A Meal
Mana? No… is this the Malice Kelly was talking about? Ah… and anyway… all of a sudden… so… sleepy………
A strange fullness settled over Dojin, and his eyes slid shut.
Clearer memories, and more of them, sorted themselves this way and that, and he dreamed of the past again. Freezing to death on Earth. Being hauled off a beach when he had been certain he was already dead. Becoming a hero and chasing strength like an idiot, desperate to look impressive in front of his companions. And taking the Demon King's head, only to be stabbed in the back and die.
"Hhk—!"
Dojin lurched awake, sweat pouring off him like rain.
"Are you all right, Lord Dojin?"
"Haa… heh… damn it…"
He dropped back onto the bed.
Squelch.
"Agh!! Damn it!"
The wet cling of the sheet launched him off the mattress like a spring.
How much did I sweat?
He could feel a pair of lecherous eyes boring straight through his naked body.
"……"
"Hehe…"
"Hey… you got any clothes?"
"I-I'll go find some!!"
Kelly bolted out the door.
What is she, a retriever…
Dojin stared after her for a moment.
"Haa… I've lived through the end of the world… I've been stabbed in the back… so what the hell is this supposed to be…"
He perched on the creaking bed, avoiding the soaked patch, and looked down at his diminished hands. Then, following gravity, at the part of him hanging between his legs.
No… why is that the one thing that came out big? Unbelievable.
He started going over his surroundings again, carefully.
A slum…?
He stood to look outside, and only then realized this was the first time his feet had actually touched the ground.
Is it a blessing that I can move at all?
Step. Step.
"Haa… Feels like I took the Demon King's head just yesterday, and now—ugh!"
Every step dragged. He looked down at his legs.
Nothing but skin and bone……
Creeeak—
He forced himself over to a small, filthy window, felt how thin and light it was, and pushed it open.
The stench hit him the instant the pane gave—wastewater thick with every kind of filth, slamming into his nose. Trash lay discarded in every direction. There was even the badly rotting carcass of some animal he couldn't identify.
The slums of India, the ones he had seen in a documentary, rose unbidden in his mind.
My memories from Earth never used to come back this clearly… pulled off that beach… becoming a hero… cutting the Demon King's throat… thirteen years…… Haa… I don't know. I don't know what any of this is.
Glancing around outside, he spotted Kelly digging through a trash bin for clothes.
………
She noticed his gaze and waved, dirty rags and all.
A short while later.
"Kelly… was this really the best you could do?"
He pulled the clothes on piece by piece.
"…"
What she had scavenged was a reeking, hole-riddled T-shirt and a pair of shorts. He couldn't bring himself to put on the underwear.
"Haa… we don't happen to have any money, do we?"
"…"
"Hoo… yeah, figures. Then this place, is it maybe…"
Kelly brightened and answered.
"Oh! Around here, if you get into an empty house like this first and hold your ground, it becomes yours!"
"That's…… something, at least. I think we need to go over where we stand, one more time. I'm still way too mixed up…"
"Yes!"
"First, your people…"
"Our people…"
"…"
Kelly met his eyes and didn't look away, her gaze clear.
"Right. Our people… no, hold on. So I really came back as an alien?"
"Reconstructed. We offered our kin as a sacrifice to the god that crawls the abyss, and with the Hero's flesh and the Memory Stick as a medium, we made the body you have now, Lord Dojin."
"Thinking about it again still pisses me off. That bitch stabbed me in the back, and five hundred years have gone by? Where did you find my corpse? And what even is a Memory Stick? Why does something like that exist?"
"Um… I'll answer one thing at a time. First, the place we found you was a ruin."
"A ruin?"
Dojin's small brow furrowed deeper.
"Yes. And the Memory Stick you asked about along with it… it's a relic found at the heart of the ruins, together with the Hero's corpse. Our people's analysis suggested it was a special device that had preserved the Hero's memories and ego."
"Preserved my memories? That's possible? When I killed the Demon King, no technology like that existed. There's far too much you haven't explained. You told me how your people were destroyed, and how you ended up bringing me back… but you never explained how any of this actually works."
"Th-then I'll try to explain."
Dojin nodded.
"First, Planet E2359. The people here called it Earth."
The word struck him as strangely familiar, but he only nodded and said nothing.
"Aside from Pan Island, most of E2359's surface is ocean. And Pan Island is divided into Sector Zero and Sectors 1 through 8."
Kelly laid it out the way a soldier would, only what was necessary, even sketching as she went on a floor that might have been dust or might have been dirt.
"Pan Island? The shape of the continent, the name—they're the same as in my hero days… Sector 8, huh."
"What's the matter?"
"The way the sectors are split lines up pretty closely with where the old kingdoms used to be… you said this is Sector 8?"
"Yes… the northernmost place. It's where all of Pan Island's garbage and waste finally collects."
"Mm…… This used to be the Demon King's Castle…"
"What?!"
"Nothing's certain yet, so… let's move on. Next important thing. We don't have to eat food?"
"Correct… you don't need to eat to get calories. You can eat for the taste if you want, but our sense of taste is different anyway…"
"Good. All right, then. Malice. How do you take that in?"
"First you have to feel the energy… how do I explain it? I learned when I was very little…"
"…"
"Do you happen to feel anything like a lewd energy? Or rage… something damp? Sticky desire, that sort of thing."
Dojin sat down on the floor and, calling up his days as a hero, began to look inward.
When they first implanted the Core and the Mana Circuits, the problem was that my senses were opened too wide…
He breathed out, long and slow.
"!!"
Tracing those memories, he sharpened every sense in his body as far as it would go. A low hum rose from somewhere inside him.
The basic structure is the same as a human's… there's something sticky near the heart. Is that it?
Thump. Thump-thump.
The moment he focused on his heart, the world inverted, as if a shut box had sprung open.
Ngh! Is this it? Nothing looks like it's changed. Ah… the world looks faded, somehow…
And he could sense things of many colors, clumped here and there.
Dojin got to his feet and walked to the window again, holding his concentration as tightly as he could. Across the river of trash, a man was forcing open a thin door without so much as a knock and shoving his way inside. A woman screamed. Something shattered. From that place, strange dark halos bled into the air, hazy as fog—red, deep purple, black.
"!!"
He had been watching only that spot. The instant he turned his eyes elsewhere, the shock dropped him to the floor.
Insane…
"Wow! You awakened Malice Sight just like that? As expected of Lord Dojin!"
"All of that is our food? Something like food?"
"Yes… especially in this district, starving to death isn't really a concern. Only……"
"Why?"
"If our power grows past a certain point, a Battle Saintess is dispatched."
"What? A Battle Saintess? If she's a saintess, she's a saintess. What the hell is that supposed to be?"
Dojin was dumbfounded, but Kelly went on, quietly.
"Um… from what we were able to investigate… they say she's a biological weapon made using the Hero's Core. It wasn't my assignment, so I don't know the details, but when we approached this planet there was movement on a massive scale. One of our people was analyzing that movement when they discovered you."
"…"
"And when we first found the Hero's corpse, there were traces that suggested the Core had been extracted."
"Ah, those rotten bastards. I got handed something the size of a bean and nearly killed myself raising it… ah… I'm pissed. The Church…"
Kelly watched his face and said nothing.
"So if we raise our power past a certain point, the Church comes for us. That's what you're saying."
"Yes…"
"And from your side of it, you're just eating. You get stronger just from eating?"
"We…… haa… yes. Up to a point. Past a certain level, you can store it and use it the way those infuriating Battle Saintesses use mana."
Dojin remembered Floren, the mage from his old party, who had hidden their mana with painstaking thoroughness.
"So we can use it. Then what about concealing it? Hiding it?"
"Unfortunately, the great warriors of our clan did release it in bursts… but I don't think they ever once considered hiding it. That's why I stayed hungry the whole time, too."
"Right…… And earlier, when you gave me head…"
"Head?"
"Mm. You sucked my cock, didn't you?"
"Oh! Your cock!! Yes! Kehehe, it was so rich, and so delicious."
She swallowed.
"The semen tasted good too… kuh, that thick Malice, hehehe. And it was bigger than the toy I used to use…"
He wanted to call her out for how thoroughly scrambled her common sense was. But she was an alien, and for an alien, knowing this much was already a lot.
"Anyway, when you did that, I think I absorbed something too. I definitely felt full…"
"Ooh!! Could the Hero have the same tastes as me!!"
Excitement spilled out of her as a dark purple aura, leaking from her body into the air.
"Oh… right. This. Can I eat this?"
"Yes. You can eat what comes from yourself, but you spend more energy than you take in… And the decisive part is that the other kin said it was dirty…… that it turned their stomachs."
"…"
Dojin figured it was probably something like gulping down your own piss in a pinch, when you were stranded with nothing else.
"No, then when the lot of you were wandering around, how did you eat?"
"We each kept all sorts of living things as livestock, according to our tastes. And we ate one another's, too."
Dojin stared at her, incredulous.
"Wow… you really are aliens…… so that's how it is……"
"Yes……"
"Then what about sex?"
"That's just an ordinary meal."
For now… let's fuck. I'll try the other things too, but…
The moment he remembered the warm, pleasant give of Kelly's mouth from just before his eyes had closed, he felt the blood rush downward.
"Hey… I can't move hard right now, so you do the moving."
"Yes♡"
Hearts lit in Kelly's eyes, and she twisted her body the way the succubi he had killed by the dozen used to twist.
With what's in this body right now, I can't do a damn thing…
He had half a mind to wander outside and start poking at the world, but since things had already come to this, he decided to do what desire was telling him.
Fabric slid. She dropped down in front of him, panting, starved.
"Hehe…♡ Thank you for the meal♡"
Haahm—slurp, schlup. Kelly sucked his fully engorged cock the way someone sucks a piece of candy, greedy and wet. Schlrp. Suck. Suck.
That face is seriously obscene……… and it's getting me hard.