Chapter 6: So Long as You're Innocent
Miona received a message to return. Arzoch was in an unusually jovial mood as he greeted her.
“I promised I’d call you back for the good parts, right?”
Miona followed Arzoch back into the room with the large mirror. “What were you doing while I was gone?”
To her surprise, he answered. “I was solving an age-old problem. I tried to summon people to the demon realm some eons ago. At the time, I failed miserably.”
“Why?”
“Put simply, it’s much more difficult to target someone in the land of humans than it is for a summoning ritual to target someone in our realm.”
Something wasn’t adding up to Miona. “But haven’t you been summoning people to the other side of that mirror ever since you got back?”
“Yes. There’s a big difference between summoning someone to our realm and summoning them to the virtual world opposite a mirror.”
“Virtual?” Miona looked down at the floor and noticed an intricate magic circle painted directly on the red carpet, although she couldn’t tell what type of liquid had been used.
“Essentially, much less energy is needed to materialize the human. As a result, the effort required to target them is also much reduced.”
“I see. I don’t get it at all.”
Arzoch snorted. “That’s fine, I don’t really want you to get it anyway. I sent you away so you wouldn’t unnecessarily learn how to do what comes next, lest you be tempted to make a big mistake later. I need not burden you like that.”
“What’s next?”
“I’ll show you the result of all those experiments. By repeatedly summoning humans to the other side of that mirror, I improved my ability to select targets in the human lands by leaps and bounds. Now, I shouldn’t even need the mirror anymore.”
“I wanna see!”
Arzoch nodded and stepped over to the head of the magic circle. He gestured for Miona to keep back a few paces. “If I’m successful, a particularly vile human summoner will appear.”
The summoning ritual took much longer than the one humans typically used to summon demons. The magic circle was orders of magnitude more detailed, and the list of keywords was nearly endless, Miona thought. Once the incantation was finally complete, the magic circle lit up.
A human would have covered their eyes in response to the brightness, but Arzoch and Miona didn’t need to. An old man wearing priestly robes poofed into existence near the ceiling and then fell to the floor, possibly shattering a few bones in the process.
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“Woops.” Arzoch didn’t seem terribly broken up about it.
“GAH!” In contrast, the old man screamed bloody murder. Initially, he seemed too distracted by his unexpected fall and injury to notice his surroundings, but as his eyes looked around and pleaded for help from anyone near him, he realized something was horribly wrong. “W–Where am I!?”
Arzoch answered him politely. “Welcome. I believe you refer to this as the demon realm.”
“What! Impossible!” The old man’s eyes darted around as he searched for clues as to what was going on. His eyes settled on the magic circle.
“Here,” Arzoch offered. “Let me help you. You seem injured after all.” He took one step towards the outer ring.
“St–Stay back, demon!” He narrowed his eyes at the painted line in the floor separating his circular space from where the demon stood. “The circle! You can’t cross the circle!” he reassured himself, quite loudly.
“Ah…” Arzoch gently pressed his palm forward, stopping his hand just as it made contact with the imaginary barrier that formed the outside of the circle. “So I can’t come in there and harm you…”
“Exactly! You’ve failed in your devious plot, whatever it is! Now send me back! I’ll make no deals with you!”
“Huh!” Miona shouted angrily. “Why did you bother summoning him if you can’t even go inside the circle!?”
Arzoch turned to look at Miona, then turned back to the summoner. His serious face suddenly cracking, he laughed hysterically. Both Miona and the summoner were startled by the sudden shift in personality.
“D–Demon, have you lost your mind?”
Arzoch held up a hand towards the summoner as he controlled his laughter and settled his breathing. “I’m sorry, I… I just… I found that so unbelievably funny.”
The summoner shifted his position to ease his pain a bit as he addressed Arzoch again. “I suppose being able to laugh at yourself is a healthy quality. Now–“
“I wasn’t laughing at myself,” Arzoch explained. “I can forgive my friend over there who is not a summoner for not realizing this.”
“Not realizing what?” the summoner asked cautiously.
Arzoch answered the summoner’s question with a question. “When you summon demons back at home, what stops you from entering the circle?”
“Hm? Nothing. The circle keeps the demon in. Everyone knows this…”
Arzoch didn’t respond but nodded slowly, waiting for the implications of the summoner’s words to sink in.
“Keeps the demon in…” the man repeated to himself.
Arzoch looked at Miona again, who had a hand to her chin as she tried to reason out what was going on. Then, her face lighted up at about the same time as the summoner overcame his preconceived notions and realized the implications of his current situation.
“You mean…”
“I think you understand now, no?” said Arzoch.
The man’s eyes widened as he succumbed to his dread.
“Don’t worry, I’m a fair demon. So long as you haven’t done anything to harm my kind, I see no reason for me to antagonize you.”
“But—“ Miona tried to complain.
“You haven’t abused my kin before, right?”
“I…” The summoner was hesitant to answer the question.
“Excellent, there’s no reason for us to have an adversarial relationship then. As an apology for injuring you due to my imperfect summoning, allow me to heal you.” Arzoch stepped into the circle unhindered and crouched down over the human. “I’ve only ever been asked to heal a human once before, so I’m a little rusty. Bear with me.”
Over the next few agonizing minutes, the man was healed, although it was the most excruciating experience of his life. He suspected that the demon was only pretending to be bad at this.
“Isn’t that better? I can’t have you injured if I’m going to parade you in front of my compeers.” Arzoch lifted the old man up by his collar, forcing him to stand. He placed a hand behind the man’s back and pushed him forward.
Clearly overpowered, the man simply walked as he was told. When he reached the edge of the magic circle, he stopped with a thud, as though walking into a wall, blood trickling from his nose.
Arzoch apologized. “Oops, sorry, I’m still new at this. Silly me.” He healed the man, although once again, the cure seemed worse than the disease. Arzoch canceled the protections of the magic circle, allowing the old man to depart.