Monstro stepped into the forest to get away from them. He gripped his knife and, little by little, went deeper into the gently rustling trees.
As soon as the men were no longer visible, his anger came out as screams.
“Idiots! Stupid damned idiots! How am I supposed to hunt with just a knife?!” he shouted. With just one small knife and no experience hunting, the whole thing was a fool’s errand. With what he had, he couldn’t kill anything bigger than a wild rabbit, but they were far too nimble and clever for him to catch. Even if Monstro could catch one, he didn’t think it would provide enough meat to satisfy the party. Bringing back a wild boar would do the trick, but attacking one with a knife was a sure way to turn hunter to prey. If, by some small chance, a monster appeared, he’d have no recourse. That would be the end.
“I can’t... I can’t die in a place like this... I still have to open my own restaurant! I’m gonna earn money with my cooking and climb the ladder. I’ll become successful and important and then get my revenge on those jerks!”
Cheering himself up by shouting and cursing his harassers, he continued deeper into the forest.
“H-Huh?!”
His thoughts were suddenly interrupted by an eerie buzzing noise. At first, he thought it was a fly buzzing around his ear, but he couldn’t see anything of the sort. No matter how many times he turned his head, the sound neither went away nor got quieter. To make matters worse, the sudden darkening of the forest meant the sun must have set. It was impossible to hunt like this.
He would be humiliated, but there was no option other than returning to apologize. They might beat him, but they wouldn’t really go so far as killing him.
Irritated by the weak, incessant buzzing noise and nearly tripping on roots and sticks jutting up from the ground at all turns, Monstro eventually made it through the forest without incident.
“Huh?” he said. What he saw at the other end had him at a loss for words. The three men who had been tormenting him were all lying in puddles of blood. One of them had been decapitated, another had a gaping hole in his chest, and the last had been torn in half. An older man sat atop one of the corpses.
The man—whose gentlemanly air struck one immediately—had white, swept-back hair streaked with gray. Blood, almost certainly sprayed from the wounds of the three dead men, dyed his arms a dark crimson.
Monstro gagged. The stench of the blood from the slaughtered men was strong enough to make him want to vomit. He wanted to get away as soon as possible, but his feet were rooted to the spot. He was completely paralyzed by fear and his body would not listen to him. His teeth ground, his frame trembled. The old man looked at him with cruel, piercing eyes. At that moment, Monstro realized that he was about to die. Memories of his life scrolled by like the pictures cast in the light of a revolving lantern.
The early death of his mother.
Helping his father out with the restaurant that he ran.
The first time his father, so picky about taste, had praised his cooking.
The destruction of his hometown, victim to a stampede, on a day he had left to head into town for ingredients.
“Did you make this?” the old man asked in a cold voice, snapping him back to reality. Realizing that there was still room for questions like that, Monstro knelt down where he stood and began to beg for his life, face contorted in fear.
“P-P-Please... Please don’t kill me...”
“Answer my question. I’m asking whether or not it was you who cooked this food.”
“Y-Yes! Yes, it was me. I made the food.”
“I see. Are you an adventurer?”
“N-No! I’m no more than a worthless cook who can’t fight at all! I-I have no quarrel with you! Please, just let me go...”
“You’re overdoing it. If you don’t want to die, then you will respond only to my questions, nothing more.”
Monstro started to say yes but stopped partway through forming the sound and swallowed his words instead. He nodded.
The old man continued. “Can you make things other than this?” he asked. “This,” Monstro assumed, meaning the tomato stew.
The old man was holding a spoon and bowl in his hands. Monstro couldn’t believe that he was able to enjoy the food while the stench of the corpses still filled the air around them.
“Y-Yes. As long as I have the ingredients.”
“I see. If that’s the case, then depending on your qualifications, I may refrain from killing you.”
“My...qualifications?” Monstro asked in a terrified, wavering voice. The old man pointed at the sky with his spoon. Monstro—although terrified that he would be killed the moment he took his eyes off of the man—followed his point and gazed upward.
Monstro screamed inside, but no sound left his mouth. Directly above him were countless thousands of small flying insects.
Not regular bugs either. The fact that he could see them so clearly at this distance meant they must have been massive. They resembled flies, but they had giant, scissorlike mandibles. A massive swarm of them—devil flies—blotted out the sky.
“No way...” Monstro was not an adventurer and therefore had a limited knowledge of monsters, but he knew devil flies. These were the monsters that had descended upon his birthplace in a swarm: the “stampede” that had destroyed it.
Rumor had it that another monster existed where the swarms gathered: the Lord of the Flies. Because it was always accompanied by innumerable devil flies, which were level C, the Lord of the Flies was assigned an A rating. Class A monsters were said to be highly intelligent, even capable of mimicking human behavior.
The Lord’s apparently advanced age lined up with the timing of the first devil fly stampede that had ever been observed.
“Are you...the Lord of the Flies?”
“Name’s Beelzé. So it seems humans have become aware of my existence, then,” he said, furrowing his brows in anger. Somehow, his mood had been soured. Panicking, Monstro prepared to apologize, but Beelzé cut him off. “That’s why I decided to separate myself from the devil flies.”
“Separate...?”
“That’s right. I’d love to just spend my days satisfying myself with the simple pleasure of good food like this, but the devil flies draw adventurers. None of them have managed to reach me yet, of course, but it’s starting to bring me down. That’s where you come in.”
“...Me?”
“Mm-hmm. If you swear to provide me with good food and a peaceful life,” he said, “I will grant your wish.”
His cold, cruel eyes looked into Monstro’s and seemed to say, Well?
Monstro could do nothing but nod.