My Status as an Assassin Obviously Exceeds the Hero's

This one’s a bit long!

Lattice Nail stared up at her father on the throne, stunned to learn that the image of her mother she had believed in almost entirely had been a lie.

It’s easy to imagine that for Lattice Nail, who lost her mother as a child and never knew her, the mother she’d been told about by others had been an ideal figure worthy of admiration. The depth of her shock suggested that in Lattice Nail’s mind her mother loved all races equally—almost like a champion of justice. And now that ideal had crumbled.

“My eyes were clouded back then. I was impatient to build achievements so I could become the next demon king, and I foolishly tried to force an equal, fair alliance with a race that despised and discriminated against the Demon Clan. You seem to be mistaken— that alliance with the Human race wasn’t proposed by her. In fact, she strongly opposed it, but I pushed it through anyway. In the end, she was the one who was right.”

The demon king said this with a soft self-mocking tone. Mahiro frowned at the painful sight.

If I remember correctly, the demon king wasn’t yet the demon king when Lattice Nail’s mother died. Given that his older brother was commander Saran and he still wanted to become demon king, it’s not hard to understand why he would be impatient for achievements. The fact there had been a succession struggle implies succession wasn’t strictly by primogeniture, but choosing the more capable candidate would be natural.

Putting Lattice Nail’s story together with this, it seems the demon king had once sought rapprochement with other races, but after his wife was murdered he came to hate them, falling out with his brother Commander Saran. Then, after a sibling quarrel over the throne—disguised as a succession dispute—Saran left Demon Clan territory for the Kingdom of Reytis. Considering demon lifespans, maybe a century passed between those events.

Lattice Nail had likely misunderstood that her mother had tried to form the alliance because she’d only known the father in his state of hating other races, and perhaps information about the demon king’s wife had been suppressed rather than openly discussed. That might also explain why Yoru didn’t know until recently that the demon king had been the one who created him by having his wife killed by a self-proclaimed hero. Yoru wouldn’t force himself to learn that if Lattice Nail didn’t press it.

Still—why keep it secret from Lattice Nail so long, and why choose now to tell everything?

“My wife was killed by the envoy of the nation with which I had painstakingly negotiated an alliance. It was the day the alliance was signed and the envoy had come to Demon Clan territory. We held a modest feast in this castle to host them. You were still very young then, so you didn’t attend and were with your wet nurse. As my wife used to say, she disliked other races, but she put her duties as a consort first and attended at the start. A few hours in, she excused herself with some pretext and left the hall. One of the envoys also left. When the feast ended and I returned to our chamber, my wife lay cold with a silver dagger plunged into her chest. A single strike to a vital point—already too late. For hours after she died, I had been sitting and enjoying the feast with the man who killed her.”

The demon king spoke in a quiet voice, suppressing rage. I held my breath. Even the hero beside me was rendered motionless by the atmosphere and stared at the demon king.

There was a sound like the air creaking. In response to his emotion, the enormous magical power typical of demons seemed to interfere with the atmosphere like Amelia’s gravity magic. Only because we were who we are could we still stand; an ordinary human might have fainted or, at worst, died.

“Before killing that envoy, I asked him why he had killed my wife. He said it was because he wanted to be a ‘hero.’ Profession is innate; it can’t be changed afterward. So he thought that by defeating the demon king and those tied to him, he could gain fame and become a hero, an ‘heroic’ figure. Even as it boils my guts to think he killed a woman who’d done nothing, then they accuse me of having tempted them with an alliance and trapping them here to slay them. Their country claims I lured them in and killed them. That woke me up. Non-demons are no more than insects beneath beasts. Humans, in particular, with their short lives proliferate and act on desire, spreading nothing but misfortune to us demons. Are those things the same as us? Of course not.”