I’ve Become a Body That Can’t Live Without This Man Anymore
Quíclops.
In English, Cyclops.
One of the first-generation gods, the children of Gaia and Uranus—those same beings whom Greek myth treated as the original smiths, even older than Hephaestus himself.
They were giants with a single eye, and in later tales they forged the weapons that Zeus and the other Olympians used to bring the Titanomachy to an end in Zeus’s favor.
And yet, setting all that lineage aside, the sight of the Quíclops girl standing before me left me thoroughly dumbfounded.
…Aren’t Quíclops supposed to be men?
Greek mythology had been passed down with so many loose scraps and extra stories that I couldn’t say for sure even if I dug into the original sources, but at least as far as I knew, there was no description of a female Quíclops in the old myths.
Still, looking at the one-eyed girl in front of me, I couldn’t think of her as anything other than a Quíclops.
There was the iron hammer left behind inside the forge, for one.
It was still unfinished, but in the span of just one week, the only beings capable of making something like that were Quíclops—the other smithing race from myth—besides me.
“I-is this… really the legendary Quíclops?”
“No doubt about it. That one eye, and that faint but distinctly alien divine power too. She’s definitely a Quíclops.”
Besides, Nerites standing right beside me—and Thetis, who’d come in after sobering up—were both certain of it as well.
So, separate from my lingering doubts, I decided to treat this one-eyed girl as a Quíclops for now and asked in a calm voice,
“Who are you? And what are you doing here?”
“…”
Even after my question, the girl kept her mouth shut and said nothing.
It was obvious at a glance that she had some kind of reason, but seeing her remain stubbornly silent no matter what, I spoke again in an even tone.
“I’m not trying to punish you. I’m just curious what you were making in my forge. If you tell me the truth, I can forgive you—and I can even help.”
“!...U-um…”
That seemed to shake her a little.
And yet, even then, she still didn’t open her mouth. Watching that, I let out a small sigh.
If she wasn’t going to talk, there was nothing more I could do.
Of course, sneaking into my forge without permission and making something here was definitely wrong. But that didn’t mean I intended to do anything harsh to such a small child.
A real man should be generous with children.
Still, if she had no intention of explaining herself, I was ready to give her a proper scolding and send her back home with that.
That was when—
“It’s okay. Go on and tell us. We just want to help you.”
“Ah…”
“Come on, now.”
Nerites spoke as he gently stroked the Quíclops girl’s head, wearing a warm, kind smile.
It was a considerate gesture, but even that alone wasn’t enough to easily break down the wariness of someone who had kept her mouth shut despite my own words.
“I-I’ll tell you! M-my name is Kedalion! A-and the reason I came here is…”
I take it back.
Forget everything else. As long as you’ve got pretty-boy power, you can solve anything with a click.
Unlike me, whose face would never earn a kind word no matter what I did, Nerites was the sort of beautiful youth who could warm women’s hearts just by showing up.
The girl, who had been clamped shut a moment ago, had now blushed faintly at Nerites’s question and was pouring everything out in a rush.
Since she was born a Quíclops, she probably grew up hearing nothing good about her face either, and she likely had almost no experience with a handsome boy speaking to her so kindly... ahem. Anyway.
I found myself once again reminded that life really is easier when you’re handsome, and then I quietly listened as the Quíclops girl explained herself.
“Why a hammer? There shouldn’t be any need for a frail young lady like you to have something like that.”
“That’s…”
And then—
“I wanted to save him… my dad, who’s trapped in Tartarus…”
“!”
At those words,
all of our expressions—Nerites’s, mine, and everyone else’s—hardened in an instant.
Tartarus.
The abyss of the underworld,
The bottom of the world, a prison so deep even the gods feared it—a hell without end.
Hot storms raged there in savage fury.
Unending rain, wind, and fog shrouded even sight itself in darkness.
And through it all, the horrible screams of damned souls echoed without cease.
A world of despair and suffering, said to be a place from which no being could ever escape once it entered, not even a god.
Because of that dreadful association, everyone knew the ones cast into Tartarus were wicked beyond measure.
But that was only the common story.
In truth, among those imprisoned there were also many who had been dragged into the abyss unfairly.
The Quíclops, too, had been thrown into Tartarus by their father Uranus simply because they were ugly one-eyed monsters.
For someone who had nearly been hurled away by her mother the moment she was born just because she was “ugly,” it was a story that didn’t feel far removed at all.
And yet, even in a place that horrific,
people lived.
They slept while the blistering heat gnawed at their bodies.
They ate miserably off dirt and dried-out roots.
And with their bodies bound in chains, in prisonlike homes… they even found ways to share burning love with one another.
Steropes, the second of the three Quíclops brothers, was one such case.
Imprisoned by Uranus and chained in Tartarus with his brothers at the bottom of the abyss, Steropes had lived there as a slave ever since.
His life held no joy and no hope—only the sound of his hammer striking metal in endless despair.
But then, one day, a woman appeared before him.
A woman who had been swept along and washed up on the black sea at the very bottom of the abyss.
She had black hair and black eyes, and Steropes saved her with his own hands.
After that, the two were drawn to each other as if by fate.
In the depths of that miserable world, they took each other’s hands and loved one another.
And in the end, they had a child.
That child was the Quíclops girl, Kedalion.
Some people’s lives can look like hell to those watching from outside, while to the ones living them, they are simply everyday life itself.
Kedalion, born in Tartarus, was no different.
She spent her days helping the Quíclops laborers with their grueling work and surviving on the same meager meals day after day.
To anyone else, it would have looked like a miserable life.
And yet, she always kept a smile on her face and went on living each day.
Even though she lived at the very bottom of the abyss, where the cries of despair and pain never ceased.
The girl’s life was happy.
She had hard days, yes, but she always had a warm family beside her—
a loving mother and father.
But then,
that happiness, which had bloomed like a single flower in hell,
withered all too suddenly.
One day, the Abyss Guards burst into their home without warning.
And at the center of them stood that man.
The master of the abyss.
The very embodiment of the abyss itself.
The Protogenos Tartarus.
With the appearance of a king wrapped in danger and immense divine power, as though he had been carved directly from the abyss, Kedalion was seized by suffocating fear.
But the very next scene wiped even that terror away.
Her mother, who had dressed herself beautifully that day, roughly shoved the trembling Kedalion out of her arms, then slowly rose to her feet and walked toward Tartarus.
And then…
-smack.
“Huh…?”
“M-mistress?”
Her mother kissed Tartarus’s cheek with a dreamy, syrupy expression on her face.
Then she looked back this way and said in a cold voice with not a trace of affection in it,
“I’m sorry, everyone. I… can’t live without this man anymore.”
“W-what…?”
“M-mom?…”
With that utterly unexpected declaration of infidelity, she threw herself into Tartarus’s arms.
The horrifying sight of her mother abandoning her and her father so openly, right before her eyes, left a massive wound in Kedalion’s heart.
But her tragedy did not end there.
“N-no! D-don’t do this, Mom! H-how can you abandon me… abandon Dad! I hate this! D-don’t do that! Don’t do that!”
Kedalion rushed forward in panic and clung to her mother’s clothes, desperately trying to stop her.
Even after her mother declared that she was leaving both daughter and family behind, the girl struggled with all her strength to turn her mother’s heart back.
And yet—
“That won’t do, Lord Tartarus. Please remove this troublesome thing from my sight. Please sweep it away from this beautiful abyss forever.”
“Understood.”
“M-mom…? W-what… what does that mean…? Ghk!”
“Kedalion!”
“What the hell is wrong with you, bastards! Aghhh!!”
The next moment, Kedalion was subdued by the guards, and the Quíclops who tried to stop them were knocked down in the process.
As she looked down at her daughter, who had been bound by the hands of the Abyss Guards,
she—
the mother called Nyx—
spoke in a voice steeped in cold disgust.
“How foolish. Someone like you was nothing but trash to me from the beginning.”
“M-mom?”
“Never show up in front of me again. You ugly sack of blood.”
It was a brutal string of abuse her mother had never once said to her in her life.
And with those words,
Kedalion was forcibly cast out of Tartarus by the Abyss Guards, torn away from the father who remained behind.
The last moment as she was dragged away, she heard clearly in her ears.
As she watched that scene,
the voice of her mother—
no, of the woman she had thought was her mother—was filled not with lies, but with genuine delight.
“How wonderful. Truly… what a perfect day.”
And then the door of Tartarus shut tight.
The moment she was abandoned by her mother and forcibly torn from her father as well,
the girl’s happiness vanished from the world without leaving even a fragment behind.
For years after that, she wandered the surface alone.
Not a single person in this world ever tried to draw near a Quíclops with such a grotesque face.
Everyone who saw her face only recoiled in disgust.
Never receiving help from anyone,
the little girl could only roam the world alone, living a miserable, beastlike existence.
And as the years passed, the loneliness grew more painful and the suffering only deeper.
In the end, from within that torment, she made a reckless decision.
She would return to Tartarus…
There, she would save the only family she had left in this world.
Her father, chained in place.
Even if her body turned to a handful of ash,
even if her soul vanished like dew in flame…
she thought it would still be better than things were now.
*
“…”
“…”
Kedalion’s story had been far heavier than I’d expected.
After hearing it, the rest of us could only sit in silence for a while.
Honestly, the moment she said she wanted to save her dad from the bottom of hell, I’d already felt that something was off.
But to think there’d be a married-woman affair buried inside it…
Worse, a shameless NTR declaration made right in front of her own daughter.
Even if this was Greek mythology, a world where morality and common sense had been thrown to the dogs, it was still the kind of story that made a person’s blood boil. My urge to smash the skull of that bitch—Nyx, Immortal, or whatever the hell she called herself—was growing stronger by the second.
And the first person to break that anger-laden silence was…
“How could she betray her husband and throw herself into another man’s arms? How could anyone do such a thing! It’s truly dreadful. As the goddess of love, I can never accept it!”
“…”
“? Why are you looking at me like that?”
“…Nothing.”
