Lord Densiam von Karbelnikoff governed the Karbelnikoff area according to the order of several successive generations of Demon Kings, the most important feudal lords in the great empire of the demons. He belonged to the Ten n.o.ble Families, and even in his own circles he was considered an eccentric figure. Lord Densiam"s talent was less in the arts of warfare but more in diplomacy and business.

Despite his jovial personality and his shrewdness, he had the deepest loyalty for his king. For the prosperity of the state finances, he deposited huge sums of tax money into the state treasury. When he found out about the presence of the 27th Demon King in his area, he wished nothing more than an audience with the king. Unfortunately he arrived too late, as Yuuri had already ridden on.

Demsian"s hasty plan crumbled like a sandcastle. He had planned to have an audience with the Demon King in Karbelnikoff, outside the royal summer cottage. He had wanted to name this place "The audience hall of the Demon King" and make it accessible to the general public - for a decent tour fee. Instead he now planned to design a commemorative coin to perpetuate the visit of the Demon King. While he drew the sketch of his new plan, he bit into a Karbelnikoff pie, a regional specialty.

He had a younger sister, but their similarities were limited to the same hair and eye color. As for the differences in personalities, speech, gestures and points of view, they took second place to the three most dissimilar demon brothers of all times. Although his sister was also a demon, her comings and goings always had a quality almost divine. This woman would not spare a thought for moneymaking. She was solely interested in one thing: new uses for magic in everyday life.

Her philosophy dictated that such a practical and exciting skill as magic should not be used only for combative purposes. It would be a huge waste if magic wasn"t applied to daily life. Only then would its true value be utilized to the advantage of the demons. In order to reach her goals, she pounced on every opportunity of experiment. In her life, the most important things are: first, experiment, second, experiment, third and forth are secrets, and fifth, experiment again. The only person who knew what her third and forth most important things were was her childhood friend Lord von Voltaire.

It was on that very day that she found a new scientific challenge.

"It"s very important that His Majesty"s clothes be thoroughly washed and well maintained, even if it is a shame that his invaluable smell will disappear", sighed Lord von Kleist. "The last step is particularly dangerous, because the wrinkles must be smoothed out with a hot iron. And it is not possible at all to leave this highly important task to somebody else."

"But Günter, that"s the work of the laundry women. The girls will be very sad if you take their work away." Madame Cheri pointed out for his consideration.

"What are you thinking, Lady Cheri! One of my most important duties is to take care of His Majesty"s personal matters, and that includes was.h.i.+ng and preparing his clothes."

The door was suddenly thrown open.

"Did you just mention you wanted a better way to take care of the laundry?"

Both Günter"s and Cecilie"s gazes shot to the door at once. There, a small and slender woman was standing straight, her voice literally bubbling with self-confidence, and her light-blue eyes, slightly drawn up at the corners, s.h.i.+ning with her whole willpower. The flaming red hair was tied together at the back of her head and fell long and pretty down her back. The moment they saw this intrepid beauty, the tutor turned pale, while the s.e.x G.o.ddess clapped her hands to her chest.

"My dear Anissina!"

Lady Anissina von Karbelnikoff was Lord Gwendal"s childhood playmate who had taught him how to knit. She was considered, alongside Madame Cheri, one of the three most powerful Demon women in s.h.i.+n Makoku.

"Oh Anissina, it"s been so long! Since you have not been visiting my son lately, I started to worry about you."

"Forgive my long absence, Your Royal former Majesty. I am delighted to see you doing so well. And Lord von Kleist...?"

"Yes, yes, I"m also fine, thank you, Lady Anissina."

"But let"s get to the point! It was fortunate that I found you here, Günter. I"ve been looking for Gwendal, but he seems to have left Karbelnikoff. There"s something I"d like you to help with. Using my latest invention, all types of clothing can be prepared beautifully. I would like you to go with me to test the machine."

"Te...test the machine?"

"Would you be willing to? Yes? "

Willing or not, it was all up to her.

"Very well, then please take a look at my latest work, my great pride! I call it the fully-automatic magic-operated was.h.i.+ng-machine-kun!"

With sweeping pompous gestures, Anissina presented her invention.

My decision couldn"t have been wrong! But why didn"t it make me happy, but uneasy as if I was sinking in a swamp?

We found a piebald horse that had managed to escape from danger and continued our journey for two. We had to leave the dunes behind as fast as possible.

At night, the temperature dropped significantly. For me, an untrained soldier, it was more than just another tough night. It had already been h.e.l.l during the day! Because of the scorching heat, I was always on the verge of fainting. To remain conscious, I tried to carry on a non-stop conversation, but I never got much response from my traveling companion, except for a non-committal "Uh-huh" or "No" as the answers. If I asked more complex questions, Gwendal would even refuse to answer. Given this lack of communication, had we been a married couple, we would have already been separated and divorced long ago. It didn"t surprise me however... After all, in the entire s.h.i.+n Makoku, he was the one who hated me the most. To him I was n.o.body.

Since Gwendal always seemed moody and expressionless, I couldn"t guess what was in his mind. I felt ill at ease and didn"t know how to behave towards him while we rode on together.

"Would you mind if I put my hips around your arms?" I blurted out. d.a.m.n, this was no first date in middle school! Put my hips around his arms! How could I make such an embarra.s.sing mistake? Seriously, this guy was driving me out of my mind.

Meanwhile, there were thousands of questions at the tip of my tongue: Why was I the only one who can see the deadly panda? Why didn"t Gwendal fall into the pit? How would Conrad, Wolfram and the others escape from the quicksand? But even if I could voice all these questions, they would remain unanswered anyway. And I had no option but to pull myself together and try hard not to fall off the horse.

"Here, take it!"

"Pardon me?"

Gwendal handed me the leather water pouch.

"It"s okay. I just drank," I refused.

Even though, to be honest, I couldn"t remember when that had been. However I surely had drunk more often than my companion.

During the summer baseball training, I had learned firsthand how important fluids were to the body. I could understand better than any average person the dangers of dehydration and overheating. Even so I couldn"t just take all the remaining water for myself alone...

"Do I have to force it down your throat?!" growled Gwendal.

"Okay, okay! I"m drinking already!"

I hastily grabbed the leather pouch. After such a threat I would have drunk even poison. Oh! At last, could this be Gwendal"s plan?! Wasn"t this the perfect opportunity to get rid of me, here and now, in the middle of the dessert, without a single witness? But to do away with me, he didn"t need to go through the trouble of poisoning me. It"s a 90% chance I would fall victim to the heat anyway.

And again I began to hallucinate. This time, I saw what seemed to be a mirage: a city on the other side of a whirlpool of sand. I rubbed my dry, sore eyelids but the s.h.i.+mmering buildings didn"t disappear. Maybe the contact lenses had slipped; my sensitive eyeb.a.l.l.s did feel a bit strange.

"I could be imagining it, but I see a town over there," I said.

Gwendal didn"t utter a word, but steered the horse straight toward that direction. The closer we went, the more clearly we could see the shape of the houses. The uniform beige color of the walls was probably due to the large amount of sand mixed with the cement. The gigantic building in the town center was a solid construction with stone walls. Maybe it was a sanctuary or a government building. My brain, in a stupor from the heat, was incapable of more accurate observations.

The town was small but wide, spreading out for about a mile, very much like a strip mall in Ginza. However, there were no splendid shops here. We could only saw dusty and dirty facades one after the other. I was overcome with serious doubts as to whether one could buy anything here.

Some women walked around, and children were playing on the ground. There were a surprising number of guards stationed around the place, but not a single male civilian in sight...

"Isn"t that strange for a city?" I asked, and again got no response.

When we were about to ride inside, the guard on duty stepped forward to stop us. He wore a sleeveless, simple military uniform with a long, quite heavy looking sword hanging at his hip. His tanned, bronze-colored face was twisted into a grin, and he had a bizarre hairstyle. His dark brown hair was shaved short on the sides, leaving only a circular mat of hair on the top which was dyed red. Probably this was the conventional military hairstyle here, but I couldn"t help it, this brown-red mat reminded me of something... Yes, salmon and caviar sus.h.i.+! That was exactly it! This hairstyle reminded me of a Gunkan - Maki in the shape of a battles.h.i.+p. If all the soldiers were to move in a circle, it would look like the conveyor belt in a sus.h.i.+-bar.

"Horses are not allowed in the town," the soldier with the sus.h.i.+-hairstyle barked at us.

Gwendal quietly got down from the horse. While acting as if he was helping me get off the saddle, he whispered in my ears telling me to hide my face.

"Are you coming from the dessert?" asked Mister Sus.h.i.+-Head.

"Uh-huh", muttered Gwendal.

"Well, my respects! And no encounters with the Hinemos?"

Hinemos?! At home, in j.a.pan, this was a leisure activity where you use paper tubes to make for example a dinosaur figure. And there was also a haiku by Yosa Buson about the sea at springtime, in which that word meant "all day long." A dinosaur that swims up and down all day long in the springtime sea? No, that didn"t fit.

"No, we saw nothing", Gwendal answered in monotone.

I had no idea why, but the Sus.h.i.+-Head soldiers started to laugh.

"You lucky dogs!"

"The horse needs rest. We also need water and food. Is there a hostel in this town?"

"No idea", answered the soldier.

The whole group gurgled with laughter again. Were these lunatics suicidal? Didn"t they know who they were dealing with? If Gwendal shredded them to pieces, they would have only themselves to blame.

However, instead of teaching some manners to this reckless bunch, Lord Gwendal von Voltaire - the invincible demon between the demons, famous for his unparallel sangfroid - only stared at them briefly and rolled his eyes.

"Would you perhaps be kind enough to tell us where we could find a hostel in the city?" he said in such a humble tone that I thought I had misheard. "We would also appreciate it a lot if you could tell us where to find some water and food."

"Well, that depends on how much you are willing to sh.e.l.l out!"

Gwendal only grumbled something to himself. We left the horse and went further into town on foot.

Were there upcoming elections? Everywhere I looked, the walls were plastered with posters. The pictures were no better than children"s drawings: the faces of the candidates - a man and a woman – were more like circles with spikes on top. I could not read the sentences below the pictures.

"Stay here and don"t do anything stupid," Gwendal said then disappeared into one of the shops.

I was left alone on the street. Some children were crouching on the dry ground throwing something into a circle. Their toys were full of rusted nails.

"Do you want to become carpenters when you grow up?" I asked.

"Carpenters? What nonsense! All men should become soldiers. How else would one earn his bread, riiiiight?"

The other children nodded their heads in confirmation.

"Come inside right now!" a woman raised her voice angrily. Probably she was their mother.

Could my appearance cause so much attention? My hair was dyed brown and I was still wearing my contact lenses.

"Hey, you forgot something!" I called after them, but when I picked up the toys from the painted circle, none of the boys was there anymore.

According to the G-shock watch on my right wrist, it was three o"clock in the afternoon. The temperature hadn"t dropped and sweat was running down my chin.

"Hey, boy!"

I looked around for the friendly voice.

A nice looking woman waved at me from the door of a huge building. Her extremely long eyelashes probably gave her eyes good protection against the sand.

"Isn"t it hot out there? Come into the church, you can wait for your companions here."

Günter has always drummed into me two things: that I should never accept food or drink from a stranger, but it was okay to seek refuge in a shadowed shelter.

It was very cool inside the stone building. The sweat dried immediately on my skin as if I had stepped from the platform into an air-conditioned train. The idols of the country"s deities were hung on the walls in two long rows that reached the altar. There were about 300 such idols.

"These are all straw dolls!" I said in surprise.

Just like the "j.a.panese voodoo"! A s.h.i.+ver ran down my back all the way from my neck. This type of idolatry was just too extreme for me.

"Don"t you pray to such G.o.ds?"

A guy with the sus.h.i.+ hairdo suddenly blocked my way to the door with his back. He had at least seven or eight comrades with him. This gave me a bad feeling.

"Not very often," I answered. "Maybe I pray more often to the G.o.d of baseball." Not that it had made me any better at the game.

The men closed around me, hands on their swords. Did they want to shred me into pieces inside their own church?

"As long as you keep your mouth shut we won"t kill ya."

I heard noises coming from outside. Then the explosive sound of the door burst open.

"Come on, let"s get out of here!" shouted Gwendal.

I made a move to run away. But somebody grabbed me roughly and pulled down my hood. They held me from behind and peered into my face.

"This is the one!"

"Wh... what do you mean?"

Thanks to the best Demon technology my disguise looked exactly like a normal human. There was not a trace of the revealing black. But why the h.e.l.l would these guys want to capture me then?

At that moment, Gwendal entered the church with a surly face, held by the soldiers. He probably would not spare time to appreciate the cool temperature inside the church. Although I wasn"t sure what I had done wrong, I immediately felt the dire need to apologise to my companion.

"Even a demon warrior would find it impossible to use magic inside a church. Isn"t it so? This building was full of the power of our G.o.ds."

"What do you want? Money?"

The furrows on Gwendal"s brow deepened and his lips were slightly distorted. He was clearly angry.

"Of course it"s about money! But we want much more than your pocket money. If we turn you two in to the authorities in the capital we"ll collect a very fat bounty!"

Mister Sus.h.i.+-Head held out a poster, the one I"d seen before.

"It is you in this drawing, am I right?"

"You think it"s us in those posters? But we aren"t candidates." I exclaimed.

For a moment there was a weird silence. It was, apparently, not an electoral poster.

"Don"t pretend you know nothing! These drawings look exactly like you."

Excuse me? What do you have for your eyes, tomatoes?! This time even Gwendal was surprised. Did these guys seriously want us to believe that those bizarre portraits resembled us in any way? Two balloons with spiky hair on top - a drawing I would have made as a preschooler for Mother"s Day.

Wanted! A tall male demon with grey hair and a human girl dressed as a boy. Both have eloped together. Whoever captures them will receive a bounty of fifty thousand gold pieces.

"Eloping?" exclaimed Gwendal indignantly. "I"m eloping... with that?!"

"What"s with that disdainful tone?" I shouted. "And what is this "eloping together" all about? Do you mean "eloping" as in: "Our parents are against the marriage, let"s run away together"? My G.o.d! That would be completely absurd! Do we look anything like a couple? In case you haven"t noticed, we are both... "

Men! That was what I meant to say, but before I could finish protesting, Mister Sus.h.i.+-Head forced his hand through the neck of my clothes, without my permission.

"Arghhhhh!"

"Man, the girl is as flat as a board, even if her b.r.e.a.s.t.s just started developing... "

Committing s.e.xual hara.s.sment right in front of everyone, yet he showed no sign of embarra.s.sment. And growing t.i.ts wasn"t in my future agenda at all! My chest was just as it was supposed to be. With rigorous baseball practice, a lot of batting maybe, I might build more muscles on my chest, but nothing else!

"Well, as long as she has a cute face... There"re always guys who enjoy girls that look like boys."

"I"m not a girl, you stupid a.s.shole! Grope me between my legs, while you"re at it!"

My outbreak shocked the soldiers and they fell quiet for a moment. If Günter could hear the language unfit for a king I was using just now, he would burst into tears with disappointment. Truth be told, I sometimes thought he had a strange perception of me.

d.a.m.n it! To clear matters once and for all, I would have wanted my clothes to be torn off. There wasn"t much to show off when it came to size, but at least there was something.

Gwendal couldn"t control his ire either. He bellowed more furiously each time.

"Drop that nonsense! We aren"t even remotely similar to that drawing!"

"Exactly!" I roared too. "Or is it that I resemble Charlie Brown?!"

A soldier grabbed my right arm and showed the back of my hand to Mister Sus.h.i.+-Head.

During the long journey through the sand dunes my hands had become red. In the middle of the sunburn area, a faint whitish mark was still visible, which I had seen somewhere before.

"This is the proof! In our neighbour country, this is the mark for those who have eloped as lovers! Anyone who violates the marriage law will be branded on the back of the hand. You fled from there, and this proves it!" exclaimed Mister Sus.h.i.+-Head.

"Wait a minute... this is the Sea World"s stamp! It says "Free Entrance for the Day." Don"t you know how to read?!"

Of course they couldn"t read what it said, this wasn"t their language. d.a.m.n special ink! This was no longer about my freedom for one day, but my freedom for the whole lifetime.

"Don"t make any foolish mistake, or I"ll break your little friend"s neck! Drop your weapon, come closer and put this on you and the girl."

It seemed the soldiers were afraid to approach a demon. They threw a short heavy-looking chain at Gwendal"s feet instead. It made a m.u.f.fled clanking sound of metal on metal. While Gwendal held his glare steady on the men, he stepped forward, slightly bended down towards the chain and picked it up.

Never before had I had any problem with the police. And I would never have imagined one day I would be handcuffed in a church in a foreign land. Not only was I innocent, they even got my gender wrong!

"Please don"t put it on my right arm... That"s my throwing arm." I told Gwendal.

I breathed with difficulty as one of them was holding me by my neck. Gwendal put the metal rings on my left wrist and his right one. The handcuffs snapped into place with a clicking sound that seemed to extinguish all hope. Between us now hung a thick chain about thirty centimetres long. It was so heavy my shoulder dropped right towards the ground.

Even a pig couldn"t have had such bad luck! I had to be chained to Gwendal, of all the people in the world. What a pair! It wouldn"t take more than a quick glance to tell which one was the police, which one the criminal. As the thought of crimes came to my mind, I suddenly remember the topic featured on Six O"clock News from last week: How should a woman defend herself from a stalker?

"Urgh!" the man who had been holding me all this while groaned and dropped to the floor.

I had given him a head b.u.t.t and a kick to his crotch both at the same time, which caused me to bite my tongue badly. Instinctively, I reached for one of the idols, grabbed its head and held it out towards the men.

"Don"t move! One single movement and I stick this nail right through the heart of your G.o.d!"

In j.a.panese voodoo practice, you actually use a special long and thick nail, but one can"t always choose. The rusted nails the children had been playing with would have to do.

Such sacrilege! To hold a deity hostage. If I continued doing such things, maybe one day I"d manage to become a true Demon King.

However Gwendal"s lightning-fast attacks were much more effective than my old j.a.panese ritual curse. As he kicked his extremely long legs, three men went flying through the air. A High Kick, a Round Kick and even a Flying Knee Strike! Urgh! All his kicks. .h.i.t their targets with devilish perfection.

"Run!" cried Gwendal.

He didn"t have to tell me twice. We ran out of the church to the bright and dusty road. Footsteps and angry voices followed us. Something sharp whizzed past my ear and struck the ground two steps in front of me.

"Wow, it barely missed me!" I yelled and sped up.

Our horse was waiting at the town entrance. Gra.s.s still hanging from his mouth, he seemed to be happy. Gwendal jumped on the horse, pulled me up by the chain and spurred him on. I didn"t even have time to ask if I could wrap my hips around his arms.

(This translation was originally posted here. Please do not repost elsewhere.)