Chapter 5: Ch. 4

“Greetings, heroes from another world!”

Vassago was too busy rubbing his palms into his eyes, trying to restore his vision, to pay too much attention to the voice. It echoed through his skull, demanding his attention, but he tuned it out into nothing more than white background noise.

“Wh-what the hell? Where are we?!”

“No way, is this… heaven? Did we die?”

Vassago almost laughed. Heaven? It would have to be a mad god that would let his rotten soul into heaven. He blinked vision back into his eyes, squinting around. White marble structures, a gurgling brook, the tinkling of bells, the fresh scent of wildflower blooms…

Fine, he understood the misunderstanding now.

“Well, there’s one way to make sure.”

“How do you fig-OW! Michi, that hurt.”

“I told you not to call me by my first name! But it looks like we’re still alive, probably.”

Vassago glanced at the bickering voices, finding the boy and girl from before. The boy was rubbing his arm, looking with a sad and soulful gaze at the girl, who was currently entirely ignoring him in order to examine the room around them.

“Hey.” Vassago spoke for the first time, taken aback at how sweet and high his voice was after hearing it for the first time. He paused, then regained his composure in order to continue, “What language do you speak?”

“Me? Only Japanese. Why do you ask? Ah, just so you know, Michi-kun has the best grades in our year level in every subject, including English-OW!”

“How many times do I need to say it? It’s Umemura-san. Don’t act overly familiar with me, Murai-san.” The girl hefted her staff, which had bent suspiciously in the middle from the force of her hit—which had given off a soft sound, unlike the crack of wood against flesh should make.

“Japanese… I see. Of the eighteen thousand tongues, I speak seven hundred of them. None are Japanese.”

The two teens exchanged a glance, the girl giving a fairly unsubtle eye roll and muttering, “Chuuni?” under her breath.

Vassago tapped his incisors, looking around the area suspiciously. He switched languages halfway through speaking, but they didn’t show any reaction, which showed that they understood what he was saying. He was watching their own lips when they were speaking, as they were now beginning to argue with each other again, and they themselves didn’t seem to realise that the shapes they made with their mouths as they spoke had changed from back on their native planet.

His language wasn’t being changed by an outside force when he spoke, but they could understand it, even when he spoke ancient dialects. Instead, he could understand them because they were being subconsciously controlled to speak the local language of his own world.

Basically, this was a realm from his world. He sniffed. The flowers had a heady scent, definitely designed to deliberately cover up the smell of magic in the air, but he was the Demon of Dusk. He could tell even through the mingling scents: this was divine magic. They’d been pulled into a demi-god realm attached to his world.

“Ahem! You’re not dead.”

The voice echoed like church bells, slamming into Vassago’s brain and causing him to grit his teeth. Demigods. Still it got his attention, along with the two tag-alongs. They all turned to stare at the woman, draped in a shimmering copper cowl and holding a chicken in Her arms.

“Allow me to introduce myself. I am Ophion, Goddess of the Hearth.”

Hm? Not a name he was familiar with; a minor goddess attached to a lesser domain. Not the kind of demigod who had the pull to set up an interworld transmission, let alone one like that one that hunted him down. Someone didn’t want their name attached to this and was using Her as a front.

“Oh heroes from another world,” She spoke over the clucking chicken, gently stroking it with a golden-sheened hand, “you have been summoned from… from another world, in order to be. Uh. Heroes.”

Oh yes, She definitely wasn’t the mastermind. Looks like She had been pushed out at the last second.

“No.” The pink-haired girl stated, clear and flat.

“Ah, w-wait. As heroes from another world, you’ll get—you’ll be granted, I mean, granted great powers of might and magic—”

“The power of what? Wheat farming? No. Send us back.”

“You should at least let her finish, Michi—ah, Umemura! Umemura-san! Sorry, sorry.”

Vassago hid a smile. The last person he’d seen speak to a demigod like this had been… well, himself.

“Um, the h-heroes of another world spoken of in prophecy, the valiant-hearted hero, and the pure in spirit and body maiden—”

“Hahaha! Michi-kun, are you the pure maiden?” The boy wiped a tear of laughter from the corner of his eye, glancing wildly between the increasingly unsettled goddess and the even more increasingly aggressive girl beside him.

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“Nope! No, I’m not doing this.” The girl grabbed her hair and tore it off, headdress and all, revealing short, curling dark brown hair sweatily clipped back beneath. Pulling out the pins, she ruffled her hair, letting it settle naturally, before delving down the front of her dress and pulling out one, then two gelatinous semi-circles. “Maiden my ass!”

The goddess looked positively ashen by this point. Vassago wasn’t expecting that himself. Granted he wasn’t good with faces, but there were enough humanoid demons he thought he had more or less gotten a good handle on gender.

“Just one cosplay, Michi-kun, you’re a perfect Elena Ludwick, Michi-kun, I’ll never bother you again, Michi-kun.” The girl—boy stuffed the wig and fake, ah, the other parts into the arms of the taller boy beside him, looking positively rancorous.

“You are a perfect Elena, though. Her tsundereness is her charm—OW!”

The shorter boy turned to the goddess, raising his eyebrows and crossing his arms expectantly. “You were saying? Pure maiden and all that?”

Ophion looked ready to cry. Clearly She had already been ill-prepared for this in the first place, but the meeting had gone entirely off the rails by now, far beyond Her capabilities. Vassago almost felt bad for Her—only because he knew She was just a patsy in his abduction back home.

“There’s no way back.” She finally confessed with a sad sigh. “The world you’re being sent to has undergone a great trauma, and sending you back the other way—at least immediately—will tear it apart.”

There was something he had noticed. Ophion hadn’t looked at him, not so much as glanced his way, the entire time they’d been speaking. In fact, he’d go as far as to say that She was actively ignoring him, almost nervous of his presence.

“‘At least immediately’?” Umemura latched on to that word, belligerently stalking the goddess and poking a finger at Her cowl. “In other words, you can send us back, just not right away?”

“Y-yes! In fifty or so years—”

“Fifty years?!” The two teens spoke in unison, practically screaming and causing the goddess to flinch.

“Or!” She hastily amended, “If the healing of the world is hastened—through the actions of two heroes—it could be cut down to just a few years. Ten, maybe eight—or three! Three years!” She babbled the last words after seeing Umemura’s expression.

“Three years.” The original boy, the taller one in the black armour, groaned, squatting down and clutching his head. “My mother’s going to have a breakdown.”

“N-not at all! The temporal distortion between worlds will mean that just a few minutes at most will have passed! Furthermore, we can alter your bodies when sending you back to revert you back to your current age and appearance so no one will even know!”

“You can do all that but you can’t just send us back? What kind of god are you anyway?” Umemura groused, glaring at Ophion.

“N-no, sorry. As I said, the world you’re being sent to is… currently undergoing a great calamity. Monsters are rampaging out of control, the demon lands have fallen under the control of a mad king, and dungeons are evolving at an uncontrollable pace. That’s why we needed to send you bac—send you there. Only the ‘hero’ can undo the damage that’s been inflicted on the world and restore it to a stable state.”

She was definitely avoiding Vassago. He couldn’t help but let out an audible sneer, understanding in Her speech exactly what the two teens weren’t aware of.

“Aaah!” The boy suddenly leaped up, staring at Vassago before reaching out and lifting him up, flopping him like a ragdoll. “What about him? This world sounds dangerous as heck, you can’t send a child this young there! Can’t you keep him here for a few years?”

“Huh?! If you keep him here, I want to stay too! Like hell I care about some random world ruled by kidnapping gods, it can just break for all I care!”

“No!”

The realm rattled with the boom of the voice, storm clouds rolling across blue skies, veiling them behind angry, roiling grey. There was a crash of thunder, then the brittle blue flash of lightning, and a valiant looking woman clad in a fur cloak appeared, Her vibrant red hair free-flowing around Her face as though carried by an invisible wind. Antlers rose from atop Her head and twin wolves stalked the ground around Her, snarling softly while glaring at the gathered mortals.

“Nuena, I’m sorry.” Ophion hung Her head, clutching Her chicken while shuffling sheepishly across the ground toward the taller, muscular woman.

“Ophion.” The antlered woman gently curled a wheat-gold strand of Ophion’s hair, tucking it behind Her ear. “I will take it from here.” She turned Her head, Her eyes glowing with a brilliant blue-white light as though lit by storms. “I am Nuena, Goddess of the Hunt. I am reprieve from the winter famine. I am that which stands between man and the fangs of beasts. I am the first splash of blood on the spring soil after the winter melt. I am the blade that stills the beating heart.”

That all meant She was a serious threat if they pissed Her off.

“You have two options. Travel forward into another world, with blessings granted by we, divine patrons, to give you strength and guide your way. Or else be thrown back into the void where your bones will liquify and your flesh will return to primordial ooze while your still cognizant soul screams, trapped within a prison of rot, for all eternity.”

The teens paled, then nodded. Nuena had considerably more power of persuasion than Ophion. Her eyes turned coldly to Vassago, but didn’t speak, merely tossing Her hair and turning around, raising Her arms as she bid a portal into existence.

“Step through, ‘heroes’ from another world. All of you. The realm of the divine is not a place for mortals.”

A statement aimed at Vassago. He resisted the urge to sneer. While he had a profound and utter lack of respect for demigods, he wasn’t in a fit state to fuck around and find out with a goddess like Nuena. So instead he allowed his hand to be gently taken up by the larger of the two boys, who even offered a warm and reassuring smile and a whispered, “It’s okay, onii-san is here,” before stepping up to the portal.

“I’d hold your breath.” Nuena offered before they were all pushed through by an invisible force.

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