A Beautiful First Night
The next moment, another voice joined in — then another, one by one. Two, three, and then ten. When, amid the voices swelling to geometric proportions, I finally recognized the voices of people I knew woven into the chorus, I tasted what it felt like for my mind to begin coming apart. It could be no more than a little — because I sensed, by instinct, that his voice would be the very last to join. More than the death of anyone else, losing before my eyes the man who had been my father was a wound fated to cut deeper than all the rest.
"Demon King—! Please, make this stop! I'm begging you······!"
"Why... why are you doing this...?"
"What wrong did we ever commit! I keep asking you — why are you doing this!"
I know full well that those cries were not aimed at me. And yet for me, soaked through with the guilt of having failed to protect them, there was no way to tear free from that delusion.
If I lifted my head, the scene I already expected would surely be spread before me. The spitting of fire-sparks somewhere close, the thunder of a vast explosion — and the moment I peered into the pitch-black flames burning dead ahead, every piece of it made itself understood.
Before long, everything I had only been hearing rose up into my sight.
Before my eyes, the people I knew were being burned alive. From the instant that scene stood before me, I was already a sinner — for the voices of those screaming to be saved, the choked cries of the family I cherished and loved, sounded as though they were cursing me, me who had failed to save a single one of them.
"Ah..........aaah.........."
And just like that, my mind went hollow. The tears brimming in my eyes fell, drop by drop, to the floor.
"Saintess."
The voice calling my name seemed to work a miracle. The flames, the voices, everything the Holy Sword had conjured vanished like a mirage. Hearing footsteps draw near, I raised my head — and there was Rean's face, standing over me, looking down. From how many times his mouth had moved, he must have said something to me, though I had no leisure to wonder what. The memory had reached its end, and I could feel that the hour to wake from this dream was close at hand.
In all likelihood, I was probably lying in bed fast asleep. Yes — this was never meant to threaten me. It must have been shown to hint, in advance, at the plight they would come to, and to tell me to make haste. I was quite certain that was the belief I had held onto.
..............Creak. Creak.
That is — if it was true that I had laid myself down on the bed of my own will, thinking I ought to finally sleep. That ominous sound seemed intent on calling it a lie, but I forced myself to believe it true, and to believe it again.
Rean Galef. Everyone pronounced him a Hero without a single flaw to be found, wherever one cared to look. Even in the opening chapters I had read with my own eyes, he was a man who fell short in nothing — not in character, not in ability, not in any respect. If that dreadful sound was not some phantom a nightmare had left behind, but something truly being done — then accepting such a reality would mean denying every truth I had ever lived by. It made no sense. There was no conceivable way it could be true.
Serina came back to herself. Her whole body throbbed with a deep, aching soreness; the ordeal of the past few days had seized her limbs and showed no intention of letting go. Her features were drawn tight — naturally enough, she supposed. She had spent the entire day combing through the wreckage of collapsed buildings, gathering up the dead and praying for their peaceful rest. Even in the man's body she had originally lived in, one that had enjoyed its share of exercise, she could not recall ever exerting herself enough to pile up fatigue like this. If her heart had its way, she would have sunk into a deep sleep right then and there.
But when she recalled the repulsive dream she'd had until only moments ago, she decided it was better to open her eyes — and soon she pried apart her eyelids, which fought stubbornly to stay sealed. She judged herself roughly awake, and with her eyes half open, the sounds of the room began to drift into her ears.
Creak. Creak.
The bed was moving. The sound came over and over without pause. Old as it might be, this was absurd — the merest twist of her waist set it groaning like that. She thought it a miracle she had managed to sleep at all. It was dark all around; it must still be the small hours before dawn. She moved her hand to rub the haze from her eyes.
She flexed her stiff legs lightly, then moved to push her upper body upright. Or rather — she tried to.
'My body... it won't move.'
Something was wrong. Her limbs would not so much as twitch, as though bound fast by something. Swallowing her bewilderment, she blinked again and again, folding and spreading her ten fingers in a senseless scramble. This time, they obeyed. She felt the knotted muscles loosening, if only in patches, and her fogged vision began to right itself. The ceiling of the room she had last seen filled her sight.
So did a head of deep brown hair.
"Haah. Who'd ever look at this obscene little body and call it a saintess? You're a whore. And you get fucking soaked."
Creak. Creak. The sound of a mouth suckling at something rang out, twined with a wet, slathering squelch. At the very least, she was no fool so great as to strain to deny that this was a dream.
'Why......?'
Instead, she could only ask the question. She stopped breathing and dragged her gaze downward. Even at a moment like this, she could not let go of hope. The Hero violating the Saintess. That was something that simply could not be—
....................Huh?
The instant she saw the face of the man buried against her bare chest, Serina's common sense caved in on itself. Rean — his mouth smeared glistening with saliva, his face flushed with arousal — was licking his lips. It was with that mouth that he had been suckling at her breasts. He had stripped the clothes from her sleeping body wearing an expression of artless innocence, then violated her while his grinning eyes drank in her naked flesh, every last inch of it.
Creak-creak. The hand that should have clasped the Holy Sword and reached out to grant others salvation had been crudely raking through the place between her legs — the one place even she herself had never dared touch carelessly.
"Oh. Awake at last? I was bored half to death, you know. But what's with that expression... ah, that just now was only me talking to myself."
Not a single word reached her ears. Thinking only that she had to escape this, she twisted and writhed, straining to force her deadened limbs to move.
"Untie this. Right now!"
A shabby kind of pity rose on Rean's face as he looked down at her. What sort of life must a man have lived, that even a face made to express pity could reek of baseness? Serina bit down hard on her lip at how thoroughly she had been deceived these past three days. The image of him weeping so long as he looked over a dead child's body was still fresh — and the sight of that face now made her sick enough to retch.
"Saintess. It's all right to be honest with yourself now."
Rean caressed her scarlet, swollen sex, and she became aware of a new sensation stirring awake between her thighs — the place she had never once used to slake her desire, for fear she might come to crave the unfamiliar pleasures a woman's body could offer. And so it was that crevice, guarded more preciously than any other part of her, that his fingers were now pressing into. Dread crept over her, cold and close.
"Did you know? I've been tormenting your precious little place for thirty minutes straight now."
And the outcome those grinning words pointed to — there was only one it could be, wasn't there.
"You can probably feel it already, can't you?"
Rean spread his hand before her eyes, slick and dripping with her arousal.
"Your pussy's flooded, Saintess."
"Shut up! You fucking······!"
Her words snapped off clean. Her cheek went numb.
"...It seems the Saintess rather enjoys this sort of thing?"
A second time. A third.
"Agh!"
With one hand planted against her forehead, Rean hammered her right cheek again and again — and, as though his spite were not yet spent, he spat on the floor and lowered himself over her.
"Saintess. Do you know why I, who haven't managed to bring down even one of the Demon King's inner circle, am held in such esteem by so many? Because evil makes no distinction between man and woman."
A palm rough with callus caressed her swollen cheek.
"How many women these hands have touched — you couldn't begin to imagine, Saintess."
His hand rose once more. Five times in all, he struck the Saintess's cheek without a shred of mercy. Beneath the flesh swollen dark as a bruise under that relentless hand, tears slid down in a thin, ceaseless line.
Serina fought with everything she had to swallow the sob surging up through her grief — but even that seemed to offend him, and Rean drove his fist down into her lower belly. Her body bucked with the pain, and a long moan was torn out of her.
"This time, you'll bear exactly this much."
Rean, fully upon the bed now, swung a leg over her hips.
..................
At the sight of his erect cock grinding against her just above the navel, Serina lost the power of speech altogether. Rean's face — a base, contemptible smile climbing onto it — drew near.
"Yours and mine both, Saintess — this is a precious first time, isn't it?"
The devil's voice whispered at her ear.
"A wedding night ought to be spent beautifully, don't you think? Wouldn't you agree, Saintess?"
