a combat specialist, mostly watched as Sety took center stage.

“You cut down the demons though Filma.”

The country Filma and Sety were teleported to — called Acuracan — was not attacked by powerful demons of the Duke or Marquis class, but several lower-class demons, such as Viscounts and Barons.

For a normal person they would be fearsome enemies, but for someone on Filma’s level, they were just small fry. The moment she found one, they were cleaved in two and pulverized.

Eventually the demons started acting more stealthily, so finding them took more work than defeating them. That was the reason why, among all the members of the party, they took the longest time to solve their situation.

“I heard they were pleading for you to stay though. Did you leave the country without saying anything?”

“We told them that there were no more demons in the country, as far as we could tell. Sety really did her best, so unless they hid extremely well, I don’t think they’ll have to fear demons for a while. If we failed to find any, it means that they were beyond our abilities to find.”

“We took down the captain, or rather, a demon in charge of commanding the others, pretty early, so they weren’t cooperating well. I think that if there are any survivors, it’s demons which ran away before we could find them.”

Sety added that they made sure to defeat any demons which fled, so there shouldn’t be any survivors, as she straightened her hat which had been moved by the wind.

Sety and Filma cooperated with Acuracan’s troops and hunted down the demons by forming a circle which first encompassed the entire country, then became smaller and smaller.

Excluding the case that any demons fled from the encirclement when it was at its widest, they should have successfully hunted them all down. Since they defeated the demon in charge of command early, they could take down the demons running on their own one by one.

“We helped a bit with the wreckage too. Then they’ll have to take care of things themselves. If people like us stay too long, they’ll rely on us for everything.”

Filma and Sety removed the wreckage too large for normal people to handle on their own. Filma’s final words were based on her experiences during the confusion after the Dusk of Majesty which she had personally witnessed along with situations she had heard about during that time.

As they didn’t intend to reside in that country for a long time, they only helped to a certain extent.

Shin thought the same way too. If they were going to stay just a short while, they should limit themselves to only simple volunteering.

“What were the demons planning to do in that country, anyway? They targeted the royal family…right?”

“Doesn’t look like it was some big plan or anything. There was only one demon in charge of command, and it was just one rank higher than the others, so things just automatically developed in that direction. I suppose they just obeyed their primordial instincts, nature, or whatever, to attack people?”

Filma and Sety didn’t think that the demons exhibited any particular conduct, such as looking for something specific or acting in special ways against a particular species.

The demons that infiltrated Bayreuth acted in a similar way, so their hypothesis was probably correct.

In the game era, demons of inferior rank did not make intricate plans, or at least Shin never heard of such things happening.

“If you find a demon, kill it. Search and destroy, as they say. They’re never going to stop spawning anyway.”

Sety was not mistaken: demons were the enemies of humanity, after all. The possibility of making peace with them never existed in the first place.

The reason for their birth also resided within humanity, but there was nothing Shin’s party could do about it.