Chapter 3

There was at least one thing in this world more clear-cut than any black-and-white logic.

Dezeb Avganis stood above everything.

“Hm.”

The god of calamity in this otherworld lit a cigarette, looking contemplative.

Erabelle waited nervously for his verdict.

“This is... useful. I only came out for a walk and ended up finding something interesting. Lady, would you like to enlist?”

***

“So yeah... that’s how it happened.”

From the other end of the line came the sound of the Count groaning as he clutched the back of his neck.

Even I didn’t send my son into the military, and now you...

Erabelle pulled the receiver away from her ear at precisely the right moment.

The Count’s shouting erupted immediately.

“Do you even know what kind of place that is?! Have you lost your mind?!”

She cautiously brought the receiver back to her ear, only to yank it away again when the yelling resumed. She waited a little longer, and once his volume dropped slightly, she attempted to speak.

“You’re going to send your blood pressure through the roof like that. Just calm down... no, I mean, why are you yelling—ah, fine. Then don’t calm dow—ack!”

Failed. I almost lost an eardrum.

“Are you out of your mind?! You call me after three days, and this is what you tell me?!”

“Well... yeah. Kind of.”

The Count let out a long sigh.

Erabelle once again moved the phone away from her ear.

Then came another thunderous question about the state of her sanity.

“I am sane! So please, just calm down—no, seriously, it just happened, okay?”

Anyone would have been dumbfounded by such a vague and flimsy explanation, but she genuinely had nothing else to offer.

Honestly, I haven’t even sorted it out myself.

She swallowed a sigh.

She had no choice but to make the call, but truthfully, she was still in a daze.

How was I supposed to know they’d figure it out like that?

How could she have known that avoiding them so perfectly throughout the New Year’s Festival—those elite figures whose appearances alone drew every eye regardless of personal preference—would itself arouse suspicion?

I still don’t get it.

Why is that even suspicious?

Why the hell do they keep track of pointless things like that? Total psychos.

“At first, I thought you were doing it on purpose to attract attention.”

That was what Virgo Hag had said, chuckling as he tossed the crumpled dress at her feet.

Virgo Hag—the lunatic who had burned 1,120 people alive on Dezeb Avganis’s orders.

He claimed he had picked the dress up from the garden.

He had even complimented her, saying he had never seen anyone fall headfirst through a first-floor window like that before.

So they had been following her from the moment she left the banquet hall.

They probably watched me change clothes in ten seconds flat too...

Just thinking about it made her want to die, but either way—

she had survived.

I’m still alive.

Even if surviving meant having one of those identification tags implanted in her...

“I’m telling you, I’m fine,” Erabelle said, rubbing the back of her neck where a faint tingling sensation still lingered.

She already knew exactly what that horrific thing was.

A high-performance plasma bomb developed by Aries Cedar for internal use—one whose implantation process caused pain almost indistinguishable from outright torture.

It also came equipped with GPS tracking and several other functions.

But it wasn’t entirely bad.

In fact, the mere fact that she had been given one meant she was considered valuable.

The tags were so expensive to manufacture that anyone carrying one was usually left alone—even by the worst killers, the kind who left corpses behind them every single day.

That made it one hell of a survival tool.

“Fine? You think that makes it okay?! Do you even understand what kind of place the military is?! You’ll be fighting man-eating beasts day and night!”

“Come on, the 41st Division doesn’t deal with monsters. They mostly handle terraforming...”

“Shut it!!”

There goes my inner ear again.

At the next round of shouting, Erabelle sighed and pulled the receiver away.

“Just come home!!”

Like I don’t want to. But these tags probably record audio too...

“I’ll visit as soon as I get leave, okay? Home. The county. And I’m telling you—I’m not going to be fighting monsters!”

The Count sounded no less unconvinced.

“Why would I fight monsters? Even if the whole division gets deployed to a conflict zone, I won’t be seeing combat. Who gives a gun to someone with body level 2, anyway? It’d be a waste—ah, no! Don’t yell! I’m telling you, I just got a job, okay?”

She spent quite some time reassuring him that she was fine.

Naturally, the Count remained unconvinced.

Still, he appeared to accept that persuading his adopted daughter otherwise was impossible.

That Avganis is the division commander, isn’t he? At least he has a good reputation. That gives me some peace of mind.

“Well, there you go.”

Dezeb Avganis—a model young commander and direct heir to the Marquisate of Avganis.

Exceptional in both pedigree and ability.

One of the leading candidates to become the next Supreme Commander within the next two centuries.

That was the public consensus.

All part of the gods’ twisted joke.

The fact that she had enlisted at all was absurd, but at least that reputation helped calm her overly anxious foster father.

“I hear he treats his subordinates very well. Doesn’t overwork them, either.”

The Count fell silent for a moment before speaking again, this time in a softer voice.

“...At least call me often.”

“I will.”

There was more weight behind that simple exchange than it seemed.

For both of them, the call three days ago might very well have been their last.

“I should go now. It’s almost time for roll call.”

“Tch... damn stars!”

Before the Count could erupt again, Erabelle quickly added, “You should get out more too, Count. Go have a love life or something. Start by finding a decent gay bar, pick up some burly mountain-man type, and bring him home. Stop worrying about me already.”

“You, seriously...!”

“I’m hanging up. Don’t drink too much, and stop passing out in the street. Hygiene is important, remember? Don’t make your old adopted daughter nurse you through your own mess.”

“Hey!!”

Erabelle ended the call in the middle of his scream, entirely unfazed by the Count’s lack of decorum.

There was nothing more to say.

Dragging the conversation out would only give him more things to worry about.

“...Ugh.”

She curled inward slightly, wincing at the pain that still throbbed through her body.

The adrenaline from the other night had kept her from noticing most of the injuries at the time.

Between diving through windows, sprinting through the woods in the dead of night, being yanked around and thrown by murderers, and tumbling over stone-paved ground—

of course she wasn’t in one piece.

And that was before they tagged her.

Her entire body felt as though someone had beaten her with a metal pipe.

The pain from the implantation had been so severe that she had no memory of the procedure itself.

Her mind had simply gone blank for several hours.

...Why did I insist on going home like an idiot?

She should have just stayed hidden away in the countryside.

She would have killed for a painkiller, but the Count’s residence in the capital was practically abandoned.

There wasn’t a single decent medical supply in the entire place.

Erabelle carefully slipped her still-on-installments cell phone into her back pocket and rose from the couch.

It really was time for roll call.

Showing up on time was the bare minimum expected of a salaried worker.

If you didn’t want to die, you had to work hard.

Your performance evaluations quite literally determined whether you lived or died.

“......”

She stopped and stared at the neatly folded dark green gym uniform and shoes on the table.

“...How the hell did I even get this on?”

I must’ve been desperate.

She had actually squeezed herself into a middle-school gym uniform at her age.

Forget the emotional trauma—it was simply too small.

God, how did I even wear that? People really will do anything when they’re desperate.

It had been skintight.

Second-skin tight.

And she had been running around in front of those men dressed like that?

“......”

Please don’t tell me I stretched it out.

She smoothed the wrinkles with her hands, carefully checking the sleeves and neckline.

Thankfully, the gym uniform was still intact and hadn’t lost its shape.

Once she confirmed that, Erabelle packed everything into a box and closed the lid.

The name tag read Min Jiwoo, Class 2-1.

And now it was sealed away again.

There would come a day when she took it back out.

She would return someday.

...It took me eight years this time.

Then maybe it would take another eight.

Or several more on top of that.

However long it took—

she would survive.

Eventually, another chance to return would come.

I just need to do well... just well enough.

Erabelle murmured the words to herself.

Eight years in this other world.

That was more than enough time to understand just how few choices an undocumented, stateless person truly had.

Forget influencing the course of the world—

she couldn’t even find a halfway decent-paying job.

For the past eight years, she had done everything she could to survive in this alien world, where she hadn’t even spoken the language when she first arrived.

And the first thing she had learned was to know her place.

Getting carried away with nonsense about “the flow of the original story”?

That was suicide in a blood-soaked world like this one.

And now she had even been formally registered under the Count’s household.

Any reckless move from her would no longer amount to personal suicide.

It would be collective suicide.

Hellhound—despite the title—had never been about dogs.

It was about their master.

Dezeb Avganis.

The man who put the “Hell” in Hellhound.

He operated on a completely different scale.

You would need data from interplanetary administrations just to estimate the number of his victims.

If he woke up in a bad mood, he could wipe out a planet or two before breakfast.

That was the kind of monster at the center of this story.

There was no romance in the original narrative.

Only victims—

and perpetrators.

And since she happened to be one of the victims he had so meticulously and personally destroyed, you could say the protagonist was special in her own way.

But Erabelle had zero intention of relying on that fact.

Not even a little.