The Banquet of Beasts and the Doll Appraisal
Carina’s outburst echoed through the entire banquet hall. The sudden shout drew the eyes of every unfamiliar noble in the room, and she turned deathly pale, frantically waving both hands beside her face.
“Ah! No, that’s not… ah, why!”
She wanted to offer some kind of excuse, but her flustered lips refused to produce a single coherent word. That was when it happened.
“Oh my! Edric, you’re making the young lady uncomfortable. The two of you look so lovely together—why don’t you go dance in the center of the floor?”
Countess Carna stepped forward. With an elegant smile, she issued the command as if gently smoothing over Carina’s mortifying situation.
At those words, Edric let out a short, wry chuckle. He grabbed Carina’s wandering hand without warning and dragged her straight toward the center of the banquet hall.
“To think the person the President said he’d introduce me to was you. Well… you really do live and learn.”
“That’s my line! More importantly… you knew that President guy?”
When Carina asked with eyes full of suspicion, Edric naturally wrapped an arm around her waist and answered with a sly grin.
“Heh. I’ve bought quite a few ‘beautiful flowers’ from him, you see. We’re in a client-vendor relationship. And we have a major transaction coming up soon… ugh! Hey!”
“…You perverted bastard.”
While reluctantly matching steps in the middle of the dance floor, Carina viciously ground her stiletto heel into the top of Edric’s foot and whispered under her breath. To most men, buying flowers for a woman they loved would carry a romantic meaning, but the man in front of her was the infamous scoundrel Edric. Carina instantly understood exactly what those “beautiful flowers” meant.
It was clearly the “apology bouquet” he scattered around after groping countless women and causing scandals, a bribe to clean up his messes.
“Tsk. Listen, I only recovered yesterday. Are you trying to put me back in bed already?”
Edric groaned, then tightened the arm around her waist and yanked her firmly against his solid frame.
“Eep…! Are you insane? People are watching!”
“I have to support my poor injured foot somehow. By the way, for the daughter of a knight commander, your dancing is awfully stiff. Could it be… this is your first time pressing your body against a man?”
“……I’m going to kill you.”
Carina growled with genuine loathing. Paradoxically, however, a strange sense of relief bloomed in one corner of her heart.
Of course. There’s no way this beast-like bastard could change overnight.
The fact that Edric was still the same perverted piece of trash as before actually gave Carina a sliver of comfort. But that relief lasted only a moment.
Every time his firm hand slid down her waist, her heart hammered wildly and a sharp, throbbing pulse deep in her womb dragged her into terrible confusion.
No. This is pure hatred. My body is just having this bizarre rejection response because I instinctively loathe that filthy bastard!
Carina desperately denied the growing wetness between her legs and clung to self-justification. Then, just as the tempo of the dance quickened and the atmosphere reached its peak, she pinched Edric’s side sharply and whispered.
“We’re not exactly on friendly enough terms to be dancing so intimately. I only played along for a little while for the sake of Countess Carna—no, Aunt—who has finally come back to her senses. Now get out of my sight.”
At Carina’s icy dismissal, Edric snorted and struck back coldly.
“Don’t flatter yourself. If it weren’t for my mother’s request, I would never have danced with a bitch like you—the very cause of the day my honor and family’s prestige were dragged through the mud.”
“For a man who used to chase after any woman regardless of whether she was his enemy back in his scoundrel days, you talk a big game.”
“The me of then and the me of now are different people.”
His voice dripped with the nuance that he had truly become someone else, that he was only reluctantly dancing with a woman he found utterly repulsive for his mother’s sake. That brazen attitude made Carina’s anger boil over once again.
“Ha! What a disgusting paragon of filial piety, only toward his own mother. If Aunt Carna ever learned about the ugly things you did—treating other people’s precious daughters and married women like beasts and violating them—how heartbroken would she be?”
“…Aunt, huh. Come to think of it, you’ve been calling her that this whole time. Why do you call my mother so casually?”
For an instant, Edric’s eyebrow twitched faintly. Seeing his puzzled expression, Carina clicked her tongue in disbelief.
“Tsk. You worthless scoundrel. You’re the kind of trash who ruined your own future and your family’s prestige, so it’s no surprise you’d forget your own bloodline.”
Carina glared at him with contempt and drove the final nail in.
“Did that empty head of yours completely erase the fact that Countess Carna and my mother are cousins? To think that a sixth cousin of mine is such a hopeless degenerate. You really are the most horrific stain on our bloodline.”
The moment the suffocating dance ended with those words, Carina hurried away into the crowd as if fleeing. But when persistent footsteps stuck close behind her, she finally whirled around and snarled.
“Stop following me, you perverted bastard!”
“Well now. No matter how much we hate each other, we’re still sixth cousins. I’m just worried that a lost little lamb might get its throat torn out by wolves at a party like this.”
Edric kept exactly one step of distance and gave a short laugh. Then, suddenly, he glanced back and forth between Camilla, who was introducing the President to her parents on the far side of the hall, and Carina in front of him, and murmured under his breath.
“Indeed… seeing them like this, the resemblance is uncanny.”
It was a bizarre smile—dry, as if he were talking about someone else’s business, yet mixed with the ecstasy of someone who had realized a colossal truth. Goosebumps prickled across Carina’s forearms.
Is this guy really the Edric I knew?
From his aura to his gaze, even the way he breathed—every time that overwhelming presence, so alien to the pathetic scoundrel of the past, suddenly flared up, Carina couldn’t help but feel inwardly shocked.
“That woman always bothered me. Now I finally understand the exact reason why.”
Edric muttered as if to himself. A strange tenderness lingered on his face as he compared his mother and Camilla, and for a moment Carina almost believed he might truly have become a different person.
“…Well, they’re cousins, so of course your mother and my mom look alike. Now that I think about it… you were always rather kind to my mother, even back then.”
“Well, from the memories left in this body, she always treated me like her own son.”
At Edric’s light reply, uncontrollable rage surged into Carina’s eyes.
“Like her own son?! Don’t make me laugh! Mother took care of you in place of your bedridden mother and truly thought of you as her son! And you betrayed that heart in the worst possible way!”
The emotions she had been suppressing burst out, and Carina’s voice tore through the banquet hall.
“Lady Elizabeth, who came to work at the count’s estate on my mother’s recommendation to nurse Aunt! Because of your filthy sexual harassment, she still trembles whenever she sees a man! What you did was the worst possible betrayal of our family—of our entire bloodline!”
As if cold water had been dumped over the room, the clamor in the banquet hall stopped dead. Dozens of nobles held their breath and stared at Edric and Carina. In that icy silence, Edric gave a small, mocking laugh and answered.
“Hmph. This banquet is supposed to celebrate our recovery and well-being, yet here you are, completely out of place.”
He looked down at her with eyes that had grown chillingly calm.
“What! That’s my line, you worthless scoundrel! If I had known this was the kind of place it was, I never would have come!”
Carina felt as if she had become the clown of the entire banquet and her anger shot straight to the top of her head. Just as she was about to step away and leave the party—
“That won’t do, my dear customer. I went to such trouble to prepare this wonderful occasion. It would be rather disappointing if you ruined it so soon. Hehehe.”
The President, who had approached at some point, cut in with a soft yet pointed voice. The eyes behind his mask curved toward Carina.
“And Lady Carina. For the sake of your mother, Knight Commander Camilla’s reputation, shouldn’t you hide your personal feelings a little while in a gathering of nobles like this?”
“No, leave her be. Let her spit out everything that’s on her mind.”
Edric cut the President off. He slowly looked Carina up and down, and the corner of his mouth curled up like a snake’s.
“That arrogant, loud-mouthed tomboy personality of hers… will soon disappear once she marries and serves a fine ‘husband.’ She’ll become as docile as a doll.”
Unaware of the vile intent behind those words, Carina screamed.
“Worry about your own future instead of someone else’s marriage!”
She spoke with genuine fury and tried to walk away. But Edric’s solitary murmur reached her from behind.
“She was only a candidate… but it wouldn’t be so bad to accept her. Her personality aside, her appearance is certainly acceptable.”
“You’re crazy! Why would I ever—!”
Carina’s face flushed with rage. She spun around again, ready to hurl vicious curses and slap Edric across the face. At that exact moment, the sly smile on Edric’s lips deepened. He raised his hand first and lightly snapped his fingers.
Snap.
The crisp sound scattered briefly beneath the brilliant light of the chandelier. Was that small noise the trigger? Or had the arrogant declaration Edric had uttered moments ago pressed a hidden suggestion switch deep in her subconscious?
“I… why would I… why…………”
The lips that had been snarling with murderous intent only seconds ago began to tremble. The hand she had raised toward the air dropped limply as if by magic, and her rigidly straight knees buckled helplessly.
“Ah, aahh……!”
A sensual moan unrelated to her will leaked from between her lips. The moment the suggestion switch flipped on, the womb of the knight who had guarded her chastity her entire life began to throb madly toward Edric.
The instant her knees touched the cold floor of the banquet hall, a rush of hot liquid gushed out from between the thin blue folds of her dress. In full view of dozens of nobles, she began to shamefully soak the floor with her own arousal.
“Carina?”
Camilla, noticing her daughter’s strange behavior from afar, took a startled step forward. But the President had already moved to her side and whispered with a gentle smile.
“You can stop acting now, Camilla.”
“…Oh, is that so?”
Camilla, too, dragged the hem of her red dress across the floor and walked over to Edric on her own. She gracefully knelt at his feet. Right beside her daughter, who was already drenched and forming a puddle on the floor, the mother Camilla looked up at Edric with ecstatically glazed eyes, her lower abdomen quivering.
The bizarre spectacle of two female knights who had once protected the Empire now sitting like bitches in heat at a single gesture from one man, shamelessly pouring out their own humiliating fluids.
“I greet my Master.”
“…I greet my Master.”
The eyes of the knight mother and daughter clouded over in an instant, as if candles had been snuffed out. With their reason and rebellious spirit completely castrated, they became empty “dolls” that existed only to beg their owner for pleasure while leaking arousal.
“………”
A suffocating silence crushed the banquet hall. The knight commander known as the Empire’s sword and her promising daughter, now prostrated like slaves at the feet of the scoundrel they had loathed like a beast only moments ago. Any normal noble should have been gasping in horror and whispering furiously.
But—
Clap. Clap. Clap.
Someone slowly began to clap, breaking the silence. It was a powerful old marquis with deep ties to the count’s family. He stroked the waist of the beautiful, vacant-eyed wife standing beside him and wore an ecstatic smile.
“Truly, it was a magnificent performance, Sir Edric.”
At those words, the nobles scattered throughout the hall all burst into bizarre laughter and joined in the applause.
“Hahaha! To think the Empire’s greatest female knight has been tamed so perfectly!”
“The daughter who was a sharp young filly just moments ago—how amusing to see her dominated with a single gesture!”
“Hahaha. I wondered why he accepted an unfinished product. But now I see! We all look forward to the day that doll, who once felt hatred toward her master, is completed into one that obeys him utterly!”
Dozens of nobles. Every one of them held in their arms a doll that had lost its ego and obeyed without question. This lavish banquet had never been an ordinary party. It was a secret appraisal meeting for the “owners of hypnotic dolls”—predators who had purchased souls whose bodies were ruled by the monster known as the President.
Beneath the flood of sticky praise and applause, Edric fitted blindfolds over the eyes of the knight mother and daughter kneeling at his feet. The moment he cut them off from the world with blindfolds that matched their dresses, he languidly stroked the golden hair that now belonged to him.
“You may look forward to it. I wonder what kind of ‘wives’ these women, once called the pride of the Empire, will become in my bedroom.”
Edric’s golden eyes gleamed with arrogant triumph. Beneath the brilliant lights of the extravagant banquet hall, the curtain rose on the most hideous and perfect act of domination.