On the Side of Darkness

This wasn’t the sort of argument that Yumi expected to be having with a demon. It left her far more defensive than she expected, unable to remind herself of the reality of her fake world. “You kill humans, your very blood is lethal to humans! You’ve given no reason to see you as anything more than the enemy.”

“A singular focus as a Hunter would be.”

“I’m still alive because I can’t be anything else. It was you demons that taught me to be ruthless, as ruthless as you.”

“As a warrior should be. Doubt is a waste.”

“Then what’s the point you’re trying to make?”

“That things are never perfectly binary like you seem to believe, but also that you can’t let that distract you when you fight.”

Now it seemed that he was giving her advice. One moment he sounded like he was trying to slap her for not even thinking about what she was doing and now telling her to do it. She really wished any of this would make sense. “Where is any of this going? You’re not making a lot of sense anymore.”

“I don’t want you distracted the next time we fight.”

“Saying I’m killing innocent demons isn’t really making that point.”

“You seem to have the assumption we’re all evil and want only to kill humans.”

“Is that an inaccurate assessment?”

“If it was true, we could have easily wiped out the entire island of humans centuries ago and the Hunters would not have been able to do anything about it.”

“That’s a bold claim.”

“It’s the truth. It’s not arrogance. The weakest demon is stronger than any human. A small band of demons can easily wipe out a village and there are too few Hunters to stop it.”

Yumi was reminded suddenly of the demon’s pretending to be human to play games on the villagers. They just ignored them. They didn’t always just go around killing. Most did seem to stick to their own business. “So what is this then?”

“It’s war.”

“War? That seems a little too simple of an answer.”

“It’s an accurate one. Most demons don’t fight humans. Those that do are just as unique as humans. The ones that humans are more familiar with are the bloodthirsty ones. The rest however are merely fighting a very old war.”

Chapter 406 – On the Side of Darkness

The conversation started to draw in Yumi as she lost herself to her curiosity. She felt like she was seeing a side that ran in contrast with that of what she felt from the villagers. While they weren’t blood craved for the death of the demons, she still could feel the fear and resentment in them. Even if they didn’t say it, they wanted all of the demons dead as well. The elder might not have wanted a war with the demons at the risk of the cost of his people, but he was no less pleased with Yumi’s killings. She felt certain of that, though she had no more proof than she did of what the demon told her now.

But even if she didn’t plan on believing the demon, knowing what story they told on their side might give her some insight in how to deal with them in the future. If nothing else, the demon wouldn’t attack her for now. He seemed too engrossed within the explanation that he told. “There’s a war between the humans and demons?”

“Most of this is common knowledge, why do you act like you are ignorant of history?”

“I tended to fall asleep in history class,” she joked, tired of trying to explain why she didn’t understand the way the world worked. Yumi also worried how the demon would take advantage of her lack of basic information. She couldn’t lie her way through it. ‘I’ll just have to be ready to fight with what little strength I have.’

“I’ll humor you and explain. Most humans have forgotten the origins anyway and don’t tell it like it happened.”

“And I can trust a story that can’t be backed up?”

“You going to listen or fall asleep?” Yumi turned away and started walking again, though did nothing to tell him to stop. He resumed the march to his Lord. “What you do with the knowledge is up to you. I’m not telling you to trust anything.”

“Fine, get on with it before I do fall asleep.”

“Humans only remember demons killing them and that’s how it has always been. Ask any of them and you’ll get the same story. But the reality is more complicated than they wish to accept. It was not always the same killing each other as it is now.”

“How was it different? Did you actually get along at one point?”

“Not so cliché as that. There’s never been peace between our two races, that much was clear from the start.”

“So who started it then?”

“It’s not quite what you’re thinking either. We demons don’t come from this land or world. The world of the demons is our old homeland.”

“So it’s that sort of story,” she muttered to herself.

“What’s that?” Yumi shook her head dismissing anything that he might have heard her say. She said nothing more to stop him from continuing. “We are explorers. There’s a multitude of worlds to travel and we’ve finished learning everything about our world.”

“Then you’re invaders?”

“That’s how the humans saw us. Our original intent was to figure out how this world functioned. As we learned from our travels, each world has vastly different rules. So understanding those is important. But we didn’t have the chance before we were discovered.”

Fighting her wounds, she crossed her arms left to think on what he relayed to her. ‘This isn’t quite the story I was expecting. Demons that are explorers? Who’s ever heard of that in any story? Did Yuki figure that out? No, this is too unlikely for even him to have seen it in one of his stories. Though can I even believe such a wild story? It seems more likely that they were just coming to conquer, not explore. Demon explorers…’

The demon paused in his story, noticing the change in Yumi. “You doubt what I’m telling you.”

“Of course, it seems too far-fetched to actually be real.”

“Given our history in this world, that is no surprise. But I’ve no point lying to you about this.”

“As a Demon Hunter, I kill demons. You want me to stop.”

“I want to fight you again, making you lose your desire to fight me because of guilt would not serve me.”

“Even though such a story could do just that.”

“I can make a story up that makes it easier for you to hate us.”

She sighed, still holding doubt about the whole thing. “Just continue. I’ll decide at the end of the story.”

“Very well. When we arrived in this world, it was already well populated with humans. So it didn’t take us long to run across them. But they found our real forms far more frightening than we expected. They tried to scare us off thinking we were animals. We left to figure out more about the world before our next interaction.”

“I’m guessing that didn’t go well.”

“They sought us out. Giant animals running about on their land, they wanted to kill us. They couldn’t really do that much to us, but that didn’t stop those among us from taking advantage of it. In the end, the humans were wiped out and the first blood was spilled. We thought that they were weak and nothing to worry about, but that turned out to be our mistake.”

Now the story went to where she expected finally and just as she expected he placed the blame on the humans rather than the demons. ‘If he’s trying to claim them to be something more than beasts they wouldn’t have killed anyone. They couldn’t harm them anyway, they could just ignore the humans and went about their business.’

“The humans had more power than we imagined and they slaughtered our entire group.”

This caught Yumi by surprise. She didn’t see that coming. “If they were so powerful to do that, why is there even any sort of conflict now?”

“A couple of reasons. One, the explorers were not warriors. They would have been as powerful as any of those demons you slew today. But more than that, the humans of that period were more powerful than those today.”

“They got weaker?”

“No, we killed the powerful humans, leaving weaker bloodlines to continue. Meaning overall, humans would get weaker.”

“You’re skipping ahead of things.”

“Yes. After the explorers were killed, it sparked trouble in our world. Many wanted to avenge their deaths, while others said that it was our fault for going to their world. The resulting conflict splintered us and a group angry over their death invaded this world.”

“Which is when the war began?”

“That’s right. Those that invaded this time were warriors and it became a battle of attrition. Despite what you might be thinking. The humans back then were very powerful, even for us. The heaviest fighting ended centuries ago when they sealed off their world from ours. After that it became difficult to send more to this world, it takes a vast amount of energy to open portals between the worlds now. As a result, we’ve become stranded in this world.”

“And which are you?”

“I was just following my Lord in the battle on the promise of a good fight. And I found plenty while I was here, though with the peak of the war over, it’s been boring.”

“Boring…”

“Once the campaigns ended, most of us just settled down into the territories that we took from the humans. We can’t get back and we’ve lost our interest in continuing the war as well. Not that the humans see it the same way.”

“So it’s a war that will never end.”

“Not necessarily, you just have to kill all of us and then the war is over.”

“You make it sound like I’m the villain here.”

“We don’t really have much desire anymore to fight. Any sort of revenge we might have been seeking is lost or fulfilled, depending on who you ask. But we also can’t leave either, so you’re just going to have to share or kill us.”

Yumi shrank a bit in thought. It was a stranger tale than she was expecting from the demon. He had been quite chatty about the whole thing. She found herself more willing to accept it than just dismiss it. Though she had trouble trusting a demon, she didn’t feel like that was lying to her. Which certainly left her in a troublesome position. He might no longer have what he wanted from her.

“But enough talking, we’ve arrived,” the demon spoke, revealing a large structure that had a vaguely Japanese design to it. If she had to guess it was what passed for demon architecture, as it looked like a home or in this case a mansion. The Lord likely had it built to fit his ego. But it still remained impressive, detailed out of stone and wood in something that likely took craftsman years to complete. It felt like a status symbol to show off more than anything.

Worse though, Yumi wasn’t prepared for meeting the one that was behind all of this just yet. She didn’t know where all the time went in their walk. But now she had to face the last threat and find out if Yuki truly was being held by them.