Dungeon Overlord: My First SSS Gacha Summon Was a Yandere

The monster came out into the Heart chamber, and there was only Freya to greet him.

Little was left of the small white creature that had shown up at the entrance a few hours earlier, since half his skin had gone off in black scabs, the other half rising in blisters that oozed with every movement, and his breathing filled the whole room on its own, heavy, raw, hissing between his teeth with every inhale.

He stopped for a second at the sight of her, alone in the middle of the stone, then set off toward her again.

One step, then another, slower, his red eyes locked on her without ever blinking, and the floor shook beneath each of them despite his ridiculous size.

Freya didn’t budge an inch, and waited until he was close enough to see her face clearly before smiling.

The demon jumped backward before he even understood why, his heels scraping the stone for two meters, because ever since the labyrinth, anything that looked like good news for this woman had consistently ended in disaster for him.

Got you.

The ink thread strung level with the floor snapped against his calf the instant he landed.

He broke it clean, of course, without it costing him the slightest effort or the slightest balance, except that his eyes still dropped toward his feet for half a second, searching everywhere for the mechanism of the trap that was about to come down on him again.

Dissolve the ink.

The pen obeyed before she’d even finished the thought.

The false ink ceiling that had covered this whole part of the room from the start, invisible in the gloom of the dome, came undone all at once and dropped what it had been hiding right above the beast.

Mei came down with it, her enormous blade pointed downward, one foot braced against the guard to add the two meters and the armor that went with them.

The demon looked up far too late.

The blade drove into his body from the top of his skull to his pelvis and pinned him to the floor with a crack that climbed all the way up the walls, throwing out a spray of black blood that spattered the stone for several meters around them.

It landed, we’ve—

The monster’s arm swung to the side and caught Mei full in the armor.

The giant lifted off as though she weighed nothing, crossed half the room and slammed into the wall, where the stone caved in around her before she dropped back to her knees amid the rubble.

The demon closed both hands around the blade planted in his own body and drew it back out centimeter by centimeter, without a cry, watching himself do it, then he tossed it to the floor and howled.

"GRRRAAAAAAAAAH! RRRHAAAAA— GHHHRRRAAAAAAAAH!"

The cry made the Heart tremble behind her, and he charged at Mei before the echo had even faded.

What followed was completely beyond Freya.

She saw the giant push herself up and raise her arms, she saw the demon crash into her, and after that there was nothing but a sequence she couldn’t break down, impacts cracking three times a second, chunks of wall bursting apart every time one of them missed the other, silhouettes shifting places without her being able to track the movement in between.

They’re moving way too fast for me to follow any of it.

She caught only fragments, a fist from the demon smashing against Mei’s breastplate and making all the steel ring like a cracked bell, a counter coming off the giant and catching the beast full in the jaw to send it bouncing along the floor before it was already back, black blood spraying with every exchange without any of it slowing a thing down.

And as the seconds passed, Freya understood it was going badly.

The monster took everything he was given and came back each time, while Mei’s armor caved in a little more with every blow it absorbed, her footing giving half a meter with each exchange, and she already had one knee buckling that she couldn’t keep straight.

Then the demon caught her under the ribs, and the giant flew backward until she hit the far wall.

He charged at once to finish the job.

Except Mei threw herself forward rather than to the side, and both her hands closed around the beast’s wrists mid-lunge.

She squeezed, drove her heels into the stone that split beneath her boots, and braced her whole body against the demon’s as he thrashed without managing to break free a single centimeter.

"MADAM, NOW!"

The voice that tore through the room had nothing left in common with the timid whisper of the past few days, and Freya was already running before she’d even registered that it was Mei who had shouted.

She grabbed the scythe leaning against the wall on her way past, the handle far heavier than she’d expected even with her new body, and crossed the room carrying it in both hands, her mind emptied of everything but the distance between her and that exposed neck.

Five meters. Three. She wound up to take off his head.

But the demon pushed off Mei’s arms.

He used the very grip to hoist himself up, twisted his body into an angle no joint should have allowed, and his foot shot out to the side at a speed she could never have followed.

Freya saw nothing coming.

The impact crushed her ribcage and tore her off the ground, hurling her across the entire Heart chamber in a tenth of a second, the scythe flying off one way while her body shot the other.

She hit the far wall.

The stone caved into a star all around her, and the shock ran through her back, her neck, her skull, with a short, dry crack she heard resonate from inside her own head before everything went out at once.

Her body slid down the wall and dropped to the floor with a wet sound, one arm folded any which way beneath her, her head turned to the side at an angle nothing alive could have held.

Her eyes stayed open, fixed on the Heart still beating in the middle of the room.

They didn’t move again.

Mei’s scream tore through the room a second later, and Freya didn’t hear it.

"Kofff... kofff... kofff..."

Freya found herself doubled over in the middle of the room, one hand clamped over her mouth, coughing up air that wouldn’t go down, while her eyes shone with a divine gold that hadn’t been there a second earlier.

Her back wasn’t broken. Her neck held. Her hands were trembling in front of her, whole, alive, and it took her a moment to understand that she’d just felt her own death as closely as anyone could feel it and come back.

In front of her, at the other end of the room, Mei had just closed both hands around the demon’s wrists, exactly as she’d just seen.

"MADAM, NOW!"

Freya shook her head, and Mei understood instantly, from the gesture as much as from the pallor of her mistress’s face, before tightening her grip without asking a single question.

What she’d just seen didn’t exist yet, and if everything went to plan, it never would.

She’d drawn her skill a few minutes earlier, just before the monster came out into the room, and the system had handed her something she’d never have dared hope for.

[ Oracle’s Eye — Rank S: allows the host to perceive the ten seconds to come. Duration: 24 hours. ]

Ten seconds, no more, no less, more than enough to turn any fight around in the right hands. Except she’d only just grasped what it really cost to use it.

Because seeing the ten seconds to come meant living them.

She’d felt the demon’s foot crush her ribcage, she’d felt her back hit the far wall, she’d heard her own neck snap from the inside, and her brain had recorded all of it as though it had really happened to her.

No, not like that.

She relaunched at once, changing her angle of approach, except this time she went around to the left and the monster grabbed her by the skull to smash her against the floor before she’d taken three steps.

Still not like that.

She waited two seconds longer before setting off, and he tore off Mei’s arm to throw it at her.

She went to the right, and he opened her throat with a swipe of his nails.

She threw the pen out ahead of her as a diversion, and he cut her in two at the waist.

She didn’t move at all, and he ended up letting go of Mei to come and get her at his leisure at the back of the room.

Not like that again, still not like that, damn it, damn it, DAMN IT!

The visions came one after another without giving her a single second’s respite, ten by ten, each one ending on her own body breaking apart one way or another, and her face lost a little more color with every fresh death she went all the way through.

Behind all of it, the fight went on without her.

The demon had finally torn free of Mei’s grip and was driving into her with the regularity of a hammer, every blow making the black armor ring throughout the room, and the giant gave back what she could without ever falling back further than she needed to hold on.

No, not like that either.

She tried the ink wall head-on, and he went through it without even slowing.

She waited for him to strike Mei so she could rise up behind him, and he saw her coming.

She aimed for the legs, he jumped, and she aimed for the wound, he protected the wound.

Not like that again, still not like that, please.

She’d lost count long ago, because there had been dozens, then hundreds, and by now her mind no longer really told the difference between what she’d lived and what she’d only seen.

She’d felt her bones give too many times. She’d felt her own blood come back up her throat too many times. She’d watched the room tip onto its side from the floor too many times, with that same ceiling, that same Heart beating above her while she went out.

And her body finally refused to go any further.

She doubled over and threw up on the stone, on her knees, hands shaking, unable to do anything for a few seconds but wait for it to pass.

Across the room, Mei took a blow full in the side and was thrown against the wall, where she coughed a jet of blood through the slit of her helm before pushing herself back up against it.

The demon, meanwhile, still wasn’t going down.

The wound Mei had opened in him when she came down on top of him still split him from the top of his skull to his pelvis and pissed blood with every movement, his skin coming off in black pieces when he struck too hard, and he kept advancing all the same as though none of it really concerned him.

Pull it together, Freya.

She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand.

You don’t have time to throw up, you don’t have time to shake, and she’s got no time at all left over there, so relaunch, and this time find the right one.

She lifted her eyes back to the fight and relaunched the vision.

Then, at last, out of hundreds of futures, she found one where her body was still standing at the tenth second.

She didn’t wait a second longer, because that future had already begun playing out for real.

The ink wall erupted from the floor and shot at the demon, who broke it with a backhand without even slowing, except that behind that wall, Freya was already in the air with the scythe raised over her head, and she brought it down on him with all her weight.

He parried with one hand, his fingers closing around the blade of his own weapon.

Then she spat out the cloud of ink she’d taken the time to gather in her mouth while the wall was cutting off the demon’s view, and it exploded across his face to flood his eyes, while on the floor, the ink from the broken wall was already pulling together to draw tight like a cable, wrap around the black blade fallen three meters away, and hurl it across the room.

Mei caught it midflight without even slowing her charge and struck.

The demon parried with his other hand without seeing anything coming, because he didn’t need his eyes for that, and found himself with both arms flung out to either side, one hand on Freya’s scythe, the other on Mei’s sword.

It was at exactly that instant that the floor opened behind him.

Roku came out without a sound, hidden there thanks to his evolution, Jūyon’s sword clenched between his fangs with a small container of oil tied just below the guard, and he drove it with all the speed of his charge into the demon’s open wound.

The blade sank in up to the container, which jammed against the flesh and stayed there, exactly where the skull had been split.

"GRRRAAAAAAAH! RRHAAAA— GHHHRRRAAAAAAH!"

The demon shoved the scythe away and spun around to grab the fox, except Roku had already melted back into the shadow of the floor, and his fingers closed on nothing but air.

The recoil flung Freya across the room.

She rolled several meters, took the end of her tumble badly against a stone, and got back up all the same spitting ink, one hand pressed to her ribs, while Mei charged back in on the half-blinded monster to land three blows in a row.

Freya took a second to look at him properly.

His body split from skull to pelvis, his skin burned across one whole half, his eyes flooded with ink, Jūyon’s sword planted in his wound with the container jammed at the end, and he was still standing.

Then she smiled, and her teeth were black with ink.

"Ink’s flammable too, you son of a bitch."

All the ink spilled across the floor gathered at once and rose up into a lance that shot toward the alcove at the back of the room, where Laïa had been waiting from the start with her pink flame in the hollow of her hand.

The lance passed through the flame and caught fire along its whole length.

Then it shot back the other way across the Heart chamber, straight at the demon, and struck the container jammed against his open skull.

The container gave, the oil poured out all at once inside the wound, and the fire followed within the second.

"GRAAAA— GRHHH... GHHHHHRRR..."

The monster dropped to his knees, both hands clenched around his own skull, and his howls broke into something rawer, more smothered, while blood mixed with ink began running from his eye sockets and his mouth as it burned beneath the bone.

He stayed there, wracked with spasms, smoke rising from his gaping jaw.

Freya turned toward Mei, who could barely stand, one hand on her side and blood still running through her helm, and their eyes met for a second over the monster’s body.

She gave her a simple nod of the head.

The giant nodded back, tightened both hands on the guard, and brought her blade down.

The demon’s head left his shoulders, rolled the whole length of the Heart chamber leaving a trail of smoke behind it, and came to a stop against Freya’s foot, still burning.

Freya looked down at it, this small blackened, smoking thing that had killed her a good hundred times over a few seconds earlier, and it was only then, now that it was truly over, that she finally let herself sway on her legs.