Demon King of the Royal Class-Chapter 586

Gulp.

Meow!

I didn’t know why she kept doing this lately, but Ellen had taken to opening her mouth wide like she was about to swallow my face whole.

Didn’t she realize how terrifying that was from a cat’s perspective? It wasn’t just unsettling—it was downright scary!

Sure, I was glad she wasn’t out doing something pointless like patrolling the imperial capital. But now it seemed like the only thing in her head was playing with her cat all day. Honestly, it was starting to creep me out a little.

Ellen lay on the bed, mumbling with me beside her. Thankfully, she hadn’t been zoning out much lately, which was a relief. I had to admit, animal therapy seemed to be working wonders.

“You’re so cute,” she said.

‘Hmm. You’re not too bad yourself.’

Of course, whenever she looked out the window at the falling snow, her expression darkened.

The snowfall was relentless, and there was nothing Ellen could do as it blanketed everything. Snow wasn’t a monster, after all.

After breakfast, Heinrich and Louise had gone out and tried some strange method to melt the snow, but it hadn’t worked very well.

It was pointless for Ellen to go out to patrol the area around the capital, and there was nothing even a hero could do about a snowstorm.

In the end, all she could do was rest.

Ellen lazed around for a while before picking me up and sitting up.

‘Hmm. Is it already lunchtime?’

Time seemed to melt away.

***

It was lunchtime.

Heinrich and Louise had returned from their walk and were eating in the banquet hall. The atmosphere felt a little different—not because of the two of them, but because of something in the hall itself.

“Students who wish to volunteer to help in clearing away the snow in the imperial capital, please sign up here and report to the dormitory supervisor,” announced several staff members to students as they entered.

While the snow within the Temple itself needed clearing, the situation in the rest of the imperial capital was far more urgent. The Royal Class students who were on break were being given the option to volunteer.

It wasn’t mandatory, but for those with abilities, there was a sense of duty—an unspoken responsibility.

The signup sheet was already full of names.

The scene of superhumans, their bodies glowing faintly with the blue light of Mana Reinforcement, wielding shovels instead of swords and spears to clear the streets of the capital crossed my mind.

‘You guys, clearing snow is great and all, but maybe try not to destroy the roads while you’re at it?’

Of course, it wasn’t just the superhumans. Students majoring in magic or with supernatural powers were volunteering too. If all of them were mobilized, they could make a huge difference.

Ellen paused mid-bite, glancing toward the signup list.

Well... she could do it if she wanted. But the Hero, out shoveling snow? That painted a strange picture.

“Hey, Ellen,” Heinrich greeted as Ellen set down her tray. Beside him, Louise von Schwartz was calmly cutting her sausage.

“Are you going out to help with the snow?” Heinrich asked.

He himself seemed unsure. He wanted to help, but he clearly felt Louise’s silent stare, which was pressuring him to rest.

“Well, there’s nothing else to do,” Ellen replied, as if she had already made up her mind to grab a shovel.

It wasn’t dangerous, but... did she know that shoveling snow could make you loathe it forever? Then again, she probably already hated snow enough as it was.

“If you want to go, that’s fine,” Louise said. “Your abilities might not be... entirely useless. You might even come up with something smart.”

“Oh... Yes, sister.”

Louise seemed half-inclined to let Heinrich go, and wasn’t trying to stop him.

The snow piling up in the imperial capital was an urgent crisis, and not something to be taken lightly. It was, by all accounts, almost like a natural disaster.

In such a situation, it was only natural that I considered Riana as a possible solution. I thought about it dozens of times a day myself. If the situation got worse, I might have no choice but to ask her to step in.

Still, it was better to have something to do than to just sit around, especially when there was no real danger involved, and it meant helping people. Because of that, the usually quiet dining hall had become slightly more lively.

Most of the students were nobles—the carefully selected elite of the Empire, and fought for humanity through this Gate Incident.

Regardless of their origins or upbringing, the idea that their powers should be used in the service of others had taken root in them over time. Since the Gate Incident, that mindset had become second nature.

Therefore, when others were in danger—this time because of the snow—it felt only natural to act.

They were born into nobility, and so their thoughts were noble as well. Noble, perhaps, but there was also a sadness to it.

Suddenly, there came the smell of something burning. A sharp, unmistakable scent. What was it?

I looked around, trying to find the source.

It was Ludwig.

“Ludwig...?” Heinrich frowned as he turned toward him.

On top of that burnt smell, Ludwig’s face and clothes were scorched and torn—he was an absolute mess.

“Guys...”

Ludwig slowly walked over to Ellen and Heinrich.

“Could you guys... Just once. Just once...”

“Hey, hey, what’s going on? What happened?” Heinrich stood up in alarm, and others turned to stare, frozen at the sight of Ludwig’s condition.

“Could you... help me... just once?” Ludwig muttered, his voice hollow.

His blank expression said everything. He had been through something terrible.

***

Ludwig had clearly been through something rough. It wasn’t a conversation fit for the banquet hall, so Heinrich, Ellen, and Louise quickly finished their meals and left with him.

They headed to the lobby of the Class B dormitory.

“You should first wash up. Are you hurt anywhere?”

“No, I’m not hurt... I’m not hurt, really...” Ludwig repeated like a broken record.

Louise gently held his shoulders.

“First, wash up. Clear your head. Change your clothes, gather your thoughts, and then talk. Take it slow. Alright?”

Ludwig nodded slowly at Louise’s gentle words, still in a daze. “Yes... Yes, Commander...”

The rest of us watched in silence as Ludwig staggered off to his room.

“What in the world happened to him...?”

“I don’t know.”

“It looks like he was at the scene of a fire...” Ellen said, still holding me as she stared at Ludwig’s door with a worried look.

‘Damn it. I had just come to my own conclusions about the Empire’s problems, and now something else was already happening?’

***

Ludwig needed time to calm himself after his mental breakdown. That started with changing out of his charred clothes and washing up.

Soon, he returned to the lobby, washed and dressed in clean clothes. But he still didn’t seem calm.

Still in a slight daze, Ludwig began explaining what had happened, though his words came out jumbled. He wasn’t great at speaking even on normal days, and having gone through something so serious, his words were even more tangled up. In the end, though, it wasn’t a long story.

“Plundered?”

“Uh, yeah... Some people... they set fire to the temple where the priestess was... and they plundered it and killed everyone inside...”

Ellen, Louise, and Heinrich couldn’t help but feel their eyes widen at Ludwig’s words.

“When I got there, it was too... too late. Everyone was dead. The temple was burning. I went in to find the priestess, but... she had already been brutally murdered... and then the building collapsed...”

Ludwig had been buried under the collapsing building along with Rowen’s body, but a superhuman would not die from such a thing. Ludwig had escaped the ruins of the temple on his own, and watched the guards and mages who arrived to deal with the fire put it out.

He hadn’t been involved in the attack—Ludwig wasn’t the arsonist or anything like that. He hadn’t even known what the incident was about.

After confirming that he wasn’t involved, the guards let him go.

Still reeking of smoke from the fire, Ludwig had returned to the Temple, helpless to do anything more.

“This... this is wrong. This shouldn’t happen, right? The priestess didn’t do anything wrong. The people at that temple didn’t do anything wrong. What did they do to deserve this?”

Ludwig’s eyes were filled with anger. He seemed convinced the perpetrators believed that those who’d died at the temple deserved it—that it was a place full of sinners, and so setting fire to it, looting it, and killing everyone inside was justified.

“I... I don’t know what to say. I really don’t. I just keep thinking that this shouldn’t have happened. And... and...”

Ludwig’s eyes flickered to Ellen and Heinrich as he spoke.

“I know the people who did this should be punished. But... I have no idea how to find them... I really don’t.”

His eyes grew unfocused again.

“I saw the ones who ran after looting the temple,” he mumbled. “I want to find them. I want to ask them why they did it... The priestess was a good person. A really good person. So why would they kill her...?”

Ludwig hadn’t missed the culprits—he had seen them with his own eyes. Even so, he believed it was impossible to track them down now that they had disappeared. He had no authority to investigate, and even if he did, he didn’t think he had the ability to catch them.

“I’m sorry. I know I have no right to ask for your help. But still... this... it’s something I just can’t do on my own...”

His voice trembled with sorrow, resentment, and helplessness.

Ludwig had neither power nor authority. He couldn’t take justice into his own hands, and so he had returned to the Temple seeking help.

Someone with strength. Someone with power. Someone with wisdom.

To Ludwig, the only person who came to mind was Ellen Artorius.

“Could you... just this one time... Help me, please?”

Ellen looked at the desperate Ludwig. And then, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, she nodded.

“Yes. I’ll help you.”

Ellen, who carried guilt in her heart for Ludwig’s condition, could not refuse his request.

***

The arson, murder, and plundering at the Temple of Ouen... Ludwig asked Ellen for help, and she agreed without hesitation.

Louise and Heinrich didn’t respond right away, but they listened quietly as Ludwig recounted what he had witnessed.

“The priestess said the temple had been defaced, and there were those who had even tried to set it on fire. Maybe those same people banded together and did this... That’s what I think.”

Hatred toward the Orders of Ouen and Alse had been growing, and that hostility sometimes turned into direct attacks on their temples.

People had vandalized the buildings, and some had even attempted arson.

This time, things had blown up spectacularly—into an actual attack by a mob. That made it both a collective crime and, in a way, perhaps an organized one as well.

Then again, it probably hadn’t even been that organized. Most of the participants were probably strangers to one another, so even if a few were caught, it would be impossible to identify and capture them all.

With the population of the imperial capital already far beyond what was manageable, identifying each individual was nearly impossible.

Even so, something about the story felt off.

“Are you sure everyone in the temple is dead?” Ellen asked.

Ludwig nodded.

“I didn’t search the whole temple... but when I went in, I didn’t see anyone alive.”

Ellen, who had already decided to help, stayed calm and collected.

“And you’re saying it was done by ordinary people?”

“I saw the ones who fled from the temple with stolen goods. I definitely heard them say something like, ‘Food would be better than this junk.’ I’m sure I heard it.”

After listening quietly and thinking it over for a moment, Ellen looked at Ludwig.

“Not all priests are holy knights,” she said calmly. “Therefore, it’s only natural that many of them don’t have exceptional physical abilities. But... is it really possible for a high-ranking priest to be killed by ordinary civilians?”

That was exactly the problem. No matter how furious the mob had been, could they really have slaughtered everyone in the temple, including a high-ranking priest?

I was thinking the same thing as Ellen.

But Ludwig shook his head.

“No. I thought about that too. But if Priestess Rowen had been capable of fighting, she wouldn’t have needed me as her bodyguard. And when we ran into trouble during the purification, I was the one who carried her out.”

Ludwig’s reasoning made sense. If Rowen had possessed the strength to defend herself, there would have been no need to assign Ludwig as her bodyguard. There was no reason for someone capable of self-defense to rely on someone else.

That meant Rowen simply had no combat ability.

There were plenty of ordained priests who never received formal training as holy knights. That much was plausible.

“And the temple wasn’t that large,” Ludwig continued. “I don’t think there was anyone there who was on the level of a holy knight. None of the bodies I saw were wearing armor...”

Given the severe shortage of priests, most clergy members who were combat-capable had been deployed to serve with the Allied Forces.

This wasn’t the headquarters of the Order of the Holy Knights—it was just a small temple belonging to the Church of the Five Great Gods in the imperial capital. It made sense that there wasn’t a single holy knight stationed there.

The rundown temple was vulnerable. It was entirely possible that a mob could have stormed in, killed everyone, and set the place ablaze. It wasn’t impossible. Just... highly unlikely.

However, that was the state the imperial capital was in—a place where the Orders of Ouen and Alse faced growing persecution.

Ludwig seemed tormented by the fact that the mob's anger had taken on such a cruel form and had been directed at innocents.

“If this really was the work of a mob, like you say, then neither the guards nor the Order of the Holy Knights will be able to catch all the culprits. And... the same goes for me,” Ellen said.

Ellen didn’t have any miraculous ability to solve everything.

“I see...”

Ludwig had come to Ellen thinking that someone smarter or more capable might have a solution, but even she couldn’t do much if this was truly an attack and looting by a chaotic mob.

Ellen fell silent, clearly deep in thought. It seemed as though she were at a loss as to how to find a clear way forward if everything Ludwig had said was true.

In that silence, Louise von Schwartz turned her eyes toward Ludwig.

It was clear she had a deep affection for Ludwig’s kind heart—after all, she had been a recipient of his help just the day before. That made it all the more evident that she now wanted to help this lost, suffering boy.

“There are a few things we need to clarify, even if we can’t uncover every detail.”

“Clarify...?”

“We need to look at this incident in three stages.”

Louise raised three fingers.

“Murder, arson, and plunder. This event can be broken down into those three distinct actions.”

She lowered her hand, then continued calmly, “What matters most is the sequence of those actions—whether the murder happened first, the arson started first, or the plundering came first, and most importantly, what the attackers were trying to accomplish in the first place.”

Louise wasn’t trying to solve the case right away. She was starting by dissecting the event, laying out its components to build a foundation for greater understanding.

“The goal might have been plunder. If that was the goal, then maybe they only killed the priests because they were caught during the act. In that case, the theft would have come first, followed by murder. And then they set the fire... Though I still don’t understand why they needed to burn the temple.”

Louise spoke slowly, laying out each possibility with careful thought.

“Or, it might have been murder. If so, they attacked the temple with the sole intent to kill the priests. Afterward, they looted the empty temple, perhaps because they felt it was a waste to leave behind the valuables within the temple. And as for setting it on fire... that could have just been an expression of hatred or rage.”

Heinrich listened silently beside her, absorbing every word.

“As for the arson being the primary goal—that seems least likely,” Louise added. “If they had started with the fire, the priests would have tried to escape. But Ludwig, you said they were all dead when you arrived.”

“Yes... that’s right.”

“Then the fire must have been set after the killing.”

The discussion had shifted to the timeline and intent behind the incident—plunder, murder, or arson. Based on Ludwig’s testimony, arson was clearly a secondary act.

The true purpose had to be either plunder or murder.

Ludwig sat there, dazed.

“But... Why does the order matter?”

His question wasn’t a defiant one—it was weary and helpless. ‘Why analyze it now, when the damage was done?’ he seemed to be saying.

But Louise shook her head.

“It does matter,” she said gently, looking straight at him. “Because the ones who killed, the ones who stole, and the ones who set the fire... they might all be different people.”

Ludwig blinked, confused.

Louise turned to Ellen, as if silently asking if she was following.

“You’re suggesting the events happened in succession, by different people?”

Louise nodded calmly.

“Yes. It may have looked like a single event—an attack by a mob—but what if it wasn’t? Even if it was a crowd, the murderers, the looters, and the arsonists might not have been the same people. The crimes could’ve been committed at different times, by different people.”

She paused for emphasis, then added, “And as Ludwig said, even if the temple’s security was weak... I still think this scenario is more likely. No matter how angry the mob was, and even if the priest wasn’t trained to fight... The chance that a high-ranking priest was killed so easily by a random group of people just seems too unlikely.”

Both Louise and Ellen seemed to agree on one thing—this was no ordinary incident.

In the end, sitting around and speculating wouldn’t change anything.

“Let’s go to the scene,” Ellen suggested quietly.

That was the decisive difference between Ludwig and Ellen. In the whole human world, there was no door that wouldn’t open for the name Ellen Artorius. The guards, the Order of the Holy Knights—no one would deny her anything.

“Um... Sister,” Heinrich spoke up hesitantly, turning to Louise. It was clear he wanted to help Ludwig. He hoped, with some nervousness, for Louise’s permission.

“...”

Louise looked at him with her usual stern expression.

She always seemed cold at first glance, yet this was the same woman who had killed her own siblings to protect Heinrich. It was impossible to truly measure how deeply she cared for him and how much guilt she carried.

“You’re helping a friend, so I won’t stop you. I’ll put my name behind it as well,” she said calmly.

Heinrich and Louise hadn’t come here for politics. They had come to rest.

“Of course, if things start to look dangerous, you’ll have to stop,” she added, this time directing her gaze toward Ludwig.

“I’ll go with you.”

She wasn’t just giving her permission—it was a declaration. Louise would personally accompany them. And if the situation escalated beyond the case of simple arson, she would put an end to it herself.

There was no reason for her to let Heinrich risk his life.

She was going as a monitor, and that meant she was willing to walk alongside them until the situation got better.

“Th-thank you...” Ludwig stammered, overwhelmed with gratitude. He hadn’t expected Louise to offer her help. She had followed Ellen’s lead and stepped in as well.

‘What...? What’s happening?’

The situation was starting to snowball.

What had started as a single person’s desperate plea was quickly drawing in figures with unimaginable influence.

Something felt off. This wasn’t going to end with some clean, ordinary resolution.

Everyone in the room was now getting involved in something suspicious—something heavy.

I wanted to scream at them not to go.

But I was just a cat. All I could do was let out a helpless meow.