—The second basement floor of the mansion.
At the center of the hollow, cavernous stone chamber stood an altar. Perched silently atop its highest tier was the doll of a long-haired woman.
Kernel placed the bobbed-hair boy onto the tier just below it.
"O, our King of Curses! On this night, I bring a most magnificent offering for my King's sake!"
Clasping his hands before his face, he made his report with overflowing ecstasy.
—And that is?
A mechanical, emotionless female voice echoed within his mind.
"The soul of this one stimulates the evolution of others! If you assimilate it, my King, you shall be reborn as a supreme being!"
Kernel bellowed at the top of his lungs, shaking the chamber walls.
—Reborn...
The hair of the female doll lengthened, coiling tightly around the bobbed-hair boy.
The doll convulsed violently again and again, its entire form gradually staining a deep crimson. Its body melted away into a thick sludge, and the scarlet mud slowly reshaped itself into the figure of a person. In an instant, it transformed into a woman clad in a crimson dress intertwined with blood-like tubes. Her pitch-black hair reached all the way to the floor, a large, perfectly round void was gouged out of her face, and countless tiny holes perforated her flesh. From that hollow and the myriad holes across her body, a black mist billowed forth, shrouding her entire form.
—The stakes are gone?
The King of Curses stared blankly at her own body for a brief moment and murmured before bursting into a shrill, piercing laugh.
—At last, I am free!
"Ooh, now is the moment our King of Curses—!"
As Kernel raised a shout of pure delight, the King of Curses closed the distance with terrifying speed and thrust out her right palm.
"Gwah? B-Bubobababababah?!"
The moment her right hand seized Kernel's face, his entire body bent at unnatural angles, crushed and mangled until it became nothing more than a round lump of flesh. As she pulled and stretched the gore, it reshaped into a black-robed monster with an absurdly massive head and a mouth slit all the way to its ears.
"..."
To the silent, kneeling thing that had once been Kernel,
—For my sake, bring death to all who dwell within this mansion.
She issued the command, dripping with malice.
The thing that had once been Kernel slithered out of the chamber with strange, writhing movements.
—Curse them! Curse them! Curse them!
—Curse humans, livestock, plants, monsters, all living things! Be cursed, and turn this world into a realm of curses!
As the King of Curses cried out as if singing a hymn, the mansion was dyed a vivid crimson, and pulsing red tubes burst forth across the floors, walls, and ceiling.
—My sons, my daughters!
Three monsters materialized before the King of Curses.
The first was a stuffed bear with a torn mouth. Sharp fangs bristled within its gaping maw, and something resembling a human face lurked deep inside.
The second was a tall, middle-aged man with human faces surfacing all over his body, the colossal face of his main form possessing an exceptionally large, hollow black eye and mouth.
The third was a monster crawling on all fours, its face twisted at an unnatural angle.
All at once, they struck grotesque, unsettling poses.
—Curse the entire world to death.
At the King of Curses's command, the three monsters began to move, letting out low, guttural growls.
—At this moment, the entity calling herself the King of Curses was utterly convinced that she was the one who would sow malice and despair across the entire world.
To be sure, under ordinary circumstances, she would have been entirely right. After all, through this evolution, the King of Curses's rank had ascended from Prime Minister to King. In Demon King terms, this made her equivalent to a True Demon King. Every last living being in this world would surely have been cursed to death at her hands.
However, the one who happened to be present in this very mansion was the strongest monster in existence. What was more, that monster, of all people, had already ordered one of the former Six Great Generals of the Evil Army and two Subordinate Kings not to let so much as a single insect escape the grounds.
At this point, checkmate was already an absolute certainty for the King of Curses's side. It was only natural. The Evil Army was one of the superpowers that split the world in two. And the supreme fighting forces of that evil faction had been honed beyond all comparison through that monster's brutally vicious training.
Above all, the ultimate deciding factor was that the world's sole absurdity—Kai Heinemann—had, of all things, gotten completely serious about exterminating the King of Curses.
Knowing nothing of this, the King of Curses took her first steps down the path to utter ruin.