Even in the early hours of the morning, the lights of the Lionheart’s main estate weren’t fully extinguished. The mansion, its gardens, the forest, and all the rest of the estate were guarded by knights. In addition to that, various spells protected the interior of the mansion, so breaking in from outside was close to impossible.
Of course, the people inside the mansion could still move freely. Whether it was late at night or early in the morning, anyone belonging to the main family was allowed to venture anywhere on the grounds of the estate.
Accompanied by Laman, Gerhard had gone to their estate in Gidol, while Cyan and Gilead had yet to return from Ruhr. The Third Division of the Black Lion Knights, which was commanded by Carmen, was conducting nighttime training in the depths of the forest. Since no exceptions were allowed during training, even Ciel, who should currently be wrapped up in a blanket, was somewhere in the forest.
Eugene had decided that today was the perfect time to leave the mansion.
He had decided that he wouldn’t be using the Lionheart’s warp-gate that stood within their forest and would instead use the warp-gate of the capital city of Ceres. Eugene would be using the fake ID that he had used back in Samar on the way to Helmuth, and once entering Helmuth, he would decide what to do next according to the situation.
Eugene had even written a letter for the rest of the Lionhearts, hoping that it would keep them from getting too worried. However, he hadn’t written down where exactly he was going and had just said that he would return after taking a look around the world. After thinking that it might not be enough, Eugene had then added on a few more lines.
[I’m leaving in order to find myself. Please don’t worry too much. I’ll definitely return.]
Eugene had added these lines after some careful consideration. Although he didn’t know how the others might react, he knew how Carmen would respond to that first line.
If someone from the main family snapped and made a fuss about finding Eugene, Carmen would definitely stop them from looking for him. Eugene knew Carmen well enough to be sure of this.
Eugene silently considered this fact.
This definitely wasn’t because they were the same type of people. While Eugene desperately tried to convince himself of this, he placed the carefully-written letter on his desk. All of the items he had prepared for the trip were already inside the Cloak of Darkness, so everything that Eugene needed to take with him was on his body.
After leaving his room, while making his way down the hallway, Eugene ran into his elven maids, Narissa and Lavera.
“Sir Eugene? Where are you going?”
Nina, who was originally Eugene’s personal maid, had become the chief maid in charge of the entire annex, so Lavera and Narissa were currently serving as his personal maids together. While their careers as servants of the Lionheart clan weren’t that long, the serving experience they had accumulated during their past lives as slaves, along with their sincerity and loyalty towards Eugene, worked as additional points in their favor.
In other words, they were a special case. This couldn’t be helped. While Eugene didn’t really care about it, he had become the person with the strongest influence in the main family.
Laman Schulhov, who Eugene had brought back from Nahama, had joined the Knights of the White Lion and was currently serving as Gerhard’s personal escort. It was all thanks to Eugene having gotten tired of Laman following him around shouting, ‘My lord, my lord.’
—I’ll be fine, so just go and escort my father.
Narissa and Lavera had become his personal servants right out of their apprenticeships because Eugene, after seeing how enthusiastic these two were, had said something to Nina in passing.
—Isn’t it enough to graduate them from their apprenticeship if they've learned that much? It will be inconvenient for them to be used by anyone else, so just have them serve me.
In the first place, Nina herself had become Eugene’s personal attendant as soon as she had graduated from her apprenticeship, and she had risen to the rank of the annex’s chamberlain in just a few years. Nina felt that she needed more of an education, but over the past eight years, she had learned to follow Eugene’s orders unquestioningly.
That was how Narissa and Lavera became Eugene’s personal attendants. Currently, the two of them were each walking while carrying a large basket of laundry. The contents of the basket were all Eugene’s training clothes, towels, and innerwear.
“A walk,” Eugene brusquely answered their question.
“If that’s the case, allow me to wait on you,” Narissa quickly responded.
At this, Lavera glanced at Narissa with her lone eye and muttered, “Wouldn’t it be difficult to match Sir Eugene’s stride with your prosthetic leg?”
“E-even with my prosthetic, I can still walk quickly, so it will be fine,” Narissa insisted.
Thud, thud.
As a demonstration, Narissa took a step up and down the stairs with her false leg. Eugene couldn’t understand why these two were arguing like this when he hadn’t even accepted their offer. Also, why would he need an attendant to serve him when he was just going for a walk?
“I’m just going to go by myself. The laundry I left out for you earlier was the last of it, so don’t go into my room while I’m gone,” Eugene instructed.
Narissa nodded, “Yes sir, understood.”
“How would you like to eat your breakfast?” Lavera asked.
Eugene waved her off, “I’ll call you if I’m hungry, so don’t knock on my door in the morning.”
This was because it would be better the later the letter was found.
Leaving Narissa and Lavera behind, Eugene headed out of the mansion. From then on, he didn’t run into anyone else. He had memorized the patrol routes of the knights charged with guarding the mansion. Even if they did cross paths, Eugene suppressed his presence so that he wouldn’t be noticed, and he also used a spell to hide his appearance.
Once he was far away from the mansion, Eugene no longer needed to be so careful with his movements. As he soared up into the night sky, Mer poked her head out from within the cloak. While looking at the Lionheart mansion that was getting farther away by the second, Mer grinned.
“The next time we return here, it’ll be with Lady Sienna, right?” Mer asked.
“As long as things go well, then probably,” Eugene replied.
“Of course, things will go well,” Mer said confidently. “Sir Eugene, if you were on your own, then I couldn’t help but be anxious, but Lady Anise is going with you as well, right?”
On the contrary, wouldn’t that actually make things more likely to go wrong? Eugene was sincerely worried about this possibility. If it were in the past, things might have been different. But currently, it had been revealed that Eugene was the Hero and Anise was the Saint.
Looking at themselves from Hemuth’s point of view, they should be seen as intruders entering the country to someday attempt to slay the Demon Kings, so… Eugene was worried about whether or not they would even be able to enter the country through normal means. For now, he would try to enter with his fake ID, and if that didn’t work, he would have to see about smuggling himself in….
“Sir Eugene, instead of thinking up something stupid, why don’t you just leave it up to Lady Kristina?” Mer suggested.
Eugene repeated her words back to her, “Something stupid? Me?”
“You just thought about smuggling yourself in, didn’t you, Sir Eugene? The Devildom of Helmuth isn’t just some local hole-in-the-wall shop, so do you really think that it’s possible for you to smuggle yourself in?” Mer asked skeptically.
Eugene snorted, “You’ve never even been to Helmuth, so why are you acting like such a know-it-all?”
“I’ve spent most of my life in Akron, and the only other places I’ve been to are the places that I’ve gone with you, Sir Eugene, so of course, I haven’t been to Helmuth. However, I do know that Helmuth is a country that’s impossible to smuggle yourself into,” Mer insisted.
“Do you really think I don’t know that?” Eugene tried to bluff.
“The fact that you’re still thinking about smuggling yourself in despite knowing that proves that you’re coming up with a stupid idea,” Mer said. Delighted by her own clear reasoning, she puffed out her chest.
Annoyed by her triumphant smile, Eugene flicked Mer right in the middle of her forehead.
“Ouchie!” Mer yelped.
Although she had suffered for it, Mer was right. It was impossible to smuggle anything into Helmuth. The Demon King’s Empire was governed by a completely different set of laws compared to those which governed the rest of the kingdoms on this continent.
If one were a citizen of Helmuth, as long as one paid their regular monthly tax in life-force, their livelihood was guaranteed without them having to work even a day for the rest of their life. The only consequence of paying the tax in life-force was that one would have no energy for the rest of the day. Furthermore, if one signed a contract to become an undead worker after one died, one could even become a quasi-nobleman and live a luxurious life.
In this empire where you could lounge around without having to work, the cost of immigrating into the empire was quite expensive, but it didn’t seem like too much when one considered being able to live like that for the rest of their life.
However, there weren’t just one or two people in the world who wanted to enjoy comforts and luxuries without paying the price that they needed to pay. The sorts of people who were even unwilling to accept the offer to be put to work after they were dead would attempt to secretly cross the borders of Helmuth without any assistance from Helmuth’s immigration support service and without purchasing permanent residency.
Such people would surely die.
Helmuth was an empire entirely ruled by the Demon King, so it was unbelievably generous to humans, but it showed no mercy to smugglers or illegal residents.
This was only natural.
Night Demons, like the succubus, could forcibly drain a person’s life-force through their dreams. But that said, Night Demons weren’t the only ones who coveted a human’s life-force. life-force, a human’s vitality, had the power to nourish demonfolks.
Helmuth’s humans didn't have to work because they donated their life-force to the demonfolks of the aristocratic class and the Demon Kings who stood at the very top. Smugglers and illegal immigrants who attempted to receive the same preferential treatment while not providing regular payments of their life-force were killed by hunting packs of demonic beasts without even giving them a chance to defend themselves in court.
“Of course, with your skills, you should be able to outwit the hunting packs of demonic beasts. However, what are you going to do after that? Sir Eugene, you will still be an illegal immigrant, and under Helmuth’s laws, all illegal immigrants are executed unconditionally,” Mer lectured as she clicked her tongue. “Therefore, please don’t think of anything strange and just trust in Lady Kristina. After all, isn't Alcarte Parish, which we’ve planned to use as our route into Helmuth, the place where Lady Kristina originally resided?”
Her reasoning was impossible to refute. As such, Eugene flicked Mer on the forehead once more.
The Alcarte Parish in the Devildom of Helmuth was where the borders of Yuras and Helmuth met. Originally, Kristina had served as the Assistant Bishop of the Alcarte Parish, where she had been in charge of spreading the faith and enlightening the immigrants of Helmuth and the occasional freak demonfolk.
As a place that lay on the border with Yuras, it was possible to enter Helmuth through the Alcarte Parish. They would still have to go through immigration, but Kristina should be able to make things more convenient by relying on old connections.
“The world really has changed a lot,” Eugene sighed.
The Bishop of Alcarte — Eugene frowned as he thought of what to expect from that person.
* * *
Although he could use his fake ID when leaving Kiehl, Eugene couldn’t use it to secretly enter Yuras, as it was sure to be discovered.
The Vatican had been the ones to issue his fake ID, and the immigration inspector was a Bishop who belonged to the Vatican. Since he was fully aware that his fraudulent use of the fake ID card would be discovered, Eugene took a stand close to the inspection checkpoint.
Upon noticing the forgery, the bishop called out to him, “Excuse me…!”
The fake ID was discovered, but ultimately there weren't any issues. When he was dragged into the interrogation room to be questioned about the ID, Eugene subtly released the spell that had been concealing his original appearance, handed them an identity card with the name Eugene Lionheart on it, and showed them the Holy Sword. That was all that Eugene needed to do to solve any problems he might face within the Holy Empire.
He proceeded to make use of a few more warp gates. The place where he had arranged to meet with Kristina was Neran, a city at the northern end of Yuras.
Once they departed from there, they would need to cross several days' worth of plains to arrive at the Alcarte Parish.
“It has been a while,” Kristina said in greeting.
She had already arrived in Neran the day before and had been waiting for Eugene. Thanks to that, Eugene immediately reunited with Kristina upon arriving through Neran’s warp gate.
“It hasn’t really been that long,” Eugene argued.
It had been about a month and a half since they had parted ways at Fort Lehain. It had already been four days since Eugene had secretly left the Lionheart estate in the middle of the night.
Eugene complained, “Although this is only my second time visiting this country, I’ve really come to dislike it. The warp gates are so sparsely distributed between the cities that moving around is so cumbersome and time-consuming—”
Kristina interrupted him, “Lady Anise says there weren’t any warp gates around three hundred years ago, so did you still think it was frustrating back then?”
Eugene grumbled, “Hey, do you really need to ask that? We didn’t even know how convenient warp gates were back then because they didn’t exist three hundred years ago. But now that I’ve become used to warp gates—”
Kristina interjected once more, “Lady Anise says to stop complaining and just shut up?”
“You’re actually Anise, who’s only impersonating Kristina, aren’t you?” Eugene said suspiciously. “Or perhaps you’re Kristina, who’s only pretending to be Anise and telling me to shut up.”
Kristina covered her mouth as she giggled. Then, with a cough to clear her throat, she started leading them away.
“I’ve already been in touch with the priest of this parish,” Kristina said once her giggles had subsided.
“To be honest, I don’t like that we’re relying on the Bishop of Alcarte in the first place,” Eugene confessed.
“Fortunately, the Bishop has promised us her cooperation,” Kristina reported.
Eugene asked suspiciously, “Can she be trusted?”
Kristina nodded, “As far as I can tell, yes, she can; she’s an honest and faithful person.”
There was an unavoidable difference in the common sense of Eugene, Kristina, and Anise.
Eugene and Anise were people from three hundred years ago. Anise did have the experience of having lived in the era of peace that rapidly followed the swearing of the Oath. However, Eugene or Hamel had no such experience. According to Hamel’s common sense, demonfolks were enemies who had to be killed no matter what.
Such an unwavering hatred had only been tempered slightly after he had reincarnated and lived the life of Eugene Lionheart. Though, very slightly. Although he believed black wizards should definitely be killed, Eugene had come to feel that, according to the situation, it should be okay to let them live. But in the case of demonfolks… Eugene honestly wasn’t too sure.
The Queen of the Night Demons, the Blade of Incarceration, and the Rakshasa Princess — these notorious names who had run rampant through the world three hundred years ago definitely needed to be killed.
But what about the other demonfolks? The demonfolks who had been born in a peaceful world and knew nothing about war? Should even those who had never known war nor wished for it be defined as enemies and summarily executed just because they were born as demonfolks?
Eugene didn’t know the answer to that. Nor did he want to seriously consider the question. He just felt that, as long as there was a reason to kill someone, it was fine to kill them. Eugene wasn’t a saint or a sage, so he didn’t have a set moral compass on whether to kill someone.
Eugene voiced his suspicions, “She’s not human, is she?”
Apart from the question of whether or not demonfolks should be killed no matter what, there was another matter that caused Eugene to question his common sense, whether or not demonfolks could have faith? Could they really believe in and worship the God of Light, whose mission was to purify all demonfolks?
Eugene accepted that since the world had changed, there were bound to be differences in what passed for common sense, but let alone accepting it, he couldn’t even understand this.
“...She’s half-human,” Kristina replied with a wry smile.
If two people’s races were different, they usually couldn't have children. But it wasn’t like offspring were never born. Very rarely, two different races could join to create a child. The least common occurrence of this was the half-elf, born between a human and an elf. Besides them, there were a few cases where children were born between demi-humans belonging to different races.
Alcarte Parish was founded for the purpose of converting both the humans and demonfolks of Helmuth. Eileen Flora, who served as the vicar here, was born from a union between a demonfolk and a human, and so was the rarest of all mixed races, a half-human half-demonfolk.
This fact wasn’t widely known to the public. The Bishop of Alcarte always wore a pure white robe that went up to her head and covered her face with a mask. So her parishioners didn’t know what their vicar’s appearance actually looked like.
However, Kristina, who had served as the Assistant Bishop of Alcarte, knew the Bishop’s secret. She was born with the mixed blood of a demonfolk and a human. But because she had such a special bloodline, Bishop Eileen’s faith was all the more sincere, earnest, and faithful.
“It’s only natural for Sir Eugene to be suspicious of her, but Vicar Eileen is the right person for this. I have never once had cause to doubt her faith,” Kristina stated confidently.
[It seems you feel a sense of kinship with her. The more pitiful and terrible your fates were, the more you relied on faith,] Anise said with a smirk.
“As both the Vicar and a Bishop, she is a prominent figure in Alcarte and holds a diplomatically important position. In particular, she helps to maintain a close relationship with the demonfolk nobles of Alcarte,” Kristina defended her.
“A close relationship?” Eugene repeated.
Kristina nodded, “Yes, to the extent where they even come to observe the services officiated by the Vicar.”
So when they didn’t have even a single speck of faith, they still came to watch the church service solely out of affection.
Kristina continued speaking, “While she said that she wouldn’t be able to help us with attempting to forge our identities or smuggling us in, she would be able to provide assistance by helping us get a visa immediately, ignoring the waiting line.”
“A visa?” Eugene said as he blinked, not knowing what that word meant.
Kristina began to explain, “Helmuth is also extremely famous as a tourist destination. To the extent where, if you’re rich, you hope to see Helmuth at least once before you die. Have you heard about Helmuth’s Demonic World[1], Sir Eugene?”
“What is that?” Eugene asked hesitantly.
“It’s a huge amusement park in Helmuth,” Kristina replied. “They say that it’s full of rides that will drive children crazy. Apart from that, Helmuth also has numerous resorts with tourist attractions, so countless people visit Helmuth every day for sightseeing. However, Helmuth strictly manages the number of humans within the empire. They restrict entry to keep the tourists from overflowing so that they can keep things under control.”
To think that a country ruled by the Demon Kings would become a famous tourist destination…. Eugene suddenly realized the gap between his common sense and the present day.
Kristina got to the point, “A visa is the proof of permission to enter that all foreigners must have. We can apply to the immigration office in Helmuth to obtain tourist visas, but… according to the message from the Bishop, there are too many tourists currently visiting the empire, so we would have to wait at least a year.”
Eugene silently processed these facts.
Kristina added, “A tourist visa also needs to be renewed once a month by paying a large amount of money. The citizens of the Helmuth Empire with permanent residency regularly pay their taxes in life-force, but tourists are not allowed to pay in life-force.”
While originally, the Demon Kings already had a wastefully large amount of gold, Eugene had been wondering where the financial power needed to provide welfare for the enormous number of imperial citizens had come from. The tourism business seemed to be making them enough money to break their banks[2].
“However, Bishop Eileen has said that she would be able to lend a hand so that we can obtain a residency visa without any costs. She can bypass the years-long waiting line and get them to us by today,” Kristina informed him.
“Wouldn’t we still be rejected at the immigration screening stage? What if they don’t allow the Hero and the Saint to enter the country?” Eugene asked.
“I was also worried about that fact, but Bishop Eileen has said that won’t be a problem. I don’t know if she did anything to persuade them personally, but…,” Kristina’s words trailed off absentmindedly as she opened the door to a waiting carriage.
The continent’s greatest tourist destination? A Demonic World that drives kids crazy? Resorts?
Was this still the evil empire ruled by the Demon Kings?
“The world has gone insane,” Eugene sighed as he shook his head.
1. The original text uses the English for Demonic, making it an obvious reference to Disney World ☜
2. The original Korean idiom uses ‘to make their guts explode.’ ☜