The Ruler's Delusion
Humans are an inferior species, nothing more than prey — so thought the monster, having devoured the body of a corporate executive and successfully completed its mimicry.
Set aside the single flaw of being unable to multiply its numbers, and its physical abilities and intellect were without question far superior to those of humans.
It was true that it was forced to live in hiding among humans, but in a way, that very fact was itself proof of its superiority. Humans could never seek out those of its kind concealed within their own ranks.
The sciences had advanced, and yet all their machines and technologies were useless against an appearance identical to their own; personality, speech patterns, and the like could be devoured wholesale along with memory and identity, allowing it to imitate humanity better than humans themselves could.
Its kind were not some verminous parasites.
Quite the opposite — they were sovereigns who looked down upon humans with contempt and pulled their strings from behind the scenes. Humans themselves were their meals, and one needed only to step outside to find a buffet of delicious, varied feasts spread out before them.
Humans labored under the delusion that they alone stood at the apex of the ecosystem, when in truth an invisible species existed above them.
That species was none other than themselves — the ones called Rulers.
All it had to do was quietly enjoy, from a comfortable height, the society and civilization and achievements that humans had so diligently built up over the ages.
They would never suspect that the works of their several-thousand-year history were being indulged in as one Ruler's idle pleasure.
In that sense, the social standing of the man it had eaten and now wore was well suited to savoring such indulgences. A directorship at Seosan Life, a subsidiary of Seosan Electronics — one of the most prominent conglomerates in the country.
It could have devoured someone of even higher standing if it wished, but a position too elevated risked drawing human eyes, so it had settled on a reasonable middle ground.
Knock, knock.
The monster, lounging back in its office chair as it mocked humanity and wallowed in its own magnificence, felt a surge of irritation when someone rapped at the door.
"Tch... come in."
At its permission, the door opened, and a beautiful woman entered the room clutching a stack of documents.
...That female employee... ah, right — the human called Assistant Manager Lee Ji-yoon.
It wasn't often that a mere assistant-manager-level employee entered the director's office, but she was on the verge of earning a team-lead title through her excellent work, which made it possible.
"What is it... huh?"
As the human called Ji-yoon drew near, a stench like rotting food waste washed over her, and the monster furrowed its brow.
At first it nearly flew into a rage, mistaking the smell for actual garbage — until it caught on to something and found itself puzzled instead. The odor it had taken for kitchen scraps was one that only its own kind, the Rulers, could smell.
And the reason it smelled like discarded food was that this woman was a discarded shell — a piece of refuse that one of its kindred had eaten and spat back out.
Which meant, in other words, that the human standing before it had already been consumed, and what remained inside was nothing but an empty husk.
Occasionally there were kin who insisted on feeding only on human brains, and when discarding the corpse afterward proved tiresome or inconvenient, they would produce empty shells like this one — NPC-like things that went through the motions.
It, having been born only recently, possessed no such ability to fabricate hollow shells.
Though nothing had ever been formally decreed, a hierarchy of sorts existed even among Rulers, based on ability.
The lowest rank, the first of them: Pwun. A being with no power beyond devouring a human and stealing that human's face and memories. Its transformations, too, were limited to a single person — to become someone else, it had to throw away the appearance it currently wore.
The second rank: Knight. It possessed all the rudimentary abilities of a Pwun, and in addition could replicate the outward appearance of any human it wished to become, down to mere fragments of their body. Their numbers were few, but they could retain the biological data of the humans they devoured and revert to those appearances at will. Within limits, they could also manipulate human memories and patterns of behavior.
The third rank: Rook. Able to wield every ability of a Knight without restriction, and further capable of implanting into a devoured human's skull what was known as a Fake Brain. A human fitted with one went on living without raising any suspicion, parroting their old habits and mannerisms exactly like an NPC. And at the command of the Ruler who planted it, they could be manipulated like a puppet on strings. Particularly gifted Rooks could even replicate their own bodies, temporarily swelling their numbers — though this was nothing like true reproduction, and did not grow the species. Given time, the duplicates died off on their own, their abilities were vastly inferior to the original's, and the number that could be made was limited besides.
The fourth rank: Queen. A being that could exercise every power of a superior Rook without the slightest constraint — and could even multiply its numbers without limit. Where a Rook's copies fell short of true breeding, a Queen's multiplication approached it: the genuine propagation of the species. The individuals she multiplied could, under the direction of the original, wield abilities approaching those of a Rook themselves.
It was a power bordering on catastrophe. If a Queen so desired, she could wipe humanity from the earth and set the Rulers visibly, openly, upon the apex of the world's ecosystem.
For a species that could not multiply itself by nature, she was in every sense worthy of the name Queen — scarcely different from a mother.
And yet the fact that Rulers still hid among the ranks of humanity meant that no individual had yet reached the rank of Queen. A legend, passed down like folklore, spoke of a Queen several thousand years ago — but it was, at best, an oral tradition. According to it, the Queen was something like what humans would call a vegetarian: rather than eating humans, she was said to sustain herself on the semen of men.
The Rulers had naturally laughed such a baseless tale out of the room, and it was no different. Whatever the case, no Queen existed yet.
Or... perhaps one was simply keeping her existence hidden.
It entertained the thought for a moment, then shook its head inwardly. Nonsense. A being capable of driving humanity extinct at a whim had no reason to go on hiding among them.
Hmm... more importantly... a kindred nearby, was there? Perhaps I should meet them...
Someone capable of producing a Fake Brain had to be at least Rook rank. Knowing them couldn't hurt, it thought — and yet some part of it hesitated.
If one were forced to name another way in which Rulers fell short of humans, it would be their utter lack of cooperation. There were even Rulers who so loathed their own kind that they hunted them down and killed them.
The door burst open.
"I'm so sorry, Director. It's just... we have visitors."
The door flew open without warning and the secretary rushed in, speaking in a fluster. Puzzlement crept over the monster's face.
"What? Visitors? There's nothing on my schedule today. Is it a vendor?"
"That's the thing... I'm sorry, but they say they're from the government. They had official credentials, so I couldn't very well turn them away..."
"...The government?"
How absurd. And vaguer still — no ministry named, no office specified, just the government, lumped together. That much was a little suspicious.
"Ah, for fuck's sake. Why is everyone pissing me off today... Yeah. Send them in."
"Yes, sir."
There was no need for courtesy toward food waste, so it spoke without restraint. The female employee named Ji-yoon answered briefly with unfocused eyes and left the room.
"Show them in, then."
At the irritation-laced command, the secretary bowed her head obsequiously, glancing at its mood, and moments later two women in black suits stepped into the office.
One was a black-haired woman with her hair swept back into a ponytail, the narrowed, smiling crescents of her eyes and mouth conjuring the image of a fox a thousand years old. The other, strikingly, was a blonde, blue-eyed foreigner with hair falling to her waist, her face so expressionless it was practically a poker face.
It was rare enough for someone who looked entirely foreign — not even mixed-blood — to be a civil servant in this country, and the monster found it odd.
What the two had in common was that both were considerable beauties, and both possessed bodies hardened with considerable muscle. Perhaps because it had eaten its share of humans, it could roughly trace the outlines of their figures beneath their clothes, and knew what it was looking at.
"May I ask exactly where you two are from? I have no memory of scheduling an appointment."
It asked indifferently, without so much as rising from its seat. Someone of its social standing had no need to startle and grovel because a pair of visitors claimed to be from the government. From the very beginning, it had never possessed the slightest intention of bowing to humans.
"Good afternoon, Director Choi. We're civil servants dispatched from a government agency called the Parasite Extermination Bureau."
At the question, the fox-faced woman began to draw closer, the corners of her mouth curling higher as she spoke in a warmly familiar tone.
"...I'm sorry, the parasite what?"
When it asked her to repeat herself, thinking it must have misheard, the woman clapped her palms together brightly and explained their agency all over again.
"An agency that exists for the purpose of exterminating parasites. Ah... even with it spelled out this plainly, I suppose you're still not grasping the situation, are you?"
Only then did the vague suspicion sharpen into a definite shape.
The woman's narrowed eyes slid open into something venomous, demonic pupils glinting forth as her true nature surfaced.
"From the agency that kills verminous little things exactly like you, you half-witted parasite."
The monster wearing a man's body lunged from its seat in an instant — and in the same breath, the woman's hand darted into her coat and something came out, pointed straight at it, and fired.