Ο* * *Ο
“The word “hometown”.
To me, it always brought feelings of hunger and humiliation.
When I was about four years old, I realized that I came from the most wretched background imaginable. Slash-and-burn farmers didn’t belong to any country or city—they were drifters. In a life where survival meant scorching forests to make way for fields, there was no such thing as settling down or staying in one place.
The edge of the world.
That was how I referred to my village in my heart. When I looked out at the endlessly vast forest, I couldn’t help but feel that way. Especially in winter, when snow quietly piled up on all sides, the village would fall into such deep silence that I sometimes wondered if all of humanity had died.
Winter.
Winter for a slash-and-burn farmer.
A season so cold and hungry that you had to do anything—anything at all—to survive.
“Yes, Daisy. This is nothing at all, really.”
I had known for a long time that the adults in my village held strange feelings toward me.
Looking back on it now, I think it was because I was overly mature. Physically and mentally, in strange ways, I was ahead of other children my age. Even at the age of eight, melancholy already lingered in my eyes. Perhaps that was what stirred the adults’ lust.
A village isolated from the outside world.
A girl born with beauty that was, perhaps, excessive for such a place.
The outcome of that could only go one way—it was, in some sense, already set in stone.
I could have resisted. Easily.
But if I took one meal less, that meant there would be more left for my parents or for Luke. My mind was too quick with numbers and gain to simply ignore that fact. So I let the adults play with my body.
“Daisy, you’re truly beautiful.”
“How could your skin be so pale and soft?”
When my parents were out working in the fields, and Luke had gone off to play with the neighborhood boys, like clockwork, that familiar play would happen—somewhere in a corner of the village, or in the corner of some shabby hut. I would quietly look down at the men frantically groping my body.
“…….”
They’re like stray dogs chewing on their own shadows, I thought.
I never particularly considered myself to be unhappy. It was just that, whenever the cold winter wind would thud, thud, dully and slowly against the outer wall of the hut, I couldn’t help but wonder.
Why do people go on living instead of just dying?
Someone’s tongue traced across my skin. As if it were the most delicious fruit. According to the village adults, my body supposedly smelled like peaches. But there’s no way destitute peasants like us had ever even tasted a peach, so they must have just said whatever came to mind. They’re all liars.
For instance, a certain family’s wife had died.
She was a woman who went out during the day to gather herbs. Three days after she went missing, they found her in the mountains. Her body had been torn to pieces by wolves. Her husband was thrown into despair and wailed in grief, and the villagers comforted him, saying what a terrible misfortune it was.
But in truth, the woman had been murdered by the men.
The gang boasted as they toyed with my body. They had ambushed a woman wandering the mountain trails alone and raped her until she died. They didn’t seem to feel any guilt whatsoever. It was undeniable proof, laid bare before my eyes, that morality didn’t exist in this world.
“Hey, you.”
Perhaps noticing my gaze, one of the men in the gang approached me. Albert. He was the most violent of the secret group festering like a cancer in this village. The man slapped me across the face.
“Do you think you’re special to look at us like that? You’re just a whore barely surviving the winter thanks to us, and yet you dare look down on your benefactors?”
“…….”
“Disgusting wench.”
The man spat on my chest. It didn’t really make much difference—my body was already covered in the adults’ spit. But perhaps just the act of humiliating me was satisfying enough for him, as he turned and walked back to his companions.
The absence of guilt.
The skill of justifying one’s own evil.
No matter what happened, they blamed others. They were people who had completely lost the ability to take responsibility for anything.
I came to accept that this was simply the nature of humanity. Perhaps, for them, such shameless cunning was a necessary tool—something indispensable to survive lives crushed under the weight of misery. As I looked down at the men rubbing their now-heated genitals against my thigh, which was already smeared with spit, I felt—strangely—at ease.
And then—
This grotesquely twisted world of the slash-and-burn village was casually trampled.
A raid.
A massacre.
As golems, unlike anything I had ever seen before, surrounded the village, someone quietly stepped forward.
“I am the master of all demons, Rank 72 Demon Lord Andromalius.”
He was a man entirely clad in black.
His hair fell over his eyes, and a black cloak draped over his body. His gaze swept slowly across us, as though testing us, his two eyes glinting with quiet scrutiny. I would only come to know later that, at the time, he had concealed his true name.
“Put aside your questions like why I am threatening you and why I decided to attack you. From this point forth, you are not allowed to ask any questions and must only give me answers.”
The villagers were stricken with fear after the sudden invasion. It was understandable—eight men had been killed. I remembered each of their names clearly. René, Albert, Jean, Toby, Abel, Bruno, Thibault, Lucien…….
Of course I remembered them.
They were all the men who used me like a toy.
“O-O Greater Being, please grant us mercy.”
The village chief spoke.
I thought to myself how foolish he was. Just moments ago, the man in black had commanded, “Only answer what I ask.” The chief had just defied a freshly given order. It was not a wise choice.
Sure enough, one of the man’s subordinates threw a dagger. The chief was struck in the center of his neck and died on the spot. The villagers screamed, but it was nothing more than what they had brought upon themselves.
“This is my final warning. I will not allow you to ask any questions. You are tasked with only giving me answers. If you are not able to give me a proper answer, then I will kill another person as an example each time.”
The man spoke calmly. Only then, perhaps realizing the man’s true intent, did everyone fall silent.There was truly nothing that could be done about people so slow to understand.
“Is there a boy named Luke here?”
For some reason, the man was looking for my older brother.
At first, the villagers resisted. Everyone tried to overcome the crisis by staying silent.However, the man was far more cunning than they were, and he easily shattered their scheme.
“To think you would dare to ignore my order, you all have quite the nerve.”
The man let out a faint, mocking laugh.
Up to this point, I had been watching the situation unfold with a certain degree of indifference. Even though I didn’t know why the man was looking for Luke, there was one undeniable truth: we had no power to resist. We couldn’t defeat him. Rather than putting up futile resistance, it was more beneficial to simply stay still.
However, in the very next moment, I opened my mouth.
“And the rest of you humans who live by burning the forest, I will now tell you why you must die and why the boy named Luke must also die.”
Even though the man possessed overwhelming power, he showed respect to the villagers.
He explained clearly and slowly—why they had to die, and why he had no choice but to kill them.
“Therefore, I descended upon this village in order to kill this boy named Luke. It is a misfortune that must be hard for you all to accept, so I will not make any more unnecessary remarks. For the sake of myself and the other Demon Lords, and going beyond this, the fate of demonkind, I must have you all die here today.”
He could have killed us without offering a single word of explanation.
Yet, as if even wretches like us, living in a slash-and-burn village, deserved a “reason to die”, he spoke honestly.
—I couldn’t understand it.
Even beggars surviving in a place like this village never hesitated to use violence against a young girl. It was all too easy for one person to treat another like livestock. A man like the one standing before us could have massacred the villagers without a second thought, could have dismissed us all as garbage—yet instead, he treated us as human beings.
I was the only one here who realized this.
The villagers were still trembling in fear. It seemed the man’s words never even reached their ears. I was astonished. No nation, no city had ever acknowledged them as people, and they had cursed their lives for it—yet now, when that recognition was finally happening before their very eyes, not a single one of them noticed.
“…….”
I stood up.
I wondered—could you be someone who lives in a different world? seaʀᴄh thё NovelZone.fun website on Google to access chapters of novels early and in the highest quality.
Could you be someone who knows that a person must take responsibility for the wrongs they have committed—and that such responsibility must last forever?
Are you someone who can face yourself honestly?
“O Great Being.”
I spoke with force in my voice. The man’s black eyes turned to look this way. Even though it was a child who had spoken to him, there was no sign of condescension or scorn. The man was looking directly at me.
The moment our eyes met, I sensed something instinctively. Though no words had yet been spoken, I had a vague certainty about what was to come. That he would not be able to reject me, and that I would not be able to reject him—this became undeniable from that single exchange of glances.
“I dare to rely on that magnanimity and offer my words.”
I spoke carefully, making sure not to trip over my words. I can say with certainty that I had never paid as much attention to my tongue and lips as I did then. I observed the man’s demeanor with great care. I could feel that he, too, was watching me intently—almost frighteningly so.
I knocked on the man with my voice.
And the man responded with his voice.
And as time went on, our certainty only grew stronger.
“O Great Being. Therefore, I wish to rely upon your magnanimity. If the prophecy is only directed at Luke, then you do not have to kill us all. Please take the life of Luke alone.”
If you are as I imagined you to be—
the kind of person I desperately wished to meet—
then without a doubt, you will respond to these words.
“However, please allow me to be the one to kill Luke.”
A brief silence settled.
The man spoke in a low voice.
“Let me ask you a question.”
“Ask me anything, O Great Being.”
“Killing your kin is the largest sin. Why do you wish to voluntarily commit this sin?”
Why do you wish to take sin upon yourself?
That was the heart of the question.
I smiled—because that question was, at the same time, a test. If the man had treated the villagers like pigs and dogs, he could have slaughtered us much more easily. What grand reason is needed to butcher livestock?
But instead, he deliberately chose to treat us as humans. He elevated the act of slaughtering pigs and dogs into the sin of massacring people. And between those two stood a vast and immeasurable chasm. Why choose to bear sin? That was also the question I was imposing onto him.
“It is because, O Great Being,”
There was only one answer.
“There is a need for it to be eternally remembered that I was the piece of trash who caused her own brother to die.”
That was the truth.
The adults treated me like a prostitute. They violated a ten-year-old girl who was barely more than a child. They made excuses, saying things like “we showed you mercy” or “you survived thanks to us,”but the truth was that they had mercilessly violated a young girl.
Perhaps you are someone who cannot make excuses even to yourself.
Someone who draws a line between yourself and ordinary people, who go through life justifying everything they do.
“……Your head.”
The man spoke.
“Raise your head.”
And then, we met eyes for the second time.
It felt as if we were the only two people in the world.
***
One winter day, I met a Demon Lord――
and for the first time in my ash-stained life, I met someone of my own kind.
***
TL Note: Thanks for reading the chapter. Please gimme freedom. Work is going to be the death of me. I’ve been trying to submit a PTO for the past 5 weeks and still haven’t been able to because of my workload. I feel like I’m getting regular headaches now… Ugh… I’ma go rest.
See you guys in the next chapter.