Chapter 663 The Street Boy II

Reaching the next kingdom, however, the merchant simply dumped young Hawthorne onto the street and told him to pray for the grace of the goddess before he went on with his own business.

The street was crowded and loud. The boy stood in the middle of it with nothing but the clothes on his back and watched the merchant’s cart disappear around a corner.

Years later, this naturally turned Hawthorne into nothing more than a street kid dressed in ragged and dirty clothes that barely covered him.

Benjamin watched the boy learn to beg, learn to steal. He watched the boy learn to sleep with one eye open and one hand on a broken piece of wood.

He spent the five full years surviving on those same streets, however he kept being mistaken for a defenseless young girl and getting attacked again and again by the fellow homeless people who lived around him.

Benjamin watched the boy be cornered in alleys and in the dark corners of abandoned lots. He fought back with nails and teeth, but lost as often as he won.

One fateful day, trapped once again in a narrow alley and surrounded by a group of dried-out and dirty men, Hawthorne yelled at the top of his lungs:

"I’m male, see?!" while he pulled up his ragged clothes and showed them his crotch without any shame left.

The men stopped and stared, while the boy stood there with his face red with anger and humiliation.

"Well, I’ll be..." one of the men said, his eyes going wide with surprise. "I haven’t done it with a young boy before."

The other men laughed and stepped closer.

Fortunately, before any of them could lay their hands on the pretty boy standing in front of them, a new voice stepped in firmly from behind the group.

"If she says she doesn’t want dirty old men, you should leave her alone."

Turning around quickly, the men found a small girl dressed in a dark dress standing there, and beside her a woman with long dark hair, a fancy robe, and a visible weapon at her side.

The girl in the dark dress had a face that showed no expression at all, and the woman beside her had a face that showed nothing but calm.

The men looked at the weapon, then looked at each other. That was all the information they needed to realize the woman might have been a knight of some kind, so they turned and fled the alley without another word.

The woman watched them go, then she turned to the boy and smiled.

"How do you do, missy?" Zanya waved her hand in a friendly greeting toward the young figure who stood alone in the narrow alley, and her voice carried the easy confidence of someone who had never once been afraid of anything in her life.

"...I’m a bo—"

"I would give you clothes, education, a place to sleep, a big sister to care for you," Zanya interrupted him without any hesitation, turning her face away in a casual manner as the words left her mouth, "and training to make you strong... But I only endorse girls... Oh? Were you about to say something, young lady?"

Hawthorne’s face turned a deep shade of red as he blushed hard, and he looked away from her while he played nervously with his fingers and seemed completely uncertain about what answer he should give next.

The offer that had just been placed in front of him was more than he had ever been given by anyone in his entire life, and the cost of it was only a single word.

"V... Very well..." he muttered after a long and heavy pause, the words coming out almost too quietly to hear, and his voice cracked in the middle of them. "I’m a girl. My name is Hawthorne."

"Now, isn’t this nice? Be true to yourself always!" She put her arm firmly around his neck in a friendly but possessive grip and pulled him a little closer.

The heat of her arm against his shoulders was the first warm thing he had felt in years.

She continued: "It was either that or you bear my offspring and become forced to care for them. Or meet the sharp end of my blade. Hahaha! Ah, that person there is Frigoris. Frigoris, say something."

"...Frigoris..." she muttered in a soft voice that barely rose above a whisper, and her eyes did not move from the middle distance.

And with that short and strange introduction they left the alley together, walking onward toward the place where he was officially joined into what Benjamin later discovered to be a large and organized group known as the "New Testament."

[Sekhmet also joined that organization. They’re the ones that want me dead, huh?] Benjamin asked Sys while the two of them continued to watch the memory play out in front of them, and his voice inside the white space was flat and tired.

{Apparently. But there is a chance the New Testament are also pawns,} Sys replied in her usual calm and measured tone, and her golden eyes unblinking as she spoke.

Hawthorne was the first true member of the Apex Girls, excluding Frigoris—who was becoming more mysterious with every new piece of information that surfaced.

He soon figured out that his gender would always be mistaken by strangers no matter how clearly he tried to explain it, so he began to rely heavily on constant body building to send the point across in a way that left no room for argument.

No matter what Zanya told anyone about him in private, if those people saw a clear and muscular man standing in front of them they would know the truth for themselves without needing further words.

And the method worked over time and stopped most of the confusion.

But Zanya still refused to let him dress as a man in public, so the forced feminine clothing became a constant and painful source of embarrassment for him that lasted for ages until he finally grew used to it and stopped fighting against the rule.