Your return to your “home sweet home” is surprisingly uneventful. Which is actually a nice change of pace for you. Sure, it takes only a couple of hours for your group to be completely exhausted, you included, but that is fine. The whole point was to get some distance between you and the troglodytes, who you wouldn’t even trust to deliver your mail.
Your most important action, before you go to sleep, is taking the eunuchs, Alpha and Gamma away from the rest of the party—most importantly Pythia—and recasting your [Submission] spell on them, which is now level 3. It takes some ten minutes for your energy to recharge to cast the spell for the ninth time, but, even though it doesn’t appear to change anything, you feel it is worth it. At least you can be sure which minions you can rely on to die for you if needed.
Keeping Alpha and Gamma on shifts to watch Pythia and additional two of your eunuchs on shifts next to you, lets you sleep with relative peace of mind.
You resume your journey with the first rays of the sun. All the way to your base, through the forest and over the rocky terrain, you keep throwing glances at Pythia, but she is surprisingly well-behaved this entire time. Well, aside from her conversation with Elza. Upon learning that Elza’s boyfriend was sent into the troglodyte tunnels for speaking out against Xi, Pythia decided to describe, with gruesome detail, the poor fellow’s ultimate fate, bringing Elza to tears.
Table-san’s condition has… sort of improved. At least she’s capable of basic human functions like walking and eating on her own. Though apparently, she wept through most of the night, at least that’s what eunuch Bob told you this morning. Turns out, he’s a super-light sleeper. Who knew? You decide to put him in charge of protecting Table-san on your journey. It’s not like there’s any real threat of one of your new subordinates doing her harm, but you never know.
Does it make you less of a Demon Lord for caring about some poor human woman you never met before? At the very least you don’t see a reason to be cruel for the sake of being cruel.
You start to recognize your surroundings. Specifically, the particular shape of a couple of mountains in the distance, forming a letter “M”. You’ve seen it before. You’re close to your… “home”.
That’s when you see two small, green goblins appear from behind the rocks up ahead, running straight at your party. Hercule stands between you and the goblins, though that is hardly necessary. The goblins change direction sideways the moment they spot your impressive group. They’re not even armed and are dressed in little more than rags for pants and shoes.
“Summon Spider!” You command and a spider appears a couple of feet ahead of you.
“Capture those two goblins and bring them to me,” you say to the spider calmly and watch her quickly catch up to the goblins and spew her sticky webs at them. You can’t help but smile—no matter how many submissions you cast, nothing beats the absolute loyalty and unquestioning devotion of your loyal summons.
The two goblins fruitlessly try to get out of the webs of your spider, but there’s no chance in all seven hells they could ever accomplish that with their scrawny bodies, even if they had a month. They could be scouts of some larger force, but that is unlikely since they look more like beggars. What worries you is that they came running from the direction of your base.
“Who are you?” You ask the goblins when your loyal spider drops them at your feet.
“Please don’t hurt us!” one of them cries, but he is so hoarse he can barely speak
“Ah! Maybe you could help us?” the other asks with the same voice.
“Help with what?” you ask.
“We were on our way to our home when some strange bunny girls attacked us!”
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“Wait. On your way home?” you ask as the hamster spins the wheel of your brain. Something about this seems…
“Yes! Please! We’re nothing but poor farmers, working for lady Ariadne!”
Oh, no! You remember! Your sister said that seven goblins were all that remained of her subjects, even though you never met them.
“There are only two of you?” you ask. “Where are the others?”
“Ah! They…” the goblins hesitates to answer.
“W-we all ran in different directions! Maybe they’ve run someplace else?”
That doesn’t sound right. To begin with, how could those two let even a single one of these weaklings escape? Maybe Delta with her… tendencies… But Epsilon too?
“Hercule, take these two!” You command the muscle giant. “Double pace everyone!”
Was it too much to trust the dumb bunnies with the protection of one, small door? Something’s not right.
The “M” shaped mountains looked deceptively close, but you end up walking for several more hours before you truly reach the rocky plain that is your front yard, where you fought your first battle in this world, just two days ago. As you approach, you see the entrance to your dungeon-castle. And not only that. You were right to think something was wrong. Very wrong.
Delta and Epsilon are lying unconscious on some kind of white cloth on the ground. Their hands are tied behind their back, both their arms and legs are bound with some old rope. We had a rope? Next to them, you see five goblins, bound and gagged. They’re awake, but not even trying to escape. The only goblin that looks even remotely muscular is tied with a double amount of rope. Seriously, where was all this rope earlier?
Beta is also tied up next to two small piles of hay. She slowly and pitifully moves one strand of hay at a time with her teeth, from one pile to another, writhing on the ground like a worm. After each strand she mumbles something to herself, most likely counting the number of hay strands.
A little behind the tree bunnies you see a figure sitting in lotus position on a large rock. She has two sheathed katanas in her lap. Bunny ears, white shoulder-length hair, black shorts, ankle-high boots and form-fitting black waistcoat with a high neckline. But she’s not smiling like the first time you met her and doesn’t reveal her cute little fang.
As your party approaches, Chi opens her eyes and looks at you with a glare of a thousand deaths.
“You have this one, single chance to undo whatever witchcraft you cast on my comrades,” she says in a low voice. And yet—despite the distance between you and Chi—you hear every single word she says as clearly as you see the sunlight reflected from the katana that she unsheathes. “If you do not, I will kill everyone you brought here, starting with that feathered bitch, and then use all the knowledge I learned from my dear little brother to torture you in ways you could not even begin to imagine!”