Dungeon Overlord: My First SSS Gacha Summon Was a Yandere

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The sound of applause rang through the warehouse, accompanied by steady footsteps, while the black tentacle slowly retracted toward wherever those sounds were coming from. Naturally, every gaze turned in that direction.

A woman was approaching, deep mauve hair falling across her shoulders and eyes of exactly the same shade, so dark and so saturated that they brought to mind two night flowers whose hearts had never opened. She wore an immaculate maid’s uniform, and the tentacle that had just withdrawn now hung idly down her back, while her forehead was perfectly smooth, since she had concealed her horns for her visit to Evangel.

She stopped behind the knights, between them and the warehouse exit.

"It seems some clever soul sensed me coming and suddenly thought about taking a hostage, or something along those lines."

"Aaaah... never mind. Let’s do as agreed, Aria."

The knights, frozen until then by the death of their vice-captain which had happened in the blink of an eye, all sprang into motion at once. As the saying goes, a cornered man becomes a far more dangerous one, since he has nothing left to lose. Except that against Aria, a man’s dangerousness remained thoroughly mediocre regardless.

The first two charged together and Aria didn’t shift a single step. Two tentacles burst from her back and crossed the distance without anyone seeing anything but a black blur, and both men collapsed screaming, each with a leg pointing somewhere their body no longer went.

"That’s already better," she remarked, brushing off her apron. "There are twenty of you, after all, do make an effort. Though I suppose only seventeen of you are still in any condition to fight now, but that should still be plenty, shouldn’t it?"

"MY LEGS! MY LE—"

Three more came in from the left in tight formation, and all three of their swords shattered at the same instant, reduced to fragments before reaching anything at all. They didn’t even have time to work out what had happened to their weapons before they were on the ground, hands severed at the wrist, blood beginning to spread between the flagstones in long dark trails.

Freya, seated in her chair, narrowed her eyes slightly.

As impressive as ever, Aria~~ Even with my new body and my new sight, I still can’t follow her movements!

"Help! Somebody! HELP!"

"Fall back! All of you fall back, don’t go near h—"

A tentacle wrapped around the ankle of the man speaking and yanked him sharply backward, dragging him scraping across the entire length of the warehouse.

"MEEERCY! HELP! SOMEBODY HEL—"

CRACK.

The screaming stopped dead, then resumed a second later, transformed this time into a continuous groan that would go on for quite a while.

Aldric, standing beside the chair, watched the scene without managing to look away, his face falling further with every passing second, so Freya leaned slightly toward him.

"She’s SSS rank, after all."

"Aaaah... isn’t this a little too lopsided?"

"And whose fault is that, do you think? The stronger one’s, or the weaker one’s?"

Aldric, understanding perfectly well how deep that question ran, fell silent to think it over, even if deep down he already knew the answer.

Meanwhile Aria carried on with her work in no particular hurry, walking among them now, and each time a knight got back up to try something, a tentacle put him back down with an almost irritating precision.

"Oh, this one has courage. That’s commendable."

"Go to hell, monster!"

"You see? Courage."

SCHLAK.

His right arm joined the floor three meters away and the man collapsed screaming in turn, while another managed to drag himself as far as the chair to clutch at Freya’s ankle, his face covered in blood and tears.

"Mercy... mercy, madam, I’m begging you, I have—"

A tentacle seized him by the foot and tore him clean off the ground, hauling him sliding toward the back of the warehouse while he screamed the entire way, until the wall stopped him with a dull thud and he stayed there, groaning without moving again.

"In any case, let’s not waste any more time. Medor, go earn your XP!"

Aldric didn’t move, blinked once, then turned his head very slowly toward her.

"...Medor?"

"Yes. Medor."

"Madam, that’s a dog’s name."

"Absolutely."

"...A dog’s name."

"And? You obey, you come back when called, and you have the loyal look. Honestly, I don’t see the problem."

He opened his mouth, closed it again, then gave up entirely and walked out into the warehouse, where eighteen men now lay on the ground, all alive, all maimed, and all thoroughly incapable of defending themselves. He stopped in front of the first one, the one missing both legs.

"Wait... wait, no, no, NO—"

SPURTCH.

The blade went in beneath the sternum and came out through the back, and the man stopped moving. He pulled his sword free, took three steps, and did it again.

SPURTCH.

Then another, then another after that, never saying a word or changing his expression, simply moving methodically from one body to the next, while Aria watched him with a polite smile and her hands folded in front of her.

M-m-monsters...

Sir Cedric, still pressed against his wall at the back of the warehouse, watched those two fill the floor with a layer of blood that was now reaching the grooves between the flagstones, and particularly that woman in the black and white maid’s uniform.

Then the silence returned, and the two of them moved back toward the other woman, the one who was clearly at the head of all this.

But young Paydragon, who is so noble, has someone above him? And who is she, anyway? I’ve never seen her face anywhere.

Freya rested her elbow on her raised knee and propped her chin in her hand.

"Aria? Wasn’t it agreed that you wouldn’t kill anyone, so as to leave as much experience as possible for Aldric?"

"I apologize, madam." The maid drew herself fully upright before continuing. "I acted on emotion when I saw him charging in your direction. I couldn’t restrain myself."

Freya rose from her chair for the first time since they’d arrived.

"Do you know how you can make it up to me?"

She circled slowly around the maid, letting her fingertips trail along her arm, her back, then her hip, until Aria finally turned, caught her by the waist and kissed her.

The kiss lasted, and Aldric immediately looked away toward the nearest wall, his cheeks red and his gaze fixed with great determination on a beam that held no particular interest whatsoever.

What on earth is going on here?

Sir Cedric, for his part, no longer had the faintest idea what he was looking at, between nineteen slaughtered knights, an apprentice hero finishing off the wounded one after another without ever changing his expression, and now two women kissing in the middle of all that blood.

Then their lips parted.

"Like that?" Aria asked.

Freya brought two fingers to her mouth.

"That seems sufficient for now."

Then all the warmth left her face at once, and her gaze turned entirely hard.

"As for you, Paydragon, explain to me what we were supposed to do with the man over there," she said, pointing at him.

So they haven’t forgotten me, then...

"We were to let him go so that he would spread fear among the knights. On top of which, this being a clandestine expedition, they could never have spoken of it publicly, so by seeding fear through a survivor’s account with no possibility of making it public, we would have come out well ahead."

"And what did you say at the very beginning, when you arrived here?"

"That..." Aldric appeared to think for a moment before he understood. "...That Myriam had been useful to us."

"Do you understand your mistake?"

He nodded without a word, unable to hold her gaze.

"You spoke in front of the witness we were supposed to release. You revealed that we knew the identity of the spy. One sentence, Aldric. It took you a single sentence to undo everything we had put in place—and condemn that man to death."

She let the silence settle a moment before continuing in a markedly colder tone.

"So since I can see that you let yourself slip the moment I’m not standing behind you, we’ll be resuming the lessons tomorrow, and far more harshly than before."

Aldric flinched at those words but nodded without attempting to protest.

"Now go and correct your mistake."

He turned toward the man without a trace of pity in his eyes, then advanced, bloodied sword in hand and blood spattered across his body, while Cedric tried to back away without managing it since he was already against the wall.

"Please... please! I promise I won’t talk... I won’t say anything... I... mercy!"

The tears began falling as he realized he was going to die and that there was absolutely nothing he could do about it.

"I have a family... I have... please..."

It was Freya who answered.

"We have no mercy for a rotten knight. The world will be better off with you dead."

Sir Cedric’s mind stopped short.

Me, a rotten knight? I never did anything.

Aldric halted a few paces from him, then drove his sword into the ground in front of him.

"Listen to me. You may have lived a sinner’s life, you may have closed your eyes where you should have opened them, but there is still one thing left to you. Repent in your death, get up, and die as a knight with your weapon in hand, rather than ending against a wall in tears."

And Sir Cedric truly looked at him, for the first time that evening.

He knew this man, of course, as all of Evangel knew him. He was the one who had paid out of his own pocket to have the old well in the Lower Tannery reopened after the baron judged the expense unnecessary. He was the one who had stood alone outside a tavern to stop three creditors from dragging an entire family into the street in the middle of the night. He was the one they said had sold his own house’s silverware to cover a fine that had nothing whatsoever to do with him. A ruined noble whose name was worth very little anymore, and who nonetheless kept placing himself in front of the people nobody else would defend.

Cedric had a comfortable wage, a roof, a uniform and a title.

And he had never once done any of that.

Then something surfaced, something he had buried so deep he no longer remembered keeping it at all.

He had been eleven, and the neighbors’ little girl was crying outside her door because older boys had taken her things. He hadn’t been able to do anything that day, too small and too weak, and he had gone home with the anger burning in his stomach. But the next morning he had come back and sat down beside her, and he had sworn it to her with all the seriousness an eleven-year-old can muster, that one day he would become a knight. Not a wealthy one, not a famous one, but a knight with a good heart, someone people could count on, someone people would run to when nobody else would listen.

She had laughed through her tears and told him she believed him.

And I believed it too.

This is what knighthood was supposed to be. This is what all of us should have been. And he did it without being asked, without a bonus, without an order, and without even having the means to do it.

While I was handed the armor, the oath and the wages, and all I ever managed to do with them was make excuses.

He thought back to the villages spoken of in low voices in the common hall, to the knights who left at night and came back without their faces, to the bonuses he had watched pass by while telling himself it was none of his business.

I knew Baron Frarken killed innocent people for his own gain. I knew far more than that, and I never did a thing about it. Worse than that, I convinced myself that doing nothing meant staying clean.

Except staying clean beside a man who got himself dirty for others wasn’t nobility. It was cowardice I had arranged to find comfortable.

He looked down at his own hands, which were still shaking.

She was right. I am exactly what she said I was.

So if there’s nothing left for me to fix, then at least let me die standing, just once, keeping the promise I made to a girl foolish enough to believe me.

He stayed like that a few seconds longer, then finally braced himself against the wall to get to his feet, wiped his face with the back of his sleeve, and drew his weapon.

"Thank you..."

But as he had done his entire life, he was selfish one last time, making a final request of a man who owed him absolutely nothing, adding yet more weight to a burden that had never been his to carry.

"My name is Sir Cedric, of no house and no lineage, son of no lord and heir to no title. I live in the Orangia quarter. My wife goes by the name Cassancre, and she has enough to live on, I left her enough to manage."

His voice trembled for a second before he took hold of it again.

"But my son is called Félix. So if you have the heart for it, Paydragon, raise him. Make a good man of him, in your image rather than in mine. I’m begging you."

Aldric said nothing, but he nodded once, slowly, and that was enough.

So Cedric brought his sword up in front of him, set his footing, and squared his shoulders for the first time that evening.

"I am Sir Cedric."

"My name is Aldric Paydragon, apprentice hero, and the future of the Paydragons!"

And with those words the final dance of the ball began, under the gaze of the two women.

Sir Cedric charged at Aldric, who had raised his sword high above his head, exactly as Mei had made him repeat a thousand times a day, and then, when the man came into range, the blade came down.

The air split apart in its path and was thrown to either side of the warehouse, lifting the dust off the floor in a circular burst, while Cedric’s sword cleaved in two along its axis without offering the slightest resistance. The blade continued its course straight through the body, from the crown of the skull to the pelvis, and the two halves toppled to either side before hitting the ground.

Freya sat open-mouthed for a moment, because she very clearly hadn’t expected that result, then began applauding slowly as she rose from her chair.

"Woooww! I had no idea you had a taste for gore, Aldric!"

"I wanted to put all my strength into it so he wouldn’t suffer more than necessary."

"Ah yeah, gloomy as ever. Can’t you speak lightly like everyone else?"

He gave no answer and simply looked around him, then at the window that had just appeared in his field of vision showing his current level, a level that must have shot up considerably and which alone accounted for this newfound strength.

Then Aria bowed.

"I shall take my leave, madam. I’ll bring you good news regarding the underworld very soon!"

"Already?"

Freya pulled a face entirely unbefitting a Calamity of Greed, which of course did not escape the demon, who allowed herself a smile before answering.

"You know perfectly well that I’ll come back, madam."

"Yes, yes. I know."

She took her hand anyway and held it between her own for a moment, just long enough to squeeze it once.

"Be careful all the same."

"Always."

Aria leaned in, pressed a kiss to her forehead, then vanished into the night without a sound, leaving Freya smiling foolishly at the door she had just walked out of.

Aldric, meanwhile, hadn’t moved.

He was looking at the body cut in two at his feet, then at his sword with blood dripping steadily onto the flagstones, and he stayed like that for a long while without saying anything, his face closed and his eyes filled with a heightened determination.