Chapter 45: Chapter 43: The Queen and the Knight

She was breathtaking.

Not even the black clothes on her body, her stern expression, and her dress could hide her ‘color’.

“Greetings, knight. May I call you Your Majesty Lionheart?”

She is a dangerous woman. Even the smile in her eyes and the delicate fingers covering her mouth exude a certain aura.

An innate temperament, a source of strife that colors her mere presence and a color that is a harbinger of corruption.

‘Beautiful.’

At first glance, her purple eyes, reflecting the moonlight, seem to hold an endless darkness that no light can penetrate.

A lesser man would have drowned in the depths of that abyss without even realizing it.

“I am the queen of this small kingdom, Beatrice Aligieri Spero.”

“Leon Dragonia Lionheart, ruler of the Lionheart Kingdom.”

Leon kissed the back of the woman’s hand respectfully, but wary.

‘How did I not notice?’

Is that even possible? Leon is not the kind of man to get cocky.

Even if he’s weakened from his prime, how could she fool his senses that kept countless assassins and demons at bay?

“Hoo-hoo, don’t be so vigilant, I just wanted to say hello to a benefactor of the kingdom.”

“This is not a good time for a lady to visit.”

The moonlight was still just past dawn. It was a knight’s virtue to rise early in the morning to train, but it was not a royal virtue, much less a lady’s.

“I am being watched.”

“Watched?”

Leon looked puzzled by Queen Beatrice’s words.

“Watched? By who?”

The queen smiled bitterly and named the forces holding her captive.

“The Great Marshal and his knights are watching me and keeping me confined.”

“The Great Marshal?”

Leon remembered the Great Marshal loyalty to the queen, and he didn’t seem the sort of man to commit such disloyalty.

But you never know what’s in a man’s heart. A loyal knight might covet a king’s wife, or a pious priest might amass a fortune.

“Your Majesty Lionheart, I have a favor to ask of you.”

The queen’s hand grasped Leon’s. It was a mere grasp, but it had a disturbing quality to it.

“I will hear and judge.”

“I want you to kill the grand marshal and his knights, and if you do, I will give you everything in the kingdom.”

“…….”

Leon did not accept the offer quickly. It was too suspicious.

The queen, not unaware of this, smiled and whispered.

“I want you to investigate the castle’s basement, where the grand marshal is hiding something.”

It was then that footsteps were heard in the hallways, and the castle was in an uproar. It was the sound of armor and military boots.

“Your Majesty Lionheart, I apologize for the late hour, but I will open the door!”

There was no waiting. It was the grand marshal and his knights who burst through the door.

“How impolite of you to barge into a royal bedchamber in military style!”

“……I recognize the rudeness, but the situation is urgent and we have no choice.”

The grand marshal apologized and paced the room. Queen Beatrice, who had stood before Leon only moments before, was nowhere to be seen.

“Hmm…….”

He sensed the aura in the room and knew in his gut that the Queen was here but he did not ask Leon if he had met her.

“I have met the Queen.”

“Is that so?”

“The queen of your country went out for a night walk, and you don’t ask.”

“Because that’s the kind of woman……she is.”

“Ha…!”

How could the knights let royalty go out for a night stroll? Even Leon has knights and guards wherever he goes.

“You leave royalty alone in this time when demons are on the loose?”

“……Demons don’t invade at night.”

“Bullshit.”

Since when do demons work day and night? There are hundreds of them hiding in the castle right now, disguised as humans.

“It’s almost as if you’re convinced.”

“…….”

The grand marshal turned to leave without answering but Leon’s words stopped him.

“The queen says you’re imprisoning her.”

At that, the grand marshal and his knights’ gazes sharpened.

“That is none of your business…….”

“Lord Burns, you’d better come clean about what you’re hiding.”

Ricardo Burns, the Grand Marshal of the Spero Kingdom turned away as if he didn’t need to answer.

Once they were gone, Leon stroked his chin.

“Suspicious.”

Both the queen and the Grand Marshal.

There was more to their behavior than just a defense quest against a demon army.

“In any case, do I need to investigate the basement to get to the bottom of this?”

But he wasn’t ready for that now. Leon had to face an army of demons that had begun to move with the dawn.

* * * *

An army of demons marches as the legions of ugly lust that corrupt all things living and fill them with pleasure advance.

-Transgress them. Cut off their heads and let them see their flesh mocked!

-Corrupt them, let them have an orgy in the square!

-Cut up the children and feed them to their parents! It will be a sight to behold!

Thousands, no tens of thousands of demons marched as the air changed before the march of malice that corrupted the living in the pursuit of primary pleasures.

“Androzin has spoken! He will give a hundred slaves to the first to cross the city walls!”

A naked soldier who embraced even pain as pleasure shouted as he swung his whip.

“Kee-hee-hee, let us corrupt the men.”

“Let’s pickle them with pleasure so they can’t think!”

“Corrupt them! Corrupt them! With pleasure──”

At that moment, the demon at the head of the line stopped, eager to tie up the humans with ropes as soon as possible, but then it saw something and shuddered.

“What is it, why aren’t you going faster?”

“You idiot! I’m not stuck behind you-”

The first row stops and so does the second row.

Row three, row four…… All the demons within sight of the city wall stop in shock.

-Kiyo-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh!

It was a scream.

No, the scream itself is familiar to the demons. The problem is the subject of the scream.

-KIEEEEEE……

The agonized cry sounded like the despair before death and the battlefield freezes at the grotesque and ghastly scream.

Those who are more accustomed to screams than anyone else, those who generate them, turn to their screaming compatriots.

At the end of their gaze there were Hunters, holding burning wood but demons were impaled in it.

“”?????””

What was that?

Was that torture for demons?

Demons are spirits, after all and when they die, they just go back to the Garden of Evil…

“False lives that know no death.”

On the ramparts, a cavalryman shines with a brilliant radiance in the light of dawn. His golden sword glistens as if absorbing the dawn’s light.

“Beasts like worms, driven only by primal needs.”

The golden sword decapitates the hanging demon, then the knight picks up the severed head and throws it.

The head rolled over two kilometers and landed in the middle of the demons.

A black soul leaked out of the decapitated demon, the soul that should have returned to its body now that it has lost its vessel──is sucked into the rider on the wall.

It didn’t take long for them to realize what this meant.

The immortal demons witnessed death.

They stare at the demonic butcher who has performed the impossible miracle.

“Listen, you filthy worms, I, Lionheart, on behalf of the Ten Thousand Gods, will teach your evil servants the value of a single life!”

Come, lowly things, your terror is here.

The demons who have made the material world their playground shriek in terror as the Lionheart King, the very terror of the demons, teaches them the value of life.

The fear of death spreads uncontrollably among the lower demons and even the mid-level demons.

They’re used to destruction, killing, and terror, but only as doers.

Demons are less accustomed to fear, as it is natural for them to return as spirit beings when they die.

The thought of dying never crosses their minds, so when they see death, they begin to self-destruct.

The Legion is broken as the immortal army crumbles at the sight of death.

“You, you fools, where are you running!”

“Stop! Don’t run!”

The higher-rank demons watched their subordinates crumble with ridiculous ease and tried to stop them. But there were too few mid-level demons to hold them back.

“Damn the Corpse Harvesters, if only they were here!”

“Where the hell did the Fallen go!”

The mid-level demons that Leon and Yappy had hunted so thoroughly during the night were the middle commanders of the army.

With them dying en masse in the middle of the night, there would be a shortage of mid-level officers to whip the lesser demons.

“You stupid things, get back here──”

-Bang!

A mid-level demon that was about to shout out was pierced in the torso by a javelin that flew in from somewhere and without even a chance to scream, the demon was torn up.

As he fell, gravity taking over, the last thing he saw was a lone rider charging toward him, wielding a holy sword.

“Glory to the Lionheart!”

Chasing the fleeing demons, a one-sided slaughter begins.

On the third day in the gate the demon butcher began his slaughter.

* * * *

They slaughtered over a thousand demons.

The hunters, including Koo Dae-sung and Kim Jin-soo, were skeptical that demons could die so easily.

“At the end… there was even one who killed himself.”

“And we can’t even use the Holy Law like His Majesty can…….”

The demons’ escape was a spectacle.

Either they didn’t realize they were fleeing, or they became an abomination, trampling over each other and fleeing in all directions to live on their own.

All the hunters did was shoot and kill the fallen demons one by one.

“These bastards… Your Majesty, is this their first time seeing you? What did they do on the first day?”

“Well… maybe they didn’t get the word out because they have a big army.”

Just then, Leon spoke behind the Hunters’ backs.

“That’s not true.”

“Your Majesty!”

The cruel Lionheart King, who had ordered the torture of the demons to be displayed in plain sight this morning, sneered at their behavior.

“They’re all selfish and uncoordinated, and only care about fulfilling their own desires, not the good of the group. They calculate what they can gain from what only they know.”

“Is that all there is to it?”

“Well, there are some things like that, but the only demon this king killed on the first day was a troll, so there must be some things they didn’t understand in the chaos of the battlefield.”

Koo Dae-Sung recalled the demons committing suicide to avoid being killed by their own hands and knew they would not rally easily.

“This is why you captured the demons alive?”

“That’s right. They do the cruelest things of all, and they have no tolerance for it. Scum maggots are scum maggots wherever they go.”

Leon added as he stomped on one of the demons the Hunters had captured.

“Capture them well and drag them away. Their screams will make a good symphony.”

The Hunters didn’t tell him that Leon was just an ignorant demon hater who wanted to see the demons suffer as much as possible.

Ah, so our Lionheart King had a deeper meaning!

“By the way, where did Lord Yappy go? I didn’t see him during the battle.”

“Lord Spinner is carrying out this king’s orders.”

“????”

The Hunters wondered about that, but chose not to ask.

‘Torturing demons?’

‘Biting and killing them.’

‘The word ‘uncooperative’ gives me the creeps.’

The captured demons shuddered.

“Help me! Help me, my lord!”

The demons did not look sympathetic. A few of the Hunters, who had been slightly expecting a demon of pleasure, slapped the demon on the back of the head to relieve their disappointment.

* * * *

Contrary to the Hunters’ expectations, Yappy’s destination was not the prison.

Yappy had taken advantage of the distraction of the battle to sneak into the depths of Spero castle.

“Huh? Didn’t something just pass by?”

“Didn’t you see it?”

Circling the ceiling upside down and not making a sound above a certain decibel, Yappy easily evaded the soldiers’ surveillance.

The occasional sharp-eyed knight glanced his way, but his camouflage was perfect. Yappy made his way to the depths of the tunnels, where he found a group of men.

“General Ricardo, I know you’re in command of a battle, but what are you doing here?”

It was Ricardo Burns, the kingdom grand marshal, and the knights who followed him.

“The outsiders will take care of that. The problem is the seal. I assume the seal is working well?”

The seal, a similar term that Yappy had heard for a thousand years.

It was the Yakt Spinner who had sealed the Gem of Wisdom, kept it hidden, and ensured that no one could breach it.

“Yes, but… no, no.”

The soldier shook his head pointlessly as he tried to say something but Ricardo looked past the soldier to check the seal.

The cover is lifted and the seal is revealed. Yappy’s wide-angle lens captured it clearly on camera. And──

-what?

It was a surprise, even to the super-intelligent Yakt Spinner.