Vol 1 Chapter 2 – Time Has Passed! 【Vol 1 – Ten Years Later, the Male Disciple I Reunited With Had Somehow Turned Into a Succubus】

The subspace where the evil god and I were sealed was an empty void. Nothing existed there but the two of us.

We didn’t need food. We didn’t even need to sleep. Even if we died, we’d revive immediately, and we ceased to age.

All we could do in that place… was fight.

For what felt like eternity, I just kept fighting, fighting, and fighting the evil god.

By grinding out real combat experience, I inched forward, growing ever so slightly, like a turtle crawling along. The evil god, on the other hand, was a being that had been complete from the very beginning. The concept of “growth” didn’t apply to it.

──And finally, the day came when the turtle overtook the god.

The full-force strike I’d forged over what felt like endless time pulverized the evil god’s very existence. At the farthest reaches of that subspace, I finally destroyed it.

By the time I returned from that sealed subspace, about ten years had passed in the real world.

“Well, for me, it was way more than ten years…”

According to the lore left behind by the elves, one second in this world is equal to a hundred thousand years in subspace. By that math, I’d been in there not just for ten years, but for billions—no, trillions of years.

“…I wonder how Shion’s doing.”

Even before I got trapped, my life had been nothing but battles and training. I didn’t really have much in the way of regrets.

When I closed my eyes, wondering what to do now, the image that came to mind was Shion’s tearful face just before he sealed the evil god and me away.

“…I wasn’t exactly a great Master either… I mean, I’m the one who taught him ‘Succubi Are Scary’ and all that…”

That said, nothing else came to mind in terms of things I wanted to do.

“So for now, I guess I’ll go see Shion.”

It had been ten years since we parted, and I had no idea where he was or what he was doing now. Still, I had promised I’d definitely come back. So even if I showed up after ten years, it’s not like he had any right to be mad at me. Probably.

Anyway.

First I’d find Shion, and then decide what to do after that. After all, I’d spent so long in that subspace that even if it took me a few years to track him down, it would feel like nothing to me.

“…Wait. Unlike me, Shion should have kept growing, right?”

Before we were separated, I was eighteen and Shion was nine, so now Shion should be nineteen.

Subjectively, I feel more like ten trillion and eighteen, but you don’t age in subspace. So to other people, I still just look eighteen.

Which means that, visually speaking, I’m juuuust barely the younger one now.

“Hmm. In that case, would it be better if I called Shion ‘Onii-san’…?”

Mulling over that very serious problem, I started walking toward the nearest town.

──In the end, I never once ended up calling Shion “Onii-san.”

Not because I had to maintain my dignity as a Master, or because of any difference in our sizes.

It was for a much more fundamental reason: our genders were different.

The only thing I really knew about Shion was his age.

That said, a kid who’d been swinging a sword since childhood didn’t have that many potential futures. Most of them end up as soldiers, mercenaries, adventurers, or sword instructors. Something along those lines.

So I started asking around about Shion in the nearest city.

First stop was the Adventurer’s Guild. I picked out a friendly-looking middle-aged guy and invited him to the tavern. In every age and every place, people are weak to free drinks.

“Shion, huh? The only one that name brings to mind is the Demonbane Princess Knight.”

“The… Demonbane Princess Knight?”

“What, kid? Don’t tell me you’ve never heard of the famous Lady Shion?”

Just as planned, once the ale was flowing, the bald guy’s head turned bright red and he started telling me everything he knew. For the record, I paid for the drinks with money I’d gotten by selling the meat from the tigers and bears I’d hunted on my way to town.

“Lady Shion is the Princess Knight of the Succubish Kingdom who took down the evil god ten years ago—basically, the savior of our era.”

“Um… this Lady Shion is a woman, right?”

“Of course she is. She’s a princess knight. I’ve never seen her in person, but the stories say she’s more beautiful than even an elf, with a body so sexy even a succubus would be jealous!”

“I see…”

If that Shion were a guy, it wouldn’t be strange at all for him to be the same person as my disciple.

So what, then?

The evil god’s revival had been a huge incident at the time. Maybe once it was sealed away, there’d been some kind of political spin, and the story that spread was that a princess with the same name as my Shion had defeated the evil god?

Whether that rewrite had been to make the evil god’s sealing easier for the public to understand, or whether there’d been some other intention behind it, I had no idea.

In any case.

If Lady Shion is a princess, then she and my disciple, Shion, are two completely different people.

──At the time, I honestly believed that.

“Nowadays, anyone who thinks they’re hot stuff is headed for the Succubish Kingdom. Rumor has it Lady Shion is gathering talented people from all over to build the strongest army in the world.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Word is, though, they only hire women. For men, the bar is higher than the clouds.”

“That so.”

If that’s the case, then there’s a good chance Shion went to the Succubish Kingdom at least once.

I grabbed a few more people and asked around, but didn’t get anything more useful than that. So, I decided to head for the capital of the Succubish Kingdom.