Frondier first headed towards Elysia, leaving the collapsed Baal and Marco behind.
Elysia was inside a protective barrier weaving with Obsidian.
As Frondier lightly waved her hand, Obsidian smoothly retreated from Elysia's surroundings and returned to Frondier.
Elysia breathed a sigh of relief.
Her eyes were a little hollow, perhaps due to the prolonged darkness, but she seemed otherwise unharmed.
“Y-Yeah. Is it… over……?”
Elysia froze mid-sentence, her mouth agape.
It was fortunate that Baal had moved slightly to accommodate their arrival; otherwise, the rune would have been overflowing with devils, leaving no room to stand.
Indeed, where Elysia was looking, just outside the rune, devils were piled up like a heap of trash.
“……Are they all dead?”
“I don't know. I can't check every single one of them, and I don't want to.”
Frondier's answer was even more horrifying. If she didn't even know if they were dead or not, it meant she had no intention of killing them.
“What are you going to do now? Are we going back? Will you send me back to the dorm?”
Elysia asked with a sliver of hope, but was denied once again. Her lips pouted slightly, but it was a response she had half expected.
“These guys, one is the leader of Satan's devils, and the other is the leader of the western devils. It's too much of a waste to just leave them.”
Frondier thought for a moment.
With these two, could they achieve a grand unification of the devils? The devils hidden within the Empire were already following Frondier.
‘……No, there's no way that could last forever.’
Hostages were merely a temporary means of negotiation, nothing more. A peace treaty through threats – there was no deal more hollow than that.
But for now, it was safe to say that the devil war was off the table.
Tens of thousands of devils lay dead here. All that remained were the high-ranking devils of each faction. Even if they waged an all-out war, it wouldn't be a real war.
‘But I need to talk to the western devils. Their thirst for revenge is no joke. They'll try something again someday. It's absurd to keep stopping them every time.’
Frondier, too, wanted to resolve things through dialogue and negotiation, but the western devils wouldn't listen.
No, they seemed to consider humans as outsiders from the start. Their goal was to find the devils hidden within the Empire, so their basic position was that humans should not interfere.
‘If they just wouldn't do that in my own backyard, I'd leave them alone.’
But as things stood, Frondier had become another enemy to the western devils. Whether that outweighed their original thirst for revenge, she didn't know.
‘First, I need to know. What exactly are they trying to avenge, and why are they in the west?’
According to the first western devil she met, they too should have originally been in the Demon Realm.
It wasn't just the western devils. The Empire's devils and even Lily were the same. It was strange for them to be in the human world in the first place.
As far as Frondier knew, there was only one way for a devil to be summoned into the human world: to form a soul contract with a devil, like the Empire's Shadow Unit had done. To open a gate using a medium like Dragonheart and summon them.
Even Satan himself couldn't handle Dragonheart and couldn't cross over. He had only sent his subordinates.
‘……Satan used that gate to plant his devils in advance. To destroy the Empire.’
And when the gate closed, Satan's devils, unable to receive further information or commands, acted on their existing orders. As a result, outdated information put them at a disadvantage.
Satan wouldn't have wanted to kill his own subordinates on purpose. Especially not when the plan was failing.
In other words, even Satan didn't know. A way to send devils to the human world other than the gate.
‘Ms. Lily said she didn't know why she was in the Empire. She had been in this land since she gained consciousness. I thought most cases would be like that.’
At least for the devils hidden within the Empire, many situations would be similar to Lily's.
The Empire was not a good place for devils to live. If they knew how to cross from the Demon Realm to the human world, they could use the same method to return. Even if it was difficult, they would at least try.
But neither the devils encountered in Hitchcock nor all the devils gathered within the Empire knew how to return.
The western devils, however, were different.
They had a clear intent to kill and sought out the Empire's devils. They even directly mentioned the word ‘revenge.’
Ultimately, the western devils held the clue.
“……So, I'd really like it if you woke up soon, Baal.”
Saying that, Frondier glanced at Baal, but there was no sign of him waking up.
He had checked his pulse earlier, so he was definitely alive, but he was worried that he might have suffered more damage than he thought.
Perhaps he was simply ‘barely alive.’
At that moment, Elysia spoke up.
She seemed to have been thinking about something, her face etched with worry.
“Why are you keeping me here?”
Frondier tilted her head in confusion.