The silence that followed the magical cataclysm was not empty; it was heavy, a physical weight that pressed down on the valley like a leaden blanket. The birds had fled miles away. The insects had burrowed deep into the earth. Even the wind seemed afraid to blow, leaving the smoke to curl lazily upwards in vertical, stagnant pillars.
Ren Satou crawled over the ridge of the valley. His breath rasped in his chest like dry leaves skittering over pavement. His stolen boots, stripped from a dead squire days ago, were two sizes too big. The stiff, unyielding leather had rubbed his heels raw, leaving a trail of bloody footprints on the sharp shale. Every movement was a negotiation with agony. His left arm trembled with the effort of dragging his emaciated body, while the stump of his right arm throbbed with a dull, necrotic heat that whispered of approaching death.
Below him lay the epicenter of the destruction.
It was a crater of impossible geometry. A perfect hemisphere carved out of the bedrock, easily a hundred meters across. The heat of the blast had been so intense that the edges of the crater were vitrified, turning the granite into jagged, obsidian-like glass that shimmered under the pale moonlight. The air smelled of sulfur, of ozone that tasted like copper on the tongue, and the sickeningly sweet, unforgettable scent of cooked meat.
Scattered around the rim of this glass bowl were the remnants of the nameless Subjugation Squad that had given their lives to create this hole.
Ren didn't know who they were. He didn't know their names, their ranks, or the people waiting for them back home. He didn't know if they were famous heroes or desperate mercenaries. He only knew they were dead. And unlike the monsters, humans left bodies behind.
A knight in full plate armor lay crushed flat against a boulder, his steel cuirass compressed like tin foil. He must have taken a direct hit from a gravity spell. A mage, her robes still smoldering with blue embers, was impaled on a stalagmite of earth that had been thrust upward from the ground with violent force. An archer hung from a shattered tree branch by his own entrails, his bow snapped in two on the ground below.
It was a massacre. A total, absolute wipeout.
Ren stared at the carnage with dead, glassy eyes. His stomach didn't churn. His mind didn't recoil in horror. The part of his brain that processed empathy, the part that was human, had shut down days ago. It was a necessary sacrifice for the survival of the organism.
'I need something,' his mind whispered, the thought cold and transactional. 'I need a weapon that isn't broken. I need food that isn't rotten. If they are dead, they don't need it anymore.'
He began to slide down the slope, his one hand scrabbling for purchase on the loose rocks. He moved like a cockroach, scuttling from shadow to shadow, terrified that whatever had killed these heroes was still watching. But he was more terrified of the hunger that was currently digesting the lining of his own stomach.
He reached the knight first. The metal was still warm to the touch. Ren tried to pry the sword from the crushed gauntlet, hoping to find a blade better than his rusted dagger, but the metal was fused together by the intense heat of the battle. He cursed silently, his throat making a clicking sound. He managed to unhook a leather pouch from the knight's belt. His trembling fingers fumbled with the clasp.
Inside was a single, small, hard biscuit wrapped in oil paper. It was an iron ration, meant to sustain a soldier on a long march.
Ren shoved it into his mouth immediately. He didn't unwrap it fully; he ate the paper too. The biscuit was dry as chalk, sucking the remaining moisture from his mouth. He choked, gagging as the dust coated his throat, but he clamped his hand over his mouth, forcing himself to swallow. He wouldn't lose a crumb.
He moved to the mage next. The smell of burnt flesh was stronger here. He searched her pockets with frantic, invasive desperation. He found a flask of blue liquid.
'Is it water? Is it poison?'
He didn't care. He uncorked it and downed it in one gulp.
It tasted like battery acid mixed with blueberries. A sudden, violent rush of heat flared in his veins, making his vision vibrate and his heart stutter.
'Potion,' he realized, wiping his mouth with his dirty sleeve as blue sparks danced in his vision. 'It's a potion.'
It didn't heal his arm. It didn't fix his hunger. But the artificial energy kept him moving. It jump-started his nervous system, pushing him past the point of exhaustion. He crawled toward the center of the crater. The instinct that guided him—the scavenger's nose, honed by weeks of eating beetles and rotting mice—told him the biggest prize was there.
The source of the devastation.
Lying in the middle of the glass depression was a nightmare made flesh.
It was the Demon General.
It was massive, easily three meters tall even while slumped against a pile of rubble. Its skin was a deep, obsidian purple, covered in chitinous plates that looked like samurai armor fused with insect carapaces. Four horns spiraled from its skull, forming a crown of bone that screamed of royalty and malice.
But it was broken. The squad hadn't died in vain. A massive spear of holy light—probably the last desperate spell of the mage, cast with her life force—was buried deep in the Demon's chest, pinning it to the ground. Its left arm was missing, torn off at the shoulder. Its legs were a ruin of crushed bone and black ichor.
It was dying.
Ren froze. The sheer pressure emanating from the creature made the air thick and viscous, hard to breathe. Even in death, a General of the Demon King was a being that defied the laws of biology. It radiated a malice so potent it felt like static electricity prickling Ren's skin.
Ren wanted to run. His lizard brain, the part that had kept him alive in the forest, screamed at him to flee. Hide. Bury yourself in the mud. Don't look at it.
But his hunger screamed louder.
'Meat.'
The thought intruded, terrifying in its simplicity. 'It's just meat. It's powerful meat. If I eat it, I might die. If I don't eat it, I will definitely die.'
Ren took a step forward. Then another. He held his stolen dagger in his trembling left hand, a toothpick against a dragon.
The Demon General's eyes snapped open.
They were gold. Not the flat, animalistic yellow of the low-level demon that had taken Ren's arm weeks ago, but a burning, intelligent gold. Vertical pupils constricted as they focused on the small, ragged human approaching it.
"A rat..."
The voice was a tectonic rumble. It didn't come from a mouth; it vibrated the glass beneath Ren's feet, shaking his bones.
"The warriors are dead... and yet... a rat comes to scavenge the glory?"
Ren didn't answer. He couldn't speak. His throat was too dry, his vocal cords atrophied from silence. He just stared at the Demon's chest. Specifically, at the wound where the spear of light was fading, dissolving into particles. Beneath the cracked chitin armor, something was pulsing. A rhythmic, wet thudding that resonated with Ren's own dying heartbeat.
Thump-thump. Thump-thump.
The Demon's core. Its heart.
"Get away..." The Demon General tried to lift its remaining arm. Gravity warped around the limb, crushing a nearby rock into dust with a sound like a gunshot.
Ren was slammed into the ground. His nose broke with a sickening crunch against the glass floor. The pressure was immense, like being at the bottom of the ocean. His lungs collapsed.
But the Demon was weak. The gravity field flickered and died as soon as it started, the Demon coughing up black blood.
Ren gasped, sucking in air mixed with the metallic taste of his own blood. He pushed himself up, his limbs shaking.
'It's dying,' Ren realized, wiping blood from his lip, smearing it across his pale cheek. 'It has no strength left. It's bleeding out. It's just... food.'
He looked at the Demon. He didn't see a monster. He didn't see an enemy of humanity. He saw a meal ticket. He saw the only way to stop the necrosis that was slowly killing his right arm. He saw the only way to survive the coming winter.
He began to laugh. A wheezing, broken sound that bubbled up from his chest.
"I'm not... a rat," Ren croaked, his voice sounding like tearing paper, foreign to his own ears. "I'm... the garbage man."
He charged.
It wasn't a heroic charge. He tripped over his own feet, scrambled on all fours like a beast, and threw himself onto the Demon's chest.
"You dare—!" The Demon roared, trying to crush him with sheer will, but its connection to the magic of the world was severed.
Ren didn't stab the Demon. The dagger would never pierce that armor; it would snap on impact. Instead, Ren dropped the knife. He plunged his left hand—his only hand—into the open wound caused by the light spear.
The Demon screamed. It was a sound that shattered the remaining glass in the crater, a frequency that made Ren's ears bleed.
Ren's hand burned. The Demon's blood was like boiling tar. It ate at his skin, peeling it away instantly. But Ren pushed deeper. He felt past the shattered ribs that felt like steel bars, past the regenerating muscle fibers that twitched against his touch.
He felt it. The Core. Hot, pulsing, roughly the size of a melon.
"Get... OFF!"
The Demon thrashed, its massive body convulsing. A wave of force threw Ren backward, but Ren held on. His fingers were hooked into the arteries of the heart. He braced his feet against the Demon's chest.
With a scream of exertion that tore his abdominal muscles and popped the blood vessels in his eyes, Ren pulled.
Squelch.
Something gave way. Wet, tearing suction.
Ren rolled backward, tumbling over the glass, clutching his prize to his chest.
The Demon General went rigid. Its golden eyes widened in genuine disbelief. It looked down at the cavernous hole in its chest, then at the insignificant, muddy creature shivering on the ground.
"You..." The Demon wheezed, black foam bubbling from its lips. "To consume... the flesh of chaos... You will not survive... Human... You will burn..."
The light in the golden eyes faded.
And then, the disintegration began.
"No..." Ren whispered, his eyes widening in horror.
It started at the fingertips of the Demon. The obsidian armor didn't rot; it flaked away into black dust. The massive limbs began to lose their coherence, drifting away like smoke in a strong wind.
Unlike animals, monsters in this world were made of condensed mana. When they're dead. They returned to the atmosphere.
Ren clutched the heart in his hands. It was already beginning to steam, the surface turning flaky and translucent. It was fading too.
If it disappeared, he would be left with nothing. No food. No power. No survival. Just a memory of a meal.
"Don't go!" Ren shrieked at the meat in his hands, panic seizing him. "Don't you dare disappear!"
He didn't have time to think. He didn't have time to cook it. He didn't have time to hesitate about the poison or the taboo.
He buried his face in the pulsing organ before it could vanish.
It didn't taste like meat. It tasted like licking a battery terminal while drinking boiling oil. It tasted like anger.
Ren gagged, his body convulsing to reject the foreign matter. His esophagus spasmed. But he clamped his hand over his mouth, forcing himself to chew. The texture was rubbery, tough, popping with pockets of bitter fluid that seared his tongue.
He swallowed.
The reaction was instantaneous.
"AAAAGGGHHHH!"
Ren curled into a fetal position as his stomach felt like it had been filled with molten lead. The pain wasn't localized. It shot through his veins, burning them out from the inside. It felt like he had swallowed a star.
He vomited blood. Not his blood—black blood.
But he didn't stop. He couldn't stop. As he watched, the rest of the heart in his hands began to turn into particles of light.
'It's wasting!'
He ate with the desperation of a starving dog. He ate while screaming. He ate while his vision went white and his eardrums burst from the pressure of his own blood. He shoved the dissolving chunks into his mouth, swallowing them before they could vanish into the air.
When the last piece was swallowed, the real torture began.
Ren's body arched off the ground, his spine cracking audibly as the vertebrae fused and reshaped.
The mana of a Demon General was not meant for a human vessel. It was a torrential flood trying to fit through a straw. It tore through his meridian pathways, shredding them and rebuilding them in real-time.
His veins turned black, visible through his pale skin like a spiderweb of ink spreading from his stomach to his extremities. His heart—his human heart—stopped beating.
Thump.
It restarted. But the rhythm was wrong. It was slower. Heavier. Like a war drum.
THUMP.
"Hot... Hot..." Ren clawed at his throat. He tore off his shirt.
His skin was bubbling. Literally bubbling. The human flesh was melting away like wax, dripping off his frame to reveal raw red muscle underneath. The pain was beyond the capacity of the human nervous system to transmit; his brain simply registered it as a blinding white light.
"Kill me..." Ren begged the empty air, his voice dissolving into a gurgle. "Please... just kill me..."
But the God of Trials was not merciful enough to grant him death. This was the trial.
His bones began to break.
Snap. His femur shattered, then re-knitted instantly, thicker, denser, blacker.
Crack. His ribs expanded, shifting, creating a cage of bone to protect the new, volatile core in his chest.
Pop. His jaw unhinged, the joint widening. His human teeth fell out one by one into the mud, replaced by sharp, serrated shards pushing through the gums like daggers.
And then, the arm.
Ren watched in horrified fascination through eyes that were bleeding tears of black ichor as the stump of his right arm exploded.
There was no red blood. Only a black, viscous liquid that poured out, defying gravity. It swirled, hardened, and twisted.
Bone grew from the marrow, white and gleaming, spiraling out like the branches of a dead tree. Muscle wove itself around the bone like living wire, dense and powerful.
It wasn't a human arm.
It was a monstrosity. The forearm was longer, covered in black, chitinous scales identical to the Demon General's armor. The fingers were long, multi-jointed, tipped with obsidian claws that glistened in the moonlight.
And it hurt. It hurt more than the amputation. It felt like being forged on an anvil, beaten into shape by a hammer made of fire. Every nerve ending was screaming as it connected to this alien limb.
"I don't want this!" Ren screamed, his voice distorting, deepening into a guttural roar that echoed off the valley walls. "I want to go home! I want my mom! I want to play games! I don't want to be a monster!"
His mind fractured.
The pain was too much for a fifteen years old boy to process. The Ren Satou who worried about exams, who loved gacha games, who cried when he watched sad movies, retreated deep into the dark corners of his consciousness. He curled up inside his own mind, hiding from the agony.
In his place, something else woke up.
Something primal. Something angry. Something that understood only one rule: The strong eat the weak.
The transformation lasted for hours. Or maybe days. Time had no meaning in the crucible of evolution.
When Ren finally stood up, the sun was setting again, painting the sky in blood reds and bruised purples.
He was taller. His school trousers were shredded, hanging in rags around his legs. His chest was bare, a patchwork of scars, raw muscle, and black scales that shimmered like oil. His eyes had changed. The whites were gone, replaced by black sclera, and his irises were a glowing, toxic gold.
He looked at his new right hand. He flexed the claws. The air hummed as they sliced through it.
He felt... full.
For the first time in weeks, the gnawing emptiness in his stomach was gone.
But he was angry.
A rage, pure and white-hot, bubbled under his skin. It wasn't just his rage. It was the Demon General's rage at being eaten by a rat. It was the rage of every human Ren had seen die. It was the rage of a boy who had been abandoned by God.
'Destroy,' the instinct whispered. 'Break something.'
Ren looked around the crater.
Shadows were creeping in. And with the shadows came the scavengers.
Monsters. Ghouls. Corpse-eaters. They had smelled the death of the General and come to feast on the lingering mana. They had come to pick the bones of the corpses.
Dozens of them. Eyes glowing in the dark like constellations of hunger.
They saw the lone figure standing in the center of the crater. They smelled human. They smelled meat. But they also smelled... something else. Confusion rippled through the pack.
A wolf-like monster, made of shadow and bone, driven by starvation, lunged. Its jaws snapped, aiming for Ren's throat.
Ren didn't run. He didn't cower. He didn't calculate.
He simply raised his right hand.
'Die.'
SPLAT.
He didn't just hit the wolf. He obliterated it. His hand moved faster than sound, creating a sonic boom that cracked the ground. The impact reduced the monster to black mist before it even hit the ground. It dissolved instantly, returning to mana.
The other monsters froze.
Ren turned to them. He opened his mouth. His jaw split wide, steam hissing from his throat.
"My..." Ren spoke. The voice was a dual-tone nightmare—the boy's cracked tenor overlaid with the General's subterranean rumble.
"MY... FOOD!"
It wasn't a battle. It was a tantrum.
Ren Satou, the boy who couldn't run a mile without wheezing, was now a blur of destruction. He tore through the pack of monsters with a violence that was unnecessary, excessive, and cruel.
He didn't just kill them; he dismantled them.
He grabbed a ghoul by the head and crushed it. It exploded into black dust. He kicked a lizard-monster so hard its spine shot out of its back before it vanished into smoke.
He was crying the whole time.
"Why?!" Slash.
"Why is this happening?!" Crunch.
"I hate you!" Rip.
He was screaming at the God who put him here. He was screaming at the world that wanted him dead. He used his new arm like a club, like a spear, like a shield. The scales deflected claws and teeth that would have shredded steel. The claws sheared through iron and bone as if they were paper.
The air was thick with the black fog of dying monsters. He slipped in the dust, fell, scrambled up, and killed again. He was a natural disaster contained in a human skin, venting a lifetime of frustration in minutes of slaughter.
When the last monster had dissolved into the night, Ren didn't stop.
He attacked the rocks. He attacked the trees. He punched the ground until the earth cracked and his knuckles split, only to heal instantly. He unleashed a blast of pure mana from his hand—unrefined, chaotic—that vaporized a boulder.
"SEND ME BACK!" He roared at the silent stars, his voice breaking into a sob. "I DON'T WANT TO BE STRONG! I WANT TO GO HOME!"
The rage ebbed, leaving behind a hollow, aching emptiness that was worse than the hunger.
But the hunger wasn't gone.
The Demon General's heart was powerful, but it was alien. Ren's human body was rejecting the foreign mana, burning up from the inside. His cells were screaming for something compatible to stabilize the transformation. They were screaming for human protein. For human blood.
Ren's golden eyes, glowing with a toxic light, drifted from the fading black mist of the monster to the edge of the crater.
To the bodies of the Subjugation Squad.
The Knight. The Mage. The Archer.
Unlike the monsters, they hadn't disappeared. Their bodies were still there, broken and cold, but real.
A new scent hit him. It wasn't the smell of ozone or sulfur. It was the smell of home. It was the smell of species compatibility.
'Eat them,' the Instinct whispered. It wasn't a suggestion; it was a biological imperative. 'They are compatible. Their flesh will soothe the burning. Their mana is soft. Eat them, and the pain stops.'
Ren took a step towards the Knight. His mouth watered—a thick, viscous saliva that dripped from his new, jagged teeth.
'No,' Ren thought, clutching his head.
'Why not?' the Instinct reasoned coldly. 'They are dead meat. They are just containers of carbon and mana. If you leave them, the worms will eat them. Are you less than a worm?'
Ren fell to his knees beside the Knight. His monstrous right hand reached out, the obsidian claws hovering inches from the crushed armor. He could hear the blood still settling in the corpse's veins.
It smelled delicious. It smelled like the Sunday roast his mother used to make.
"Stop..." Ren whimpered. His left hand—his human hand—grabbed his right wrist. He squeezed so hard his nails dug into the scales, drawing black blood. "Stop moving!"
But his right arm didn't listen. It trembled, inching closer. The claws extended, ready to peel the armor like an orange rind.
'Just one bite,' the voice in his head promised seductively. 'Just the heart. Or the liver. You need it to survive. You are the Main Character, remember? The Main Character does whatever it takes to live.'
"I AM NOT A CANNIBAL!"
Ren screamed, the sound tearing his throat. He punched himself in the face.
Crack.
His nose broke again. But the hunger didn't stop.
He looked at the Mage's face. In his delirium, her dead, glassy eyes flickered. For a split second, she didn't look like a stranger. She looked like his classmate. She looked like the girl he sat next to in Math. She looked like his mother.
"Ren..." the hallucination seemed to whisper. "It's okay. Eat. You're growing."
"NO!"
Ren threw himself backward, scrambling away from the bodies like they were on fire. He gagged, dry heaving bile onto the glass floor.
"I am Ren Satou!" he shrieked, clawing at the ground, shredding the stone. "I have a student ID! I live in Tokyo! I don't eat people! I DON'T EAT PEOPLE!"
'You are a monster,' the Instinct hissed. 'Look at your hand. Look at your shadow. You are one of us.'
"SHUT UP!"
Ren slammed his monstrous arm into the ground, again and again. He wanted to break it. He wanted to rip it off. He smashed it until the rock pulverized and the shockwaves shattered the bones in his human arm.
"If I eat them..." Ren sobbed, his forehead pressed against the cold, sharp glass. "If I eat them... then I can never go home. I can never look Mom in the eye again."
He lay there for a long time, shivering, fighting the urge to crawl back to the meat. He bit his own lip until it bled, just to taste his own blood, just to distract the hunger.
'I'd rather starve,' he decided, the thought fragile but absolute. 'I'd rather rot here than eat a human.'
He forced himself to stand up. He couldn't leave them there. If he left them there, the hunger would win eventually.
"Hide them," he muttered like a mantra. "Hide them. Hide the food. No... Hide the people."
He crawled over to the bodies. He didn't look at their faces. He focused on the metal of their armor, the fabric of their clothes. He dragged the knight into the small cave, his stomach cramping with every step, screaming at him to take a bite.
But he didn't.
He covered them with rocks. Each rock was a seal on his own humanity.
"You guys were lucky," Ren whispered to the stones, his voice trembling with a mixture of envy and grief. "You died as humans. You didn't have to become... this."
"Các người đã chết khi còn là người. Các người không cần phải trở thành... thế này."
Then, he went back to the center of the crater.
The Demon General's body was gone, dissolved completely into the ether. But the ground where it had fallen was still warm, scorched by the immense mana it had released.
Ren sat in that depression of vitrified glass. It was the only warmth in the freezing valley.
He curled up, clutching his monstrous right arm to his chest, rocking back and forth in the spot where the monster had died.
"I'm sorry," he whispered to the silence, closing his eyes against the horror of his own existence. "I'm sorry I'm a monster. Mom... I'm sorry."
***
Hundreds of miles away, the wind howled against the frosted windows of a warm tavern in the Northern Borderlands.
It was a haven of noise and life against the freezing night. The air smelled of roasted mutton, spilled ale, and woodsmoke. Adventurers boasted of their kills, merchants haggled over prices, and bards tuned their lutes.
At a corner table sat a group that drew no small amount of attention, though they tried to keep to themselves.
A dwarf with a beard like iron, methodically polishing a massive axe with a cloth that looked older than most of the patrons.
A priest with a permanently red nose, already on his third mug of wine, smiling beatifically at nothing in particular.
A small elf girl with twin tails and white hair, reading a thick grimoire and ignoring the world entirely.
And a young woman.
She was striking, with short, vibrant blue hair that framed a face which she herself would boldly claim was the most beautiful in the realm—and few would argue. Her sword rested against the table, the hilt worn from use.
Himmel the Hero took a sip of her ale, grimacing slightly. "Watered down again. Why is the ale always worse the further North we go?"
"Because the water freezes, so they have to melt snow," Heiter said, swirling his wine glass. "Unlike this vintage. The rumors are getting strange, aren't they? Corrupt priests are one thing, but this?"
"It's just peasant superstition," Eisen grunted, not looking up from his axe. "A monster that eats monsters? Sounds like a fairy tale parents tell their kids to keep them out of the woods."
"Frieren?" Himmel looked at the elf. "Have you sensed anything?"
Frieren looked up, her eyes sleepy and unbothered. "The mana flow in the North is... turbulent. Distorted. Like someone tied a knot in a river. It's ugly."
"There was a Subjugation Squad sent to the Crater Valley," Himmel said, her voice dropping. She traced the condensation on her mug.
"The Kingdom lost contact with them two weeks ago. They assume the Demon General killed them."
"And then the Demon General disappeared," Heiter added, his smile fading slightly.
"Vanished. Along with the squad. No bodies recovered."
Himmel looked out the frosted window. The North was a dark, foreboding line on the horizon, swallowed by the night.
"A merchant came in this morning," she said quietly. "He was shaking. He spilled his tea three times while talking to me. Said he tried to take a shortcut through the valley to save time."
"And?" Eisen asked, pausing his polishing.
"He said the valley was empty. No demons. No bandits. Just piles of bones and crushed rocks." Himmel looked at her reflection in the glass.
"And in the center of the crater, he saw something. A figure."
"A demon?"
"He didn't know," Himmel shook her head, her blue hair swaying.
"He said it looked like a boy. Wearing rags, and does not show any hostility towards him But he had one arm that looked like... midnight. Like it was made of the dark itself."
Frieren paused. She closed her grimoire with a soft thud. "A hybrid?" she murmured, her interest piqued for the first time.
"That's biologically impossible. Human bodies can't hold demon mana. They explode. Unless..."
"Unless what?"
"Unless he's not human anymore," Frieren said simply.
"The merchant said the boy was crying," Himmel continued, her blue eyes darkening with a sudden, inexplicable sadness that cut through her usual cheerful demeanor. "He was tearing a wyvern apart with his bare hands... and he was crying. Screaming for his mother."
A silence fell over the table. Even the noise of the tavern seemed to fade into the background.
Himmel stood up. The chair scraped loudly against the floor. She smoothed out her skirt and grabbed her sword belt.
"Himmel?" Heiter blinked. "Where are you going? The stew just arrived. It's hot."
"I have a bad feeling," Himmel said, looking North, her gaze piercing through the walls of the tavern. "A really bad feeling. Not the 'world is ending' kind. But the kind you get when you hear a kitten mewing in a storm."
"We're going to the Crater Valley?" Eisen sighed, though he was already packing his whetstone. "It's three days' march."
"We're going," Himmel nodded. A confident, yet gentle smile touched her lips—the smile that had rallied armies and comforted orphans.
"If there is a demon... then we save the world. That is our job."
She paused, looking at her reflection in the window again. She didn't see a hero. She saw a girl who couldn't ignore a cry for help.
"But if there is a boy..." Her voice softened, barely a whisper.
"...Then we save the boy."
-Himmel's image-