Seria's Past
"So, kid, why don't you finish explaining?" At Angelica's words, Seria puffed out her cheeks and made a sulky face. Still, with her lips pressed tightly together, Seria eventually turned to Ian and began speaking reluctantly, as if she had no choice.
"To get straight to the point... I carry a demon's curse."
"A curse? What kind of curs— Mmph. Mmmph." Ian clamped Angelica's mouth shut as she kept babbling and urged Seria to continue. Seria shot Angelica a disgusted look before resuming her story.
"I already told you that I belong to the Mind's Eye Clan, right?" Ian nodded. He clearly remembered her saying that when she and Sia first arrived at the tent. Of course... he hadn't believed it at the time.
"My clan lived deep in the mountains, far from any human trails." For a moment, Seria's face softened with a happy expression, as if lost in fond memories. "Two hundred years ago, we enjoyed a full century of peace. So much so that we no longer needed warriors."
Of course, looking back now, that had been an incredibly naive and foolish way of thinking, Seria admitted.
"With our guard completely down, we started wandering outside the village. And eventually... we were discovered by humans. That was the beginning of our tragedy."
The Mind's Eye Clan finally understood why their ancestors had hidden the village so thoroughly and why they had never interacted with humans.
"Our hell began from that moment." The clan's eyes were as beautiful as rubies, and their green irises possessed the power to see through to the true nature of any being.
"Humans could use our eyes to create special magical tools. They really were impressive." They processed the clan's eyes into rings that could measure and display another person's physical abilities as numerical grades. The rings were incredibly effective. When mana was infused into them, the target's physical stats would appear before the user's eyes, ranked by grade. It proved to be an extremely efficient tool for identifying rogue Transcendents during the chaotic Age of Inwol.
The rings were named Liber's Rings after their creator. To us, they were cursed rings, but to humans, they were treasures of the century. And not just to humans. From then on, we became valuable research material.
"The humans pretended to be friendly. They told us there were bad humans and good humans, and claimed they were the good ones." But everyone was taken away anyway. Those who went with the 'good humans' had their eyes gouged out. They spent their lives as slaves or were discarded like trash, dying on the streets.
"Even so... how could we ever trust humans again...?" Ian couldn't say a word as he listened. Seria's eyes, as she recounted her past, were already dead—eyes that reminded him of his own when he had first been summoned to this world. They were the eyes of someone who cursed the world and had given up on life.
"We didn't just sit back and take it. We sought help from the outside. Of course... we were rejected everywhere."
When we went to Niflheim seeking aid, the elven elder said, "We don't want to get involved with humans. Handle it yourselves."
The leader of Urg, the dwarf king, said, "We don't want to recklessly destroy our friendly relations with humans."
And when we went to the Monarch Grand Canyon where the dragonkin gathered, an old dragon said, "I'm busy. I don't have time to worry about you lot."
Even the demon realm beyond the Demon Boundary, and the demon commander who guarded it, gave the same answer. "If we help you... will you offer us your eyes?"
In the end, the Mind's Eye Clan was isolated. There was no one they could turn to for help. So the clan came up with an idea. They would summon someone who could help them.
"...So you summoned a demon?" Ian asked, his tone almost accusatory.
"Then what were we supposed to do? Just sit quietly until every last one of us had our eyes torn out and were thrown away like garbage?"
That seemed to ignite something in Seria. Her expression twisted as she continued to argue back.
"You said you're the Hero, right? Must be nice to be so righteous. But we... we couldn't do that. Our clan was cornered. One wrong step and we'd fall off a cliff to our deaths."
She remembered the village elder desperately clinging to a noble's pant leg to protect his daughter, only to be killed by a knight's sword. After the noble left, the villagers silently held the elder's funeral. Without a coffin, they buried him in the dirt—his eye sockets empty of what should have been there.
That incident prompted the clan's shaman to retrieve an ancient tome from the underground storage. The shaman proposed summoning a demon to take revenge on the humans. And the Mind's Eye Clan, already consumed by rage and having lost all reason, did not oppose the idea.
"I was still young. The adults said it might be dangerous and locked all the children, including me, in the underground storage." The children didn't even know why they were locked up—the adults never explained.
"We just kept shouting to be let out. We screamed until we collapsed from exhaustion."
They cried and wailed until they passed out at dawn. By the time she woke up, the entire clan had been wiped out.
"Haaam..." Seria woke up with a long yawn. The cold wind blowing from somewhere made her body tremble, and she couldn't sleep properly. She rolled her eyes around to survey her surroundings.
"Huh... the storage." It seemed she had fallen asleep in the cold, damp basement without returning home last night. Maybe that was why her body felt chilled. She stood up, hugging her shoulders, and looked around again at the question that had risen in her mind.
"Where did everyone go?" There was no one around the girl. Not a single one of the children who had been locked up with her was in sight.
Creak. Creak. Creak. Only the iron door, swinging without a handle, greeted the awakened Seria. However, seven-year-old Seria didn't find the open door strange. She also didn't pay much attention to the fact that the other children were gone. She simply assumed the adults had finished their business and left.
"Tch... that's not fair. We were supposed to leave together, Eli, Uren... Why'd you leave me behind?" Grumbling, she kicked the door handle. Then she pushed open the swinging iron door and climbed the stairs out of the underground storage.
The moment she stepped outside, she pinched her nose at the metallic smell. "I've smelled this before." But she couldn't remember where. Still, the uneasy feeling made her keep thinking, trying to recall. Then she smacked her fist into her palm as if she'd remembered.
"Ah, that's it!" It was definitely the same smell from when the village elder had died not long ago. Seria had been sleeping at home with the other children at the time, so she didn't know the details. The adults hadn't told her anything either. She had only felt sad when she woke up to find the friendly elder gone.
Seria walked toward the source of the fishy smell. The closer she got to the empty lot behind the village, the stronger the odor became.
"Eh? Who are you?" When she finally reached the lot, she was met with a sight so horrific that even a child's mind couldn't endure it. Corpses. Corpses. Corpses. Corpses. Organs lay scattered everywhere, and the ground was soaked in blood. No matter where she looked, there were only corpses.
And standing atop the pile of bodies was a golden-haired man with bronze skin. He looked down at Seria and asked, "What are you?"
"Uweeek." But Seria couldn't answer. Unable to hold back the nausea, she vomited onto the ground. It was a terrible sight. Jake the uncle, Aunt Rosen, and big sister Natasha—people she had seen just yesterday—had turned into rotting lumps of meat sprawled across the floor. It didn't feel real at all.
"Ah... ugh, urk..." The situation was absurdly unreal, and the horror had exceeded what a child's brain could process. Seria burst into tears without realizing it. "M-Mom... I want my mom..." She sank to the ground, clutching her head, and kept crying out for her mother.
"Kid, this is the third time I'm asking." The golden-haired man had approached without her noticing and thrust his face right in front of Seria's eyes.
"Kyaa!" Seria let out a small scream and fell backward onto her rear.
"You gonna answer or not?" The man erased the expression from his face and asked. But Seria couldn't respond. She was terrified. 'He's a weird man. Scary. I hate this. Don't come closer...' She didn't want to get involved. She just wanted him to disappear.
Meanwhile, her tears had stopped. Instead, her skirt was wet. She must have wet herself without realizing it. 'I hate this... I'm scared...'
"Fine. Just die." The man waved his hand irritably. A black mist surged toward Seria.
"Kyaaak!" The girl screamed as she was engulfed by the mist and collapsed. However, the man frowned as he looked at the fallen Seria, sensing something was wrong.
"What?" Nothing had happened. 'I definitely cast the Bleeding Curse...' The Bleeding Curse caused the victim to bleed from every part of their body until they died. But the girl hadn't died. She had only fainted. There had to be a reason the curse didn't work.
'What makes this girl different from the other humans?' The man grabbed Seria by the neck, about to tear out her heart, when—
"Stop. Demon." Crack. A brief spark flew from the man's hand gripping the girl's nape. He dropped Seria and rubbed his tingling hand.
"...Huh? What are you?" Even at a glance, the man could tell. Though it was the same body, this was clearly a different person from before. Her face was already a mess of vomit, tears, and snot, but her eyes were different. They were the eyes of someone looking down on an inferior being. The girl now had the eyes of a demon looking at a human.
"Two souls?" The girl didn't answer. She simply stared at the man with her lips pressed tightly together. As the man watched her, her pupils soon split vertically, and the whites of her eyes filled with an unsettling black. Demon's Eyes.
"No. Then... two personalities?" She still didn't answer.
"Well, whatever." The demon waved his hand dismissively. "I'll find out when I crack open your skull. Right?" He spoke casually about killing her, a chilling smile on his face. Only then did the girl open her mouth.
"Save me."
"Now you're begging for your life? How amusing." The demon smirked and condensed black energy in his hand. Seeing this, the girl hurriedly spoke, saying something intriguing.
"I know about demons. I've met them since the day I was born."
"Huh? What do you mean by that?"
"What do you think I am?"
"What kind of question is—" Before the demon could finish, the girl said it. "Baal."
"...Huh?" The demon dispersed the energy in his hand and stared at Seria with a dumbfounded expression. "Kuh... hahaha." Then he burst into loud laughter. "Ha. So that's how it is? You're... that one's doll?"
The demon waved his hand as if he understood. "Go. I have no more business with you." Seria let out a sigh of relief and immediately turned around. Just as she was about to step out of the lot—
"Wait a moment. Now that I think about it, something even more interesting just came to mind."