Side Story: What the Two Have in Common
It had been four months since Yurin and Miel lost Seona.
Right now they stood with the countless soldiers of the expedition force, holding the departure ceremony before entering the Gate. Both of them found themselves thinking back over everything that had happened in those four months, muttering that it really had been a lot.
From the very day Yurin came back after letting Seona be stolen from her like some easy mark, Miel had never stopped looking at her with those cold eyes laced with mockery and sneers.
That crazy woman might beat her to death if she ever truly lost her temper, but Miel did not care. The pain and pleasure wracking her own body made it nearly impossible to stay sane. Ever since Seona was taken, these foul sensations had begun to rule every inch of her. And whose fault was all of it?
Park Yurin’s. She was the one who had let Seona slip away.
The moment Miel fully recovered her power she wanted to tear that woman apart. Of course, even if she regained her strength in the Demon Realm and fought Yurin, her odds of winning would still be less than half. That was how completely the grief of losing Seona had twisted itself into rage.
Yurin, for her part, seemed almost apologetic. Whenever Miel spat those words she simply listened in silence, never answering back. Then she would offer some hopeful little story.
“When Seona comes back to my side, I’ll tie him down right next to me and look after him forever. You’ll be there beside him too.”
That needed correcting. It was not hope. For Seona it would only ever be despair.
“Why do you torment Seona like that? If you love him, isn’t cherishing him the normal thing?”
Miel asked it with genuine curiosity. She had her own reasons for making Seona suffer. There was the pleasure of savoring the deepest corners of his memories while she shattered his mind and rebuilt it, of course. But more than that, once the memories were sealed and he clung to her like a spoiled child, the pure happiness on his face when she treated him gently was simply too good. In the end, the only way to see Seona at his absolute happiest was to first drag him all the way to the bottom. Everything she did was just the necessary process to reach that expression.
This lunatic, though, stared at Seona with a sadistic look that seemed to want nothing but his pain. She clearly saw him as nothing more than an object for satisfying her lust and her cruelty.
Yurin answered the question without a single moment of hesitation. That alone proved she was not lying.
“If all you do is cherish him, how is that any different from owning a thing? It’s only natural to pour your own feelings into someone and receive them back.”
She was not wrong. What Yurin described was no different from what Miel herself did. The difference was that Yurin’s sensibilities were warped somewhere deep inside.
But then why does she keep getting those resentful looks after she torments him?
Honestly, Miel still could not understand the woman. She herself felt the same hunger for dominion and conquest over Seona, yet for Yurin those feelings seemed to peak precisely when Seona was in pain. She filled her need for conquest and control by watching the person she loved accept even the things he hated most. She spoke of it with absolute certainty, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. Her mental state was not normal—Miel could see that clearly—and when she had rummaged through Yurin’s memories while searching for the succubus who kidnapped Seona, the same truth had stared back at her.
Most of the emotions an ordinary human ought to possess were paper-thin. Only the feelings tied to Seona surged with violent force. Especially when something happened to him, or when he suffered, the amplitude of those emotions became ferocious.
To this woman, Seona was a tool for amplifying her own faint emotions. That was Miel’s conclusion.
“Ha… Even in the Demon Realm you won’t find many twisted creatures like you.”
That was her professional opinion. Succubi possessed a certain ability to handle minds and memories. In fact, the territory of the Arandel family—ruled by a succubus lord—was a place demons with mental trauma or minds shattered by psychic attacks often visited for treatment. Miel herself had done that work right up until the day she kidnapped Seona and Yurin.
In those years she had read countless memories. Even the rough mercenary types among the demons were almost never this twisted. She had seen a few, but most of them had been warped by mental stress into distorted lust or broken personalities. This woman was different. She had carried a congenital twist from the moment she was born.
“Have you been bullying the people around you since you were little?”
Yurin cast her mind back.
“Hmm… thinking about it, ever since kindergarten?”
And it had stopped the day Seona entered the same kindergarten. Whenever she tormented the other children, Seona would give her the kisses she wanted or let her touch his body. Instead of bullying, she had touched Seona and used that to master the impulse. Looking back now, she suspected every one of those impulses had simply transformed into sexual desire for him. What she still failed to grasp was that once that desire was no longer the main force driving her, the old bullying nature had come flooding back out alongside it.
“As I thought—you’re congenitally broken in the head. Want me to give you a little treatment?”
Miel nodded once, as if confirming her own theory, and looked at Yurin.
“I’ll pass. After everything you did to Seona, how am I supposed to know what you’d do to my head?”
Normally Yurin would have snapped that she was crazy, but a faint sense of guilt toward Miel made her phrase it more carefully. Looking at the things Miel had actually done, trust was impossible. On top of that, it had not been long since a succubus stole Seona away. Yurin simply could not bring herself to trust succubi as a species. Every one she had ever seen was a creature that only spun lewd schemes.
Still, the way Miel acted now made her feelings for Seona plain enough. She had already done far too much just to monopolize him.
Even so, until we get Seona back we have to move together.
That was how the two of them spent four months talking, slowly learning each other. Because every interest they possessed was concentrated on the same man, any topic that touched on Seona never ran dry. Once they entered the Demon Realm they would have to fight with their backs to each other, so they compromised for the sake of their shared goal. In the end they might become rivals again and fight over Seona once everything was finished, but for the present objective there were no better allies who understood each other so completely.
When the day’s work finally ended, Seona used his healing ability one last time on his own body and restored his condition. The lungs that had been heaving for breath settled, and the skin that had flushed red all over returned to its original pure white.
After that the succubi began erasing the writing that covered him. The one who had pressed a pen to his flesh and written those marks spent every evening, once the work was done, counting every single tally character on his body and recording the total in a notebook. The lord had said that when Miel returned she would present the exact number of times he had been violated right before her eyes.
It was the kind of scene you only ever saw in manga. He had been too out of it to notice before, but this was not the sort of idea monsters usually came up with.
“Who the hell thought of this?”
Seona looked at the succubus who had just finished writing in the notebook.
“Ah, that? I suggested we try it.”
Was it possible this succubus had also been reincarnated, the same as him?
“Where did you even learn something like that…? It’s the kind of thing that only happens in manga…”
The succubus holding the notebook answered with open pride.
“I learned all of it watching Hitomi and Pornhub. Back when I was captured on Earth.”
And the chatter kept right on going.
According to the succubus, she herself was the one who had captured him. She said it with complete confidence. Thinking back, he had been violated by that kidnapper until he blacked out, then woken up here and been passed around among the succubi ever since.
Crunch…
Remembering it made Seona grind his teeth with pure betrayal. Moments earlier he had been having sex with Miel; suddenly it had grown rougher, Miel had stepped aside, and that kidnapper had been the one violating him. Had Miel really not known? The only thoughts that filled his head were that he had been sold to the kidnapper, that Miel had deliberately let that person “use” his body.
The woman he had thought of as his wife had blindfolded him, deceived him, and done that. She had almost certainly done the same the day before while he was blindfolded. At first he had only wondered why. Now nothing remained inside him but betrayal and raw sorrow. The reason he was being passed around by these succubi might very well be that Miel had sold him, and the thought kept dragging him deeper into depression.
He had been locked away there; now he was locked away here and violated. He felt a jarring sense of wrongness, as if he had become a sex slave.
Not a woman— a man as a sex slave.
Everything he had been taught since childhood said that men, not women, were more vulnerable to sexual violence; that was common sense. Yet somehow it felt completely reversed. Had he been violated so many times that his common sense itself had flipped?
It did not seem that way. His values simply seemed different from everyone else’s. And somewhere, very faintly, he had the feeling that there had once been a man and a woman who looked after him. Almost like parents…
That was impossible. He was an orphan of the world. He had started dating an older woman named Miel, called her “noona,” and lived with her like family. To Seona, none of it made any sense at all.