Well, Paimon's complexion may have gone a bit pale, but that didn't mean the enemy was in any better shape.
Before they could even mount a proper offensive, their merchant fleet had been ransacked. From the Habsburg Republic's perspective, it must have felt like being haunted by a ghost out of nowhere. They had surely become convinced that we harbored a monster of a strategist on our side.
Sorry to say, but it was already too late.
"Instead of a surprise attack, they should have gone for an all-out battle. If they had marched out the entire garrison, mobilized every last knight order and mage corps, and committed to a single decisive engagement, the outcome might have been different."
That was Laura's assessment.
The nearby knight orders had been completely wiped out. The precious mage forces had been mauled as well. Every elite troop type had been reduced to half-strength or worse. Meanwhile, our ogres and mages were still standing strong.
And yet, Heidelberg fortress refused to give up.
They kept organizing special units and striking at every moment we let our guard down. Nearby cities also sent reinforcements in support. But every gap they thought they'd found was, in fact, a mistake Laura had deliberately invited. As the cities dispatched troops as reinforcements and depleted their own garrisons, we turned around and seized five neighboring cities.
Overwhelming.
That was the only way to describe it.
As a last desperate move, the enemy challenged us to a naval battle. Fifteen large galleys in total advanced upriver, fire ships among them. The enemy wasn't stupid either. They had disguised the galleys so that it was impossible to tell which ones were the fire ships.
It was a situation where, if we weren't careful, we might allow a fire ship to get dangerously close. Even now, Laura's judgment was perfectly composed.
"Let us respond calmly. We can tell whether a ship is a fire ship by how deeply it sits in the water. If it is a fire ship, they would have filled the interior with reeds instead of soldiers."
"Mm-hm. Mm-hm."
Sitri nodded her head vigorously. Sitri had, in her own way, made peace with Laura. Since she was never going to understand anyway, just nodding along meant everything was fine.
"I will concentrate the lizardfolk and the elementals on those ships. We deal with the fire ships first, then mop up the rest."
"So basically, sink the shallow ones first. Got it."
On the battlefield, choosing your targets and concentrating your forces was always the right call.
Among the fifteen ships, four sat shallowly in the water. Over a hundred aquatic monsters surged toward those four in a focused assault. The rowers were slaughtered in an instant, and the masts toppled in utter disarray.
Four fire ships, stripped of their sails and oars, tangled together in the middle of the river. They became massive obstructions, blocking the other vessels of the human army from passing through.
"It is done. Issue the order for all troops to fire incendiary arrows at once."
Incendiary arrows split the sky and rained down upon the fire ships. There were even lizardmen who swam directly to the ships with torches in hand and set them ablaze themselves. The fire ships, packed tight with oil-soaked reeds, blazed up magnificently.
The fierce flames slowly spread to the surrounding ships.
"Put out the fire! You idiots—don't jump overboard, I said put out the fire!"
"Sa-save me!"
"Abandon ship and retreat! Retreat!"
Hell had unfolded in the mortal world.
The galleys burned bright. Trapped by the obstructions with no way to maneuver, the enemy fleet simply burned. Our monster legion had encircled both banks of the river and cut down every human soldier who tried to swim to shore.
Among the fire ships was a warship laden with gunpowder. That vessel exploded spectacularly. Seeming far too indignant to drown alone, it dragged three nearby ships down with it. A magnificent suicide pact.
Was there even a need to review the results? We achieved a total victory.
"Those knights taken as prisoners will all be beheaded in front of the city gates."
The heavily armored knights, flailing about after falling into the water, were captured in large numbers. She could have received a handsome ransom in exchange for their release, but Laura executed every last one without a moment's hesitation.
Suspicious, I asked her.
"Laura. Don't tell me you're doing this because you want to collect the knights' heads?"
"...How does the Young Lord see this maiden? This maiden distinguishes rigorously between public duty and personal matters. This is not the Young Lord's Demon Lord's Castle—this is a battlefield on the continent. Would this maiden really impose her hobbies here?"
Her words said one thing, but the way she twirled her hair with her fingers betrayed her—she was almost certainly brimming with thoughts of collecting skulls.
I stared at her with cold, unamused eyes.
"Laura. Are you a pervert by any chance?"
"...To hear the word 'pervert' from none other than the Young Lord himself makes this maiden most, yes, most irritated. Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine the day would come when I'd want to lay a hand on the one I serve as my Young Lord, but in this very moment, I want to hit you. May I?"
Laura's lips quivered with rage.
"Oh? Are you calling me a pervert?"
"Not calling you — stating it as fact. No virgin has ever encountered a pervert to rival her own master, nor shall one ever appear in the annals to come."
"Heavens! If that isn't the most outrageous slander."
I flew into a rage.
"Laura, you're the one who spent nine hours — twenty hours — bedding me, and then went a step further and bedded Barbatos on top of that. Taking partners regardless of gender — your perverse tastes are poised to engulf the entire world!"
"What?! When did I ever willingly spend nine or twenty hours mixing bodies with you? Every bit of it was forced upon me by the Young Lord! You are the supreme pervert among perverts — a man so depraved he could make even the goddess Aphrodite recoil and flee!"
Laura refused to back down, bristling with fury.
"Speaking of which, how many women has the Young Lord bedded in total? There are limits to shamelessness. You adulterous scoundrel!"
"Hmph. The world values quality over quantity. Even if I have lain with two hundred and twenty-five women, every one of them was the opposite sex. But what about you, Laura? You bedded Barbatos — another woman! In terms of sheer perversity, you are far worse!"
We were shouting at each other so loudly that the soldiers could hear every word. Paimon, who happened to be standing nearby, tried to break up the fight, but there was no stopping us once we'd flown off the handle.
"A five-year-old child would laugh upon hearing the Young Lord's logic. If I slept with Lady Barbatos, what about you? Didn't you sleep with Sitri? Sitri is intersex — so between the two of us, the one who bedded an intersex person is far more profoundly perverse!"
"Don't make me laugh, you bottom-loving deviant! I'll pin you down and have my way with you like a dog!"
"Go ahead and try! I'll spread the word far and wide that the Young Lord is a certified pervert!"
We pressed our foreheads together, growling at each other.
"Damn pervert servant!"
"Hopeless stockings fetishist!"
"You'd die happy getting railed by an ass!"
"Oh yeah?! And you're a man whose knees are an erogenous zone! Give me a break!"
"You, you, you, you shameless exhibitionist sex slave — how dare you—!?"
"You'd say that about your perverted master!"
Laura and I had already pushed each other to the absolute limit, so once a fight broke out, basically nobody could stop us. It was clear we'd never reach a resolution at this rate, so we both turned to Paimon at the same time.
"Paimon! In your honest opinion, which one of us is the bigger pervert — Laura, right?"
"Paimon, your Excellency! Subjectively and objectively, isn't my lord the biggest pervert here?"
Paimon furrowed her brow and agonized over it. Even Rodin's *Thinker* had nothing on the sheer anguish etched across her face — though you could probably brush it aside with a light tap of the hip.
"To be completely honest with you… both of you are in a very sorry state, and that sorry state appears to be getting worse by the day. In a word, it's serious."
Laura and I pointed at each other simultaneously.
"So who's the bigger pervert?"
"So which one of us is the worse pervert?"
Paimon let out a long sigh.
"…Your respective orientations are a little different, but you're dead even as far as I can tell. And those 'orientations' are both tilted very, very far in the worst possible direction. I really can't call a winner on either side. If anything, you might call it a match made in heaven."
I was genuinely shaken to my core.
Until now, I had been absolutely certain that even if I was a pervert, I wasn't *Laura-level* perverted. Was she seriously saying that I was in the same league as a woman who could cum two hundred times a day without breaking a sweat?
"I had no idea I was *that* much of a pervert…"
"Why is my lord so shocked? This young lady is the one facing a once-in-a-lifetime identity crisis! Oh, Goddess — was this young lady truly so debased as to be considered my lord's equal…?"
We both wilted into glum, dejected silence. All motivation to go on living had drained from our bodies.
Paimon, who had achieved a devastating one-two punch completely by accident, grew flustered and tried to rally our spirits.
"Um… For what it's worth, I don't really understand *why* you're both so depressed… Did I do something wrong? There's no way what I said was the problem, right? Please tell me it wasn't. I want to believe it wasn't."
Despite having won a resounding victory, our own command center had sunk into the depths of defeat.
A short while later, Sitri returned. She had just finished drowning every non-knight prisoner in the river. Since common prisoners would only eat up supplies if you kept them alive, the command center had unanimously voted in favor of a mass execution.
"Huh? Why's the mood like this?"
Sitri blinked and asked. Since Laura and I were riding an ultra-fast roller coaster toward depression, Paimon had no choice but to explain the whole situation.
"Hmm."
Sitri listened to the entire explanation. She still had a look on her face like she didn't quite get it.
"Hey, Dantalion. Laura. Have you ever had sex with a minotaur?"
It was a completely out-of-nowhere question. The two of us naturally shook our heads from side to side.
"Ever had a group orgy with a bunch of goblins?"
"…No, we haven't."
"That's pretty much a given, isn't it."
Sitri furrowed her brows like a mathematician confronting a puzzle of the ages.
"Underwater sex with lizardfolk? Getting drilled by an incubus while you screw a succubus? Having your esophagus feel like it's about to burst from being stuffed with a troll's member? Being toyed with by snakefolk who squeeze and knead you all the way to your stomach?"
When we answered no to every single question, Sitri tilted her head with an even more bewildered expression.
"So then why are you two 'perverts'? You haven't done anything."
"…."
"Hehe. I'll deliver the verdict, since I've done it all. You're both perfectly normal catches! There's no need to fight at all. There, make up and shake hands!"
Sitri grinned from ear to ear as she grabbed our hands and pressed them together.
Laura and I stared at Sitri in utter disbelief. The monster was right there. Did she slightly misread the meaning of our gazes? Sitri gave a cute little smile.
"Oh, right. If you ever get curious about perverted stuff, just tell me anytime! I'll kindly teach you step by step! I really like you both, Dantalion and Laura. Hehe."
We had to shake our heads with every ounce of strength we had.
Above the blue sky stretches an endless universe. The universe is so vast and deep that an ordinary person who rashly set out to travel through it would quite likely die in an instant.
Laura and I finally understood the truth—like rice, the more ripe one is, the more one bows.
Heidelberg Fortress surrendered precisely eleven months later.
Over there, they first sent an envoy, pleading with us to spare the civilians at least. The official commander of our forces was Sitri, but in reality, it was Paimon, so the decision fell to him.
"We accept the terms of surrender."
Today was the day the city gates were promised to open. While Laura held down the command center, we had taken a leisurely boat ride along the river to make our way to Heidelberg.