The Childbirth Show
The day after the council reached its decision, Karlson pushed through the forest at the head of a column of guards and villagers, working as hard as he could to keep the dread from showing on his face.
He had left only the bare minimum of men to hold the village. The force he'd assembled numbered forty-five. Twenty of those were guards, himself included. The remaining twenty-five were villagers who had never received a day of military training in their lives.
Even the guards Karlson had drilled himself were a sorry lot next to a city's regular army. As for the villagers — the monsters had stripped them of every weapon they owned, and they were marching with farm tools in their hands. There was nothing more to say about that.
To make matters worse, women had been mixed into the hastily mustered ranks, and the fatigue of fighting the fire still clung to every guardsman like a second skin.
The villagers were underestimating the creatures that had raided their home. They had decided it was something like a goblin pack. With numbers like these, they thought, getting their families back wouldn't be difficult. They would never have made such a stupid choice otherwise.
It was a stubborn, ironclad delusion.
The individual creatures might have been goblin-class in raw strength, but whatever was commanding them was anything but ordinary.
Spilled milk. If I tell them to turn back now, it'll only make the villagers more hostile.
Karlson let out a deep sigh inwardly and resigned himself. All he could do now was hope the casualties stayed low when they finally clashed with the monsters.
The undergrowth whispered as he shoved it aside. The forest was dark, and Karlson could feel the tiredness settling into his bones. He was following the faint traces the monsters had left behind, but this was a stretch of woods he had never set foot in. Besides the creatures that had raided the village, there could be wild beasts out here. His eyes kept raking the shadows with a hunter's wariness, and the vigilance ate at his concentration, draining him by degrees.
He was gathering his scattered focus, moving as carefully as he knew how, when it came.
"Keeheehee—!!"
"Wh…?"
"A monster?"
An inhuman giggle drifted out of the trees. The villagers behind him stopped in their tracks, voices thick with confusion. Karlson flashed a sharp signal for silence and pushed ahead toward the sound.
"……!?"
He tore through the last screen of brush, and there it was, standing on the hill above them.
The monster that had disguised itself as Elisa. The thing that led the rest. The moment its eyes met Karlson's, it grinned — a slow, knowing smear of a smile. The look of something that had known they would come.
A village woman stood bound and naked at the monster's side. She clutched her swollen belly, writhing in misery, her body hanging slack, her face haggard and emptied of everything. When she found Karlson at the foot of the hill, her gaze drooped away from him, too spent even for hope.
Her belly's swollen? What… no. Pregnant…?
Karlson knew her. She was one of his people. Only a few days ago they had exchanged greetings, and her stomach had been perfectly ordinary. For it to have swollen to the point of imminent birth in that span of time defied every scrap of common sense he possessed. And if she was pregnant — whose child could it possibly—
"Honey!!"
One of the villagers behind him spotted her and roared. It was her husband. Rage overrode every other thought, and he broke from the line and charged. Several others surged after him.
"Stop!!"
Karlson shouted, but it was already too late.
"You monster bastard!! How dare you do that to my wife—"
A hiss cut the air.
Thud. Thunk. Thuk.
"Ghk!?"
"Aaagh—!?"
"Grk!?"
The moment the villagers tried to climb toward the hostage on the hill, arrows came screaming out of the treeline above. Every man who had broken ranks went down before he could even reach the slope, tumbling into the dirt.
Karlson snapped his gaze to the forest the arrows had come from — and what he saw there stole the breath from his lungs. Monsters crouched in the undergrowth, bowstrings drawn to their cheeks.
The bows themselves had been looted from the village. That wasn't what mattered. What mattered was what was holding them.
God almighty. The monsters are shooting bows?
Monsters used weapons. That much was ordinary. Bows were a different matter. A sword, an axe — those were intuitive things. You swung them and someone got hurt. Put one in a monster's hand and it could use it well enough. A bow was not like that. A bow required technique. Method. Even if a creature managed to loose an arrow, without proper form the accuracy collapsed into worthlessness, and you might as well not have the weapon at all.
The shooting wasn't precise. But it was precise enough. At this range, volume alone was dropping the villagers where they stood.
Who the hell taught them?
Karlson's head jerked up on instinct, and his eyes locked with the monster on the hill. It lifted one corner of its mouth in a jeering little keeheek, as if to confirm every thought running through his skull.
You torn-apart son of a bitch…!!
Fury boiled up through him. His eyes narrowed to slits, the blood rising hot behind them.
Thwack. Thuk.
"Aaagh!"
"Ghhk…"
The rain of arrows was clumsy, but it found its marks with grim, workmanlike persistence. The villagers who had charged went down one after another, dropping to their knees in the dirt.
It was a massacre. At this point it was closer to a public execution.
"We have to help them!"
"Wait!! I'm going!"
"These goddamn bastards—!!"
The remaining villagers, watching people they had known their entire lives die in front of them, started to lunge forward. Karlson's voice cracked across them like a whip.
"Everyone halt—!!"
The column froze. He kept shouting.
"You go up there and you die like dogs!! Can you not see the arrows coming down!?"
"Then we kill the monsters in the trees, don't we!?"
One of the villagers shot back. Karlson raised his voice even higher.
"The distance is too far and they've got the high ground — the terrain is completely against us! You want to catch an arrow and die before you even get there!? And even if you somehow close the gap, if they've got more of them waiting in ambush, that's the end of every last one of us!!"
"Then what the hell are we supposed to do!? Just stand here and watch!?"
A man shouted it, the frustration tearing out of him. Karlson had no answer.
With shields we could push in. But we don't even have those. Not even that.
Most of the weapons had been stolen or burned in the fire. Karlson clenched both fists until the knuckles went white. He did not want to say this. But he was the captain of the guard — the one among them still capable of a rational decision — and so he had to.
"There is no way. Those people… are already dead. Watching what that monster does next… is all we can do."
They looked at Karlson's ashen face, and the same darkness settled over every one of theirs.
Shame.
I looked down at the villagers who had started to charge and then stopped. If they'd actually come up the hill to go after the monsters pouring arrows into them, I'd been ready to give the attack order to the ones I had waiting in ambush nearby.
Ah, well. Doesn't matter. I wasn't planning to wipe them all out here anyway. More importantly — lucky for me you knew how to shoot a bow.
I possess not only information about this world, but a considerable breadth of knowledge besides. That any of it proved useful is simply fortunate. Luck played its part as well. The monsters you created carry a decent intelligence — perhaps because they were born from you, who was once human. Had they been goblin-class in mind, teaching them to use a bow, even poorly, would have taken a very long time indeed.
Predicting where the villagers would come — laying a trap like this one — that had been Seongha's advice too. In truth I hadn't predicted the location so much as herded them to it. I'd left a trail through the forest and counted on one smart man following it all the way here.
The first plan has succeeded. Let us proceed to the next stage.
Gladly.
"Hello there~?"
I grinned down at Karlson, who was staring up at me like he wanted me dead. At the greeting, his fists clenched so hard they shook. He swallowed it down and spoke with a forced calm.
"Release the people even now. Do that, and we will not enter the forest that is your home."
The hell is this idiot talking about?
"Pffheehee!!"
The sheer stupidity of it was so genuine I grabbed my stomach and howled.
"Kikikik!!"
"Keheheh—!!!"
"Kilkil!"
The monsters joined me as if we were a single throat, laughter ripping out of them toward the humans below. For a long moment, the only sound in the forest was that laughter, ringing and ringing, mocking every one of them.
"I keep my promises."
Karlson closed his eyes once, opened them, and tried again, still reaching for that same measured tone. Impressive patience, really.
Which only made me want to smash it to pieces all the more.
"Don't give me that shit."
Karlson's mouth shut tight.
"I give them back, and what? You forget everything? Just like that? The humans behind you — can they live with that? You really sure? That you'll leave us monsters alone, just like this?"
His face went rigid, then transformed — shock and horror bleeding through as he stared at me.
"What in the world… are you? Human? Or… a demon?"
"Who knooows~"
I don't even know what I am. As if he'd have a clue.
"And besides. You're already too late."
I pointed, nice and clear, at the woman writhing beside me with her swollen belly.
"Ta-daah. Childbirth… shooow."
"Nngh—!?"
The woman, slumped with her legs spread, arched at the waist. Her head fell back as she began to push out the life that had grown inside her.
A wet gush.
"Kieee…"
Amniotic fluid spilled, and with it, my monster was born. The thing came out sheathed in blood, found its feet almost at once, and began to grow at a speed no living thing should have managed.
"God almighty…"
"Lord above…"
"What am I even looking at right now…?"
The villagers watching that impossible sight went ashen, each of them whispering their own fragment of horror. I looked down among them at the man still clinging to the ground with an arrow in him — the husband who had charged first. He had seen it too. His wife's monster-birth. His face was twisted into a ruin of disbelief.
I gave him the widest, ugliest smile I had.
"Your wife's cunt. Tasted pretty good, you know? I made excellent use of it. I'll have her pop out plenty more of my kids from now on."
"You… you son of a bi—"
Thwack.
The arrow took him through the skull.
He crumpled without a sound, not even finishing the scrap of rage he'd tried to spit. The woman, watching her husband die in front of her, went vacant — a face emptied down to the floor of despair.
I savored that despair like a delicacy. Then I smiled at the humans staring up at me with every feeling a person could wear, and asked them, lightly:
"Was it fun? The childbirth show."
A beat of silence.
Then, from somewhere in the crowd, a man's voice tore loose — everything he had been holding down, all at once.
"Keeheehee!!"
And at that roar, I finally let out the laugh I'd been holding back too.