"Any reason I shouldn't come with?"

"None at all."

She turns left. She follows the creek till she finds the lightning-struck tree.

It's not far at all.  Couple of minutes tops, by horse.

She gets off the horse, performs appropriate horse-parking rituals, and says, "This is the time you'd want to tell me if you had a shovel."

"Er, I was not informed that one might be required."

"Dragon said to use my sword. Sanity check on that being somehow a way to get me to break my probably magic sword?"

"By sticking it in dirt?  It'd have to be heavily trapped dirt.  Uh, I want to say that at that point they'd just ambush us, but that could be wishful thinking and wanting to get this over with."

"Mm-hm." Dig dig dig.

The ground here is hard-packed, but not nearly packed enough to be a match for Bella's sword.  Punching it through the ground breaks it up enough that it's easy to pry out chunks with the sword.  She might have to get her hands a little dirty too, but there's a creek right there.

Soon enough, one of the chunks of dirt pried up shows a chunk of something harder.  Extracting it from the dirt and bathing it in the creek reveals a guildplate-shaped object of reddish-silvery-golden metal.  It's not exactly the same shape as Bella's own guildplate; it's comparatively slightly thinner, slightly narrower, and the vertices and edges more rounded.  But if your prior belief was that this was a modern guildplate, put through some magical catastrophe that eroded off all the writing, you could easily see this as the remains of a guildplate the same shape as Bella's, after some horrific orichalcum-eroding blast.

"...that's an orichalcum guildplate.  Or what's left of one, I guess.  Those are the SS-rank adventurers and just the material for one is worth - snarkleroys, did that dragon say what happened?"

"Not in detail. He said it's from the last time guildplates were issued in this style."

Haroun wants to demand that Bella clarify what she means, but the wear on the orichalcum guildplate is obvious, if you know that you're looking at wear rather than epic-level disintegrating magic, which nobody else would think of at a time like this, because orichalcum simply doesn't wear down.

"How long ago?"

"Well, long enough to do this to it.

He says the whole heroes and demon lords thing has been going on a very, very long time.

Honestly it's just sort of part and parcel with there being enough worlds for one with games like your ecology to pop up? Multiverse is very big and very old."

"It - it could be a trick.  They'd just have to spend the money and effort to forge orichalcum in a shape like this.  Or kill an SS-rank adventurer and hit their guildplate with SS-rank destructive magic."

His heart already knows this isn't the case.  But then, that could be exactly the response they were hoping for, if they spent that much money and effort.  It's just, it's just why.  Why would that be the optimal strategy for any reasonable goal, given that much money and effort, why would they use it to do this.  Even taking into account that they could be trying to confuse him, or Bella, or somebody, by presenting him with exactly that puzzle, why would they be doing that.

Haroun is very quiet as they get back on their horses.  He is very young and the universe is very old.

"Kind of his entire point was that if one finds it objectionable that every few centuries you get a soft reset of your planetary civilization, one has to pull out extreme novelty, because anything you'd think of on your first hundred tries has been done."

After a while, Haroun says, "So.  The dragon told you about metaphysics, huh?"

She consults her notes. "He introduced himself, bragged about his hoard - I assume a chest made of 'philosopher's stone' with a key in it is really cool? I don't know what 'philosophers' stones' here do. Said nobody had ever taken his stuff. Said I was interesting because he couldn't read my mind or my destiny, asked me 'what are your designs upon this world'. I told him I wasn't sure yet and might know more in a week or two and favored the general flourishing of all sapient beings. Then he asked me the thing about which I'd rather be and I was like 'wait what' and - I have more detail written down than this, by the way, let me know if anything sounds interesting enough for my closest rendering - and he said the overseer, by which I presume he meant God, was sentimental and protective of his people but in fact I can pick. I asked why there'd be one of each if the positions were symmetrical, he - I think I told you this part already, blah blah mechanism of destiny. But that my opacity could thwart that maybe and there's never been two heroes or two lords and if he were me he might just match whatever the other one did and see what happened.

Says the council of high elves has already located me and the other guy, wouldn't tell me where other guy was but did tell me he bought a lionkin and hasn't taken her collar off and also that this is more characteristic of heroes than demon lords. Asked about and he said he hadn't bothered with finding out whether the other guy knows about me. He said the hero is defined by the choice to preserve and the demon lord by the choice to begin again. He said heroing seemed shortsighted to him, people are mortal, blah blah, world is seeking something and disrupting it just a little only winds up with it settling back like so after a while, did not explain anything about how the 'world' is seeking something distinct from how God is, asked me weird personal philosophy questions, I said I thought even if people are mortal I didn't think blowing them up tended to improve them, then I asked how onlookers distinguished demon lords and summoned heroes - since that would affect how the history got written down, see, useful filter on anything I read later -

- he said you could answer that one, told me time there was expensive, said he wasn't interested in helping me win an ordinary victory, just to disrupt the 'dance' but he didn't know what I needed to know - might have the answer but didn't have the question. Then he explained the expensiveness as being about it being difficult to contest the will of the dungeon core and force it to maintain the spell. I asked what gets this place back on track when demon lords win and he was like, it emerges out of the basic way the world works, skills and spells and dungeons and and stuff, and whatever could knock the place off the rails isn't native.

Asked for his contact information and got instructions for telling him stuff and he says it's 'not impossible' he will hear. I asked for his sources of information besides, like, watching stuff happen, and he said it's about timing - we show up when things are stable, or when the same groups keep fighting, when discoveries slow down, crime's mostly under control, everybody's mostly behaving in a stable way. Then bam. And if the heroes win too many times, demon lords get stronger, so no civilization gets to stick around very long. I said how do the demon lords get stronger if the roles aren't settled in advance or does making them both stronger just favor instability, wondered if the place just needed an industrial revolution. He said industrial revolution's been tried and that even if we can pick whatever we want it may be predictable by the selection mechanism and the higher worlds don't know what the answer is either and he thinks the world was made to find out whatever-it-is. Then he asked what my last question was. I forget what I almost asked but I actually instead asked if I had any guarantee of his accuracy and he said no.

Then he gave me buried treasure instructions, told me what the chameleon cloak is called in passing, told me to turn in the plate to the guild for the reward, said the only thing that hasn't happened before is my opacity, if I don't capitalize on that nothing changes in the long run. Then I was back in the dungeon by the stairs where we met up again."

It's a lot to chew on and Haroun is probably going to ask her to repeat it later.  Some time later.

The probability of this scenario has certainly risen to the point where he needs to keep separate track of that possible world, just like he needs to keep track of the world where this is all an elaborate plot for an unknown purpose.  At least there's a mental Skill for that.  Haroun has no idea what the people of Bella's world do instead.

Haroun Pevers rides for a time.

The thought that there might be some utilitarian argument he'll have to listen to, for why it is perfectly reasonable to take the part of the Demon Lord and wipe out everyone, is like an aching hole in his heart, a place of contradiction.  And he can already see the maneuver his mind wants to execute to stomp down on the contradiction.  It doesn't matter whether there could possibly be some utilitarian argument for picking the Demon Lord's side over the Summoned Hero's side, because that's not the only option.  Clearly, the real utilitarian priority over the long run will turn out to be disrupting the whole cycle, which is coincidentally exactly what Haroun wants to do in order to avoid a war that will probably kill all of his friends and family no matter who wins it.

It's a very clever argument.  It might even not be wrong.  The fact that Haroun's mind is immensely motivated to build an argument like this and seize on it doesn't make it wrong.  It just makes it very hard to think about.

They get into the next town that night, a relatively larger one.  (Though still with a Guild office probably too small to accept an orichalcum guildplate being turned in; the dragon said to do that at Cowcorn.)  The inn has showers, this time.

When Bella leaves in the brighter morning, she'll see that there's posters around town advertising a slave auction, with some leering text about how attractive girls and boys will be sold there, including a prize beastfolk woman.  One gets the impression that slave auctions are considered a spectator event by a certain sort of person, and that the slave auctioneers are happy to play to this.  Does the Summoned Hero / Demon Lord care to do anything about that while she's in town?

No but it puts her in a REALLY BUMMED MOOD.

Haroun can tell.  There was a time when he'd have felt pure fellowship with her over that; now he still feels a lot of fellowship and a little bit of wondering if this is the kind of thing that swings somebody's choice toward Demon Lord.  He doesn't say it out loud.  It seems - stupid, like he can guess what Bella says in reply.  Something along the lines of That's not how I work, why would it be?  Seeing a slave auction doesn't make him want to wipe out all the countries in the world.  And if Bella's not happy seeing this in her new world, because why would she be, then she doesn't need him speaking up right now and asking dumb questions.

He still deliberately stops the horses so he can pick up some snacks being sold by a stall that prominently advertises『fëa 』-free foods, with an uncollared and well-dressed beastman cook and a human cashier working in obvious harmony.  He really doesn't want Bella to start thinking that slave sellers and buyers make up his whole world.

Yum, chicken. If she notes the poster-perfect diversity of the staff she doesn't comment.

Ride.  Ride.  Ride.  New town.  Inn.  This one doesn't have 『Qualia』-free food and they have to cross a whole street to find a restaurant that does.  Haroun runs through shirtless martial arts exercises.  Sleep.  Wake up.  Remember to say ⊥』』』⊥.  『Qualia』-free breakfast.  Ride.  Haroun asks Bella about her world.  She asks him about his world.  Bella repeatedly Evals the few spells she knows, getting started on increasing her mana capacity, and possibly leveling her magic Skills if that's also happening.  Soon she's up to casting with three-tenths of a mana, then four-tenths.

So it goes, and in due time Haroun announces that he expects to make the city of Cowcorn before nightfall.

Bella produces a couple of drops of water with the endless fountain spell to make a wisp of hair stay out of her face. "What should I expect once we're there - turn in the plate, then, do I get an inn, or do you have a place I can crash at, I don't know if you're in a dorm or what."

"Huh.  I think I was thinking in the back of my mind that I'd try to arrange one night of temporary student housing, but that's when I thought we'd be making town with only a few silver left, not... whatever is the reward for turning in an orichalcum guildplate.  Uh, no promises because I don't actually know, but I'd expect that to be pretty substantial considering how much you could get on the black market for the scrap value of the orichalcum itself.  So you can probably get a really nice place for yourself, near campus.  High-nobility-level stuff, if you're willing to spend the money now and rely on your growth rate as a Summoned Hero... summoned person... to make more money later.  I could grab stuff from my own dorm and sleep in whatever servant's room those quarters come with.  Or you could get a room at an upscale regular inn, or a couple of rooms if you want your destined companion sticking around nearby.  I don't want to presume, but my guess is we both see that as common sense."