It Can't Be (1)
Succubus. What exactly is a succubus?
If you ask an ordinary person this rather obvious question, they usually answer something like this:
“A devil who bewitches men.”
“A monster that slips into your dreams and sucks out your vitality.”
“A woman with a sensual appearance who seduces humans and drags them into pleasure.”
“A non-virgin who devours virgins.”
Generally speaking, none of those are wrong. Succubi really are beautiful and dangerous—especially lethal to men. Tales of grown bachelors falling for a pretty succubus and ruining their entire lives are so common they’ve spread to every corner of the Human Realm.
In fact, I have a similar case right in my own family.
“Why did you marry Mom?”
“A cute blonde with huge tits kept throwing herself at me. How was I supposed to resist?”
That would be my father. He was such a strange man that, from the moment I grew old enough to argue, I was constantly bickering with him.
“No matter how you look at it, you should’ve shown at least some common sense. You ran away from your family, said you were going to marry Mom, and even immigrated to the Demon Realm. Thanks to you, I’m the one suffering. It’s honestly embarrassing whenever my uncles bring you up.”
“Your uncles don’t know what they’re talking about. One day, when you get your own succubus, you’ll understand how your old man feels. Heh heh…”
“…Right.”
“And just so you know, my love for your mother was genuine. Especially… I really loved her soft silver hair.”
Looking back, the stories Father told about his past never quite added up. Whenever that happened, I made a point of correcting his mistakes.
“…Didn’t you just say she was blonde a second ago?”
Besides, the mother I remembered was definitely closer to “slim” than “busty.” Yet even when I raised such reasonable objections, Father would only laugh in that unpleasant way.
“Heh heh. Don’t try to know too much. You’ll find out naturally when the time comes.”
“……”
Although he was never the most reliable father, it seemed his feelings for Mother had been sincere. Even after she passed away from illness when I was young, he never remarried. He raised me and my older sister all by himself in a foreign land. He tried his best to fulfill his responsibilities as a parent.
And then, ten years later, when Father left this world, he gave me a heartfelt last will.
“The world is shit, so live strong, Luke.”
Being the dutiful son I was, I took those words to heart.
A few years have passed since then.
…Yeah. It really is pretty shit.
Now that I’m twenty-two, I’ve come to understand Father’s last words quite well. Once you become an adult, you realize the world is far more unkind than you imagined—and among all places, the Demon Realm has been especially unkind to me.
“Oh ho, so a mere half-breed dares to look down on purebloods?”
As a low-ranking civil servant in the Demon Realm, I was once again dealing with a nightmare customer today. It seemed that someone like me—who lacked horns, wings, or a tail—stood out particularly well to troublemakers. So much so that I even had my own named nuisance.
The Blonde Vampire Girl (341 years old, self-proclaimed veteran of the Second Demon Realm War) was once again delivering a patriotic lecture while I was already swamped with work.
“Goodness, the youth these days know nothing of proper conduct, nothing at all… This body poured its heart and soul into establishing the foundations of this nation, yet here a half-breed is wasting the taxpayers’ blood. How truly lamentable.”
“I’m sorry, but even if you say that, we cannot issue the blood pack this week. Administratively, it takes at least a week—”
“Nonsense! It is precisely because of slackers like you that our Demon Nation has fallen into stagnation! How can you keep saying it’s impossible without even trying?”
“No, I’m telling you, it really is impossible…”
Because the Demon Realm has such a wide variety of races, the types of troublemakers are equally diverse, and the bullshit they pull is even more varied and infuriating. Once, a cyclops came in claiming he could only use one eye and therefore deserved disability benefits. Another time, a ruined dragon suddenly released its polymorph and went on a rampage, paralyzing operations for an entire day. (The documents lost to its breath attack still haven’t been fully restored.) And once, a family of seventy-eight goblins staged a protest in front of the community center demanding childbirth subsidies. (Short-lived species with rapid fetal development only receive partial subsidies and have strictly limited voting rights.)
At this point, it’s less a melting pot of races and more a trash can of races.
So when I inevitably started feeling skeptical about Demon Realm society, the vampire in front of me rattled on with even more enthusiasm.
“Heh heh. For the sake of this weak-willed half-breed, this body shall share its experiences from the Demon Realm War! This happened 287 years ago on the Nadia Plateau. At the time, our supplies had been cut off, so I had to survive on nothing but grass and dew—”
“……”
As the ancient tale began, a migraine suddenly hit me. The stories this old bat told were, to put it crudely, complete garbage. They always ended in self-praise and were unnecessarily long, like some dragged-out web novel. So, as usual, I let it go in one ear and out the other.
Then the small child inside my heart whispered secretly and pathetically.
Hmm. Should I just quit?
It was a whisper I’d heard dozens of times already this year. Even the child in my heart could see that this job paid peanuts while demanding insane hours. Since I was still young, maybe it was better to look for something else. Maybe it would be smarter to learn a proper skill while I still could.
…Despite that powerful urge to resign, I soon gave up and let out a sigh.
“Ugh.”
Throwing in your resignation is easy. Dealing with the living expenses that come after is not. The reason was simple: I had a family I was responsible for.
In the end, I fulfilled my duty as the emotional trash can for the demons that day, then headed home without feeling the slightest sense of accomplishment. The sky had already turned pitch black from all the overtime. I trudged wearily toward our shabby old house.
When I finally opened the front door and kicked off my shoes, I called out in a tired voice.
“I’m home.”
At my listless greeting, something hesitantly emerged from the narrow, dark hallway to greet me.
“…You’re back, Luke?”
It was unmistakably a demon. Unlike me, she had small horns sprouting from her head, bat-like black wings folded behind her back, and a slender, smooth tail that swayed cautiously at her waist. Her appearance was one hundred percent what anyone would call a succubus.
However, her aura was far from what people usually imagined when they thought of succubi. She was modest rather than glamorous, demure rather than seductive. In fact, her behavior was so reserved it bordered on socially awkward. No, she was straight-up a shut-in. She had no friends and was so shy she couldn’t even order delivery over the phone.
She barely resembled our pureblood succubus mother or even me, a half-demon. If not for that purple hair, I might have believed she wasn’t related to us at all. And yet, as if testing the laws of genetics, the same blood flowed through our veins.
In short, we were siblings.
My older sister looked at me with worry. I’d come home later than usual.
“You’re pretty late today… Are you okay? Nothing bad happened, right?”
At her clumsy but kind question, I deliberately exaggerated.
“So many things happened. I’m exhausted, seriously.”
“R-really? What happened…?”
Even though I’d said it as a joke, she clutched her chest in concern. As always, she was the perfect target for voice phishing scams. For my timid sister’s sake, I quickly dropped the act.
“I was just kidding. It was the same as any other day. Something suddenly came up, that’s all.”
“Ah, I-I see… I thought maybe…”
Only then did her expression brighten a little as she let out a sigh of relief. She glanced at me cautiously before asking carefully.
“Have you eaten?”
“Not yet.”
“Then go wash up. I’ll set the table quickly. Let’s eat together.”
Honestly, she wasn’t the most dependable person, but moments like this made her seem like a proper older sister. I stood there blankly for a moment before nodding.
“…Okay.”
Even though I’d come home two hours late, she still hadn’t eaten. Deep down, I found her consideration both foolish and deeply touching.
“Here, eat a lot.”
“Thanks for the meal.”
After my shower, a generous dinner was laid out on the table. Sitting across from my sister, I took a spoonful of pork kimchi stew and gave my usual review.
“It’s good.”
“…Really?”
My sister was a professional homebody. Inside the house, she was good at almost everything. Cooking, gardening, embroidery, calligraphy—you name it. But when it came to anything outside, she had zero talent. She was so severely incapacitated that she couldn’t even handle a normal convenience store part-time job, let alone customer service.
“At this level, you could open a restaurant. Human Realm food is pretty popular in the Demon Realm these days.”
“R-running a restaurant is too much…”
Just talking about going outside was enough to make her face turn pale. She shrank her shoulders and spoke in a tiny voice.
“…There would be male customers too.”
“I could handle serving and you could cook.”
I’d said it like a joke, but there was a real reason she was so terrified.
Androphobia.
It stemmed from a childhood trauma where she had nearly been kidnapped by humans simply because she was a succubus. Although the kidnapping attempt had ultimately failed, ever since then she had extreme difficulty interacting with people. Especially if the other person was a man—she couldn’t even hold a proper conversation.
She’d even had to attend an all-girls high school because of it.
Well, even in an all-girls school she was still a loner, so that didn’t change much.
Thankfully, she didn’t fear me, her younger brother. If she were scared of me too, she would have nowhere left to stand.
Of course, as a fresh adult with a pathetic salary, supporting another grown person wasn’t easy. But it couldn’t be helped. I couldn’t just abandon my only family.
And no matter what others might think, in my eyes, my sister was by no means a hopeless person.
“But if we worked together, you’d be the one suffering, Luke…”
She had low self-esteem, but she also had solid self-awareness and a conscience. She was the type who took even my casual future hypotheticals seriously. I gave her a bitter smile.
“You need to be a little more shameless, sis.”
“…?”
“Why do you assume I’d suffer if we worked together?”
I’d meant it as comfort, but she still answered with an apologetic look.
“…Because I don’t have any skills like you do, Luke.”
“You’re good at cooking, laundry, and cleaning. And you’ve never killed a single houseplant. You’re basically a druid.”
“Anyone can do those things.”
“I can’t.”
Had she forgotten how, as a child, I’d forgotten to feed my hamster and ended up reenacting “Now kill each other”? I didn’t want to see a hamster split into seventeen pieces either, but…
As I recalled that bitter memory, my sister continued.
“But you’re the one who works.”
“What you do is also work.”
Despite my full-course sincere mental care, she hung her head like a criminal.
“Ugh… I’m sorry for being such a burden. I can’t even do the simple things everyone else manages…”
“What are you talking about? Thanks to you, I’m enjoying this kimchi stew right now. Honestly, where else in the Demon Realm could I eat something like this?”
“But we still have debts to pay, and because of me our living expenses keep going up…”
“We’ve almost paid off the hospital bills, and your living expenses don’t amount to much.”
It wasn’t a lie—my pathetic salary was just enough to cover it. Still, something seemed to weigh on her mind as she kept avoiding my eyes.
“But lately you always look so tired… As your older sister, I want to do something for you, but nothing goes the way I want… I don’t want to hold you back, but if I don’t hold on, I feel like a pathetic person who can’t do anything by herself…”
“Haa.”
Man, why was she so down today? After dealing with shameless troublemakers all day, handling my consistently submissive sister felt like going from a hot spring to a cold bath. It was extremely bad for my health.
So I tried to change the subject by observing her carefully. That’s when I realized there wasn’t even a spoon or a bowl of rice in front of her.
“By the way, aren’t you eating? You said you hadn’t eaten yet either.”
Even to my reasonable question, she only gave me that familiar hesitant fidgeting and glanced sideways at the wall calendar.
“W-well, I do need to eat too, but…”
Even when she needed to ask for something straightforward, she always hesitated. That was one of her long-standing habits. Only then did I realize what she was trying to say and turned my gaze to the wall calendar.
On one side of the calendar, the reason her tongue had been particularly long today was clearly marked.
The “meal” she was talking about wasn’t rice or wheat.
“Ah, it’s already that time.”
“Mmm…”
The last Thursday of every month.
That was the day I had to offer her my vitality.
For the sake of my androphobic, socially anxious succubus sister.