The World Is Mine For The Taking

Satania lowered her head then, as though she had finally come to terms with something she had been desperately trying to deny all this time. The look on her face wasn’t one of acceptance, but one of reluctant defeat, as if she had finally been cornered by a truth she wanted more than anything to reject. Her expression carried a frustration that almost looked painful, and for the first time since we met, she didn’t seem to have an immediate answer or comeback.

Her teeth were clenched so tightly that I honestly thought they might crack if she kept forcing them together like that.

Frustration practically radiated from her, yet it didn’t seem like she intended to act on those emotions, at least not right now. She looked as though she had finally realized that, despite being the one who killed Lilith, she had still ended up walking down the exact path Lilith had wanted her to take from the very beginning. That realization alone must have been enough to make anyone question everything they thought they understood.

Honestly, that thought alone was terrifying to imagine.

I also suspected that Lilith herself had been the one who revealed whatever truth Satania had seen, the very thing that drove her to want Lilith dead in the first place. If that suspicion was correct, then Lilith had been playing a game that nobody else even realized had started. Everyone probably thought Satania had acted on her own judgment, but maybe that decision had been carefully guided all along.

That possibility made Lilith far more frightening than anyone had ever imagined.

Raw strength wasn’t even the scariest thing about her.

Her mind was.

Well, she had been an ancient dragon, after all, and a being born from the cosmos itself. She wasn’t just another powerful creature who happened to live for thousands of years. She was someone who had personally shaped this world into what it had become today. Calling someone like that merely intelligent honestly felt like an understatement. Intelligence alone wasn’t enough to describe someone who had lived through ages beyond imagination.

Wisdom was probably a much better word for someone like her.

The kind of wisdom that only came from existing for so long that everyone else eventually became painfully predictable. Trying to outthink someone like that was probably like challenging the ocean to a drinking contest. It sounded impressive until you remembered who you were competing against.

"Now then," I said, breaking the heavy silence that had settled between us. "I assume you’re finally willing to listen."

"Just kill me," she muttered, her voice carrying none of the arrogance she had shown before.

"I won’t," I answered calmly, without the slightest hesitation in my voice.

She slowly lifted her head and stared directly at me, confusion beginning to replace the frustration in her eyes.

"...Why?" she asked quietly, as though she genuinely couldn’t understand my reasoning.

"Because right now, this world still needs you," I replied. "You want to protect it, don’t you? Or maybe your goal is simply to prevent it from being destroyed. Either way, our objectives aren’t really all that different when you look at the bigger picture."

My eyes remained fixed on hers without wavering for even a moment.

"And if you couldn’t even defeat me, and you couldn’t kill Lilith without everything still ending up according to her plans, then you might as well give up on protecting this world altogether, because enemies far stronger than Lilith are eventually going to arrive. They’re far stronger than she ever was, and they won’t be nearly as forgiving."

Silence filled the space between us for several long moments while she simply continued staring at me without saying a single word. Her expression changed several times during those few seconds, almost as though she wanted to argue but couldn’t find anything convincing enough to say.

Then she spat directly onto my face.

"Piss off!" she shouted without holding anything back. "I’ll never affiliate myself with someone like you!"

She definitely carried some kind of grudge against me.

That much was painfully obvious from her reaction alone.

Honestly, I wasn’t particularly surprised by it.

Trying to deny that would have been pointless anyway.

The spit slowly ran down my cheek, but I didn’t even bother wiping it away. Instead, I simply let it slide down naturally until it eventually fell to the ground. Cleaning it off right away honestly felt less important than keeping the conversation going.

To be honest, I had expected her to be stubborn from the very beginning.

Her current reaction still managed to exceed those expectations by quite a bit.

Then again, this was Satania I was talking to.

Someone who embodied Wrath was never going to become reasonable after a single conversation, especially one that completely shattered everything she had believed until now. Expecting anything different would have been incredibly optimistic on my part.

Killing her right here would have been incredibly easy for me.

Doing that honestly wouldn’t have required much effort at all.

That option simply didn’t feel like the correct choice anymore.

Considering the absolute hell this planet was eventually going to face, someone like Satania was far more valuable as an ally than as another corpse lying on the ground. The future waiting for all of us wasn’t something I wanted to face while throwing away powerful people over personal disagreements.

Maybe I could eventually do something similar to what happened with Lucielle.

Although, fucking Satania was probably going to be one of the hardest things I would ever attempt in my entire life. Honestly, calling it difficult almost felt like underselling it. The woman would probably try to rip my head off long before anything even got remotely close to happening.

Thinking about that almost made me laugh a little.

Still, I figured I’d eventually find some kind of opportunity.

Patience had gotten me surprisingly far already.

Time wasn’t exactly working against me either.

If I somehow managed to pull it off, then maybe I’d be able to strengthen her as well.

At first, I honestly doubted that Lucielle’s increase in strength had anything to do with me fucking her. The whole idea sounded ridiculous when I first considered it, and I almost dismissed it immediately. Still, the more evidence I gathered, the harder it became to convince myself that it was all just a coincidence.

She really had become noticeably stronger afterward.

The women I’d fucked before hadn’t shown any obvious signs of receiving the same kind of improvement. At least, nothing had stood out enough for me to notice. Maybe I had simply overlooked it, or maybe the effect really was unique.

Perhaps it only worked on the Seven Deadly Sins.

Lilith might have secretly done something to all of us without anyone realizing it.

While those thoughts were still running through my head, Satania suddenly slipped away from me and quickly created some distance between us.

"Tch..."

She clicked her tongue in annoyance before taking several steps backward, making it clear that she wasn’t planning to let herself get cornered again.

"Don’t think for even a second that I’m going to let you catch me like that again," she said while glaring at me. "And don’t expect you’ll ever be able to do to me what you did to Lucielle."

Her eyes narrowed into a cold stare filled with hostility.

"From this moment onward, I’ll be waging war against you."

"You should really reconsider that," I replied with a calm sigh. "Declaring war on me isn’t going to do you any favors, no matter how satisfying it sounds right now."

A slow breath escaped my lips before I continued speaking.

"If we start fighting each other now, everything both of us have spent years building will gradually fall apart. Our resources will continue shrinking, our manpower will disappear little by little, and every army we’ve painstakingly gathered will end up becoming nothing more than wasted effort. All that preparation would practically amount to nothing except making life easier for the enemies we’re actually supposed to fight."

Armies exist for a reason, and wasting them on pointless internal conflicts would only make that reason meaningless.

"They’re supposed to fight the real enemy. That’s exactly why I have a proposal for you."

One of her eyebrows slowly rose, and although she still looked irritated, curiosity quietly slipped into her expression despite her obvious attempts to hide it. She didn’t say a single word after that, but her silence made it clear she was waiting to hear exactly what I intended to propose.