The Demon King Experiences His First Real Battle (3)
And as for the Brider's method of reproduction, Rin the black mage looked upon the creature with undisguised revulsion, while her older brother Ron clicked his tongue in disbelief.
"What a truly vicious way to breed. Why isn't a demonic beast like that better known?"
Ron asked out of genuine curiosity as a black mage. Summoning such a creature would have been rather entertaining, he thought—and yet he couldn't help wondering why a beast like this had remained so obscure that even he had never heard of it.
Selina answered with a bitter smile.
"Its meat is surprisingly delicious, so it's quite popular in the Demon World. I'm a Vampire, so blood is enough for me—meat only gives me the taste without filling my hunger, so it means nothing to me. But those things taste so good that the moment another demonic beast or demon spots one, it gets eaten on the spot. If it weren't for the demons who keep breeding them precisely because the meat is so good, they might have gone extinct long ago."
In other words, within the Demon World, Briders were treated as livestock.
They eat that?
Ugh... no thanks.
Ron and Rin both wore peculiar expressions at the thought of the Brider as a food animal. Rin in particular felt bile rising at the mere imagination of it. That something so hideous could be considered delicious was beyond the aesthetic comprehension of even black mages like them.
Jae-hyun, on the other hand, either had grown so used to the Brider's grotesque appearance that it no longer registered, or he simply did not care. Either way, his attention was fixed not on the creature itself but on the middle-aged man who had been injected with its eggs—and on the woman who was still filleting her own daughter alive.
Then, at last, he felt the surge of death energy and absorbed it at once.
The ten-year-old girl, carved apart while still breathing by her own mother's hand, had finally died.
"Ah... aaaaaaah!!!"
Only after her daughter was dead did the woman's mouth become free, and she screamed—a raw, shattering howl. The knowledge that she had personally sliced her precious child to death with her own hands had broken her mind completely.
Watching the spectacle, Jae-hyun smiled coldly.
For ten long years he had steadily contemplated how best to make the betrayers and their families suffer. Reducing a mother and daughter to this wretched state had been one of the experiments related to that purpose.
But the foremost target of his revenge remained the Saint, Lucretia.
The Holy Power wielded by Lucretia and the priests of the Holy Kingdom of Astraea might not affect Jae-hyun himself as Demon King, but it was more than lethal enough against his subordinates—an irritating ability. For that reason he had marked Lucretia as his first priority for vengeance, intending to erase the Holy Kingdom of Astraea entirely and clear the field of troublesome enemies before his dark legions ran rampant.
And Lucretia had no family. As a Saint, she would have found marriage difficult for the sake of her public image—unless the groom were someone of a Hero's stature, at least.
Of course, marriage was not entirely impossible. Jae-hyun still lacked detailed information; everything he currently knew about her had come through Ron and Rin, and amounted to little more than the fact that her authority surpassed even the Pope's.
So she might have married. Whether she had or not, however, did not matter.
No—if anything, he hoped she had married and borne children.
That way he could force her to bear not only new children, but grandchildren as well.
"Graaaagh!"
Watching the middle-aged man die slowly in agony after the forced injection of the eggs, Jae-hyun wore the mad smile of a cruel Demon King.
I should test what happens if I put those eggs in a womb.
He had already observed the effect of injecting the eggs into a man through the middle-aged victim. Now he wanted to see what would happen if they were placed inside a woman's uterus.
But first, it was time to watch the Briders growing inside the middle-aged man's body.
"Aaaaaaaagh!"
The man screamed as though his throat would tear. Both of his arms and legs swelled, and then something burst through the flesh.
"Kieeeee!"
They were tiny Briders.
Barely the size of a thumb, yet unmistakably Briders. Moments later, something else punched out through his side.
"Kieeeek!"
The last of the hatchlings.
At the sight of Briders that had grown by devouring flesh and drinking blood from within, now bursting free of the body, the villagers screamed. Some of the women broke into sobs.
Jae-hyun made no move to silence their cries or weeping.
Screams and tears are rather pleasant to listen to.
On the contrary, he found the sound agreeable—because it meant they were suffering.
His grudge had long since expanded beyond the betrayers and the soldiers who had followed them. It was aimed at this entire world. A world that had summoned him without his consent, that he had saved, and that had then betrayed him when he simply tried to leave in peace—he would never forgive it. To take his revenge upon this world, he would first have to slaughter everyone except those who already hated it and sought its destruction.
And every single villager here was a target of that revenge—someone who had to die in agony.
"Kuhuhu."
Watching the middle-aged man finally expire in a fountain of blood while the Briders tore into his corpse, Jae-hyun laughed with genuine pleasure. The greater the resentment packed into a death of pain and despair, the higher the quality of the death energy he obtained. That death energy converted into Demonic Energy and added itself to his power.
The more people who died in agony across the Intermediate World, the greater his strength would become—and the stronger every subordinate under his command would grow as well.
"Hmm. Who next, I wonder?"
As Jae-hyun's gaze began to select the next sacrifice, the villagers flinched and prayed that it would not be them. Seeing them driven to the brink, Jae-hyun decided it was time to dangle a carrot—to turn them into creatures clinging to foolish hope.
Cornered humans lashed out. That was precisely why black mages fought to the death rather than betray their own. But leave even a scrap of hope, and humans would cling to it.
Having once been human himself, Jae-hyun knew that truth all too well.
"I'll need to spare at least fifty of them. I'll keep them alive for labor, after all."
The words meant nothing to him. He had no need of labor. If he wished, he could raise an undead army hundreds of thousands strong and throw up a fortress in moments. The idea that he required a mere fifty workers was a lie so transparent that even a passing dog would have laughed.
And even if it had been true, sparing fifty out of a hundred fifty-nine still meant a hundred nine people would die.
But Jae-hyun's bait did not end there.
"And among those fifty survivors, none will have lost family. Kill one person, and their entire family dies with them. Spare one person, and their entire family lives."
It was a seductive lure.
Everyone present feared not only their own deaths but the deaths of their families. Jae-hyun's words planted the hope that they and their loved ones might all survive together.
Foolishly, they seized on the belief that they would be among the fifty and felt relief. Those with large families felt it most of all, convinced their odds of survival had risen. Not one of them considered that, in the end, they would all die.
Or perhaps they simply refused to think it—preferring to cling to empty hope and the comfort it brought.
"Very well. Time to choose a sacrifice. I need one human female for an experiment. All women aged fifteen to forty, virgin or married, step forward. Anyone who fails to come out within one minute will have their entire family slaughtered."
"Y-yes, sir!"
At his command, every woman in that age range hurried forward, desperate not to die—virgins and wives alike—and lined up before him.
There were fifty-three in total. Jae-hyun looked them over. As expected of slash-and-burn farmers, not one of them was particularly attractive. None possessed beauty worth even a brief diversion or the trouble of tossing to his subordinates. But as experimental material, they would serve well enough.
Now he had to choose one among them.
"I need to pick one of you, but simply pointing someone out would leave too much to chance. So I'll give all fifty-three of you a fair opportunity."
The moment he finished speaking, large numbers appeared on the women's clothes—from one to fifty-three.
"W-what!"
"Are these numbers?"
Even those who could not read knew their numbers; there was no commoner who didn't. Even a small child learned to count so they could tally goods, and teaching numbers took only a day—nothing like the long labor of literacy. Slash-and-burn farmers knew their numbers as well as anyone.
Jae-hyun addressed the murmuring hundred six people in a voice of ice.
"I am merciful, so I will give you a choice. Vote for the woman numbered one through fifty-three whom you most wish to see die. The woman who receives the most votes will be the one who dies."
The hundred six people trembled violently.
W-we're supposed to vote?
We're the ones who decide who dies...?
Jae-hyun congratulated himself on his mercy, but anyone could see how vicious the act truly was. Calling it a vote changed nothing—forcing them to choose who would die would leave a lifelong wound of guilt, as if each voter had committed murder with their own hands.
Not only would they select which of the village women died, but if the woman they marked actually received the most votes and was killed, they would feel no different from murderers. It was a truly cruel method.
Jae-hyun, however, found the situation entertaining, and Lucien was clearly intrigued as well. Selina said nothing, but it was plain she considered it quite an amusing game. Ron and Rin felt a stir of anticipation too.
No one could know who would receive the most votes, and that uncertainty only made it more thrilling. Jae-hyun had already declared that if one family member died, the entire family would die with them—and the villagers knew it. For any of the fifty-three women who had family, the highest vote total meant death not only for herself but for everyone she loved.
And here, human psychology would split.
It won't be the same for me, right?
That was not the thinking of the women being voted on, but of the voters themselves.
Ordinarily, people would vote for a woman without family, to minimize the total number of deaths. But if that woman then died with a high vote count, the voter would be crushed by the guilt of having committed murder. So many would instead prefer to vote for a woman they believed would not die—and that target would naturally be a woman with a large family, someone others would supposedly never vote for.
They would cast their vote for her to escape the guilt of murder, while convincing themselves that everyone else would vote for someone different and leave her untouched.
It was a tangled, self-contradicting paradox with no correct answer. Until the votes were actually cast, no one could predict the result.
And that was precisely what made it such an entertaining game for the Demon King.
Who would die, and who would live?