Episode 17 – Choice (2)
“Are you regaining your senses a bit now?”
Using the sharply transformed tentacle, I untied the rope that bound her wrist.
I had realized halfway through that she, unlike the others, had not yet lost her sense of self.
After all, her reaction was entirely different from those who had completely broken down.
So, there was no need to kill her right away. Just as I had kept the Goblin Chieftain alive to converse, I had simply called her to hear her story.
“I won’t eat you right away, so don’t worry.”
I gave a bitter smile as I looked at her cowering figure. Though her mind hadn’t collapsed, it was clear she was in a deeply weakened mental state.
‘At first glance, she’s near-human in form. Round ears. What kind of race is she?’
Simultaneously, I carefully observed her. Her appearance now revealed aspects that couldn’t be seen when her consciousness was muddled.
Her skin was whiter than mine, and her dry pink short hair looked like it had been roughly cut by goblins, with uneven ends.
Her face, though emaciated, still exhibited a beauty that couldn’t be concealed by her weakened state.
Considering this is the Demon Realm, there were a few races that came to mind as possibilities.
“Hihk?!”
As I pried open her protesting lips with my moving tentacle to expose her teeth, a particularly prominent canine came into view. My earlier suspicion about her race was correct.
“You’re a vampire.”
“Y, yes, that’s correct.”
As I released her from my tentacles with a smirk, the fear-stricken woman finally began to speak.
“My name is Siera Merteus.”
“Vampires are classified as a superior rank among demon races. Someone of your status, especially one of the nobility, shouldn’t have ended up as a slave in a mere goblin village.”
“About that… how could you possibly…”
After I recited the information I had about vampires, her slightly widened eyes wavered, clearly surprised by how detailed my knowledge was.
In her eyes, I was nothing more than a queen of strange monsters. How could she imagine I’d know so much?
“Who exactly are you?”
Naturally, that was all she could ask, sitting on the floor as she looked up at me blankly. To which I offered a faint smile.
“No matter how much I tell you who we truly are, you wouldn’t believe me. So don’t bother asking. Just answer my questions instead. Why would someone like you get captured by goblins?”
“That is…”
I demanded an answer once more. After briefly glancing at the countless wriggling tentacles around the room and on the ceiling, Siera finally began her story, reluctantly admitting the truth.
As I suspected, she was part of the noble vampire class, an upper echelon even among vampires.
But no matter how powerful a demon might be, the Demon Realm was a place dominated by warlike races, where battles and duels were rampant, and chaos was the norm.
Her family was no exception. Just as there were times when they would triumph and enjoy the glory, there were also moments when they faced failure.
“I was merely given my punishment after losing in a power struggle against a competing house. Normally, we are granted an honorable death, but the one who captured me was a creature who knew neither honor nor tradition.”
Her captor, after wiping out her family, sought complete revenge by crippling the female members of her family so that they could not fight back and then handed them over to lowly goblins.
Siera, one of them, was subsequently traded and abused, eventually ending up in the goblin tribe I had destroyed.
“To be honest, even if players were controlling them, it’s unthinkable that such a minor force could directly capture someone like you.”
After learning her story, I offered another sardonic laugh.
Her tale was tragic, yet, regrettably, common.
To lose everything—dignity, honor, and life itself—was far from unusual in such a ruthless world.
“With no clear understanding of what you are, you at least appear to be more reasonable than the goblins, so I ask for one last kindness: grant me an honorable death.”
Subsequently, Siera prostrated herself on the floor, her disheveled body shaking as she begged me to end her life.
She insisted that with her broken body, devoid of any remaining strength or hope, it would be more merciful to end her suffering swiftly.
“I find you too precious to simply kill.”
“!”
Unfortunately for her, I had no intention of letting her die easily now that she was in my grasp.
Her pale face lifted slowly as she tried to process my words, but I merely grinned and released the tentacles binding her before standing up.
“I will show you exactly who we are, and afterward, we’ll have a proper discussion.”
I then forcefully pulled her to her feet.
Using my tentacles to stabilize her frail body, I gently grasped her trembling face.
Her eyes, filled with terror, trembled as she seemed to sense that I might subject her to even more horrifying treatment than what she endured at the hands of the goblins.
But my intentions were not to harm her.
“Look into my eyes.”
A delicate tentacle sprang from my fingertips, entering her ear, while my glowing eyes became visible in her reflection.
*
[Your mental enhancement level is too low to fully decode the genetic information of a superior species yet. If you don’t enhance your abilities, all the genetic data absorbed this time will remain uninterpretable dummy data.]
“Tch, am I supposed to keep eating insects and animals forever then?”
With Siera, I secured more than a dozen females. All were demons, including those with superior physical features compared to goblins, even when their bodies were damaged.
Even though I had euthanized the others and submerged them in digestive fluid to make them comfortable, their data remained indecipherable, highlighting my lack of power.
[Extracting mana from them has been a success.]
“For now, that’s all I can use.”
Ultimately, the nutrients I extracted from them were limited to mana. Now that I could store mana within my body, I gauged the amount I had accumulated.
Clearly, this was a small amount when viewed as a single force.
If I were to use it inefficiently now, I’d barely be able to produce something like an enhanced Goblin Warrior.
“There’s no other way. I’ll have to find an alternative method to use this power.”
Initially, I wanted to mimic what was familiar to me as a former player—the ways of the demons.
Most demons naturally possessed mana. Depending on their race, they had various roles such as shamans, mages, knights, or nobles. They were part of privileged classes, and in war, everything revolved around them.
However, the amount of mana I currently had was inadequate. To begin with, all the mana I could gather was extracted and stolen from others, so building a large force of mana-wielding soldiers was fundamentally impossible.
“The only way is to build on our strengths while developing our own methods.”
At this point, I abandoned my previous plan and chose a new route.
After all, the group under my control as queen was far beyond conventional comprehension.
“Ordinary soldiers will continue to be mass-produced as usual. By fully utilizing the characteristics of mana-beasts, they can achieve strength without reliance on mana. Meanwhile, all the mana we secure will be concentrated in a select few. This is a better approach than creating mediocre soldiers.”
I judged it better to invest heavily in a few soldiers to make them last as long as possible rather than creating numerous, disposable soldiers.
Furthermore, if those soldiers possessed their own sense of self and could voluntarily engage in future wars and grow through experience, they’d be more valuable.
It was here that Siera’s experience became intriguing to me.
If I could restore her broken body and give her immense power, I would gain a soldier far superior to any goblin warrior. This experiment was undoubtedly worth attempting.
“Introducing such a prominent sense of self into the collective suddenly may cause disruptions. Can you handle at least 200 years worth of a vampire’s consciousness?”
The system questioned if I could handle Siera’s sense of self.
In other words, would I be able to control her once her consciousness was formally integrated into the collective?
“Of course.”
This worry was unnecessary.
There was no possibility of me being overpowered by Siera from the very start.
She would merely be another piece in my long-term strategy.
I would replace every cell, including the neurons in her brain, with universal cells I could control, completely eliminating anything that belonged to her.
Siera would be reborn as a knight who would absolutely obey the queen’s commands. Her sense of self would only need to serve the basic function of knowing who she was.
“She has already agreed.”
Of course, I wasn’t imposing this without offering her anything.
The experiment had her full consent.
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