As soon as I entered Benny’s workshop, darkness rushed in, filling my vision.
KWA-KAAM-!
“Shadow, hug me!”
The effect was incredible!
“Aaaah!”
“Jonah, help!”
I felt an unidentified texture wrapping around my whole body, soft, squishy, and sharp all at once.
Instinctively, I flailed around, and the shadow, which had flinched for a moment, began to adjust its grip around me slowly.
It hadn’t been painful before, but now I felt oddly at ease.
As I stumbled around, I realized I was trapped inside a large cylinder.
“Uh.”
Outside, the shadow monster was staring at me with its twinkling (?) eyes, while Benny stammered in shock.
After a brief moment of contemplation seeing us turned into a spectacle inside the cage, I shouted.
“You wicked witch, Benny! What are you trying to do to me?!”
“N-No! I didn’t tell it to do this! It just did it by itself!”
“Don’t lie! I know everything! You want to lock me up like this and conduct weird experiments that I can’t tell anyone about, right?! You weren’t asking me to help with an experiment; you wanted to experiment on me!”
“I’m not! What would I even experiment on you for?!”
Benny, panicking, quickly fiddled with something while the shadow monster behind her continued to observe me like I was some kind of treasure.
“What do you mean, ‘experiment’…? Are you trying to make me say it out loud?! Showing me weird videos to brainwash me, or dousing me in some new potion to marinate me, or pouring slime that just melts my clothes off to leave me naked!? It’s obviously going to lead to something vulgar that’s hard to express!”
“I’ve never even thought of that?! Aren’t you the one with the dirtiest thoughts here?!”
“Whaaat? So you’re saying I’m not saying it, but my body is vulgar? Though I’m a kid, I’m more than capable of being made into a child?!”
“Who are you trying to capture with that kind of talk?!”
Benny screamed in frustration and pressed a large button. The cylinder’s door opened with a low signal tone.
But instead of rushing out, I cautiously glanced around.
“…What are you doing?”
“Aren’t I just going to get pounced on right after I go out?”
“I don’t think that’ll happen… Just wait a second.”
Benny muttered something, then lightly snapped her fingers.
Swoosh!
At that moment, silver chains shot up from the floor and wrapped around the still-wide-eyed shadow monster.
-Grr…
It whimpered sadly but didn’t resist much. As if it finally realized what it had done wrong.
“Benny. What was that just now?”
“I’m not really sure… Originally, that’s where the shadow monster was supposed to live.”
“Not in your shadow?”
“The place where it can follow you is in my shadow; it’s just hiding inside. The most comfortable place for it is here.”
Benny pointed to the cylinder I had just been in. I hadn’t noticed from inside, but various magic symbols were drawn on its surface, visible from the outside.
“This is custom-made. From the start, shadow monsters can only live in such special places.”
“…What exactly is it? I mean, is it really okay to call it a shadow monster? To me, it looks like something entirely different.”
In response, Benny smirked and nodded.
“If I want to gain your cooperation, I should probably explain that part too. Remember I told you it wasn’t originally a monster?”
“Yeah. It used to be Benny’s friends, right?”
“Well, there were some I wasn’t as close to, but we all knew each other. …So, let me introduce it again. Although I’ve been calling it a shadow monster, it’s actually neither a shadow nor a monster.”
Benny softly stroked the monster’s side, which was wrapped in chains, its gloomy eyes lowering, with its tentacles hanging limply and sharp teeth hidden away.
“It’s a chimera.”
And then, her heart-patterned eyes blinked sorrowfully.
“I’m the same.”
*
Just like always, most of the problems occurring in the labyrinth city are caused by the One Who Devours the Twilight.
The incident that struck young Benny was no different.
Her entire orphanage was kidnapped.
Somewhere in the labyrinth, adults were dead, and children were caged. There, heretics were conducting forbidden experiments deemed taboo.
Could engineered madness be transplanted into a human body while maintaining sanity and growing stronger?
The theory was simple.
All monsters were the result of ordinary flora and fauna failing to resist the final curse of the God of Madness.
So, if they could absorb a manageable level of madness, they might maintain sanity while gaining an endless empowerment buff without cost.
This meant that the powers of the God of Madness could be absorbed and offered to the Goddess.
Fueled by a notion even a child could come up with, the One Who Devours the Twilight began performing all sorts of mad experiments.
Implanting magic stones in human hearts, replacing body parts with monster parts, crossbreeding humans and monsters, and more.
Most of it was chaotic human experimentation done recklessly without sound theories, and naturally, most of them died in horrific agony.
Children whose hearts had been embedded with magic stones lost their bodily form and melted away, while those who gained monster limbs ended up horrifically disfigured and dead.
In breeding cases, the monsters used as models remained unharmed, but the boy children who became the breeding stock suffered severe psychological trauma from the intense physical contact, leading them to self-harm.
Among those, there had been a relatively successful experiment.
That was Benny, who had undergone the eye implant of the succubus.
Although she couldn’t utilize the succubus’s special ability of allure, she became the first successful case to gain the ability to maintain youth and a touch of magical talent.
That day, Benny was trapped in her undeveloped young body and had to witness her friends dying one by one.
“But it didn’t end there. They also began to desecrate corpses.”
They mixed melted corpses together, colors of mucus eventually turning black.
From the twisted corpses, they extracted intact monster parts and soaked them in the goo. Bloodshot eyes, sharp teeth, tentacles, acidic fluids, and so on.
They then poured in the essence and life force extracted from the driven-mad children.
Making something that originally had no life able to move like it was alive.
Thus, the shadow monster… or rather, the nameless chimera was born.
“Finally, they fused this newly born creature into my soul. How they did that, I don’t know. I’m sure they used some sort of divine substance, but I can’t even grasp which god’s power is residing within it. The only thing I’m sure of…”
Benny carefully stroked the shadow monster, picking her words while it growled as if it didn’t like it yet ultimately accepted her touch.
“Benny and this creature became one, and we gained power. Power enough to escape that damned place.”
The moment Benny and the shadow connected, they could understand each other’s thoughts.
Hatred toward the One Who Devours the Twilight. Revenge that had to be achieved even at the cost of burning themselves. …And madness so intense it made their heads spin.
“I surrendered my body to madness and rampaged like crazy. And when I came to my senses, we had broken the cage holding us, and I tasted blood in my mouth. Ah, and my teeth have turned out like this.”
Benny opened her mouth wide, revealing her shark-like pointed teeth. She resembled the shadow monster perfectly.
Swoosh.
At that point, Benny released the chains wrapped around the shadow. Naturally, the creature that had melted into her shadow peered out from the shadows, blinking its eyes.
Benny looked down at her feet and smiled sadly.
“So, this creature fundamentally hates everything. It wants to return the pain it suffered. …But you are the exception.”
“Me?”
“Yeah. I don’t know the exact reason. But it’s showing immense goodwill toward you, Jonah! The reason it put you in the tank earlier is that it feels the most comfortable here, so it was a concession to you.”
“That… I do appreciate it.”
As I looked at the shadow with a strange gaze, Benny spoke in a somewhat stiff voice.
“I can guess the reason. …You’re similar to us, right?”
“Me?”
Benny looked at me with a sense of camaraderie in her eyes. As I tilted my head in confusion, she hugged the shadow.
“In Fairy and Silver Coin, they mentioned they were studying ways to either stop its feeding or detach it from me, right?”
Saying that, she let out a deep sigh, as if it were the last breath of her life.
“I’ll put it more clearly. I want this child to regain the peace that was taken from her. And I want to reclaim the future that was stolen from me.”
“…Can I really do that?”
“I don’t know. But I’m going to make it happen.”
Benny’s eyes, marked with heart shapes, sparkled in purple.
“Magic is a miracle.”
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