At that moment, Kōichi stood right in the middle of Axel's city gate plaza, the setting sun, or maybe Beldia's own black miasma, stretching his shadow long behind him.
He tilted his head slightly and swept his gaze over his shoulder.
Behind him stood a dense mass of adventurers from Axel's guild.
Normally, this bunch was either getting drunk or sinking deeper into debt, but at this moment they were all standing behind him in solemn silence, weapons in hand.
Kōichi even spotted that punk Dust and his gang of deadbeat friends.
For no particular reason, a surge of heroic passion welled up in Kōichi's chest. Was this the power of bonds? Was this the rallying pull of a leader? Even if his own teammates were all disasters, as long as these several hundred elites of Axel were here, a mere Dullahan...
"Kazuma, do you see that? This is where the people's hearts are. As long as we hold the first wave, the guys behind us will drown that bag of bones like a tidal wave!"
Kōichi lowered his voice, and there was a grim kind of coolness in his tone, like a man ready to die gloriously.
Kazuma straightened his back as well. His hands were still shaking, but his eyes had sharpened.
"...Kōichi, I feel it too. That's the weight of justice! Since everyone's watching, I, Kazuma Satou, am going to be a hero for once today!"
Just then, the head Beldia was holding let out a contemptuous snort, and his right leg, clad in pitch-black armor, stepped forward with force.
Thud—!!!
The heavy armor slammed against the ground, sending out a visible ring of black ripples.
"If you worthless insects want to die together, then I shall grant..."
Beldia hadn't even finished speaking, and he hadn't even swung his sword yet, when a series of incredibly synchronized, incredibly swift, utterly unhinged footsteps suddenly came from behind Kōichi.
Shuffle shuffle shuffle shuffle shuffle—!!!
Kōichi and Kazuma instinctively turned around.
The several hundred adventurers who had looked united just moments ago were now fleeing in wild retreat at a speed that even the finest Thief would have struggled to match.
In just three seconds, the once-crowded gate plaza was empty except for scattered wine bottles, a trampled cabbage, and Kōichi's party left standing in the wind.
Dust was the fastest one of all. He even turned back and yelled, "Kōichi! Kazuma! Hold him off for a bit! We're heading to the guild to order your victory feast, and maybe help write your wills while we're at it! Hang in there, pride of Axel!!"
In the blink of an eye, those so-called comrades had retreated all the way to the base of the city wall five hundred meters away. Some of them had even pulled out binoculars and popcorn, wearing the most punchable we're-just-passing-spectators expressions imaginable.
Across the empty plaza, only Aqua's miserable sobbing echoed.
"Waaahhh! They ran! They all ran! Kōichi, we're dead! Take me with you too! I don't want to get turned into a chew toy for skeleton soldiers!"
Kōichi and Kazuma froze.
Their formerly cool poses now looked like two stage comedians who had forgotten their lines.
"...Kōichi," Kazuma said, still holding his sword-drawing pose as he slowly turned his stiff neck, the corner of his mouth twitching so hard it looked ready to fly off, "that weight of justice I was talking about just now... it suddenly got a lot lighter. Like only a few grams. The kind that blows away in the wind."
"...Same here, Kazuma." Kōichi stared at the Beldia ahead of them, who had already started laughing out loud, and felt his blood pressure breaking past human limits. "I take it back. Axel doesn't have any elites. This place is just full of hopeless, shameless, irredeemable trash adventurers straight out of a gag manga!!"
Beldia held his own head in one hand, laughing so hard his armor shook.
"Hahahaha! Humans! Is this the bond you're so proud of?! Splendid! Absolutely splendid! This ugly instinct for self-preservation is practically more evil than our Demon King's Army! Well then, now that no one is in the way... are you ready to meet death?"
At that moment, time itself seemed to stop in Axel's gate plaza.
Kōichi and Kazuma Satou, the two Reincarnators from the civilized world, displayed astonishing synchronization in the face of a double crisis, pigheaded teammates fleeing at the last second, and a Demon King's General going berserk.
No words were exchanged. No glances were shared. All it took was the slightest lowering of their centers of gravity, and in that instant, their souls became one.
"One, two!"
At Kazuma's signal, the two of them moved in perfect unison under Beldia's murderous gaze, as neatly coordinated as a ceremonial guard drilled a thousand times over.
Their knees bent slightly, their waists folded to a perfect ninety degrees, their hands pressed flat against their pant seams, and their heads lowered until they were practically about to knock against the muddy ground.
"We are deeply sorry, Beldia-sama!! It was our failure to keep our people in line. The crazy woman in our group blew up your grand residence, and the idiot in our group kicked your precious armor!! Please, we beg you to forgive our rudeness!!"
Kōichi and Kazuma's voices echoed across the open plaza, full of sincerity, humility, and the sort of desperate survival instinct that practically screamed, Just don't kill me. I'll do anything.
Beldia, who had been laughing uproariously, fell silent on the spot.
The severed head in his hand hung there with its mouth wide open, the expression on its face shifting from anger to shock, then from shock to a deep, surreal sense of absurdity.
He had crossed countless battlefields over the years. He had seen Heroes who would rather die than yield, and deserters who pissed themselves running away, but this was the first time he had ever seen humans in the middle of a battlefield perform such a textbook, such a professional dogeza-style apology to the enemy commander.
"...Hey. You two." Beldia's voice came out a little hoarse as he brought the head in his hand closer, as though trying to confirm whether he had fallen under some kind of illusion. "Where is your dignity? Where is your pride as Adventurers? I've already drawn my sword. I was fully prepared to grant you an honorable death, and instead you're... apologizing to me?"
"Dignity can't be exchanged for Eris! And it definitely won't block your curse!" Kazuma stayed bent over, his voice coming out from under his own crotch, somehow both shameless and weirdly self-righteous. "Kōichi is right. We're here to solve the problem, not to throw our lives away! If you still don't feel better about this, we can hand over this little Crimson Demon Clan brat to you for five years of free labor. She can haul bricks for your castle!"
"Hey! Kazuma! Kōichi! What are you two spineless cowards talking about?!" Megumin shouted, face red with fury as she swung her staff so hard it whistled through the air. "I am Megumin! I will never accept such a humiliating agreement! And besides, I only know Explosion Magic. I don't know how to haul bricks at all!"
"Shut up! Nobody asked for your opinion!" Kōichi snapped without even raising his head. Then, in an even more submissive voice, he said to Beldia, "My lord, look at it this way. If you kill us, not only will you get no compensation, you'll also end up with a reputation for bullying the weak. So how about this instead. The blue-haired one in our party may not be very bright, but she's actually an extremely high-performance water purifier. We can send her to your castle every day for a full-coverage, no-dead-angle holy water dis... no, air purification service. What do you think?"
Beldia went silent.
He looked at the two men bowing deeply before him, then at the perverted Crusader nearby with a disappointed look on her face because she had not been cut down, then at the blue-haired girl still clutching her foot and crying.
All at once, he felt that, as a Demon King's General, standing here and bickering with this bunch of lunatics was nothing less than an insult to his professional career.
"...Enough. I've had enough of you freaks." Beldia shoved his head back onto his neck in irritation, though it sat a little crooked, then violently swung his greatsword and pointed it at Darkness. "If you're so eager to apologize, then let this woman receive my curse! If she survives for one week, I will acknowledge your sincerity. Otherwise, I'll turn every last one of you into skeleton laborers!!"
A streak of pitch-black light burst from his fingertips in an instant and shot straight toward Darkness's chest!