Yomigaeri no Maou Chapter 3

Seven years had pa.s.sed by since the time Luru’s memories as the demon king returned and he began his life as a baby.
He had pa.s.sed over the days when he couldn’t move, and since he had been able to move about on his own feet, you could say that Luru’s life had undergone a dramatic change.
At any rate, as an infant, the only things he could look at were his parents, the servants, and excepting his parents acquaintances who would occasionally come by, there was nothing besides that except for the ceiling and bed.
Even if they took him out somewhere, it seems that they thought that having him out for too long was bad for his body, so would immediately bring him back into his room, and so there wasn’t much time for him to observe anything else.

Compare to that lifestyle, just how were things now?
He was able to move as he fancied and pleased, and able to walk about as he pleased, and visit the places that he pleased.
Having overcome the period as a baby when he could do nothing, Luru truly felt that being able to walk was a marvellous thing.

Being able to go outside meant that there were many things he had learned, but first of all, that where Luru was living now was a residence located in a frontier village.
Though Luru’s father was a lower cla.s.s n.o.ble, he was different to common villagers in that he had greater prosperity in his property and lifestyle.
Having said that though, compared to the period in which Luru was the demon king, the difference them and the other villagers was very little, and at best they lived in a slightly bigger mansion, had one more dish per meal. It was only to that degree.
Perhaps we should say that ‘that’s why’, the other villagers thankfully didn’t have a bad relationship with Luru’s family, and though it wasn’t as though they didn’t show any respect at all, the majority of the villagers treated them friendlily so both his mother and father were able to live without many problems.
As for Luru himself, the villagers treated him kindly, and he didn’t feel any particular discomfort with his village life.
If you forced him to say something, then perhaps he felt that it was a little strange having all these humans treat him kindly, but he only felt that way because he compared it to his time as a demon, and because of that, this much was obvious now that he was a human.
At first he hadn’t been used to it, but as the same thing repeated, within a few years it had become a matter of course to him.

Even if his heart was that of a demon, he was able to get along this well and live with other humans.
‘Could I not have made something like this possible when I was the demon king?’ Though it wasn’t as though he didn’t have such feelings of regrets, he told himself that this was already in the past, and he strove not to get too grim about it.
Even if you regretted it, things that had already happened couldn’t be changed.

Though the village was a called a frontier village, a highway pa.s.sed through it, and if you wanted to reach another village, it wasn’t that difficult as long as you had a carriage.
Because of Luru’s age there was no way he could travel to other villages himself, but he had at least been to the neighbouring town before.
If you compared his village to the town, as expected his village was a little behind in culture, but there weren’t that many differences, and it wasn’t as though his village was extremely poor either.

Like that, after observing various things, and looking into various things, the conclusion that he finally reached was that this village was a relatively good village to live in.
It was peaceful, the people were kind, and the people were prosperous enough not to starve.

It was a tranquil enough village that he even thought that it mightn’t be bad to live out his life here until he died.

However, Luru had no intention of doing as such.
For what purpose had he been training up until now?
It was for the sake of leaving this village and travelling the world. It was for the sake of going on a journey.

Luru had decided to live as he wished, but that included going where he wanted; in other words, going on a journey.

Luru wanted to see the world.
He wanted to see with his own eyes where the world was headed after the end of the long demon-human war.

To that end, for the sake of acquiring the knowledge needed, while he was growing up, he indirectly asked his parents about the world.

Luru was the reborn demon king.
In other words, there should have been not a small amount of time that had pa.s.sed since the conclusion of the demon-human war.
There was no objection to this matter.
However, the problem was just how long exactly that pa.s.sed since then.

If it had only been one or two years then he wouldn’t have particularly cared.
If it was only of that scale, then even if the demon race faced persecution, there would have been survivors amongst his fellow demons.
If he travelled the world, he would probably be able to meet his old acquaintances.
However, the scale of time that reincarnation took was not something so little, or so it was once said.
A decade or a century was nothing more than an instant to a travelling soul.

That’s why it wouldn’t have been strange for a considerable amount of time to have pa.s.sed since Luru was destroyed as the demon king.

To confirm just how long it had been, he asked his parents.
Just when was now? Just how long had it been since the conclusion fo the war with the demon race?

What he found out was that since that day, the day that the demon king had been destroyed, it had already been some thousands of years, and the war between the demon race and human race was almost nothing more than legends and myths but now, so they didn’t know the details.

He had asked about whether the demon race still existed, but the answer was that they didn’t really know.
There was a race called the demon race, but they were a different race from the one in the myths, and the species that the human race had warred with was nowadays referred to as the Ancient Demon Race, and it was said that had already left this world.

If he tried to explain things in line with that fact, then the demon race that had been defeated by the humans had probably been completed exterminated, and disappeared from this world as a species.
However, he believe that, nor did he want to believe that.
No matter how much the humans have overpowered the demons, was it realistic for them to have wiped out every single one?
No, it’s probably impossible, thought Luru.
You couldn’t have said that Luru just wanted to believe so.
But the demon race had a long lifespan, and their life-force was far beyond that of a human’s.
No matter what, it probably would’ve been impossible to have erased every single one of them.

Hearing about this fact, Luru had managed to come up with an objective.
He would search for the demons, that is, the ones now called the ancient demons.
They were surely few in number.
However, it shouldn’t have been the case that not a single one remained.
If he believed in this, and travelled the world, he would find them.
There was still the matter of what he’d do after that, but for now, he wanted to confirm no matter what whether or not his brethren still lived to this day.

It was the responsibility of the one who had once led the demon race.

For that purpose, Luru had trained his ability to manipulate mana all these years, and had reached a fair degree of skill.
Of course if you compared it to his time as the demon king, then it was weak and rough perhaps you should say, but even so it was a large difference from when he had just been born.
At the very least, he could use magic needed for everyday life with no problem, and could use offensive magic to a certain degree.
As for large scale destruction magic, because he still hadn’t found a suitable location to practice it, he hadn’t used it even once since he had been born into this body so whether or not he could use it was an unknown, but he had this feeling that he probably could.

Even though it had been that difficult to circulate mana, he could now do it well enough.
Though it wasn’t to the extent of the heroes who he had battled as the demon king, he had reached a level where he could apply it in combat.
It seemed that if it was just low level monsters, then at the very least he wouldn’t lose.

If he continued at this rate, then the day when he could leave the village probably wasn’t that far.
Strictly speaking, he felt that if he left right now he could make it work somehow, but even if he left, there wasn’t a place where a seven year old could find work.
For now he had the goal of considering what work he would do after leaving the village, but at present he had no support[a backer, maybe a reference], so it would probably be difficult.

In other words, though you couldn’t say that the day when he left the village was far away, he had no choice but to stay in this village for a few years longer.

However, his life in the village wasn’t bad, so that was fine too.
Up until now he had been acting like a normal child, so he had managed to make a few human friends in the village.

Today he had promised to plan with those friends, and right now he was walking to their meeting place because of that.
He had left the house a little late, but it was within the margin of simple miscalculation errors.
After a while he reached the meeting place and saw a group of three boys and girls waving at him.

“Luru! You’re finally here!? You’re late!”

It was a red-haired boy who gave off a lively atmosphere, Rusty.
He was the same age as Luru, and a little while after being born they met each other, and since then they had always played together. In this village, he was Luru’s longest friend, and one of his childhood friends.
His lightly freckled face was twisted in a little displeasure.
It was probably because Luru had come late.
Luru obediently apologised, and tried to appease him.

“Ah, my bad. Once I start reading books I completely forget about the time.”

Luru’s family had a library befitting of a lower cla.s.s n.o.ble family.
Books were expensive and not something you could buy that easily, but even so they were necessary to education, and so his father dedicated a portion of his salary to increasing their book collection.
Luru’s parents had taught him letters, so he could read.
That’s why he had permission to read some of the books in his home.

“Books? What’s fun about that? If you’re a man then you need adventure! Let’s go to the forest! The forest!”

Said Rusty, whose mood had bettered right after Luru apologised.
Rusty’s dream was to one day leave the village and become an adventurer.
It was an occupation that didn’t exist in Luru’s time as the demon king, but these days it existed as a special job.
As for why it was a necessary occupation, to Luru’s shock, it seems that unlike Luru’s time, maps were uncertain, and there were a considerable number of regions that were yet unexplored.
Even places that people had once walked in the past were now regions whose layout and geography were now unknown, and the occupation ‘adventurer’ arose for the sake of searching them.

“‘Adventure, adventure’. Rusty, you haven’t pa.s.sed Patrick-san’s swordsmanship lessons even now, right? Just when on earth will Rusty be able to leave this village, I wonder?”[‘ittai itsu ni naru koto kashira’]

The one who spoke the words that made Rusty grimace again was one of the childhood friends he had promised to meet today; a pretty girl with dull blonde hair and was known for her bright expression, Mii.
She was 7 just like Luru and Rusty, but perhaps because she was a girl, she had a more realistic outlook than Rusty did.
Having said that though, it was undeniable that she was still a little childish.
You could feel from her voice her fear of Rusty leaving the village.
It was clear as day that feelings of love for Rusty dwelt in her eyes, and because of that, she wanted Rusty to stay in the village forever.
Those feelings were understandable.
But those words had the opposite effect.
Rusty was learning swordsmanship from Luru’s father, Patrick, in order to gain the skill required to leave village, but Patrick was not soft.
Patrick gave Rusty a number of conditions regarding leaving the village.
They were that he needed to master the sword to a certain extent, and use his skill to hunt the low level monsters that lived in the forest at fixed intervals.
To a normal villager like Rusty who didn’t possess any talent, it was a relatively strict task, and because of that Rusty continued to train the sword each day.
Regardless, Patrick rarely praised people, so Rusty was steadily growing impatient.
He occasionally grumbled that he would never, ever receive a pa.s.s.
Mii had pointed this out to him just now.
Though a slightly threatening atmosphere began to surface,

“Now, now, isn’t it fine? It’s important to have a dream. I don’t think that he intends on holding you back, and if it does come to that, you can just think about it then, you know?”

The one who advised Mii and Rusty was the final person they had promised to meet up with today; a girl two years older than Luru, Yuuri.
Her silky, grey hair was beautiful, and with azure eyes, she was a fairly good looking girl.
You could imagine that in 10 years she would be quite a beautiful woman, but she loved Rusty.
It made you want to wonder, ‘just why is Rusty this popular?’ but it was because Rusty gave off this feeling that made you want to worry about him.
It was probably this that drew the two girls in.
While thinking that it was a pleasant[/cute/charming] situation, Luru often hung out with these three in the village.

“Well, it’d be nice that happened one day… More importantly, we’re meeting here because something is happening today, right? You still haven’t told me why we’re meeting here…”[Note: Luru uses ‘ore’]

Right.
Yesterday, Rusty told Luru to meet them here today, but when he had asked about why, Rusty replied “It’ll happen tomorrow, so look forward to it” and wouldn’t tell him.
It didn’t seem that they were just meeting here to play and he could tell this from the fact that when it came to today’s promise, Rusty seemed quite excited, but he didn’t know why.

In the end he couldn’t find out even if he asked Rusty, so he still didn’t know why they were gathered here today, but when Luru asked again just now, Rusty grinned and spoke.

“Yeah… Actually, the old man at the inn said that today, adventurers would be coming to the village! Real adventurers!”

At Rusty’s words, Luru, Mii and Yuuri all widened their eyes.
Adventurers were essentially a profession that searched unexplored lands and ruins.
There were also those who did miscellaneous jobs like acting as the guards for merchants or travellers, but they rarely visited this village in the remote rural areas.
However, it wasn’t as though they had never visited at all, and there were cases of low rank adventurers coming here as guards for travelling merchants.
However, those were different to the adventurers that Rusty spoke of.
“Real” he had said.
They were adventurers who were high ranked even amongst adventurers, and lived a lifestyle that you could truly call adventures.
Of course it wasn’t as though to say that low rank adventurers were fake, but what they meant was that the low cla.s.s adventurers were a little different from those you could call adventurers, so many referred to these as “real” adventurers.

Hearing this, Luru understood why Rusty was a little stimulated.
He was a boy that was aiming to become a real adventurer.
To him, it was the same as heroes visiting the village.
That’s why he had gone out of his way to gather them.
He had probably planned to head with them to the gate where the adventurers would be coming from, and speak to the adventurers about lots of different things.

“If they’re real adventurers, then wouldn’t getting too close to them be dangerous? Lots of people say adventurers are a rowdy lot, you know.” warned Luru, just in case.

Those who would be called real adventurers were, no matter what they were like, strong.
Because of that, there weren’t a few among them who had slightly arrogant demeanours, and he had heard that it wasn’t as though they had never acted violently before.
Of course if they went too out of hand then the organisation known as the Adventurers Guild would expel them and take away their rights as adventurers, meaning that it would be impossible to make a living.
Because of that, there was a certain limit, but if it was just at the level of badly treating some children who got too close, then they tended to overlook it.
That’s why Luru had warned him, but…

“It’s fine, I said! Adventurers are strong, and n.o.ble! They’re not gunna do something like act violently!”

Said Rusty, without taking heed.
Mii and Yuuri made slightly anxious expressions, but it seemed that Rusty didn’t see that.
Well, I guess boys with dreams are like this, sighed Luru.
Seeing Rusty behave like this, Luru gave up and decided that if anything happened, it’d be fine if he saved them himself.
Though Luru didn’t know how far his strength went, if it was just at the level where they’d hold back because they were children, then it would probably be fine.

Thinking this, he followed behind Rusty, and the two girls that he dragged along with him.

/Chapter 3 END