Chapter 34
To summarize the long article that continued below, it was like this:
Traces of demon summoning had been discovered in an abandoned church in Ort Village. Amidst voices of distrust toward the Holy Knights due to a lack of proper investigation, a demon appeared in a rural village about 500km from the capital.
The demon that appeared devoured 308 out of 348 village residents and took away 39 humans who had pledged loyalty to him. Eden was the sole survivor of this disaster.
Perhaps because she was the only survivor, most of the article was written focusing on Eden.
Her family had their limbs severed alive and their heads torn off and eaten by the demon. Eden confronted the demon with a kitchen knife, but the sheer difference in physical strength ultimately left her unable to save her parents. She could only watch them die.
As Eden wept tears of blood, the demon placed a curse on her. It was a heinous curse that made her body rot away while still alive.
“This is an article I brought to inform you of objective facts, and besides this, I have subjective information I collected through other incubi.”
“What’s that?”
Andre approached Bezel as if he had been waiting and crouched down in front of him.
“It was really strange that he killed all the others or made them into followers, but only spared that woman named Eden. I was curious why, so I diligently went around investigating.”
A cold hand touched Bezel’s thigh. Andre stroked the length of his firm thigh and rubbed his face against Bezel’s knee.
“When humans face a high-ranking demon like Lord Marbas, they usually freeze up or run away. Aren’t there many humans who hide and pretend not to know even when their parents are dying right in front of them?”
“That’s true. Since she wielded a knife and put up a fight, Eden was an exception there.”
“Yes. That’s right. And what’s more, even after her parents died, she held her ground and didn’t flee. Even when Lord Marbas gave her a chance, saying he would spare her if she ran away now.”
“Hm? Marbas did that?”
The Marbas that Bezel knew wasn’t merciful enough to make such an offer to a human. If anything, he would have snatched up a fleeing human and shoved them in his mouth.
As if expecting Bezel to question it, Andre continued.
“He probably wanted to make her feel at ease and then hunt her as she fled. Isn’t that more interesting than eating a human who’s just standing still?”
“Adding unnecessary trouble, that’s just like Marbas.”
“Yes. He’s completely opposite to the refined Lord Beelzebub.”
The ranks among demons are determined from birth. Though the hierarchy can change since it’s not determined by strength alone, the inherent value that an entity is born with doesn’t change. Unlike Bezel, who was born with a rank that couldn’t be called high and steadily grew by devouring those above him, Marbas was Hell’s second-in-command from the moment he came into the world. As such, Beelzebub had always been serving Marbas as a superior entity.
However, whether he respected Marbas was another matter. Marbas’s tastes and personality were nothing like Beelzebub’s. Since he was a superior entity, he couldn’t say anything, but it wasn’t just once or twice that he heard news and thought ‘Why does he live like that?’
He was also negligent in his duties in Hell. It was routine for him to dump all his assigned work on subordinates and be absent doing useless things like tormenting lower-ranking demons.
Fortunately, their jurisdictions didn’t overlap, so there weren’t many occasions to be stressed by him. The term “serving” was just attached because that was his official position. It wasn’t like he followed Marbas around fawning like Andre did to him.
If it were the gap between a high-ranking demon and a low-ranking demon, it might be different. Among high-ranking demons, even with differences in power, there was generally an atmosphere of mutual respect. Though it was closer to neglect than respect.
“The really important part starts now. A human who didn’t run away even when given the chance. That unusual sight seems to have caught Lord Marbas’s interest. You said that woman received Lord Marbas’s curse, right?”
When Bezel nodded without answering, Andre grinned.
“That curse is a curse, but also not a curse.”
“What do you mean?”
“In other words, it’s a kind of bait to make that woman Eden come to him.”
That part was something Bezel had already suspected. Marbas was hoping for Eden to come to him burning with desire for revenge. Either to devour her, or to open a gate, or like Bezel, to achieve both.
But what Andre said next was completely beyond his expectations.
“He must have taken quite a liking to that woman. Judging by how he put her up as a candidate for his bride.”
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