30: An Unpleasant Discovery

Court Mage’s view

When the ripple of magic went out across the world, anyone with even a bit of mana sensitivity noticed. This had to be the largest divination spell I’d ever felt. A meeting with all the best minds in magic was immediately held, heedless of the costs involved in teleportation. This wasn’t something to be handled in mere messages. 

We weren’t able to determine much, except that the spell didn’t end. It was an ongoing record keeping spell that appeared to be watching over the entire world. The most obvious location to cast such a thing would be the great tower of wind. Reports tell us the Hero is currently there. We were still arguing over who we’d send when we heard it. An angry and frustrated voice echoing across the heavens.

“WHO TAUGHT THOSE BASTARDS DEMON SUMMONING?!?!”

…

David’s view

Wow… I’ve never been this angry before. Not that I can remember at least.

“Sorry, Ed. I lost myself for a bit.”

“No, it’s okay. Though I think that might’ve been loud enough for the whole world to hear. Felt like there was magic behind that shout of yours.”

“Yeah, sorry. I don’t think I’ve ever been that angry before.”

“You’re clearly still angry.”

“Yeah.”

“Wanna talk about it?”

“Someone is summoning demons and murdering them for their horns. It’s been going on for years.”

Yeah, that expression of shock on Edward’s face seems about right. Took him a bit to recover enough to speak.

“I sorta knew there was a black market for demon horns, but I never imagined they had a way to get more outside of the wars. So, what do we do? Is it time to hunt demon summoners?”

“First, I’m going to create a spell to block the summoning and prevent more victims. Then we hunt demon summoners.”

Having cast the crazy big divination spell I made, I now had access to the entire world’s history, and even knowledge of the present. Before I could even delve that far into the data, I already found something infuriating. It began with the discovery that the population balance had more humans than demons. This was strange, because demons shouldn’t be dying as often, thanks to much safer living conditions. Then I found out why: Demon summoners murdering demons every year. Lots of them doing it too. How they kept this hidden, I don’t know, and don’t really care. I’m sure I could figure it out if I spent enough time studying the data I now have access to, but I’d rather just hunt them all down first, and worry about the why and how later.

…

Edward’s view

It’s a little scary how powerful David can be when he stops holding back. With the power of his flight magic, we reached our first destination rather quickly. Thankfully, he accepted my suggestion of creating illusory wings to borrow angelic symbolism and improve our chances of obtaining a positive reception. It’s a lot easier to convince people that we are following a divine revelation when we show up with a holy glow, and angelic wings. 

It’s not really a lie, exactly. As the hero chosen by god, David is a divine agent, so his discoveries can be considered a divine revelation. It’s just not really him who’s been enlightened by an agent of god, instead he’s the agent of god enlightening the rest of us. 

My ability to convince people of this is rather important, because it seems the first target is a church. Thankfully it’s not an important church, and not in a large city, just one of many town churches. However, it seems the head of this church is David’s target. I hastily threw together a message spell to inform one of the higher ups I report to in the capital, but there’s no way they’ll be able to get here in time to do anything more than clean up the mess… at least I was able to convince David to ensure the mess didn’t include any dead bodies. 

The way David uses holy magic though, truly amazes me. Binding someone in chains of light is a pretty difficult spell, and making them strong enough and last long enough for how he’s using it, is even more impressive. Creating such a thing myself, would leave me completely exhausted, yet he looks unphased. Plus, he never received training in the church. For an untrained person to suddenly display such mastery of holy magic, how could anyone claim he didn’t receive a divine revelation? Though it is a little disturbing to know this mastery came from the knowledge of magic he gained in Demi. 

***Author Note***

Rolled dice to figure out which way the population balance was leaning and they said it was strongly in favor of humanity. Then rolled to see how much this was the demons fault… not at all apparently, so I can’t blame it on stupidity or magical research. So I had to come up with a different idea and this is what I ended up with: Humans doing something terrible.