After Fran had come to terms with the possibility that the village would be destroyed today and that there was nothing she could do to stop it, she lowered her weapon. She decided to switch from fighting the two demons for the sake of extracting information about their strength to watching them in order to learn about their movements and behaviour.

Luckily, they didn't appear to have any aggressive thoughts at the moment. But even then, Fran's body was ready to get the heck out of there as soon as the situation got spicy.

From what she could tell from their interaction so far, the first arrived demon, a small, black-haired demon girl of about one metre in height, seemed to be the superior one of the two.

This observation also confirms the information she had learned in the past, that the stronger the high-ranking demons are, the more they resemble the human race in appearance, especially Humans.

After all, apart from the two horns on her head, the black-haired and black-eyed demon looked just like any other girl you might find running around in the streets.

The other, much taller demon, while still resembling a Human woman, had a few more appendixes on her body, like the black wings sprouting out from her waist and the thin but long tail with a heart-shaped tip. In addition to that, the maid outfit that this demon wore and her behaviour towards the smaller one screamed out to the world that she was the black-haired demon's subordinate.

“Serena, take care of our real target. I'll follow when I'm done here.”

“Yes, milady.”

At the command of the smaller demon girl, the taller one kneeled down in respect and disappeared as fast as she had reappeared earlier.

However, Fran didn't even care at the moment what strange magic the demon had just cast, as she had never seen anybody move that fast before, nor had she heard anything about the existence of teleportation magic. After all, the smaller demon's words sounded rather ominous to her.

So, having enough of the current situation, Fran was about to turn around and hightail it.

“Wait.”

But contrary to what her mind had told Fran to do, her body stopped upon hearing that word. It felt like a command from a king, an absolute being, a god even. Whatever it was, it was an order from someone nobody could and should disobey. So, despite screaming at her body to get the hell out of there, she turned around again to face the demon girl.

Seeing this, the demon smiled delightedly and skipped towards the elf. When she arrived, she circled Fran a few times to take a look at her from every possible angle before stopping in front of her. Then, as if being satisfied with something, she nodded a few times before finally speaking up.

“You've grown up beautifully. As expected!”

“...”

Even though the demon's words made no sense to Fran, she just chose to remain silent so as not to accidentally upset the demon. After all, it was apparent that her life was now in the hands of this demon.

“How old are you?”

This time, however, Fran felt like she couldn't afford to keep quiet, so she simply answered truthfully.

“32”

“Huh!? 32!?... Hmm... It's later than I thought. I never thought she'd last that long... That's regrettable...”

After mumbling some incomprehensible words, the demon waved her hands in the air as if to send her thoughts away and returned her attention back to the elf.

“Well, whatever. Kukuku... It seems she hasn't told you anything. This might be even better... Kukuku... Well then. I'll be off. I'm sure we'll meet again. Until then, take care.”

After saying this and snickering quite ominously, the demon turned around and left. But instead of disappearing like the other demon, the girl just walked slowly into the forest.

Only when the demon was nowhere to be seen anymore, did Fran feel the tension fade away, resulting in her falling to her knees and gasping for air as if she had just run a marathon.

Despite the obvious relief she felt, it didn't mean her mind was in a calm state again. While it was true that her life seemed to be out of danger, it was only one of the countless problems she was facing at the moment. After all, the uncertain state of her pupil's mind, which was one hundred percent Fran's doing, still had to be resolved.

First of all, as already stated, the village of Mousa probably had no future with the appearance of the two demons. As already proven earlier, there was no way Fran could fight them off to protect the village. However, it was only one village. Such situations, where unprotected settlements were raided and destroyed, had happened before. This one would just be another one. So, for Fran, this wasn't that much of a problem.

The next point, however, was far worse for her.

In Fran's perception, Rina is already done for. There was no way to rationalise why Rina's case in particular would end differently from all the known cases of people touching a Demon-Spawning-Cloud. So not only did she have to come to terms with the fact that she and the world had lost their trump card against the demons, but she now also had to fight off the grief that was slowly creeping up on her for losing someone quite, no, pretty, no, deeply important to her. Apart from this, she didn't even want to think about the reaction of a certain noble lady with blonde, curly hair waiting in the Capital upon learning about this.

But in the end, these problems were royally overshadowed by a realisation she should have had much earlier, despite the current emotional baggage she had on her shoulders. It should have occurred to her as soon as she had seen the two demons. After all, it was something that could overwhelmingly change the future course in which Yggildos was moving.

For it was only now, when she seemed to be safe and the adrenaline rush in her body had died down, that Fran truly registered that...

'We're able to communicate!'

***

For most of the current century, the Valkyria Kingdom has been plagued by demon appearances. In addition to that, as time progresses, the number of such cases has increased. It's so common now that it's no exaggeration to say that demon attacks occur every week somewhere in the kingdom.

Fortunately, the prophecy of the demon invasion has been known since the kingdom was founded nearly a millennium ago. So, all the past rulers had ensured that the general population had a certain amount of strength so that they could at least defend themselves in case of an attack.

So, even though most commoners and peasants were not trained fighters, they still had decent muscular strength, meaning that with enough courage and sacrifice, a common demon could be subjugated with 20 to 50 untrained peasants. Thus, it wasn't too far-fetched to think that a large, unprotected village could survive an attack by a common demon. Not to forget that it was already highly unlikely that a particular village would face such a threat, considering how many of them exist around the world. Though, destruction would be certain were a village to be attacked twice.

Furthermore, the heroic King Gaius Miriculan I, who founded the Kingdom of Valkyria, had the foresight to build the capital city in the west of his territory close to the border of the demon lands, thus forming a protective wall for the rest of the kingdom. As the capital and largest city of the kingdom with the most population, it was, funnily enough, both the most dangerous place to live due to its proximity to the demons' territory and the safest due to the number of soldiers stationed there.

So, for the past few decades, most of the Demon-Spawning-Cloud appearances and, thus, most of the demon attacks were concentrated on the outskirts of Valhale, the capital. Fortunately, with the capital close by, trained reinforcements from there often arrived in time. Therefore, one could say that everything has gone according to plan so far.

However, since the new king came to power, the capital has stopped sending soldiers to the villages, leaving them in a position where it was more than just possible to face multiple demon attacks in a decade without trained support. So, even though it was possible to fight off a demon or two with great effort and sacrifice, their downfall was imminent.

All that, however, had never been the case for the village of Mousa.

Even though it was located southwest of Valhale and, therefore, even closer to the border of the demon territory, it had never been attacked by demons, which was highly unlikely for villages in that region. That and the fact that Mousa was quite large for being unfortified was supposed to make it a prime target for demon raids.

So, as ridiculous as it might sound, one of the former village chiefs had declared that Mousa was a place 'protected by a higher being'. That could have been the only reason why this village had remained untouched by demons for so long.

Although most villagers in the past had just shrugged at that declaration at first, it changed as that generation had passed on and new ones took the reigns. So now, not even a century later, almost everybody in Mousa was a believer in that absurd statement.

The current chief, Paul, who had grown up in Mousa when the story was on the rise, naturally belonged to that group of believers, like almost everyone. He had to. After all, as one of the most capable men in the village, who could even cast a few low-tier Fire spells, he would have to fight against demons in the front-line, were one to appear. And that would be highly undesirable.

For the first half of his life, it looked like that his hope could come true. Sadly for him, it had changed about a decade and a half ago. It was all because of this shitty red-haired b*tch in front of him and her parents. Since her stupid father's actions or her birth, the real reason be damned, a demon had appeared and wreaked havoc in the village.

After all, he could never forget the horror he felt when he had faced such a demonic being a decade ago and, in addition to that, lost his family and most of his friends. Initially, he had assumed that that attack was the only one. But if what the High Priestess said about those black clouds were true, including the most recent appearance of such a cloud, it would already be the third attack in way less than two decades!

It was obvious that the gods, or whatever else had previously protected the village, were angry. So, he and all the important people in the village had gathered to appease them by making sure that the reason for all that, the girl in front of him, wished she would have never been born. Only when she begs for her life to finally end would he kill her.

That was how it was supposed to end. After all, how hard could it be to break a young girl's mind and body who had just entered adulthood?

Yes, there was a time when Paul had thought that.

At the beginning of the torture session, the girl tied to the stone bed in front of him screamed at the top of her lungs each time he scarred her limb, burned her skin, or twisted her fingers. But not even an hour later, all the screams had died down, and she just stared at him with her red eyes.

At first, he was afraid that he had gone too far and that she had lost consciousness or, even worse, died with her eyes open. After all, he was finally able to vent his anger and grief at this hateful girl in front of him, so perhaps he had been too eager. But luckily for him, it was clear upon closer inspection that neither was the case.

However, it was at this moment that he started to get scared. Not because of the fact that he was literally torturing a human being, a very young one at that, but rather because the subject of his torture stopped showing emotion halfway through.

So, with sweat slowly but surely forming on his back and all of the enthusiasm from the beginning gone, he turned around to where the other high-ranking villagers were watching and muttered in a weak voice, “How about we end this now? It seems like she won't react anymore. It's pointless to continue,” to which they nodded after a short consideration

Glad that most of the audience seemed to agree with him, largely since most of the audience seemed to feel the same, he grasped the iron bar with both hands, raised it above the red-haired gir, and pointed the sharpened end at her chest.

“[Heat]”

Then, with a short chant, he applied his magic on the bar to heat it up with as much power as possible, not caring about the fact that his hands, gripping the hot metal bar, burned in the process. It was as if he did it to fight off his fear of the girl with the pain in his palms.

Last but not least, he took a deep breath and, with all the force he could muster, thrust it down.