Episode 1
Darkness swallows my vision.
My body burns like it’s on fire.
I can feel my heart pounding hard enough to hurt.
In stark contrast to a body that’s clearly not behaving normally, my mind stays eerily calm — calm enough that I can watch what’s happening to me from somewhere outside myself.
In front of me, Teresia is screaming, desperate, tears streaming down her face.
It’s been a long time since I’ve seen my childhood friend cry like that.
She used to cry easily, but ever since she was chosen as the saint, she stopped.
Suppressing her emotions to throw herself fully into her duties — admirable, in its way, but it left something complicated in me.
(This is a problem…)
I feel bad for making her cry, but at the same time, seeing her show that kind of raw emotion again after so long — I can’t help but feel a little glad.
Still, I can’t just leave her like this.
I move slowly, reaching out to wipe away her tears —
(…Damn it.)
My hand is covered in pitch-black darkness.
The crimson claws extending from my fingers are sharp as blades.
I look like something out of a monster story — though of course, that doesn’t mean the girl named Yurina actually is a monster.
No.
The girl named Yurina is the demon lord.
A strange way to put it. I’m thinking about myself like I’m someone else.
Probably because I’ve just remembered something.
Awakening as the demon lord must have brought me into contact with the world’s underlying logic.
In any case — I remembered.
(…This place. This is that game’s world.)
A classic RPG where you play as the saint, traveling the world, eventually confronting and battling the demon lord.
The twist: the demon lord is the saint Teresia’s childhood friend.
The demon lord has no idea she’s the demon lord until her awakening.
And demon lord Yurina dies, run through by the saint’s blade at the climax of their battle.
That’s how the saint saves the world — from the player’s perspective, a genuinely bleak story.
The worst part is that remembering all this changes nothing about what I can do now.
The demon lord has to be defeated.
Just by existing, a demon lord empowers monsters across the world.
And the maddening part is that until the demon lord awakens, even the demon lord themselves doesn’t know where they are — yet that influence over monsters persists regardless.
That’s why the saint had to keep purifying the world’s corruption, to draw the demon lord’s awakening out into the open.
That was the journey she’d been on this whole time.
And its endpoint had been standing right beside her, all along.
“Yurina — Yurina! Wake up! Please, I’m begging you…!”
Teresia keeps calling out to me, unwavering.
Black magic bursts from me against my will, taking the shape of blades, lashing out at her.
But she can’t bring herself to strike back — not when the demon lord is me.
In the story, there’s a moment where I regain my senses just long enough to grant her wish, and that’s what lets her steel herself for the fight.
And since I’m a reincarnator, my reason has stayed mostly intact, so I figure I could play along with the original story and call out to her the same way.
But then it occurs to me.
The demon lord — even saying it about myself feels strange — is someone I myself need to defeat.
After all, in some sense I still think of myself as human, as Teresia’s childhood friend.
So I should be the one to fall here, without begging for my life.
And — well, if that’s true, there’s no reason to make Teresia do it, is there?
I don’t want to saddle her with the weight of having killed her childhood friend.
I don’t want to make her carry that.
I glance at the demon sword in my hand.
Looks like my hand still moves fine.
Which means — I can kill myself.
“Teresia.”
“…! Yurina, come back to your senses—”
“Listen, Teresia. I—”
Hearing me speak, her face crumples into something between tears and a smile.
Not knowing how much longer I’ll keep control of my body, I decide to say only what matters most, at the end.
“Teresia. I’m glad I got to go on this journey with you.”
I grip the demon sword backward, point aimed at my own chest.
And before Teresia, who seems to understand exactly what I’m about to do, can reach me —
I drive the blade —
A few weeks after the girl named Yurina chose to end her own life.
“Hm…”
Somehow, I’m alive.
Honestly, since the demon lord’s essence apparently just vanished on its own — incredibly convenient turn of events — I don’t really know what to make of it.
I clearly drove that blade through my own chest meaning to die.
Why am I alive.
But more than that —
“Yurina, you don’t need to do anything anymore. I’ll take care of everything for you, so just rest here, okay?”
Teresia, beaming with the brightest smile imaginable, approaches holding a washcloth.
Her eyes are absolutely not smiling.
“Um, Teresia — what’s that washcloth for…?”
“I’m going to clean every single inch of your body for you.”
Knew it, damn it!