Chapter 42: Murderers and Demons

The woman was born in a back alley.

Without anyone blessing her birth. Neither the mother who gave birth to her nor the father, whoever he was, gave her any words of blessing.

The only words given to her when she was first born were curses…

“Do you know that my life is ruined because of you…? Heh, heh heh… Pfft… but it’s okay. Because you, you damn thing, are now out of my life… I just have to start over… I have to maintain even a miserable life…”

Her biological mother left, leaving only ‘curses’ for her.

Abandoned without even a name, without even one of the parents a normal child would have, and without even knowing the face of her father, whom she should have known, she was abandoned in a shabby back alley, cursed as soon as she was born.

If she were an ordinary child, she would have struggled and died in vain. Because a newborn baby who was abandoned as soon as she was born could not have great survival skills.

However, a born monster is different.

The baby, who didn’t even have a name, survived with her innate vitality and grew up on her own.

She learned the common sense of the world through her senses, and holding a rusty sword that was rolling around on the ground, as befitting a back alley with poor security, she protected her own safety and filled her hungry stomach.

All life is weakest the moment it is born. Even a born monster is no different.

It’s just that unlike ordinary humans, even when a monster is at its weakest, it’s still a monster to others.

So the monster, who grew up a little and learned how to properly wield a sword, moved to survive.

Even if she was born great, she couldn’t move without eating anything for the rest of her life.

She instinctively knew how to kill others, and it wasn’t difficult for her to dominate a shabby back alley.

She always killed others to get what she needed, because she knew common sense but didn’t understand it properly. Because that was the easiest and most convenient thing to do.

So she was a monster who killed others enough to survive, and was always covered in blood, but even she had something lacking.

“…Empty…”

Survival was always her top priority and goal. In that sense, there was nothing lacking in her.

No amount of money, no high position, no power that would make everyone bow their heads to the ground, none of that mattered to her, no matter what was given to her.

Because even when she had only grown up enough to hold and wield a sword, she was a monster and an invincible, strongest being. Because she was born like a mutation.

If the thirst she felt came from such things, she would have quenched her thirst long ago with that power. Because overwhelming power is like that.

But the lack, the emptiness, the thirst she felt was not such a thing.

What she wanted was… human warmth.

The affection a family gives to a family, the love a lover gives to a lover… whatever it is, the warmth a person can give to a person. She wanted something spiritual, not physical.

Even though she was a monster, she was born as a human, and even though she had the power to trample everything in the world under her feet, she wanted what ordinary people should have been given, but she was not.

It’s ironic.

A monster who has the power to stand above everyone and has lived wielding only that power, instinctively craving such ordinary things?

Perhaps, because she was a monster from birth, she already knew that she was abandoned by her parents and cursed from birth. Her superhuman senses are aware of it, or…

But she had never experienced such things in her life.

“M-monster…!”

“Ah, aaaaah! S-save me… save me… please…!”

“Ah, ahh…”

“Mother… I’m, I’m sorry…”

“P-poor… thing…”

“Ha, haha… if I… knew I would die… like this……”

The emotions that people showed towards her were not such warm emotions.

Fear, killing intent, despair, regret, jealousy, hostility, contempt, disdain, resentment, pity…

“…Those, those aren’t what I want…”

None of them were what she wanted, what she craved.

They were all ambiguous or terribly cold. In her world, the emotions the world showed her were only such things.

There were times when she felt such things.

It’s just that the place where those warm emotions were directed was not her.

Warmth was always someone else’s, and the world was always a cold space for her.

‘I’m thirsty…’

The common sense of the world she learned was always that of the rough and difficult underworld.

Gradually becoming just one of the monsters in human guise, unable to obtain what she craved, and just skillfully covering herself in other people’s blood for survival, she became more and more twisted.

Her appearance grew up to be healthy and beautiful, but her body was always covered in blood, and the stench of blood that had seeped into her flesh never faded.

She couldn’t have what she wanted with just power. She could kill others to get what she needed to survive, but the emptiness in her heart could not be completely filled with such things.

There is something in the world, there are many people who have what she wants when she leaves the space she is in, but it seemed that only she was not given it.

She was jealous. She felt hatred welling up.

She didn’t know how to define that emotion properly, but in the rising twisted unpleasantness, she wanted to relieve that emotion through what she was best at.

She drank the blood that was still warm, desperately hoping that it would quench her thirst even a little.

‘It’s not enough, it’s not enough…! It’s not nearly enough…!!’

But that wasn’t enough. It couldn’t be enough.

She instinctively knew it, but she felt like she would go crazy if she didn’t do that.

Nothing in the dark underworld, where all kinds of miscellaneous things in the world gather, filled her.

How long had she lived like that?

Enough time had passed to build a mountain with the corpses piled up and a river with the blood that had flowed.

By the time she had become so notorious as a crazy killer that no one in the underworld didn’t know her name.

She finally met.

“Oh my, your body is a mess.”

The man who uniquely saw her as human, not a monster.

“Are you okay? You look like you’re having a hard time.”

A person who offered kindness instead of hostility, and a hand with just goodwill instead of an attack.

In the face of the unknown, which she had never seen or experienced before, she was stunned, and like a person enchanted by a succubus in a story, she dropped the sword that had been with her all her life and took that hand.

For the first time in her life… she met someone who showed her what she wanted, what she should have had.

She had longed for it all her life, so she couldn’t help but react to such a light gesture.

“Hmm… little one, what’s your name? Huh? You don’t have a name? Haha… you must have lived a rough life. Then can I give you a name? You said it’s okay? I’m glad.”

That day, the monster, who was just a nameless horror killer, got a name.

“It’s my first time giving someone a name… how about Jill Agrippa? Do you like it?”

That day, she became Jill Agrippa from a nameless monster. The monster became a human.

Jill Agrippa was finally able to get what she had so longed for.

-Although it wasn’t very long…

The blunt, rough feeling felt at her fingertips, and the heat felt on her skin, awakened Jill Agrippa from her reverie.

‘Ah, that’s right. That’s right. I was fighting a strange guy who seemed to have sprung up from the ground?’

Because fighting was no longer important to her… she often lost herself in thought in the middle of doing something.

In the moment that had become her most important moment in her life, which had now become a past that had passed too far.

‘The texture is unfamiliar… I don’t think I’ve ever faced an opponent that my sword doesn’t work on?’

Until now, all the opponents she had faced were weak. There was no one Jill Agrippa couldn’t defeat.

But the one in front of her now was definitely not a weakling.

Pain spread rapidly through her body.

“Guh…”

“Do I look like a pushover because I have a hole in my chest?”

The devil standing before her eyes was the one who gave her that pain.

“Annoying-smelling b*tch, there are no contractors here. I don’t have to control my power, and I don’t have to not kill you, who has a connection with my lovely contractor.”

Spit!

Jill Agrippa, who spat out blood, smiled.

“You… seem to be a mentally… strange person…?”

Perhaps it was because of the stimulation of the pain she felt after a long time.

Agrippa smiled and stared at the devil in front of her, Sargatania.

‘Devil’, huh…

It would be a nice gift for their reunion, thinking that, Jill Agrippa threw herself at the devil in front of her again.