– Contract –

Prologue

Leticia panted shallowly. Her body, trembling under the weight of pleasure, didn’t easily regain its strength even after the o****m had passed. Instead of moving her limp body, she turned her gaze and faced Mikhail. His smile, tinged with smiling eyes, was lewd.

“Hah…”

“Don’t tell me you’re tired already.”

At his words, Leticia let out a small, breathless laugh. Their lovemaking, which had begun before sunset, had continued until daybreak, so wasn’t the word ‘already’ a little much? But Mikhail noticed her reaction and whispered spitefully.

“Should we stop if it’s too hard?”

Leticia looked up at Mikhail as he smiled wickedly. She knew well enough that this wasn’t really a question. He only wanted to tease her. Just from the fingertips pinching her n*****s, or his hips slowly beginning to move again, his intentions were obvious.

“Hngh, just…”

“Just?”

“…Keep— hah, ah…”

Before she could even finish speaking, his manhood struck hard against the entrance of her womb. Her body, made unbearably sensitive from repeated orgasms, quivered even from the brief stimulus and begged for what came next. It felt good. It was pleasure so overwhelming that she didn’t want to think of anything at all.

“Ah, aaangh…! Mikhail, hah! I love you…”

“Liar.”

It was always the same answer. No matter how many times she said she loved him, Mikhail didn’t believe her. Perhaps that was only natural. As he said, her love was a lie. This is a problem. The thought surfaced awkwardly, but soon melted away into the pleasure that followed.

I.

There were wishes in the world that people wanted to fulfill even at the cost of their souls. Whether the reason lay in humanity’s greedy nature or its innate foolishness didn’t matter.

To demons like Leticia, the only thing that mattered was the fact that humans always carried wishes in their hearts and waited for the day those wishes would come true.

So her profession should have had a promising future. Harvesting human souls through contracts and bringing them to Hell, that was.

Because of the recent war with the Heavenly Realm, Hell was desperately short on slaves. With even high-ranking demons missing, slaves went without saying. Thanks to that, the status of demons who brought in human souls had risen considerably.

However, that was only when their performance was good.

“I never thought a case like this exists.”

Leticia, a rookie demon, muttered as she sat on the roof of a building. It had already been a month since she was assigned her territory, but Leticia had yet to secure even a single soul.

That had still been the case an hour ago. Leticia had tempted a woman who had lost her young daughter by telling her she would be able to see the child again, then held out a contract. Offering her a pen, Leticia urged her to sign in the sweetest voice she could manage.

The woman hesitated, then picked up the pen, and the closer the nib came to the parchment, the deeper Leticia’s smile became.

…If only a stench hadn’t drifted in from outside at that very moment, Leticia would have landed her long-awaited first contract.

Leticia glared at the roadside. Three priests were holding censers that gave off an atrocious smell. That stench was the problem. Humans seemed to love that sort of smell for some reason, and the moment they breathed in the smoke, they threw aside the contract and ran outside. Even now, there were easily more than a dozen humans following behind the priests. It meant that all the nearby residents had rushed out.

‘Did I get assigned to the wrong territory?’

Her vague mutter sounded quite plausible. Her seniors had said they didn’t know anything about those annoying censers either, so that damned patrol system was probably something that existed only in this district.

Complaining wouldn’t change her assigned territory, so Leticia grumbled as she moved elsewhere. If she wanted to track the scent of despair or sorrow, she had to get as far away from the censers as possible.

By the time even the sunset had faded, a sweet scent drifted around the tip of her nose. All sorts of negative emotions gave off pleasant smells, but a scent this sweet, as if it would melt her lungs, was clearly the scent of sin. It seemed someone had committed some grand act of blasphemy. Or it might have been murder or robbery.

Leticia didn’t care either way. Most sins stemmed from desire, and for that reason, sinners easily fell for a demon’s temptation. To her, that fact alone was what mattered.