Dungeon Overlord: My First SSS Gacha Summon Was a Yandere

The White Saintess of Veille.

That was what everyone in the city called her now, after stringing together mysterious appearances over the past three days, and above all after rumors that magnified every single event far beyond anything that had actually taken place.

The White Saintess of Veille. Honestly, I could never have come up with anything that good myself.

Except that technically, she was the one who had planted it through Kyiara’s girls.

And while all of that spread, Aria was working on her own side, torturing the two other bosses in order to guarantee their unwavering loyalty, as she herself had put it, all while strengthening the underworld of Evangel and making certain everything down there ran exactly as intended.

Beyond that, she was also working on the framework of that final act Freya had been waiting for, helping her lover while knowing perfectly well how much it meant to her.

Nobody ever noticed her.

She had put away her maid’s uniform for a perfectly unremarkable seamstress dress, had additionally cast an illusion spell on herself, of the same sort that concealed her horns, simply as a precaution, and walked around with a basket on her arm and a veil over her head, which was more than enough for her to vanish completely into the crowds of Evangel and blend into the mass of people.

Her, the SSS-rank demon.

That day, she was in the market square, a few meters from a particularly aggressive soldier checkpoint of the kind that had become common lately, with men searching passersby, carts and absolutely everything that came through that corner with far too much enthusiasm, if you follow my meaning.

She dropped her basket.

"Oops."

The apples rolled across the ground, one of them bumping against a soldier’s boot, and Aria hurried to gather them up while apologizing profusely, except that as she straightened she knocked into the shoulder of a commoner standing behind her, who pitched forward and collided squarely with the soldier.

"You piece of filth! You’re in on it with the man we’re searching, you’re trying to draw my attention off him?!"

"It wasn’t me, someone shov—"

The soldier’s fist went out before the sentence was finished, the crowd shouted, someone threw something, and there were two dead before the morning was over.

Aria, meanwhile, had already turned the corner with her basket put back together.

And barely a few minutes later, a young woman with white hair was kneeling in front of two bodies covered by a sheet, under the eyes of some fifty people who imitated her one by one.

Baron Frarken, for his part, hadn’t seen any of it coming.

Or rather he had, he could see perfectly well what was happening, except that he interpreted it exactly the way a man of his nature was bound to interpret it.

"They’re defying me."

He stood at the window of his office, hands clasped behind his back, looking out over his city from the third floor.

"They’ve always defied me, in truth. These people have lived on my land, under my protection, paying taxes any other lord would have doubled long ago, and this is how they thank me."

"Sir, if I may, the reports indicate the tensions stem primarily from the interventions of—"

"Interventions?"

He turned on Olfred all at once, and Olfred didn’t flinch in the slightest.

"My men are restoring order, Olfred. That is their function. If the people take that for violence, it is solely because they were left free for far too long."

He sat back down in his chair and picked up a pen.

"We shall correct that."

And so it was that the following day, four announcements were posted at every street corner, shouted aloud by Baron Frarken’s employees standing beside the notices for the benefit of the illiterate.

The harvest tax went from an eighth to a quarter.

A pacification tax was instituted, one that nobody ever truly understood the workings of, beyond the fact that it applied to every commoner household and was payable directly to the knights on patrol.

Which is to say that it handed the knights outright carte blanche over the rate, as well as over the consequences in households that failed to pay, and that was very likely the worst thing that could have happened to the poor people of Evangel given what Baron Frarken’s knights were and the mentality that drove them.

A curfew had also been established from nightfall to sunrise, any violation being punishable by immediate arrest.

And the knights of the estate were granted the right to enter any dwelling, at any hour, in search of any sign of rebellion.

That one went hand in hand with the second, of course, dramatically increasing the abuses and everything else at the slightest suspicion from any knight, who could now act not out of duty but out of pure personal grudge, over some matter years old or over any pretext at all, and with complete impunity.

That was the moment everything capsized.

The abuses, the beatings, and worse still, because as a result of all of it the people began gathering in secret at the risk of being caught, which did happen from time to time and immediately spawned a fresh cycle of hatred, since a relative of the dead, a distant cousin or a workmate would then take their place at the clandestine meetings, and so on and so forth.

Which produced a climate of extreme tension throughout Evangel, much to Freya’s delight.

Aaaah~ He bit down far harder than I’d hoped.

I expected the taxes, possibly the curfew, but entering people’s homes? Really? And handing every right in the world to those corrupt bastards of knights on top of it? Aaaaah~~ He’s just handed me absolutely everything I needed.

And so the days that followed grew more and more violent.

The knights came in groups of six, kicked in doors that weren’t opened fast enough, turned over interiors, took whatever they liked under the pretext of seizure, and when a man placed himself in front of his family, he generally ended up on the floor.

In the Lower Tannery district, a father was killed in front of his two daughters for refusing to pay a tax he had already settled that very morning.

At the central market, an entire shop burned down because a knight had knocked over a lamp while searching the back room, and the three people who tried to put out the fire were driven back until the adjoining house went up as well.

In the Orangia district, an old woman died of a heart attack while six men ransacked her bedroom.

And one night, it was a soldier who was found at the end of an alley, his throat opened by someone who hadn’t been able to take any more.

Freya came for all of them.

She knelt in front of the smashed door of the father from the Lower Tannery, with his two daughters weeping behind her and a crowd growing by the minute.

She knelt in front of the still-smoking rubble of the market shop, in ash that came up to her thighs and soiled her dress once again.

She knelt in front of the house of the old woman in Orangia, whom nobody else cared about since she hadn’t had family in fifteen years.

And she knelt in front of the soldier’s body, at the end of his alley.

That last one changed everything.

Because when she knelt in front of that soldier, under the eyes of a crowd that understood absolutely nothing, someone eventually asked her the question.

"Why are you praying for him?"

It was a young man, barely twenty, standing a few paces away with his fists clenched.

"They killed my uncle. They killed the father of those little girls in the Tannery. And you’re praying for one of theirs?"

Freya didn’t get up and didn’t even turn her head toward him.

"Do you know his name?"

"...What?"

"His name. Do you know it?"

The young man said nothing.

"Neither do I."

She pressed her hands more tightly together.

"He might have had a mother somewhere waiting for him tonight. He might have had a wife. He might have done terrible things, or he might only have obeyed because he never found anything else to do with his life. I don’t know. Nobody here knows, and now nobody ever will."

She lowered her forehead onto her crossed thumbs.

"So if nobody prays for him, I will. I’ll pray that he’s given better choices in his next life, I’ll pray because above all else he was a person, someone’s child, someone’s parent, and I pray because the gods forgive. So who would I be, a simple peasant, not to pray for him?"

Then the young man knelt down beside her.

Then another, then ten, then the entire alley, including two soldiers who had come to collect their comrade’s body and who stayed there, on their knees in the mud, alongside people they had beaten two days earlier.

And from that day onward, she became a symbol for good.

The symbol of a white saint, of purity of soul, of a woman who had lost everything and who still prayed for those who killed, never once drawing the slightest distinction between a soldier and a commoner.

White flowers appeared everywhere in Evangel.

On doorsteps, on windowsills, tied to carts, tucked into children’s hair, and laid at every spot where someone had died, so that within three days it became impossible to cross a district without passing a hundred of them.

The gesture spread just as quickly.

People began kneeling in the street at sunset, hands joined and thumbs crossed, foreheads lowered, and it started with small groups, then entire streets, then every district at the same hour.

And the rumors, for their part, kept growing without anything able to stop them.

Aldric, on his side, carried on as he always had.

He trained relentlessly, sought experience by helping the city’s adventurers, took part in the rebuilding, and came to the aid of families who had lost their man and with him their entire income.

Whereas the baron went on spending without any return whatsoever, having lost a considerable portion of what used to come up from the underworld.

Aldric now benefited from all of it, on top of the trade deals he had struck for the violet pepper, and thanks to the advances he had received he had long since paid off his family’s debts, the ones his father had left behind.

He had even taken the opportunity to buy two large buildings, on Freya’s advice.

The first he had turned into an orphanage, run in direct partnership with the Church of Life, whose faithful now regarded Freya as an apostle.

The second had become a free school, where he promised a midday meal to every child of the common folk who came and sat down in it.

All of this, of course, also served to prepare for the future, arming the generations to come with knowledge and learning while feeding them at the same time.

The baron, for his part, had obviously caught wind of all of it, still having ears throughout the city.

"A peasant girl and a dog of the gods..."

He was pacing his office, a crumpled report in his hands.

"A peasant girl who should have died gutted in Veille, who simply kneels in the mud, and my entire city takes to worshipping her?! And on top of that, this clown, this puppet of the gods, plays the savior and the people cheer for him just the same, while I. I. I am the—"

He cut himself off.

"Do you understand what I am being told here, Olfred?"

"The reports are conclusive, sir."

"That is not the question!"

He let the paper drop to the floor before grinding it under the heel of a shoe that was very likely worth the price of the orphanage building Aldric had just acquired.

"I am the lord of this city. I was appointed, confirmed, recognized by the high nobility. And now some filthy girl with no name, no lineage and not a single title makes my people hers in the span of a week?"

He stopped short.

"And that damned Paydragon."

He turned toward Olfred with an expression that had nothing left of his usual anger.

"He picked her up, he housed her, he paraded her through my streets, and now he has my own people kneeling through her. He wants to take them from me. He wants to take everything from me?!"

"What would you have us do, sir?"

The baron stayed silent for a long moment, one hand resting on the back of his chair.

Then he suddenly began to laugh.

Loudly, without offering any answer at all, laughing to himself, laughing like a man who has just found a solution, at least in his own eyes.