Demon King's Perspective "Uuu. *Sniff!* *Hic!*"
"Fwehehehe!"
Fermina, hunched over and blubbering messily, and Shiro, facing the wrong direction and letting out an eerie laugh.
Chaos.
How did things end up like this?
It all started—yes—with me swiping some expensive booze from
I'd suggested having a pajama party with Shiro, dragged Fermina along too, and before I knew it, we'd started a little drinking gathering.
Yeah.
I want to have a serious talk with myself about why I thought giving Shiro alcohol was anything other than suicide.
It's Dustin's fault for hoarding such good stuff.
There was also a monitoring angle—I wanted to keep Fermina from doing anything rash.
A smart girl like her should be able to grasp just how unfavorable the proposal Shiro had put to the God Word Religion was for the Demon race.
And based on their past dealings and the existence of the system, she should also have figured out that Shiro wasn't on the Demon race's side.
Shiro was only with the Demon faction to use them, and the moment they lost their usefulness, Shiro would dump them without a second thought. Fermina should have realized this much.
That assessment was half right, half wrong.
Shiro was indeed using the Demon race, but at this point, there was no intention of discarding them.
If there were, the traitorous Second Division Commander would still be alive—after all.
But Fermina couldn't know that far.
So if she judged Shiro to be a threat to the Demon race, she might bare her fangs.
Despite having zero chance of winning.
I'd had Fermina's background looked into.
Shiro probably felt like she'd picked up a stray, but this girl was of high birth and high ability.
Born into a noble house.
She was the former fiancé of
Since childhood, she'd been drilled relentlessly with the duty of serving the declining Demon race, and she'd lived her life according to that creed—a thoroughbred aristocrat.
If it meant securing the future of the Demon race, she possessed the ruthlessness to eliminate anything that threatened it without hesitation.
That was precisely why she'd seen Sophia's charm-spreading at the academy as dangerous and tried to force her removal.
Well, sadly, the overwhelming gap in their abilities meant she hadn't even been worth noticing.
What worried me was how Fermina would react to the latest proposal after hearing it.
This proposal was of no benefit to the Demon race.
If you were thinking about rebuilding the Demon race after the system's collapse, you wouldn't want to hand over the lost technology in the elf village to the Human race, and returning a fortress you'd paid a tremendous price in lives to capture at practically no cost was unacceptable from a defensive standpoint.
Fermina would want to stop it at all costs.
And then there was the whole Sophia incident on top of that. What if she flew into a rage and attacked Shiro?
The old Demon bloodlines that worshipped power were, despite being sharp-minded, the short-tempered brawn-over-brain type.
As a test, I'd given her some alcohol while keeping an eye on her, but I never expected she'd be a crier.
"Uuuh. What am I supposed to do? What do you want me to do? What did I even do?"
She'd been like this ever since draining her first glass at the toast.
Behind her slumped figure, I could practically see dark, ominous shadows swirling.
Yeah.
It seemed she'd been through the wringer under Shiro, learning the ways of scheming and manipulation.
On top of that, she knew Shiro's power firsthand, so she was trapped in a dead end—she wanted to do something about it but couldn't.
And now, fueled by booze, she was rambling about all of this right in front of the person in question.
She was pretty far gone.
As for the cause of all this—just a moment ago, Shiro had pulled some kind of object out of what appeared to be a pocket dimension, an object that absolutely could not be broadcast on daytime television without heavy censoring, and popped it into her mouth. *Crunch, crunch.* Yeah, that thing she was munching on.
Every survival instinct I had was sounding the alarm at full volume, telling me to absolutely not touch Shiro right now.
I was a little curious about what exactly she was eating, but giving in to that curiosity was asking for trouble.
If I lost that bet, my life could be over.
Despite drinking what should have been expensive, fine wine, I couldn't taste a thing!
On one side, Fermina was sinking into the floor with enough force to fuse with it; on the other, Shiro had become what was arguably the most dangerous creature in the current world.
Something was wrong.
I'd imagined pajama parties as being more... fun and giggly.
How did it come to this?
And would I live to see tomorrow morning's sunrise?
Pope: "My alcohol..."