Seona, Yurin, and Miel
Someone was shouting desperately, clutching Seona tight against their chest.
"Seona! Seona!"
Consciousness was returning, slow and heavy. He felt as though he were cradled in something soft and warm — a gentle touch that soothed his body like a balm.
When Seona opened his eyes, the face looking down at him was his mother's. Mina was staring at him through a sheen of tears.
"Mom… I'm… sorry."
There was no strength in his voice. It wasn't just the exhaustion in his body. Seeing his mother after so long made his throat close up.
It had been nearly two years. All those agonizing memories. All those moments without his parents. He had never once imagined that his mother would come for him — into this dangerous Demon Realm. Day after day he had been steeped in despair, certain that his life would simply end here someday.
He had turned away from how desperately they must have been worrying about him, clinging instead to the hope that his parents wouldn't grieve — and that was why he had never been able to leave Yurin. Then, one day, on the eve of the wedding, in the midst of those terrible days, Miel had abducted him. Because of her, his mind had shattered into pieces, and he had forgotten his own parents.
The hatred he felt toward those two still would not leave his heart.
While his mother held him and sobbed, hurried footsteps suddenly came running toward them. Seona looked up — and saw a face he knew.
The girl who had been his childhood friend for fifteen years. His first love, the woman he had once promised to marry. The woman who had smiled while putting him through every kind of torment.
It was Yurin.
She closed the distance in an instant, a sword gripped in one hand, and swung it straight at the mother holding him.
"No!"
His mother, with him still in her arms, seemed to believe she couldn't block it — that was why she was clutching him so tightly. To keep him from getting hurt.
Why… please…
Clang!
But contrary to what he expected, the blade was stopped by someone's hand. The one who had caught it was the Succubus Lord, her nails grown long and sharp. Her expression was startled, yet it also carried the look of someone who had half expected this.
The Succubus Lord had noticed it earlier — the way this woman called Mina kept casting hostile glances at the girl who was supposedly her companion. Not the behavior of an ally. More like that of an enemy. It had already told her that the situation was different from what she had first assumed.
In the memories of the boy called Seona, the woman she had just stopped had appeared — but Seona had regarded those memories as pure suffering. When the Succubus Lord had peered into them, she had tasted the bitterness of something that was both love and agony at once, and she had not liked it. This woman, like Miel, was clearly one of the people who had tormented the child named Seona. The sword she had just swung proved that suspicion beyond any doubt.
The Succubus Lord curled her fingers around the blade, locking it so it could not be pulled free. The woman before her was so frenzied that she failed to notice what the other hand was doing. The Succubus Lord raised the nails of her free hand, ready to drive them into the woman who was Seona's enemy —
"Don't! Please don't kill her!"
Seona's desperate cry stopped the Succubus Lord's hand.
"Is she not the woman who humiliated you? And still you tell me to stop — why?"
She truly could not understand it. Those memories must have been agony beyond measure. He had every reason to want her dead. And yet he was holding that back.
"No matter what she did, she's the childhood friend I spent fifteen years with… She deserves to be punished, but she should be punished by human society."
"I cannot agree to that."
It was a more trivial reason than she had expected. Even killing the woman with her own hands would barely be enough to settle that grudge — and yet he wanted to leave it to the laws of society. That was a value utterly foreign to demonkind.
"Once Yurin and the rest of us go back to Earth, she'll be locked up in prison. She won't be able to see me the whole time she's in there. I have no intention of meeting her after that either, but… for me, that's enough."
The honest truth was that Seona knew Yura would grieve if Yurin died. Yura — Yurin's parent — had been one of the people who had been kind to him since childhood. Unlike Yurin, Yura had never suddenly turned on him or done him harm. If anything, Yura had treated him with genuine warmth, almost like one of her own children. He did not want to make someone like that suffer.
"Would it not be better never to see her again at all?"
"Even so, I don't want her to die."
"I am not speaking of killing her. I am speaking of ensuring she can never see you."
The Succubus Lord smiled, one corner of her mouth lifting. The gaze she fixed was not on Seona — it was on Yurin. And Yurin, meeting that look, felt a surge of dread. She could sense that this woman intended to do something terrible to her.
"Ah… no! Don't — stop!"
Yurin knew what succubi could do — that their power was the manipulation of the mind. She seemed to grasp exactly what was about to happen to her. She dropped her sword at once and tried to flee, but Mina moved faster, seizing her and slamming her face-down into the ground.
"Let go! No! Seona is mine…! No one gets in the way… no one!"
It was the kind of line a villain might scream in a final act — but the expression on her face and the raw fury in her voice carried a genuine, chilling madness. The sight of her treating Seona as nothing more than a possession made everyone present recoil. Even with her true face laid bare, even reduced to this ugly spectacle, she still refused to release her grip on that obsession. It was almost impressive.
"Well done. I will handle the rest."
The Succubus Lord spoke to Mina, who still held Yurin pinned.
"Not at all… Please take care of it."
"Let me go! I don't want to forget — please, Seona! Seona!"
Yurin thrashed like a madwoman, screaming that she didn't want to forget Seona, and at last stretched her arms out toward him. It was terrifying to watch. Seona looked down at her and answered with a cold, cutting sneer in his voice.
"I hope you get to understand even a fraction of the pain I felt. Goodbye… Yurin."
Once the Succubus Lord touched Yurin's mind, the Yurin he knew would be gone. That short farewell was all the answer he had for her.
The Succubus Lord placed her hand on Yurin's head. Mina pressed down hard on the thrashing body, pinning her so she could not resist.
"Ah… aaaaaagh!"
Yurin's face contorted in agony. Her tongue lolled out, and she collapsed into unconsciousness.
"This child will no longer… be able to perceive Seona."
The Succubus Lord had applied one of the most refined forms of torment available to succubi — the manipulation of recognition itself. It was the most basic method of mental torture used to ensure that hostages, even when confined together, could not perceive one another. And its effectiveness was unmatched.
From now on, Yurin would only be able to see Seona in her own memories. Unless the Succubus Lord herself undid it, Yurin would not be able to see him, hear his voice, or even feel his touch if she somehow managed to lay hands on him.
Compared to the suffering she had inflicted on Seona, it might not seem like much. But given the depth of that obsession, she would wander forever searching for him. Seona did not want Yurin dead — he simply did not want to see her. Yurin was obsessed with him to the point of staking her own life on it. That obsession would never fade. And now she could neither touch, nor see, nor hear the object of that obsession. To her, Seona had simply become invisible.
When she woke from her faint, she would not immediately understand what had been done to her. But in time, she would. Even after she returned to Earth, even after she got out of prison and searched for Seona with desperate longing, she would never find him. On the entire planet, he had become invisible to one person alone.
Hearing the Succubus Lord's words, Seona understood. Yurin would never again be able to toy with his life. It was better than watching her die. Yura would not have to grieve over Yurin's death. And Seona found himself thinking that all that remained was for Yurin to thrash and suffer in her endless search for him. He wanted her to understand even a little of the humiliation and pain he had endured — and he intended to watch it happen.
"Now it is Miel's turn."
The Succubus Lord spoke flatly. But beneath the calm, a quiet rage simmered.
"The contract says you can't harm me or kill me until tomorrow! You can't lay a single finger on me — go ahead and try!"
Miel looked frightened, but she still spoke with brazen defiance.
"Starting tomorrow I will issue a wanted order, so do your best. In this mother's name as Lord, no matter where in the Demon Realm you run, bounty hunters will be on your trail."
The Succubus Lord had acted on impulse and only now realized she had no way to keep Miel locked up here until the following day. But this time the offense was Miel's own — a violation of the laws of the succubi. That meant she did not need to send her own daughters to pursue her. She could issue a formal wanted order. If she set the condition that Miel need only be brought back alive, and attached a large enough bounty, bounty hunters and mercenaries from every corner of the Demon Realm would move. The Demon Realm was a world of the strong devouring the weak — but it was also a world that moved for capital.
Miel would not last long before she was caught and dragged back. The single day written into the contract had been granted so that she might reflect on her wrongs. Outside of that day, she would be too busy running to spare a thought for remorse. And if she tried to flee through a Gate to Earth, once the fog cleared the hunters would hunt her down and kill her.
Miel already sensed it — that for her, just as for Yurin, everything was over. She collapsed in a daze, trembling with fear at the punishment that awaited her. Then, as if something had occurred to her, she crawled toward Seona and put on a coquettish air.
"Seona… we got along so well, didn't we?… I was gentle with you more often than not… I'll make you feel good every single day if you keep me by your side… I'll do anything you want… please, just let me stay with you… We're a married couple who share the same Yin Crest, aren't we? Please…"
Seona looked at her and spoke.
"The truth is, the moment you made me forget my parents… that hurt more than anything Yurin ever did to me. I still remember when you pretended to be my mother. The way you shattered my mind every day and pieced it back together was even more horrifying… But I guess it worked out. Because of those terrible memories, I'll remember you forever."
Miel realized there was no hope left. The strength drained from her body, and she sank to the floor. The Succubus Lord ordered her confined to the underground dungeon. Soldiers clapped manacles and ropes around Miel's body. As a precaution, one of her sister succubi was assigned to watch her as they led her away, disappearing toward the cells below.
With the thought that everything was finally over, Seona felt a lift in his spirits. Once they returned to Earth, he wanted to go find his father himself — it had been so long since he had seen him.
"Mom… or should I start calling you Mother now?"
Seona tried changing the form of address, just once. But Mina always insisted he call her Mom — being called Mother made her feel as though the distance between them had grown.
"Oh, you… just call me Mom."
That feeling of hers, it seemed, had not changed at all.
"Dad's doing well, right? Do the two of you still go on weekend dates?"
"…Let's talk about it when we get home."
There was a faintly bitter look on Mina's face, and Seona could not bring himself to press further. The warm, easy expression from just moments before was gone. Seona, too, sensed that something had happened to his father. He could only hope it was nothing serious.
Both of them grew subdued. For all the things they had so badly wanted to say to each other, their words dwindled, and at last fell into silence.
All that remained now was to take the unconscious Yurin, rejoin the expedition party, and return to Earth through the Gate. When they asked the Succubus Lord's leave, she said she would open a Gate herself once the expedition arrived.
The Succubus Lord was afraid of the woman called Mina.
The high-purity mana she carried within her… it was almost like that of a Demon King. Looking at that pure, vast power, the Succubus Lord could only hope that the bomb would not go off — that this woman's blade would never turn toward them. That was why she had needed to stay in Mina's good graces, and why she had personally delivered punishment to both Yurin and Miel.
Sympathy for the child named Seona had been part of it, yes. But the greatest reason she had been forced into such deference was, in the end, power.
She prayed they would leave soon. She waited for the expedition party that would arrive before long — hoping, for the sake of her territory's peace, that these people would be gone as quickly as possible.