Epilogue

Clatter-clatter went the bed of the carriage as it shook.

Even though the road was somewhat paved, the bare earth was strewn with small stones, and whenever the carriage wheels rolled over them, the bed jolted. As a carriage used by the knights of the Fonteau Kingdom, it was naturally of fitting quality, but since it was made of wood, a faint creak whenever it shook was unavoidable.

Within that swaying carriage bed.

A woman whose clothes and skin, and even her once brilliantly beautiful golden hair, were caked in mud sat there, and beside her sat another woman with silver hair and tanned skin who was no taller than that first woman's chest.

Both of them wore plain, simple clothing.

The two had once been adventurers, but they had spent a long stretch of time inside the abandoned mine, almost all of it naked and being raped by the Black Ooze.

Their faces held little vitality, and their eyes were somehow hollow.

By the time Fiana and the others, now sitting across from them, had fought the Black Ooze, the two had been so weakened that they could not put up anything resembling resistance.

Of course that would be the case, Fiana thought.

Whatever sort of being that slime was, no one could keep their sanity intact after being raped over and over by a monster inside the abandoned mine. Especially that monster, which did not merely violate female bodies but impregnated them and made them give birth.

As a fellow woman, she felt that no one could possibly endure a state like that with her sanity intact.

Exhausted, worn out, the two huddled against each other, magic-sealing collars around their necks and iron shackles binding both their hands.

There was no sign now of them trying to harm Fiana and the others as they had before.

Watching the two of them, Fiana cast her thoughts back to the battle inside the abandoned mine.

Their route had taken them once again through the village at the mountain's foot before pressing on to the Mithril mine. Up until they reached the abandoned mine, nothing in particular had been out of the ordinary.

One thing that did cross her mind, however, was this: why had the slime that had devoured so much of the vegetation and beasts around the abandoned mine left the mountain-foot village more or less alone, taking only a handful of livestock and never harming people?

From what she had heard, it seemed the slime's very first victim had been a resident of that village. Perhaps that awareness still lingered in it… or perhaps it was simply on a whim.

If one understood the slime's behavior to some degree, even that ceased to be surprising.

They had banded together, searched through the abandoned mine without letting their guard down, and, just as expected, subdued the thing that had made the deepest part of the coal mine its lair.

Compared to the carnage from before, it had been an almost anticlimactic ending.

They had frozen it, shattered it, and purified every last bit of it with flame.

The reason they had not returned at once to the Royal Capital after the subjugation was that she had been uneasy, wondering whether that had really and truly been the end of it.

The elven knights who had accompanied them said it was just a slime, but to Fiana and Alfira, that thing simply could not be a mere slime.

So they searched throughout the abandoned mine, subjugating every last slime down to the final one, and even then, unconvinced, they spent one whole night camped before the abandoned mine.

She had been met with looks of exasperation and told she was overdoing it, but Fiana still carried in her chest a vague unease that not all the problems had truly come to an end.

But there was nothing more to be done.

What needed doing had been done.

The accursed monster had been subdued, and the aftermath had been cleaned up as much as possible. All that remained was to return to the Royal Capital and report to the Queen.

Why had such a monster come into being? Why did it violate women and try to impregnate them?

Above all, the ability to spawn monsters was supposed to belong to the [Demon King] alone, so how had a mere slime come to possess a similar ability?

From here on, it would fall to the kingdom's scholars to examine, analyze, and ponder over that power.

So that no second or third [Demon King] would ever appear.

There was no [Hero] left in this world.

That was why they had to keep striking first to ensure that no [Demon King] arose.

They would purge the monsters, ward off calamity in advance, and expand human territory.

And then, by eradicating monsters from the world… this world would become humanity's.

That was not something achievable overnight, in any short span of time.

It was a human ideal that would surely require decades, even hundreds of years.

Still, even so — had that slime, a thing that should have no proper thought to speak of, treasured these two alone?

It was true that there had been no women in the mountain-foot village near the mine. But there were any number of villages further from the mine, with young women among them. Why, instead of preying on villages like those, had it kept just these two adventurers — Frederica and Satia, protected so carefully in the deepest part of the abandoned mine?

Despite being raped to a state where they could no longer even understand the words spoken to them, in terms of physical health alone the two were perfectly fine. She did not even want to imagine what their meals had been, but they had been fed, given moderate exercise, and… perhaps that slime, the Black Ooze, had felt some special kind of emotion for these two…

She shook her head.

Unable to fathom a monster's thoughts, Fiana turned her gaze from the two lifeless women to the world outside the carriage.

They were on the way home. The familiar scenery was not yet in sight, but in a few more days they would be able to return to the Royal Capital.

Once they did, she thought she might take some leave for a while.

In many ways, she was tired.

Not physically, but mentally.

She thought Alfira, riding in the same carriage, was surely the same.

To call it a mutation would settle the matter, but from here on, there was no guarantee another monster of the same sort would not appear.

A world without a [Demon King]. Was it precisely because of that that monsters were evolving into new kinds of beings?

At that thought, Fiana shook her head. Her abundant silver hair swayed along with the motion.

That would truly be a nightmare.

Monsters being born from a human womb… the very thought was abominable.

As she was thinking this, she suddenly felt as though one of the women who had been held in the abandoned mine — the one who had once bared her fangs at them, but who now, after being violated endlessly, was utterly worn out in body and mind, was looking at her.

"Frederica-san?"

Feeling that gaze, Fiana spoke her name for the first time since the battle in that abandoned mine.

From the moment they had restrained the two in the abandoned mine until today, watch had been kept over them by the male knights. The stated reason was that Fiana and Alfira, having been assaulted by them once before, could not be trusted to do it without unease, but now she wondered if it had also been judged that, as fellow women, they might be moved by strange sentiment at seeing the two reduced to such a state.

That was how it was with Frederica and Satia… no trace of vitality could be felt from them at all.

They looked as if they could die at any moment, and no one would be surprised.

Yet their ears could hear, and they likely retained consciousness.

When her name was called, Frederica turned toward Fiana the jade eyes that had once shone with her fiercest spirit. Clouded, muddied — eyes without any light.

Those muddied eyes were terribly deep, holding a darkness as though despair itself had stagnated and pooled at their depths.

Just gazing into those eyes was enough to send a chill, a cold something running down her spine.

A colder something than even when she had faced the abominable Black Ooze inside the abandoned mine.

As if refusing to comprehend what it was, Fiana hurriedly averted her gaze from Frederica.

She was aware that her heartbeat had grown disordered. Her pulse was quick and short, her heart pounding like an alarm bell.

Fiana laid a hand against the abundant bosom that was so out of proportion with her short stature, as if to confirm the pounding of her heart, and let out a sigh small enough to be drowned out by the sound of the running carriage.

Frederica would not take her eyes off her.

Even outside her field of vision, Fiana, with her keen sense for such things, was aware that the other woman's eyes remained fixed upon her.

Alfira was driving the carriage. Several other male knights were also riding in the bed.

They too seemed to have some interest in the lifeless Frederica and Satia, casting sidelong glances at them, but each time they met those weak, faint gazes, they would look away again.

Eerie.

If she had to put it into a single word, that one fit best.

Living human beings, yet with an air like wraiths. Alive, yet like the dead. Surely it was because their skin was sullied, their hair dulled, and no emotion showed on their faces.

Like life-sized dolls… it was a poor comparison, but it felt as if no matter what was done to them — no matter how roughly they were handled, they would not so much as cry out.

The atmosphere about Frederica and Satia was uncanny enough that not only fellow women like Fiana and Alfira, but even the burly elven knights, found it unsettling and refrained from meeting their eyes.

Watching this, Fiana let out a sigh.

What was she even thinking, getting so worked up over human adventurers?

"You don't seem to be feeling well. Are you all right?"

She asked deliberately, in a gentle tone.

With those hollow eyes, Frederica looked back into Fiana's as if responding to that voice.

Dim… eyes as though all emotion had vanished from them.

Was it because the Black Ooze, the one who had violated her — who had taught her, given her pleasures not of this world, had died?

And Satia, who had overlaid the image of her dead master upon the Black Ooze, did not even react to Fiana's voice.

Her head still resting against Frederica's generous bosom, she stared blankly forward without so much as a blink, as if she had forgotten even that motion.

At the end of that gaze, there was no one, and there was nothing.

Neither of them answered Fiana's voice.

Their movements were kept to the bare minimum. Frederica at least responded to the voice, but that was all.

What if, she thought.

Back then. What if they had been seized by the Black Ooze and unable to escape?

Would she and Alfira have ended up like this too? Surely that was the fear Fiana had felt looking into Frederica's eyes, she thought.

Because the state these women were in might have been her own, in another what-if.

Violated, defiled. Crying out for help yet unable to escape, despairing, their hearts breaking… and accepting, in the end, that pleasure that did not seem of this world.

And then — once one had accepted it, one could surely no longer live without that pleasure.

That sex, so unbearably good, in which one panted shamelessly… and was forced to feel pleasure all the same, even while begging for help through tears.

It was an unknown ecstasy even for Fiana, who had lived a long time, a masochistic pleasure that she, a strong knight, would never have come to know in her entire life.

To be handled roughly. Just that alone was something fresh, and above all — something she would surely never taste again from this point on.

So Fiana, while extending her sympathy to the two, still ended up averting her gaze.

It frightened her, helplessly, to project herself onto them.

To drive that thought from her head, she let out a breath, and with her eyes closed for just a few seconds, turned her mind to something else.

What she thought of was Frederica and the others as they had been when she first met them.

When they had met before, words had still passed between them. They had spoken, the light of reason still dwelt in their eyes, and they had managed a mutual understanding.

But now even that was difficult.

Once more, Fiana turned her gaze away from Frederica. And Frederica too, perhaps sensing that no more words would be spoken to her, turned her own gaze toward Satia, who was leaning against her.

With her gaze averted, Fiana did not notice.

Nor did the male knights, who could not bear to look at the pitiable state of the two.

There was no vitality in the women's expressions, and their bodies merely shifted slightly with the swaying of the carriage.

However, those hands of theirs, bound in shackles so they could not resist, had been laid against their own bellies.

As if to stroke something precious, a treasure. As if cherishing it. As if loving it.

The two stroked their abdomens.

Slowly. Gently. With love.

Fiana and Alfira knew.

That the Black Ooze impregnated women.

But that, they had thought, was something they could deal with after returning to the Royal Capital.

She and Alfira too had been violated once. If their wombs were filled with its seed, they would conceive a child, and what was born would be not human but a slime.

But they had properly dealt with the semen inside their vaginas, and nothing had come of it. Nothing had happened.

That was what the two believed. What the truth was, what reality had been, lay hidden within a dream.

That time. While they had been sleeping, the two did not know that they had been panting in the infirmary of the royal castle.

And right now, there were several knights around them.

Believing they could handle any unforeseen situation, it had not mattered to them even with the Black Ooze's children inside the two women's bellies. If anything, they had even thought that they wanted to return to the Royal Capital without the male knights ever noticing the two women's true state.

That was a mistake.

The cause of it would soon be made plain.

The two stroked their abdomens.

With arms that had grown womanly and softly fleshed, having seen no real training since they were seized by the Black Ooze in the abandoned mine.

Arms with a soft layer of fat, thighs gone slightly plump, abdomens with flesh on them but not slovenly so.

In stark contrast to their expressions, their figures had taken on a heightened allure, and to anyone who knew nothing of their circumstances, they carried a shadowed atmosphere about them that might have made them promising courtesans in the brothels of the Royal Capital.

But Frederica and Satia stroked those alluringly fuller abdomens. Bellies with more flesh and fat, and, more than anything, ever so slightly distended.

Cherishing that swell, the two gazed down at their own bellies with lightless eyes.

"——"

For the first time.

For the first time since being taken from the abandoned mine, Satia opened her mouth.

Her voice was so weak it was nearly drowned out by the sound of the running carriage. A small voice, like the warble of a little bird.

Hearing Satia's voice so close, Frederica twisted her lips.

With a crooked smile, she pressed her cheek against the head of Satia, who was leaning against her.

From the hair washed in the lake where she had always cleansed her body, none of the strange stench they had endlessly breathed in inside that abandoned mine remained.

But Satia's warmth, her softness, called back to Frederica what had happened in that abandoned mine.

It was the same for Satia. Frederica's body temperature and softness reminded her of being held in the abandoned mine by her beloved Goshujin-sama.

The two needed each other.

If they had each other, they could remember. They could keep on yearning.

That pleasure. That happiness.

And the future in which they would live together with the Goshujin-samas who were soon to be born to them.

"Alfred-sama…"

Stroking the beloved child within her belly, Satia smiled.