The Turmoil Begins (1)
"Now do you believe me?"
Before retreating after exhausting every last bit of the Grand Lord’s strength, Lena grinned down at Karin, who had just been infused with the essence.
This can’t be...
Karin, sprawled on the floor, could only stare in disbelief, her eyes wide and her body twitching.
Heat and fierce power surged through her entire body. Along with it came a strange, liberating sensation, as if she had smashed through a wall and become one with something vast beyond it.
The knowledge and emotion flooding into her were reminding her of one undeniable fact: she had become a part of the great hive.
"Be honest with your feelings. You can do that now. You have the strength for it."
Lena, speaking like a senior offering guidance, soothed the still-confused Karin. Strength—at that word, Karin’s eyes changed.
The power she had longed for more than anything else was here, right in her hands. And with it, her emotions surged. A violent torrent of rage and hatred toward her enemies—an intense flood she had never felt before in her life. Her eyes trembled, and her face twisted into something ugly and feral.
"I can’t hold it in. I want to tear apart and devour the bastards who crushed me with power while I was living a perfectly normal life and tried to drag me around however they pleased. Why?!"
"Don’t be afraid, and don’t try to reject it. It’s only natural now that you’ve become one of us."
Watching Karin reel in shock at the frenzy of her own emotions, Lena nodded as if she understood completely.
She had already experienced the same thing herself. And Karin, whose compatibility was even lower than Lena’s had been, possessed a slightly more unstable sense of self. That meant she was all the more likely to be swept away by the surging emotions and the consciousness of the hive.
Understanding that, Karin’s eyes turned red, then flashed with a murderous intensity.
"You understand now, don’t you? That man gave you, miserable as you were, the chance to realize your own wish with your own hands. So are you just going to stand there?"
"Hex...!"
At Lena’s goading, Karin finally gave in completely. She shot to her feet and looked around with blazing eyes. The twitching tentacles sprouting from her back were already tearing through flesh and clothing as they writhed from her body.
"Over there."
Lena pointed her toward Hex’s location, which had been discovered by another minion elsewhere, and upon hearing it, Karin had no reason to hesitate.
She kicked off the ground and broke into a run, racing toward Hex. Lena, having already lived through this entire transformation herself, could already imagine the future waiting for Karin—and she smiled as she followed after her.
"Come on, run faster! Hurry!"
"The monsters are coming!"
In the eastern district of the city, with the western gate already fallen and Ascalas’s minions pouring in to carry out a massacre, most of the residents fled here in a frantic stampede.
The magistrate had fallen. The garrison had fallen. Any chance of gathering together and putting up resistance had vanished long ago.
"But at least hold them back until everyone’s evacuated! What on earth are those monsters? Are they demons from the Demon Realm?"
"They were monsters I’ve never seen before! I couldn’t even tell what kind of demon they were supposed to be!"
The commander of the garrison, who had at least tried to buy time until the people could evacuate, sought to identify the monsters, but neither the seasoned mercenary nor the learned mage could say what they were.
All I have to do is get out. I just have to get out!
Among the panicked crowd, he was there too. With his subordinates in tow and baggage piled high in his arms, he shoved aside and threatened the other evacuees, doing everything he could to force his way out of the city.
"I-it’s coming!"
"The sky! Aaagh!"
But then, at last, the monsters that had broken through to the eastern district came crashing down upon the very place where the fleeing masses had gathered.
"T-the sky!"
Hex flinched hard and, at someone’s scream, looked up with a jolt of terror. He had seen it with his own eyes—the monster with the face of a black-haired girl, beating its transparent wings so fast it seemed to blur, swooping down from the sky to pierce a knight’s body clean through with a spear before tearing his face off with a single kick.
"Could that be...?"
But what truly horrified him was not Lena, who had led the monsters here and wiped out the ragtag garrison that had been shuddering in fear.
It was because he had spotted a familiar face among the minions—creatures shaped like wolves, bears, goblins, humans, and all sorts of other forms.
"Hex... get out of the way!"
Karin saw him too.
The information broker Hex, the man who had fled with his underlings and a bundle full of valuables. The villain who had hounded her mercilessly when she had lost everything.
"Stand still!"
Using the black tentacles sprouting from her back as weapons just like the other minions, she lashed one out and sent a terrified soldier in front of her flying.
It’s surging.
Carried away by the torrent of hot, violent emotion, she found herself smiling without realizing it. Power she had never known in life was boiling up from deep inside her.
What’s more, she was no longer alone. The consciousness of Ascalas, connected as one and on a scale utterly unlike what Lena had experienced when she first awakened, was proof enough that a vast being stood behind her—and that this being was on her side.
"Y-you... how...?"
"I was reborn."
Hex, finally coming face-to-face with the girl he had locked in a basement and then forgotten, stammered in shock at her sudden appearance.
"So now I should give you a chance too. A chance to become His nourishment."
"Boss!"
"What are you standing around for? Kill her!"
Shivering at Karin’s grin, twisted by her emotions, Hex realized there was no way to escape this chaos and despairingly ordered his men to take her down.
"Aaaagh!"
The underlings had no choice but to draw their daggers and charge.
Compared to the other minions, whose bodies had already been warped and twisted in all directions except for the tentacles jutting from her back, she still looked like an ordinary woman—so they had underestimated her.
Idiots.
Karin’s eyes flashed. In the blink of an eye, her tentacles moved, lashing through all of them and skewering them to death.
Hex staggered back, his face draining of color, as he watched his subordinates collapse in fountains of blood.
"Now it’s your turn. Die while you writhe helplessly under something so absurd and unjust!"
Karin bared her teeth and sprinted forward, her blond hair flying behind her. Hex, now thoroughly terrified, drew the sword at his waist and swung it like the mercenary he had once been—but Karin came on with such ferocity that she didn’t even care if her own body was cut. Before long, he lost his grip on the blade.
"Ghh—aaagh..."
Then her hand, darting into his embrace, pierced straight through his stomach.
"I can feel your insides. They’re so warm."
She grabbed his intestines with her hand, crushed them, and laughed as she looked up at him. Only after Hex’s eyes rolled back and bloody foam gurgled from his mouth in unbearable agony did she pull her hand free.
"How does it feel?"
At that same moment, while the city’s residents—still deprived of any real chance to resist—were being slaughtered one-sidedly, Lena approached Karin, who stood before Hex’s corpse.
"Naturally, it feels amazing."
"No one in this world has no story. There are plenty of people who’ve suffered more than we have, people with far more desperate wishes. But we were lucky enough to be born with high compatibility, and we were given the grace to resolve those stories. So all we have to do is remain loyal. To Him."
"...Yeah."
Karin nodded at Lena’s words. Just as she said, all that remained now was loyalty. If they did that, they would keep growing and evolving, and in the end, there would be an answer waiting for them.
"You know, right? The retreat order’s been given."
And at that very moment, just as Karin completed the quest she herself had been given, the Grand Lord issued the order for all forces to withdraw.
Lena and Karin retreated from the devastated city along with the other minions.
◇◇◇◆◇◇◇
"What kind of nonsense is that?"
"It’s true, my lord! The small city of Rhoden in the northwest has been overrun and ravaged by unidentified monsters that came pouring out of the northern forest!"
"...Monsters?"
The man, who had been answering with mild disinterest, shot to his feet. It was, after all, such a shocking report that it would have been difficult to grasp at first hearing.
"You’re saying Rhoden has been occupied? Demons?"
"W-we don’t know. According to the witnesses, they were monsters no one had ever seen before. And they didn’t actually occupy the city either. The monsters only took the city, hurt the people, and then returned to the forest they had come from without settling there."
"It doesn’t matter—it means the city suffered enormous damage, doesn’t it? Damn it! Why now, of all times? Why does this have to happen in my territory of all places!"
Baron Brandt, the lord who governed the region, flared up and frowned deeply. It wasn’t merely that one of the cities under his rule had been attacked.
In times like these, there were other places a minor lord like him needed to keep his eyes on, and he was annoyed that problems were cropping up from some completely unexpected corner.
"My lord, we should rescue Rhoden and reinforce its defenses..."
"The movements of the great lords these days are anything but ordinary. If it comes to it, I’ll need to choose a side and cling to it somehow. And you think I have the luxury to worry about that place right now?"
The old balance of power, which had held for so long, was clearly beginning to collapse across the continent. Baron Brandt knew very well that if a minor lord like him wanted to survive, he would have to grab hold of a safe line and go under it.
He had a bad feeling that if he spent time trying to stabilize matters from within, he would be left behind.
"Then how about this, my lord? There are mercenaries rising rapidly within our territory these days. Along with the local soldiers we can muster, why not entrust them with this matter?"
"...Mercenaries? Can they really handle it? I hear there are hundreds of them."
"From what I’ve heard, they’ve been absorbing mercenaries indiscriminately and swelling their ranks. Their momentum is no small matter either. In particular, their leader is said to be extremely unusual—so strong that he is clearly beyond the level of a normal mercenary."
In the end, the steward’s suggestion was one that appealed to him. Besides, for ages, mercenaries had always been used for jobs that were awkward to assign to knights or regular soldiers, so there was nothing strange about it.
"Very well. Go and bring me their commander."
Baron Brandt finally accepted the proposal.
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