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The heartless demon still smiled, standing between the heavens aflame and the fate rushing headlong toward them, as though he could feel no heat at all.Ah, but of course.A demon has no heart. Therefore he has no sentiment, no delirium, no omen of love.
“You’ve lost to me again,” he said. “Great hero. Strongest demon hunter. Perhaps it’s time that title was changed, hm? A hunter who couldn’t save anyone ought to die quietly and without complaint.”All demons are alike: liars, lunatics. It would have been enough not to listen. Enough not to heed his venomous words, his unhinged grin, those eyes hollow as abandoned graves.
The demon hunter drew his sword. A thousandth of a second before the demon’s suicide, he failed to reach him in time. Then witnessed a death he could not comprehend.Afterwards it happens again.
Again. Again.
Everything repeated. Everything forgotten.Once more he faced the demon. Once more he was burned by him.Splice the beginning and the end of the film reel together. Tie the shoelaces into a dead knot. Again, again—a million times, a billion times.
The demon did not know why the cycle would never end.
Perhaps because he himself was the knot.
Death had once been his beloved. After every flame of vengeance and passion had burned itself to ash, all that remained was the withered residue of cinders. He began to think of nothing except dying.To be killed by the girl named Emilia—he could endure it however many times necessary. That was her long-cherished wish, the root from which his own obsession had grown.“I’ve had enough!” cried the demon who had experienced thousands of deaths, shouting into the face of Death itself. “My wish has already been fulfilled! So give me an ending. Give me the termination and death already. I’ve—”
“Ah. So it’s you again.”
The demon tilted his head. “Wanna an apple?”
He drew one from the sack tucked beneath his arm and tossed it toward the demon hunter. The redhead frowned at it suspiciously.
“A bomb?”
“No-Nope. Just a normal apple. No demonic additives included.” The demon blinked and bit into his own with a loud crunch.
Only moments ago he had burned Tokyo to the ground, slaughtered hundreds of thousands—perhaps millions. Now he sat here in perfect composure, conversing with the nemesis who had killed him just as many times.
How strange.
Before becoming a demon, he had merely been an ordinary high school boy. Yet now he felt older than anyone in the world.
Across every cycle, not once had he defeated the demon hunter fated to oppose him. But emotions like envy, jealousy, hatred—those could not burn endlessly through a thousand lifetimes indeed.
“So I gave up,” he said, spreading his hands. “Great hero, could you hurry up and kill me already so we can start over?”
“Start what?” the hero asked unexpectedly.
“Everything,” said the demon.He began counting on his fingers.
“If you wanted, you could kill me right at the beginning. Though I suppose that wouldn’t satisfy Public Security regulations, since I hadn’t officially become an Archbishop yet. Or you could...” He shrugged. “Well, when it comes to killing me, you always find a way.”
He sounded utterly certain.And that was the truth of it: for demons, suicide did not truly exist. Their self-destruction was not for the sake of dying, but for continuing to live. Death and life ceased to differ. How cunning.
But that hunter—the hunter was different.
If the demon died, the hunter would inevitably become the prime suspect. That man would kill him. Certainly.“The one who kills me will be him,” the demon murmured.The hunter was death.The hunter was also life, and something else besides.
“I’m tired. Kill me already.”The demon who had just destroyed everything the hunter possessed spoke lazily, taking another bite from the apple.
If only this were the hunter’s skull instead.
He thought viciously: so many times, so many times, he had killed him over and over, yet never once managed to be the one to kill him in return. And still he had to obediently bare his throat. Unfair. Utterly unfair.
But the demon hunter sheathed his sword and walked toward him.In every previous cycle, this had never happened before.
The demon looked up and watched the dust- and blood-stained white coat halt before him. Then he heard the hunter ask:
“Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why would a demon who destroyed Tokyo—destroyed everyone’s lives—do something like this?”
The demon snorted and pulled a mocking face.
“Don’t use all those people to hide the fact that what you really mean is: ‘You ruined my life.’”
“I don’t deny it,” said the hunter. “So what’s your answer?”
The demon fell silent for a moment.
Then he asked softly.“What if I hate you?What if I envy you—your life, everything you are—and want to drag it all away from you?What if I want you to think of me until death?
“I’ve died so many times. So many. Part of me wants you to hurry up and die. Another part wants you to stay alive and suffer.
“Reinhard... how can you make me hurt this much? How can you make me think of nothing except you?”
The demon hunter stood speechless.
The fury and hatred carved into his face faded into bewilderment, and in the next instant his hand closed around the demon’s throat.
Strangled to death this time?Fine by him.
The demon scarcely cared.
“...I don’t know you,” the hunter said, tears spilling from eyes gone dry with grief.Magnanimously, the demon reached up and patted the tense muscles of his arm.
“And I’ve never even heard your name.”
“Ah. That’s why I introduced myself, wasn’t it?” the demon replied. “I am the Demon of Return, Subaru,Natsuki subaru,the Archbishop of Pride.”
And the man you have killed ten million times.
He laughed silently to himself.
“If that’s true, then this is nothing but—”
“I wanted to see you like this.”The demon interrupted his furious outburst with startling sincerity.
“Because if you weren’t consumed by hatred—if you weren’t burning in the fire of revenge—then you’d mean nothing to me at all. No... this version of you is the only one worthy of my—”
Hatred?Love?What had he meant to say?
Whatever the word was, it vanished into the inferno when the hunter snapped his neck and cut the sentence short forever.
The hunter killed him.
Then he opened his eyes once more.
The same streets. The same unfolding events. The same fate.
The demon waded through pools of blood in search of death, while the hero still slumbered curled inside his beautiful dream of heroism.In that case, didn’t that make him the prince who kissed Sleeping Beauty awake?
How disgusting.It was all the hunter’s fault.
That was what the demon thought as he lit the fire that consumed all of Tokyo and stood idly in the center of the blaze waiting for the hunter to find him.He no longer repeated the same conversations. It made him sound like some pathetic closeted romantic.
Most of the time he simply mocked him instead. The twisted expressions on the hunter’s face were exquisite things.
At what point had he stopped driving blades through his own throat?
Had he realized that dying by the hunter’s hand no longer hurt so much?
Wrong.
Everything was wrong.
And yet, once, amidst the endless repetition, the demon asked:“Do you know how to truly kill a demon?”
Again the demon lay beneath the hunter’s sword, beneath a sky of flames.
This time he spoke no cruel words. Perhaps he had simply grown tired of repeating them.
“Let me tell you a story,” he said. “A story about a demon and a bottle.”
“In the first century, sealed inside the bottle, the demon thought: if someone rescues me, I’ll grant them anything they desire.But no one came.
“In the tenth century, the demon thought: if someone rescues me, I’ll kill them.But still no one came.
“And by the hundredth century, the demon thought—ah, if someone rescues me...”
The demon whispered softly, intimately, like a lover speaking in bed.
“I’ll kill myself.
“Because I have spent too long inside the bottle. Freedom would no longer be salvation to me, but poison.”
He smiled at his former nemesis.
The hunter reached out instinctively, only for the fire to scorch his hand.
“A demon can only truly be killed by forgetting,” the demon said. “If the whole world ceases to fear a demon, then that demon disappears—not physically, but conceptually. It never returns.
“I am the Demon of Transmigration. But no one in this world believes in Transmigrating.
“There is only one person who fears it.”
His smile deepened.
“So kill me,Reinhard.If you can make me stop fearing return... if you can make me truly die... then I’ll give back everything you treasure.”
Demons made no promises.
Demons did not honor contracts.
Demons lied, betrayed, contradicted themselves. They could never be trusted.
He did not care whether the hunter agreed or not. He merely forced the bargain upon him, chattering away as always.
The demon shaped his fingers into a gun against his temple and smiled brilliantly.
“See you next time.”
Bang.
Blood and brain matter burst outward like fireworks, crimson rain splashing across the hunter’s stricken face.
My blood looks good on your lips.
That was the demon’s final thought before death, heedless of every emotion flickering across the hunter’s face.
What the demon said to the hunter did not truly matter.Because it was not the future, but the past.
Time was a Möbius strip.
He would forget. He would move forward. They would meet again, and once again repeat their little drama of killing and being killed.
Honestly, he was beginning to tire of it.
“So try saving me,” the Demon of Transmigration said with a provocative grin. “You can do it, can’t you? The hero who saved so many people—when will you finally come to save...”
Across infinite time, the demon and the hunter danced a waltz.Admittedly, the dance would never end with a bow.
The ballroom burned. Time itself burned. Everything flowed downward like a melting oil painting.Like Salvador Dalí’s The Persistence of Memory, memory alone endured eternally for the demon called Subaru.
At the end, the demon waited, as Beatrice once waited for her ‘Someone’.
A demon would never reach out toward a hero.
So come chase me.
Permanently.
Endlessly.
Forever,forever.
“What a terrible movie.”
Natsuki Subaru dumped the last handful of popcorn into his mouth. The lights rising with the rolling credits stabbed painfully at his eyes.He had endured three solid hours of incomprehensible cinema only to receive an ending that was not an ending at all.
“Garbage,” he repeated.
Beside him, Reinhard said mildly, “Is that so?”
“You sat through three hours of torture without a single complaint? Your taste in films is clinically dead.”
“At least the emotions between the protagonists felt... genuine to me.”
Subaru slammed a hand onto the armrest and leaned aggressively toward him. Unfortunately, the disparity in their height made the gesture entirely nonthreatening.
Reinhard regarded him expressionlessly.
“If you dare say you sympathize with me, I’ll kill you.”
“I’ll kill you first,though.” Reinhard replied calmly. “My apologies for turning the theater into a crime scene. I’ll dispose of the body properly.”
“Asshole.”
“I believe that line belongs to you.”
Wasn’t the frequency of these utterly meaningless exchanges becoming a little excessive?Reinhard sighed inwardly as he led Subaru home by the chain attached to the collar around his neck.
This world truly did contain demons and demon hunters. They truly were one such pair.And since demons could not legally possess identification, Subaru’s food, clothing, and daily expenses were all funded by Reinhard.
Even so, the demon possessed not the slightest gratitude. His favorite pastime was devising increasingly elaborate ways to murder the hunter assigned as his partner. So far, none had succeeded.
When they emerged from the theater and reached the utility pole outside their apartment building, Reinhard remarked:
“You were the one who chose this movie for our date.”
“The fact that you think this was a date is revolting.”
“It wasn’t?”Reinhard tilted his head slightly.
“No. And I only picked it because the synopsis sounded interesting. Total false advertising. Today sucked because of you, so just die already.”Subaru rejected the idea with the same breezy tone one might use to discuss dinner plans.
“Your aestheticism is as hopeless as your personality,” Reinhard sighed. “Which is precisely why you’re still under demon hunter supervision.”
“Supervision? More like imprisonment and exploitation.”The demon stuck out his tongue exaggeratedly, rattling the chain attached to the Public Security-issued collar around his neck.
“Haven’t I said this before? People like you could never make me abandon my love—”
“Next time, I’ll choose the movie.”
“I sincerely doubt your taste is any better than mine.”
Subaru strode ahead dismissively, wholly unimpressed by the words of his so-called partner.
Then, halfway up the stairs, he suddenly spun around.
“What is it?” Reinhard asked.
“You seriously think there’s going to be a next time—?!”Subaru shrieked.“I am never going on a second date with you!”
“How unfortunate that we agree completely,” Reinhard replied. “Outside of work, I’d rather not be involved with you at all.”
“Then either let me go or kill me already, coward.”
Resting a hand thoughtfully against his chin, Reinhard genuinely considered the consequences of murdering him.
Being face-to-face with a homicidal maniac was rather terrifying.
Fortunately, neither hunters nor demons could really be called normal people.
Reinhard’s contemplation did not last long. A notification chimed from his phone. He glanced at the message and asked:“Would you like to watch it again?”
“What?”
“The movie. A coworker gave me two complimentary tickets.”
“No,” Subaru answered immediately. “Who would watch that garbage twice? More importantly—it’s dinner time, isn’t it?”
Reinhard checked the hour.
At this point it was less dinner than a midnight snack.
Still, under Public Security’s demon management regulations, regularly supplying blood to one’s contracted demon was technically part of the job.
No one else should be passing by at this hour.
Reinhard removed his coat and rolled up one sleeve of his shirt.The demon, who had clearly been waiting impatiently, seized his arm and bit down viciously.
Fangs tore through flesh, opening a terrible wound. Blood poured freely, quickly staining the lower half of the demon’s face red before trailing down his throat and soaking into his hoodie.
An utterly dreadful way to eat.
The hunter curled his fingers and rapped sharply against the back of Subaru’s head.
“That’s enough.”
The demon lifted his head.Blood covered the lower half of his face, and his crimson eyes gleamed brilliantly. He had never made the slightest effort to conceal the demonic nature lurking beneath that body.
He grinned carelessly and grabbed the pristine edge of Reinhard’s shirt to wipe his mouth clean.
“I’m a demon, remember? Dirtying someone like you is one of my favourite—”
The hunter caught him by the clothes and hauled him up like an unruly cat, dragging him back toward the apartment.Because of the demon’s fierce resistance, Reinhard eventually had to resort to physical force to make him sleep.
Which, Reinhard thought while staring down at the sleeping Natsuki Subaru, was no less than the demon deserved.After all, wasn’t the person who wished to be killed by him—and wished to be saved by him—the very same man?