The Monsters of the Gate
The Demon Realm had always been a barren land, starved of resources.
Most of the plants that managed to grow in that harsh soil were toxic, so few were ever used as food. What the Demon Realm could claim as resources amounted to little more than various kinds of ore and mineral deposits.
The majority of high-ranking demons devoted themselves to advanced arts—magic and alchemy—in hopes of manufacturing food and materials themselves. Nearly all of them failed.
It was a problem that had gone unresolved for ages. In the end, though, a solution presented itself.
A certain mage, through a mishap with spatial magic, opened a portal that could reach another dimension.
The existence of an outside dimension was, at first, a profound shock to the people of the Demon Realm.
Beyond that portal lay a land of lush green, where the creatures roaming free were not the dangerous magical beasts of their own world but gentle, weak animals. They even found beings of intelligence—creatures that looked much like themselves.
To learn about that dimension, they abducted several of those intelligent beings and interrogated them. What they discovered was that the other world overflowed with the food and resources they so desperately needed.
At the rate things were going, every resource would run dry and the demon race itself would face extinction. Faced with that crisis, the Demon Realm's council stopped trying to create resources and began planning to seize them instead.
That decision became the starting point. After long years of research, they developed the Gate—a gateway capable of ferrying vast armies between dimensions. In the process, they learned that far more dimensions existed than the one they had first found.
And so the Demon Realm began invading other worlds, stripping them of their resources without end.
But war on a dimensional scale bred a new problem within the Demon Realm itself.
A shortage of manpower.
As the wars dragged on and dimension after dimension fell, resources piled up in abundance—yet every battle thinned their ranks further. On top of that, far too many demons struggled to adapt to foreign worlds, leaving them at a constant disadvantage in combat.
On the brink of being unable to continue the resource wars at all, they turned to biological transformation of their own bodies.
They began reshaping themselves into forms capable of bearing children with the humans of other dimensions.
The next generation, born of mixed blood, resembled the human species of the world they meant to conquer—and adapted to that world as well. With each successive mingling of bloodlines, the resemblance deepened, until their appearance grew beautiful enough to seduce the natives of those dimensions.
By the third generation, their forms were nearly indistinguishable from the intelligent beings of the target world. By the fifth, they had become beautiful enough to enthrall them outright.
At first they seized anyone they could—women and men alike—to breed and replenish their forces. But the wombs of intelligent females proved inadequate. Many could not bear multiple offspring at once, and pregnancies often lasted far too long. Worse still, a womb worn out by too many births became useless for further use.
So their attention turned to the males of those intelligent species.
Biologically altered demons could extract seed from those males and, once impregnated, birth vast numbers of children in a single pregnancy—and the gestation period was short. A week of pregnancy, and a demon only three months old could already take up a weapon and fight. There was not a single reason left to use the females of other species as broodmothers.
As a result of that prolonged biological manipulation in service of endless conquest, the Demon Realm's sex ratio collapsed. Males made up a mere 0.1 percent of the population. Nearly all demons were female.
It had been done because more females than males were better for producing manpower—but the choice had been extreme even by that logic. To make matters worse, the method of reversing the completed body modifications had been lost to time.
Male demons were still born on rare occasions, but high-ranking demons often claimed them as personal playthings to preserve pure bloodlines.
In the end, maintaining the population required the unconditional abduction and breeding of males from other dimensions.
Before the survival of an entire race, it was a choice they could not refuse.
After plundering dimension after dimension for their resources, the demons discovered a world called Earth.
They already had more resources than they could use. What they needed to sustain their population were males.
Sixty-five years had passed since the Demon Realm first opened Gates into the dimension known as Earth, hungering for its "human resources."
Most of the Demon Realm's forces had turned over by generation. The soldiers who now carried mixed genes from Earth's intelligent beings were, at minimum, third- to fifth-generation demons.
Even when those males were violated, they showed little resistance—some even welcomed it—but their libido proved weaker than expected. So the demons forced aphrodisiacs and drugs into them and used them as breeding stock to swell their ranks.
Enough time had passed since the conquest of countless other dimensions that the males of those other intelligent species were largely dead. No new outer dimensions had been discovered either. Even the unpopular human males of Earth had become urgently necessary.
How urgent? When a single male was captured, he was dosed with stamina drugs and then gang-raped by thirty or forty demons in a day as a matter of course. In extreme cases, the drugs were administered until death, and the number of demons who used him climbed into the hundreds.
The demons had been reshaped through body modification for the endless production of soldiers, and their lust was bottomless.
It was no exaggeration to say that entire territories of Demon Realm nobles had risen in rebellion over the right to monopolize a single man.
A high-ranking demon—a succubus—closed a history of the Demon Realm with one hand, her face a picture of boredom, as if to say she had no idea what all the fuss over men was about.
Her tone might have suggested she knew men well. The opposite was true.
Barely twenty years old and knowing nothing about men at all, this succubus regarded them with nothing more than pure curiosity.
The only demons who had never undergone body modification were the high-ranking nobles.
She had lustrous golden hair, smooth copper-toned skin that gleamed, and curved horns like a ram's.
Next month she too would come of age and pass through a Gate into the dimension called Earth.
As a high-ranking demon, she would lead other demons into battle as a commander, earn distinction as a demon officer, and raise her family's honor. It was a path she had chosen herself for the sake of her noble house.
There was a private desire mixed in as well.
Beyond the Gate, she could seduce and capture men—and, as was the nature of a succubus, she might even take a human male who met her conditions as a partner.
Her entire force consisted of fifteen fifth-generation orcs assigned under her as fresh recruits. But she was a succubus who could wield magic. Defeat in battle was not something she could imagine.
The golden-haired, copper-skinned succubus with ram's horns could hardly wait for the moment she would step beyond the Gate.
Yurin was amusing herself again today by feeding Seon-ah drugs.
Ordinarily, Seon-ah went wild the moment anyone touched her rear hole. But when Yurin threatened to withhold the medicine, Seon-ah wept and hesitated—and in the end accepted being pierced by her fingers.
Claiming yet another of Seon-ah's firsts filled Yurin with such delight that she crooked her fingers this way and that, searching for the prostate, and Seon-ah screamed.
The drugs quieted her, but Yurin could feel Seon-ah's condition steadily worsening. She had withheld the medicine for a while, and Seon-ah was suffering through withdrawal.
With the drugs as leverage, Seon-ah would now accept anything asked of her. Yurin could take her body as she pleased—and do everything else she had imagined as well.
The foul memory of Seon-ah being violated by that bitch Min-ji no longer crossed her mind.
Seon-ah belonged only to her now, obedient at her side. Lately every single day had been bliss.
She had already drawn up all kinds of plans for thoroughly enjoying Seon-ah's body after the wedding, so that this delightful life could continue. Determined that married life should never fall into routine, she had prepared schemes Seon-ah was sure to love—enough to last for years and still not be enough.
If she claimed Seon-ah's first marriage as well, that would be one more first to add to her collection.
Yurin watched Seon-ah wail and made no effort to hide the filthy desire on her face, a smile curling at the corners of her mouth.