After the demon lord’s cheerful greeting to Marcel, he just did the cool ‘playboy on the bed whose satisfied with himself’ pose as he stared at Marcel and once again smiled like his life wasn’t on the line. This Marcel thought was pretty provoking and he started getting annoyed, not for long though. 

The demon lord’s smile could probably wipe out a few thousand people, was what Marcel thought as he stared at the man who called him his wife earlier.  

“What did he mean by that? Am I the one getting married or is he still dreaming?” Marcel asked himself. He promised himself that he’d never act stupid, absentminded or densely like he had before after he remembered everything that happened to him yesterday, but this guy’s words left him at a loss. 

He thought and thought trying to find answers. His tattoo strictly told him, “You’re the wife!” and he himself already knew that this was probably the case, but he still denied it. To prove that all that about being a wife was just a delusion, he finally asked the man beside him about it. 

“Who's this wife you speak of... and why am I still in this bed?” The other man flinched for a second at Marcel’s question.  

“Did he really not know about him being his wife when he walked into his castle practically defenseless?! Oh crap!” Thoughts like these ran inside the demon lord’s head. 

And yes, Marcel was described by the demon lord as defenseless, you know. Walking headfirst into your enemy’s castle without even your most powerful weapon at hand. It was like he was asking for something bad to happen to him. 

And when the demon lord heard from Letia that he wouldn’t be a problem, he just took it as, “Yes, he’s aware that he’s going to be my wife” and when he went into heat upon seeing him, he saw it like something you’d do with your wife, so he just went for it. 

All he thought he needed to do was coax himself into the good graces of the hero who had agreed to be his wife, but that was like most things, was not even close to the truth. 

Uh-oh. Now he knew why he had a sense of urgency to apologize to the hero after he had done the “deed”. He really might die now that he had unjustly assaulted the hero. He also understands now why he begged him to stop in the middle of it yesterday and that just added more spin to the storm of guilt brewing up inside of him. 

He firmly reprimanded himself after those thoughts. How could he just take someone without their consent like he had done? He just thought that the hero already knew about it, which explains why he came to him shabbily prepared like he did.  

But Marcel wasn’t shabbily prepared at all. He had used his hero aura to effortlessly procure a full set grade A armor. His armor comprised of shoulder guards, a chest plate, gauntlets and fully armored boots. There was also a pair of knee guards and a helmet to boot although he just didn’t want to make himself fully stiff so he just put them in storage. It was armor befitting someone who’d defeat the demon lord, at least in human standards. It’s a wonder that his future husband managed to get rid of all of them last night before he did the deed. 

“Yes, let’s talk...” Marcel looked really angry, like he was about to dish out the punishment of the century as he slowly pulled out Frostbite from his storage in a dramatic manner.  

“Let’s talk about how you did all those naughty stuff to me and even though I told you to stop you still...” He was interrupted, “Oh, so he chose you, huh?” Another phrasing of words that left Marcel confused, again. He was still telling himself to not act ignorant in front of him, but he couldn’t suppress the urge to ask, “What?” 

“Your sword, obviously. Uh, didn’t you know what your sword is? Your sword is a dragon.” The answer left Marcel in a daze, unable to process the information for a few seconds before he finally came to his senses.  

“A dragon?” He asked in an unbelieving tone. The other party just answered with a casual nod and then said, “I’ll tell you all about it later, my wife.” Marcel who once again heard the same again felt inclined to ask every single detail pertaining to the subject. 

“It looks like she didn’t make it clear enough, so let me enlighten you. You’re my wife!!” He said at the top of his voice as if making a proclamation. The words echoed inside Marcel’s mind for a while and then he also went on to scream at the top of voice, “Huh?!!!” 

“Yes, and the one who gave you the title of hero should have been the one to tell you that.” The demon lord gritted his teeth, looking pissed and grumpy at a certain someone, who was probably who knows where, doing who knows what. 

[The spirit of the world sneezed, wondering if someone was talking about her.] 

“Huh... bu-but I never agreed to marry you in the first place. In any case, why would I want to marry the most sinister man in the world anyway?” Marcel let out his complains. 

“Hey, I’m not sinister... Who told you that?” The demon lord looked like he was very unhappy to be referred to as the most sinister being in the world. 

“Huh, everyone knows that you’re evil.” Marcel stated as if it was common knowledge. 

“Who said I was evil?” The demon lord asked him. 

“Humans obviously. They said that you’ve enslaved every monster under your control and that you’re the cause of all the evil that exists in the world.” 

“Ah-huh... That’s just because the humans have never been here before, well apart from the heroes that is and a few exceptions. Humans also have a tendency to brand anything they don’t know about as evil and wish to exploit from those who have what they don’t.  

“Have they ever asked themselves what demons do every day? Well here’s the answer, they wake up, go to work, eat and sleep just like them, but what happens when a demon accidentally finds themselves on the other side of the rift and into the human world. Let me tell you, they get enslaved and made into pets, slaves to contracts and in some cases killed as a way to power up. Humans are so selfish. Humph.” The demon puffed his cheeks. 

“Pfft!” Marcel thought of laughing, but then he held it in. The demon lord seemed to notice it and said, “This isn’t a laughing matter, you know. The humans always try to come up with ways to invade this dimension. Thanks to the fact that there are rifts in time space which stop the majority of humans from entering this dimension, my subjects are all safe as long as they’re here or in any other dimension apart from the human realm.” The demon lord said with a smile on his face at the end. It looked so beautiful that Marcel almost fell for him. Almost, I said almost. The demon lord wasn’t going to win his heart yet with a smile. He still had a lot of questions. 

“You say that, but what about all the heroes you killed. Didn’t you do the same thing you said humans do?” The question perplexed the demon lord more than Marcel had expected it to. He just stared as the beautiful face that seemed to be confused. 

“Eh, what are you talking about? I didn’t kill the heroes. As a matter of fact, no one did, well except for three who wanted to steal my throne, that is.” He stated with a straight face. 

“Huh, but they never returned to the human world. That’s what I heard. No one has ever seen the heroes and their parties again after they went into the rift.”  

“Yes, that’s be expected. The hero’s party probably ended up in one of the multiple dimensions in the universe, but the hero always arrives in this one. Almost all 370 heroes made it here and then they found something important to them, leaving me alone.” The demon lord once again put all the facts on the table. Marcel was stunned to hear the story of the heroes, beginning at the parts he had missed since they were never written down. 

“If you didn’t kill them, then who did?” He still continued to insist that the demon lord was the murderer who led them all to their end. 

“Ah, like I told you, I didn’t and no one else did. I just told you that said they found something important to them and left me alone...” He looked frustrated, having to keep explain the same thing over and over again, but then he sighed for a moment and continued, “Yes, all the heroes who made it into the demon realm thought I had done something to their companions who mysteriously vanished, even though they had all entered the rift together. It’s a good thing that you decided to come here alone.” 

“So, what happened afterwards?” Marcel looked eager to hear more, so the demon lord indulged him. 

“Yes, coming back to that. They all insisted that I had used their companions as hostages or something and tried to defeat me, but alas, I was too powerful for all of them. So, after countless days, months or even years of fighting me, they’d finally give up and find someone else, name them as their arch-rivals instead and then clash with each other on several occasions until they got tired of it and finally fell in love with each other and then with my blessing, get married. This pattern has gone on for millions of years. The heroes would then spontaneously reincarnate after they died into a creature of the demon realm and live their mortal or sometimes immortal lives together. You can find some of the previous heroes up and around sometimes if you look closely.”  

That much information almost made Marcel’s head explode, but he got the gist of what had happened between the previous heroes and the demon lord, but he still had one vital question to ask that’d soon leave him devastated and fill him with hopelessness. 

“So, if all the heroes knew that they couldn’t defeat you in the end, why didn’t they just go back to the human world? Because they never came back, everyone thought that you’d done them in.” Marcel finally asked, the answer he wasn’t going to like. 

“That’s because once the hero comes to the demon realm, he can never go back to the human realm. They aren’t fully human in the first place, so they can’t expect to be flung into another dimension like their companions either without something special happening.” The demon lord noticed Marcel slowly bringing the sword he was still holding, by the way, closer to him. He just raised his hand and the sword seemed to levitate out of Marcel’s hand and into his. 

“So, this is how you look this time...” He said as he examined the sword. Afterwards, he just said to the sword, “Come out, Frostbite. It’s not nice to ignore people.”  

The sword as if it heard every word the demon lord had said began to glow and when the demon lord threw it, an immense surge of energy, blue in color filled the room and took to the skies. The energy was cold and unwelcoming and just like its name implied, it carried a freezing chill to it.  

The energy the sword generated could be seen from anywhere in the demon realm and some familiar dragon exclaimed, “Brother!!” 

Back to the room. After the beam of light had subsided came a man with icy blue hair in a while coat embroidered in snow flake designs in blue with similar white pants and white pair of shoes. He was very handsome too and all Marcel could do was stare at him. 

“Huh, a man. But didn’t he mention earlier that Frostbite was a dragon? Just what exactly is going on... and it-it-it's cold~.” He thought and then he sneezed. “Just what is going on here?”