-- Previous Chapter

    “A-Anissina.  I want to take my fingers out of this already.”

    “Not until the weaving is finished.”

    On the other side of Lord von Voltaire’s hands, a small loom has been installed. The yellow warp that has been strung up is being woven through with yellow string.  It’s currently in knitting mode, but with just a change of a head, it can quickly be turned to fabric mode.  It’s a complicated pattern, but it’s somehow being made with the mysterious inner-workings of the machine.

    “Cut-cut the power!  Just stop Mr. Fast-Knitter for a moment!”

    “How lazy.  This is why people say that demon men have become weak lately.”

    She’s the one who’s been saying that.  Lord von Voltaire’s childhood friend and knitting teacher, the woman who has written in her diary ten thousand times that she will devote her life to the advancement of The Great Demon Kingdom, the Mad Magicalist, has put her hobby to a practical use in researching magic to make the lives of demons all the more affluent via daily experiments like these.

    At first glance, she seems to be a petite, slender and perhaps a slightly strong-willed beauty, but as one of The Great Demon Kingdom’s Three Great Witches, her power is on par with Lady Celi.

    “Shit… maybe The Great Demon Kingdom’s Three Great Nightmares…”

    “Did you say something?”

    Taking out the finished product from Mr. Fast-Knitter, she examines the fabric closely.  The knit and consistency is perfect, but it seems to be lacking in refinement.

    “Hm, as expected, if there’s no feeling of having passed through a person’s hands, it just doesn’t have that transient feel.  It follows that this…

    “… You’re going to say it’s a failure, right?”

    “Oh, you guessed it.”

    Of course.  It’s been close to 150 years that they’ve been going through this same thing.  Gwendal collapsed on the desk with a mutter.  Why does she keep making these unnecessary machines?  But still, that meat grinder was awesome.  It was a masterpiece in every meaning of the word.

    “What are you complaining about, Gwendal!?  It’s because you just knit white pigs and bears and stuff without even trying to make something epic that you can only just barely make something like this.  Passion and a fighting spirit is the deciding factor in knitting.  You need more discipline!”

    What he wishes above all is to never be seen like this.  In actuality, he’s only convincing himself that no one knows.

    Everyone knows.

    *.*.*.*.*

    Package tours are where the company takes care of everything and are thus super easy.  From transportation tickets to accommodation reservations, the company arranges everything.  Sometimes, even the souvenirs are included.  On two-hour specials on TV, there’s always talk about someone getting murdered on one of these vacations, but in reality they’re not that dangerous.  If there was one drawback, it was that you might get stuck riding with annoying tourists that you can’t get away from for the whole day.

    Kind of like now.

    Putting our elbows on the railing, we faced the coast that had long disappeared over the horizon.

    The four of us.

    “… Why are their four of us?”

    Our original reservation was for two men.

    Because he would have definitely objected, I left a note for my overprotective tutor in the writing I had just learned saying that ‘I’m going out for a little rehab.’  But that was no good.  First of all, he wouldn’t understand what rehab was. (1)  So, I thought I’d write ‘I’m leaving the castle,’ but I couldn’t remember how to spell ‘castle.’  In the end, I figured I’d at least let him know I was coming back. With that, the note became as so:

    ‘I’m going out for half a month.’ (2)

    … Was that too vague?  No, he’d be able to figure it out.  Now I just hope that I got the sentence structure right…

    Our destination is a temporarily neutral land so there’s no problem if we’re recognized as demons.  But even so, black hair and eyes stand out too much so I’ve got on a brief disguise:  round sunglasses that you would only find on a villain in a video game and a pink knit hat that’s very fitting for this cold weather.  Combined with this cane (Windpipe No. 1), I look like a suspicious old man.

    Finished with my preparations, I rolled my huge trunk to the designated meeting spot.  Waiting there in light clothing was the second son, seasoned traveler.  But…

    “You’re late, Yuuri!”

    “… huh?”

    Also standing there was the third son of the three brothers that look nothing alike.  If he kept his mouth shut, he was an unrivalled pretty boy, but in reality he was just a spoiled brat made all the more intimidating by the beauty he inherited from his mother.

    “I’m your fiancé so it’s my duty to supervise you on your travels so you don’t get caught up in some sort of love affair!  Especially since you’re a flirt, a cheater and wimp!”

    Wolfram von Bielefelt, flirts and cheaters become flirts and cheaters because of their true feelings... is what I didn’t feel like explaining to him so I just said:

    “… Don’t call me a wimp.”

    “I apologize for letting him have his way like this,” said Conrad as he faced the ocean breeze, not looking apologetic in the slightest.  I’m getting throttled here- hey you’re not enjoying this, are you!?  I want to know.

    “At any rate, I was more shocked by Your Majesty’s plan.  Scandalously hiding a girl in your trunk.  It was impressive.”

    “I thought I’d pulled it off perfectly…”

    The fourth person was inside my huge trunk and was wheeled here by me.  They were that small.

    When he looked inside, Conrad didn’t get angry, but instead looked like he was about to laugh.

    “Well, if it isn’t the assassin!”

    While he usually manages to predict my actions and is able to just shrug and say ‘I thought it’d turn out this way,’ it seems that this time I really blindsided him.  As he pulled the assassin out of my luggage, his shoulders were shaking slightly.

    “Unbelievable!  What did you say to the guards?”

    “That I wanted to have a private talk as father and child.”

    “That’s like acknowledging the claim.”

    I keep on telling you it’s not true.

    Even I know it’s crazy to take the person who tried to kill you with you to rehab.  But, she’s only about ten years old and if I left her at the castle I don’t know what Günter would do to her in his rage.  He’s beautiful and wise, but when it comes to me, he loses his head.  I can only think he suddenly gets stricken with some horrible illness or gets possessed by an animal spirit.

    “How stupid are you?” Wolfram asked.  “On what planet is there someone who takes the person who tried to kill them on a vacation?”

    “There’s one person on this planet.  Sorry for being stupid.  But no one’s been able to get her to say why she tried to kill me or where she got the insignia from, you know?  Would you be able to stand not knowing why an elementary school student tried to kill you?  I wouldn’t.  I want to ask her.  But I still can’t get her to tell me her name.”

    If I look to the side and down, there’s some curly red hair.  The too-small waves look a little like the perm my mother had a few years ago.  The look was super popular for a time, but as a baseball brat that was always starving, every time I saw it I thought of wavy noodles and had to eat some instant ramen.

    “Hey, what’s your name?  If you can’t tell me your last name, just your first name is fine.”

    As the cold ocean breeze painted her cheeks red, she grasped the railing with her small hands.  She’s glaring at something in the air as her manly eyebrows and long eyelashes tremble.  Even though I haven’t met her eyes or heard her talk, I got the feeling that she’s keeping people at a distance and is pretty much rejecting everything in the world so I hesitated to call out to her.

    Even so, I make myself keep asking.

    Who are you?  My what?  Why did you want to kill me?

    “Hey, if you don’t tell me your name I’m just gonna make something up.  Like Instant Noodles or Maruchan.  Oh, but I don’t mean Martinez who used to be in Seibu.” (3)

    “It seems now’s not the time for that.”

    Conrad puts his hand on the girl’s forehead while standing behind her.  For a moment, I’m jealous of how easily and naturally he touched her like that.

    “She has a fever.  Probably because she’s been out in the wind too long.”

    “A fever!?  Then she won’t be able to go in the hotsprings!?”

    The ship’s destination, Schildkraut, is separated from The Great Demon Kingdom by ocean and is the port city of Hildyard.  From the impression I got from it when we passed through on the search for the demon sword, it was a free and neutral-seeming trade city.  There are a lot of business-like people who bear no hostility towards us demons.

    It seems they’ve overcome discrimination and prejudice with their hardcore merchant spirits.

    A bit inland from Schildkraut is Hildyard’s world famous resort town.  Gathering all the pleasures known to man, it’s a town that has stretched luxury to the limits.  It’s a theme park of the adult pleasures of gambling, drugs and sex.  There aren’t any dancing, human sized mice though.  The image I’ve drawn in my mind is a neon-lit Las Vegas.  Yes, a Las Vegas town where people from all over the world gather and have dangerous fun, enjoy drunken entertainment and the night never ends…

    “We’re not going there,” said Conrad.

    … and its adjacent hotspring town whose waters are reputed to cure most any illness.

    If you bathe in this abundantly flowing water for one day you’ll live three years longer, two days and you’ll live six years longer, three days and you’ll live until you die.  That calculation is a bit strange.

    “The waters really do work.  I’m told my father recovered from serious, life-threatening injury after drinking the hotspring’s water.  I myself have had the pain in my sword arm’s tendons completely healed after a two-week stay here.  For strengthening an ankle after a sprain, ten days would be enough to make it even stronger than before.”

    “Ooh, I like that, stronger than before.  Then if I soak up to my shoulders maybe I’ll get rocket arms.  And if I dive under, maybe my IQ will rise, too?”

    ----------

    (1)    Rehab is written in ‘Japanglish’ here as ‘rihabiri/rehabili’.  Oh, I also forgot to mention that Conrad used straight up English to say rehab in the last chapter ^-^;;   The two of them use a lot of English. Yuuri especially.  I should probably point that out more often…

    (2)    The real note says “I’m leaving home.” He chose home because he couldn’t spell castle and then figured, hey, it’s the place where I live so I could call it my home.  And then Yuuri’s like, ‘does that make me a runaway?’  I changed it because of a(n embarrassingly lame/forced) joke later on.  But!  I promised myself I’d translate everything, so that means I’ll have to embarrass myself with my lameness XD

    (3)    Two things in this footnote!  The first is Maruchan (which I’m not even sure I need to footnote, but you never know).  Maruchan is a company that makes instant ramen.  The second is Martinez!  Domingo Martinez played for the Seibu Lions and his nickname was Maruchan.  It’s got nothing to do with the ramen company, though.  Martinez was a bit on the roly-poly side, and Martinez written in Japanese is ‘Marutinesu,’ so they took the ‘Maru,’ which means ‘round,’ and stuck –chan on the end for a cutesy nickname.  Basically, Maruchan is a friendly(?) way of calling him… well, roly-poly.  Here’s his trading card XD

    *.*.*.*.*.*.*

    When you receive a letter from an important person to you, just breaking the seal can cause your heart to pound.  And then, if it’s the very first composition from a person who hasn’t been able to write until now, you wouldn’t be able to read it without tears in your eyes.

    When Günter von Christ discovered the thin yellow paper left behind on top of the desk in the Demon King’s deserted office, he did a little dance.

    “That His Majesty would leave a letter for me in the Demon Language he has just learned!”

    So moved that he even had ‘tears’ coming out of his nostrils, the tutor studied the slip of paper.

    One brief sentence was written there with large, thick, and awkward letters.

    “Oh, what strokes brimming with boldness and self-confidence! As expected of the calligraphy of the one who supports us demons.  It makes me proud to teach him.”

    If you look at it from the side, the size and flow aren’t balanced and there’s no sense of any sort of layout. It’s a note of an absolute beginner level. Even if you compare each character to the Nazca geoglyphs, you can just barely recognize them as letters.  However, love seems to have an awesome power that turns a wise man into a fool.

    “Now then, even though I’m alone, I’ll read this heartfelt composition aloud.”

    ‘I go out half monfh.’

    Yuuri was extremely hesitant about whether spoken language and written language was different, so he just wrote it in the subject-verb-object order he learned in middle school English class. If you took some artistic liberty in translating it, it meant ‘I’m going out for a bit,’ though.

    “I…. go…. monf….?”

    His slender white fingers were shaking so much that the paper was wrinkling.

    “… Monf?  I… go monf…. monk? …. go monk?  … Monk!?”

    Academically translated, this reads as: ‘I’m becoming a monk.  Don’t look for me.’  ( 1 ) **you should definitely read the footnote XD

    Normally in Japan, saying you’ll become a monk just means something along the lines of joining Buddhism, but for demons it means to send your life along with a prayer to be under the care of the True King’s spirit.  It’s the same as saying you’re getting ordained.

    “Why is His Majesty becoming a monk!?  Was he not satisfied with me!?”

    No one would become a monk for a reason like that.  But for Günter, whose thinking ability had flown away, telling him that would be like reading The Great Demon Kingdom’s Constitution to a horse. (2)

    A soldier rushed out onto the opal floor of the office, not even pausing to knock on the door after running down the hallway.

    “I have an announcement!”

    “Is it about becoming a monk!?”

    After being faced with such a ghastly visage, regardless of whether he was of an age where he could still be considered young, the messenger took a few steps back.

    “Huh?  N-no.  I have no such joyful news.  We believe that the perpetrator of the high treason crime of attempting the assassination of the king has escaped.  And, well… according to what I’ve heard, it seems likely that His Majesty himself let the criminal out in order to have a private talk with his child…”

    “Now I understand everything!”

    There’s no telling what goes on in the brains of the ten nobles.  The middle-aged soldier who brought the news slowly backed away from Günter, who was breathing wildly through his nostrils.  How does he understand everything with just that little bit of information?  The one he served before was like that, too.  They were definitely born into the ten nobles, but all they did was invent bizarre things.  From his view, it was mind-boggling why they spent so much time making those complicated machines.

    After all, even if you make a magic-powered meat grinder machine, there are virtually no dishes in Great Demon Kingdom cuisine that use ground meat.

    This is why normal citizens can’t understand the thought processes of nobles.

    “His Majesty is so kind.  Even though he knows it’s not his child, he was likely unable to not attempt to save them from the path of evil!"

    “Y-yeah…”

    “In order to heal a young girl’s twisted heart, borrowing the power of faith is certainly effective.  I expect nothing less from the man I admire.  His every thought is full of wisdom.  But Your Majesty, that doesn’t mean that you have to become a priest as well!  Sometimes love that runs too deep becomes self-sacrifice!  While it’s one of his charming qualities, it’s such a waste that he’s squandering all that beauty and intelligence on one child!”

    Wondering if he’s reciting some script, the only spectator becomes uneasy.

    Drawing his graceful eyebrows together, the tutor gazed at the heavens and made a fist.

    “I have to do something….”

    ----------

    (1)    OMG, this was painful!  I’m really bad at this pun stuff!  I’m so sorry! x.x It was a highly untranslatable joke where kanji characters accidentally form the word for ‘becoming a Buddhist monk.’

    This is the real joke.  Yuuri wrote, “I leave home.” (Ore, deru, ie wo).  The characters that Günter couldn’t read were written in katakana(bold-italic approximations, here).  So it was like he was going, “I… lea… ho…?”  Basically, all he could read was ‘I’ and the kanji.  Anyway, the kanji for ‘leave’ and ‘home’ form the word ‘shukke’ which, as I mentioned before, means becoming a monk, so that’s how Günter comes to his conclusion.  Geez, that was difficult just to explain o.o

    So anyway, yeah.  I made it a spelling mistake + un-readability.  I’ma go hide under a rock now XD

    (2)    This was a joke too.  It continues on the whole Buddhist theme here.  There’s a saying in Japanese that goes ‘a Buddhist prayer on horse’s ears’ (uma no mimi ni nenbutsu).  It means something along the lines of doing something pointless.  It’s kind of (but only kind of) similar to ‘pearls before swine.’  Takabayashi replaced the ‘buddhist prayer’ with ‘The Great Demon Kingdom’s Constitution.’  Anyway, I thought it made sense literally translated so I left it as is ^-^

    *.*.*.*.*.*.*

    I woke to the sound of moaning.

    I freaked out a bit wondering what I would do if it turned out to be a soaking wet girl sobbing in the corner of the room or a horde of fallen soldiers looking at me, but the moaner was the Assassin Girl because her fever had risen.

    Conrad had gone to the ship’s sickbay for some children’s medicine, and I was left alone with the suffering girl in the small cabin.  Because we had asked for a trip where we wouldn’t have to worry about standing out, the cabin was plain as opposed to last time’s luxurious passenger ship’s stateroom.  Because we had turned a double into a room for four, it was kind of like a boarding house.  Wolfram was sleeping soundly in the next bed.  What’s up with the angelic pretty boy snoring with a sound like ‘Gghgpihh-ghgpihh.’

    The sweat that appeared on the child’s forehead shone in the dim light of the small lamp.  The rolling of the deep black waves spread out on the other side of the round, inset window.  I felt minute vibrations from them like a stronger version of a cell phone’s vibrate function.  If giant squids had a territory fight near the ocean floor, it seems the boat will feel the effects as well.

    The girl who still hasn’t told me her name flipped over in her sleep and turned her back to me.  Her tanned arm was uncovered.  With the intent of fixing her blanket, I grab a hold of Windpipe No. 1 and stand.

    When I caught the flu, for three days I could just barely make it to the bathroom.  It was painful to eat and drink.  I could only eat my mother’s porridge or ice cream.

    “… Ice cream would be great, right?   More than that … it’d be great if her mother was here.”

    Since husband and wife equally take part in raising their children, I guess a father would be okay too.

    “Hey, where are you from?  What house in what country can I give you back to?”

    “…-ome.”

    I thought it was some random babble.

    “Hm?”

    With her back still facing me, the girl repeats herself in a hoarse voice.

    “I can’t go back home.”

    “Why?   Is it money related?  If you need a train ticket or… ah, there are no trains, huh?  But your parents are probably worried, so I could always just take you back home myself.  Do you  know your address?  Oh yeah, what’s your name?”

    To offer to pay transportation fees for the person who tried to kill you…  I’m really something else.  The girl clammed up again and, due to her fever, curled herself up into a fetal position as if she were cold.

    Giving up, I move to grab the blanket and cover her exposed left arm.  On her olive-colored, thin shoulder, there was small black writing.  Ten is a really young age to have a tattoo.

    “I…… Izu…ra.  Is that a name?  Or is that an encouraging word or something?  Izura… sounds like a girl’s name.  Then I’ll call you Izura.”

    “No!  Izura is my mother’s name!”

    “Then what’s your name?”

    “Greta,” she said bluntly.  There wasn’t a ‘my name is’ or a ‘pleased to meetcha’ or ‘let’s get along’ or nothing. (1)

    Ah well, for now let’s just do introductions.

    “Greta, I’m Yuuri.  Shibuya Yuuri Harajuku…..”

    I started to say it out of habit and caught myself.  Here there are no kanji and no Harajuku.  This introduction will never be useful to me again.  I’ll probably never have another chance to use it.

    “No, never mind, just Yuuri is fine.  And, can you tell me your address?  Where do you live?  A cold place?  A city?  If you’re cold, I’ll get another blank…”

    Without any clear intent, I touched her hair.  I might have been going to pat her head.  I didn’t think anything of it.

    Greta screamed.  It was so loud you wouldn’t even think she was sick.

    ----------------

    (1)    Just wanted to point out that Yuuri says ‘My name is’ in English here.