“Enough. At this rate, the people on the other side of that wall will hear everything.”
The fight had grown heated, and I finally intervened on the pretext that the screams would be overheard by the men who had been waving their cocks around in front of the wall.
“Secretary. Put Maria back in her restraints, then send her to solitary.”
“Yes, Assistant Trainer.”
It was less mediation than a one-sided command.
“Mmgh, mmph, mmmph!!”
Maria was dragged off to solitary while continuing to shout that she had been wronged, that this was slander, and that she was not having an affair.
“.......”
With the target of her anger gone, Zentia continued to snort furiously, her eyes still bloodshot.
This was quite different from being soaked in an aphrodisiac or having one’s face flushed from alcohol. Anyone could tell that Zentia was enraged enough for her blood pressure to have shot through the roof.
“Zentia.”
After retrieving my cock from Eris, I dressed myself properly and stood a short distance in front of her.
“Do you trust me?”
“What?”
“I asked whether you trust me even in a situation like this.”
At my question, Lilith tilted her head.
Eris also watched my expression, while Zentia simply stared blankly for a moment before frowning.
“Don’t tell me….”
“You didn’t take everything I said at face value, did you?”
Zentia’s eyes widened as though she had been struck on the back of the head.
“D-don’t tell me you deceived me…!”
“Whether I deceived you or not, I don’t know either.”
“What?! What kind of wordplay is this…!”
“If your husband really did have an affair, then what I said becomes fact. If not, then I was merely making an assumption.”
“……!!”
I bent my knees to meet Zentia’s gaze, then placed an index finger against my lips and smiled.
“Until your husband says it himself, I don’t know whether it’s true or not.”
“Th-that….”
“Don’t you find yourself thinking about it? What if what Maria said was true? What if she really was being wronged? She didn’t even commit adultery, yet in a situation where she was on the verge of death, she was mistaken for an adulteress.”
“.......”
The wariness in Zentia’s eyes toward me returned.
Until now, she had treated my words as though they were the truth.
I had even told her myself that they were the truth.
But now, her faith in them was beginning to waver.
And the one shaking the very foundation of that trust was none other than me.
“However, there is one thing we know for certain.”
“What—what are you trying to say? No, what are you trying to say, sir…?”
Zentia was wary.
Zentia was hoping against hope.
Standing on the boundary between distrust and trust, she could not even tell whether her attitude toward me was hostile or not.
“What am I trying to say?”
I pointed at Hole Number Two.
“Your husband did not choose you.”
“……!!”
“Did he order his subordinates to fuck you? I don’t know. Did his subordinates read the situation and avoid Maria of their own accord? I don’t know that either.”
“P-please stop.”
“Did your husband, Kite, quickly figure everything out and secretly give orders to his subordinates, then take only Maria for himself? Did he want to become hole-brothers with the men who came before him in one way, but not in the other?”
“Stop… please!!”
“To stop, we have to confirm the truth in the end.”
The truth.
That single word was driving Zentia mad.
“Do you want to know?”
“Know what?”
“What the truth is.”
“.......”
“We’ll reveal the truth more clearly and explicitly. Humans feel things better through actions and emotions than through words, don’t they?”
With my own hands, I undid the restraints holding Zentia to the chair.
There were still mana-control cuffs around her wrists, but Zentia slowly rose from the chair and put some distance between us.
“Let’s gradually reveal the ‘real’ truth behind this dispute.”
Whether that truth was what Zentia wanted, or a cruel truth she did not want, was something we would have to wait and see.
“H-how are you going to find it out?”
“It’s simple.”
It was an exceedingly simple matter.
“All we have to do is destroy the anonymity.”
If they had been playing games within the fence I had built for them, then all I had to do was destroy that fence myself.
“Secretary.”
“Yes, Assistant Trainer.”
“Wash Zentia and dress her in new clothes. Cover her face and hide her identity with a robe. Make her look like a demon observer concealing her identity.”
“An observer…?”
“Yes. Something like this.”
To help Lilith understand more easily, I bowed elegantly toward Zentia.
“Would you care to take a look at this lot, my lady?”
“.......”
At first, Zentia looked me up and down as if she had no idea what I was doing.
“These men are quite excellent. They are suitable for you to play with, so if you tell me which cock you want, I’ll wrap it up nicely and send it to your salon.”
“What are you trying to—”
“Ah, I may have become too immersed in the role.”
I had wanted to convey the general idea, but Zentia must have been under too much pressure.
“Secretary. You understand the sort of feeling I’m going for, right?”
“You mean a slave trader and a noblewoman who has come to purchase a sex slave?”
“Exactly.”
As expected of Lilith.
However—
“…How, specifically, are you planning to proceed?”
It seemed Lilith did not know what I intended to order after disguising Zentia as an aristocratic lady.
Well, that was only natural.
If I told her my plan outright, it would mean that a magic capable of reading minds existed.
“There’s nothing complicated. Zentia only has to give a signal. She wants to check a slave’s skills.”
“Check his skills…?”
“Yes. And the cunt she’ll use to check those skills is this one.”
I placed a hand on the chair Maria had left.
“......Ah!”
Zentia let out a cry of realization.
“Heh, heh heh…. All right. I’ll make that the wager.”
She laughed lowly, swallowed, and nodded.
“If my husband really is having an affair with Maria… I’ll obediently submit to your will.”
* * *
Morning.
I leisurely welcomed the morning in the assistant trainer’s office.
“.......”
Natalie, the supply succubus whose virginity I had taken, first sampled each dish to confirm that it was safe.
I had intended to eat leisurely after checking that nothing was poisoned, but—
“Secretary. Is there something you want to say?”
“Have you not made things a little too complicated?”
Lilith, my female secretary, thrust a report densely packed with information at me.
“I don’t know how I’m supposed to report this.”
“Weren’t you planning to report it once everything was over?”
“I have to organize things bit by bit so that I can submit the report quickly and assist you, Assistant Trainer.”
The report divided the prisoners into four groups.
Kite. Zentia. Maria. The subordinates.
The arrows pointing from one to another had been erased, supplemented, and tangled together into a complicated mess.
“…You’re not going to tell me that another one of the subordinates was secretly in a relationship with Maria, are you?”
“Even if that were the case, it would have nothing particularly to do with corrupting Zentia.”
I turned the page and wrote the word ‘Zentia’ on a fresh sheet of paper.
“There’s no need to think about it so complicatedly. What matters is that Zentia accepts ‘what the truth is.’”
“What the truth is…?”
“It’s a matter of perception.”
“Perception….”
“Among humans, there are people who clearly know that their partner is cheating, yet pretend not to know because of other factors and continue living that way.”
There were actually quite a few couples like that.
Because of their social honor, perhaps. Because of their children. Or because they had been gaslighted into believing that the problem lay with them.
“There’s no need to ask Zentia whether she ever noticed signs of an affair before. She’ll recall such situations and come to that conclusion on her own.”
“That….”
“That’s right. It’s Zentia’s prejudice. She’s already looking at her husband through colored glasses, assuming he must have committed adultery.”
“.......”
It was a distortion of the truth.
“That’s right. I said I was telling her the truth, but it wasn’t the truth. It was merely an opinion.”
“Not a fact….”
“A situation I believe to be the truth.”
“.......”
“Do you want a clearer answer?”
Lilith gave a short nod.
Even Natalie, who had been standing quietly, pricked up her ears and listened.
“All right. I’ll tell you. I told Zentia what I believed to be the truth, yet I also told her that my words might be false.”
“You mean it really is an affair?”
“Yes.”
“Why would you tell Zentia that…?”
“Because what I’m aiming for is to turn Zentia into a vampire, a member of the Demon King’s army.”
She needed faith and trust.
“She can’t simply despair and kill herself, or decide to tear every human apart. She has to become a vampire at my side and work for me out of faith.”
“Um….”
Natalie raised her hand.
“Do you mean that you first made her doubt herself, so that she would realize on her own that the doubt itself was an act of consideration—and a clearer truth?”
“Something like that. You see, humans can’t properly comprehend the concept of negation.”
Like how telling someone not to think about an elephant only makes them think about an elephant.
‘My husband didn’t cheat on me. The Assistant Trainer must have lied. The more I repeat that to myself….’
“He might have cheated?”
“Exactly. She probably spent the whole night racking her brain and suffering over it by now. Then, the moment she learns the truth, her faith in me will become even firmer. She’ll accept the wager as a complete defeat.”
There was only one truth.
“He did cheat.”
I could say that with certainty.
“Even if I know nothing else, I can definitely tell apart the fucking bitches who cheat and then shamelessly scream that they didn’t.”
I had seen a certain nuance peculiar to women like that in Maria.
—Ah, fuck! I didn’t go to the club!! You don’t trust me, oppa?! Is this all our trust amounts to?!
From the expression and voice with which Maria, Hole Number Two, had indignantly shouted, I was certain of the truth.
“Shameless bitches always lift their chins the highest.”
Who was more wicked—the Zentia who had been cheated on without knowing anything, or Maria, the other woman and dungeon wife?
“Well, I might just believe that because I want to. Heh heh.”
“…What’s the probability?”
“99.99%?”
“But….”
Lilith tilted her head with a grave expression.
“According to the conversations the guards reported hearing between the soldiers….”
“That’s the trap.”
I mimed covering my ears.
“Those bastards knew we could hear everything they said, so they put up a smokescreen.”
“......Pardon?”
“More precisely, it seems they were doing everything they could to protect Maria’s cunt, at least, in order to deceive me, the human assistant trainer….”
They had acted as though there were internal divisions among the humans.
“If they were going to make a communal cunt, they should have become hole-brothers all the way to the end. Heh heh. Do you know what Kite’s mistake was?”
“What was it?”
Day Two.
“He made his subordinates fill one cunt in succession, but he himself shoved his cock into his lover’s untouched cunt.”
All the way through Day Three.
That bastard never touched the used-up cunt the others had fucked.
“Perhaps on the first day he tried to be a sweet husband, but after seeing his subordinates fill his wife’s cunt, he decided it had become a whore’s cunt.”
Day One.
“The moment Zentia had been turned into a rag by his subordinates, that bastard decided to use Zentia as a rag while protecting Maria. He abandoned Zentia, deceived me, and tried to steer things toward a situation favorable to himself.”
Within the limited circumstances, that bastard did his absolute best to deceive the Demon King’s army.
“If he had known his wife was being fucked and still chosen his wife’s cunt through his tears, I would have thought he was a pathetic, idiotic, hopelessly devoted man who was a sucker not only for his lover but even for his own subordinates, rather than an adulterer.”
“Even though his wife was being gang-raped by his subordinates, he still loved her….”
“‘Sob, my dear wife! I’ll draw the other men’s semen out with my cock! I’m sorry!’ If he had acted like that, I would have been fooled.”
If he had even pretended to plunge his cock into the ragged cunt his subordinates had used one after another, scraping out the semen they had pumped inside her, I truly would have been deceived.
“But what a shame.”
All that effort had been in vain.
“Now, who’s going to become that rag?”
Day Four.
“Call all seven of them to the room with the wall cunt. And….”
I folded down the first of the three fingers I had raised.
“Number Two. No, there are only two choices now.”
Zentia’s cunt was gone.
“If we put Maria, the other woman, into the first hole, where will the subordinates put it? Their superior’s lover’s cunt? Or….”
I extended my hand toward Lilith.
“......The priestess?”
Lilith answered.
“Correct.”
Behind Hole Number Three was Dalia.