The Hero Who Returned From Death Quits

EP9. ■■

I felt something was wrong. What the heck? What was happening?

I felt a sense of question as if something was breaking inside me.

Ah, this is… a chain. However, I don’t quite remember what the chain was binding.

Something inside me… seemed to be binding me up, something that shouldn’t be released.

There seems to be something that absolutely must not be released… something that would cause trouble the moment it was released.

That thought was swept away by the feeling that followed.

My senses are not working. My reason seems to be dissolving and fading away.

It’s just dark, confusing, and the world seems to be spinning.

I didn’t even know what state my body was in.

I just felt like I was slowly becoming unable to think about anything, and my consciousness was slowly sinking into the other side.

‘I’m tired….’

I closed my eyes. For some reason, I felt a little sleepy.

And when I closed my eyes, a sweet voice rang out from somewhere.

“Hey! Ainzel! What are you staring at like that for?”

‘…uh?’

I was quite surprised when I heard that voice. When I opened my eyes, my childhood friend was in front of me, smiling with a mischievous expression.

“Hey, Emma, ​​what are you doing? We were supposed to go into the forest and pick wild strawberries! Were you sleeping here? Come on!”

When I heard that, I thought.

Why is my friend from the past in front of me now? He clearly said he was going to go to the city to become an adventurer, but then disappeared.

“Yes, you, why are you here.”

I said it stammeringly. Then the child made a face as if he had heard something very strange and said,

“What are you talking about! You were the one who was late for our appointment! You had a clear promise with me and you were just sitting there on the hill. What the…dream?”

Oh, I see.

Why did I think it was real? It was all a dream. Of course, it didn’t make sense that I would become a hero, or that I would experience such a terrible future after becoming a hero. Only then could I laugh freely.

“Yeah, sorry. I think I had a really long… horrible dream.”

“What was that horrible dream? Did you have a dream about ghosts?”

“No, it was something scarier than that… a hazy dream.”

My friend made a face as if he had lost his temper and pouting his lips as he spoke.

“So, are you going to go pick strawberries or not?”

I laughed.

“Of course I have to go!”

When I come home after picking a bunch of raspberries, I’ll ask my mother to bake me a raspberry pie. My mother’s raspberry pie is the best in the world.

…

Lena witnessed a truly incomprehensible sight.

I definitely felt a dark magic similar to that of the Demon King.

And as soon as he came into contact with that black magic, Ainzel suddenly fell to his knees.

The sight was so similar to a doll with its strings cut that Lena was quite surprised by that alone.

But there was one truly surprising and frightening sight.

Ainzel’s body, which had collapsed like a doll with its strings cut off, began to melt away.

“Ah… ugh, ugh…”

A sound like the howling of an animal began to resonate from Ainzel’s body. Even his vocal cords had melted, so the sound seemed to resonate from his entire body.

“Grook, groo, grooo…”

Finally, after his body had melted away to the point where not even a human form remained, his body began to reconstruct itself with its own blood.

Gradually, gradually, as the bloody mass that could be called a clump grew larger, the building began to collapse. After that, the bloody mass continued to increase in size, until it became a sphere with a diameter of at least 20 meters and rose into the sky.

Then, the blood began to gradually take shape. It looked like a fetus in its mother’s womb, with cells dividing and taking shape.

Strange arms and legs began to appear from the blood. They glowed pitch-black, just like the black magic seen in the Demon King’s Castle.

When the segmentation was finally complete, Ainzel took the form of a gigantic monster that no one could dare refute.

The eyeless monster flared its slit nostrils, which resembled those of a reptile, and began to scream.

“AA …

The cry sounded more like a scream than the monster’s own voice, and Lena looked at the monster with surprised eyes.

Can’t that monster speak? Lena thought, and the monster opened its mouth and began to speak with a snake-like tongue.

“pain!”

“…uh?”

At that voice, Lena looked at the monster with startled eyes. It was definitely… Ainzel’s voice.

“It hurts! It’s disgusting! It’s hateful! I want to die! I want to live!”

The monster began to scream, as if its vocal organs had adapted to it, as if it didn’t even know what it was saying, but because of that, it sounded all the more sincere.

“I hate the empire… humans… this world.”

Lena stood still, unable to even think about responding.

“I hate it! I hate it! I hate it! I hate it! I hate it!”

The monster began to scratch its own head with claws similar to those of a corpse. Blood flowed out.

Then the monster flared its nostrils once more and brought its head close to the warlocks and spoke.

“Warlocks… I hate them.”

The monster lifted one of the warlocks by his clothes with its fingers, then opened its mouth wide and dropped the warlock into its maw.

Crunch. With that sound, the warlock was chewed to death by the monster’s fangs. Blood spurted out from the mouth where the fangs were completely exposed.

Then the monster grabbed the warlocks and started killing them one by one in different ways, as if it was thinking about how to inflict pain on them.

One was killed by turning his neck against the direction of his body. Another was killed by cutting his upper and lower body in half. Another was killed by folding his spine in half. Another was killed by holding him in his hands and shaking him repeatedly against the ground as if he were a child playing with a toy, and then he was thrown into a slurry.

Some of the warlocks tried to use their dark magic on the monster that was Ainzel, but it was not affected at all, and they became the material for the process of the monster removing flesh and bones with its huge hands with great delicacy.

When we killed all the warlocks like that, the monster laughed. Or at least that’s what Lena thought.

The monster, with its grotesquely distorted expression resembling a laughter, sniffed and then this time stuck its head out in front of Lena.

Lena tensed her body. She didn’t know when the monster would attack her. Of course, there was little chance of her losing, but she had already exhausted a lot of her stamina, so she had to be prepared for any possible threat.

Then the monster opened its mouth.

“No, it’s not the smell that I hate.”

When Lena heard that, she fell to the floor with a blank expression.

What on earth is that monster talking about?

Whether she was dazed or not, the monster pulled its head away from Lena, turned its head, flicked its long snake tongue, flared its nose, and opened its mouth again.

“Ugly, smelly.”

Lena couldn’t figure out what the monster meant by the unpleasant smell. That was understandable, because in the direction Ainzel was looking, there was nothing even in her line of sight.

And the monster distorted its expression with all its might. At least that’s what it seemed to Lena.

“The smell of the empire.”

Upon hearing that, Lena’s face turned pale. The direction Ainzel was looking at was… clearly, the direction of the Empire, and furthermore, the direction of the Empire’s capital.

The monster began to crawl towards the direction it was looking.

Lena started following the monster.

A few days passed like that.

The monster crawled towards the empire without any hesitation or rest, and Lena followed it.

The monster trampled everything in front of it as it advanced. There was a village of humans in front of it, and when the humans, fearful of the monster’s appearance, thrust their spears and swords at it, the monster ate them all.

There was no trace of fear, guilt, or hesitation in that action. All that was felt was pure hatred for this world.

Those who were trampled before the monster were no exception. The monsters attacked with the same pure hatred they had when dealing with humans, and all that was left in the path of the monsters was destruction and blood.

“Over there! Something is approaching!”

The soldier shouted urgently. Then the soldier’s superior looked at the giant monster crawling towards him with a pale face.

“Report, report now!”

That was the first step in the Empire’s discovery of the monster’s existence, as it was reported by a neighboring country.