Dungeon Overlord: My First SSS Gacha Summon Was a Yandere

Over the following days, everything accelerated and soured very quickly.

The seeds Freya had planted with the help of the people now working for her were beginning to sprout all over the place, and above all inside the heads of everyone in Evangel.

She rather saw all of it as a stage play. She had prepared absolutely everything for the grand finale, and it was now time to run through the remaining scenes in order to arrive at the conclusion of the whole thing. She knew it, she could feel it, and above all she was terribly impatient about it, because the moment would come soon enough, the moment of the final scene of her play.

Because with her existence, with the baron’s repeated losses, with the underworld having cut off all cooperation with him whether directly or otherwise, and following both the actions and the rumors, the people were growing more hostile toward the baron by the day and turning instead toward Aldric’s kindness and toward his view of things, a view that appealed infinitely more to them than his neighbor’s did.

A view of things one might call noblesse oblige.

In a manner of speaking, if one set aside two or three small details, such as the fact that he was now finishing off wounded men by the dozen in empty warehouses and that he was working for an invader from another world, Aldric was the noble par excellence.

The noble as one imagines them before ever meeting an actual noble.

The kind who holds that a title isn’t a reward but a debt, that every privilege received must be repaid through a duty rendered, and that if one stands above people at all, it is solely so that one can step in front of them the day something comes down on their heads.

And that was exactly what the people of Evangel saw in their streets every single day, while the other man stayed on the third floor of his manor.

Now Freya knew it was time.

Time to finally make use of that survivor of Veille character she had been building all along through her conduct, through her actions, and above all through the rumors. It was time to begin the play, in order to prepare the finest act as it deserved to be.

And it began when Baron Frarken, watching the tensions rise in his own city and no longer able to obtain the slightest piece of information or the slightest cooperation from the underworld, gave his soldiers and knights free rein, with the perfectly clear order to restore order whatever the cost and by any means they deemed necessary.

He had abandoned every last trace of pretense.

He no longer acted at night, nor in disguise, nor through intermediaries, but in broad daylight, with his emblem stitched onto every tabard and displayed at every crossroads, proclaiming his supremacy and his authority over the people of Evangel.

Which, in a city like Evangel, meant precisely what everybody had already understood.

Violent altercations multiplied from one day to the next, in the alleys, in the markets, outside the shopfronts, and they ended more and more often in the deaths of citizens for whom nobody would ever be able to demand justice, which did nothing but feed the discontent, the fear and the resentment building within the people.

That was when Freya, or rather her character, stepped in and began her real work.

The first time was in the Morio district, that same district Aldric had gone to help with repairs a few days earlier.

A man had had his skull opened against a wall there for refusing to empty his pockets in front of some soldiers, the situation had escalated as it always did, and one thing leading to another, he had lost his life over it.

The body had been left where it fell.

Soldiers were still swarming the district in search of any sign of rebellion, so nobody dared go near it. The man likely had no close family, a few friends in the neighborhood at most, and not one of them was prepared to risk his own life to come and collect his body.

Better to wait until they leave, they must all have been telling themselves.

That was when a woman with white hair arrived in the square.

She wore that same too-simple village dress everyone knew her by, without a single piece of jewelry and without a single ornament, and she crossed the entire square under the gaze of a frightened populace, a populace that nonetheless carried anger somewhere behind their eyes, an anger born of that constant sense of injustice they had been made to swallow for days and against which not one of them could do anything at all.

There were also the eyes of the soldiers and the knights on her as she drew closer to the body, step by step.

One knight did in fact step forward to stop her, his hand already moving toward the grip of his sword, except that a man beside him, almost certainly an officer, laid his own hand over his wrist.

"Don’t be an idiot. Look around you."

He had whispered it, something Freya nonetheless heard perfectly well given her hearing.

The knight looked around him while listening.

Because every pair of eyes in the Morio district was there, including those that had come from the direction the woman had arrived from, a great many people having quite simply followed her along the way, so that the square was now filled with commoners all murmuring among themselves.

"What’s she doing here?"

"No idea, the lads told me to come here, that’s all."

"Same for me..."

"Hold on, is that her? Is that actually her?"

"The one from Veille. The one my sister-in-law was going on about the other day."

"I heard she survived 7 days in the ashes before young Paydragon found her."

"Seven days without food or water, that’s right. And without sleeping."

"And what’s she doing this for, over a man she’s never even met?"

"Quiet. Watch."

More and more people packed into the square, and yet nobody caused the slightest disturbance, nobody tried anything at all, not even the soldiers, the knights having likewise understood perfectly well that it was better to do absolutely nothing and let things unfold at this stage.

Right on schedule. Looks like a good number of people turned up for my first role~~ Yay~~

She then simply knelt down on the paving stones themselves, in blood that hadn’t yet dried, and joined her hands in front of her with her thumbs crossed before lowering her forehead until it came to rest against them.

Then she stayed there.

After a few minutes the crowd began to disperse, everyone getting on with their lives and returning to their own business, but the damage was done and the character was well and truly planted.

After a few hours it began to rain.

A fine, cold rain that gradually soaked through her dress and plastered her white hair against her face and the back of her neck, and she still didn’t move.

The only problem Freya might have run into in this sort of situation was of course her number one enemy in this world since the very beginning, namely boredom, because staying in the same position for hours on end would have driven anyone out of their mind and would eventually have pushed someone into making a mistake.

Except that all she had to do was focus on her real body.

And so, while all of Evangel believed her to be disciplined to the bone and suffering in the cold for the salvation of a complete stranger, she was in fact settled comfortably back in her dungeon, her mind busy chatting and laughing with the girls.

The upsides of having two bodies, I suppose~~

Then an old woman eventually came out from under her awning to kneel beside her, then a man, then two children.

And when daylight returned, there were dozens of them kneeling there.

Not the same ones as at the start, mind you, but simply others, people who had been passing by, who had heard the rumor that she had stayed out all night in the rain without moving, and who came in turn to pray for a few minutes, or even a few seconds, for the salvation of that poor man.

When Freya finally rose, her dress was entirely soiled with mud and red, and she left all the same, miming for the whole journey back a weakness her enhanced body did not feel in the slightest, without uttering a single word.

The next day, at the exact spot where she had prayed, a miracle occurred in the eyes of the citizens.

A white flower, the sign of Gaïra, the goddess of life, had grown between two paving stones.

The goddess had heard her prayer.

The day after that, there were a hundred of them.

Of course, what people did not know once again was that all of it had been arranged by Freya herself with Aria’s help.

After all, everything was for her final act.

That evening, in her room at the Paydragon manor, Freya stood in front of the tall mirror.

She started from the bottom, taking in that village dress whose hem had turned black with dried mud, whose fabric still bore the red marks that had never come out in the wash.

Then she worked her way slowly upward.

Her hands, with their broken nails and palms marked by grit. Her shoulders, where the previous day’s rain had left long paler streaks. Her throat, her chin, and finally her face.

Her long white hair, still damp as it fell on either side of her face.

And her pale mauve eyes, which looked back at her from the other side of the glass with a perfect composure not a single inhabitant of Evangel would ever have managed to detect in them.

She looked at herself like that for a long while, without moving a muscle.

Then she smiled.

And she turned all at once and began to dance on the spot in the middle of the room, one arm stretched toward the ceiling and the other folded against her chest, spinning on her bare heels once, twice, three times, her filthy dress opening out around her legs and her white hair flying behind her with each turn, while the candlelight swept across the wall along with her.

She stopped mid-curtsey, one leg tucked behind the other and her head lowered, exactly the way one greets a hall after the first act.

"Hihi~~ Looks like in another life I must have been a demon!"

And so the rumors, already well underway, began running far faster than she herself could ever have managed.