Benny becomes mentally fragile without Shadow. Yet, she still wants to cut that connection.
After pondering that question for a while, Benny slowly nodded her head.
“To get my life back, that’s the only way.”
Getting her life back. I had no idea what that meant, but the sincerity behind those few words hit hard.
With that, she straightened her posture and gathered herself from the playful atmosphere from earlier before speaking up.
“Can you explain what that means in a bit more detail?”
“…Alright. Jonah, you’ve decided to help with my experiment, so you deserve to hear it.”
Benny hesitated for a moment, her lips pursing. She continued carefully, as if laying out something precious.
“First of all, I don’t hate Shadow. I’ve never thought of it as something that should disappear from my life or a blemish I need to cut out.”
“Of course. If Benny truly hated Shadow, you would have been at each other’s throats by now.”
The principle behind Shadow’s actions is simple. If someone harbors goodwill, it returns it, and if it senses hostility, it retaliates.
Of course, it seems to particularly favor Benny, but… not enough to be an exception.
“Shadow, how should I put it? If I had to say, it’s like my ‘rage.’ Its very existence symbolizes my past.”
“Given your nature, it makes sense.”
“…So when I see Shadow, I feel as if I’m still trapped in that cramped iron cage.”
A cramped cage where one can’t even stretch their waist. The stench of blood looming from all sides. The screams and pleas echoing day and night. From friends turned into unspeakable monsters and hunted down the next day.
Benny’s childhood was filled with such nightmares.
“We were orphans, but we weren’t without family. We decided to be a support for each other.”
“Were you part of some organization or something?”
“Hell no. That would mean we had no future. We would either become criminals or be used and thrown away eventually.”
The back alleys of Pangrave are largely split into two.
The shallow underbelly where thugs of the lowest tier gather, and the deep, dark underbelly where the truly heinous criminals lurk.
Orphaned kids like Benny and me would have no reason to get involved with the latter, and those folks wouldn’t spare a second thought for insignificant orphans, so the “organization” being mentioned here likely refers to the gangs of thugs.
Those guys are clearly a ragtag bunch. I could easily beat them up single-handedly.
Thus, they tend to be vicious toward the weaker.
Specifically, that means towards orphans. It’s no coincidence that as soon as I developed pickpocket skills, I targeted only the thugs’ pockets.
But just because we’re orphans doesn’t mean we’re always on the receiving end. Aware of their own circumstances, orphans would help each other out.
Common knowledge, but that doesn’t mean they band together to fight the gangs. It’s more about sharing information to survive: “In a certain alley, if you pay the price, they won’t hit you,” or “There’s a crazy lady who gets drunk and starts swinging.”
It was merely sharing survival tips.
When I first possessed this body, I was approached by such orphan communities.
In my case, however, it was led by someone who seemed to have lost their way. They were bragging about making the best gang in Pangrave, pretending to play army without even having been to the military.
They said they wanted to have me as their future boss. So I just kept my distance.
Dreaming of being a nationwide thug, how terrifying is that?
Anyway, that was my past, but Benny was different. Benny’s friends were genuinely good friends.
Sometimes they would share barely earned bread, and whenever someone got hit, they would either throw rocks from afar or take the hit together to protect one another.
Real friends like that.
“Our goal was simple. When we grew up, we wanted to become great adventurers and change this wretched fate, and we aimed to ensure that no other children like us would have to suffer.”
“A noble dream, though perhaps a bit unrealistic.”
“Right? Sometimes the priest from the temple, who looked out for us, would put us all into an orphanage whenever a slot opened up.”
In this world, orphans in orphanages and street orphans are worlds apart.
All orphanages are affiliated with the temple or are institutions under its oversight, so touching a child from an orphanage would be akin to confronting the temple itself.
Mediocre thugs wouldn’t even dare consider it.
It was effectively a promise of safety until one became an adult.
Had that been the case, Pangrave might have become a slightly more livable place by the time we grew up.
“Though that never happened.”
“…One Who Devours the Twilight.”
“Right. Only fools would dare openly attack the temple in Pangrave.”
One day, a band of heretics invaded, killing all the adults at the orphanage and abducting all the children, dragging them somewhere in the labyrinth.
Thus began Benny’s hell.
“Surprisingly, those lunatics targeted the orphanage with a sense of twisted goodwill. They believed the adults had done enough good that their deaths would send them to the Heaven of the Gods, and the children were raised in the Goddess’s name, so they were certainly headed to her side as well.”
“No way…”
What a mindset that essentially justifies killing because they’ll end up in heaven anyway. No wonder zealots act without hesitation.
“The guy who kidnapped us even kindly asked what our dreams were, just like any adult asking a child.”
Frightened, the children of the orphanage revealed their dreams. And then they were subjected to experiments fitting those dreams.
“Melonia, who wanted to become a legendary swordsman, received sharkman teeth as implants. Day by day, her body dried up until only razor-sharp teeth were left, and she became a mummy.”
“Jammit, who dreamed of exploring the labyrinth with Melonia, had his eyes replaced with those of an Evil Eye and began thrashing in hallucinations. He started accumulating injuries, and only after his skin was entirely peeled away did he pass away with a relaxed face.”
“Frey, who wanted to become a priest and help them both survive, was soaked alive in the death energy of an undead monster. Naturally, he perished not long after, but his bones remained and began to deform little by little, resembling large shells.”
“The only boy among them. Marek, who was scared of becoming an adventurer just like the others, yet wanted to become an orphanage director to create a home for others like him, was used as a breeding experiment with monsters. Unable to fight against the madness and despair of being infected, he committed suicide by ramming his forehead into the horn of the drill boar that mounted him.”
“And then there was me. Having wished for nothing more than to become an adventurer and live well, I was the only one who survived to witness all of this vividly.”
Ironically, Benny’s friends drew courage from looking at her. Hoping that if they just hold on, they might survive too.
Of course, this was impossible. In the end, the last of them to resist, Marek, declared he no longer had the courage to live, offering a short apology before taking his own life in front of Benny.
“That wasn’t the end. That insane woman gathered the corpses of the other dead children and my friends, forcefully injecting them with life force.”
What was born from that was Shadow.
The teeth Melonia received, the eye replaced from Jammit, the shell of Frey that was transformed, Marek’s horn that pierced his own forehead, and the fluids from countless others coalesced into a protoplasmic monster.
In a final experiment, One Who Devours the Twilight attempted to implant Shadow onto Benny, who ultimately turned the tables, leading to her current state.
“Which is why I couldn’t give Shadow a name. Melonia? Frey? Jammit? Or Marek? I just didn’t know what to call it.”
That wasn’t all. Seeing Shadow adorned with the limbs that led her friends to death must have constantly resurfaced those memories.
Moreover, by witnessing the magic used against Morgana recently, she realized that Benny’s magic resembles a miracle born from desperation.
In other words, it had to touch her trauma.
For Benny, who often dug at her wounds, the existence of Shadow likely felt like a nightmare that never faded, no matter how much time passed.
Regardless of her care for Shadow.
“I know. I personally killed that zealot back then, and after a lot of time, I’ve become this high-ranking adventurer. A grand adventurer that everyone dreams of being.”
Upon reaching this point, Benny let out a hollow laugh.
“Yet, I still couldn’t become an adult.”
If Shadow is an immortal monster, Benny is the eternal witch. Her time has been frozen back in that distant past, at the moment where she devoured the twilight.
“My thoughts haven’t changed. I don’t want Shadow to disappear, but at the very least, this connection… this erosion must vanish.”
Only then can Benny truly become an adult. She would be able to uphold the promises she shared with her dear friends.
…Only by shedding all the shackles that bind her can Benny finally live her own life.
No longer confined in a cramped iron cage, she curled up on her own.
After glancing at her for a moment, I sat down beside her. Then, tapping my thigh with my hand, I said,
“First, lie down, Benny.”
“…What?”
Benny tilted her head with a dumbfounded expression. I grabbed her head and laid it onto my thigh.
Once she realized it, she found herself in a knee pillow position, and I gently stroked her purple hair while speaking.
“Now that I’ve heard your story, can I share mine?”
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