The Direction of the Territory (3)
I walked slowly through the barracks quarter beside the duke.
Each step along the narrow muddy path between the tents made a squelching sound underfoot.
I couldn’t tell whether it was from yesterday’s rain or simply from the filth that had built up here.
The tent flaps billowed in the wind, flashing glimpses of what lay inside, and every time I caught sight of it, my breath caught in my throat.
Inside one tent, a man lay staring blankly at the ceiling, his mouth half open and saliva dribbling from it.
His eyes were completely unfocused, and the corners of his lips were crusted with dried white foam. He looked drugged out of his mind.
Beside him, another man grinned foolishly and reached toward empty air, as if he weren’t laughing at a person but at some hallucination only he could see.
“...Those men.”
“They’re given mana drugs at regular intervals. Otherwise they wouldn’t last.”
Rosena said it flatly. In the next tent, a man lay face-down on the ground, his back crisscrossed with whip marks, and pus was running down over them.
And yet he was smiling, as if he couldn’t even feel the pain.
That smile was even more horrifying. It was the face of someone who had given up on resistance, on suffering, on everything.
“The drugs dull their senses?”
“Not dull. Broken. No one who’s used dozens of times a day can stay sane. Without the drugs, they couldn’t make it through a single day.”
Every time we passed between one tent and the next, some new sight emerged.
A tent where three women were all on top of one man at once. A tent where a man had been left bound to a post by ropes around his hands and feet. A man crouched in a corner, trembling as he clutched an empty syringe.
There was nothing human left in any of it. They existed only as bodies to be emptied by desire.
“I thought...”
Rosena’s steps slowed for a moment.
“...that it would be enough simply to supply male prostitutes.”
“.........”
“The desires of demons are endless. Especially in the military. I thought that to satisfy them, all we needed was a greater number of male prostitutes. Not just I, but the marquises and counts all thought the same. So we brought them in by the hundreds, however we could.”
The calmness in her voice was laced with thorns. Thorns directed at herself.
“Men imported from the human kingdom. Breeding men taken from human farms. Kidnapped from back alleys. Dragged in under the pretext of debt. We used every possible means to fill this place. Hundreds came in each month, and hundreds were discarded.”
My stomach turned.
Each tent was no different from someone’s grave.
Maybe if I had never met Lilith, I might have been lying in one of those tents right now.
No, in a sense, I might as well have been. I had simply been lucky enough to end up attached to Dreaming Chalice, a top-class brothel, instead.
“And yet it was never enough. No matter how many we added, no matter how many new bodies we shoved in. The nobles always said there weren’t enough, and the soldiers were always hungry. In the end, I took it as the nature of demons and accepted it. I thought endless consumption was only natural.”
Rosena cut herself off there, then suddenly looked visibly flustered. Her ears went red, and she hurriedly turned her face away.
“A-ah, I, of course, never came here personally. I did not... participate in such places.”
“...Huh?”
“I only allowed its existence for the sake of managing the soldiers. That is all I mean. Do not misunderstand.”
Without my even asking. I swallowed a laugh to myself. After all the chaos she’d made under the World Tree, the way she was now insisting, I’m pure, was almost cute. It was common sense that a duke like her would never come to a place like this, and yet she was still bothering to explain it to me.
She cared what I thought.
“I didn’t misunderstand, Duchess.”
“Hm. Naturally.”
Rosena straightened her expression with a single cough and looked forward again.
By the time we reached the end of the muddy path, we were standing atop a small hill overlooking the barracks district.
Hundreds of shabby tents stretched out below us. Strips of cloth flapped in the wind, and from time to time they revealed the misery inside.
“But when I went to Hereun, I changed my mind.”
Rosena’s voice dropped a shade lower.
“Not just Hereun—I toured many pleasure cities. I had the chance to look around all sorts of brothels. Dreaming Chalice, Starry Night, and three or four others besides. I deliberately visited every one I could, from the high-end houses down to the mid-tier ones.”
“And what did you see?”
“Well-managed male prostitutes.”
Rosena continued slowly.
“Men with healthy bodies who greeted their clients with a sheen to their skin, light in their eyes. They weren’t doped out of their minds, and they weren’t forcing smiles. Of course, none of those places were perfect, but at the very least, they were different from here. And the response from the nobles who used those men was clearly different from the nobles here.”
“How so?”
“They were more satisfied. Their recovery was faster, too. Stress levels, mana recovery rates, time before returning to combat. All of it was several times better than here. Once I confirmed that, I realized it. It isn’t the quantity. It’s the quality. And the management.”
Rosena turned to face me head-on. There was a seriousness in her red eyes that I didn’t usually see.
Not the woman who had lain purring in my lap, nor the one who had barked beneath the World Tree, but Duke Rosena.
“I will be clear with you.”
“.......”
“To put it simply, I want to put you in charge of managing the male prostitutes here.”
The wind climbed the hill and tossed my hair around.
I looked silently down at the hundreds of tents spread out beneath us, at the hundreds of men breaking apart inside them, and at this woman’s proposal that I take responsibility for all of it.
“...Me?”
“If not you, then there is no one I can trust with it. You understand men’s hearts better than demons do, and among men I have never seen anyone cleverer than you. If not you, then who else could I give this to?”
I fell silent for a moment and stared out over the barracks below.
My mind began knotting itself into a mess.
She wanted me to manage it? This place? It was certainly an opportunity.
Being entrusted with a project under the duke’s direct command was a position a normal male prostitute could never hope to reach in a lifetime.
But at the same time, it was strange. Lilith had clearly promised me the position of branch manager at Dreaming Chalice.
If the duchy deployment succeeded, Dreaming Chalice would gain Rosena’s name behind it, and then expanding its branches into Hereun and other cities would be only a matter of time.
Setting aside the fact that I’d already gotten ahead of Cecilia—
At first, I had been disappointed that I couldn’t go to the human kingdom, but the more I thought about it, the more I felt that being a branch manager at Dreaming Chalice wasn’t bad at all.
It wouldn’t dramatically improve my life, but if I brought in a few guys like Leni and ran things more or less like a barracks, I could probably slack off and loaf around without working too hard. In other words, I’d already judged that life to be pretty decent.
But now Rosena was offering me something completely different. This was bigger. Much bigger. Big enough to shake my entire future.
“...Could you give me a little time to think?”
“Take all the time you need.”
Rosena answered calmly, but her gaze was studying my face with obvious care.
I listened to the wind rustle the tent flaps and did my calculations.
If I became the branch manager of Dreaming Chalice, I’d be able to move beneath Lilith’s shadow and work from a stable base in Hereun.
But if I became the administrator of the duchy’s male prostitutes, the scale would be completely different. It was an offer that couldn’t be judged by simple comparison. And yet I didn’t have nearly enough information to accept it immediately.
The scope of authority, the size of the resources, the responsibility if I failed—none of it was clear.
“...You really are unusual.”
Rosena suddenly lifted the corners of her mouth just a little. It was a smile close to admiration.
“If a normal man—or even most demons—were offered such a thing by me, they would drop to their knees and accept on the spot. This would be a project under my direct command. A task granted in the name of a duke. The proper response would be gratitude before anything else, not hesitation.”
Rosena took one more step closer. The hem of her uniform swayed in the wind.
“And yet you’re thinking it through carefully. You weigh gain against risk, question the conditions offered to you, and try to read my true intent. Yes, you really are different.”
Amusement flickered in her red eyes. Rosena looked at me for a moment longer, then tipped her chin up slightly and lowered her voice.
“Very well. Then I’ll add to the terms.”
“The terms...?”
“I will grant you the title of baron.”
It took me a beat to understand what she’d said. Baron. A noble title. For me. For a mere former janitor turned male prostitute who had been planning to run away to the human kingdom and live an ordinary life.
“Wh... what...?”
My voice cracked without my meaning it to. Rosena watched my reaction with obvious satisfaction and gave a slow nod. The wind rose up the hill again, making the rows of tents flutter all at once.