Arlosse snorted.

“Now’s the right time?” he said, but his thoughts were busy with everything else that the young human warrior had said.

A great human Emperor?

The mention of another authority figure spurred Arlosse’s mind. This place, the entirety of the ten Floors he was supposed to go through, was called Bahathraden, the Compound Demesne of Fallen Authorities. Did it mean that the nature of each Floor would revolve around an authoritative figure? A King, a Queen, an Emperor, a Lord, a Prince and whatnot?

That seemed to be the theme.

But this Triayt the Unbecoming was long dead. Did that mean Arlosse didn’t have to interact with the authority in focus within the Floor? Was he, perhaps, meant to grapple with the ideals left behind by Triayt? The story the young warrior had shared so far, was livid with Triayt’s ideals. The bastard had actually informed the demons about this relic, the Last Shard, which he had hidden away to ‘deliver the world’. What did that even mean?

But then…

‘I’m a demon. Where am I supposed to stand exactly?’ Arlosse thought.

He was dragged out of his thoughts by the eternally confused look on the young human warrior’s face. He was probably still suspicious about Arlosse really being clueless about what was going on, and the Incarnate preferred it that way, though he could see that this probably wasn’t going to last for very long.

He poked the young man’s throat with a finger.

“Continue. How did you all figure now was the right time?”

The young man massaged his neck and then spoke.

“The Verdance revealed the location of the Last Shard through one of our Priests and we readied our armies immediately.”

“Wait? The Verdance? What’s that?”

The young man gaped and the suspicious look on his face grew more pronounced.

“How can you not know the Verdance? Don’t your kind run away from their magnificence like the dogs?” he said with a small, mocking smile.

Arlosse scowled and had been about to threaten the young man with the shrinking of the Fickle Viper around his neck when he thought back to the brilliant staves the Clerics had been holding. What had they called the light that burst from them again?

“Does it have to do with the Abundant Radiance?” Arlosse asked.

Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.

The young man gaped with an even deeper look of confusion on his face.

“Are you… are you sure you are a demon?” he asked.

“You know. I’m getting hungry. I think I’ll take a bite off your arm. You’re not going to be needing it anymore anyway.”

“Alright! Alright!” the young man shuddered and tried to draw back only for his neck to kiss the Fickle Viper and bleed. “The Verdance is the divine, merciful being who guides us. They are a brilliant deity of light… and your worst enemy.”

“I see,” Arlosse said.

A cold feeling ran through his stomach. In his previous life, there was no evidence of deities. He had even shunned the heretics who made sacrifices to imaginary gods.

Here, they were real.

Feeling uneasy, Arlosse changed the subject.

“If only your people – humans – knew the location of the Last Shard, how did the demons catch wind of it? How are you fighting over this right now?”

“Because there was a spy for the demons among us, someone who managed to get into the inner circle of undisclosed knowledge and informed the demons!” the young man said with a great, furious huff. “Thankfully, we captured the son of a lump of dung and made him confess what he told your people! He had shared the location of the Last Shard and the route we were going to use to reach it without drawing the demons’ attention.”

Arlosse narrowed his eyes.

An informant?

“If that’s the case, the demons should have reached the Last Shard by now. Why is there even a battle, or one of this scale at least?” he asked.

The young man donned a grin.

“Because we have an informant of our own, and he’s still undiscovered! Your Generals must have already realised! He gave us detailed information about the path you were going to use and so we struck first,” he said.

Arlosse shook his head.

So that’s how it was.

Arlosse was more intrigued than baffled, though, which wasn’t the reaction the young warrior had expected him to show.

“Still,” the Incarnate said, rubbing his chin. “I can’t imagine a slow army was the best choice to use to approach the location of the Last Shard. There’s second battlefield somewhere out there, isn’t there?”

The young warrior turned a little stiff and nodded a short while later.

Both the humans and demons must have sent quicker, smaller squads to go on ahead while the rest of the army followed.

Arlosse frowned.

Speaking of the armies though…

If the humans knew how the demons were going to respond with the information they had been given, it was strange to him that they mobilised a whole army to meet that of the demons. Ideally, the priority must have been to get the Last Shard before the demons and put no more effort into nothing else. But, perhaps the humans’ informant was a little late in giving them the news, meaning their response was a little late still.

Yet even with that, why?

Was it to stall the demon army, giving their advance forces a better chance?

Were the humans just itching to go to war with the demons that much, to use the surprise attack as a chance to get rid of their forces?

Maybe the demons were planning to do the same after they acquired the Last Shard.

Arlosse didn’t know which it was, but it didn’t seem as though either of the two forces’ advance groups had found the Last Shard yet.

He looked at the young human warrior. He was looking back intently.

Arlosse wished he could say he saw himself in the young man, but he didn’t. He saw something else though.

“What’s your name?” he asked.

“Why… why do you want to know?”

“Don’t make me ask again.”

The young man frowned.

“Castor. Castor Von Hide,” he said.

“Right, Castor. You come from a good family, don’t you? That’s why you’re so informed about ‘undisclosed information’, right?”

Castor’s face turned red hot with might have been embarrassment, fury or both.

“What about it? I’m not soft. I was able to heavily injure even a…” he suddenly stopped and simmered down like cooled water.

“Injure what?” Arlosse said with a brow raised.

At that moment, the white horse whinnied. Arlosse turned and saw the horse giving beckoning him with its gaze. It then pointed with its snout at the wound on its chest.

“Right,” Arlosse said. He was supposed to heal the damn thing.

With the context he had now, he supposed the reason the horse saved him from being blown to bits by its master was so he could heal it as he had said he would. It seemed that him speaking in the human tongue, saving the horse and also its master, and earned him that much in trust.

It wasn’t loyalty, but it counted for something. That was what Arlosse thought at least.

“Stay here… Castor,” Arlosse said, but kept the Fickle Viper threatening to clench fatally around his neck.

He had taken steps towards the white horse when he felt a hot breeze on his chest. It was bare. His tunic had received a blast of some kind of fire earlier and gotten burnt.

‘I need a change of clothes,’ Arlosse thought and he looked around at the wide assortments of fancy and otherwise armour strewn about with the many corpses.