Side: Amahashi Kakeru

The Demon Lord set up in the empty room and got to work crafting magic items.

We only had the one finished item on hand, and apparently it would take about three days to make enough for everyone. Today was Saturday, so they'd be ready by Monday, she said.

At least this way we'd avoid a full-blown uproar over people from another world suddenly turning up.

"Hime-sama, are you all right?"

Princess Pricia, meanwhile, looked a little thrown by the whole situation, but—

"Don't worry about me. I was a soldier. I'm used to harsh conditions."

The fact that the word "harsh" came up at all meant she still hadn't settled. She seemed irritated by the state of things; in her head, the war with the demon race wasn't over yet. That was the sense I got.

Though, the truth was, the one who'd been pushing hardest for a ceasefire with the demon race was none other than Princess Pricia. In that sense she and the Demon Lord made for a bad match, but it wasn't that she hated or resented the Demon Lord personally.

Race against race, nation against nation, individual against individual—she was someone who kept all of that properly separate in her mind.

"It's just, I'm worried about what's become of everything since we vanished."

There was that. With Princess Pricia and the Demon Lord both gone, there was every chance the brakes had come off. The hardliners on both sides might be running wild.

When the conversation lapsed for a moment, Filia and Sanctina came back into the living room.

Filia had said she wanted to talk to the Demon Lord and headed off to the room where the magic items were being made, while Sanctina had excused herself to go take a look around the house.

"Hero, don't you have any family?"

The house probably struck Filia as odd. I mean, aside from the living room, the kitchen, and my own room, the place was nothing but empty rooms with no belongings in them.

"My parents are overseas… in a faraway foreign country. They work abroad. I was supposed to live in this house with my grandma. She passed away a little while ago."

It was the house Grandma had picked out so we could live together—she'd started getting sick and was in and out of the hospital from around the summer of my third year of middle school.

She'd gone with a big house so my parents could come home whenever they wanted.

Out here in a regional city, you can find roomy detached houses easily enough if you go a little ways out into the residential suburbs. And besides this place, there was still Grandpa and Grandma's house back in my hometown, which you could honestly call the middle of nowhere. The commute to high school would've been rough, so we rented this place.

"At least enjoy your school years"—that was Grandma's teaching. So she let me go to the high school I wanted, and went out of her way to plan on living together somewhere close by.

"Then, the altar over there is…"

"Altar? Ah, the butsudan¹. Yeah. It's Grandpa and Grandma."

"I'll go and offer a prayer."

And with that, Sanctina began offering a prayer at the small butsudan set in the living room.

Back in that world, Saints prayed regardless of denomination, so this was nothing unusual. The gods they prayed to might differ, but as a rule they prayed to every god. Every god except the demon race's, that is.

"It's not like there's anyone here to mind. Use it however you like until you go back."

Now then, I had to start thinking about dinner.

First I needed to check whether rice and miso soup would suit their tastes. It was only around two, but maybe I'd cook the rice ahead of time and have them taste it.

Side: Pricia

Send Hero-sama back to his original world. That was why I had agreed to help defeat the Demon Lord.

That defeating the Demon Lord was the key to the Hero's return was clear from the records of past Heroes kept in the royal castle.

I bore no personal grudge against the demon race or the Demon Lord. The more I went out to the battlefield, the more the meaning of the conflict—and its reality—beat me down.

The world was not gentle in the slightest.

The clamor drifting in from outside told me this was not our original world. This was Hero-sama's homeland, the world I had pictured from the kind of person he was after spending several years at his side.

To think I would end up living here for a while.

"This is good timing—just sit and watch this."

To let time pass without doing anything in particular. That was something I had rarely known. Perhaps out of consideration for that, Hero-sama started up something or other.

"There's sound…"

Sanctina was startled. Sound was coming from a black board in the room, and scenes I had never seen were playing across it.

Was it some kind of far-sight magic, the sort the demon race and the elf race use?

"Hero-sama, I cannot understand the words of this magic tool."

At my words, Hero-sama looked taken aback. Hero-sama, summoned from another world, had been lent a ring-shaped translation magic tool and wore it at all times.

We and Hero-sama could understand one another's speech, but in this world it would mean we could not be understood.

"Ah, that'll be fine. I talked it over with the Demon Lord and had her set up the magic tool in question to handle translation too."

So Filia had already noticed and taken measures. That was Filia for you.

She was the one the elf race had dispatched to serve as our strategist. Though it seemed she had also been keeping watch on the human race, which was trying to widen the war with the demon race.

"This is called a television. Well, strictly speaking it's video streaming. I'll leave on the stream of someone traveling around this country."

Watching this thing they called video, I could tell it was a large town. Countless carriage-like things ran along, and people rode in them.

Judging even from their clothing, there was not, for now, a single person who looked to be a destitute pauper.

When I glanced at Hero-sama, he was doing something in the next room. A room like a kitchen.

Looking at Hero-sama, whose appearance had reverted to how it was when he was first summoned, my chest ached.

We had dragged a young man of another world, one who knew nothing of conflict, off to war, and made him dirty his hands. His Majesty had promised to grant whatever he wished as compensation, whether or not he returned to his homeland, and a portion had been given in advance—but.

They had kept hidden the fact that, if he wished to return home, there would be no time for him to receive that compensation.

Still, I could not stay mired in regret.

The Demon Lord had no intention of going back over there, so I could set her aside, but Filia and Sanctina I had to see returned home.

For that, the Demon Lord's cooperation was needed. Galling as that was.

Even so… ever since coming here, hearing the Demon Lord's true feelings—the very thing I had wanted to know all this time—only deepened the unpleasant foreboding within me.

To begin with, summoning from another world was a forbidden secret art left behind by the gods. In accordance with the Oracle, a Hero was summoned from another world to save this one.

Yet this time, involved in it firsthand, I had come to feel doubts about the existence called a Hero, and about the war. And those doubts had only grown since coming to Hero-sama's world.

Why did the gods hand down an Oracle to destroy that Demon Lord? Unlike the records of Demon Lords past, she was gentle and avoided conflict.

Once it came to that, I grew doubtful whether even those records of past Demon Lords were accurate.

When I put the question to His Majesty, to the Archbishop, and the like, all they would say was that one must not doubt the will of the gods, and there was no getting through to them.

I had sensed they were hiding something, but what sort of arrangement was there between the gods and the human-race royalty and church?

In the end, I had resigned myself to it being something beyond my knowing.

Well—for now, I had to find a means to send the two of them back to their original world, so as not to be a burden to Hero-sama…

Here, in this other world, where the eyes of the gods likely could not reach.