Apotheosis of a Demon - A Monster Evolution Story

AFTERSTORY 03 - THE NIGHTMARE BEGINS

Coming out of my three-year hibernation, I decided to go check out a human town.

There were a few human villages nested deep inside forests the way demihuman settlements used to be, but there was only one single 'country', or at least something close to being a country, that had a lot of humans congregating, where interaction with demihumans was actively being maintained.

The human race once numbered in the hundreds of millions. The virtually-suicidal decisions that they'd made time after time during my fight with the Unseelie Lord and their loss of the World Tree's blessings meant that the human race, complacent in their luxury and safety as they had been, was now barely a shadow of themselves.

Quite a few of them had still been alive when I finished reviving all the World Tree Saplings, in fact. However, their population took a further dive as many humans found they now had to contend with the threat of monsters, a threat they'd forgotten how to deal with since generations ago, as well as the vengeance coming from a small group of vindictive demihumans.

But all was not lost for the human race. With the help of demihumans and some of their own people who had taken up arms to be Adventurers once again, the dangerous but less intelligent monsters began to be culled. Slowly but surely, a new country was established, and the human race began its journey of recovery...

...according to what the Saplings told me, anyway. The consciousness of the new Saplings had come from my fellow orphans and secret alpha testers, and they could be quite... playful, from time to time. Sometimes they also told me about stuff I honestly couldn't care less about, like "The neighbor just had a litter of kittens!"

So I had no idea how much of what they told me were accurate.

I took out a pure-white hooded coat from my subspace inventory and put it on. I landed in the only human country in this world.

While the humans had their own leader in the form of a representative instead of a king, formally, this was actually a 'multi-racial nation' run by a council whose members included demihumans.

Over half of the country's population were humans. Yet watching the faces of the humans walking around town, I saw less excitement for their civilization's revival and more a kind of unease.

Well, I suppose I could understand why. It was exactly because humans were weak that the other races had allowed them to parasite on the World Tree in the first place. Now that they no longer had access to their incredibly convenient magitools, I expected they would feel conscious of their physical disadvantages compared to demihumans.

I understood, but I wasn't going to do anything about it. I mean, I was a Goddess of this world now. I wasn't going to start favoring one single race over another.

One of the former orphans who was knowledgeable in Oriental culture told me that I was similar to a sort of koujin, a wrathful god of purifying flames. By nature, I was very much not any kind of merciful Buddha.

"We humans had once sinned—"

From far away, I heard a faint voice that sounded like it had been amplified by a magitool.

"Hmm?"

On a whim, my feet carried me closer. A single human man and several demihumans were standing on a stage and making a speech in a plaza.

"...Tiz?"

He was that one ex-emperor of some fallen country or another. Haughty, but quite an interesting character. By the end, as a leader of humans, he'd realized his sins and helped me with the destruction of the Saplings. Next to him was... the girl of the pair of elven twins, if I remember correctly.