Fremd Torturchen - Volume 9 - Chapter 4

4

The Queen’s Transformation

It’s time for a confession.

Lute was a simple, awkward man with a heart full of compassion and righteousness who cared deeply about his wife and his friends. Part of that was due to his nature as a beastman, but it was just as much a product of his own personal convictions. In his eyes, any man who couldn’t protect the people he cared about was no man at all, and a disgrace to the beastfolk to boot. That was something he believed deeply.

Once, though, he went against those beliefs and committed a grave sin.

There was something he had forgotten. Something he had absolutely needed to remember.

Back at the World Tree, a thought crossed his mind.

Perhaps he ought to remember Kaito Sena’s smile.

It would be best if he made sure to remember it, no matter what happened.

But he forgot. And that wasn’t all. There were oh-so-many things that had slipped his mind.

It’s time for a story.

A story about who Kaito Sena was by nature.

Lute had checked all his information in the beastfolk lands. Kaito Sena came from another world, one where he’d been abused and eventually killed. Then the Torture Princess had summoned him to act as her servant. Originally, though, he had been nothing but a powerless boy, a tragic child victimized without anyone to protect him.

Yet somehow, everyone had forgotten that simple fact.

None of the adults whose job it was to defend the world had remembered it.

Lute and the others had collectively placed the burden of the entire world on the back of a single boy. They were the ones who were soldiers. It should have been their burden to bear.

Kaito Sena offered no reply to his cry of regret.

All he did—

—was smile a vaguely awkward smile.

Then after thinking it over for a moment, Kaito reacted. He waved with big, childlike sweeps. The meaning of that gesture was the same across worlds. And because of that, Lute gasped. When Lute realized that, he cried out Kaito’s name.

As he did, Kaito kept frantically waving.

He was saying a single word.

“Good-bye.”

Lute had never forgotten that moment.

Not a single day went by where he didn’t think about it.

Someday, someone would probably tell the tale with a lyre in one hand.

Come, little ones. Come, and behold.

Picture the sight. Picture the four monarchs, standing amid the flattened trees.

Picture those who are too exalted, too noble, and too beautiful for us to even imagine.

Picture the Sand Queen and the hermaphroditic Three Kings of the Forest.

All of them were drenched in blood. And unlike the Kings, the Queen had lost her sanity to boot. Her eyes were staring off in different directions. The only thing lucid about her was the sheer bloodlust she was directing at any she considered to be in her way.

The Three Kings responded to her malice in kind. The ancient wolf turned to the heavens, the white deer stomped its hooves, and the colossal hawk spread its wings wide.

Then the Kings and Queen all opened their mouths in unison.

A quartet of voices split the air like lightning.

The noise quickly departed the range humans could hear. Yet heard or not, the Three Kings of the Forest roared on. Looking at them, it was clear they were singing an elegy.

After all this time, their sworn friend’s corpse had lost its mind. How could they learn of that and not grieve?

However, their profound sorrow was met with flame.

The Sand Queen’s magical firebombing was much like the fixed batteries’. Anyone on the receiving end would be burned to a crisp.

With nary a pause, the colossal hawk swept its battered wings. Blood spilled off them as a great wind blew forth. The shock wave dissipated the heat and extinguished it, and the ancient wolf followed up by kicking off against the ground and leaping into the air.

Mountains trembled. The earth cracked.

The beastfolk had braced themselves for the impact in advance, but even that wasn’t enough to stop them from all tumbling ignobly to the ground. If they hadn’t been ready, some of them might have actually died. Shouted warnings sounded through the air from all over. All the while, the ancient wolf soared.

Higher and higher it went, a black shadow against the sky.

The sun went dark, and a rain of blood poured down.

Then the ancient wolf brought its arm down on the Sand Queen. However, its claws merely bounced off her scales and snapped off.

The broken claws spun through the air and fell right in the middle of the army.

“Fall back, fall back! Take cover! Ahhhhhhh!”

One fervent scream rose up after another. By some stroke of fortune, none of them ended up getting skewered. Still, the fallen claws towered high over the army, each one easily taller than any of the beastfolk present. The procession’s terror was all too visible in the way they held their tails and ears.

Next, the white deer turned its hooves on the Sand Queen.

The King shifted its weight forward in an attempt to trample the Queen, causing the ground to tremble so hard that cracks began forming across the mountain. The Sand Queen squirmed, but the hooves were unerring. The immense weight being focused on their tips caused a small chunk of the Sand Queen’s scales to peel upward a hair.

A familiar cry split the air.

“Ready, aim, fiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiire!”

Much the way Aguina once had, Randgrof Elephabred gave the order.

A bombardment roared out, flames gushing from the cannons set up atop the slanted mountainside as one shot rang out after another in succession. It was a tremendous display, made possible only by the demi-humans’ incredible transportation skills. The relentless, merciless bombardment served to illustrate the stubbornness, or to an extent, the ill nature of the ones unleashing it. Aguina had approved scant few to operate the cannons, and the ruthless efficiency with which they worked went to show what model examples they were of the demi-humans’ natural disposition. Furthermore, those were no cannonballs they were firing.

They were silver harpoons coated in the blood of the Three Kings. They slammed into the Sand Queen one after another. Over a dozen of them merely bounced off her.

However, three of the harpoons managed to slip between the dislocated scales.

The ancient wolf grabbed hold of the harpoons’ chains and gave them a relentless yank.

The Sand Queen’s vast body rose up off the ground and tore loudly through the air itself. The ancient wolf knew that if it slammed her straight back down, there was no way the beastfolk would emerge unscathed. Instead, it used the short time before the chains snapped to hurl the Sand Queen against a nearby mountain. The sound of every bone in her body snapping under her own weight split the air. However, the Sand Queen was unable to feel pain.

After landing, the Sand Queen slowly rose back up and let out a cry. Elisabeth still couldn’t see her in her entirety, but her instincts told her that the Sand Queen was all but unharmed.

The sole damage she’d sustained was losing one of her scales in its entirety.

Elisabeth wasted no time in letting out a soft murmur.

“Nail Gun.”

A spiral of crimson petals and black darkness raced forward, and rusted nails the size of thin pillars appeared out of the air. In a perfect world, her goal would have been to pierce the Sand Queen’s mana source through, but her scales had previously made that impossible. Now, though, Elisabeth was able to focus her attack straight at the Sand Queen’s one bare patch of skin.

A thunking noise rang out in succession. Black blood gushed out from between the nails, and the Sand Queen let out a roar of anguish. Even without the ability to feel pain, she was still able to tell when she was losing fluids.

A chorus rose up to join her roar.

“Ah, aah, ah, AH, ahh, AAAAAAaaaaaaAaAaAaAAAAAA!”

There was an eerie solemnity to the voices. They sounded just as much like a scream as they did a hymn.

A flock of birds. A school of fish. Rainbow light. Drops of blood.

The divine beasts all shot toward the Sand Queen at once, using Elisabeth’s nails as a target to land on and explode. The Sand Queen’s flesh tore, causing massive amounts of blood to spill out and drench her surroundings. Elisabeth gave a small nod.

The Sand Queen’s blood was full of mana. The more of it they could spill, the better off the beastfolk would be.

“Let’s see if we can bleed her dry, shall we?”

Seeing that the tactic was effective, the Torture Princess fired off more volleys of nails.

The thunking ran out once more as Elisabeth stabbed, pierced, and penetrated the wound.

“Adjust for the second row, fifth from the right! Fire!”

Meanwhile, the beastfolk were making their move as well. They took advantage of the Sand Queen’s immobility to finish adjusting their great bows, then carefully aimed between the peeling scales and fired.

Their bows lacked the raw firepower the cannons had, but they allowed for far more precise sniping, and their arrowheads were coated in the same underling poison they’d used during Ragnarok. The Sand Queen was a corpse, so the poison had little effect on her body’s ability to function, but its corrosive effects were powerful nonetheless. The scales around the impact sites began melting.

That then allowed for more harpoons to find their mark. The ancient wolf grabbed the chains once more.

The Sand Queen swayed on her feet. Waves of heat exploded erratically from her mouth, blasting away the topology of a nearby mountain.

Some of the soldiers got caught up in the shock wave from the impact. Viscera spilled from their mangled torsos.

Little ones such as them were so terribly fragile.

Before the Sand Queen could do any more damage, the ancient wolf reached out and clamped her mouth shut.

As it did, the white deer smashed her womb, and the colossal hawk pecked away at her legs.

The battle was going far better for the Three Kings of the Forest than anyone could have imagined. They were all injured, but at the same time, the Sand Queen had already been destroyed once, and the beastfolk, demi-humans, and humans already knew how she fought.

By all accounts, their victory was almost at hand. Upon seeing that, Elisabeth narrowed her eyes.

…Hmm?

And there, for the first time,

she realized that something felt off.

She’s hardly putting up a fight. Surely this can’t be what Alice wished for.

Elisabeth frowned. At the same time, though, there was a part of her that said, “So what?”

Maybe the Sand Queen had suffered more damage than Alice had accounted for. Perhaps that was all there was to it. The problem was, that child really, truly wanted for everyone to all die together. Would a girl that driven really overestimate her toy soldier by such a degree? Elisabeth found that hard to imagine.

On the other hand, she had no means to convey her misgivings to the Three Kings of the Forest, nor would she have even had time to.

The gross humiliation continued playing out before her eyes.

Scales and claws went flying. Flesh tore. Blood was shed. Viscera was spilled.

The Three Kings of the Forest were tearing the Sand Queen apart piece by piece. It was horrible to look at. However, it was also logical. If you wanted to put down someone who was already dead, you needed to destroy their body to the point where it could no longer move.

Elisabeth coolly observed the scene before her.

As she did, she was reminded of a battle she’d fought once before.

This wasn’t Elisabeth’s first time going up against someone who had been broken.

For example, there was her final battle against the demons. By having their egos destroyed, they had attained a whole different sort of power than usual.

Aguina Elephabred was a studious man. I’ve little doubt he knew about the demonic flesh mass and its attack on the Capital.

An ominous premonition came over her as she mused on that fact. However, there was no reason to believe that, even if faced with defeat, the Sand Queen would be able to transform herself the way they did. The incident at the Capital came about due to the rare confluence of demonic contracts being mixed with ego death. In the Sand Queen’s case, that didn’t apply. It had no reason to.

Yet for some reason, Elisabeth’s sense of foreboding refused to go away.

Then the ancient wolf’s gargantuan arm sank into the Sand Queen’s body. Her skin should have been elastic, but all of a sudden, it lost that quality.

Elisabeth’s eyes went wide at the impossible turn of events.

The transformation was starting.

“What’s going on?”

“The Sand Queen’s…falling apart?”

The beastfolk let out cries of confusion, and Elisabeth couldn’t help but stare as well. However, out of the blue, her instincts as the Torture Princess screamed the answer to her, and all at once, she realized what was going on.

Ah, so that’s it! The Sand Queen’s a corpse! She isn’t alive!

In other words, that meant that her entire body was nothing more than raw magical material.

The demi-humans were poorly versed in the ways of magic. However, they had learned of the beastfolk technique of using corpses as raw material to perform magic with during their joint battle at Ragnarok, and while they thought of the beastfolk as old friends, the possibility of eventually finding themselves as enemies had always been at the back of the demi-humans’ minds. It stood to reason that Aguina would have researched the technique in more depth later on.

He made a choice based on that knowledge, and the material writhed in accordance.

Scales melted, flesh crumbled and commingled with blood, bones faded away,

everything swelled up,

and, with a pop,

it all burst.

Ahrasa Aina, o’er Dragons’ Graveyard the sun rises and flashes

Ahrasa Aréna, blistering sands wash over her cold silver ashes

Deep within an eternal sleep, her ever-closed eyes watch over her sheep

Ensuring all her descendants are honest and true and good and resplendent

Please, my queen, know it is true, believe in us as we believe in you

Elisabeth thought back to those lines from the epigraph to the Sand Queen’s legend.

When she first read the passage, a question had sprung to her mind.

Wouldn’t an entity that watched over her sheep and ensured that everyone was honest and true and good and resplendent—and with “ever-closed eyes,” no less—be terrifying? she thought. It seemed to her that the song could be taken as something like an aphorism for those children.

There wasn’t a demi-human pureblood in the world who hadn’t heard that legend, and in all likelihood, Aguina had taken away the same impression from it that Elisabeth had. By the looks of things, the song had played a key role in shaping the Queen’s transformation.

By now, her entire body had crumbled.

Her scales had melted away in their entirety, and her flesh and blood were all merged together. She no longer had any sort of defined silhouette. Instead, her whole body from top to bottom had become a soft, flabby blob. And that blob was covered in eyes. Eyes, innumerable eyes, swiveling every which way.

That thing wasn’t the Sand Queen anymore.

It was just an entity that judged everyone and determined if they were honest and true and good and resplendent.

It was a monster that saw everything.

It was hideous. It was evil. It was wise. It was broken beyond repair.

“What the hell is that—ack, gack, GAH!”

“Don’t breathe in if you can help it!” Elisabeth shouted as she covered her mouth. “It might well be the last thing you do!”

Pungent poisonous fumes were rising up from the fleshy blob at an alarming rate. It was because all the Sand Queen’s blood had gotten compressed at once. Soldiers fell to the ground where they stood and started vomiting. Beastfolk had a strong sense of smell. They wouldn’t be able to endure it for long. Elisabeth snapped her fingers. Crimson petals and black darkness whirled up and blew as a powerful gust.

As she did, the colossal hawk gently flapped its wings as well, protecting its people by blowing away the stagnant air.

Meanwhile, the flesh blob began wriggling.

Its surface extended outward with terrifying speed, and it turned a bizarre “arm” on its avian foe. The glutinous tentacle grabbed one of the colossal hawk’s wings. The inside of the arm was lined with teeth.

The blob bit down with them and ripped the wing clean off.

Blood splattered the ground. A shrill screech rose up, as did a bellowing roar.

The ancient wolf wrenched its arm free from the flesh blob and used its tremendous claws to grab the blob once more. It pulled with all its might and tore the blob in half. However, the halves simply sprang back.

They rejoined all on their own and stuck fast to each other. The whole army collectively stared, dumbfounded.

The flesh blob had done the impossible, and it had done so in the most ridiculous manner imaginable. It all kind of felt like a bad joke.

“Nail Gun.”

Elisabeth shot some stakes at it to test the waters. A muffled bwoinnnng echoed sadly through the air.

All the nails had hit their target.

However, that was all they had done.

It made sense, in a way. The Sand Queen’s body had already degraded as much as it could. There was no point trying to damage it further. Her blood was all blended into her flesh, and her mana reactor had moved inside her body.

All her vulnerabilities were gone.

At the end of the day, the Sand Queen was nothing more than a walking corpse, and now she was taking full advantage of that fact. For all the efficiency her transformation boasted, though, it was also as blasphemous as blasphemy could be. This wasn’t a choice any normal man would have made.

In short, that speaks to the sheer degree Aguina has been broken, Elisabeth mused bitterly.

Meanwhile, the Three Kings’ bewilderment was shaking the air itself.

Never could they have imagined their old friend’s corpse losing everything down to its very form. In the Sand Queen’s current state, it was impossible to even grieve for her anymore. All that existed now was a comedically unidentifiable blob of flesh.

A sad realization started dawning on those assembled there.

The curtain had closed early on the battle of legend they’d been expecting.

All they had to look forward to now was a sad, honorless brawl

that would go on until the flesh blob’s tank ran dry.

Hooves smashed eyes. Claws tore flesh.

Poisonous blood went spraying in every direction.

The Three Kings of the Forest continued their melee, and the flesh blob took their fierce onslaught head-on. Suddenly, though, it began writhing again. The moment before the next kick made contact, the blob’s eyes turned into mouths. It chomped down on the King’s leg, hoof and all.

The white deer hurriedly wrenched its leg free, but its entire ankle had already been eaten. White bone peeked out from inside the wound. And the ancient wolf’s paw met the same fate. Just like its royal brethren, all the flesh on its fingers was gnawed off.

The way the flesh blob was fighting was too bizarre for words. The Three Kings of the Forest were getting played for fools.

However, the blob’s new body did make it considerably more vulnerable to long-range attacks.

“Ah, aah, ah, AH, ahh, AAAAAAaaaaaaAaAaAaAAAAAA!”

The saints renewed their bombardment. Blinding light smashed into the blob over and over, burning away chunks of it and shaving it down.

Compared to before her transformation, fire-based attacks seemed to be far more effective against the Queen. However, there was still a problem.

The saints no longer had anyone who could gather and coordinate their attacks or alleviate their burden, and individually, they weren’t cut out for protracted battles. Many of them were already vomiting up blood, and it wouldn’t be long before they’d all reached their limits.

“I had hoped to be able to preserve my mana, but I can see that isn’t an option. I’d best be prepared to drain my reserves dry.”

Elisabeth clapped her hands against the crimson ground and conjured a pair of small stakes.

With them, she pierced her own hands through. Her blood poured out, mixing in with the Three Kings’ blood that had been spilled across the ground. Elisabeth then used the mixture to draw a magic circle she would normally never use.

With it, she carefully called forth the entity she deemed best suited for the job.

“Wicker Man!”

Darkness and petals burst and scattered, and a dry, snapping sound emanated as dark boughs reached out.

A massive, birdcage-like figure knit itself together with the flesh blob at its center. It was far larger than any other time Elisabeth had deployed it, and it was shaped differently as well. This time, it had stumpy limbs and a long, protracted torso. It almost resembled a jail cell that had been locked up tight. Furthermore, its boughs were tightly interlaced. The flesh blob struggled and raged, but the figure obstinately refused to release it. Instead, it burst into tempestuous flames.

Dainty, feminine screams rose up from within as a chorus of mouths all cried in minutely varied pitches.

However, the person controlling those flames—Elisabeth—clicked her tongue.

“’Tis insufficient. I haven’t the power to burn her through. Abandoning the Sand Queen’s form has made her hardy, I’ll give her that.”

The blob was soft and vulnerable. However, burning it down to charcoal would have required a truly prodigious amount of thermal power. Plus, the mass of eyeballs had begun crying, drenching the flames and weakening them before Elisabeth’s eyes.

“That Aguina, always a clever one,” she muttered, chagrined.

Despite the Sand Queen’s mind being broken, the finesse with which she was manipulating her body was downright scary. And unlike how fervent her impulse to wreak destruction to protect her race was, she seemed to have no such compulsion to preserve her own form. That alone made her a formidable foe.

At this point, it comes to a matter of how much the Three Kings can crush on top of the amount I already burned away.

That was the ultimate verdict Elisabeth settled on. The flesh blob’s very existence lay outside mankind’s ability to fully comprehend, and although a powered-up Fremd Torturchen numbered among their foes, their side had no mages on par with Kaito Sena.

The only ones who could take on foes surpassing the fourteen demons were entities of a similar caliber.

Then, right as Elisabeth finished arriving at her conclusion, she heard something.

It was the sound of hooves striking the ground. And pretty close to her, at that.

She looked up with a start. There, she spotted a summoned beast that looked like a cross between a lizard and a horse. Elisabeth had seen those creatures before. The three races summoned them during Ragnarok, and by the looks of it, the beastfolk still owned some.

There were just over a dozen of them, and they cut through the foul air and dodged the chunks of blobby flesh hurtling between the trees as they raced forward.

As the pack passed her by, Elisabeth saw something more.

The people mounted on the beasts were none other than her own Peace Brigade.

Randgrof Elephabred was riding at the vanguard,

and beside him on the same mount, Lute was manning the reins.