Free Web NovelChapter 14: Got My First Kill Tonight, System and Stepsister Both Approved
The low door wasn’t locked. A bad sign, or a good one — I couldn’t decide.
Elsa pushed it open with her fingertips and slipped inside without a sound, a blade held low along her thigh. Alice and I were right behind her.
The room was dark, lit by a single oil lamp at the far end. Gutted crates, dust, the smell of rotting wood. And over there, by the grimy window, a man sat half-turned away from us, slumped on a stool, watching the street through a gap in the shutter — a lookout, who hadn’t heard us come in.
Elsa raised a hand. Nobody moves.
Then she crossed the room.
I’d never seen her move like that. Not fast — silent, fluid, not a single creak of the floorboards under boots that should have weighed a ton. She was behind him in a few steps, and the man never knew a thing.
One hand clamped over his mouth, smothering any sound. The other drew a blade across his throat, clean, almost gentle, the way you’d cut a taut rope.
A wet gurgle broke under Elsa’s palm, his heels scraped the floor, and then nothing. She held him up, eased him down along the wall, and laid him on the stone the way you’d lay down someone sleeping, while a black pool spread beneath him in the gloom.
My stomach lurched. It rose on its own, acid, and I had to clench my teeth to force it back down.
Alice’s hand found mine and squeezed. She didn’t say anything; she just stayed there, her warm palm against my cold fingers.
I shut my eyes for a second. Hold it together. I’d wanted to come. I’d stood up to Elsa over it barely minutes ago, knowing full well what we’d find down here — so I didn’t get to fall apart at the first body. I opened my eyes again, and I moved forward.
The rest of the ground floor was empty. No children, of course.
"You don’t stash a kid on the ground floor," Elsa murmured, like a confirmation. "It’s lower down. Find me the way in."
I opened the Eye.
The world tipped over into its familiar lines — and there, in the middle of the room, I saw it. A thin thread of mana sinking into the floor where there should have been nothing. It ran down between the boards, steady, like breathing.
"There," I said, pointing at the floor. "It goes down — the mana’s sinking under the boards."
Under the dust, the outline of a trapdoor showed faintly, almost invisible to the naked eye. Elsa slid her fingers into the groove and lifted it without a sound.
A stone staircase plunged into the dark. The air that rose up caught in my throat — the stale must, the urine, and underneath it something I didn’t want to name.
We went down.
The steps seemed to go on forever. With every one, the smell thickened, and the silence with it — that too-full kind of silence where you can feel there are people, right there, holding their breath.
The corridor opened onto cells. Rusted bars, set into the stone. And behind them, packed into the dark, a dozen children — filthy, thin, their eyes too big in hollowed-out faces.
Some curled in on themselves when they saw us, as if we’d come to finish what had been started. Others didn’t move at all; they looked at us without seeing us, like they’d forgotten what an opening door even meant. One of them, a little one, couldn’t have been more than six.
It turned my stomach. The rumor at the guild, the kids vanishing from the tanners’ quarter — it was here. Under our feet the whole time, and no one had ever come.
"Who goes th—"
Two men burst out of a side door, blades in hand, woken by I-don’t-know-what.
Elsa didn’t say anything. She moved.
And there, with the Eye wide open, I saw what a fight between a monster and ordinary men really looked like.
The first managed half a step. She caught him by the throat, hauled him up like an empty sack, and slammed him into the stone wall. The back of his skull hit the rock with a dry, sickening crack, the sound of a green branch snapping, and his body dropped limp, folded at an angle nothing living would have taken — dead before he even touched the floor.
The second understood he was going to die; I read it on his face. He raised his blade anyway, on reflex, out of desperation. Elsa caught his wrist mid-swing, twisted it until I heard it give, and turned the weapon back on him; the point went in under his jaw and came out somewhere else. She let go, and he crumpled without a sound, already gone.
Two seconds, maybe three, and two men lay on the floor.
A third backed toward the rear, ashen, hands raised, his blade fallen at his feet. Elsa grabbed him by the collar and pinned him to the wall, effortlessly, like pinning an insect.
"You — you’re going to talk."
I’d never seen rage like that in her. Not the playful demon who’d ground me into the dirt for weeks, the one who smiled while she made me crawl, but something cold and absolute that didn’t raise its voice and was all the more terrifying for it. The kids were her line. Maybe the only one.
"Get the children out of here, both of you. Right now." She didn’t take her eyes off her captive.
Alice was already at the cells.
The locks gave under a brief discharge of light, and she knelt down in front of the kids, at their level, her voice suddenly soft — the voice I’d only ever known her to use for me.
"It’s over. We’re getting you out. No one’s going to touch you again."
Some were shaking too hard to move. The little six-year-old had curled into a ball against the wall, his face hidden.
So Alice opened her hand, palm up, and a flower of light bloomed in it — warm, golden, soft as a tiny sun held in a palm. It turned slowly on itself, and petals of brightness drifted free to float in the black air of the cellar. The children’s eyes latched onto it. The little one lifted his head. And one by one, as if drawn to it, they stood.
"That’s it," Alice breathed. "Follow the light."
We started guiding them toward the stairs.
I was heading back up the corridor, the smallest one held tight against my chest, when Elsa got to work behind us.
I didn’t hear all of it. I didn’t want to. But the man broke almost at once — fear, probably, more effective than any blow — and his voice caught up to me at the foot of the stairs, trembling, pleading.
"We do it for a demon, I swear! We didn’t have a choice — it was that or die, him or our families! Please, I don’t know anything else—"
"His name," Elsa cut in.
"Nobody knows his name! We hand him the kids, that’s all! We hand them over, and we live another day, that’s all I know, I swear—"
A demon. The cold went down my spine, and I climbed the last steps without looking back, the child clinging to my neck.
We came up into the big room above, the kids blinking in the lamplight, Alice gently herding the smallest ones behind her, away from the window.
That was when the door flew open.
A man — a sack over his shoulder, back at the hideout with no idea. He took us all in at a glance: children standing in the middle of the room, where there should never have been any; a corpse by the window, his lookout, in a spreading pool of blood; and two strangers, in his den. His face came apart.
Then he charged — not at me, at Alice.
And time shattered.
The Eye flared without my deciding it. The world slowed, stretched, and everything turned terribly sharp. His charge, his weight pitched forward. The short blade sliding out of his sleeve, already raised. Alice’s back, turned away, bent over the children, exposed.
I had no time to be afraid. No time to think. There was no decision, no I have to, no calculation — none of the things people put in stories about moments like this.
Just my body.
The body Elsa had broken and reforged over weeks, moving before I did, without asking my opinion. My arms setting the little one down behind me in the same motion. My feet sliding — the Dance, the sidestep drilled a thousand times until I was sick of it. My hand finding the grip, the iron sword clearing the scabbard in the same breath.
And the blade coming down.
It met his throat. There was an instant — one, tiny — where I felt the resistance, the skin, then what lay under it, and then it gave. It gave like nothing at all.
The blood sprayed.
Over me, in waves, scalding, in spurts, in time with something still beating inside him. Over my face, my hands, into my half-open mouth, and the taste froze me — iron and copper and salt, thick, hot, everywhere.
The man stopped dead. Both hands flew to his neck, as if to hold in what was escaping between his fingers. He opened his mouth to scream, but nothing came out, nothing but a wet hiss, a gurgle with nothing human left in it.
And his eyes found mine.
Wide open, disbelieving. He looked at me like he didn’t understand, like he was waiting for me to explain why the world had just tipped over. Terror rose in them, slowly, and then something behind them went out, like a lamp being blown out.
His knees buckled, and he collapsed at my feet, in a spreading pool, and didn’t move again.
Time started again.
I stayed standing there. The sword in my fist, my arm dripping, his blood already cooling on my skin. I looked at him, on the floor, this still heap of flesh that a second ago had been running, breathing, wanting something. Everything reached me from very far away, like through water.
And a blue window opened in the dark, calm, as if nothing had happened.
[ Level Up ]
> Level 20 — +1 to all stats, +1 free point
I stared at it without really taking it in. The nausea I was bracing for — the one that had folded me in two a moment ago, downstairs, in front of Elsa’s blade — didn’t come. But something else took its place, dull and cold. You leveled up by killing men here. Same as the slimes. The system hadn’t hesitated for a single second: to it, the man drained of his blood at my feet was worth one line of experience, one more number, nothing else. Exactly what the very first slime in that dungeon had been worth.
I waited some more. I waited for what had drowned me before, in front of Alexia’s body — the ground giving way, the legs buckling, the world caving in. Nothing came. Not like that. And somewhere, far down, under the kind of numbness that had settled over me, that absence lodged itself like a splinter I didn’t have the strength to look at.
But there were a dozen kids behind me, and the little one staring at me over Alice’s shoulder. This wasn’t the time, not here. So I pushed it all down, where I already kept the rest, and I clenched my teeth.
Alice had turned in time to see the man fall.
She looked at the body, then at me, red from my hair to my hands. And she said nothing.
Elsa came up through the trapdoor behind us, dragging her half-conscious captive by the collar. She took in the scene in a single look — the dead man, me, the sword, the blood — and asked no questions, because she didn’t need to.
"There’s a demon behind this, all right," was all she said, her voice flat. "Let’s get out of here."
We handed the children over to the city guard, and the captive with them.
They stared at us like we’d dropped out of the sky — which, for two of us, wasn’t far from the truth. These same guards who’d been going in circles for weeks had just watched three strangers hand back a dozen missing kids in a single night, plus a man to question on top of it. One of them stammered out his thanks, another ran off to find a superior. I barely heard them; everything reached me from far away, muffled, like through water.
"The demon," I said to Elsa the moment we were a little apart. "We have to go now, before he hears we took his hideout and bolts."
"No."
Nothing like her hesitation an hour earlier, when she’d nearly run for the guards; this time the tone left no opening at all.
"Elsa—"
"No, Kuro." She turned to face me, and her look didn’t leave me an inch. "A handful of humans in a cellar is one thing. A demon is another thing entirely. You go charging in there tonight, at your level, in the state you’re in, and you die. That’s not a threat, it’s just how it would end."
And the worst part was that, deep down, I knew it. A demon wasn’t three half-asleep thugs.
"Tomorrow, first thing, we warn the city lord. We come back with his elite, in numbers, and we don’t give this thing a single opening. That’s how you hunt a demon — no other way, and not alone." She paused, and her voice dropped a notch. "And besides, you’re both wrung out. The training, the dungeon, and now this. You can barely stand. Tonight, you sleep."
I wanted to push. But she was looking at me in a strange way — not the hardness of the instructor who screamed at me at dawn, something else. As if, under the dried blood, she saw something I hadn’t shown yet, and was choosing not to name it.
I gave in. Reluctantly, but I gave in.
Back at the inn, I washed. For a long time.
The water ran red, then pink, then clear. I scrubbed my hands long after they were clean, until the skin burned, and I still felt like there was some left, there, in the creases of my fingers, under the nails. The taste didn’t leave either — iron and copper, deep at the back of my throat.
Then I lay down in the dark, and sleep didn’t come.
I lay there for hours, staring at a ceiling I couldn’t see, running the scene again, and again, and again. The door opening. His charge. Alice’s back. My arm moving on its own. The throat opening like nothing. The taste. His eyes in mine, that disbelief, and the lamp going out behind them.
And all night I repeated the same words to myself, like a prayer you recite to drown out the rest. He was going to strike her. It was him or her. I had no choice. It was necessary.
The trouble was that another thought kept rising underneath, and that one I couldn’t silence.
I’d written this. Exactly this. Hundreds of times.
In another life, behind a screen, safe and warm, I’d had my heroes kill without a second thought. He drew and cut the bandit down. One clean line, and on to the next paragraph. The blood, when I bothered with it, was for atmosphere, a touch of red; no one ever lay awake afterward, no one ever tasted it.
What a liar I’d been.
Because the truth was this: a man who’d been running, who’d wanted to live, and who all at once wanted nothing at all because my hand had decided it. And that wasn’t even the worst of it. The worst was having searched myself for the weight, the horror, the hero who falls apart, and finding nothing but a big empty calm — as if the boy who’d thrown up in front of Alexia had been left somewhere along the road, and I didn’t even know at what point I’d lost him. freewebnσvel.cøm
I was turning into someone else. And I couldn’t have said which scared me more: that, or the fact that it didn’t scare me enough.
The door opened softly.
I didn’t need to turn around to know. The mattress sank behind me, two arms slid around my chest, and Alice’s forehead settled between my shoulder blades. She didn’t ask if she could; she never asked.
"I know what you’re thinking," she murmured.
I didn’t answer.
"You’re trying to feel bad about it." Her voice was very low against my back, almost a breath. "You keep turning it over, waiting for it to break you, and it doesn’t come, and that’s what’s eating you."
I closed my eyes. She read me like an open book, and I no longer had the strength to close the pages.
"So listen to me." Her arms tightened. "A man ran at me, a blade in his hand, to kill me. And you opened him up before he could so much as touch me, without hesitating, without even thinking about it."
A silence. I could feel her heart beating against my back, slow, steady.
"You think that makes you a monster," she breathed. "To me, it’s the most beautiful thing anyone’s ever done for me." freewebnσvel.cøm
Something tightened in my chest.
"The dead man, the blood, what you’re supposed to feel... none of it exists, Kuro. There’s only you, and me, and the fact that you’re still here, alive, holding me. The rest doesn’t matter." A pause, softer still, and more chilling without her knowing it. "The rest never mattered."
Not one word of horror. Not one second of recoil for what I’d done, for the open throat, for the man on the floor. Only me, only my pain, that she wanted to put out with her bare hands.
Another night, maybe, I’d have wondered why none of it frightened her, and why the only hurt she could see in any of it was mine.
But that night, I was far too empty to ask myself anything at all. And her words, twisted as they were, were exactly the ones I needed.
I turned over. I pulled her against me, hard, my face in her hair, and at last I felt something give way deep in my chest — not tears, not quite, but something close to them, that slowly came loose against her.
She said nothing more. She just stayed there, her warmth against mine, her slow breathing, her hand moving up and down my back, again, and again.
And after a while — I don’t know how long — lulled by her breath and the silence, the one who’d been so sure he couldn’t close his eyes finally fell asleep.
