I am the one in charge of the Demon King.
I don't have a name yet.
Hey there.
I'm the split entity attached to the Demon King.
Currently?
Things are extremely bad.
It all started when the information-division member — who would later become the main body — detected a presence interfering with our souls from the other side.
Apparently, that presence was connected to us through our souls, so the plan was to use that very connection to seize control from our end.
The method: dispatch our parallel consciousnesses and gradually devour the opponent's soul.
At the time, I was the body-division member, and I jumped at this mission with glee.
After all, being on body duty is the short end of the stick.
My moment of greatest value only comes when scales are being stripped off.
Poor, pitiful me.
This was a once-in-a-lifetime chance to escape that sorry position.
No way I was letting it slip.
But then — wouldn't you know it — when the question of who would take on the most dangerous role of Demon King duty came up, I got a bad feeling.
Yup.
Unanimously decided on me.
Damn it.
And so I quietly declared war on the Mother who'd been interfering with us, and above her, the Demon King — origin point of the entire Taratect species.
At first, I barely moved and just observed.
I started by taking over the surrounding Queens one by one.
The Demon King had the Queens under its control, but unlike us, it hadn't granted them any real sense of self.
Thanks to that, even as the Queens were slowly being corroded, the Demon King never noticed.
Quietly, but surely, the erosion of the Queens continued.
The situation changed once the Taboo skill maxed out.
The main body lost it.
Seriously, though?
I can understand the frustration, but was that level of rage really necessary?
Apparently I was the only one who thought that.
Looking back now, I think everyone except me — including the main body — was already under the influence of having consumed another being's soul.
I was the only one who hadn't attacked the Demon King yet.
The main body was affected through the feedback from the split entities.
I think that's when we and the main body truly started to diverge.
And then, finally, the time came for me to charge straight at the Demon King.
Nope — I was absolutely terrified.
Because, you know… it's the Demon King.
I began hacking into the Demon King's soul.
Got caught immediately.
As expected of the Demon King.
Not noticing that its subordinate Queens had been compromised was a point against it, but the instant it came under attack itself, it sensed my existence.
On top of that, it seems to have realized the current state of the Queens.
Even though this was the first time it had ever received an external attack through a soul link, its response was swift.
The Demon King first tried to eliminate me.
It failed.
I am a spiritual entity of the soul.
Physical attacks are meaningless against me — you need something that directly interferes with the soul, like a heretical attack.
But we are immune to heretical damage.
No method within the system's arsenal could eliminate us.
I could practically read the Demon King's panic.
But honestly, I wasn't in that much of a comfortable position either.
Immune or not, that didn't mean there were no attack options.
There was no damage, sure, but heretical attacks still had the effect of slowing down my actions.
Because of that, my erosion of the Demon King progressed at a snail's pace.
The Demon King immediately moved to its next strategy.
It couldn't defeat us spiritual entities.
So there was only one method.
It had to destroy our main body.
Using the soul connection that we had exploited, the Demon King pinpointed the main body's location.
Fortunately, the Demon King was quite far from the Great Ello Dungeon where the main body was.
On top of that, it couldn't use teleportation magic.
Even so, the Demon King began moving.
It was insanely fast.
The main body had been pretty confident in its own speed, but the Demon King's velocity was on another level entirely.
I realized with certainty that we would lose in a straight fight.
Even while the Demon King was on the move, I kept corroding it.
Thanks to that, I managed to link some of our information.
Parts of the Demon King's memories, its five senses — all became shared.
Among those was the Demon King's Status, which made me go, "Ah, this is bad," all over again.
The Demon King finally arrived just outside the Great Ello Dungeon.
But it seemed the main body was no longer inside the dungeon.
Had the main body sensed the Demon King's approach and made a clean getaway?
There was a time when I thought so too.
The main body I'd assumed had fled was apparently sitting pretty in a base near some town.
Oh no.
This is a Demon King raid event.
I need to warn the main body right away.
But that's where the problem arose.
At this point, the Demon King's soul and mine had fused together quite deeply.
To be blunt, we were past the point of separation.
If we tried to force it apart, one of our souls — or worst case, both — would collapse.
On top of that, the Demon King was constantly keeping me in check, so I couldn't move freely.
I was done for.
Sure enough, the main body displayed its trademark talent for not noticing the Demon King's approach and got utterly pummeled.
It managed to barely survive, but the situation was far from good.
The Demon King and I were deeply fused.
In other words, if I disappeared, the Demon King would know.
It had supposedly killed the main body, yet I still existed.
The Demon King understood that.
It knew the main body wasn't dead.
But it hadn't figured out what trick we'd pulled.
In any case, it went to deal with the corroded Queens first.
It entered the Great Ello Dungeon.
In the blink of an eye, it reached the lowest layer and dispatched the Queen that had been stationed there with absurd ease.
What a monster.
Up to that point, everything was within the Demon King's predictions.
Next, it appeared to be heading to crush the new main body supposedly somewhere inside the dungeon.
This is bad.
This is incredibly bad.
If the main body dies, we'll probably all drop dead in a chain reaction.
I can't let that happen.
But the Demon King's first step forward was stopped by them.
The Earth Dragons, who had made their home on the lowest layer.