The spherical-faced undead, Maru, smirked as he carried the blonde girl on his back. Receiving a reward from the Rot King for such simple work was magnificent. Judging by just how thrilled the Rot King had been, there was no doubt that obtaining this human woman's body would grant him enough power to obliterate Ares.
Once Ares was dead, the world would fall under the Rot King's dominion. In other words, humans would truly become their livestock in name and in deed. When that happened, they could break and butcher them however they pleased for sport. Rarely was there livestock of such exquisite quality. Above all, slicing one half of a mated pair to ribbons right before the other's eyes, or forcing a mother to choose which of her two children to butcher—those were the ultimate forms of entertainment for Maru and his kind!
(Ahh, I'm swelling with anticipation!♪)
As he hummed a tune while jogging along, the head of Sankaku beside him began to spin. Yes, it was spinning in an unnaturally rapid blur, quite literally.
"..."
Maru reflexively stopped and backed away to put distance between them, but Sankaku's head kept whirling at blinding speed. Then, his body began to rotate in the opposite direction.
"S-Sankaku?"
The moment he timidly called out, Sankaku's head tore clean off, launching into the air as it spun. Then, something stark white crawled out from the headless torso.
"Eek?!"
Letting out a tiny shriek at the sheer ghastliness of it, he scrambled backward, only for a hand to seize him by the neck from behind.
"Hey, hey, where do you think you're going?"
At the sound of that woman's voice, a chilling dread struck him as if ice had been pressed against his spine. Slightly turning his head to look behind him, he saw that the blonde woman he was carrying had planted her right hand firmly on his face.
"—?!"
He nearly cried out again. And naturally so. The corners of the innocent smile on the blonde woman's mouth were split open all the way to her ears, revealing razor-sharp fangs. No livestock—no human—could ever bare such fangs or wear such a wicked expression. Which meant this woman was not human, but—.
He desperately tried to shake the woman off his back.
However—.
"W-Why can't I shake you off?!"
Indeed. Even though her slender arm looked fragile enough to snap under a firm grip, it possessed an immense, uncanny strength that refused to budge even a fraction of an inch.
The white humanoid entity that had crawled out of Sankaku stretched its limbs broadly. With that single motion, Sankaku's body crumbled away into dilapidated ash.
"N-No way..."
A raspy voice leaked from Maru's throat.
This was impossible! Something like this was utterly inconceivable! Maru, Sankaku, and the other direct subordinates under the Rot King's personal command were blessed with the divine protection of Restoration. Even if their heads were lopped off, a few blinks would be enough to fully restore them. Yet he had turned to ash? That meant the divine protection was not functioning. The Rot King was an evil god—a being who stood outside the standard laws of nature. The only thing that could nullify his divine protection was an entity that likewise deviated from the natural order. Which meant this blonde woman and that white humanoid entity were—.
"Guh-gee?!"
Just as he arrived at that worst-case conclusion, the blonde woman gripped Maru's head, attempting to tear it apart from both sides with horrifying force.
To make matters worse, the white humanoid entity was drawing closer.
—Terrifying!
If that thing touched him, Maru would lose everything. Everything that an intelligent creature was naturally entitled to enjoy!
Why hadn't he noticed something so foul until now?! From the blonde woman behind him and that white humanoid mass, he could sense a malice that far surpassed even that of the Rot King.
Along with agonizing pain, he realized that his wounds were not regenerating.
(W-What is happening?!)
Normally, through the power of the Rot King, any injury Maru and his kind suffered would heal in an instant, and they barely felt any pain at all. Yet not only was he failing to regenerate, but as his body was gradually torn apart, an unbearable, writhing agony coursed through his entire frame.
Between the blood-freezing terror of having his body slowly ripped apart and the excruciating pain he had thought he had forgotten long ago, a scream spilled from his mouth.
Through his fracturing vision,
"I see. So the Great One's precious person was already secured by you all long ago..."
Following that final murmur from a tall, sanpaku-eyed man with a horn on his forehead who had appeared before his eyes out of thin air, the white humanoid entity reached its hand out toward Maru. The instant it made contact, Maru's consciousness plummeted into an eternal nightmare.