From the Tip of the Tongue of the Lowliest Maid - Chapter 50

This work contains scenes of sadistic coercion and hardcore depictions of BDSM. Reader discretion is advised.

It was a similar sensation. Clearly, something was shaking him. Something sweet and ominous was crawling through his veins. Ragnar walked through the sleeping darkness of the world, heading toward the farthest corner of the castle.

The closer he got, the stronger the unpleasant scent of metal and blood became. The stench of death was overwhelming. Ragnar furrowed his brow.

Though it was a place that killed animals for his sake, to sense the reality of that death outside the dining table was still displeasing.

Even Ragnar, familiar with battlefields where corpses piled up like hills, found the stench of death in the slaughterhouse especially unpleasant. And he knew why. It was the one-sided massacre of unarmed beings.

Enduring the foul stench that even God might turn His head from, Ragnar stepped into the damp and musty building. The black stones were soaked with all kinds of moisture.

He felt as if he might suffocate beneath the weight of sin. Only cursed beings could endure such sin. Their god had said so.

Eventually, his steps came to a halt.

Ragnar’s refined boots touched the blood-soaked stone floor.

It was the place where the stench of death was thickest—the heart of the slaughterhouse.

“……”

He inhaled deeply.

This was the wavering of a great Holy Knight, revealed only in the god-forsaken darkness—never exposed under the light.

“Arzeletta…”

In the darkness of the slaughterhouse, moonlight seeped through a narrow window like a prison cell slit.

Pale skin like the moonlight, hair darker than the dark. Her every step, graceful as if dancing, shimmered like an afterimage beneath the dim veil of moonlight.

Ragnar’s throat trembled.

Why was that woman here?

Just a few days ago, she had been bustling about with laundry under the white sunlight.

What had stopped Ragnar in his tracks was Arzeletta.

Clearly a cursed being, and thus naturally belonging to such a place—yet a woman he never imagined would be here.

The veins on the back of Ragnar’s hand bulged hard.

He had come here looking for something, but finding that something was far from welcome. Even more so, confirming that it was Arzeletta—that cursed, lowly woman.

The dizzying stench of blood, the traces of accumulated death, the thick darkness that seemed to prove they had been forsaken by God—even within the gloom, a sharper darkness loomed. And from a crack in the old window, a blade of moonlight pierced through, illuminating Arzeletta.

Her face, revealed beneath the fragmented moonlight, was pale and translucent. Even Ragnar, who had offered every sense of his flesh as a sacrifice to God, thought it was not something human… She was a beautiful existence.

And into the nape of that Arzeletta’s neck, Yoseph the hunchback had buried his nose. Arzeletta’s long hair swayed. The nape she offered to the hunchback was delicate and slender. Yoseph, like someone making a desperate confession, embraced her from behind, pressing his nose and lips against her neck.

He was a man with a cursed hump on his back, a monster-like figure—but in this slaughterhouse, Yoseph alone was king. Upon the death that he ruled over in his own world, he dreamed a perfect dream toward a woman cursed like himself.

“Arzeletta.” Yoseph called her name desperately as he inhaled the scent of her neck. Arzeletta, Arzeletta… How many times had he repeated it in his heart? The name, finally spoken aloud by the hunchback, felt damp and clinging.

“Mm…” At the voice that spilled from Arzeletta like a scratch along the throat, the hairs along Ragnar’s spine stood upright. Haa— A breath, like a sigh he couldn’t hold back, was so vivid it felt as though it had been blown directly into his ear.

Whether it was a moan, a response, or a reply to Yoseph’s call, the sound could not be clearly distinguished. But the sweetness contained in that breath unpleasantly provoked Ragnar’s nerves.

…Adultery. A filthy act of lust committed by a man and woman not bound by marriage.

“Arzeletta.” The hunchback’s desperate voice as he called her name momentarily halted Ragnar’s judgment.

Do they even have law? Here, in this vile slaughterhouse steeped in nothing but sin?

The laws of Impellias strictly forbade acts of adultery within the domain, but they were not subject to the law. Incomplete beings like them were not treated as citizens and bore no responsibilities.

Law, morality, ethics. But was the discomfort he felt at this moment truly because of that?

The question Ragnar posed to himself was soon interrupted by Yoseph’s voice.

“Are you scared?”