Chapter 466 - Guilt?

Chapter 466: 466 - Guilt?

Neither of them moved.

Lohan felt as if the air had been sucked out of the entire chamber, while the constant hum of the offspring around them turned into a distant, almost unreal noise. 𝔣𝖗ⅇℯ

He had prepared himself for almost anything, for a plea for help, for begging, even for a threat, but not for that.

On Lisa’s back, he felt her whole body stiffen, her paws planted into the stone, and her breath catching in her throat.

He tried to come up with some answer, anything that would fill that emptiness, but every sentence that came to his mind sounded too small, too inadequate in the face of the weight of those words.

There were a few moments when silence seemed like the only honest reaction possible.

"You... what?" Lisa finally managed to say, her voice coming out low and broken. "Are you sure about this?"

The creature didn’t answer right away.

Her thin body kept lying on the platform, with the offspring swarming over her as if nothing had happened, and for a moment Lohan thought she might have lost consciousness.

"I am," the voice replied, finally.

Just that, a dry, empty answer.

"We can free you," Lohan said, quickly, the words coming out almost tripping over each other. "Seriously. I can cut these chains, the two of us can take care of your offspring, and then we’ll get you out of here. You can leave, disappear, go anywhere those people will never find you again."

There was another silence, longer than the first.

"No," the creature said.

"But why not?" Lisa pressed, taking a step forward without realizing it. "You’d be free. You could live, you could..."

"Live," the voice repeated, and there was something about that word that sent a chill through Lohan, as if the creature were tasting its meaning for the first time in a very long while and finding no flavor in it at all. "For what."

That wasn’t a question, it was only a statement of fact, said in a tone so empty that Lohan realized, with an uncomfortable tightness in his chest, that she wasn’t being dramatic or trying to manipulate anyone. There was simply nothing left in there that wanted to go on.

He had dealt with desperate creatures before, with monsters that fought to the last breath, with Players who begged for their own lives. But never with someone who seemed to have completely exhausted her own will to exist.

Even when he was in a hospital bed in the other world, Lohan still felt the desire to live, to experience things, because he hadn’t been through anything so traumatic that it would make him change that.

’When someone reaches that point, there’s no use offering hope,’ he realized, with a bitter clarity. ’Hope is exactly the thing she no longer has the energy to carry.’

"Why?" Lisa asked, her voice faltering slightly. "Please, explain it to me. I want to understand what happened to you."

The creature took a while to answer, and when she finally spoke, the words came out dragging, as if each one were being pulled out by force.

"Weeks," she said. "I don’t know how many have passed. They brought me here, trapped me, tore off my horn." She paused briefly, heavily. "Then they brought the others."

"The others?" Lohan asked, though he already feared the answer.

"They brought others of my same species." Her voice didn’t change its tone, not even a little. "At first they arrived as confused as I was, but then the humans smeared that stuff on my body and the males completely lost their minds. They don’t know what they’re doing. They only know they have to do it."

Lisa raised a paw to her mouth, her whole body trembling.

"After they finished doing what they wanted with me, I laid eggs as a result," the creature continued in a mechanical voice, as if she were talking about something that had happened to someone else. "Then the humans came, killed them all, and the eggs hatched, then more are born, my own offspring did to me the same thing the previous males did, and when more are born, the humans come in and kill the old ones. They say the horns are worth a lot. That the experience is good, compared to how weak they are."

Every word fell on Lohan like a stone, and the worst part was the tone she used, with an absolute absence of anger, of sadness, of any emotion he could recognize. She wasn’t complaining, only describing, as if she were really recounting someone else’s routine.

"I’m only the reason they keep being born," she finished. "So kill me. Please."

No one spoke for several seconds.

Lisa felt her stomach turn in a way she hadn’t felt since her first days in Elysium, when she still saw every death as something personal.

She had already hunted thousands of monsters, had already taken the lives of creatures that barely even looked at her before dying, and had never stopped to truly think about what went on inside them.

It was easy, when they growled, when they attacked, when they bled without saying anything.

It was much harder when one of them could speak.

’If she’s like this, how many others have been too?’ she thought, her claws clenching against the stone. ’And I never asked.’

Lohan felt the disgust inside him turn into something heavier, colder, a mix of anger and helplessness he didn’t quite know where to put.

This wasn’t a flaw in a system, nor a programming accident, it was a choice. Someone had looked at a creature capable of thinking, of speaking, of suffering, and decided she was worth more as a machine for producing resources.

’And I was about to do the same, on a smaller scale,’ he thought, and the thought bothered him more than he would have liked. ’Every monster I devour, every creature I turn into biomass, I wonder if any of them ever had something like this inside.’

It was a question he knew he wouldn’t be able to answer, and one that would probably come back to bother him on many nights to come, but at that moment, he tucked it away in a corner of his mind, where he could examine it later with more calm.

But right after, another thought, colder and more practical, pulled him back.

Most of the monsters he had faced so far were irrational beasts, creatures driven by hunger and instinct, that attacked everything that moved without even recognizing what they were attacking.

This was different. The creature in his mind spoke, remembered, understood exactly what was happening to her.

She was completely different from the monsters that had tried to kill him just for seeing him in their field of vision.

"This isn’t an isolated case," Lisa said suddenly, her voice low and hard. "Halon, there are billions of Players connected in Elysium. Billions. If a group of only twenty players set this up here just to level up, how many places like this do you think exist out there?"

Lohan didn’t answer, because she already knew the answer, and so did he.

Sure, it was easy to feel pity for that particular creature, precisely because she had managed to communicate her own suffering.

But how many other monsters in how many other caves were going through the same thing in silence, with no voice to cry out for help, with no one who could hear?

And the worst part was the feeling that there was nothing he could do about it, not there, not at that moment.

He could destroy that cave, he could kill every guard of the Black Horn Legion, he could burn that breeding ground down to ashes, but the real problem was much bigger than a cave, and much bigger than a guild.

He let out a long sigh, a sound that in his form was more of a vibration than anything else.

"Alright," he said, finally, softly. "I’ll do what you asked."

The creature showed no relief, no gratitude, not even surprise.

Only a small movement in her thin body, almost imperceptible, like someone who could finally let out the breath they’d been holding for a very long time.

It wasn’t an easy answer, but even so, Lohan knew there was no other he could give at that moment.