Chapter 120: Reality

Zarria felt the blood draining from her face. Like a series of misfortune, one bad thing just kept happening after the other. The people they tried so desperately to protect were still going to die in the end.

It all seemed like a very bad joke.

Jaizen gazed past Zarria to the red-haired girl behind her.

“Who’s that? A slum rat?”

He pointed the bronze cannon to her head. Bright blue lines traced the grooves of the weapon, an indication that it was powering up, loading the next shot.

“Please step aside, Lady Theocheirós. I need to kill her now.”

Zarria stared at him in shock. The way he said those words so casually was so incomprehensible, it left her speechless.

“Lady Theocheirós?”

She clenched her fists, her blank expression turning into a frown as she looked at the red-haired girl.

The poor girl stepped forward, walking straight in front of the mouth of the cannon.

Zarria could only watch in silence as it all happened.

“Kill me,” the girl muttered.

Jaizen gave her a carefree smile.

“Yep, sorry about this.”

The explosive power of the hand cannon produced echoes through the streets. After the loud bang, silence dominated the air.

Liquid mana dripped from the metal cannon to the ground. A few seconds later, drops of blood mixed in with the blue liquid.

“Lady Theocheirós?! What are you doing?!” Jaizen exclaimed.

Zarria ended up blocking the cannon’s mouth with her own hand, causing all of the bones in it to shatter. Her entire wrist was blown off, leaving only some burnt flesh and dangling veins.

It turns out, Jaizen’s weapon was the real deal. Even with the Mirror of Heaven enhancing her physical attributes by orders of magnitude, she still couldn’t withstand a point-blank blow from a weapon crafted by a Hemmethe.

The weapon also got destroyed in exchange. Bright blue liquid spilled all over Jaizen’s sleeve and his weapon was shattered into pieces, but he didn’t seem to mind.

“A—Are you okay?! Oh boy, your brother’s gonna kill me…”

The dark-haired girl gritted her teeth. She refused to show any more signs of agony even though it really hurt like hell.

“I’m… fine…” she replied in between heavy breaths. Her face was contorted in pain.

“Ishrafa, goddess of healing,”

The other two remained silent as she began to recite a prayer.

“See our pain, free us. See our wounds, heal us.”

No one — not even Zarria herself — saw what happened. It was as if their eyes were merely playing tricks on them and the damage wasn’t there in the first place. Her hand, as well as the sleeves of her black gown were back to how they used to be in the blink of an eye. There was no transition, no process and no explanation as to how it healed. It seemed as though they were just imagining the wound until they snapped out of it.

It was mysterious as it was creepy. Jaizen looked like he couldn’t help but question reality itself.

“What the hell…” he whispered.

The young man shook his head and then wiped his liquid-mana-stained hand with his gold suit without a care about manners or his appearance.

“Lady Theocheirós… why did you do that?” asked Jaizen.

Regaining her composure, Zarria began to speak.

“Your thoughtless conviction to kill her is the most confusing thing and you dare ask me that?”

Puzzled, Jaizen replied.

“What do you mean? We already received orders to kill the slum rats, what more is there to think about?”

A mixed feeling of sadness and anger welled up in Zarria’s heart. She felt extremely insulted as she remembered what her brother told her just earlier today:

’Let’s be kinder to the people who are suffering, Zarria. This world is already cruel enough.’

Suddenly, the desire to retreat to her brother’s arms grew stronger.

Jaizen cut off her thoughts.

“They turn into these dangerous creatures. Even though this girl is a human right now, who’s to say that she won’t transform and hurt innocent people later? It doesn’t matter if they do it at will or if someone else is pulling the strings, our goal should be to eliminate any danger to our empire. Besides, they’re just slum rats. They were bound to perish for a long time.”

Most of what he had said, to Zarria’s frustration, did hold water. But there was something about it that didn’t sit right. Especially the fact that some Olcourians were also able to turn into a monster.

Zarria took a deep breath and then spoke.

“Let’s not be hasty, Lord Hemmethe. You only know the surface of what’s really going on.”

Jaizen seemed to dislike his intelligence being questioned. His eyebrows furrowed as he looked at her.

She continued.

“It’s not that the people of the slums have the ability to transform. A mastermind has control over a certain group of people for some reason, and can turn them into monsters. In fact, the first one to undergo this transformation is an Olcourian. A member of our clan.”

Zarria turned to the red-haired girl who seemed to have stopped giving a crap.

“A few minutes ago, you blamed my clan. I feel like you know something about this.”

She sighed.

“What’s the point? Just end this already. He’s right. I might turn into a monster like my brother, so just kill me right now.”

Zarria firmly held her by the shoulders.

“Please tell me what you know. I understand that you’ve just lost a family, and it hurts and you want to give up. But I will never give up —not when our family name is being sullied.”

The girl glared at her and then barked back.

“That’s all you ever care about, huh? Your name. Your honor, your reputation.”

Zarria was immediately shut down.

“I LOST EVERYTHING!”

“Our parents died of starvation in front of us because they gave us all what little food they managed to find. Since then, I did everything I could to protect Walter, the only family I have left.”

“I did everything I had to do to put food on the table. We were surviving. Even when you god-wannabe hypocrites made our lives ten times harder than it should be, we survived.”

“And now, you… you took him from me, too.”

“Just kill me already.”

It was as though Zarria had been woken up to the ugly reality of this world. Her worries, concerns and fears were nothing compared to what the people here experienced daily.

“That’s why you refuse to accept our religions…” she muttered.

The girl looked at her, a shocked expression on her face.

“What did you say?”

Zarria lifted her gaze from the ground to the girl, surprised. The red-haired girl continued to speak.

“You think were refusing the mark of divinity? Are our lives really that insignificant that the rest of you don’t even have a clue about our situation?”

“You Theocheirós enslaved us. If joining your religion was that easy, most of us would have already done so just so we could finally be treated as human beings.”

“Did you know? For someone like me to join your religions, I have to be legally owned by a member of your clan. And as if that wasn’t messed up enough, I need to earn my value to be worthy of being your slave. I need to prove my usefulness right now and hope that you’d find the thought of enslaving me delightful. That’s how it is.”

“None of the people who tried ever succeeded. They did all sorts of humiliating things just to win your approval, but it all ended in vain.”

“When we stopped trying, you people found another way to exploit us. You control the food in the slums, you sell them for a ridiculously high price. Lately, stealing food has been an impossible task, so the only way to get something to eat was to buy them with our dignity. It’s still the same.”

“You won’t accept us and you won’t leave us alone. What do you want? Is watching our suffering really that amusing to you?”

Her words pierced Zarria’s heart like sharp blades. Divinity Clan, the source of the values and good morals of the whole empire, was actually rotten to the core.

She couldn’t accept it. While she boasted the glory of their name, the ordinary people were suffering because of them.

Superior clan this, strongest clan that, it was all utter bullshit.

They were trash, worse than maggots squirming in the dirt. That was the kind of clan Zarria belonged to.

It was painful, it was infuriating. It felt like she was slowly sinking in a pool of feces with no hope of rising up.

Zarria stepped backwards unconsciously.

’So this is how breaking feels like,’ she thought to herself.

As she stepped backwards, her back hit the chest of a person. Turning her head to look who it was, tears suddenly welled up in her eyes.

“Dhein…”

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