I Came Back but the World is Still a Fantasy!? - 4-48: A Warning From the Past (Dream) (1/8)

4-48: A Warning From the Past (Dream) (1/8)

The darkness of society.

The darkness of the world.

The darkness of the gods.

Such things might sound grandiose, but in fact, they were all close by.

A large temple prepared by an evil religion that worshiped the evil god that once nearly destroyed the world.

No one would expect such a thing to brazenly be on the streets────

───Or at least that was supposed to be the case.

Yet as expected, the darkness was something to be exposed.

The temple of the cultists was located in the basement of a building ostensibly masquerading as a legitimate company.

That day, a group of people stepped into its halls and fought with the cultist warriors there.

However, the battlefield was strange.

It was dark, gloomy, and ominous inside the cultist temple.

With stone walls and floors reminiscent of ruins and sculptures of giant monsters, the air was so gloomy that any normal person’s mood would plummet with a whiff.

With a faint hint of blood, the atmosphere within was so evil that it didn’t seem the slightest bit strange to see monsters, evil spirits, and suspicious men dressed in black robes.

That’s why the people that entered stuck out like a sore thumb.

The men and women at the head of the group were dressed normally – or to be more apt, they were dressed appropriately(・・).

A boy with soft brown hair and an earnestly handsome face, clad in white and silver armor, cut down the grotesque monsters with his double-edged sword that shone like a shattered star.

The kind of appearance the holy knight or the hero ought to have.

The other person was a woman brimming with nobility, what with her shining blonde hair seemingly covered in golden sand and her beautiful face.

Though lightly dressed compared to the man, even an amateur could see that she was a princess warrior.

A few words here, a few words there, and the winds would rage, the flames dance, and the lights cut through the darkness.

If one were merely to look at the hero and the princess scattering the sinister air within the basement and the cultist warriors that fought them, one would be predisposed to think that they were the very picture of the knights of justice fighting against the evil forces of an evil cult.

Yet the group with them did not fit such a play.

───Who are you people!?

Those cries were the first and last words of a cultist warrior, for when they passed by him, a mace swung out of nowhere and blew away his head.

The group cleared a path for the two knights with such proficiency that not even a drop of blood landed on them.

They were all dressed in the same attire, and every one of them was a woman in their late teens or early twenties.

They wore white brims on their heads with little ornamentation and were attired in a black one-piece and a white apron dress – the so-called maid’s uniform.

These were not the sort that prioritized the moe and carnalities as the ones in modern Earth would, and were more like the Victorian maid outfits.

As their skirts lightly waved, they suppressed the denizens of the temple one after another.

They wielded iron balls, battle axes, hammers, and other dangerous weapons with a blank expression on their faces.

Monsters, traps, and cultist warriors attacked them, but in the face of their power, they all turned into dust.

Yet not a speck of filth would dirty their hands or clothes.

Even in the world of Falandia, such a sight was queer.

The cultist warriors’ cries were not only because of their strange attire but also their strength.

At the very least, their combat power and skill were several orders of magnitude above the forces here.

It was incomprehensible why such monsters were taking over the temple while dressed in maid uniforms, but even if they could comprehend, they would turn into gruesome corpses or lose consciousness before they could.

But even those whose lives were spared were not fortunate, for the fate of captured cultists couldn’t be further from fortune.

Above all───

“Keep some of them alive. They’re a valuable source of information!”

───They were caught by this man who smiled only with his lips under his hood.

The odds of them being treated decently after this was zero.

“Frau, get those priests under control first! Miya, Kaya, support! Cattleya, watch our back! Louise, Sela, clear the path!”

『Understood. 』

Perhaps it was because they were leisurely enough or perhaps it was merely a habit they’d acquired, but regardless, the girls responded in unison and gave a simplified curtsey-like bow despite being right in the middle of a battle, then they moved with blinding speed, each achieving what they’d been instructed.

The person in command was also strangely dressed.

He wore a gray hooded cloak that hid almost everything but his mouth, yet from the sound of his voice, it was apparent that he was a boy.

The clothes underneath that cloak could be seen from time to time, but they were so ordinary that one couldn’t help but wonder if someone from the street had accidentally gotten mixed with the group.

What made it even stranger was that it was this person who was commanding the maids.

“Shin! You know they’re still technically my subordinates, right!? It’s you, so I don’t mind you giving them orders, but at least give me orders first!”

“U-Umm… What should we do, Shinichi?”

And then even the pair of knightly men and women turned to that cloaked boy for instruction.

“The both of you are completely useless unless we’re trying to wipe out the enemy! You always jump straight in without thinking! You sure you have a brain in those skulls of yours!?”

But all they got in return was a barrage of abuse, criticizing their recklessness.

“That’s why the two of you should just stand there. Help from the incompetent will only serve to impede the efforts of my master.”

That left the boy depressed and the girl bashful(・・・), but there was another character of note beside the boy.

The warriors that tried to surround the cloaked boy were frozen by her.

A bewitching beauty with fox ears and three tails dressed in clothing that looked like that of a simplified version of a kimono, casually worn to show off her deep cleavage and her white thighs to the fullest.

Neither of the two boys here stared at her, but some of the warrior cultists were bewitched by her beauty and promptly burst into flames, causing the next wave of warriors that appeared to shrink in the face of her icy smile.

“I agree with her this time, Lilisha-sama, Kite-sama.”

When grotesque monkey-like monsters tried to jump past those men and attack, arrows of flame shot through them.

An arrow for each, and the person behind that excellent performance that turned the monsters into ashes was a maid with long, blue hair that flowed down her back.

And then, perhaps out of vengeance or perhaps because it merely wanted to deal with what it considers to be the stronger foe, a boar-like monster that stood three meters tall rushed at her; however, her expression remained unfazed, and she took out a halberd even bigger that herself from out of nowhere and cut the boar in half, giving rise to a great death throe as the monster’s massive body tumbled down.

“Eek!!”

“W-Who are you people!?”

Her unchanging features were beautiful, but her expressions were so lacking that her voice felt cold.

The sight of her and the fox-eared beauty standing on both sides of the boy was just like a painting because of how beautiful they were, but to the cultist warriors that were either on fire or in ice, as well as the cut corpses of giant monsters, that picture could only be that of hell.

“You will be lectured and punished with him later, so do prepare yourself.”

The maid had a pair of amber eyes, but it was not the enemies that she looked at harshly but her master and the hero.

“Uu, I-I’m sorry!”

“P-Punishment? That sounds delightful!! What more, to be served with a sermon!”

The beauty behind that cold gaze only served to make it more terrifying and so strike the hero with fear, but the master of the maid, the princess, was instead filled with ecstasy and started acting kittenish.

“…”

“Hey! Don’t stare at me like that! Stella, you said that on purpose, didn’t you!?”

Shinichi dismissed her stare as he knocked out a priest that was about to mutter some strange chants.

But she too was not a normal person, and she took out a table knife and threw it at him without so much as a change in expression.

“What are you talking about, I wonder.”

“Don’t play dumb! You’re still angry because of what happened with Lilisha!”

Despite that the cloaked boy and the maid acted as though nothing had happened.

The boy just tilted his head, allowing the knife to pass by him and pierce a bull-headed monster in the head.

The boy then pulled that knife out and kicked the bull-headed monster before throwing the knife back toward the maid.

“Oh my, could it be that you intend to say that you’re not responsible for what happened to Lilisha-sama?”

“It’s precisely because I know I’m responsible that I’ve been traveling with you for a month and a half!”

Meanwhile, the maid pulled up her skirt a little and kicked the cultist warrior that had approached her from behind, sending him into the air. Above his head could be seen a giant bat nailed into the wall by the table knife.

“Yet the results remain to be seen.”

“Everything I do just makes her happy, so what am I supposed to do? How about you do something yourself for a change!?”

The boy unleashed a gravity spell with his angry yells, and the maid jumped up to use that(・・) as a springboard to jump even higher to land behind the boy with a giant hatchet and crush the approaching wall(trap).

At the end of the boy’s gaze was a half-fishman-like monster plastered onto(crushed into) the wall like a fish print.

“I’ve already tried many things even without you telling me to.”

The maid and the boy had their backs to each other as they used brute force to deal with the traps.