[Contract]
It was the only skill these guys had.
It was at least registered as a skill, but if you took the wording at face value—
‘This is the very contract these humans made with a demon.’
If so,
the way to nullify that contract was simple.
‘Delete that skill.’
In other words,
“Why do you need the boss’s permission to quit a job?”
“What are you...?”
The contractors stared at me, alarmed and suspicious.
I didn’t need to explain it one by one.
‘If I explain and they look like they’re siding with me, that action itself might be treated as a breach of contract.’
I stood up,
looked to the soldiers behind me, and spoke.
“Corporal Jeon Gwangil.”
“Yes. Corporal Jeon Gwangil.”
“Take the assault detail and bring in every monster corpse outside.”
“The monsters’ bodies, you mean? Understood. Loyalty, loyalty!”
Our warriors with absurd physical prowess burst out of the building and started collecting the monster corpses.
“Sergeant Lee Minjae.”
“...Yes. Sergeant Lee Minjae.”
“Load a million volts.”
“Executing.”
The Legion’s strongest mage.
Blue current gathered in Sergeant Lee Minjae’s hands.
The contractors who saw it were horrified.
“W-what are you trying to do!”
“So in the end you’re going to kill us all!”
They had seen Sergeant Lee Minjae’s magic with their own eyes here,
and they seemed to know well enough how powerful it was.
And yes,
if Minjae hyung felt like it, wiping them out wouldn’t be hard.
“I told you, I’ll handle the rest.”
“...?”
“Oh, but.”
The dish of [Will to Live] was still in effect.
Even though the desire to live should have been in the lead more than anyone,
‘he overcame it and asked me for freedom.’
If so,
well, it isn’t even hard.
‘I can spare that kind of freedom.’
I could, but
in exchange—
“It’s going to... hurt a lot, though.”
“What do you mean!?”
It’s not like we’re close.
Giving it away for free feels a bit off.
“Think of it as paying for the bad things you’ve done so far.”
Shock and doubt settled at the same time in the contractors’ eyes.
“Minjae hyung.”
I had no reason to answer that look.
“Fire the million volts.”
“Executing.”
Bzzzzzzzt!
“Grrk...”
The gathered Awakened.
When Minjae hyung’s lightning spread through them,
thud...
The contractors who had been looking at us just fine a moment ago all collapsed to the floor.
“...For the record, Youngjun.”
Of course,
we hadn’t killed them.
“It’s not exactly easy to modulate lightning so nobody in a crowd this big dies.”
“Come on. You nailed it, why the ◆ Nоvеlіgһt ◆ (Only on Nоvеlіgһt) fuss.”
“I was actually a little spoo— never mind. Forget it.”
There were over a hundred contractors gathered here.
All of them were out cold.
‘Minjae hyung’s magic is also optimized for suppression.’
Back then,
when our unit considered Lieutenant Kim a major threat,
‘Minjae hyung was the one who knocked him out and stuffed him in a cell.’
If you modulate the strength of electricity,
knocking someone out is easy.
“By the way... Sergeant Shin Youngjun.”
“Hm?”
“What exactly are you trying to do?”
Just as I was about to give the next order,
Corporal Seo Suhyeok looked at me like he couldn’t make sense of it.
“They were our enemies to begin with.”
You could guess his reason
without trouble.
“Frankly, no one would complain if we killed them here. The non-kill principle you stated applied to those who didn’t act hostile toward us.”
“Well, that’s true.”
“The other soldiers clearly assumed we’d kill these guys. Or, failing that, lock them up and let them rot for life.”
Wow.
Sounds like our unit talks pretty brutally when I’m not around.
“Honestly, I and the other squad leaders expected something else...”
“Hm?”
“You know, like sending them to your vassal.”
“Ah.”
The vampire’s existence is technically classified,
but the squad-leader tier knows.
In fact, I was the same as the other squad leaders.
When I thought these guys were clearly evil, I was going to turn them into vampires on the spot.
Truth is,
that’s not a bad option either, but—
“It’s a little short of enough.”
“Sir?”
They committed evil acts.
From what I hear, their contracting didn’t start that long ago,
but aside from attacking us,
they must have done a few other bad things.
However,
‘their intent was made of human goodwill.’
Even if they themselves had to sacrifice,
they wanted to save even a single human.
Sacrifice.
“I don’t exactly plan to praise that spirit of sacrifice.”
“Then why...?”
“But ignoring it completely feels a bit off.”
I intend to punish the wrongdoing properly,
but their goodwill
should factor in to some extent. That’s my view.
“Don’t worry too much. And you know what?”
“...?”
“Turning someone into a vampire supposedly doesn’t hurt that much.”
However,
to the extent I factor in that spirit of sacrifice,
for their guilt
I intend to make them pay precisely.
“I get what you’re thinking, but... it feels like you’re taking a very complicated, difficult route. Do we really need to go this far?”
“To be honest, there isn’t a must.”
“Sir?”
And the reason I’m going this far... honestly,
all that talk about sacrifice and paying for sins—
that’s not the reason.
Compared to the real reason for me,
those are trivial.
“It just feels a bit arrogant.”
“...You mean me?”
“Not you, man.”
The being that treated humans, once the owners of this world,
like toys,
and in the end tried to remodel them to its own taste.
“A demon.”
If I can land a clean hit
on that bastard,
“I can put up with a little hassle. As much as it takes.”
****
The unconscious contractors
were confined in rooms nearby.
“Make it strictly one person per room.”
“Understood.”
When I ordered the soldiers to lock the contractors up,
I added, again and again,
“And engineers, reinforce their rooms. They might try to burst out.”
“Yes.”
How insolent.
A being that wants to play with humans as it pleases.
A demon.
‘The reason contractors got shackled to their contracts... is that [Contract] skill.’
Conversely,
if we can delete that skill,
the contractors can regain their freedom.
As far as I know,
there is only one way to delete a skill.
‘Job change.’
Ariella is the precedent.
Whatever jobs her vassals had originally,
once they changed into vampires, their job forcibly shifted into the [Vampire Knight] line,
‘and the skills and traits they used to have were deleted.’
That was also the core reason she couldn’t make me her vassal.
If I became her vassal, my cooking skills would vanish,
and she feared she wouldn’t be able to eat my cooking.
‘What matters is the method to change the job.’
From what I’ve experienced so far,
there are two methods.
One, mobilize Ariella
and turn them into her vassals.
Or...
‘adopt a slightly wrong eating habit.’
A little later,
the soldiers brought in the monster corpses per my order.
“Where should we put these?”
“It looks like you’re going to cook, so if you’re cooking we should move them to an open space...”
“Huh? Why would I cook these?”
“Sir?”
“They look ominous at a glance and they look like they’d taste bad. What cooking with ingredients like these.”
They had assumed I would cook, of course,
and started looking for a spot suitable for cooking, then answered, flustered.
“T-then why these corpses?”
“The rooms we locked them in.”
I looked at the corpses and said,
“Fill them... as full as possible.”
“...?”
At that,
most of the soldiers looked puzzled,
but just one
seemed to grasp what I meant, her face going pale.
“C-Commander...!”
Maybe a bad memory surfaced.
Her body trembled,
and with the blood drained from her face, the woman spoke.
“That’s insane!”
“Hey, shouldn’t you be happy?”
I looked at Lee Hyunjin
and smiled lightly.
Just wait.
“I’ll make you juniors.”
****
“...Haa!”
The sudden electric shock.
The man who had blacked out from it,
Wonjun, was able to open his eyes before long.
“W-where... is this?”
His last remaining image was of a soldier with a cold face.
The thunderous lightning released from that soldier’s hands,
the very strike that turned countless demon minions to ash in one blow.
That lightning.
‘Is this hell...?’
Struck by lightning like that,
he figured he must have died.
Thinking that,
he couldn’t help being seized by a dreadful thought.
The being they served was a demon.
And according to Earth’s transmitted lore,
‘hell is the demons’ domain.’
Until just recently,
he had relied on demons to try to save at least a few humans,
but now that he had realized that choice was wrong,
anything connected to demons was horrific.
Struck by that lightning,
he feared he had been thrown into the demons’ domain.
‘...?’
A moment later,
as the mind that had just woken up came online a bit,
he realized it wasn’t hell.
‘A familiar shape...’
The room he was in looked very familiar.
The derelict building they had used as a hideout.
Only,
if there was a difference...
‘Am I imprisoned?’
The doors and windows around him—
some material, steel plates or whatever, had been slapped all over them.
It looked rushed and a bit slapdash,
but even so,
the sealing looked impossible to break out of.
‘And those corpses...’
And all around,
the monsters that had guarded them until recently,
...or maybe the minions they themselves might have become later—
their corpses were piled up.
‘...Why?’
Realizing he’d been imprisoned
wasn’t hard.
But that didn’t make the puzzlement go away.
‘If they wanted to kill me, couldn’t they have done it?’
They had been completely subdued by the soldiers.
Killing them would not have been hard.
If there was any reason to imprison them, it might be to extract information,
but whatever the exact reason, at the time they were more ‘unwilling to die’ than anyone.
If threatened with their lives,
they would have spit out any information easily.
There was no need to go so far as to imprison them.
And yet they had locked him up like this.
As he was about to work his brain
to guess the reason—
‘...By the way.’
The puzzlement rising in his head
was shoved aside
by another feeling
that surged in with overwhelming force.
A wave of feeling that instantly seized Wonjun’s mind,
so strong that resistance was impossible.
Gurgle...
‘I’m hungry.’
Hunger.
He was dumbfounded at himself for realizing his thoughts had stopped because of an empty stomach,
but that ridiculous feeling
only lasted a moment.
“Hff... hff...”
His breath turned rough,
and pained groans leaked out.
Drip.
Saliva dribbled from his mouth,
and the hands that should have wiped it were holding his gut.
‘I’m hungry...’
As a child,
when his birth parents abused him,
when he lived in a poor orphanage,
when society suddenly threw him out,
he had experienced a hungry life more than a few times.
Even so,
the hunger he felt now...
was on another level from anything he had felt before.
“S-something to eat...!”
He tore through the room in a rush with that thought.
But
there wasn’t even a drop of water to drink, never mind food.
‘I-I have to get out.’
If there was no food in the room,
he had to leave,
but the door to the outside was sealed.
Boom!
He tried to break the wall with an Awakened body,
but maybe the wall had been reinforced somehow.
With no proper combat skills,
he couldn’t even destroy the wall.
‘Grrrk...!’
Excessive hunger
was about to blow his reason away.
If this hunger kept on,
he might have offered himself to the demon that had deceived him
and demanded food in return...
There was something in his mouth.
‘...Food!’
He rolled his tongue in a hurry,
and something wedged between his teeth touched the tip of his tongue.
‘A piece of meat?’
He shouldn’t have eaten any meat.
Why was a piece of meat stuck in his teeth?
Normally he would have found it strange,
but he had no room for that.
The meat stuck between his teeth
slid down his throat,
and just a little,
so little it was barely perceptible, the hunger eased,
and with it
the smell that meat had carried,
a faint meaty aroma, filled his mouth.
“A-anything is fine...”
That aroma
stimulated him even more.
“Give me... something to eat...!”
His reason vanished,
and only the anger from hunger filled his head.
The meaty aroma in his mouth,
that aroma drove him to seek meat...
‘If it’s meat...’
His gaze
turned to the corner of the room.
For some reason,
from the very beginning that had been in the room with him—
‘...Looks delicious.’
the monsters’ flesh.
