Heroic Chronicle of the Reincarnated Demon General

Chapter 3

“Unhand me, you vermin!!!” the Demon King bellowed, struggling against the bloody restraints.

Lucas merely laughed at the Demon King’s furious expression, then turned his gaze towards the Hero and her surviving companions, who were watching the confrontation with expressions of disbelief and growing alarm.

“Get out of here now,” he said. “Or you’ll get caught up in the blast and die.”

Hearing his warning, the Hero blinked in confusion. Then, her eyes moved to Lucas’s chest where his magic power was rapidly condensing, and the realisation that he was planning to blow himself up along with the Demon King dawned on her.

“No,” she muttered softly, slowly shaking her head.

She let go of her sword, about to dash over to him, but one of her companions grabbed her and pulled her back.

“What are you doing?!” the knight demanded.

However, the Hero barely paid her any mind, her eyes fixed on Lucas as she struggled to break free from their grip.

“Get her out of her,” Lucas said to the knight, turning his eyes back to the Demon King.

“NO,” the Hero shouted. “NO, NO! Luke, don’t!”

“!”

Lucas’s eyes widened in surprise when he heard the Hero call him ‘Luke’, and he immediately snapped his gaze back to her.

“You…knew?” he asked, a note of surprise in his tone.

‘Luke’ was what he’d called himself when he’d infiltrated the human world some years back, deep enough that he was able to get close to the Hero and travel alongside her for some time.

He’d disguised himself with magic then, but the fact that she called him ‘Luke’ now meant that she’d long since known that her former ‘companion’ and the Demon General before her were the same person.

Lucas chuckled at this realisation, and as he heard the sound of the chains binding the Demon King shattering, he exhaled softly.

“Leave…Judith,” he said, calling her by name.

He closed his eyes for a second, and when he opened them again, the smile on his face disappeared.

“Leave now.”

Immediately, magic power and demonic energy began swirling around Lucas like a raging storm.

The Demon King roared in rage, forcibly breaking one of his hands free from the restraints before swinging his sword straight toward Lucas, intent on killing him before he could blow himself up.

Lucas reached out with his left hand and caught the incoming blade, allowing the sword to cut into his palm, spilling more blood from the wound, which he splashed on the Demon King to strengthen the weakening chains.

Turning towards the Hero, Lucas shouted at her with all the strength he had left.

“GET OUT NOW!”

The storm of magic power and demonic energy surrounding Lucas grew even more violent, and an intense light began to shine from his chest as the condensed power neared criticality.

Despite all of this, Judith was still very hesitant to leave him behind, but her companions dragged her away, knowing they couldn’t afford to stay any longer.

One of them used her sword to cut a hole in the subspace, creating an opening which they used to escape.

In the last moment before she was pulled out of the subspace, the Demon King broke free of the last chain binding him, but by then, it was already too late to stop what Lucas had set in motion.

A brilliant flash of light engulfed everything within the subspace, and Lucas’s body exploded into a million pieces, blasting the Demon King and everything around them to bits.

—Or at least, that was what Lucas had expected to happen.

When Lucas opened his eyes again, he was in the body of a male child.

“Huh?”

Didn’t he just die alongside the Demon King a moment ago? Why was he suddenly lying on a bed positioned opposite a cracked mirror, in a room that felt both familiar and unfamiliar at the same time?

He looked around in bewilderment, struggling to understand what was happening.

‘Where the hell am I? More importantly, why am I in the body of a human child?’

The pale grey skin that had characterised his demonic appearance was completely gone, replaced by fair, white skin that looked unfamiliar to him.

Although the mirror in front of him was cracked, its reflection was still clear enough for him to recognise the black hair and blue eyes staring back at him, along with the facial features that were identical to those he’d possessed as an extremely young demon, decades ago.

It was unmistakably Lucas himself, but at the same time, he was just as unmistakably human.

“What the hell is this? Some sort of elaborate illusion?” Lucas muttered in confusion as he looked around the room.

He climbed off the bed and walked toward the cracked mirror, placing his hands on either side of it as he carefully examined his reflection.

As he stared at himself, he circulated the little magic power available within his body toward his eyes, causing two rings of light to appear in each eye, one surrounding his iris and the other encircling his pupil.

“My Mystic Eyes are working,” he muttered.

His expression scrunched up lightly as he confirmed that his innate ability was still functioning despite whatever had happened to him.

Instead of bringing up his status board in the usual manner, Lucas activated his Mystic Eyes of Truth on himself, causing a semi-transparent board displaying his information to appear before his eyes.

|Name- Luke

Race– Human

Gender– Male

Age– 16

Level– 10

Class– None

Health– F

Energy– F

Strength– F

Agility– F

Durability– F

Skill– None.

Innate Ability– Mystic Eyes of Truth.|

His name was exactly the same as before, but his race had changed from demon to human; his skill was gone, and his Level, which had previously been 910, had plummeted by 900 and was now a mere 10.

However, Lucas soon realised that the most shocking part of this entire situation was still left for him to be discovered.

The door to the room suddenly opened, and in stepped a teenage girl, her eyes widening in surprise the moment she saw him standing in front of the mirror.

She dropped the basket in her hands, its contents spilling onto the floor as she rushed towards him with an expression that was mixed with joy and concern.

“Luke, you’re awake!” she cried out, her voice unmistakably familiar to his ears.

Lucas turned towards her, and the moment he met the golden eyes of the beautiful blonde-haired teenager who hugged him, he couldn’t help but mutter a name in disbelief.

“Hero Judith?”

“Hmm?”

The girl raised an eyebrow in confusion, blinking once before responding with a puzzled question. “I haven’t told anybody about that yet. How did you know I have the Hero skill?”

“Eh?”

“Ehh??”

The two of them made confused sounds, staring at each other in mutual confusion.

Before Lucas could even manage to say anything else, Judith’s eyes widened slightly as she suddenly seemed to realise something.

“Wait, don’t tell me you were just messing around and calling me a Hero again as a joke?”

Rolling her eyes, Judith exhaled softly before continuing, “Come on, Luke. The last time we played heroes was when we were, like, I don’t know, twelve? That was over four years ago. You’ve really got to stop messing with me like that.”

She turned around as she spoke, heading back towards the door to pick up the potatoes that had fallen out of the basket she’d been carrying, while Luke simply continued staring at her in silence.

‘What the hell is this? Four years ago?’

Lucas hadn’t even known the Hero for up to four years, and he most certainly hadn’t known her when she was twelve years old.

His thoughts abruptly came to a halt when he was suddenly hit by a wave of pain that made him groan, several unfamiliar images flashing through his mind.

Judith immediately turned around, her expression filled with worry as she rushed toward him.

“Luke?!” she called out, grabbing him and guiding him back toward the bed, while Lucas clutched his head and groaned in pain once more.

“Ah, the medicine!” Judith exclaimed, looking around restlessly. “Where did I drop it?!”

She sprang to her feet and dashed out of the room to find where she’d left it, leaving Lucas sitting on the bed with his hands clutching his head as he continued groaning in pain.

A filmstrip of images flashed through Lucas’s mind, with memories that he’d never experienced layering themselves over the memories he already possessed.

Within these unfamiliar recollections, the Hero wasn’t the twenty-eight-year-old woman who’d invaded the demon race’s territory and attempted to take the Demon King’s head, but rather the young girl who had just dashed out of the room, whom he’d apparently known for since childhood.

She was someone he’d lived with ever since the parents of ‘Luke’ had perished while fighting monsters, and someone he was still living with even after her father had gone missing the previous year.

When all the memories finally entered his mind, his headache abruptly subsided.

Lucas silently turned towards the cracked mirror, staring at his reflection with a new realisation dawning on him.

He’d sacrificed himself to take down the Demon King, and had somehow ended up reborn as the childhood friend of the Hero.