The very night Barbatos had crossed the threshold of death.
At a point where she should have been resting absolute, the second trial was imposed.
"I will carve inscriptions onto your heart and organs."
Barbatos slowly lifted her eyelids. She realized she had been unconscious on the floor all night. It had been a chamber prepared for Dantalion, so a luxurious carpet was laid out beneath her. And yet her entire body—her organs, down to her very bones—was freezing cold.
"Why aren't you answering?"
Even though Ivar knew full well what state Barbatos was in, he pressed on regardless.
"Could it be you've finally decided to abandon the trial? That would be for the best. I had expected you to fail midway anyway. The fact that you managed to disrupt your own mana through sheer willpower is impressive enough in its own right. Then, let us consider this matter a wash—"
"It's fine."
Barbatos rose to her feet.
Like the legs of a horse burdened with far too heavy a load, Barbatos's arms trembled. She lifted her face and looked up at Ivar Lodbrok. The eyes of the sickly—dark circles beneath them so deep they had sunken into black hollows. Her complexion was so pale she looked as though she might collapse at any moment.
"The next trial. I can do it."
Deep within the depths of her pupils, a fierce will burned bright.
Ivar let out a quiet scoff.
"Allow me to say it once more. I do not trust your sincerity. You say you will seek out Lord Dantalion, that meeting him will be enough to satisfy you... You speak convincingly enough, but at the end of the day, you are nothing more than a Demon Lord consumed by ambition. Should the opportunity arise, you would throw away your repentance without a second thought and seize power once again."
"No. I swear—"
"Then prove it with actions, not words."
Ivar produced a grimoire from within his robes.
Ivar opened the grimoire and showed it to her. Though Barbatos had become a waste as a mage, her knowledge remained fully intact in her mind. She recognized the shape of the magic circle at a glance.
"Sealing and oath magic..."
Yes. It is a tool to force the contractor to keep their promise. It should be a welcome spell for you in some sense, right?
As expected, it was the same method the Demon Lord Paimon had been subjected to.
Paimon had made a secret pact with Gracia, the Saint of the human army. The promise was that the Mountain Faction and the human forces would unite to attack Dantalion. Paimon broke that promise at the last moment. As a consequence, she faced the crisis of death……
'Am I going to follow the exact same path as that wench Paimon? No, the order is just reversed.'
Barbatos felt a laugh almost spilling out.
She was the woman she least wanted to resemble. No matter how she lived, she must not live like that woman. For thousands of years, she had opposed her, vowing never to become like her.
But she had loved the same man. She had fallen in love with him. And similarly, she would be killed by that man. Should she admire this as a strange fate? Or curse it as a revolting coincidence?
"I plan to bind your ambitions with an oath."
"Yes. I also think it is a wise and correct measure."
"Just yesterday, you were boasting about being the immortal Barbatos, and now you're nodding along and fawning over a mere handmaiden? So this is the caliber of a Demon Lord after all. It's utterly repulsive."
"……."
Barbatos bowed her head.
Suffering humiliation was nothing. Thinking of Paimon only sharpened Barbatos's will. They said the half-human, half-demon Lapis Lazuli was also dead. If that were true, she was practically the only one left who could realistically save Dantalion……
"I pursue safety. Although the Circle of Mana has collapsed, you remain a threatening figure. The risk must be eradicated at the root. Therefore."
Ivar brought a longsword that had been mounted on the wall of the tent.
"Before placing the binding magic, I will destroy your heart."
"……."
"If the Circle is the source of magic, then the heart is the source of magical power. As magical power fades, a Demon Lord's dominion weakens. I will eliminate your heart until your dominion is nearly gone."
Barbatos shut her eyes tightly.
Yesterday, everything she was as a mage had been erased. Today, everything she was as a Demon Lord would be stripped away.
What the other party meant was that they would keep destroying her heart until no magical power remained in Barbatos. When the body is damaged, the magical power within naturally enters a recovery process. To make such recovery impossible, they would destroy the heart again, and again, and again……
It might take dozens of times. It might take hundreds.
"Understood."
The 'procedure' was carried out immediately.
It was a procedure composed of simple motions. Ivar raised the longsword and thrust it into Barbatos. When Barbatos's heart was destroyed, magical power surged within her body to mend the wound however it could. Waiting until the heart had fully regenerated, Ivar brought the longsword down once more.
At the agony of living flesh being sliced open and her heart torn asunder, Barbatos screamed endlessly.
"Graaah! Hagh, aah, aaahhh!"
Thrust, regenerate. Thrust, regenerate. This was repeated for an entire day.
No matter that a Demon Lord possessed an immortal body, the heart was special. Before, when Bael had shattered Barbatos's heart, she had lost her strength and collapsed. A single destruction—she could endure that. Two consecutive destructions—perhaps she could endure that as well.
But three times.
Four times, five times, six times, without pause twelve times over—this was an act that stripped Barbatos of her magical power to the very last drop.
At first, it took fifteen minutes for the heart to regenerate. Quite impressive, given Barbatos's utterly ravaged body. The second time the heart was destroyed and regenerated, it took another fifteen minutes. Fifteen minutes again the third time. But starting from the fourth, the speed dropped sharply—it took thirty minutes.
Sixty minutes for the fifth. Ninety for the sixth. The seventh slowed further with a heavy sluggishness to a hundred and ten minutes. A hundred and twenty for the eighth. Then the speed dropped terrifyingly once more, and the ninth took two hundred and forty minutes.
The time taken for the final, twelfth—
Was a full six hours.
"…ngh… aah… ah…"
Barbatos trembled from the overwhelming agony.
It was torture, plain and simple.
The magical power remaining in her body had been scraped to the bottom. Like a rag wrung out dozens of times, not a single drop of magical power remained in Barbatos. Even the muscles once strengthened by magical power had gone limp. Having lost all magic, all mana, Barbatos's physical strength had fallen to that of nothing more than an ordinary little girl.
"How does it feel? To have fallen from a position where you commanded the world to the status of a helpless weakling in the blink of an eye."
In total, the work had taken twenty-three hours. Ivar Lodbrok showed not a trace of fatigue.
"That is an ordinary Demonkin. Everyone starts from there. You, who were born blessed with mana from the start, could never have understood. You were born strong, and it was only natural that you reigned as the strong."
Ivar seized Barbatos's hair and wrenched her head up by force. Barbatos groaned.
"You took what was not natural and treated it as natural. Meeting with Dantalion was something that should never have been permitted. But you must be thinking this—after enduring this much suffering, shouldn't that be enough?"
Ivar Lodbrok lowered his head until his face was right in front of Barbatos's nose.
"Isn't it enough now? Someone of my standing has gone so far as to bring suffering upon himself—surely that should be enough by now. Something that was never permitted, but since I've gone to such lengths, shouldn't it naturally be permitted now?"
Ivar whispered.
"—How arrogant."
The Vampire girl's fangs gleamed with murderous intent.
"If it meant I could meet Dantalion even one more time, I would gladly endure any amount of pain. Even if my heart were destroyed and regenerated for over a hundred years, I would not hesitate if it was for Dantalion. Being treated as the sole exception—that must feel perfectly natural to you."
Ivar sneered and slapped Barbatos's cheeks back and forth.
"You knew that Dantalion wished to meet no one, yet you still refused to give up on a reunion. That is your sin. It's arrogance. To you, yourself is more precious than Dantalion……"
Slap, slap— Ivar's strikes did not stop. Barbatos's cheeks flushed red.
"But I will let you go."
"Thank you……thank you……"
"No. There is no reason to thank me. I simply want you to realize your own arrogance for yourself. Go on—try being cast into the world in an ordinary body. Try being unable to order anyone around, having to solve everything with nothing but your own strength."
"……."
"Everyone is like that."
Ivar hurled Barbatos aside by her hair.
After that, various restrictive seals were inscribed upon Barbatos. Measures were taken so that the moment even a trickle of mana accumulated in her body, she would feel the agony of her internal organs being torn apart. So that Barbatos could not naturally regenerate her mana.
She was trapped in a state of near-total mana depletion for eternity.
If Barbatos revealed or was exposed as Barbatos to anyone other than Dantalion, her heart would explode. In her current state of having lost all her mana, having her heart destroyed once more would undoubtedly mean death.
A meticulous prison.
Unbreakable shackles were clamped upon her.
— Thud.
It was still the dark of night.
Ivar Lodbrok slipped away from the crowd unnoticed. She unwrapped the bundle in the forest and casually dumped Barbatos onto the ground.
"……."
Barbatos tumbled across the earth. She no longer had the strength to even make a sound. All she could do was watch as her skin was torn open against the stones. Injuries that would have healed in an instant in the old days now oozed thick trails of blood.
Ivar Lodbrok turned her back without a moment's hesitation. Over the course of two days, she had perfectly stored Barbatos's appearance as a Memoria artifact. For the public execution ceremony, all she had to do was put Barbatos's doll on display. After all, the condemned was covered in mana-sealing restraints—there was no way to tell whether she was the Demon Lord or a mere doll.
"Oh, right."
Before turning away, Ivar looked down at Barbatos one last time.
"I'm not a demon who is cruel through and through. I do admire your will in some respects. Consider this a small gesture of that admiration—I'll give you one tiny clue. His Majesty Dantalion is in the 'west.'"
"……."
"I hope you'll find a single grain of sand in that desert."
And with that, Ivar Lodbrok departed.
The information that Dantalion was staying on the western side of the continent was, of course, a lie.
Ivar had built a cabin in the snowy reaches of the Kingdom of Moscow. Since His Majesty Dantalion had already moved there, he would likely remain in the north for some time. That meant, to be precise, he was closer to the northeast of the continent—on the exact opposite side from the west.
Ivar Lodbrok had toyed with the Demon Lord Barbatos right to the very end.
"……."
A long time passed.
More than an hour after Ivar left, Barbatos finally stirred. She tried to push herself up off the ground with her hands. But it didn't work. Her knees buckled and she collapsed. Her skin scraped against the rough earth once more.
Barbatos planted her hands on the ground again, like a baby taking its first steps, but with a stubbornness far beyond that of any infant. This time, though her back was bent, she planted both feet on the earth.
"……Just a little more. Wait for me. You idiot."
Barbatos took a single step forward.
Her knees gave out and she collapsed.
Barbatos rose and took another step forward.
"We'll meet… soon. Yes. Soon…"
And so she advanced.
Just as she had when she slew the last Dragon Lord.
Just as she had when she led the Crescent Alliance Army into battle.
Just as her immortal name had always been, across three thousand years.
"I really am going to hit you… hard."
Barbatos was smiling.