All right, ripping the bandaid off… I"m dropping Maou Saikon. Frankly, it"s just not going where I thought it would, and I"m getting pretty bored. Mainly, I like the interplay between Galtau, Laetia, and Angelica as a family, but the author seems intent on forcing only the demon lord and the hero together and leaving everyone else out.
Anyway, I"ll be finishing the current arc, which ends with chapter 27, then washing my hands of it. I have another series already picked out, so a.s.suming someone else doesn"t start translating it before I"m done with MS, you"ll see what it is when I start posting it! Sorry for the people who want to keep reading this series!
Chapter 24 - The Stalker Demon Lord, Full of Parental Love
I could feel the burning flames of anger rising up from my body.
That was how little I trusted this Jaunis character. He felt just like a wannabe playboy. Perhaps he used to belong to some thieves" guild somewhere, but after they got taken out he ran away, hid his origins, then registered at the adventurers guild, or something like that I"m sure.
Well, his past doesn"t actually matter. The real problem is now. I wouldn"t be giving my daughter to a punk like this. If that ever happened, Laetia would be devastated. And anything that makes Laetia sad would meet the full force of the demon lord"s wrath! Just try and steal Angelica"s maidenhood. You think you"ll die an easy death? I"ll pull out your entrails and use them to hang you up a tree!
Somehow, I felt like I was thinking something really fitting for a demon lord for the first time in a long while.
"Huh… I got gooseb.u.mps all over for some reason just now… whyzat?"
Not good. I let my emotions overflow. I guess the thief could detect that on some level.
"It is you, Jaunis, so you probably did something to get on another adventurer"s nerves, hm? I certainly think about murdering you at least five times a day."
The fighter Zenkay smiled sunnily as he said this. Even the way he spoke was so girly… it was getting harder and harder to tell if he was really a boy or girl.
"Um, isn"t thinking of killing someone five times a day pretty abnormal? Isn"t that more than the number of times I even get in trouble?"
"As for me, my previously established record was nine times in a single day," Selene interjected.
"That"s about the same for me."
"Selenie and Angelie, aren"t you being pretty mean? Or actually, I"m the only one who gets bullied, y"know? Y"all are makin" me feel like I"m just leeching off the party…"
This thief Jaunis, it looked as though he was already an isolated ent.i.ty within the party… Or rather, without me lifting a finger, the party already seemed poised to dispose of him…
No no, I can"t let my guard down. Maybe he was the type of person who normally acted silly, but when the chips were down he became super cool or something. Like when someone who"s usually violent inadvertently does a good deed, like suddenly taking in a stray puppy, it can trick people into believing that they"re a nice person. It was possible that was exactly this guy"s angle. For men who only think with their lower halves, they"re oddly clever when planning out these kinds of schemes. I couldn"t rest easy just yet.
"All right, let"s head to the caverns. We don"t know much about this place other than it"s considered to be a fairly difficult dungeon. Even if there"s no more demon lord to fight, we"re still the hero party. We can"t let our skills get rusty."
"But if the monsters in these caverns are supposed to be strong, why isn"t it more well-known? I hadn"t heard of it before either," Zenkay wondered.
"The answer is simple. Allow me to inform you." The mage Selene pulled out a book of some kind. "These are records from seven hundred years ago, found written in the demonic tongue on some stone monuments. They are translated as thus: "These caverns are home to powerful monsters, but there are very few items to be found. It is pointless to journey there.""
So it"s basically a c.r.a.p dungeon!
"Huuuh~, so going there will just make our stamina wilt… By the way, talking about things wilting—"
"You despicable man, say any more and I"ll curse you to death," the priestess Nahalin interrupted.
Well, I could understand what the thief was trying to say. Or more like, because he"s a thief, if there wasn"t going to be any treasure, he probably didn"t want to go at all…
"Don"t worry about it. Just think of it like a challenge. In order to not sully the honor of a hero, we need to work harder!"
Ooh, Angelica, that was a pretty good line there. I was so moved I started clapping. Ah! I"m giving myself away!
"Huh? Did someone just start clapping?"
They all looked at each other in confusion. Yep, none of you are the culprit. It was me, after all.
"Wow, I"m starting to feel creeped out… Well, let"s get it together and blast through the caverns!"
Angelica led the hero party to the cavern that no one seemed to know the name of. There was some conversation along the way, but it mainly consisted of the thief Jaunis saying something idiotic and someone else venomously shutting him down; that seemed to be this party"s main dynamic.
"Hey, y"know, there"s this thing called the "suspension bridge effect," yeah? So like, I"s just thinkin", what if we leveled up in some forested mountain with lotsa bridges, then maybe some cutie chick would—"
"Jaunis, just give that up. You"re more likely to get thrown off a bridge instead."
"Shoudja really be sayin" that? Aren"tcha like the hero "n stuff…?"
It was like this the entire way.
Aah, it wasn"t so much that he was outright hated, this man Jaunis was simply the type of person that was easy to scorn. If that weren"t the case, the party"s atmosphere would be a lot more frigid. Even when the person being bullied doesn"t like it, the bullying itself would look the same on the surface, but there are some people out there who deliberately want this for themselves. Jaunis was probably that kind of person.
Well, if Angelica"s party had been full of suspicious characters, I would have been completely shocked as her stepfather, so at least I was spared from that. However, whether someone had romantic feelings for Jaunis was a completely separate matter. In a party with such a high percentage of girls like this one, it wouldn"t be odd if he were aiming to woo one of them; in fact, it would be completely normal for that to be the case.
I read this in a certain biology book, but in extreme situations of life or death, humans may temporarily experience increased s.e.xual desire. It was an instinctual response to leave behind offspring, apparently. I had also heard that among adventurers, there were a lot of men with a weakness for women, and I couldn"t just write that off as idle gossip.
Of course, if they both sought a serious relationship, then I wouldn"t just mechanically oppose it out of hand. For humans, love was another part of growing up. The search for someone to value more than oneself is the reason humankind is social, as they say.
However, I would absolutely never allow Angelica fall prey to mindless carnal l.u.s.t. She was still young and had almost no romantic experience, so I was deathly afraid that she"d be deceived by some ne"er-do-well. I needed to be able to give appropriate advice to her, as a parent to a teenager.
These were the topics stewing in my head as I tailed them while they arrived at the caverns.
— — Chapter 25