Chapter 103 Male’s Dwelling
Edited by: Kanaa-senpai
So we’re just a little bit closer to our destination.
Their limbs barely obeyed and their heads were wrapped in a fine fog. Every joint seemed corroded and creaked, but there was no chance to rest. They supported each other and moved forward, like a wounded animal and its offspring huddling together, fleeing toward a place that might offer a last quiet.
For some reason, a small, ridiculous cheer rose in him.
It was the Psionic Power, used too much—the kind of mental strain that made the world tilt and laughter leak out of him like a cheap cough. Fatigue made his smile crooked and too loud for the situation.
”Hey, Flatty-chan, if we get eaten by the blue Maggot, we’ll probably become a friendly pair of monsters. If that happens, I wonder if we’ll be able to live here happily ever after?”
He imagined it plainly: forever side by side on those low, rolling hills, always together. Her shyness would melt into a softer, kinder companionship—no hunger, no illness, no wars. Like sibling pupae settled into a quiet life, their days unbroken and gentle.
What difference would that be from being properly alive? Both were versions of the same, unending dream—an intercourse with sleep that would never end.
”Like a storybook ending, huh? Then the two live happily ever after. I kind of like that,” he said, grinning despite the heat and heaviness in his bones.
Heat climbed through him; his body felt feverish. Maybe an infection. His thoughts thickened until words drifted away and made little sense.
”Come on, pull yourself together. We’re almost there,” Flatty-chan urged.
”Yeah. We’ll play together, tend the fields for work, sleep under the same roof at night. There’s nothing here, but Flatty-chan would be beside me. Wouldn’t that be lovely?” he babbled, voice soft with the image.
”Living a day-by-day life in the countryside isn’t lovely at all. Being poor is the worst. I won’t let you live like that—even dead, I won’t. So get up and come this way. You can see it already,” she snapped, then eased into a more anxious softness.
She tugged him along, her arm warm and stubborn. He tried to name her in his mind—who was she, really? The face and the name slipped like wet paper.
His breathing was raspy, a dry wind through a hollow reed.
”You’ll keep living as you like,” she said, oddly tender beneath the command. “You’ll keep scraping at my heart, doing good and foolish things, always making me worry. That’s the right way.”
Her own head bobbed like a ship in fog—her focus drifting as badly as his. Did he ever have an older sister like this? He couldn’t remember. The landscape blurred and slid past.
There was a strange memory, or perhaps a trick of exhaustion: a single cocooned person who, when they saw him, stopped whatever they were doing. Not just stopped—seemed to draw the attention of others away, as if protecting him. Maybe it was a hallucination. Maybe not.
When he came to himself, they were near the edge of the woods. The in-between memories were jagged and incomplete, as if he’d been running a sleepless marathon. They collapsed on the ground and lay there until their reason and strength returned like a tide.
Fortunately, no monsters prowled the clearing. The relief hit him deep—if even this place were searched, they had no plan beyond running.
He sent out a mental probe with his Psionic Power and read the forest.
”This is… wait. Ugh, damn… calm down for a moment,” he muttered.
”Whoa. Hey—are you okay?” Flatty-chan asked, alarmed.
”Yes. It won’t take long. Turn away for a bit, please.”
”Understood. O—okay. There, there,” she said, awkward and worried as she watched him.
He vomited—again—salt and the sourness of bad luck. If only he could purge the fatigue with it, but his knees simply went weak and nothing more helpful followed. After the metallic taste ebbed, he reached out with his mind once more.
The male settlement was not a forest at all.
It looked more like an anthill of human parts and a mass of belongings, all bound together with blue Maggot silk. Organic spires rose like towers—each almost ten meters high—and there were well over a hundred of them, a clustered city of rot and structure.
The stench was violent, raw and fishy; it struck his eyes and made them water, though the threshold of his awareness dampened its worst. Still, nothing about the scene was bearable.
”This is driving me mad,” he said under his breath. “A monster nest. We have to go in?”
It was a final disposal ground for people—broken ones, those who’d failed to hatch, the discarded and the dead. It felt like a gruesome scene from a bad horror film; the smell was worse than stepping unmasked into a waste-processing plant. It hurt more than it offended.
Tangled in the towers were the clothes of poor townsfolk, pieces of daily life wrapped into the living architecture. Mummies and fresh, dripping flesh lay piled together—maybe hundreds or thousands who’d come to this place over decades and never returned.
Around the meat-spires, dozens of red-black butterflies hovered despite the night. They settled on carrion like ordinary moths on animal carcasses, drawing moisture away. This place was their perch and their rest.
”I want to burn the whole thing,” he said, voice low and heated. “Drive a gas tanker into the Maggot nest and blow it up… no, stop. My head’s still fuzzy.”
This wasn’t a satisfying action-movie moment; it was real and disgusting, and they had to enter alive. If this were a film and they were the cheeky couple, they’d have been killed by now for flirting.
He had hoped to use the forest’s wood as building material for a cabin, but that plan fell apart the moment he saw the scale of the nest.
They finished their preparations at the entrance. This was a middle level of the dungeon—the central district—and the only escape was forward. His feet trembled, but the way out lay ahead.
They were powerless explorers; most explorers were, he reminded himself. Still, they carried one weapon each: Psionic Power.
He turned to Flatty-chan and met her serious face.
”Confirm this: in the trees you’ll go ahead with your Psionic Power active so you can’t be seen. If we run into anyone, it’s fine—you won’t be visible. I’ll carry your body and follow behind.”
”If someone comes from the front, you’ll warn me right away?”
”Yes. If I’m found, take it as a loss.”
He became the coal-miner’s canary—walking into danger to test the air. An invisible scout no one should notice.
If they could salvage furniture from inside, they would move silently and borrow a few pieces, then synthesize them into a shelter using their Psionic skills.
”What if we get trapped with no way out? If someone corners us from both sides—what then?” he asked.
Flatty-chan taught him the fallback.
”If the attackers are monsters or normal people, we fight. But if they are Psionic users, we surrender quickly. We won’t fight unwinnable battles.”
Flatty-chan is weaker without weapons, and even armed she is not especially strong.
Even a surprise attack might fail. He had never seen a Psionic user weaker than her in open combat—but she never pretended otherwise. Pride wasn’t her flaw; she knew her limits, and that honesty was the mark of a true Imperial Guard.
Strength was the courage to admit weakness.
”If that happens,” she said quietly, “I’ll switch to persuasion. If the Psionic user isn’t parasitized, they’ll never harm you, Young Master.”
He met her steady gaze and nodded. Courage moved between them like a breath shared in darkness.
Fear belonged to both of them.
If she were caught trespassing into a male’s sleeping chamber, it would be an instant death sentence. He might be spared, but Flatty-chan would be executed without question.
”I’ll try to fight back,” he murmured. “I won’t let them hurt you. I’ll make a scene, cry like I did when we delayed the move. Maybe they’ll pity us.”
A sorrowful male form was trauma itself to the females of this world. A pathetic, clinging gesture—like a stray dog—could stay a hand that might otherwise strike.
”No woman would hurt me if it means hurting you too.”
”You mustn’t,” she said firmly. “Whatever happens, you must put yourself first. Tell them everything—about the monsters, about me—and follow their orders out of this floor.”
”Aren’t you afraid? You’re not forcing yourself?”
She smiled faintly. “I have a bamboo-spear mind. An Imperial Guard who fears serving her master isn’t worthy of the title.”
She lied.
Terror and the will to live bled from every pore, a pale aura trembling around her body.
He remembered suddenly—Flatty-chan was barely twenty. At that age, he too had been ready to risk his life for the opposite sex. It hadn’t been a lie. For the one person he’d pledged to, he’d done anything. That kind of self-sacrificial impulse could kill her easily, like gravity pulling a stone downhill.
She was trying to impress him.
He would have to watch her closely.
If their enemies were still human, they wouldn’t want to mar his image; they might hesitate. But if everyone inside had already turned into monsters, there would be no mercy. In that case, the mint oil—the weakness of the cocooned beings—would suffice. A splash, a strike, a surprise death.
A reckless tightrope act.
But somehow, with their patched map and half-broken compass, they had traced an escape route through the maze.
”It’s dangerous,” he said. “But we have to go.”
”We’ll succeed. We’ll come back,” she replied.
He smiled faintly. “Then let’s go.”
The world fell silent again.
His body remained behind, slumped in Flatty-chan’s arms, while his consciousness slipped ahead ten meters into the forest of flesh-towers. Red-black cones rose in ranks, a maze of warped anthills made from corpses. Visibility was poor—the long, narrow mounds curved and twisted into gullies and clefts like a nightmare landscape.
The ground sank with each step, sucking at his boots like mud. Limbs of the cocooned hung limp from the tower walls, and invisible blue Maggots writhed along the surfaces. When they sensed the mint oil from earlier, they withdrew into cracks, fleeing the scent. A few dropped from above, pattering softly; some landed on his clothes and scurried away.
He passed the entrance and reached the first corner. Each corridor ran seven or eight meters before the next bend, too short to see through. He swallowed back bile—the air itself tasted of rot, heavy and alive—and kept moving. The bloody tang coiled up from his lungs into his throat.
This world of flesh was silent, like walking across the surface of Mars.
Then, ahead in the passage, a human figure appeared—a person with a head half-pupated.
”——?[distorted speech]——”
The sound came like a fly buzzing near his ear. It talked to itself, the noise unpleasant, insectile—half muttering, half humming a broken tune.
”Flatty-chan,” he whispered across their mental link. “There’s one coming. A monster. Three meters and we’ll cross paths.”
Only she could hear him.
When the creature turned the corner, Flatty-chan struck.
She aimed for the head, silencing it before it could make a sound. The cocooned skull burst under her blow, the body folding with a dull collapse.
The soft pupa tore; the thing was dead before it fell.
”Next,” he said.
She only nodded.
They hid the body in a corner, quick and quiet. Another cocooned figure appeared soon after, and she dispatched it the same way.
Whenever others came, they pressed against the cold spire, breath shallow. Each second beside the growing heap of corpses eroded what was left of calm.
They found several open chambers within ten minutes—enough to gather tatami, tables, partitions. They stacked everything neatly. All that remained was to carry it out of this pit.
”I’ll free both hands,” he said. “Returning to the body now.”
The world flickered and righted itself—the comforting scent of conifers, the crisp night wind.
They trudged through the trees, both arms full of furniture. Only the forest left to cross. A few more trips and they’d have enough to build. They couldn’t risk building here; the sound would give them away.
They quickened their pace, wary of meeting another monster.
”It’s sad, all those people killed by monsters,” he said, “but at least we don’t have to take any more chances.”
”Exactly,” she replied. “Conquering floors isn’t a man’s work. If we can avoid it, all the better.”
They shared a thin, weary breath of relief.
Then, from far away, came voices.
Loud, angry voices.
”Shh—Young Master, someone’s coming again,” she hissed.
Flatty-chan moved in front of him, straining to listen. Her hearing was sharper than his.
The voices grew clearer, cutting through the dead air.
”That’s what I’m saying! Our comrades are in danger—why won’t anyone help? There are a thousand townsfolk who can still move!”
”But wouldn’t it be easier to wait and strike here?”
”Too late! The ground team’s fighting up there already! You’d really let them die?”
Of all times, it had to be now.
Voices arguing—two women. The kind of quarrel cocooned beings shouldn’t even have.
They were coming closer from the direction of the entrance. No cover anywhere. In a few moments, they’d collide head-on.
”Flatty-chan, what do we do? Should one of us take one each?”
”No time to check with Psionic Power whether they’re monsters. We go back—now.”
”And the cargo?”
”Leave it. This instant.”
He hesitated, but obeyed. They set down the folding screens and bits of furniture as quietly as possible, abandoning them in the middle of the corridor. Their footsteps slipped away into the twisting dark.
The farther they went, the fewer hiding spots remained—walls too clean, partitions too straight. At the final turn, they collided with someone.
A young girl.
”Wha—who are you? What are you doing here!?”
”[Interference]. Move aside!”
”Kya—!”
Recognition jolted through him—the petite girl from their first day here, the one always at Himawari’s side. Flatty-chan’s fist met her face before the thought was finished. The blow shattered the girl’s head like tofu crushed in bare hands. She fell without a sound—proof she was a monster.
Flatty-chan dragged the body into a niche. The corpse was light, small—barely a teenager.
”…Her head’s gone,” he whispered.
They both flinched, faces stiff. It wasn’t a sight anyone could stomach. Flatty-chan swept the fragments aside with her foot and hurried on.
”Lucky she was taken over already,” she murmured.
”That girl—Himawari’s friend, right? One of the Imperial Guard candidates. I thought she could use Psionic Power. She died too easily.”
”Once they’re possessed, even Psionic users lose their power. They’re just puppets.”
So even the gifted lost everything once infected. The way her skull burst so easily proved she had no mystic defense left.
Then came other voices, sharp and confused, drifting from behind them.
”…blood. In the hall…”
”Someone… disposal… look—”
”Quickly… intrusion… we must find the Young Lord!” [distorted]
They turned, panic blooming in their throats, and slipped through the nearest door.
Inside, three beds stood in neat order. The room glowed with a false sanctity—clean, perfumed, veiled in layered curtains descending from the ceiling like a princess’s canopy. They hid behind the fabric, breath tight.
The voices outside grew louder, passed the door, then faded. Wrong room.
He let out a long, shuddering breath. Silence returned—holy, oppressive. The beds were immaculate, as yesterday, white sheets folded with ritual precision. Only the soft breathing of three males disturbed the stillness.
He sent out his Psionic Power. The heavy nets parted as he checked each sleeper.
At a glance they looked peaceful, even fragile.
Flatty-chan whispered, trembling, “Young Master… how are they? If they’re still alive, we should request rescue for them.”
Her voice was prayer itself.
He shook his head. “Too late. We missed it.”
”What do you mean?”
”Their heads… eaten. They might be alive somehow, but I can’t tell.”
The truth was uglier than words could hold. The three men were long lost.
”Blue Maggots are inside their brains,” he said. “Half their skulls are gone—what’s left is… mixed. The Maggots are cocooning with them.”
Above the nose, all muscle and bone were missing. The brownish brain stems gleamed, half embedded with strange creatures—half Maggot, half butterfly.
The remaining brain tissue fused with the parasites, wrapped in translucent red-black threads like spun glass.
They looked like alien brains sealed in jars.
”They’re murmuring,” he realized. He leaned closer, but heard only nonsense, the broken syllables of patients trapped in dreamless coma.
”They don’t have words. No self left. Just kept alive. Maybe death would be kinder.”
Flatty-chan’s throat caught. Even if they weren’t her masters, seeing males consumed was agony for any woman.
He used his power again, lulling them back into silence. There was nothing else to do.
When their forms blurred back into stillness, Flatty-chan wiped her eyes and steadied her voice.
”So the infection differs between men and women… but these three are still alive.”
”How can you tell?” he asked.
”Ordinary corpses don’t stir a woman’s protective instinct,” she said softly, conviction rising.
”What do you mean?”
”When a male is near, the air changes. It’s not disguise or decay—it’s something you can feel. A sense that you must protect, that your body remembers its purpose. I feel it now.”
A female sixth sense—instinct or illusion.
Males were fishing lights in the dark; wherever they shone, females gathered. But the lure only worked while the light still burned. Perhaps it was the monsters’ strategy all along. More lamps, more prey—it made a cruel kind of sense.
He thought of Himawari. Her Psionic Power hadn’t faded; that meant her master still lived, somewhere above.
They both looked back at the three bedridden figures behind the gauze.
”…What horrible monsters,” she whispered.
”Yeah,” he said quietly.
He turned off his Psionic Power and sank back into his body. He couldn’t bear the sight any longer. He had almost joined them—half-dead, brain split, will dissolved.
”If that attendant hadn’t used mint oil to ward them off…” Flatty-chan began.
He remembered those eyes—gentle, maternal, the way she’d looked at him before dying.
He would have shared their fate: brain-dead, she turned into one of the things.
The surface Imperial Guards would come for him—Trash-san and Vocal Slut-san leading the descent, their Psionic Power burning like flares in the dark. No one could have stopped them. Their unbroken psychic signal meant only one thing: he was still alive.
They would rejoice at his survival, even as something in them whispered that the reunion was wrong. But that whisper would fade in days. No one wanted to face the truth that reunion itself was a trap.
Thus the prey multiplied.
Joy disguised the snare. Visions of family and freedom lured them deeper until none ever returned.
Yet—had no one ever escaped?
He clutched the dead attendant’s key in his sleeve, a tiny charm of cold brass. Her silence was a final message: *You can do what others cannot.*
Flatty-chan straightened, her resolve renewed.
”Once the outer presence fades, we’ll carry the supplies again. Please catch your breath.”
”Wait. Someone’s here. In this room.”
”I’ll deal with it.”
”Okay.”
She vanished toward the small chamber at the back. A moment later she returned, carrying a tray—and blood dripped from her fingers. He sensed it first, reaching out with Psionic Power; Flatty-chan braced his limp body against the wall. The thing she’d struck down had been carrying slabs of raw meat and—fingers. Food for males.
When it fell, its surface thoughts flickered through him. It was a caretaker—a supposed mind-reader who had tended the three bedridden men.
”How could a corpse still wield Psionic Power?” he muttered.
Flatty-chan wiped her hands on the netting, voice low. “I don’t think she ever could. That ability died when the Maggot took her brain. She only pretended—to comfort the women. Claiming she could read the hearts of the sleeping males was a convenient lie.”
”A lie everyone wanted to believe,” he said.
”Exactly. A way to speak to men who’d stopped answering.”
Monsters, she explained, could mimic human gestures but not thought. True understanding was impossible. Their cleverness came from some other origin—one that mirrored but never reached comprehension.
”They can talk without knowing language,” she whispered. “Feel without emotion. Become human without ever being one.”
He shivered. “The cocooned ones—their voices were nonsense once the illusion dropped. Just noise.”
”Then they weren’t speaking at all,” she said. “We heard what we needed to hear. Sound itself deceived us—a mystery’s echo.”
Strip away the illusion, and the speech became static and scraping. To onlookers, they were lunatics conversing with a television’s snow.
”It’s likely they just reflected our wish to communicate with males,” Flatty-chan concluded.
He nodded. The rescue team’s theories had said the same: a dark inversion of the wish-granting mystery.
He was about to move when shouting rose again outside. Shadows crossed the netting—two women forcing open the door.
It was midnight. No one but attendants should enter a male’s chamber. For a moment he thought: *Monsters.* But they weren’t.
Flatty-chan pulled him close, whispering, “Hide at the back. Don’t move until they leave.”
They crouched together in the corner behind layers of folded cloth. The air stank of iron and jasmine.
The door burst open. Himawari strode in.
Her hands dripped blood, her whole body shining pale white. The light made her skin seem sacred, her hair a halo of defilement. There was no wound—perhaps she had only just been resurrected.
Power radiated from her like heat. His skin prickled under the psychic pressure.
”Fresh blood,” she hissed. “Someone was here.”
Her colorless eyes swept the room, slow and merciless.
”They’re still close.”
He froze. This was the same killing aura from that day in the dungeon, when she’d chased him through corpses and smoke after her comrades died.
”Kill all intruders,” Himawari ordered. “Even if they’re Kujukuri scouts—or that ridiculous-named Imperial Guard. She slaughtered my people. I should have broken her sooner.”
”Himawari-sama,” murmured the timid woman beside her, “bringing severed heads into the masters’ chamber is—”
”Ah, right,” Himawari said. “Forgot myself.”
She kicked the head in her hand into the corridor. He recognized the face, once kind, now emptied.
Then she sniffed the air again.
”Still inside. I can smell them.”
”In here? Impossible—this is the males’ bedroom!”
”They think we won’t defile sacred ground. That hiding beside the invalids makes them safe.”
”The masters—are they unharmed!?”
”Lock the door. Whatever happens, I’ll kill them.”
The other woman obeyed, turning the iron key. The lock’s click sounded like a closing tomb.
”We were too gentle,” Himawari whispered. “Should’ve chained them from the start. No mercy, even for our masters. If we’d crushed their necks early, none of this would’ve happened.”
Blood traced her fingers as she stepped forward, voice trembling with ecstasy and rage.
”Two wasn’t enough,” she said. “I should’ve killed more Imperial Guards first—made them understand I was serious. One survivor would’ve been plenty.”
And with that, the light around her flared, unholy and perfect, as though faith itself had gone mad.
Notes:
• Psionic Power – Mental energy concept in Chapter 35’s lecture. Trash-san teaches it to strengthen the protagonist’s mind after dungeon ordeals.
• Himawari – A one-eyed black oni girl/aberration-type psionic; town leader/face; asks for promotion help; apologizes for killings; sets 2‑day deadline.
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Edited by Kanaa-senpai.
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