The Sadist's Canvas
It hurts!!
“Hmm-hmm-hmm~”
The smuggler infamous among his peers for being a complete psychopath descended the stairs sideways like a child, humming a wildly off-key tune.
“What shall I play with today?”
He stood with his hands clasped behind his back, pacing leisurely in front of a shelf cluttered with all sorts of metal instruments.
“Yesterday was the fist, so today…”
“You sick fuck…”
The Sadist whipped his head toward the source of the voice.
“Sick fuck? Me?”
“Are you seriously asking that?”
The man who had followed him down spent a long time chewing on his words, lips writhing like two insects locked in combat. Finally, with a thoroughly fed-up expression, he spoke.
“Sigh… Just take it easy. The captain told you to squeeze her for information, not flip some kid inside out.”
“I am squeezing her. Right now.”
“That’s exactly why you’re a sick fuck. What if she dies? If she dies, the captain won’t just let you—wait, what the hell!”
The man’s words were cut off by a razor-sharp skewer that had suddenly appeared right under his chin.
“Buddy.”
“G-get that thing away from me, you crazy bastard!”
“I’m talking here.”
“…”
“I’m doing it right now. I’ll handle it. Got it?”
The man nodded frantically, his whole body trembling, goosebumps standing on end.
Only then did The Sadist withdraw the needle with a satisfied smile.
“Crazy son of a bitch… Do whatever the hell you want.”
The man shot him a look dripping with pure disgust and turned back the way he had come.
“Hmph.”
Left alone, The Sadist let out a small snort as if he genuinely couldn’t understand. What an ignorant fool. That man would probably never, until the day he died, be able to appreciate the same aesthetics that he did.
“Hmm-hmm-hmm~”
The Sadist began walking again. Beneath that seemingly cheerful humming lay a twisted curiosity—an artistic desire to explore the pure, naked soul hidden at the very bottom of a human being by inflicting the most extreme pain imaginable.
The Sadist was a pervert in the truest, most exceptional sense. According to his personal aesthetic, there existed an insurmountable gap between the screams of adults and the screams of children.
Call it melody, if you will. An adult’s scream was always tainted with vulgar calculations, compromises, and lies—desperate attempts to reduce the pain and survive. The result was a twisted, malicious cacophony that was utterly unbearable to listen to.
But a child’s scream contained nothing but pure despair and perfect surrender. Compared to the tangled mess of an adult, it was like a single beautiful straight line left by a master artist’s thumb smearing across a canvas. Clean. Honest. Perfect.
That was why he preferred children. In the act of drawing out their true souls, the helpless bodies of children who had not yet been stained by the world served as the most flawless, seductive blank canvas imaginable.
“I wonder what kind of scream I’ll hear today.”
With his favorite skewer—smooth, long enough, and perfectly balanced—The Sadist hummed happily as he walked toward the door that held his personal muse, swollen with ecstatic anticipation.
Creak…
Just imagining how sweetly that adorable little sculpture he had so carefully kneaded and beaten was marinating in despair inside the room was enough to send a mental orgasm surging through him, along with a heavy heat in his lower body…
“Hm? Was the lamp always over there?”
The Sadist scratched his head.
Something felt off. He did remember leaving the gas lamp behind.
But there was no way he would have placed it in such an ambiguous spot. He had positioned it carefully so that the moment the door opened, the sight of her lying there in rags would be visible at a glance.
“Something’s strange…”
“Yeah, no shit, you fucking psycho?”
Whoosh—whoosh—
Thud!
.
.
.
“Ugh?”
That was the last sound The Sadist made before Helen’s blackjack smashed into his skull and he collapsed on the spot.
“Haa… D-did I… get him?”
“…”
She had. Helen caught her breath. She had been worried he might not go down in one hit, but that fear had clearly been unfounded.
No matter how sturdy a man was, it seemed even he couldn’t withstand a stone made heavier by proper centrifugal force. Helen approached the still-twitching body on the floor.
“Ghk. Ghk.”
The Sadist had lost all control. He lay on the ground, repeatedly stretching both arms into the air before curling them back toward his chest.
She had aimed for the back of his head, but it looked like she had struck the medulla or brainstem. Judging by the reaction, the aftereffects would probably last a long time. In that case, maybe it would be better to just leave him like this so he could spend the rest of his miserable life in agony—
“Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! You fucking piece of shit!!!!!!”
Helen brought the blackjack down again and again on the fallen man’s head.
“F-fuck! Fuck!!!!”
She struck, and struck, and struck again. Eventually the bottom of the sock tore open and the stone fell out.
So she picked it up again. Picked it up, smashed it down, smashed it down, struck, struck.
When the stone in her hand split in half, she gripped it with both hands and stabbed with the sharp edge. When it split again and became too small to hold, she simply rained down punches with her bare fists.
“Huuu… What the… die… no, not yet… just die already… me…? I’ll kill you… I’ll kill—wait, what are you looking at… look away, you fucking dog!!!!!”
Helen kept hammering with her bare fists, then gouged at his eye sockets with her fingers.
Squelch.
And then… the sensation of her fingertips pushing into the soft, jelly-like lens and crushing it was so bizarre it defied description.
It was bizarre enough to finally snap Helen back to her senses.
“…”
Like someone doused with cold water, every hair on her body stood on end. She scrambled away from the corpse on all fours, then leaned against the wall, letting out sharp, ragged breaths.
“Hii… hii… hiiii…?”
“…”
The corpse, left defenseless and subjected to indiscriminate violence, had turned a vivid pink from the face down to the neck.
The postmortem spasms and the creaking rhythm of twitching muscles didn’t match at all. The arms trembled, the breathing grew harsher, the tinnitus rang endlessly—it was like watching an old movie where the scenery and soundtrack were completely out of sync. The nausea was impossible to suppress.
“Ugh. Ueeegh.”
Brown and green vomit—stuff she didn’t even remember eating—poured out like a waterfall. It was her first time throwing up in this romance-fantasy world. She should probably add that she was sobbing too. The exhaustion that followed dulled the joy of having overcome the crisis.
“Haa… haaa…”
After emptying everything inside her, Helen lay on her side, gasping for air. She could hear the wet sand grains soaked in blood crunching and crumbling near her shoulder.
“Huk… huu… Goddamn it, what the hell was that…”
Having barely regained control of her breathing, Helen tried her best to suppress the feverish shudder running down her curved spine and recalled what had just happened.
But no clear clues came to mind. Everything was vividly remembered, yet everything felt hazy, like a dream. The wine-like emotions that had surged up, the strange impulse behind her actions—none of it made sense.
Then her eyes landed on the sock lying on the floor, drenched and heavy with blood.
Helen tilted her head.
“…What do you call that again? More importantly, have I ever seen something like that before?”
It really was strange. Whether in her past life or now, Helen had never paid much attention to weapons.
At best, she could only divide them into vague categories like old guns, modern guns, and other bladed tools.
She had even less interest in crude, makeshift weapons like this one that reeked of practical violence.
Then whose idea was this? Whose thought?
She didn’t know. Even if she did, she decided to let it go for now. In times like these, when inner thunderstorms were so frequent, it was common to suffer from hallucinations. More importantly, she needed to check whether anyone had heard their violent scuffle.
Crawling unsteadily to the door, Helen pressed her ear against it.
“…”
It was quiet.
Deathly silent.
Whether the room’s soundproofing was abnormally good, or whether the people outside had simply dismissed the excessively loud brawl as part of some perverted game, the hallway remained completely still.
For Helen, that was good news. The situation felt favorable. She needed to shake off the flashing hallucinations in her head and get out of here.
Ah, but before leaving, she had to clean up the nightmarishly tangled blood first.
Nothing drew the eye quite like a swaying red ghost, and the unique stench of blood could easily ruin everything.
“S-sorry. I… I…”
Helen tore off the cleanest part of the fallen man’s shirt lining and scrubbed the blood from her face and hands as hard as she could. It wasn’t perfect, but it was enough to pass in the dark.
She roughly brushed off the blood clots hardened like scabs from her hair and eyebrows. Because her back hair had flopped forward, she ended up looking like a bride wearing a veil far too large for her head—an utterly ridiculous sight.
Still, she gained one useful clue: long hair could be used to cover her face.
Helen picked out a piece of cloth that still had no blood on it, tore it into a long strip, and tied her hair into a ponytail so the back of her neck was clearly visible.
Now somewhat resembling an escaped convict, Helen searched the corpse’s waistband and took a small bundle of keys along with the discarded skewer.
She pressed one hand gently against her chest and focused her hearing.
It was still quiet. Helen nervously tapped the hard stone floor a few times, then began walking toward the door with extreme caution.