Became the Queen of the Legion

“Are you coming to your senses now?”

I used a tentacle with its end sharply modified to untie the rope binding her wrists.

I had realized midway that, unlike the others, she hadn’t lost her sense of self yet.

Her reactions were different from the others who were completely broken.

If so, there was no need to kill her right away. Just like I kept the goblin chieftain alive to talk, I merely called her to hear what she had to say.

“I won’t eat you right away, so don’t worry.”

I smiled bitterly looking at her, all curled up. Although her mind wasn’t broken, it was certain that she was in a state of diminished capacity right now.

‘Judging by appearance alone, she’s close to human-type. Her ears are round too. What race is she?’

At the same time, I examined her appearance closely. I could see a different aspect compared to when she didn’t have proper consciousness.

Her snow-white skin seemed even whiter than mine, and her fluffy pink short hair was a mess at the ends, as if the goblins had cut it roughly.

Her face was haggard, but beautiful enough that even that haggardness couldn’t hide it.

Considering this is the demon realm, there were a few races that could be candidates.

“Hieek?!”

When I used a writhing tentacle to push away her resisting arm and checked her lips, a particularly prominent fang was visible. As I thought, she was the race I had guessed.

“A vampire, I see.”

“Y-yes, that’s right.”

As I smiled after releasing the tentacle, she finally opened her mouth and started speaking properly, trembling with fear.

“My name is Seira Merteus.”

“Vampires are demons belonging to the upper tier of racial value. Even if you’re a low-ranking one, there’s no way you’d be enslaved in a mere goblin village. Especially with a surname, indicating noble class.”

“How do you know such…”

As I listed out the information I knew about vampires, her eyes shook slightly, widened, as if she hadn’t expected me to know in such detail.

As if wondering how a being like me could know that. Indeed, to her eyes, I’m probably just the queen of monsters leading strange monsters right now.

“Who on earth are you?”

So naturally, she could only ask that.

I slightly raised the corners of my mouth at her words, asked blankly while sitting on the floor.

“Even if I tell you our identity, you probably won’t accept it anyway. So don’t bother trying to know and just answer what I asked. Why was someone like you captured by goblins?”

“That is…”

As I demanded an answer again, Seira glanced at the countless tentacles writhing around the chair and on the ceiling, then spoke as if she had no choice, beginning to tell her story.

As I expected, she is a noble-class vampire belonging to the upper ranks even among vampires.

But no matter how strong a demonic beast is, this demon realm is basically a chaotic world where aggressive races wage war and battle almost every day.

Her family was no exception. If there was a time when they were victorious and claimed glory, they could also be defeated at any time.

“It’s just that we were defeated in a power struggle with a rival family and paid the price. Usually, it’s tradition to allow one to enter eternal rest honorably, but the one who secured me was someone who knew neither honor nor tradition.”

The enemy who captured her annihilated her family and, claiming to take more perfect revenge, damaged the bodies of the women of her family, including her, so they couldn’t use their powers, and threw them to mere goblins.

She, being one of them, was subsequently sold and plundered among goblins, drifting until she ended up with the goblin tribe I annihilated.

“Well, no matter how much a player plays, it’s unlikely they could directly capture someone like you with just that level of power.”

I smirked as I learned her story.

It’s a sad story, but also a common one.

The defeated suffering shame and humiliation and losing everything… isn’t that only natural in nature?

“Though I don’t know your true identity, you seem to be a being more reasonable than the goblins. Please, grant me a final mercy and kill me honorably.”

After that, Seira prostrated herself on the floor in an awkward posture, burying her head in the mucus while begging me to kill her.

She wanted to end it cleanly, saying there was no hope or meaning in living on with a broken body that had lost all power.

“It’s too wasteful to just kill you.”

“…!”

But unfortunately for her, I didn’t want to easily kill her after she had come into my hands.

She flinched and raised her pale face, but I grinned, disconnected the tentacles from my body, and stood up.

“I’ll show you properly what kind of beings we are, then let’s talk again after that.”

I forcibly raised her as she staggered.

I fixed her body, which still couldn’t walk properly, with tentacles and gently held her trembling face.

Her eyes, filled with terror, shook uncontrollably. She seemed to have intuitively realized that if I set my mind to it, she could suffer something even more terrible than being violated by goblins.

However, I didn’t particularly intend to torment her.

“Look into my eyes.”

As thin tentacles formed at my fingertips and entered her ears, my eyes reflected in hers began to glow.

* * *

[The consciousness enhancement level is still too low to fully interpret the genetic information of higher species. Unless consciousness enhancement is done, the genetic information absorbed this time will be just undecodable dummy data]

“Tch, until when do I have to live eating only insects and beasts then?”

The dozen or so females secured along with Seira. They were all demons too, and even though they were broken, they were females of races belonging to the upper ranks compared to goblins.

I put them out of their misery by ending their breath and soaking them in digestive fluids, but I couldn’t properly interpret that information. The reason was that my power was still insufficient.

[Extraction of magic power from them was successful]

“For now, we’ll have to use just that.”

In the end, the only nutrient gained from them was magic power.

Now able to store magic power in my body, I gauged the amount of magic power I had steadily absorbed so far.

It’s clearly a small amount when viewed as a single group.

If I were to use this magic power clumsily, I would only produce inferior versions of goblin warriors.

‘Can’t be helped. For now, I’ll have to use magic power in a different way.’

What I first thought of was imitating the methods of demons familiar even to me as a player.

The mainstream of demons were, of course, those possessing magic power.

Sorcerers, magicians, knights, nobles, etc., who could have various roles in their respective races, were the ruling class and solid power class, and everything revolved around them even in war.

But with the amount of magic power I currently have, I couldn’t catch up to them.

From the start, the only magic power I could have was what I extracted by stealing from others, so it was fundamentally impossible to have a large number of soldiers possessing magic power.

‘We’ll have to leverage our strengths and develop our own methods.’

At this point, I decided to scrap the existing plan and walk a different path.

After all, this group over which I reign as queen couldn’t be measured by existing common sense.

“We’ll mass-produce ordinary soldiers just like now. If we maximize the characteristics of demonic beasts, they can become strong even without magic power. Instead, we’ll concentrate all the magic power we secure on a small number of individuals. This is better than being half-baked.”

I judged that it’s better to invest as much as possible and use them for as long as possible rather than creating and consuming mediocre soldiers.

Moreover, if that soldier has self-awareness and can voluntarily participate in countless future wars and grow on their own.

I coveted the experience Seira possessed.

If I restore her broken body and give her more power, I would instantly gain one powerful soldier incomparable to mere goblin warriors.

This was certainly an experiment worth trying.

[Sudden intervention of an oversized ego in the hive may cause confusion. Can you handle the ego of a vampire who has lived for at least 200 years?]

The system asked if I could handle Seira’s ego.

When her ego formally belongs to the hive. If I could control her.

“Of course.”

But it wasn’t a meaningful concern.

The possibility of me being overwhelmed by Seira didn’t exist from the start.

She will only be used as my chess piece.

I will replace every cell of that body, even the brain cells, with omnipotent cells that I can control, making it a body with nothing of her own.

Seira will only be reborn as a knight who absolutely obeys the queen’s orders. Her ego is enough just to know who she is.

“She has already agreed to it anyway.”

Of course, I wasn’t trying to do this without giving her any carrot.

It was an experiment proceeding with her explicit consent.