The Mysterious Game (6)
[Ascalas Minion (D)]
Congratulations. For the first time, you have succeeded in forming your faction. Don’t worry that it’s only one. Depending on your choices, a faction can explode in size in an instant, or vanish just as quickly!
Agares’s voice was absurdly spirited and solemn. I, however, was still frozen in place.
“One piece of advice: it would be best not to overthink this. Isn’t this just a game?”
Perhaps he noticed my state, because he gave a faint snort, as if asking what the problem was. And with that, my mind snapped back into focus. I realized what I was doing, standing here staring at a palm-sized screen and watching the things wriggling inside it.
I glanced around for no reason. The one-room apartment with the lights off was exactly the same as before, unchanged no matter what was happening inside my phone.
“Still having trouble settling your mind? Remember the miracle you saw before starting the game. This game is only the process. The real reward is that miracle. Don’t you want it? A greater miracle.”
“Fine. Move on to the next part.”
I let out a sigh and shook my head.
Agares wasn’t wrong. I was just playing a game. If I could get a reward through that game, that would be enough. Then I would be able to obtain what I wanted.
The wrist holding the phone no longer ached at all.
“It seems the minion who joined your faction has something it wants to say to you.”
“Then I should hear it.”
Inside the screen, the girl whose outward appearance had not changed was fidgeting with her hands and feet while looking at my avatar. She was clearly talking rapidly about something.
Thanks? Why?
Seeing the message, I honestly didn’t understand. In the process of infusing essence and turning her into a minion, her will had never once been taken into account.
Then I remembered the look on her face at the very end, as she had frantically swallowed the essence in ecstasy. She looked normal now, but maybe eating it had damaged her mind?
Would you like to ask Lena about her story?
Again, the game asked me to make a choice. And of course I chose to ask. I needed information. I needed to know where this place was, what kind of people lived here, and what had happened.
Minion Lena begins her story.
Soon, after she nodded, a long block of text began pouring out from her mouth in sequence.
Lena’s Revenge
📍 Location: The Village
🎁 Reward: Mythic Essence, increased loyalty within the faction
“You have learned the story of a minion with a miserable fate. At the same time, your first quest has appeared. What do you intend to do about it?”
By the time I finished reading Lena’s story as it streamed upward, a quest had appeared for the first time. Unlike events, quests awarded rewards according to the completion of the objective.
“If it’s Lena’s revenge, then I guess it means attacking that village.”
After checking the quest details, I clicked my tongue. This quest was meant for Lena, now a part of my faction, too.
To kill the villagers who had betrayed her and her mother, offering them up to a corrupted fox spirit as sacrificial offerings, and to help her exact revenge so that her loyalty would rise even further.
Accepted
It was certainly a tragic and pitiable story. Besides, from the perspective of someone playing the game, there was no reason to refuse a quest that promised a reward for completion.
More than that, this game required me to go looking for events on my own, then find quests or whatever else within them, so it made even less sense to turn it down.
“He’s pleased. Do you see? A single petty choice of yours, and your minion is happy. Please don’t take it lightly.”
Along with Agares’s mocking laugh, a smiling emoji appeared above Lena’s head inside the screen. After that, I moved my avatar and headed toward her village. Its location was already marked on the map with an exclamation point.
With Lena riding on its back, the avatar cut straight through the rough forest path and headed there.
◇◇◇◆◇◇◇
“There... it’s just ahead, Great Lord!”
The sun was beginning to sink over the forest. Riding atop the back of the giant spider as it smashed down small trees and plowed straight through rough vines, Lena pointed toward the village visible in the distance and shouted.
I’m going to kill them all. I’m going to... offer them all up. To my god.
The dull golden eyes of the exhausted girl now flashed with madness.
After eating the essence of Ascalas that had flowed from its fangs just moments ago, she had become an entirely different being.
And she understood that very well herself. The instant she awakened after consuming the essence, she had clearly felt the knowledge and instincts injected into her by Ascalas forcibly twisting the very core of her being.
That was, after all, the way Ascalas expanded its faction. Of course, none of that mattered to her anymore, not now that she longed to escape reality.
To the terrified spider that had come to her, she saw a savior who had saved her life, granted her strength, and even prepared a chance for revenge.
If only she could fulfill her wish, she thought she could willingly give her body and soul to anything, whether it was an alien monster or a demon from hell.
“You may eat them all.”
Seeing the villagers recoil in shock at the appearance of the giant spider cutting through the forest, she twisted the corners of her mouth.
As a member of Ascalas, she could communicate with the Great Lord, now linked to her as one. That was why she had a vague sense of what the Great Lord wanted and what it was trying to say, even though it could not speak in words.
What the Great Lord wanted, after asking her for her story, was a fierce appetite. Devouring and expanding the faction. That was their mission.
Having learned that, Lena willingly offered the villagers who had betrayed her to the Great Lord as sacrifices.
“Run! It’s a monster! A beast!”
The village looked ordinary enough at first glance. But the villagers, suddenly thrown into emergency, panicked and scrambled in confusion.
“Wh-what is that...”
The hunter who hurried out with a sword at the news of a beastly invasion widened his eyes in shock when he saw it.
It was no ordinary beast. What had broken through the palisade was a massive spider clad in a hard shell over its entire body.
“Run!”
“Aaagh!”
The spider began slaughtering people at random. It swung its front legs like weapons, skewering people and beating them to death. Men, women, children, none of them mattered. If it was alive, it killed it.
The hunter stared in a dazed stupor at the body of a woman whose face had been completely smashed, flying through the air.
“Jeff!”
“No, no, damn it. We can’t win. Let’s get out of here!”
Several people came running up with blood on their faces and seized his arm, trying to drag him away. At the same time, he saw someone else who had been firing arrows from a rooftop pierced through by the tentacle spewing from the spider’s back.
Monster.
The terrifying aura of the spider, which showed not the slightest hesitation or mercy in massacring people, began to swallow the entire area, breaking the villagers’ will and freezing their bodies in place.
In the end, Hunter Jeff and the others had no choice but to swallow their fury and turn to flee.
“Where are you all rushing off to like that? Mister Jeff.”
But someone blocked their path. The people who had been fleeing in panic toward the outside of the village stopped dead when they saw the girl suddenly appear in front of them.
“Y-you...”
“The kid! How are you here?”
They couldn’t hide their shock at seeing Lena. She was supposed to be here as the sacrificial offering, the one to calm the fox spirit driven mad by magi.
But Lena only smiled faintly.
“Why... why us and my mother? We did nothing wrong.”
“Damn it! Don’t spout nonsense! Ever since the day your mother and you came to this village from the outside fifteen years ago, something was wrong! At least learn to listen, you bitches... What happened to Ron? To Hans?!”
Hunter Jeff, who had forcefully argued that they should be offered as sacrifices to soothe the fox’s rampage, shouted back at her with a sword leveled at her throat.
They were all the same, mother and daughter alike.
His eyes, glaring at her, trembled.
It had been fifteen years since Lena’s mother came to this village carrying baby Lena in her arms. In truth, the two of them had adapted fairly well and managed to live there over those fifteen years.
Jeff had only borne a grudge because Lena’s mother, young and beautiful, had refused his proposal.
When his drunken attempt to assault her failed and his position began to grow uncertain, the fact that the village’s guardian spirit had gone berserk and begun to rage was pure luck for him.
The villagers, who knew nothing, believed his words absolutely when he said they had to offer a sacrifice to the fox to keep the source of the corruption at bay.
“Ron? Hans? They’re all dead. To the fox that attacked us. My mother was killed too. It bit her instead after she shoved me away so I could escape. But... that fox died too.”
“So that’s it. I knew it, I knew it. You were the source of the calamity! And after the fox comes that monstrous spider?!”
When they heard that everyone was dead, Jeff and the others flinched. Then Jeff, who suddenly remembered the spider behind them, felt his heart drop and shouted at Lena.
“Aaaagh!”
“Monster?”
But at that moment, Lena’s face twisted, and the transformed hand that lunged forward sent a black tentacle piercing straight through his chest. Jeff stared in disbelief at the tentacle that had shattered his heart.
“How dare you call him a monster? You lot are the monsters!”
“Y-you damn...”
“She’s a monster!”
Lena, having killed Jeff instantly, ground her teeth and growled. At the same time, parts of her body warped and changed, then spewed tentacles identical to the spider’s, which pierced, coiled around, and crushed the stunned villagers where they stood.
If they had responded calmly, perhaps it would have been different, but by now everything in the village behind them was already being reduced to ruin by the spider. The villagers, swallowed by fear and confusion, crumbled without being able to mount a proper resistance.
Quest completed
And so the massacre continued. Until every villager visible to the eye had been slaughtered. At last, when the blood-red sunset finally went down and the stubborn sun had completely sunk below the horizon, the only ones left in the village were Lena, drenched in blood, and the Great Lord.
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