Chapter 341: Episode 341_Life Is About Coming Empty-Handed and Leaving Loaded (2)

3.

Everyone wants peace.

That is also why the upper class tends to be conservative.

Change always carries the possibility of gaining much, but it also inherently means you could lose a great deal.

Those who have spent a long time solidifying their positions will risk their lives to reject changes—even those that might seem beneficial at a glance—for this very reason.

Because you never know how things will turn out.

To give up even a little of your current position in order to gain more ultimately means taking a loss on what you already have.

Of course, if you don’t have much to begin with, and the potential reward far outweighs what you stand to lose, then it’s worth considering whether to take a loss or make an investment.

But things rarely work out that easily.

Especially not in reality.

If someone threatens your position, it means they have also weighed the risks of change and decided to proceed—and their goals will almost never align with your own.

That was why many people had been worried.

Long before the war broke out, from the moment Han Simin had first crossed over to the continent with the Demon King.

—Hey, so Simin’s getting away with it now by dressing the Demon King up as the Heavenly King and riding high, but what happens if that blows up in his face?

—What do you mean what happens? His life blows up, that’s what. 𝚏𝗿𝗲𝐞𝐰𝚎𝕓𝐧𝚘𝘃𝗲𝐥.𝐜𝚘𝕞

—No, you idiot, I mean what happens after that. We’re just viewers, so we can just go, “Oh, so that’s how it is. He’s screwed,” and keep watching, but from the NPCs’ perspective, that’s not how it looks. The reality is, some adventurer bastard teamed up with Demons, brought the Demon King to the continent, passed him off as the Heavenly King, and has been toying with the entire continent. You think they’re just going to let that slide? They’ll strip him of his territory and title on the spot. And that’s if they’re being nice. More likely, it’ll be infinite kill-on-sight.

—True.

—And you think Simin, with his personality, is just going to sit there and take it? No way. Hell, even if it wasn’t Simin, who wouldn’t be pissed enough to want to go on a rampage? It’s not real life, it’s a game. There’s no real downside to going nuts.

—You’ve got a point.

—You know how it is. When your life gets ruined, all you feel is emptiness and you head for the Han River, but when your income gets ruined, the only thing on your mind is how to get revenge.

—So you’re saying Simin will go on a rampage? How? The Demon King can’t even play his role as a Demon King right now.

—Hey, you dumbass. When everything you own is about to go up in flames, you think he won’t find at least one way?

—Then what’s he supposed to do?

“I wasn’t trying to be confrontational. I was just thinking out loud. It suddenly occurred to me, you know? Simin stopped the continent’s crisis, but what if that lunatic gets into a mood and summons the demons? What if, after squeezing every last drop he can from the continent, he just goes around destroying the whole thing?”

The listener remained silent.

“You know what the worst-case scenario is?”

“What?”

“I’ve been watching Simin’s stream since his very first Enhancement, for over a year now.”

“Yeah.”

“That bastard would absolutely use the demons to keep the Users on life support, just barely breathing. And then he’d try to make even more money than he lost when his foundation on the continent collapsed.”

“Come on, that’s a bit of a stretch. If he has half a brain, he wouldn’t go that far.”

“I think so too. I’m just saying, it could happen.”

Among the people who watched Han Simin’s stream, only a tiny fraction let their imaginations run wild like this.

Even if the scenario was entirely plausible, the idea that a User who had poured twenty hours a day into the game for a year and a half would deliberately steer things toward ruin was an absurd choice. It made no sense in both the short and long term.

Losing your foundation could happen in an instant, but making such a ridiculous choice could lead down a path where the very ground needed to rebuild that foundation vanished entirely.

So they had just laughed it off.

They had never dreamed it would actually happen.

*

The demons were enduring a hellish existence.

The world they inhabited was already a hell from a human’s perspective, but for the demons, it had become a hell in a completely different sense.

It all began when the age-old boundary between Heaven and the Demon World finally collapsed. The Demon King was defeated by the Heavenly King and fled to the continent, and then the Heavenly King returned to his domain.

The Heavenly King’s all-out offensive was relentless. To survive, the demons had to do whatever they could to flee and evade the Celestials.

Fights broke out sporadically, but the Celestials, led by the Heavenly King, swept through the Demon World like an unstoppable tide. There was some resistance, but any demons who weren’t battle-types or had taken refuge in hideouts could not escape the Celestials’ iron hammer.

Even as they endured such brutal days, the demons never once blamed their Demon King.

“Damn those Celestial bastards.”

“So they were hiding their true nature all along.”

“Massacring and ravaging even demons who can’t fight? Unforgivable.”

They were a race born for battle.

At the same time, their sense of community as “the demon race” was extremely strong.

They did not believe one defeat meant eternal failure, and they clung to the hope that they would one day have their revenge once the Demon King returned.

That hope had been the driving force that sustained the demon race for tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands of years.

So the demons held their breath and waited.

Someday, their chance would surely come.

For them, that chance came sooner than expected.

A storm of dark magic swirled, pulling at their bodies.

The demons did not question the strange phenomena occurring all across the Demon World.

“The Demon King!”

Dark magic that transcended dimensions.

They believed there could be only one source.

One by one, the demons began to throw themselves into the maelstrom of dark magic.

4.

One hundred thousand Gold.

Simin had agonized over it for a long time.

It was undeniably a huge amount, but the decision was made harder by the fact that he had blown through far more Gold than that in previous spending sprees.

Of course, that same experience was also why he had been able to make his decision so quickly.

Experience is the best teacher, after all. He had personally paid Gold to cast Meteor and had used other large-scale AoE skills, so he could estimate the cost.

’There’s no way Meteor is going to cut it here.’

There were simply too many of them.

Just at a glance, he knew there was no way a few falling stars could devour that many humans.

On top of that, Han Simin had received a request from the aide.

To protect the territory.

He had already confirmed that flashy AoE spells like Meteor didn’t come with some convenient feature that spared the person who had summoned him. If he called down Meteor here, it would be nothing more than a decision to go up in a blaze of glory along with the ants swarming below.

That would end the war, sure.

Along with the fall of the Rich Territory.

The instigators of the war would click their tongues in regret that they hadn’t been able to devour the Rich Territory, but the ordinary people of the continent would clap and cheer that evil had been vanquished.

And the one who would be happiest of all would be the Heavenly King.

He could not allow that to happen.

So instead of an AoE spell, he chose summoning magic.

Strictly speaking, it was more of a magic circle than a spell.

“Epia, can you control them?”

“I’m not sure. I’ve never tried to control demons with my power sealed like this.”

“...Still, you’re the Demon King. Won’t they listen out of fear of retaliation?”

“If demons were the type to be afraid of that, they wouldn’t be demons.”

“Really?”

“Yes. Honestly, I’ll be lucky if they don’t just rush in to kill me before they even bother with the humans, once they realize how weak I’ve become.”

Simin was speechless.

He wanted to say, ’No way, would they really go that far when the fate of the demon race is on the line?’ But when he stopped and tried to think from a demon’s perspective, he had to admit it was possible.

If he were a demon, and if he could be resurrected even after death, then it would be far easier to cut off the head of a weakened Demon King and become the new ruler himself than to fear death and fight humans. That would be a much better way to plan for the future.

Besides, they weren’t even in the Demon World right now; they were on the continent.

It might seem like the very survival of the Demon World was at stake, but he couldn’t assume that every demon would act purely for the good of their world.

That was a major problem.

However, once a Gate was opened, it could not be undone.

The massive Gate yawned open in the sky, and demons poured out of it.

Seeing the horror freeze on the faces of the ants below washed away at least a little of the unease in his heart.

“Serves you right. Even if I die, I’m not dying alone.”

Whether it was Meteor or the demons, neither could be controlled.

In that case, a massive number of demons who would fight to the death to kill humans was a better choice than a Meteor that would just take a lot of enemies with him in one shot.

Tens of thousands of demons that had fallen from the sky now faced the humans.

Fortunately, the demons’ wings and horns were intact.

A strange silence fell.

In the midst of it, Epia did not step forward.

The demons, in that silence, quickly scanned their surroundings to grasp the situation.

The Demon King was nowhere in sight.

Instead, they felt something.

The countless humans surrounding them.

The enormous killing intent those humans were directing toward them.

That killing intent had not originally been aimed at them, but now, it was.

That could only mean one thing.

“Humans...”

“The Demon King was being attacked by humans.”

“How dare they...!”

“Where is the Demon King?”

War!

Han Simin didn’t know that the demons, tormented by the Celestials of Heaven, were on the verge of exploding with rage, but his timing was perfect.

Once the demons confirmed that only part of their power was restricted and that they were otherwise unharmed, humans were by no means an object of fear.

Dark magic began to whirl across the battlefield.

“But where is the Demon King?”

“I don’t feel any dark magic.”

“Is that important right now? Those damn humans are attacking the Demon King because the Celestials look down on us. We need to teach them a lesson.”

“No, but there’s no way the Demon King could have been beaten by such lowly humans. And he wouldn’t have called us just because he was in danger. But I really don’t feel any dark magic...”

“Waaaaaah!”

The one sensible question raised in the chaos was drowned out by the roar of the humans, whose fighting spirit blazed alongside the swirling dark magic.

What did it matter?

At least, to the demons, the current situation meant only this:

“As expected of the Demon King! He saw that we were in danger and is using this opportunity to conquer the continent! We love you, Demon King!”

Somewhere, the Demon King was watching.

And that Demon King was, at the very least, the strongest, most vicious, and most brutal Demon King ever to take the throne.

The demons charged toward the humans.

Han Simin slipped quietly along behind them.

*