A Secret Taste
A secret taste!
So it must have been around this time. If I recall rightly, it was roughly here that the demon race — banished to a far continent after losing the old Race War — finally elected a proper Demon King and began their rampage...
Come to think of it, no, that was even earlier. The war was already in full swing by this point, which is how I came to be sold off somewhere in this sorry state of mine.
In any case, the Demon King of the present age — hailed as the demon among demons, the king among demon kings — rallied his kind under the slogan of "One Demonkind," a race that could scarcely go a single day without tearing at each other's throats. How he ever managed to herd those unbridled colts into one place remains a mystery to me even now...
But suppose the demons had somehow fused their divided strength into one. What would they do with it next? Before the pile of bombs they'd worked so hard to gather started detonating amongst themselves, they would have to swing the cannon's barrel toward some other target, wouldn't they?
And so the Demon King, settling an old score while he was at it, forced through an invasion of the Central Continent — the fabled land of milk and honey. Riding tamed sea monsters of colossal size, the demons came ashore on the continent's western coast and butchered the humans with unstoppable momentum.
Yet the intelligent races of the Central Continent, humans foremost among them, met the onslaught with lukewarm complacency... The upshot: the demons seized territory amounting to nearly a tenth of the continent and built a forward base upon it.
Once things had deteriorated this far, the dignitaries representing each race really ought to have snapped out of it...
"Drink! Pour more!! Strip!!!"
The Emperor had long since thrown state affairs overboard, drowning in wine and women.
"Ahh... O World Tree, you are as beautiful today as ever."
The Elf Queen, senile perhaps from living far too long, spent her days gnawing on the tree and suckling at it...
The dragons, as ever, kept a slothful silence, while the dwarves were emptying their entire royal treasury to forge some "Absolute Ring" or "Absolute Pendant" or what have you.
And the beastfolk?
"Let's go slit that rat bastard's throat!!!"
"Flay the scales right off those snake bastards!!!"
They were in the thick of a civil war all their own.
So there they all were, every race paying the demons no mind whatsoever — and what else could possibly come of that? Naturally, it was the powerless who died in droves...
Refugees sprang up beyond counting, and the only ones rejoicing were the slave traders, who had found themselves a captive market. It was an era when anyone you hauled out of a crowd became a slave, no questions asked — for those vultures, this was the chance of a lifetime.
I was one of those slaves, you see — dragged in from a refugee village with the back of my skull smashed in by a wooden club. In any event, I was nothing more than a powerless little brat, and so I was sold to that pig and hauled off to his castle...
"Prepare the slave I bought today. The usual."
"At once, Your Grace."
Scrubbed squeaky clean and locked away in some gloomy basement, I was weighing whether to bite off my tongue right then and there when —
KWA-AAAAAABOOM—
"We're under attack! Protect His Grace the Duke!!!"
The demons had come.
"Whew... I really thought I was a goner back then. Well — in a way, I suppose that was a stroke of luck?"
Burrowing into the wreckage of the shattered fortress, I poked my head out just enough to survey the scene. What hope did these people have of repelling a high demon — four great, imposing horns crowning its skull, spells blasting from it left and right — they who had grown so fat and lazy with complacency? A creature that could topple a spire with a flick of its wrist and crumble a wall with a single stomp; how were potbellied knights, soft from years of feasting and idleness, supposed to stand against such a thing?
"Now that's a sight. I'd call that a fitting death for that pig, no?"
The duke, skewered clean through and pinned to his own castle wall by a black banner bearing some unnameable sigil, was a truly hilarious spectacle. It stung a little that I hadn't wrung his neck with my own hands, but seeing him like this a second time was satisfaction enough — I was snickering to myself when, like paint dissolving into water, the world began to warp...
"Ah... right, I have no memories from here on, so I suppose this part just gets skipped."
I'd cracked my skull on a chunk of the ruined fortress amid all that chaos and blacked out, so naturally this stretch of the memory leaps ahead. I waited, idly stroking my chin, and little by little the scenery began rebuilding itself — though I must have leaned on the skip button rather too hard, because quite a lot of time had already passed when it did.
"WAAAAAAAHH!!!!!"
A mighty roar of celebration was shaking heaven and earth in every direction. Setting the pandemonium around me aside, the first thing I did was look down at my hands...
"Huh? Looks like a good deal more time went by than I thought."
Where before they had been a young child's hands, they were now roughly the size of a sixteen-year-old's — only then did I finally take stock of my surroundings.
"Kyaa! The Hero just looked at me!"
"No, he didn't! He was looking at ME! The Hero has perfectly good eyes — why on earth would he look at you?"
Down the lane cut through the surging crowds, a young man in gleaming white armor rode at the very head of the column, his eyes a piercing, wintry blue... Behind him marched the armies — the Imperial Knights, the Mage Tower's corps of mages, and more besides.
Clop— clop— clop— clop—
The demons had proven mightier than anyone had imagined, and humanity, left with no choice but to reel its front lines back, had raised the curtain on its counteroffensive as of this very moment. Enter the so-called Hammer Unit — formed by wringing out every last elite asset the allied armies could possibly spare: the high mages and Master-class knights of the Mage Tower; the Temple's forces, spearheaded by the Saintess and filled out with bishops and paladins; even adventurers of Platinum Plate rank and above.
And leading them all: the Hero, Mikhail.
The icon of hope for this age — the one who, it was said, had drawn the holy sword bestowed by the God of Light in ages long past. Their send-off ceremony was so magnificent that even I, a mere street rat who had scurried through back alleys for a living, found myself clapping and cheering with all my heart.
Back then, I envied them. I even looked up to them...
"But looking back now, every last one of them was a bastard too. They didn't so much as twitch until the fire had caught their own heels..."
For all those years that the powerless were being ravaged by demons, what exactly had they been doing? The Master-class knights who claimed they could match a high demon single-handedly kept their silence. Perhaps it was the rotting corpses' doing, but when plague ran rampant, the Temple refused to open its doors to commoners. The adventurers of Platinum Plate and above — once held in esteem exceeding even the knights' — packed up their lives and moved far from the front lines in search of their own survival. And in the meantime, the Mage Tower was quietly abducting people to carry out experiments on living bodies...
"And these are humanity's beacon and shield, are they... A passing dog would burst out laughing."
A beacon for whom? A shield for whose sake? Countless souls rotted into the ground without so much as a proper burial. The streets overflowed with children who had lost their parents, and the wails of mothers bereaved of their children echoed beneath all of heaven.
Well — I can say all this only because it has long since passed. Back then, I trusted them without a shred of doubt, so perhaps I have no right to these words at all.
"Ha... haha..."
All I could manage was a bitter, self-mocking laugh.
By this point, four-tenths of the Central Continent had fallen into the demons' clutches. Mercifully, once matters reached that pass, the human alliance and the elves whose lands bordered the front gritted their teeth and held the line, and the war ground to a standstill. The remaining demi-human races, mind you, wouldn't lift a finger — as far as they were concerned, the demons were somebody else's problem, and humanity could sort itself out.
Amid that tense, frozen standoff, the Hammer Unit's arrival fell like rain upon a drought.
The first Hero, so the stories go, assembled a party and toiled away at growing stronger for a long, long while before finally taking the Demon King's head. The current Hero, by contrast, had been a Master-class powerhouse to begin with, and with the entirety of humanity's greatest strength serving under his banner, he simply pulverized the demon host through sheer, overwhelming force.
So what was I doing while those hopeful tidings of imminent victory spread across the continent?
"GYAAAAH!!!"
"It's an ogre! Stop it with your bodies if you have to, you worthless trash!!!"
I was playing meat shield on the frontmost line. And my commanding officer was some unhinged young noble brat.
I had been eking out a living in the Holy City on petty sleight of hand, but as the saying goes, the longer the tail, the sooner it's caught — and after one grift too many, the guards finally laid hands on me... While I sat caged behind bars once more, gnawing my nails and trembling, I was hauled off somewhere in the name of an imperial decree...
"Choose. Will you be executed here, or will you serve His Imperial Majesty upon the front lines?"
"Th-the front lines... I-I shall go... to the front lines."
And so I was press-ganged into the army.
"Hello...?"
"Oh! A fresh recruit! Welcome — name's George. This here's Reynold, and that one's Fludd!"
George, Reynold, and Fludd, who had introduced themselves so brightly on that first day, were all dead in battle by the next. For nearly a year after that, every soul dragged to this place died playing, quite literally, the part of meat shield. And somehow — somehow — I survived it all...
Things got so absurd that the men started laying bets on whether I would crawl back alive from the next battle.
But even my survival luck seemed to have declared its end today...
"Keh... urgh..."
Why, pray tell, is our commander over there with his throat seized, being drained of his blood? Only then did I truly come to understand the saying that an incompetent commander is the most terrifying commander of all.
Any fool with an ounce of sense would have kept his guard up upon finding a woman so beautiful her jaw hit the floor, standing alone in a ruined village... Or failing vigilance, even a scrap of courtesy might have saved his life. One way or another, that lunatic's chosen option — Capture her and bring her before me — was beyond question the worst one available. The result: thirty soldiers besides me, and one piece of vermin, met utterly gruesome ends.
Hair black as ebony, eyes that glowed crimson like inlaid rubies, a flowing black dress — she was licking her sharp fangs with quick flicks of her own tongue as she drew near me and spoke.
"Hmm... I wonder what you would taste like?"
Still, I'd been knocked around the front lines hard enough to be called a grizzled veteran, so I had a fair guess as to what she was.
The True Ancestor — Bathory...
She who reigned as queen of all vampires... no, as their god. A monster you could count on one hand among all the demons humanity had faced.
And that very woman came gliding toward me, her high heels marking every step with a crisp click-clack...
But then, I was nobody — for a wretch like me, living this long was already more than enough, and there was nothing a single meat shield could do against a woman who had slaughtered humans past all counting. So I resolved to accept death with dignity.
And thus I prepared my last words in the privacy of my heart.
'Tch... Go on, kill me. But one day humanity will crush every last demon — and you, I'd wager, will be lying among the headless corpses when that day comes!'
I chanted it over and over inside, face fixed in grim defiance, biding my moment to deliver the line...
"Mmm... You're fairly easy on the eyes. Shall I spare you, just this once?"
"PLEASE SPARE ME!!!"
It was a temptation far, far too sweet for any deathbed oration.
So much for my last words.
If there's a way to live, you seize it with both hands...
"Kyahahahaha! Then come here and lick it."
She perched herself on a chair of who-knew-when-it-had-been-made, crossed her legs, and set one foot swaying lazily back and forth...
"YES, MA'AM!!!"
And I threw myself down and crawled to her as fast as my hands and knees would carry me.