Story: Konosuba Darkness Approaches

 

As much fun as it is to watch Kazuma suffer - and it is very, very fun indeed - let us not ignore the title character for this particular thread, shall we? Darkness! Oh, what a name that is for a character like her. Darkness, a brilliant radiant blonde, who wears bright yellow armour and has a generally sunny disposition - who also happens to be a complete masochist pervert.

It's the kind of name that Megumin should have if you think about it. It's a quite Chunni name. It's also not her real name, by any stretch of the imagination. Her real name, Lalatina Dustiness Ford, is absurdly aristocratic and elegant — which makes her insistence on being called “Darkness” even funnier. It’s a self-selected edgy adventurer alias from someone who is fundamentally incapable of being intimidating for more than five seconds before saying something catastrophically perverted.

Actually, it's the one thing that, if you did it to her, she'd beg for you to stop. Call her Lalatina, and it's worse than dropping a mountain on her. She'd get off on the mountain. The name... Less so. Which isn't none, do note, but it's also not - 

You know what, let's change the topic here and see what she's doing now that she's 'joined a new team'. The answer to that, in this case, happened to be 'skipping down the street' which is an astonishing feat of strength considering she's in full plate.

“A new beginning…” she whispered. “New companions… new hardships… perhaps terrible monsters beyond imagining… perhaps being captured by brutish bandits…”

All of a sudden, Darkness hugged herself, imagining that very thing happening to her, right at that very moment, while her new team struggled to rescue her in time before... Before~!

"Ehhhh~" she giggled and collapsed to the ground hard, and proceeded to make concrete angels right where she lay out of sheer giddiness. "Well now, that would be simply terrible, wouldn't it~"

Worth highlighting this. Darkness had collapsed onto the hardened ground, created enough of a wedge to move around actual dried concrete to the point she made angel shapes in them and did this on accident.

Darkness is hella strong, guys. Hella strong - if not for her low accuracy she would be a beast in combat. And that is the truly horrifying part about Darkness. People — understandably distracted by the constant stream of degeneracy pouring out of her mouth — forget that she is not built like a normal human being. She is built like a siege weapon that developed psychological issues.

This woman just cratered herself into a road by accident.Not with a running start. Not with a skill. Not with some dramatic anime impact frame backed by orchestral music. No. Nothing remotely like any of that. She merely experienced a particularly vivid fantasy and folded into the ground hard enough to alter local geography.

“Ehhhh~” Darkness moaned blissfully, still wriggling around in the outline she'd somehow carved into the street. Tiny chunks of shattered stone crunched beneath several hundred pounds of enchanted plate armour and absurd crusader muscle. "Oh, oh dear, I really should get going. I have so much to do still, to make sure I'm ready for my new party~"

"You have a new party, Darkness?"

She lifted her head to look up and see someone smiling down at her. It was Chris. 

There are very few people in the world capable of walking up to Darkness while she is actively grinding herself into municipal infrastructure and reacting with anything less than alarm. Chris, however, merely tilted her head with mild curiosity, hands behind her back, smiling down at the writhing crusader-shaped pothole in the middle of the street like this was a perfectly ordinary social interaction.

Darkness froze. Then, with the agonizing slowness of a haunted suit of armour rising from a battlefield grave, she lifted herself from the crater. Bits of concrete slid off her breastplate. Her hair was full of pebbles. Her face was still bright red.

“A-ah! Chris!” she yelped. “H-how long have you been standing there!?”

Chris tapped her chin thoughtfully. “Well… I got here around the ‘brutish bandits’ part.”

Darkness made a noise usually associated with steam escaping damaged machinery. Meanwhile, several feet away, a horse quietly refused to continue down the road until someone dealt with whatever this situation was.

Chris, displaying either saintly patience or catastrophic enabling tendencies, crouched slightly to inspect the damage Darkness had done to the street. “…Did you do this?”

Darkness straightened proudly. “Yes.”

Chris stared at the crater. Then at Darkness. Then back at the crater again, clearly trying to determine whether her friend was secretly a dragon disguised as a noblewoman disguised as a mighty warrior. Because this was another thing people tended to forget about Darkness. Underneath the endless fantasies, the constant blushing, the worrying enthusiasm for public humiliation and monster encounters, she was an absolute statistical nightmare.

Strength? Absurd. Defense? Nearly impenetrable. Pain tolerance? Frankly inhuman, though admittedly for reasons that made everyone uncomfortable. The problem was that all these incredible combat attributes had been installed into a woman whose ability to actually hit something was approximately theoretical.

Darkness could probably punch through a castle wall. The castle itself, however, would be perfectly safe because she'd somehow miss and obliterate a wheat field three miles to the left. Chris, still examining the crater, reached down and poked one of the grooves.

"So, tell me about your new party," Chris said, rolling on her heels. "Without doing that thing you do where you awaken a person's -"

"Out of my waaaa~aaay!" 

Right at that moment, a boy with brown hair ran full pelt by them while being pursued by a girl with blue hair and another girl wearing a pointy hat. Neither of them were gonna question that.

"That was them now," Darkness said.

"They seem nice," Chris observed, looking after them as they went. "I take it that you've already awakened their inner sadomasochist?"

"I wouldn't have the faintest idea what you mean," Darkness sniffed. "I really should be punished for making such an awful mess, don't you think?"

"Not particularly!" Chris chirped, rolling on her heels and keeping her distance. "Well, anyway, I hope you get on great with your new party! Try not to scare them off, okay?"

=====

Oh, that's bad, that's very bad! For a while now Chris had theorised that Darkness and her ability to turn people into sadists might extend to the divine as well as the mortal, but she'd never risked finding out until now.

Oh, this was bad, it was very bad. To put it in a way that might be more easily understood, try this.

Compare Old Testament God to New Testament.

Yeah, let's go with that. Aqua wasn't exactly as nice as the New Testament God, but it gets the idea across, right? If something flipped God's switch and made him go back to the Old Testament stuff...?

It's bad, right. Bad for a God or a Goddess to become a sadist. It's a lot of power to wield, even if Aqua is a bit restricted right now. She wouldn't be stuck in this plane of existence forever, and if that sadism became ingrained...?

Yes, yes, I can hear some of you commenting now, 'what difference would it make?' but in truth it's a lot. A lot of difference. Aqua's cruelty comes from a sense of general superiority, not from actively enjoying it. 

Actually, let's refine the metaphor: Old Testament God vs the actual Devil. Not some metaphorical Devil, Satan itself. Yeah, that's a better way to think about it. Which would you rather deal with there, the one that would punish you for whatever, or the one that whispers sweet nothings into your ear so you can eat all the dicks for all eternity?

That's the situation Chris finds herself faced up against. No, not the dick eating bit - the part where Aqua derives sexual satisfaction from making others suffer. That's a really bad thing to let happen. She could not let that sit.

It also meant she could not personally risk staying around Darkness lest that influence creep into her as well. She had to find a cure for this malady - before things turned out really bad for absolutely everyone!