Reincarnated as the Monster of all Monsters

"Don‘t you dare to try and lecture me, Demon! It is only through my mercy that you were even given the possibility of living here in the first place, and I can just as easily withdraw my mercy!"

Though barley noticeable, the soldiers surrounding the Archbishop gripped their weapons just a bit more tightly, a clear indication to Hendrik that these knights were truly loyal to the Archbishop. Even willing to go against him and his wife, if their master deemed them a threat.

It was a difficult situation, to say the least, and not one he wanted to be in, though he had always known that it might be a possibility. He had hoped it wouldn’t manifest in reality. Despite being supposedly blessed by the gods themselves, he had always known that Herz’ background would cause trouble regardless.

He quietly took a step back, keeping his eyes closely on the knights hands, if any of them dared to try and strike his wife he would…

He stumbled backwards, in his mind, screams echoed, and looking down on his hands, he saw blood clinging to them. At his feet was a man wearing the silver armor of the kingdom, and next to him was a demon wearing the black armor of the Demon Lords armies. His wife’s spell had clearly worn off, the nightmares haunted him once more.

His own mind tortured him now as it regained its full senses once again, every dead body surrounding him suddenly morphing into other people, people he called friends and family, people he had led down and had gotten killed in the war.

Why had he been chosen? He was no warrior, no hero, or leader; he had been a simple nobody living out his life normally, studying to become a simple craftsman in his small hometown. And yet he was supposedly the chosen hero to save this world? If so, then why was he such a failure in everything? He had gotten them all killed he had he had he had he had…

He fell to the floor, his body cold and unresponsive, his mind playing out every single death he believed he had caused through his ineptitude as a leader, over and over again.

He had sworn to never pick up that blasted sword ever again after the war had ended, but then he was summoned to personally escort some criminal, and then the blasted archbishop demanded an audience soon after. And of course he demanded to see the "Holy Blade that slew the King of Evil."

Even just looking at the sword had been enough to make his head spiral with guilt and anxiety. If it weren’t for his wife, he couldn’t even hold it much less wield it in battle like he had just a few moments ago. And even then he had to hold back so as not to throw up during the battle, his psychological scars so deep that even his wife‘s powerful magic had trouble keeping them contained.

He began to rock back and forth, sometimes flailing his limbs around as to slap away the many traumatic visions he now faced once more.

His sudden outburst was the thing that broke up the ensuing fight just a few steps away from him, his wife having dispelled her disguise to reveal herself in all her demonic glory as she and the Archbishop argument continued to spiral out of control.

Rushing to her husband's side, her hands engulfed in a green light, she touched his forehead with as much care as if he were made out of porcelain, and soon Hendrik‘s mind began to clear once again, his many visions fading away, slowly being replaced by others. He saw himself and his wife standing under the tree on the hill, the red light of the sunset bathing them both in a warm glow of happiness, their three children dancing in a field of flowers.

In that memory, he was save and happy, and a small smile broke out on his face as he saw each of his children smiling faces before him.

Ever since they had their own children, both he and his wife started to see the world differently, it had been their way of healing from deep wounds that both of their decisions had led to, and ever since they moved to this village, she had grown increasingly attached to the many children of the village, often telling them the stories of their lives simplified as a heroic prince going on a quest to save a captured princess, with her father being portrayed as a tyrannical dragon.

In other words, children were incredibly close to her heart, and learning that a supposed friend of theirs was responsible for the murder of countless of them was, of course, a reason for her to lose her temper and possibly outright attack the Archbishop.

But the resulting tranquility of his wife focusing all her attention on helping him, rather than arguing with the Archbishop, was suddenly broken as a scream rang out into the air, a scream filled with terror and pain.

A child‘s scream.

And this time it was real, and everyone heard it, it was not a part of Hendrik‘s trauma-induced nightmares, but reality.

Startled, Hendrik shot up, almost bumping heads with his wife in the process. He looked towards the source, as did everyone else, and there he could see a swarm of people approaching, there were children, women, and men all running towards them, seemingly completely unaffected by the sea of corpses laying in front of them.

He turned to his wife, who‘s demon eyes could see more clearly and farther than his ever could, she looked just as confused as he did, as were the Archbishop and his knights, there was seemingly nothing in the direction the people were running from.

Soon, however, the blurry faces of the people became more clear, and a gasp rang out from his wife, and though he himself couldn’t yet recognize the faces, he finally started to put two and two together, as did all the elves  present.

Those were the people living in the village, and they were all running away from the village. The only thing in that direction other than miles of untamed wilderness and forest trees.

Without a second thought, both Hendrik and Herz rushed towards the mass of people, they had spent years now living among them, and they considered most of these people friends, if not outright family, forgetting all about the previous heated discussion about fanaticism and responsibility.

But another thought soon crossed both of their minds: before leaving to greet the visiting Archbishop, they had left their own children in the care of close family friend Marcus, the village backer who often kept their children quite and satisfied with his treats. But as they finally managed to reach the storming mass of people, amongst the chaos and screams of terror and fear, they could not find the old friendly man, nor his eye-catching bright pink apron he had inherited from his wife after she had passed away.

They tried to flag down and ask some of the people, but they simply ignored them and kept on running in terror, even the fully armed and armored Knights of the Church, who rushed after them after they realized what was happening, were struggling to control the mob of terrified people.

Eventually, with the help of both the Archbishops and Herz's magic calming the masses down enough, so that questions could be asked, but even with the magic to calm the people down, most simply refused to describe the horror they had witnessed with tears rolling down their faces and their bodies shaking uncontrollably when asked to describe what happened.

When asked about Marcus and their children, most simply answered that they didn’t know, that they only had the goal of getting away, and that they hadn’t stopped to see who else had made it or not. Eventually, however, they came across one person who seemingly still had his wits about him, an ex-adventurer by the name of Julianna.

"The thing came from the lake, it was covered in a black slime I didn’t recognize; at first I thought nothing of it, it wasn’t screaming or seemed to be in pain, it simply walked through to the marketplace…"

Julianna‘s eyes were staring into the sky, she wasn’t blinking, and her face was completely pale. Her tone was completely devoid of anything that could be regarded as emotion, it reminded Hendrik of the corpses he had seen Necromancers use in battle, another reminder why it had been banned by the crown for being to unethical.

"Someone approached, asked if everything was alright and what that black slime was... The following scream was so loud... And when I looked up, the person was kneeling on the floor, and that thing was holding something in its hand. I couldn’t really see what it was, but it was fleshy, and blood was flowing everywhere… It turned its head to look at me… And it was like I had seen the face of madness itself as it was simply smiling at me. What happened after was just a blur, all I remember was that I was running and screaming…"

A shaky exhale, the first sign of emotions...

"I can still see it‘s crimson red eyes staring right through me, every time I close my eyes, I can see it’s smile... I‘m scared to sleep because I know I will see nothing but that thing’s smile and eyes, staring at me…"

Julianna then began to mindlessly ramble, becoming more incomprehensible and nonsensical with every passing moment.

Frustrated and his anxiety only increasing more and more, Hendrik turned and began to run towards the village. He ignored the calls of the knights, the Archbishop, and his own wife as he increased his speed, the only thing on his mind being his children and whether or not they were save.

He was only briefly hindered as his wife screamed for him to wait up. Looking back, he could see her as well as two knights running towards him, slowing down to let them catch up. His wife ran into him, almost tackling him to the ground.

It took longer than usual to cross the fields, as they were littered with the corpses from the battle, but eventually they managed to get past the two trees that marked the beginning of the village grounds, and they were met with absolute carnage the moment they stepped into the village marketplace.

Multiple bodies were laying all over the market place, and puddles of blood were strewn about everywhere, from nearby houses to the many stalls selling their wares, it seemed no place was spared of the crimson liquid.

A man was slung over the crates of a stall, the fruits it once contained having rolled all over, the few that remained inside were covered in blood, multiple walls were lined with corpses that were sitting in puddles of their own blood, while another wall had multiple dents inside of it, with the body of a dead child laying face down in a puddle of blood in front of each of these dents.

It took all of them a moment to take the sight in, what was once a quaint and quite village square had turned into a sight that put some battlefields to shame, or so they believed, until they flipped one of the dead people laying in the dirt over, trying to identify the man.

The man's eyeballs had been torn out and stuffed inside a hole in the man's stomach, as had been multiple of his fingers and toes, and pressed into the flesh of the man's forehead were many teeth, while a handful of hair was stuffed inside the man's mouth, despite the fact that the hair on the man's head seemed mostly untouched.

Everyone present had to hold back the bile from overflowing, while the unlucky knight who had flipped the man over was so shocked he stumbled backwards and couldn’t move for several seconds.

Looking around, they found that most corpses were defiled in similar ways, most having had their limbs or other appendages like fingers or toes cut off and stuffed into holes that were ripped into their body elsewhere, most commonly the stomach or thighs. Many were also missing their teeth and eyes, though none were quite as brutal as the first corpse they had tried to identify, but even so, the states of these bodies were easily enough to make all of them very close to throwing up, and the tipping point was soon found as they entered a house with a broken down door and a trail of blood leading towards it.

Inside they found two people, a woman and a wife, bound by rope to their chairs around a table and another piece of cloth tightly bound around their noses. Out of their mouths were sticking multiple body parts like arms and legs, and on the table itself were the bodies of two children, their arms and legs ripped out and a fork and knife sticking inside of their backs.

The two adults showed no sign of damage or harm, having seemingly died due to a lack of air.

They choked to death on their own children’s limbs stuffed down their throats.

Even as a man who experienced the demon wars firsthand, this was too much, and the sight and smell made Hendrik throw up, just like everyone else did as well, with the exception of his wife, who had searched a different house and was luckily spared the truly gruesome sight.

Once Herz reconvened with the others, she found them in their sorry states and immediately used her magic to calm them all back down again, smartly choosing not to enter the horrifying house herself, but even with her magic, they still needed a few minutes to calm down enough to continue, and in the eerie quiet that followed, the town somehow seemed even more dead than it already was, and with no wind blowing, even the trees stayed completely silent, like they were mourning the events that had unfolded here.

Continuing the search, they only found more and more of nothing. As they further and further got away from the marketplace, the fewer the bodies and blood became, there were fewer and fewer signs of struggle and simply abandoned houses, as the terrified villagers left as soon as possible, which led to a horrifying theory, that whatever attacked wasn’t out to destroy the village or conquer it or anything like that, it simply wanted to cause as much pain as suffering as it possibly could, choosing to kill and harm fewer people, to inflict horrible torture and pain on those it did manage to catch.

As they reached the very edge of the village where people still lived, there were no signs of blood or a fight anywhere, just hastily left behind houses in an attempt to escape to a safer place and away from the horrible monster, but of course to escape, they either had to flee towards the nearby river where traders would often ride along from and to the capital, thereby crossing the marketplace, or they had to run into the dark forest filled with wild animals and dangerous plant life.

A set of nearby footprints in the dirt road showed that most chose to try their luck through the marketplace, but some very clearly ran into the forest. As such, they came up with a quick plan, sending the two knights after those who ran into the forest to try and find them, after all, they were elves, and this was their territorial specialty. While they stuck around the village to try and find any clues as to what and where that monster went, it couldn’t have just disappeared after all.

As they returned to the marketplace, their facades of stoic bravery started to crumble almost immediately. They have basically searched the entire village at this point but have found absolutely no sign of their children anywhere, nor of their caretaker Marcus, and it began to eat at their nerves even more as they had seen the corpses around the village.

Would they even be able to recognize their children if they have been killed?

What sort of torture must they have gone through at the hands of this vile creature?

These thoughts and many more now constantly circled their minds more and more, and their desperation and frustration only built more and more, and yet they never gave up, searching every home and checking every body for any signs of their children or Marcus, and this endless determination was then rewarded.

As they were searching one of the abandoned homes, they used fire magic to light up the interior of the house, and there on the floor, amongst the many different things strewn about as the owner had made a quick escape, they found a trail of blood leading to a door, and as they opened the door, they found a lightless room that once was the bedroom, everything was destroyed and blood coated the walls and floor, and in the very middle of the room, there lay a man, each of his limbs spread out as much as possible, in each of his hands and feet, a nail was driven through to have him bolted to the floor, unable to move, as hundred wounds oozed blood out from his body.

But just as they were simply about to leave, thinking it was just another horrible tortured soul, tortured and killed by this monster, a sudden noise rang throughout the room, it sounded like something heavy was smashed against something that was soon followed by an unmistakable sound of a scream, though it was muffled and extremely quiet, but in the endless quiet of the village they both were easily able to hear it, and it came from underneath them.

 

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Hanna was glad she stuffed all of these people's mouths with their own clothes, but she also kind of regrets it, while it kept all the annoying crying and pleading out of her ears, it also stopped her from enjoying the wonderful screams of agony and pain to their fullest. She had considered just dealing with the constant annoying noise, but she soon found that it actually just ruined the wonderful sounds her actual victim was making, who knew that so many children together could be louder than an actual adult having their eyes gauged out by her tail while she broke every single finger one by one.

Grabbing her latest victim off from the hard stone wall she had just thrown them against, she noticed the lack of a noise coming from them, one quite slash across the guy's remaining face with her claws confirmed her suspicions, that the man was now dead. Hanna frowned at the corpse, some of the children had managed to survive longer than this guy did, how absolutely unfulfilling.

She flanged the corpse across her shoulder onto the pile where all the other corpses now lay, she decided that it was easy to just store them all here instead of dragging them all back onto the marketplace, it also saved her time to play with the next one much quicker.

Turning around, she looked onto the next person in line to have fun with, and her face lit up in sadistic glee as she saw just who was up next in the makeshift cage she had created out of shelves and barrels.

Three pairs of tear filled eyes stared up at her. It wasn’t often that something like that occurred ever since she got her new body, but whenever it did happen, it felt absolutely beautiful to Hanna.

She walked over slowly, making sure every single step she took made a splash in the many blood puddles that were scattered across the room. She didn’t know why this person had a secret room far below his house, the many bottles around the room made her think of a wine cellar or something like that, but that seemed way too unpractical to be true.

Then again, it did come very much in handy so she wasn’t about to complain.

Once she was in arms length of her next victim, she stopped walking and simply stared, enjoying their faces of pain and fear.

She hadn’t exactly kept track of how many she had managed to drag down here and torture until their bodies went limp, nor did she really count how many she killed up on the village grounds, they all simply blurred together into one blood-and-agony-filled torture spree. She was simply too blinded by the immense enjoyment of it all to truly care who she currently tortured or mutilated, but this would be different.

Ever since the first moment she had laid eyes upon these faces, she knew that these children were special, protected by a powerful spell that prevented any harm that may come to the children and made it impossible to even think of harming them, it had even kept her insatiable appetite for pain and suffering at bay for a time, as well as having seemingly magical disguises that made them look human, or at least hide their more demonic parts.

A young boy and his two sisters, the people who found her and led her back to this quaint, beautiful village, at first it seemed like a curse. She questioned everything there was to her life and existence, the only reason she was here now was because she had been a pawn all along, controlled by forces beyond her understanding, her entire existence meaningless as she was nothing but a puppet that would be discarded after she had done what needed to be done.

But she had spit in the face of that, she killed the one responsible for that fate, and now she was finally free, free to do whatever her twisted heart desired. She had been sent here by accident, used by a Demigod to hide from the consequences of their action, then used by the embodiment of fate itself, to correct supposed wrongs in this world that weren’t meant to be, but now she was finally, completely free.

For a moment she hesitated and thought to thank these children, in a way, it was them that had made all of this possible in the first place, though it only lasted for a brief moment.

She slowly started to reach out with her claw, the children backed away as far as they could into the corner, but it was not enough, and she grabbed one of the girls arms and started to pull her out. The other two, however, did not stop resisting yet as they both grabbed the other arm of the girl and started to pull her back, and much to Hanna’s shock, she was starting to lose this game of tug of war.

Many people had tried to pull her victims back after she had selected someone, but even the adults never managed to even resist her for more than a few seconds, but here these two toddlers were actually managing to pull their sibling away from her grasp.

She released a growl of anger and grabbed with her other claw as well, pulling with as much strength as possible, but all that did was put her and the two children in a stalemate, with the child being pulled screaming in agony, and although it was muffled by her mouth cover, the scream still managed to make Hanna’s ear ring.

They stayed in that stalemate for a while, with neither side willing to stop for even a moment and neither side seemingly running out of stamina, but eventually a subtle tearing sound could be heard, and before Hanna could even realize what was truly happening, she ripped the child’s arm off, and the sudden loss of a counterweight sent her running backwards, where she slipped on a puddle of blood and fell right into her makeshift cage.

The old wood stood no chance against the force of the impact, and many shelves and barrels were immediately destroyed, with pieces of wood flying everywhere.

And Hanna screamed.