Epilogue

Wooden wheels clattered as the carriage rolled along.

It was hemmed in by more than a dozen soldiers and guarded by knights on horseback.

Behind the carriage trailed a band of refugees several hundred strong. Not one of them carried anything that could properly be called luggage, and they had the look of people who had fled at a headlong, breakneck pace.

Most of them were women.

Any men who had been there were killed on the spot.

The women had been raped, and if they were lucky, rescued by the soldiers and knights in the very midst of it. The refugees gathered here were those who had been saved that way, or who had been fortunate enough to escape without ever encountering the slime horde.

Among the soldiers and knights, too, women were the majority.

At the head of the band, inside the carriage shielded by the knights, sat the two who had escaped that horror — the royals who had fled the slime assault — Meltia and Maria.

The two of them, like everyone outside, wore deep exhaustion on their faces.

Through the carriage window, their gaze was fixed on the royal capital of Fonteau, still close enough to make out with the naked eye.

But the sight was no longer what it had once been.

The beautiful streets, the white castle that had stood at their heart. No trace of them remained. Most of the houses had been crushed beneath slimes, and the royal castle itself had been swallowed up inside a gigantic one.

What was happening within that thing, they could only imagine, but from the state of the castle town and the slimes' behavior they could roughly guess.

Meltia, tears streaming down her face, and Maria, sobs spilling out of her, carved that sight into their eyes, into their minds, into their hearts.

They believed their mother was fighting on inside that castle.

And that one day they themselves would go to save her. They held to that thought firmly, fiercely.

Clenching her fist so tightly the knuckles went white, Meltia gripped Maria's hand. Maria did not cry out at the pain, and gripped her sister's hand back just as hard.

The world had been saved.

By the hand of the [Hero] who had appeared from another world, blessed strongly by the goddess's protection.

The [Demon King] had been struck down, and the monsters had walked a steady path of decline.

That was how it was supposed to be.

Monsters were spawned by the [Demon King].

And so, at the hands of adventurers, at the hands of knights, the monsters had been steadily thinned out… that was how it was supposed to be.

But that had been a mistake.

No, perhaps with the [Demon King]'s defeat, a new [Demon King] had been born.

There was no way to know the cause.

Meltia, daughter of the hero who had struck down the [Demon King], glared through tear-blurred eyes at the slime defiling the royal capital, the town her father and mother had built.

And beside her, Meltia's younger sister — Maria, the black-haired girl who had so strongly inherited the blood of the [Hero] from the other world, likewise fought to hold back her sobs as she fixed her eyes on that sight, never to forget it, to carve it into her heart.

Slime.

The monster everyone had thought the weakest.

A nation brought down by the weakest of them.

The two girls were heading onward.

To the neighboring beastfolk country.

To rely on the woman there who had once traveled with the [Hero] at their mother's side.

Sometime in the future, the world would be saved again.

By the hand of a new [Hero]. By the hand of a saintess who carried the [Hero]'s blood.

At the cost of many sacrifices, with the help of many people, the saintess Maria would save the world.

This was the first step toward that day.

The first story. The story of where the story began.

The story of how the world was once again defeated by monsters, and how a new [Demon King] was born.

The slime, the Black Ooze, would spread from here across the entire world.

It would take in many races, many enemies, and grow in power.

In the end it would come to be called the [Demon King], and the weakest of monsters would become the strongest of foes.

And it was the story of how the goddess's [Hero] steeled herself for the battle to come.

She would be defeated again and again, sacrifice comrades again and again, and yet keep pressing forward.

Years from now, decades from now, to take her mother back. To take back the country in which she and her sister had been born and raised.