"Cut off the enemies' heads and pile them together."
"There may be survivors hiding among the corpses. Jab them through properly to make sure."
The Treviso Plains.
Behind the maritime city of Venice, a vast plain stretched out in every direction. The Demon Lord's Army officers and soldiers ran about hither and thither, carrying out orders in a haphazard fashion. Their commander, Marbas, watched them with a faint, distant gaze from beneath half-lidded eyes.
Sitri approached from the right.
"It's all handled."
"Sitri, is it? Good work."
"Good work, my foot. It's our soldiers who suffered."
Sitri undid her helmet strap with a somewhat feeble hand. She tossed the helmet aside without a care, and an aide standing nearby caught it deftly. Attendants hurried over and presented Sitri with a damp towel and a glass of water.
"Ah, it's fine. I can manage on my own."
When one of the attendants tried to wipe her down, Sitri lightly waved him off. The attendants retreated with apologetic steps. Sitri drained the glass in one gulp, then rubbed her face vigorously with the towel.
"What are the losses?"
"The Anatolia Empire's country bumpkin brats weren't a problem. Most of them were green recruits who didn't even know how to fight. There wasn't even the satisfaction of a proper cut, let alone time to enjoy myself. Honestly, I should've figured as much from the moment they started blabbering about 'Isaav' or whatever. Right?"
Sitri tossed the towel behind her. As the battlefield's sand and dust came away, a beautiful face was revealed. Marbas thought she had grown even more beautiful than before.
More beautiful than the old days when she always walked around grinning.
That she was more beautiful now, broken in one place and wearing that blank expression.
"The real problem was the Habsburg Republic lot. They actually knew how to fight. If Bretagne hadn't sent reinforcements, things could've turned out badly. As it stands, three thousand of my soldiers ended up wounded."
"And the enemy?"
"I don't know what you mean, Uncle Marbas."
Sitri smiled faintly.
"Have we ever allowed an enemy anything other than total annihilation?"
Just then, a scream rang out from beyond the army camp's tent. Marbas and Sitri turned their gaze. Under the blazing midday sun, a man was being held by both arms by soldiers. Judging by his rank, he wore ornate armor.
"He appears to be a general from Anatolia."
"To be precise, the supreme commander."
Sitri extended an empty water glass to the side.
A servant hurried over and poured ice-chilled water. Sitri tilted the glass, eyes fixed on the enemy general. The man, sporting a magnificently grown beard, continued bellowing at the top of his lungs.
"I haven't quite picked up Anatolian myself. What's he shouting about?"
"How would I know something you don't, Uncle? Did you forget I'm an idiot already?"
"Hm. Unfortunately, neither of us can understand what that man is saying."
The adjutant drew an axe. The soldiers gripped the Anatolian general even tighter. The general stared in disbelief at the soldiers around him, then at Sitri, who was leisurely gulping down ice water under the tent.
"Indeed."
Sitri said impassively.
"What a shame."
With a whoosh, the axe cleaved through the air.
A head hit the ground. The man who had served as the supreme commander and chancellor of the Anatolia Empire died with his face twisted into an ugly mess until the very end. Soldiers dragged out the next person to be executed. Screams erupted, and the sound of blades slicing through wind rang out at regular intervals.
"Killing off enemy generals is going to take a while."
"They did field an army of one hundred and fifty thousand, after all."
Tens of thousands of corpses lay strewn across the plains.
The Demonkin army, led by Marbas, encircled Venice as planned. The Anatolia Empire, wary of the Demonkin forces, holed up inside the city for the time being. But once the Habsburg Republic's reinforcements arrived at their rear, the imperial army boldly decided to launch a pincer attack.
No one could criticize it as reckless.
The Anatolia Empire's army numbered a staggering 130,000. Add to that the Habsburg Republic's 30,000, and the total came to 160,000—a grand host poised to strike the enemy from both sides.
The Demon Lord's army, by contrast, consisted of roughly 60,000 at most.
To surround Venice, they had been forced into a long, thin encirclement. Their numbers were few, and their lines were stretched impossibly thin. Naturally, the Anatolia Empire judged that now was the perfect opportunity.
Up until the midway point of the battle, the imperial army held the advantage. No matter how powerful the Demon Lord's forces were—supposedly capable of handling a threefold disparity in numbers—they struggled against enemies pressing in from two directions. The Demon Lord's lines seemed on the verge of collapse at any moment.
—that is, if the black-and-white lily banner symbolizing Bretagne had not appeared on the far side of the plains.
Seven thousand strong, the Bretagne knights shattered the imperial army's flank in one devastating charge. And just like that, the Demon Lord's forces, which had been sitting in a docile defensive posture, unleashed a furious offensive. The battle devolved into chaos in the blink of an eye.
Every formation on the field crumbled. The more the battle devolved into a brutal, indiscriminate melee, the more it favored the Demon Lord's army—because the Demon Lords could issue commands directly to their Demonkin, one by one.
Allies and enemies became hopelessly intermingled, turning the field into a living hell. Unlike the Demon Lord's forces, the Anatolia Empire could not relay orders with any precision. After one hour, then two, the battle had transformed into something entirely different.
The massacre began.
The army of ten thousand led by Sitri was the most brutal. Bunching together around Sitri, they turned the battlefield into a sea of blood. Humans begging for mercy, humans turning their backs to flee—Sitri showed no quarter, cutting down every last one without hesitation.
The human forces lost their will to fight in the face of slaughter bordering on madness.
The Demon Lord's war horns blared across the entire plain. Warhorses' hooves and wolves' claws tore through the innards of the 160,000-strong army. Of all those soldiers, only fifty thousand managed to escape and flee back to Venice.
In a single battle, one hundred thousand had perished.
"Ahh, I'm totally exhausted~."
Gamigin walked in under the tent. Her golden hair stuck out in wild directions. She had spent the entire battle riding a wyvern, darting this way and that across the sky, and her hair had dried into a thoroughly unsightly state. She watched with evident pleasure as attendants fussed over her, wiping her down.
"I sent pursuit squads after every last one of those fleeing rats, so there shouldn't be any problems. Well, the ones who already made it to Venice are beyond our reach from here."
"Good work."
"Of course, of course. I worked incredibly hard. Ugh, I knew it—I'm just not cut out for war. Rolling around lazily in bed, now *that's* what life is about."
Shortly after, Vassago entered the tent, bringing all the commander-class Demon Lords together in one place.
The battle had left them all visibly exhausted. Like people who had just finished something momentous, the Demon Lords sat in their chairs, staring blankly outside. Out there, the generals of the human army continued to be executed.
The four Demon Lords sat in a row, watching the spectacle.
"How many are left?"
"Hmm. Apparently just about a hundred more to cut down and it's done."
"How gruesome."
Vassago furrowed his brow.
"Tell the executioners to hurry up and finish them off. We'll be up all night at this rate."
"Supposedly they're already killing them as fast as they can. Five of them taking turns, going one at a time."
"Can't those five just grab one each and take them out simultaneously?"
"You know, you're actually becoming less dignified with age."
Marbas said to Vassago with a wry smile.
Vassago nervously gulped down his wine.
"Dignity, my foot. Nothing sillier than worrying about etiquette in wartime. What happened to that bastard Dantalion?"
"I'm afraid I have bad news for you — he won his battle too."
"Damn it all. Once again proving there's no God in this world."
Vassago spat thin saliva onto the ground. Gamigin cackled.
"Don't bother. If you're hoping for Dantalion to die, you'd be wiser to go hang yourself first. Who's going to stop him now? Huh? I'll say this unofficially, but I'm on Dantalion's side, okay?"
"That's why women who start dating late are the scarier ones."
Vassago muttered curses under his breath.
"For the first time in a thousand years she gets herself a boyfriend and suddenly she can't see straight, handing over her liver and gallbladder and everything else. Pathetic. I want to erase the part of my past where I ever thought, even for a moment, that you were a wise woman."
"Heh. I had no idea Lord Vassago thought so highly of me. And I'm sure Lord Vassago, being ever so clever, wouldn't have come up short against Dantalion?"
"......"
"Dantalion really is something, though. They sent the Bretagne kids here, they sent all of us here too, and somehow he still comes out on top by himself."
"Hmph."
Vassago gulped down wine with a sour expression on his face.
A languid atmosphere hung in the air. It was a bizarre sight. Tens of thousands of corpses blanketed the earth in every direction, and executions continued without pause right before their eyes, yet a sense of weariness had settled over the Demon Lords who were the very architects of the slaughter.
"Still, only the ones who were meant to survive did survive."
Vassago murmured.
"There's no Demon Lord here who'd be foolish enough to stir up trouble for nothing, right?"
"Mm, probably?"
Gamigin yawned.
"Only the people who seem like they've got long lifelines are left. Now that it's come to this, I'm telling you—I always had a feeling Paimon and Barbatos wouldn't make it to old age."
"......"
Sitri shot Gamigin a sideways glare. Gamigin chuckled and brought both hands together in front of him.
"Sorry, sorry. I'm just being honest. How should I put it—Barbatos and Paimon were intense types, you know? They lived short and bold, and that was fine, but they weren't the kind to live long and thin like me. Something along those lines~."
"......"
Sitri turned his head away.
"Once this war is over, there won't be any countries left to pick fights with us, so it'll be peaceful for a while. Let's all get along, the ones who survived this far. If you start scheming and plotting behind people's backs for no reason, you know some scary Demon Lord out there is going to get furious."
"Don't worry. I don't even have the energy to fight anymore."
Vassago let out a sigh.
What about the Neutral Faction? Are you thinking of leading the Demonkin army?
"I'm content as things are. In truth, I'm a man who loves peace."
"Sure you are."
The war was over.
There were still minor loose ends to tie up, but those would be better described as cleanup work than actual warfare. The four Demon Lords standing at the pinnacle of the empire watched the execution, sensing the peace that was about to descend.
Peace.
*So in the end, all that blood was spilled for peace?*
Vassago narrowed his eyes.
*It really was all for nothing. What even remains of the Demonkin army?*
But Vassago quickly stopped himself from thinking any further. He had survived. That was enough. With Bael, Agares, Barbatos, and Paimon all gone, things had grown rather anticlimactic, but a Demonkin army like this wasn't so bad either.
*Just managing to hold onto my own life is already more than enough courtesy to existence itself.*
The adjutant swung the axe with full force.
— Whoosh!
The axe sent blood spraying through the air as it severed yet another head.
The severed head rolled away. It tumbled along as if it might stop at any moment but never quite did, making an awkward lap across the ground before finally losing momentum and coming to an abrupt halt. A cold silence lingered over it.
The severed face was twisted into an ugly grimace.