Goki had always despised crooked, underhanded ways. In that sense, the Asura of the past—his sworn brother—had once been the absolute worst. He would torment and slaughter insignificant weaklings merely to kill time. He engaged in such completely pointless games. Of course, Goki never dreamed his brother actually alleviated his boredom with such cruelty. His brother was a God of War to his very core; he was never meant to be that kind of ogre.
Serving him after that change had been, in a way, daily torture for Goki. After all, he had no choice but to watch in silence as his master—the very embodiment of his pride—steeped himself in everything Goki loathed most.
Yet upon meeting a certain Great One, his brother readily reclaimed his former purpose. That Great One, Lord Kai, thoroughly beat his brother down, snapping his towering, arrogant nose clean off.
Under hellish training with Lord Kai, his brother took to the regimen like a fish to water, rapidly growing in strength to a degree that even Goki could clearly see.
Now, not a shred of desire to torment the weak remained within him. If anything, he seemed to deeply regret his past deeds. In fact, he had recently thrown himself into helping construct the Monster Nation known as Fiesta.
Naturally, to the monsters and the demon race, his brother was the former leader of the fiends who had treated them worse than livestock. At first, the pushback was immense; they refused to even speak with him. Lately, however, it felt as though his brother's earnest dedication was finally beginning to melt away some of that lingering bitterness.
He never threw his weight around, nor did he carelessly flaunt his power. Instead, he drank shoulder-to-shoulder even with the weak. He was once again the brother Goki knew before joining that vile organization known as the Evil Army, and seeing him like this made Goki so overjoyed he could leap into the air. Above all, it was Lord Kai who had restored his brother to the ogre King he had once revered.
Kai Heinemann—that Great One was truly cut from a different cloth.
First and foremost was his absolute strength, which allowed no one in this world to stand as his equal. Frankly, the more Goki trained and grew, the more acutely he realized just how vast the chasm between them truly was. Even the Commander-in-Chief of the Evil Army would likely be nothing more than an insect crawling across the dirt before Lord Kai. Just as a dragon stepped on an ant, he would be squashed flat in a fraction of a second. The same held true for the Heavenly Army. Goki simply could not envision any entity in this world capable of putting up a decent fight against that Great One.
Then there was his overwhelming charisma. Those who followed Lord Kai were the gods and mythical beasts of the Gods' Ordeal, entities once sealed away for threatening the balance of the world. The executive class among them possessed strength rivaling the Six Great Generals and Six Heavenly Gods, the absolute pinnacles of the Evil Army and Heavenly Army. On top of that, even Beelzebub—the most terrifying calamity of all—bowed in obedience to him. These were beings of absurd, terrifying power. Most of them believed the entire world revolved around them; serving someone else, let alone forming alliances, was completely out of the question. Yet before Lord Kai, they carved out small factions and made heartbreakingly earnest efforts every day just to win a shred of his favor. In all this world, Lord Kai was likely the only one capable of captivating such monstrous personalities down to their very souls.
However, that barely scratched the surface of Lord Kai's true nature. What made him most extraordinary was his profound attachment to humankind.
Granted, many gods took a liking to humans. In itself, that was hardly bizarre. But for the gods, it was merely a detached benevolence, akin to doting on lower creatures devoid of intellect or status. They held neither true sincerity nor obsession toward mortals. To them, humans were like a favorite vase—annoying if broken, but easily replaceable. That was the extent of it.
Yet Lord Kai's feelings toward humans were completely different. He considered the future of every single mortal in this world with the utmost gravity, dedicating what seemed like an excessive amount of care toward human organizations that were utterly trivial to him.
It was almost as if Lord Kai genuinely believed himself to be human. Of course, such a ridiculous notion was impossible, but it had succeeded in stirring a fierce curiosity about humans within Goki.
Having ended up on this mission by chance, Goki had enthusiastically set out after Lord Kai ordered him to protect the former-human undead. While slaughtering the small fry crawling out of the walls and searching for those captured by the master of the mansion, he discovered a specter girl under attack by an undead creature with a twisted face. He moved to intervene immediately, but paused when he caught the fierce resolve blazing in the girl's eyes. Struck by a strange sense of deja vu, Goki decided to hold back and watch a little longer.
Gritting her teeth, the girl conquered her terror, refusing to break under the monster's relentless provocations. And after the vile farce where the beast summoned a woman who seemed to be her mother from its mouth and fed her to other monsters, something in the girl shifted. It was impossible to pinpoint exactly what, but the change was undeniable and profound.
Spitting right in the creature's face, the girl stood tall and shouted:
"A piece of trash like you will definitely get beaten by someone one day! When that happens, you'll be the one crying!"
To anyone else, they were just the sour grapes of a powerless former human. Yet hearing those words from her filled Goki with a surging wave of regret and shame.
Even this fragile girl, who looked like she might break at a touch, had conquered her fear to defy someone stronger than herself. Yet what had Goki done? Arbitrarily deciding everything was futile, he had turned a blind eye to his brother's atrocities all along. Surely he had stood a far better chance of reasoning with his brother than this girl ever had.
He couldn't place all the blame on his brother. The moment he chose to stand by and watch in silence, Goki was just as guilty.
(She's just like I used to be...)
To true powerhouses, Goki was nothing more than an insolent, low-level ogre. Having met Lord Kai, he understood that to the marrow of his bones. Ignorant of his own weakness, clinging to the laughable belief that the weak brought misery upon themselves, he had retreated into his shell and done nothing.
(I had turned into a thoroughly wretched bastard!)
The moment that realization struck him, something snapped. His body moved on instinct. He reached out and caught the monster's right wrist just as it swung down toward the girl.
"Y-You're—"
"Shut your filthy mouth."
Still pinning the left wrist of the trash who called himself Nejire, Goki drove a kick straight up into his solar plexus.
"Gugehh!"
Nejire's body looked ready to launch like a cannonball, but Goki yanked the pinned left wrist back toward himself. The sudden pull mangled the left arm into a twisted wreck.
"You're already twisted up anyway. Just thought I'd give you a hand."
"Gugih... Y-You bastard, who are...?"
"Well, as for that twisted personality of yours, twisting it any further is probably a lost cause."
Ignoring Nejire's question entirely, Goki wrenched the already-twisted wrist even further until it tore clean off.
"Gugeh?"
Goki slammed a fist into the side of Nejire's face while the creature was still squawking in disbelief. Crashing through the crimson wall at terrifying speed, Nejire went flying, pulverizing everything in his path into dust. By the time he finally skidded to a halt, more than half of the mansion's first basement floor lay in ruins.
"Gugagage..."
His entire body twisted in unnatural directions and held together by mere threads of flesh, Nejire let out ragged groans as he lay embedded in the reddish-brown earth. Foaming at the mouth, his eyes rolled erratically in their sockets.
By any measure, he was on the verge of death. Goki exhaled a heavy sigh, turned toward the specter girl, and spoke with firm conviction:
"Girl, you were right. This bastard really is pathetic to the core."
After all, despite talking such a big game, he was already down for the count from a single, heavily restrained punch.
"Now then... what should I do with you, eh?"
Goki licked his lips.
His instincts warned him that this creature was the exact kind of filth Lord Kai despised most. Killing him too quickly might end up disgracing Lord Kai's name.
"Guhih!"
As Nejire let out a cracked shriek, sensing the grim fate awaiting him, Goki stepped forward, cracking his knuckles. But before he could take another step, a swarm of flies materialized in midair, and Nejire vanished in the blink of an eye.
"Būnbun! Don't you dare go snatching my prey!"
As Goki bellowed, a boy with antennae and an eccentric costume popped into existence.
"Show this scum a living hell while extracting the human souls trapped inside him. That is my father's command. Can a single-celled simpleton like you handle something so delicate?"
Shrugging mockingly, he struck right where it hurt.
Goki knew his own limits. He was terrible at holding back and utterly clueless when it came to delicate arts like torture. Worse, he felt such visceral disgust toward this piece of trash that he would almost certainly kill him mid-interrogation. If the specter girl's mother was trapped inside the fiend, Goki risked destroying her soul along with him.
By contrast, Būnbun—one of Beelzebub's Three Terrors and an expert in torture—would deliver the perfect ruin to this scum, extracting the mother's soul with ease in the process.
"Damn it! Just get out of here!"
"You'd best stick to babysitting that little girl over there. It suits a softie like you anyway."
Leaving behind that irritating parting shot, Būnbun dissolved into the air like smoke.
After taking a few deep breaths to steady himself, Goki severed the iron chains binding the specter girl.
"Let's go. Your family is waiting."
He spoke gruffly and turned to walk away. The specter girl reached out, catching Goki's sleeve.
"Th-Thank you..."
She offered her quiet words of gratitude.