Kays Translations

Chapter 77 – Demon King Gremlin

I took a bath to cleanse myself, got a full night’s sleep to clear my head, dressed in my samue (craftsman’s outfit), put on my work gloves, offered a prayer to the Octa-Meteorite, and sat in seiza on the workshop floor to formally receive the arrival of the Demon King materials.

Hiyori came in carrying a massive crate stamped with the American national emblem, flinched at the sight of me, and spoke in a slightly uneasy voice.

“Wh-What’s up with you…?”

“I’m just showing proper respect.”

“R-Right… Well, there are two more boxes. I’ll go get them.”

Wait, three boxes in total?! Heck yes! So much Demon King material!

But my joy was short-lived. When I saw the third box, which had a massive fluorescent radiation warning label slapped on it, I bolted to the far corner of the room and pressed myself against the wall.

WHOA WHOA WHOA!!
Don’t bring dangerous stuff like that into the house!!

“This is super bad! Why is there nuclear stuff in here?!”

“Apparently it’s radioactive material for observing the cleavage surface of the Gremlin. Umm… the main components are cesium-137 and strontium-90. It’s vitrified waste—used nuclear fuel mixed with glass to form solid glass blocks…? Ah—but they’re sealed in lead and concrete, so apparently there’s no harm. Here’s the inventory list. Read it yourself.”

“Ehhh? Are you sure it’s safe?”

“If something happens, I’ll just heal you with magic.”

The way Hiyori said that so casually while handing me the list made me feel infinitely reassured.
Healing magic that can even treat radiation exposure… That’s way too overpowered. Maybe the strongest spell in the world?

The inventory list had page after page detailing all the materials harvested from the Demon King, their properties, and their value assessments. It was originally in English but came with a Japanese translation too, which was super helpful.

One item had no listed value: the “corpse of the mutant absorbed by the Demon King.” None of the three crates contained the corpse either.

There was a note saying:
“As agreed, 0933 has priority acquisition rights for all items obtained from the Demon King, including the corpse. However, we ask that the heroes who gave their lives for America be allowed to rest in their homeland.”

If I accepted this, it seemed they’d sweeten the deal for the rest of the loot.

Of course I said OK. I just profited off of America’s conscience.

Magicians often have unique physiology, so if you set aside ethics, corpses would be extremely valuable research material. I get it, logically.

But no thanks. Human dissection creeps me out.

If I were a magic doctor or something, maybe I’d have to do medical autopsies or whatever, but that’s not my field. I make magic staffs.

All the Demon King materials had been exposed to nuclear bombardment, but apparently all radioactive contamination had been completely purified by a saint’s magic, so no worries there.

The Demon King’s body was as massive as a Daidarabotchi or giant kaiju, so sending everything to Japan would be inefficient. The three boxes I received were just a small sample for me to examine and decide what I wanted.

Time to crack them open and check the loot. I’ve been waiting forever for this!

The most abundant material from the Demon King was blood.

It was sealed in ampoules, cooled with ice and a freezing magic circle. The dark, purplish goop definitely looked inhuman. According to the documents, it’s 80% water, 18% Earth-origin solid matter, and 2% Gremlin.

Apparently, just like a dragon, the Demon King would melt Gremlins in an internal furnace and circulate them through his bloodstream to power up. That’s… intense.

I’m not super into the blood, but I’d like a few ampoules as souvenirs.

The next most abundant material was bone.
Like on Earth, it’s primarily calcium, but with trace amounts of an unknown metal mixed in.

America’s research says this new metal doesn’t match any known element.
It’s still under investigation—they’ve discovered it, but know next to nothing about it.

Now this is interesting! I want a bunch!

A magic staff made from Demon King bone sounds like something straight out of fantasy. Might be cursed as hell, though.

The mysterious metal could be amazing too. It’s apparently distinct from the alloys used in magic script. It must have special properties. Feels like the kind of thing that’d be perfect for crafting.

After bone, the next most common material was skin.

Unfortunately, the Hero’s party shredded most of it, so there’s not much well-preserved skin.

As Hiyori said, it’s like black tentacles all tangled together. Even through gloves, it feels slimy and gross. Just touching it makes my skin crawl. Ew.

That nasty skin apparently has magic resistance. According to Hiyori, it’s far weaker than when it was alive, but it’s still tough enough to shrug off mid-tier ice lance spells like Du Vaara.
Despite being all squishy and floppy, its physical strength is surprisingly high too.

Still, it’s gross…

You could probably make powerful armor from it if you didn’t care about appearances, but I don’t want it. I’m not an armor crafter anyway.

So we’ve got blood, bones, and skin—then come the rare drops.

That means horns, organs, magic stones, and Gremlins.

The two curved horns that grew from the Demon King’s head are unbelievably strong.
They’re supposedly too hard to be realistically worked. Even Conrad the Hero’s magic sword could only scratch them, which apparently says a lot.

They’re not unworkable, but would require absurd effort to shape. Basically, it’s impractical.

Still, they seem like awesome material.
Discovering how to work them could produce god-tier weapons. Not just for battle—applications in industry, agriculture, anything. I totally get why they’re rated so highly.

But do I want them badly enough to blow most of my priority acquisition rights? Not really.
If they were priced a little better, sure. As-is, they’re not worth it.

The organs are a chaotic mess.

Most of them don’t resemble anything found in Earth organisms, so no one knows what they do.

The only one whose function is even partially understood is the Gremlin-melting organ, which dragons also have.

They might have high research value, but I’m not all that interested.
I’ll leave organ research to biologists and magic doctors.

As for magic stones, it’s basically a fire sale.

The Demon King coughed up 88 of them.

So much for magic stones being rare, huh?

America had only lost 19 to him, but apparently the Demon King had been gathering undiscovered stones from all over the country.

They’re all unprocessed and wildly diverse in size, color, and brilliance.
Just looking at the 20 samples I received, plus the illustrated references for the other 68, fills me with glee.

I wanna make a magic staff with these stones so bad!
Maybe even slap three onto one for a luxurious upgrade.

Could also turn one of those pretty blue stones into a Hiyori figurine.
That would be the ultimate indulgence.

However, even that huge quantity of magic stones couldn’t compete with the crown jewel of the Demon King’s rare drops.

To my delight, the Demon King’s gremlin did not disappear—it remained intact.

The material value of the Demon King Gremlin is, without question, at the top of all resources.

Its color matches that jet-black hue I’d seen during the Class-A monster anomaly. It’s a perfect sphere with a diameter of 122mm, making it the largest in the world. On top of that, it naturally possesses a two-layer structure.

Layered-structure processing of gremlins and magic stones is one of my specialties. However, there are some monster species that naturally possess this layered gremlin structure. The most famous are wild dragons, and in the U.S., naturally layered gremlins are highly prized and referred to as “Dragon-Reactor Gremlins.”

There are also Class-C monsters with natural layered gremlins, so it’s not necessarily a sign of being an overwhelmingly powerful creature. Still, it’s a definite indicator that the magic they use is exceptionally powerful.

Just being the world’s largest and naturally layered is impressive enough—but the Demon King Gremlin also has another unusual feature.

Its cleavage planes are strange.

A cleavage plane is a “breakable surface” found in crystal structures. Gremlin cleavage planes are normally invisible, but when exposed to radiation, they become discolored and temporarily visible.

When this visibility process was applied to the Demon King Gremlin, a feature unseen in any other gremlin or magic stone was discovered.

The visible cleavage planes ran in geometric, orderly patterns that clearly followed some kind of law. It was not biological at all—rather, it was mechanical. And not just mechanical—highly advanced.

Based on this, the U.S. concluded that the Demon King Gremlin was an artificial object created by an intelligent lifeform.

In extreme terms, a weapon of invasion.

The idea that gremlins are invasive biological weapons had already existed. It was a theory proposed in Japan, in the U.S., and likely in other parts of the world too.

Humanity lost electricity due to the gremlin disasters and suffered catastrophic damage from the flood of monsters.

Viewing this not as a natural disaster but as an invasion makes a lot of sense.

The Shantak Meteor Shower rained magic stones down on Earth, acting as the first wave of a biological assault. These magic stones served as spores that spread gremlins and destroyed humanity’s electrical technologies.

Then, monsters delivered further blows to mankind, and in the final stage of invasion, the Demon King appeared, collected magic stones, absorbed magicians, and deprived humanity of its ability to resist—delivering the finishing blow. …It does sound logically consistent.

But if gremlins and the Demon King were indeed biological weapons of an invading force, there are aspects that don’t quite add up.

First, monsters are not inherently hostile to humans.

Sure, they’ll drive people out of their territory.

Sometimes they eat people when they’re hungry.

They can spread disease to humans.

Some even prefer eating humans.

But so do animals on Earth. Monsters aren’t uniquely dangerous to humanity.

There have been no confirmed cases, from the gremlin disaster to the present day, of a monster whose sole purpose is to kill humans for no reason at all. Monsters often end up opposing humanity simply because of their own survival and prosperity, but are they truly malicious weapons of war? That’s debatable.

Assuming an intelligent, hostile invader does exist…

If they really wanted to wipe out humanity, they could’ve just unleashed monsters like the ones responsible for the Mushroom Pandemic—monsters with catastrophic abilities. If three or four such global-scale biological hazards occurred back-to-back, humanity would have been wiped out easily.

But that hasn’t happened.

Was it because they couldn’t? Didn’t want to? Or never intended to in the first place?

Even the gremlins—while they did destroy electrical technology and set humanity back 150 years—they also acted as a Prometheus figure, gifting magic technology in return. That’s not a consistent effect for a civilization-destroying biological weapon.

And the same goes for the Demon King.

What the Demon King obsessively sought was the absorption of magic stones and magicians. It paid no attention to ordinary humans. There was no destruction for destruction’s sake, no slaughter for the sake of slaughter.

Sure, the loss of magic stones and magicians would leave humanity in a perilous position, and in that sense, the Demon King was definitely a threat.

But if you ask whether the Demon King’s objective was human extinction—that’s hard to say.

There are theories suggesting that the Demon King planned to eliminate all magic stones and magicians first, then proceed to exterminate humanity. The argument that the Demon King was our enemy isn’t hard to understand.

Still, the inner workings and biology of magical creatures are completely incomprehensible.

Those orderly geometric cleavage planes in the Demon King Gremlin might just look artificial to us, from a human perspective. It’s also possible that it’s just a naturally occurring structure that evolved in a certain way—just a regular creature.

In the U.S., there’s a strong faction that believes the gremlin disaster and the Demon King were invasions carried out by a magic civilization.

Considering how much damage their country suffered, it’s no wonder they hold a grudge.

However, due to various strange inconsistencies, they’ve refrained from definitively declaring that “the magic civilization is an invader.”

The American report that came with the Demon King Gremlin included extensive discussion on its value and the significance of researching it, but to sum it all up:
“The Demon King Gremlin might be the key to uncovering what the magic civilization truly is.”

Thus, the material evaluation value of the Demon King Gremlin is absurdly high.

More than just its value as a gremlin, its worth as a research subject is overwhelming.

I used the cleavage plane visualization device the Americans provided and personally examined the Demon King Gremlin with my own eyes.

When I did, the jet-black color became transparent, and the intricate cleavage planes running geometrically throughout its interior and exterior were revealed.

“Whoa. This really does… look artificial. If someone actually made this artificially… hmm…”

“It looks that artificial to you? All I see are a bunch of cracks.”

“Well, you can’t see the fine details, Hiyori. If you use a microscope, you’ll get it—wait, hang on… is that a regular dodecahedral fractal structure inside? Right there, yeah? That’s what it looks like, right? Part of the structure? Or is it some kind of component…?”

The more I observed the Demon King Gremlin from different angles, the more fascinating it became.

The cleavage visualization effect wore off after about an hour, and its color returned to the original black—but that was more than enough time for me to make up my mind.

I reviewed the list of Demon King materials one more time and circled “Demon King Gremlin” with a bold mark.

That single choice used up nearly all of my acquisition rights, so with the leftovers I picked up three vials of blood and one bone—and that was it.

Magic stones are tempting. I’d love more bones. Honestly, I’d even want the horn if I could.

But I want the Demon King Gremlin too badly. It’s worth throwing away everything else just to get it.

The Americans see its value as a key to unraveling the mysteries of magical civilization. From my perspective, though, it’s immensely valuable for applying to magical staff crafting.

If I dismantle and analyze the Demon King Gremlin, I’ll likely discover countless new magical geometric structures. There’s no way the dodecahedral fractal cleavage planes were a coincidence. The only thing I’ve identified so far is the fractal structure, but it’s only reasonable to assume there are even more geometric designs hidden within.

Every part of the Demon King Gremlin’s structure must have magical significance. It’s a treasure trove of technologies and theories I can likely repurpose into magic staff manufacturing.

“Alright. Hiyori, send everything except for the marked item back to the U.S.”

“Already? Are you sure you don’t want to go over them a bit more?”

“No matter how many days I spend thinking about it, my decision’s not gonna change.”

My arms itched with anticipation as I stood in front of the Demon King Gremlin, sitting on the workbench.

First, I’ll carefully observe it, sketch it out, and gather as much data as I can through non-destructive tests.

Then I’ll begin disassembling the Demon King Gremlin along its cleavage planes, breaking it down into geometric parts.

I estimate the total number of components will be somewhere between 500,000 and 1,000,000.

It’ll probably take at least six months to completely disassemble it without damaging any parts.

But it’ll be worth it. Without a doubt.

This is, in other words, reverse engineering.

If the Demon King Gremlin is an artifact of a magical civilization, then I will dismantle it, analyze it, and make its magnificent technology mine…!

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