Dungeon Overlord: My First SSS Gacha Summon Was a Yandere

The Frarken estate employed roughly sixty knights. That was of course an absolutely enormous figure for a mere baron, but given the modest fortune he had amassed through a trade nobody could quite identify, and above all given what this city actually was, he stood well apart from the usual barons. That alone explained the number of knights, forever growing, much like his ambitions.

Some thirty of them were eating, drinking and playing cards in the common hall.

The place was the exact opposite of the baron’s office, with its long rough wooden tables covered in gouges and tankard rings, its wobbling benches, its bare stone walls nobody had ever thought to decorate, and that permanent smell of stew, sweat and spilled beer soaked into absolutely everything.

"Damn it!" one man barked, slamming the flat of his hand against the table.

"Hahahaa! Looks like the goddess of fortune isn’t with you today either, Francis!" his neighbor shot back, sweeping up the coins scattered in front of him.

"My wife is going to kill me... again..."

He dropped his head into his hands to the laughter of the entire table.

At the far end of that same table, Sir Cedric was eating in silence.

He was young, barely into his twenties, and belonged to that category of knights who simply dreamed of a quiet, well-paid post, purely so they could give their family a decent life without putting their own too much at risk. His uncle was one of the higher figures in the black market, something he was not remotely proud of and kept carefully to himself. But it was that same uncle who, through his connections, had gotten him in here without the slightest difficulty a few weeks earlier.

So he had thanked him with all his heart, because after all, who wouldn’t have been delighted to land a position like this one?

Then the door of the hall opened.

And the one person he had no desire to see walked in.

Olfred. The man he feared to the point that he reminded him of the demon Ankour, that demon who carried men off with promises of riches and fortune, devoured their souls, then returned them to the human world. They came back hollow, stripped of everything, reduced to mere shells.

A tale his mother had often told him, always reminding him never to chase wealth at the cost of his soul.

He rather liked that story, in fact, and found the moral of it a fine one. But he also knew the world was nowhere near that simple.

The problem here was that Olfred, this thin man who was also, from everything he had observed, the true head of the estate, came into this hall from time to time. He would pick out a few knights, list them off one by one, promise a bonus. Except those knights, when they came back, never quite had the same face they’d left with, as though they had abandoned some part of themselves along the way.

"And finally, Sir Cedric."

"...What?"

He didn’t even have time to object, or to give it any further thought, before the man was already continuing.

"You will be ready in civilian dress by nightfall. I shall come and collect you to explain what will be required of you."

And with that, Ankour, or rather Olfred, disappeared and closed the door behind him, leaving Sir Cedric every bit as stunned at having been chosen.

A man came over to him then, thickset, a tankard already half empty in his hand.

"So, first time, Sir Cedric?"

"Yes... vice-captain... but..."

He clapped him on the back, hard enough to make him drop his fork.

"Worried about the three who didn’t come back last time? Hahahaha... Don’t fret, I’ll be there this time!"

Then he leaned toward his ear and dropped his voice.

"I’ll show you how it’s done, and then you’ll put in a word about me with your uncle, all right?"

So he knows?

The man in front of him, Sir Godfrey, vice-captain of the estate’s order of knights, was rotten to the core, perfectly in keeping with this estate and its baron. But he was also every bit as strong. Sitting at rank A-, he was a monster among monsters, a superhuman in the strictest sense of the word. Because to become a knight here you had to be at least rank C+, and to know the obligations of knighthood by heart, obligations which were never really honored anyway.

He himself happened to be rank C+, a novice knight who knew he had his whole life ahead of him to grow stronger and improve. Which was precisely why he decided, once again, not to oppose his superiors.

So Sir Cedric nodded, while the vice-captain was already walking off, scooping up a pint of beer on the way and raising it high.

"To the bonus, lads!"

"TO THE BONUS!"

The others did the same in a great clatter of clashing tankards, while Sir Cedric turned back to his plate, barely eating anymore but going through the motions, his mind entirely elsewhere.

Knighthood, and everything I joined it for, does any of that even still exist? Whether it’s my uncle, the baron, or these knights, why do they all let themselves be swallowed up by greed like this? Did I choose the wrong path?

Because Sir Cedric did have a good heart underneath it all. A good heart he had nonetheless set aside very quickly on arriving here, having understood it would earn him nothing but mockery and make his life considerably harder.

And finding the post agreeable enough all the same, not wanting to disappoint his uncle, he had stayed on while turning a blind eye to everything else. He simply wanted to live without asking for too much, to lead a quiet and comfortable life, to keep his wages and his roof.

Except that was exactly the problem.

Because he asked himself about the greed of others without ever once asking it of himself, when his own greed simply went by a more presentable name. Comfort. Peace and quiet. Not making waves.

And by dint of closing his eyes to protect all of that, he had ended up selling exactly the same thing as the rest of them, simply at a lower price.

~

The twenty knights, now in civilian dress, moved in groups of three at most along different routes through the city, so as not to raise the slightest suspicion. All of them nonetheless had the same destination in mind.

The Karakura district, a largely industrial sector that also held a great many warehouses.

And it was toward one of those in particular that they were headed. The warehouse belonging to the young apprentice hero, Aldric Paydragon.

The knights of course had no idea whatsoever who the building belonged to. After all, their mission consisted solely of checking its contents and then setting fire to it.

A simple job, a quick one, and one that would earn them a tidy sum. In theory, at least.

"What the hell is this?"

"But...?"

The twenty chosen knights, Sir Cedric among them still glued to Sir Godfrey, all froze on the threshold, because on opening the warehouse doors they found the place completely empty.

And above all, in the very middle of the room, there was a spot lit perfectly by the skylight overhead, which let the moonlight through and seemed to amplify it besides.

A woman was sitting there on a chair.

She held herself perfectly upright, one leg crossed over the other, both hands resting flat on her knee. She hadn’t stood at their arrival. She hadn’t even turned her head toward the door.

The air grew heavier the moment the first of them crossed the threshold.

Something dense settled gradually through the warehouse, something that seemed to seep up out of the floor itself before climbing the walls and reaching them. The dust hanging in the air stopped falling. The torches some of them carried dimmed all at once for no reason at all, reduced to orange embers that lit nothing whatsoever.

Several knights felt their breathing shorten without understanding why, and one of them, in the third row, simply dropped his sword without even noticing.

The moonlight caught in her long white hair as it fell across a black dress, a dress she had specially prepared for the occasion, having told herself she hadn’t attended a ball since her school days.

Well, this one will be a little different... After all, it won’t be a dancing ball, but a bloody one~ Now then, dance, my dear knights~~ Dance for me~

But what struck the twenty men most of all were her eyes.

A pale mauve, almost translucent under the moonlight, they held the cold gleam of two cut amethysts set down there in the darkness. And they were waiting for them. That gaze filled with absolute confidence, as though she had always known they would come, and had been waiting for precisely that.

Sir Cedric noticed then that Godfrey was panicking.

The man whose veteran instincts had immediately understood this was a trap, that this woman was nothing ordinary, and that they needed to run right now.

He turned to do exactly that.

But.

CLANGGGGG—

The scrape of a sword against stone rang through the entire warehouse.

The aura that came with that sound had nothing in common with the first. Where hers was cold, dense and utterly motionless, this one was burning and direct, and it swept the room in a single gust, forcing several men back a step without their having decided to move.

The two auras met in the middle of the warehouse, and the knights caught between them had the very distinct impression of standing at the exact point where two tides finally cross.

Then he appeared, in his hero’s armor, his sword still dragging along the ground behind him.

He pushed his blond hair back as he spoke, his eyes catching the moonlight in turn, before coming to stand a few paces from the chair, slightly off to one side.

Exactly the way a knight stands beside his sovereign.

"So Frarken’s dogs finally moved after all, precisely as you predicted, madam. Myriam has been an enormous help to us."

But he never got the chance to finish his sentence.

Because Sir Godfrey had already assessed the situation, identified the only way out and made his decision, and because a man of rank A- does not charge the way other men do.

The air itself rushed inward toward him all at once, drawn to his footing, and the floor exploded beneath him.

The flagstones pulverized into a spray of stone and dust that rose all the way to the rafters. The shockwave went out in every direction at once, tearing the warehouse doors off their hinges, and Sir Cedric, standing right beside him, was thrown like a scrap of straw clear across the room.

He rolled several meters before slamming into the far wall, the breath knocked entirely out of him.

And when he opened his eyes again, half conscious, he searched for his superior through the settling dust.

He found him at last, to his horror.

Because Sir Godfrey’s world was turning.

It had been turning for a while now, showing him in turn the skylight and the moon above, then the rubble-strewn floor, then the moon again, then something black cutting through the air with the suppleness of a tentacle.

What is that?

Then everything stopped at once.

He found himself facing something planted in the middle of the room, an upright shape from which a dark liquid was spurting toward the ceiling in steady bursts.

A body?

Wait...

Why doesn’t it have a head?

...

Ah.

And his vision completed its final rotation before coming to rest squarely on the woman seated in her chair.

She hadn’t moved an inch. She was watching him, a smile on her lips, wearing the same untroubled expression as someone taking in a performance whose ending they already knew.

Aaaah...

She really is beautiful...