A Promise Kept
"DIIIEEE—!!"
"Heeheeheehee!!"
"You monsters!!"
The women who had been freed drew the daggers they'd been hiding against their bodies and turned them on the people of their own village.
"Ghk—"
"Wh-why…?"
"Aaagh!!"
Caught completely unprepared, the villagers were stabbed down where they stood. Rage, bloodlust, madness—the women wore every emotion at once, and not a single one of them looked sane.
Clang—
"Fall back!!"
Karlson lunged forward, knocking aside a woman's thrusting blade, and shouted to the rest. Only then did the others snap out of it and scramble to put distance between themselves and the women.
"Nnngh…"
"I don't… want to die… cough!"
What they left behind were the badly wounded, collapsed where the knives had found them. No one could call it fortunate that they weren't dead. Coldly speaking, death would have been kinder. There was no way to treat them; they would die in agony either way, and the rest couldn't fight while trying to protect the fallen.
"Die… I said die…"
"Heehee!!"
"I… I… what am I…"
"I'm going back to the village. I will!!"
The women leveled their bloodied blades at the villagers, each of them radiating a warped, twisted killing intent. For some reason, they were perceiving their own neighbors as monsters.
Are their minds being controlled? No—looking at how they're reacting, this is… hallucination.
"They're seeing hallucinations! Don't kill them!"
Karlson shouted it to everyone as he beat back the women charging at him. The situation was sliding toward disaster. If a monster had seized control of their minds, killing them would have been the only option. But a hallucination could be broken with a hard enough shock, or by knocking them unconscious. Knowing that, he still couldn't bring himself to kill the women.
"Ghk!? C-Captain, but—!"
One of the guards ducked a woman's strike and answered through gritted teeth. Even if they were women, subduing people who were coming at you with weapons and every intention of killing you was no easy thing.
"So you'd rather kill our own people!?"
"My daughter's in there!"
"Shut up! You want us all to die together, is that it!?"
"Damn it!!"
"Snap out of it, Luna!!"
"Aaagh!!"
Shouts flew in every direction. Pandemonium. If they killed the women, everything they had done up to this point would mean nothing—the worst possible ending, with no one saved and only more dead. Trapped in a dilemma where he could neither kill them nor leave them standing, Karlson gave them his best answer with his hands.
Thud—
"Ugh!?"
He dropped the women one by one, beating them down. Or he drove his blade into places that would disable without killing—the shoulder, the forearm, anywhere that wasn't a vital point. They wouldn't die. But there would be lasting damage. It couldn't be helped. This was the best he could do.
The villagers hesitated a moment when they saw what Karlson was doing. Then they followed his lead.
"Ghhk—"
"Ugh!"
Now it was the women who began to fall, one after another, as the villagers charged them in turn. Even under hallucination, they still had their physical senses. The moment they started losing ground, instinctive fear seized them and they fell back.
"Don't fall back! Those things are all monsters!! We have to take revenge!! Have you all forgotten!? Those beasts that got us pregnant—that ruined us!!"
One woman among them screamed it out, and the others, who had been faltering, went still. They tightened their grips on the bloodied daggers. A savage, murderous aura rose off them.
"I'll kill them… I'll kill you, monster! I'll never let that happen to me again!"
"Revenge! Against the monsters that did this to us!!"
Karlson thought of what had happened in the forest, and it wasn't hard to imagine the horrors these women had endured in the dungeon. And the fact that all that rage was pointed not at the monsters, but at their own neighbors—that made his blood boil. Having to turn a blade on someone precious. On the very people you'd come to save. On family. On friends. The sheer absurdity of it sat heavy in his chest.
Even so, he forced his heart to still and thought it through with a cold head. The monster that had orchestrated this godforsaken situation was the woman who had just shouted from among them. He was sure of it.
It's that one.
The same monster that had once worn Elisa's skin, now wearing another woman's. An ugly, wretched creature that wasn't satisfied with ruining human lives—it had to impersonate the dead, defiling even their names and their faces.
"Heh."
The woman—the monster—met Karlson's eyes and smirked.
I just have to kill that one. Take the women down first, then that thing—
"Keeheehee!!"
"Khheheheh!"
"They're here!"
"The villagers came to save us!!"
"We're finally going to live…!"
Then laughter rose from behind them, and Karlson's thoughts stopped cold. He turned. A pack of monsters had already closed in around them. The hallucinating villagers saw the monsters as their own people, come to rescue them, and they cheered with wild, fervent joy. Faced with that warped reality—that grotesque inversion of perception—the villagers felt not so much rage as a hollow, crushing despair.
Karlson clung to a mind that wanted to go blank, counted the monsters in a rush, and his mouth fell open.
Over forty? God almighty… that's more than twice what they had when they hit the village!
Subtract the villagers already dead and the ones too wounded to fight, and the monsters outnumbered them. How? How was that even possible? It had been days. Mere days, and their numbers had more than doubled. Monsters grew faster than humans—that much was true. But this rate of reproduction was unreal.
If they left this dungeon alone, the monster population would explode. Not just their village. The surrounding towns, the cities. All of it would be overrun. Maybe. Just maybe, everything on this continent would end up on its knees before those things.
For a single instant, Karlson saw a continent burning. And standing in those flames was that monster—wearing a vicious smile, killing women like toys, playing with them as it pleased, living its life.
This… this isn't a fight we can win…
Karlson, who had never once let go of hope no matter the situation, finally gave in to resignation. In front of him, women he had to subdue without killing. Behind him, armed monsters. A body heavy with exhaustion, a heart already claimed by fear—together they pushed the situation into something close to impossible. Unless the gods themselves intervened, there was no way out of this.
The monsters and the women closed in from both sides. Caught between them, Karlson looked at the monster smirking from among the women, and one thought rose in his mind.
If I just kill you.
Kill that one monster, and it all ends. What had been little more than a hunch was, by now, as good as certainty. There was no time. There were no other options left. There was nothing to hesitate over.
Whoosh—
In that hair-trigger instant, Karlson kicked off the ground and surged toward the monster, running at the absolute limit of his speed. The suddenness of it worked—the women in his path didn't even have time to react.
"DIIIE!"
Riiip—
His blade grazed past the monster's flesh. As it did, the human skin covering it tore, and the grotesque thing underneath was laid bare.
"Close one, huh? Keehelhelhel!!"
The monster tore the rest of the shredded skin off with its own hands and laughed in Karlson's face, wearing its true form.
"Khek!"
"Get him!!"
The moment Karlson moved to strike again, the monster and the women came after him.
"Help the Captain!!"
"Stop them!"
The villagers snapped to and moved, late, throwing themselves in the way. In an instant it was a melee—people tangled with people, people tangled with monsters.
"Catch me if you can~."
The monster started skipping away, as if to taunt him. Karlson could already see how the melee behind him would end, and he chased the monster with desperate urgency. If he could just kill that one. If he could just kill that thing…!
"Hah— hah— hah…"
The third chamber. He'd chased the monster as it fled like a rat. Panting, Karlson scanned every direction, searching for the thing that had vanished into hiding.
"—!?"
Shiiing—
A presence flared at his side. He twisted on instinct and swung. Sparks leapt where blades met in the dim dark, and a familiar figure resolved out of the gloom.
"…Cecilia?"
Cecilia. His vice-captain. The precious subordinate he had looked after and trained since she was a child. The woman who had been dragged away by a monster right in front of him was, for some reason, pointing a sword at Karlson.
"Shut up! You monster—!!"
Cecilia snarled it at him, blade still leveled. The way she looked at him—the way she saw him as a monster—told Karlson that she, too, was caught in the monster's hallucination. The monster's game wasn't over.
"Keeheehee…"
A sly laugh, and the monster that had been hiding in the dark stepped into view. It approached Cecilia, groped her breasts, and toyed with her body as if putting on a show.
"This female. Mine now. Slurrrp—"
A tongue as long as a snake's dragged across Cecilia's cheek. A thick trail of saliva ran down her face, but Cecilia paid it no mind at all.
"Isn't that right, Cecilia?"
Cecilia answered the monster's question with a smile, her eyes unfocused. Karlson went slack, unable to believe the conversation unfolding between the two of them.
The shock wasn't finished.
Thud—
"Grrrr…"
Another monster walked out of the darkness and came to stand beside Cecilia. It was far taller and far broader than any of the others he had seen. Muscle stood in defined ridges along its frame; it had the bearing of a warrior who had been trained.
"A strong monster was born. This female. An excellent broodmother."
Tap. Tap.
The monster rapped its fingers against Cecilia's sex and grinned. She flinched at the touch, a flush rising in her face. Karlson's eyes went wide as he understood.
"You—"
His eyes, already wide, flew open all the way. A vein stood out on his forehead.
"I'll kill you…"
He couldn't hold the fury down. His voice shook with murder. And then—
"I SWEAR I'LL—!!! I'LL TEAR YOU APART AND KILL YOU—!!!!!"
A sound of pure, abandoned rage, stripped of all reason.
Shiiing—
Karlson charged the monster. The monster's servants—mother and child—stepped in his way.
"I'll protect the Captain!!"
"Khuhhk!"
"AAAAAAAGH—!!!"
Karlson screamed and swung his sword at the monster beyond the ones blocking him. The thrashing of a man who had lost everything, and was still losing more, was pitiful and desperate in equal measure. But to the monster's eyes, it looked like a play. And it made him smile.
"I told you, didn't I? That I'd make you watch the ones you cherish get violated and die right in front of you."
The monster opened a mouth packed with sharp teeth.
That open mouth burst into a wicked, contemptible grin.