""Mystery!"" yelled Kellela and Hayedalf.

Rose, eyes open wide, desperately began forming another axe. Grace emitted wave after wave of her purification magic, striking with renewed vigour. Rrillandral watched on helplessly, none of her abilities useful in the situation.

Mystery's telepathic screams reverberated inside the minds of all five as her soul was eaten away by the pure miasma that had engulfed it, deep within the demon lord's new body.

ding
Well, don't say we didn't warn you. At least you survived your [Astral Projection] addiction for long enough to take the demon lord down with you. [Robust] advances to level 37, for all the good it will do. Whatever were you thinking, flying between your party and the demon lord like that?

"Six levels at once?!" thought Mystery as the pain of her very existence being utterly annihilated slightly lessened. Slightly. Being wiped out of existence still hurt. In fact, it hurt enough that she very nearly, but not quite, managed to avoid continuing her thought with, "I should get eaten by demon lords more often."

Not that she intended to give up anywhere nearly as easily as whoever was writing her messages.

She poured almost all of her mana into a single overcharged [Fireball]. After all, souls weren't flammable. Taking a [Fireball] point blank was far less dangerous than being eaten by the demon lord.

To be fair, many things were far less dangerous than being eaten by the demon lord.

ding
For giving the demon lord mild heartburn, [Fireball] advances to level 23. Nice try, but not enough.

"Fourteen levels at once?!" she thought. "Are the gods playing favourites or something? Drat, I should have fired one with half my mana, got the level boost, and then fired again."

Using the little mana she had left, she pushed [Astral Projection] as hard as it would go, picking a direction and trying to force her way through. [Uncontainable] should have helped, but she had no idea which direction Kellela was in; the demon lord's mass blocked all of her senses, so she was flying completely blind, with even [Sure Navigation] failing to offer any hints.

ding
For forcing your way through gelatinous miasma, [Astral Projection] advances to level 31. And no, we aren't; that would totally be against the rules, and we'd get into real trouble if we ever admitted it.

This time, Mystery didn't comment on the level gain, or even on the ridiculous postscript, concentrating instead on getting out of her gloopy prison.

It was not going well.

---

Dreobeth groaned as he woke up. After Rrillandral had ended up trapped in a dream world, the bindings she'd placed on him had decayed. Hayedalf's cage was intact, but his makeshift enchantments couldn't hold an arch-demon forever. They'd lasted well, but the partially freed demon was finally starting to shake off his magically extended sleep.

"Damn," he muttered, running over the last few minutes of his memory. "Stupid, stupid, demon lord. How can an immortal force of nature be so bloody stupid!"

It took a few more seconds to pry himself from the floor of his enchanted wooden cage, left hanging in a tree, and look around.

"The hell?" he asked rhetorically. "Don't tell me those idiots actually accepted my surrender? What did they do? Just leave me here while they ran off to fight the master? Did they seriously expect this flimsy wooden cage to hold me?"

He glanced over at where he'd buried the egg, his demonic eyes able to see miasma as clearly as light.

"The hell?" he repeated, not having the faintest idea what he was seeing. "What did those freaky girls do to it? I don't see them around, so I guess they lost? Not that I have any idea how they could lose to an immobile egg that can't do anything but shout at people. But maybe this is my opportunity; the fool doesn't seem to be in my head for the moment. If it's that badly injured, maybe I can..."

He let the thought die, uncompleted. It wouldn't do if his master heard it, after all.

The dark fairy flared with miasma, wisps of black flame boring into the cage, eating away at the enchantments and then burning away the wood itself. It was mere minutes until the demon was free.

He gave the area a quick cursory scan; he'd worked with Xander and Blumshtik for centuries, after all, and he owed them at least some amount of effort to check if they were still alive too. After all, if they were, he might want to correct the situation.

When he found Xander's corpse, missing a couple of bones, and realised his cage had literally been partially built from him, he couldn't help breaking down into peals of riotous laughter. Blumshtik was equally dead, which somehow managed to be even more satisfying.

"So, here I am. The last surviving demon. Who'd ever have thought it?" he jovially claimed, still breaking out into occasional fits of giggles as he approached the egg of his hated master.

And then he stopped as traces of the white one's nonsensical purification magic leaked out from it.

"They're inside?!" he yelled. "How in the hells did that happen?"

Hurriedly approaching, he inspected the small patch of the thing that had been exposed to the air. The all-absorbing black shell was now mottled, with white patches spreading across the surface. And with each burst of purification magic from within, the white patches grew.

"No wonder it isn't in my head; it's preoccupied," giggled the demon. "Hopefully, they all kill each other and I can live in peace until the next time the fool is reborn. Or, with the other demons gone, I might even be able to..."

Once again, he stamped down on the thought, hard. Perhaps there was no need to, with the master locked into a fight with the [Hero], but better safe than sorry. He'd seen what happened to demons who were caught thinking about escaping their yoke, and had no intention of following in their truncated footsteps.

"Well, whatever should I do now?" he wondered as a particularly strong burst of purification magic struck the shell from the inside, causing the egg to ring like a bell. "I should run away, I guess. Even if the master wins, it wouldn't be so stupid as to order me to attack anyone when I'm the last demon, and there are hardly any monsters to use as minions, would it?"

He continued to think for a little.

"... It totally would. Dammit. But there's nothing I can do about that. I'll just have to trust in the girls to win."

Another burst struck the egg, and the white patches spread once again, now covering more than half of the surface.

"... Or not," realised Dreobeth. "They... they... can't do that! They aren't killing it, they're purifying it! They can't do that!"

The mind of the tiny demon spun as he worked through the implications. His master in its current form was bad enough, imbecile that it was, but what if it turned 'good'? What if the immortal force of nature reversed its direction, and became a force of order, on the side of the ensouled races? What would such an existence do with a demon whose very mind it could read or write at will?

"I have to stop them," he sighed. "Killing it is one thing, but I can't let them purify the master."

The black fairy rammed into the egg, pushing at the turbulent interface between black and white—a border along which reality frayed—and forced his way through. He popped out into an incomprehensible scene. A tiny mockery of the master was there, barely larger than the girls it was fighting, standing on nothing, one arm missing completely and the other severed at the elbow. It roared ineffectually, flailing uselessly as attack after attack from the white one slammed into it, eroding it to nothing. There was obviously not even a spark of intelligence left within it. There was no threat of it hijacking Dreobeth's will.

And yet, despite standing on the cusp of victory, the girls were panicking.

"She's stopped screaming!" yelled the blue one. "I can't hear her screaming any more!"

"She's still alive!" shouted the pink one. "She must be! There's a world notification when a [Hero] dies!"

"I'm out of mana!" shouted the white one, panting.

"Take mine!" shouted the black one in turn. "Recharge!"

The white one burst with her burning light once more, and Dreobeth flew in a panic, unwilling to let it hit him. But all the attention of the white one was focused upon the master. As was the attention of them all. Not a single one of the girls had noticed his invasion of this space. The portion of the purification wave that hit Dreobeth was weak. It stung, but it did not burn.

"Why are they so desperate?" he wondered.

"He's reduced enough," said the green one. "It's time I did something useful in this battle. If I lose myself, kill me."

"What?!" exclaimed the blue one, but the green one ignored her, and Dreobeth watched in disbelief as she charged at the master and plunged her arm deep into his torso.

She screamed as her veins blackened, the dark lines curving up her arm beneath the sleeve of her dress, then out across her neck.

"Rrillandral? What are you doing?!" shouted the white one, launching another burst of purification.

The black lines on the green one receded slightly before resuming their growth at an even faster pace, as she wiggled her questing arm around inside of the remaining mass of the demon lord.

"She's... looking for something?" pondered Dreobeth. "Their talk about the [Hero]... Don't tell me the [Hero] is inside there? Then all I need to do is wait, and the [Hero] will die? Will the white one lose her power with the death of the [Hero]? Does it matter if she doesn't? As distracted as she is, I could hit her from behind right now and be rid of her forever."

He resisted the urge to laugh. Premature celebration of victory was another character flaw he was doing his best to expunge. Nevertheless, he couldn't help but feel optimistic. The [Hero] would soon be dead. He had the perfect opportunity to take out the white one, the one that posed the greatest threat.

Yet he didn't move.

He had spent so long training himself not to act on impulse. To plan for the long term. If he intervened here, he would remain a slave of the master for the rest of his life. Given the behaviour of his master, that life would likely be short, ordered out of the forest to fight the moment his master's consciousness returned.

If he fled, and the white one completed her purification, he would be the slave of an entity whose behaviours he couldn't hope to guess, but that would likely prove an antithesis of demons. Furthermore, if the [Hero] died in the process, her family and party would likely be upset, and as the only surviving demon, he'd doubtless be the target of their vengeance. That life was also likely to be short.

The fairy said a rude word, then dived towards the girls. There was only one solution that had a reasonable chance of long-term survival. Yes, it also had a very high chance of resulting in a horrible and immediate death, but really, what difference did that make? It wasn't as if he had any grand plans for the next few weeks.

"Whu...?" gasped the blue one as he flew past her ear, ignoring her. She wasn't important. Instead, he grabbed the arm of the green one with impressive strength for something a few inches in height—he was, after all, an arch-demon—then ripped her out of his master and threw her backwards towards the others.

"Fool..." he yelled, the single word all he had time for as he glanced at what remained of the part of the elf that had been infected by the master. It was a pity, he thought, as he looked at her cute claws and appealing patterns running up her arm, one eye having turned blood red; she'd have made a beautiful demon.

The white one was already launching another of her purification waves, but Dreobeth ignored it, diving straight into the body of his fading master, heading directly towards the [Hero]. Even dying, the [Diligent Hero] still shone like a beacon to any demon nearby, and the half-purified miasma was no threat to a demon.

That didn't mean that grabbing hold of a soul was easy. It was a pity the soul of the elf had already eroded from her arm, or he could have just guided her hand to the right place. But that was fine; if he couldn't rip the soul from the miasma, he'd just need to rip the miasma from the soul.

He burst with flame, consuming as much miasma in the area as he could and turning it to heat. Given where he was, that was a rather substantial amount. The result was somewhat larger than Mystery's [Fireball].

His master exploded.

"Mystery!" yelled the pink one, running towards the motionless, floating remains of a soul, utterly ignoring Dreobeth.

Alas for him, the white one ignored him too, launching another purification wave to destroy what remained of the master, eroding the last traces of the miasma that made up its physical form. A wave which approached far too quickly to out-fly.

"My life sucks," declared Dreobeth as the wave parted before him, flowing around him without harming a single hair of his head. After all, what sort of magical girl ability would harm their allies? "Huh?"

"... Thank... you..." came a pair of weak words, barely audible, turning up in his mind without the aid of his ears.

"Or maybe it doesn't..." he corrected himself, watching the [Hero] he'd just saved vanish back inside the pink one while the white one switched from purification to healing.

The green one was staring at him like he'd grown an extra head, her demonisation having ceased now that she didn't have an arm stuck into the literal personification of chaos.

"You just... saved Mystery..." exclaimed the blue one, her face a humorous mask of confusion. "Why? If you'd just done nothing, she would have died. Don't you want her dead?"

"Ideally, yes, but in this case, I had more to gain from her being alive. Saving her was the selfish thing to do," he answered with perfect honesty, wondering why the two simple words from the [Hero] made him feel so strange.

And thus, even a demon was able to experience the wonderful and magical powers of friendship.