The last emperor of the Icart Empire. I will likely be remembered in history as the most pitifully slain emperor.

Lying on the floor of the palace hall, I stared blankly in thought. When I turned my head, I saw the chaos that had unfolded below the stairs. The scattered corpses were, in a way, fortunate. At least they had died early, spared from further suffering.

The remaining survivors, their flesh torn in various places, were pinned beneath the monsters. Every time the monsters moved, their bodies dangled like lifeless chunks of flesh. There were no more cries for mercy.

Gasping for breath in agony, they seemed no longer in their right minds. Well, it had been four days already. It would be no surprise if they had lost their sanity by now. The scene before me was undoubtedly grotesque and horrifying, yet it stirred no emotions within me. In a way, it was a familiar sight. After all, before I reincarnated as a human, I too was once a monster like them.

“Damn… It seems your wife has just died. How does it feel to have everything destroyed by filthy, lowly monsters?”

A man spoke as he walked through the swarm of monsters. Half of his face was twisted with burn scars, while the other half was covered in snake-like scales. From a human perspective, his appearance would probably be considered repulsive. He was not a pure monster. He was someone who had merged with a monster and turned into something else. Yet, he commanded the pure monsters as if they were his limbs.

“…That indifferent expression of yours doesn’t change, even in a moment like this. You don’t even flinch at the news of your wife’s death.”

The man muttered, his face showing a hint of weariness. Come to think of it, he had mentioned that my wife was dead. It seemed she had finally perished after being defiled somewhere in the hall. But even though I knew that, I felt nothing. After all, I was never capable of feeling any emotion.

Even though it’s been over 30 years since I was reincarnated as a human, my mind was still crawling around in the muck of the demon realm like a monster. During that time, I had tried to feel human emotions, but I hadn’t succeeded.

“Why are you doing this?”

A hoarse voice escaped my throat. After four days of barely clinging to life under his relentless torment, it was no wonder. My legs had long since been crushed and the tendons in my arms severed by the man’s claws. I could no longer wield a sword or charge forward.

“Why am I doing this, you ask…?”

The man’s red eyes narrowed as if he’d heard something amusing, and he looked down at me. He knelt beside me and cupped my cheek with his hand. Then he slowly dragged his sharpened nails across my face.

His claws sliced deeply, carving a long gash from between my eyebrows down to my chin. Another wound was added to my face, which had already been so mutilated that it was beyond recognition. I could feel the blood trickling down, but there was no pain. It was clear that most of my body’s sensations had already died.

“I was wondering when you’d finally ask… Impressive, really. It took things getting this bad for you to get curious, huh?”

“Get your face away from mine and speak. It’s disgusting to look at.”

I didn’t find it disgusting, but I said it anyway. Having been a demon in my previous life, such things didn’t arouse feelings of disgust. Still, with death just around the corner, there was no harm in teasing him once before I left. As expected, his face twisted into something monstrous at my words. His blood-red eyes, as if drenched in anger, seemed to darken even more.

“Yes, it’s disgusting, isn’t it? It took me a long time to get used to this face myself. But shouldn’t you be the last one to say something like that?”

“You made this face.”

His words confused me. Could he be someone I once knew? But no matter how hard I searched my memories, I couldn’t remember a man like him. He touched his face briefly, then looked down at me again.

“When I chose to leave behind my human body, I could have gotten rid of the scars—by shedding my skin, you see. But I chose to keep them.”

“That way, I won’t forget my hatred for you.”

A crooked smile spread across the man’s lips.

“You still don’t know who I am? After all the loyalty and devotion I’ve shown you, surely you haven’t forgotten me.

I narrowed my eyes and scanned the man’s face. Burns covered more than half of it. Black hair and red eyes… Ah, now I understand. I finally remembered who he was and why he had done all this.

The little servant boy who trailed behind me as a child. The boy I ruined with my own hands and cast out of the palace. Has he come back to take his revenge after more than a decade? Has he hated me so much that he has been tainted by monsters?

I searched through my long-forgotten memories. I remembered grabbing the boy by the hair and shoving his face into the burning coals. I think I also pulled out his nails and whipped him. What was the boy’s name?

“Ha, judging by your expression, you don’t even remember my name.”

“Am I supposed to remember something like that?”

I asked in a husky voice. I wasn’t trying to provoke him, I was just curious. But the man’s face turned into something resembling a demon from hell. But it only lasted a moment. Soon he smiled hollowly. As if everything had come to an end.

“Yes, that’s right. You… you were always like that. Never attached to anything. Incapable of feeling any emotion… Ha, even in a situation like this, you don’t even feel anger.

Of course, that was natural. The man was overwhelmingly stronger than me. By the law of power, I was crushed, and the moment I was defeated, my fate was handed over to him. No matter how he chose to deal with me, I had no right to resist.

“I endured ten years in the demon realm… only to find that I don’t even exist in your memory.”

The man leaned against the wall, muttering to himself. His expression was completely hollow as if the world had ended for him. Shouldn’t he feel more satisfied after getting his revenge? Why does he look so defeated?

I recalled my previous life. The Demon Realm was a world of survival of the fittest – a grim, slimy place where demons devoured each other to survive. Crossing from the human world to the demon realm was easy. Gates, as they were called, appeared and disappeared all over the world in endless cycles. But returning from the Demon Realm was another story.

Crossing from the Demon Realm to this world was as difficult as finding a needle in a desert. The gates were not only few but also disappeared unpredictably. The man had said that he had survived in the Demon Realm for ten years. Ten years. That meant he had found a gate relatively quickly. He must have spent every waking moment searching for one, driven only by his desire to kill me.

“…I guess it’s time to end this. There’s no reason to continue if I can’t stir any emotions in you.”

As always, he muttered something incomprehensible, then raised his fingers and rammed them into my chest. My body had long since gone numb, so there was no particular pain. I could only assume there was a hole in my chest when I saw his hand drenched in blood.

He walked towards the monsters, who were still in the midst of their grotesque feast, and shouted,

“From today, the kingdom will be wiped off the map! Go beyond the palace walls, take as many humans as you want, and feast until you are satisfied!

With that shout, a dark mass slithered out of the man’s shadow. A black snake, covered with dozens of eyes. Emerging from the shadow, it soared through the air, stretching beyond the palace. The monsters that had toyed with the nobles roared and followed, rushing in all directions.

“This is only the beginning. Soon this place will be a barren land where not a blade of grass can grow.

He spoke as if he were pronouncing a death sentence, and I knew it would probably come true. ‘So this life would end in such a hollow, meaningless way.’ Just as I thought that a strange voice, whose gender I could not determine, echoed in my mind.

[If you want to change the future, change your actions. Your actions will alter your destiny.]

***

“Gasp…!”

As the strange voice faded, my surroundings shifted. I panted heavily and looked around. The piles of bodies that had resembled a battlefield were gone. I touched my face, but the brutally mutilated flesh was intact. And this wasn’t the palace hall where I had died.

A small, private chamber, barely big enough for one person. In front of me was an altar and a statue of the goddess. It was unmistakably a personal prayer room in a temple. I suddenly remembered praying during a theology class at the academy.

“…Was it all just a dream?”