Chapter 113: A Room You Can't Leave Without S.M. (5)

Benny becomes mentally vulnerable without Shadow. Even so, do you still want to sever your connection with Shadow?

Benny, who had been pondering that question for a long time, slowly nodded.

“To get my life back, I have to.”

To get her life back. I don’t know exactly what that means. But the sincerity contained in that short phrase was conveyed to me deeply.

So I straightened my posture, and only after calming the playful atmosphere from a moment ago did I open my mouth.

“Could you explain a bit more what you mean by that?”

“…Alright. Jonah, since you agreed to help with my experiment, you deserve to know.”

Benny hesitated for a moment, her lips quivering. She continued speaking with a cautious demeanor, as if laying out something precious.

“To start, I don’t hate Shadow. I’ve never once thought of it as a stain on my life that needs to be removed or wished it would disappear.”

“Of course. If Benny truly hated Shadow, you two would have been fighting to the death a long time ago.”

Shadow’s principles of action are simple. If someone treats it kindly, it returns the favor, and if someone harbors hostility, it responds in kind.

Of course, it seems to have a special regard for Benny…but not to the extent of being an exception.

“Shadow is, how should I say it, my reverse scale. Its existence is like a symbol of my past.”

“That’s probably because of its origins.”

“…So when I look at Shadow, I still feel like I’m trapped in that narrow iron cage.”

A narrow cage where one can’t even straighten their back. The stench of blood wafting from all directions. Screams and pleas echoing day and night. The friend from yesterday turns into an unrecognizable monster today and is put down.

Benny’s childhood was filled with such nightmares.

“We were orphans, but it didn’t mean we had no family. We promised to be each other’s support.”

“Did you join some kind of organization?”

“No. That would mean no future. Either becoming criminals or being used and discarded.”

The back alleys of Pangrave are divided into two main parts.

A shallow underworld where small-time thugs gather. And a deep underbelly where the real hardened criminals, the filtered ones, congregate.

As for me, who is an orphan like Benny in the past, there’s no way to get involved with the latter, and they also don’t care about insignificant orphans, so the organization mentioned here must be a gang of thugs.

They are certainly a bunch of rabble. Even I alone can beat them up anytime now.

That’s why they act viciously towards those weaker than themselves.

Specifically, the orphans. It’s not for nothing that I targeted and picked the pockets of thugs as soon as I developed my pickpocketing skills.

However, just because they are orphans doesn’t mean they only suffer. They know their situation well, so they try to help each other out.

Of course, it doesn’t mean they joined forces to fight against the gangs. It’s just that in some alleys, if you pay up, you won’t get beaten, and there’s a crazy woman who goes berserk when she drinks and often roams a certain street.

It was just sharing information to survive.

When I first transmigrated, those orphan communities also approached me.

However, in my case, the leader of that community seemed like a lost cause. They hadn’t even served in the military but played soldier, bragging about how they would later create the greatest gang in Pangrave.

She, as the future boss, wanted to make me her man or something. So, I just kept my distance and stuck to myself.

Their future dream was to become a nationwide gangster. How terrifying these kids are.

Anyway, that was me, but Benny seemed different. Benny’s friends were literally good friends.

Sometimes they shared bread they barely managed to get, and sometimes they protected each other by throwing stones from afar or getting beaten together.

They were real friends like that.

“Our goal was singular. To become great adventurers when we grow up and change our lousy fate, and if possible, to make sure there are no more kids like us.”

“Regardless of realism, it was a good dream.”

“Right. Sometimes the priest from the Temple who came to distribute food saw us favorably, and as soon as there was an opening, he got us all into an orphanage.”

In this world, the status of an orphan in an orphanage and that of a street orphan are totally different.

All orphanages are either affiliated with the Temple or subject to its inspection, so touching a child of an orphanage is tantamount to opposing the Temple.

Petty thugs wouldn’t even dare to think about it.

It’s practically a promise of safety until they become adults.

If they had become adults as they were, Pangrave might have become a slightly better neighborhood.

“Though that never happened.”

“…One Who Devours the Twilight.”

“That’s right. In Pangrave, the only ones bold enough to openly attack the Temple are them.”

One day, heretics invaded, killed all the adults in the orphanage, and kidnapped all the children, taking them somewhere into the Labyrinth.

Thus began Benny’s hell.

“Surprisingly, those lunatics targeted the orphanage with some kind of goodwill. They said the adults were doing good deeds, so they’d head to the Goddess’s paradise when they died, and the children were being raised in the name of the Goddess, so they’d surely go to her side.”

“My god….”

The mindset of ‘It’s okay to kill them since they’ll go to heaven anyway’. No wonder the fanatics acted without hesitation.

“The guy who kidnapped us kindly asked what our dreams were. Just like how adults usually ask children.”

Terrified, the children of the orphanage shared their dreams. And they underwent experiments that matched those dreams.

“It wasn’t an exception for us either. Melonia, who wanted to become a renowned adventurer by becoming an excellent swordsman, received a Sharkman’s teeth transplant. Day by day, her body dried up, and eventually, she became a mummy, leaving behind only sharp teeth like a sword.”

“Jammit, who said she would explore the Labyrinth with Melonia by becoming a mage, received the eye of an Evil Eye and started writhing in hallucinations. No one touched her, but wounds began to appear on her body one by one, and eventually, she breathed her last with a peaceful face after all her skin was peeled off.”

“Frey, who said she would become a cleric to support the two so they wouldn’t die, was pickled alive in the death aura of an undead monster. Naturally, she didn’t last long and died…but her bones remained and started to transform little by little. Like a huge carapace.”

“The only boy among us. Marek, who wanted to become the head of the orphanage to create a place for us to return to and to prevent more orphans like us, was used as a stud in monster breeding experiments. Unable to overcome the contagious madness and self-loathing, he committed suicide by smashing his forehead against the horn of the Drill Boar mounted on top of him.”

“And then, there’s me. Unlike Marek, I just wanted to become an adventurer, eat well, and sleep well. I was the only one who survived and had to witness everything.”

Ironically, Benny’s friends drew courage from seeing Benny unharmed. They thought that if they could somehow endure, they might survive too.

Of course, that was impossible. In the end, Marek, who resisted until the last moment, committed suicide in front of Benny with a brief apology, saying he no longer had the courage to live.

“It didn’t end there. That crazy woman gathered the corpses of other dead children and my friends and forcibly injected life into them.”

What was born from that was Shadow.

A nameless, immortal monster born with Melonia’s transplanted teeth, Jammit’s replaced eyes, Frey’s transformed carapace, Marek’s horn that pierced his own forehead, and tentacles made of the bodily fluids of countless others.

As the final experiment, One Who Devours the Twilight attempted to transplant Shadow into Benny, but was instead turned on, leading to the current situation.

“That’s why I couldn’t give Shadow a name. Melonia? Frey? Jammit? Or Marek? I didn’t know what to call it.”

That wouldn’t be all. Every time she saw Shadow, carrying the parts that led her friends to their deaths, the memories of that time would resurface.

In the recent battle with Morgana, I realized something after seeing the magic Benny used. Benny’s magic is akin to a miracle born from earnestness.

In other words, it inevitably hinges on her trauma.

To Benny, who constantly picks at her wounds, the existence of Shadow must have felt like a nightmare that never awakens, no matter how much time passes.

This is separate from her affection for Shadow.

“I know. I killed that fanatic with my own hands back then, and much time has passed, making me the high-ranking adventurer I am now. The great adventurer everyone wanted to be.”

Benny, who spoke up to that point, let out a hollow laugh.

“Even so, I couldn’t become an adult.”

If Shadow is an immortal monster, then Benny is an ageless witch. Her time is preserved in the distant past, at the moment she devoured Shadow.

“My thoughts haven’t changed. I’m not wishing for Shadow to disappear, but at least this connection…this erosion must vanish.”

Only then can Benny become an adult. Only then can she keep the most precious promise she made with her friends.

…Only after casting off all the shackles that have bound her can Benny live her own life.

No longer confined in a narrow iron cage, Benny curled up into a ball.

Watching her for a moment, I sat down beside her. Then I patted her thigh and spoke.

“Lie down first, Benny.”

“…What?”

With a dumbfounded expression, Benny tilted her head, and I placed it on my thigh.

By the time she came to her senses, she found herself in a lap pillow position. I gently stroked her purple hair and began to speak.

“Since I’ve heard Benny’s story, would you like to hear mine next?”