Damn, looking at it with fresh eyes, I honestly couldn’t believe that I had been the one to cause all of this. Bodies lying broken and ripped apart, holes gouged out of them, blood, flesh, and organs lying about. I went around, body to body, checking out what gear they had that I could use, and seeing if they dropped any heads. As I performed this mildly sociopathic examination, I spoke to Sophia to distract myself.

“You know, once upon a time, there was a man and a woman. The man’s mother was from a part of the world where she had seen the utter worst humanity had to offer, and she had vented out her discontent with the world on her children. His father was a military man, his job was to yell, intimidate, and beat people who made mistakes so that they could learn how to do their jobs correctly, and form a mentality that could allow them to kill. Work he unfortunately tended to bring home with him, causing the man to know violence as the only expression of love.

The woman on the other hand, was from a far more normal family. They may not have been particularly successful, but they had enough to get by, and they all loved each other. The woman in question, however, had always wanted more. She wanted to make it, to be successful. She wanted to be a doctor, and God knows she had the brains for it. Her family loved her no matter how hard she worked, so for her to feel any pressure, she had to be the one to push herself to constantly be better, to work harder.

The man and the woman eventually met, and ended up getting together, when they were both extremely young. This resulted in them having a child, way before they were even remotely ready to be parents. The man had no idea if he could even properly care for a child, but knew he had a responsibility to do so, so he did it in the only way he knew how. He left to join the military, so that the woman and child could have enough money to live off of. The woman, unwilling to allow herself to fail on her ambitions, decided to try to do both, raise her child and study to be a doctor.

Things were okay for a while, but eventually, the woman started cracking. Becoming a doctor is one of the most academically challenging things you can do after all, and arguably even more challenging? Raising a child. The woman couldn’t realistically do both, especially not with the man constantly out of the country for work, leaving her to do both alone. One day, she reached a breaking point, and the woman snapped. She completely quit her dream of one day being a doctor, and tried to satisfy herself with just raising the boy she had birthed. However, it couldn’t last.

When the man finished his time in the military, he got a new decently paying job, and then got another job after that, and another, so at any given point in time, he would be working two or three jobs. And the man and woman brought a second child into the world. The woman tried to accept the fact that she was always alone to take care of the kids, given that the man was never home, always working, but she couldn’t. She had never wanted this life for herself after all, and started taking it out on the source of all of her discontent. Her son. The boy by this point was decently grown, and far smarter than he should be at his age. But there was something…wrong with him. With the way he thought, and the way he felt about things on a base level.

You see, when most people have thoughts and emotions, they are kinda self defined. For thoughts, they can hear a voice clearly stating the thought, or see an image. For emotions, they feel fear, envy, joy, or sadness. But this boy, he didn’t have that. When he thought, there were no words or images, only vague understanding and raw information. For his thoughts to be translated into an understandable set of words, he had to speak them aloud, so he could often be found just standing around talking to himself. And when he felt emotion, all he felt were the physiological effects and unexplained alterations to his thought process. Because he had no way of knowing that this wasn’t how everyone experienced life, he had no way to communicate this to his parents. He had no way to understand empathy, no way to understand emotion, or how people think. This led the woman to believe that while her son was intelligent enough to read complicated books he shouldn’t be able to, and learn complicated math and science, he was utterly stupid in every other regard.

When she started taking out her frustrations on her son, the boy understood what was happening, but he didn’t understand why. He couldn’t understand why. He couldn’t understand the emotions his mother was feeling so every time she would grab him by the throat and slam him into a wall, or into the floor, and scream into his face, he understood that she was blaming him for her having kids, but couldn’t fathom the reason behind the emotion.

Upon realizing his wife’s issues that were developing, the man made an effort to spend more time at home, forgetting that there was a fundamental reason behind his decision not to in the first place. The man had only one way of expressing to his son that he cared about him, and that way was violence. And the son took it all willingly, knowing that if he wasn’t there to take it, all of his parents’ rage and bitterness would target his undeserving baby sister instead. And so this went on for years. Building in intensity. No matter how hard the boy worked, or how much he demonstrated his intelligence, his mother and father would find something small to take hold of and thoroughly punish him for.

When the boy was still very young, something horrible had happened to him while they left him with someone to watch him, so the woman throughout his entire life, had decided that the only way to both protect him, and make him grow into his full potential, was to control every single aspect of his life, no matter how small. And when the boy went off course by even the tiniest amount, was anything less than absolutely perfect, she made sure to beat into him the importance of doing everything she told him to, exactly the way she told him to do it.

After enough time of this, the boy desperately wanted to escape, but knew he wouldn’t be able to. His parents would catch him should he run away. He only knew one way out. Every night, he would grab a pair of knives from the kitchen, then sit outside of his parents’ bedroom. Planning. His father was strong, and the boy had no confidence in taking him in a fight, so he would start off with swinging the cleaver down into his father’s head, killing him instantly in his sleep. He would then go over to the other side of the bed with the sharpest knife in the house, and stab it down into where his mother was sleeping, over and over until she eventually stopped screaming. Every night he would sit outside, planning the murder of his parents, before deciding not to for the sake of his sister, who, thanks to his efforts, had only ever known love and support from the man and the woman. Feeling hopeless, the boy tried several times to end his own life, each attempt ending in failure.

The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

When the boy had grown up, he confronted his mother, and told her about the times he had attempted suicide, in an attempt to demonstrate that she needed to calm down and take it easier on her kids, but her response had stopped him dead in his tracks. The first words out of her mouth, dripping with venom, showing that she meant every syllable: “Try harder next time.”. And so he did. The boy stopped going by the name he had been given, and that night, he ran away from home.

“Back on my old world, we have a genre known as horror. Basically, people run around being chased by a scary monster that wants to kill them. The monster, or the set place changes, but for the most part, that’s the gist of horror movies. Normally, the entertainment from watching horror movies is found by empathizing with the people, and feeling the fear of death hunting you down, while you’re in a safe environment and don’t have to actually worry about your own wellbeing. Me though? I always tended to root for the monsters. I felt like I had one in me, always begging to get out, and I would watch horror movies as a way to calm it down, make it stop begging for blood and destruction for a bit. The raw power, and inevitability of the monsters was something I always wanted for myself.

“So if Seth was the name of a little boy, scared of the dark, How about we make Leo the name of the monster who revels in it.”

Sophia’s POV

As I listened to Leo’s story, I felt my heart ache for him, as all of a sudden, so many things made sense. The way he never really seemed to be surprised by anything, and ready to just go with the flow and accept it as a new part of his reality: Brought about by never having proper control over his life. The reason he always describes emotions by what’s happening to his body, the reason he’s always been comfortable with saying whatever is on his mind, because that’s just the way he forms thoughts in the first place. The reason he both seemed to despise talking to people, but also so desperately wanted to build a relationship with them. The reason he flew into such a carnal rage the moment he realized there would be no consequences for his actions. The reason he gets so obsessed with his projects, taking his time, and working on them until they’re perfect. And finally, the biggest thing: Why the first words out of his mouth when I stimulated his desire were: “I want to be free.”

I also realized just how intensely my ignoring him had hurt him. This broken child, who has never been shown love by anyone in his life, but had endured so much hardship and abuse without complaint simply so that his sister wouldn’t, finally had someone to talk to, someone who was always there, and I abandoned him in his time of need. Fuck I’m a piece of shit. Worst of all, because he has no way to really tell what emotions he’s feeling at any given point in time, he operates mostly by pure reason and logic, and because he can understand the rationality behind my indecisiveness, he won’t even get angry and blame me for it, so I can’t feel like I’m doing something to make up for it.

No, you’re thinking about this the wrong way. I chided myself, The biggest problem isn’t that you hurt him, it’s that Leo can’t just inherently trust that you’ll stick around anymore. Don’t worry about making it up to him and just stick by him day to day. He’ll be sleeping in the subspace from now on, so you’ll also get plenty of face to face time to interact. No matter how long it takes, eventually he’ll trust you again. Don’t treat him differently, just talk to him like you always do.

I responded to his last sentence in a slightly teasing way, “While I can appreciate the sentiment, I gotta say, that was pretty cringeworthy.” I braced myself, hoping he was okay enough to joke around, and to my relief, he gave a short laugh. Not quite his normal one, but also not nearly as manic or deranged as before.

He scratched the back of his head and replied “Yeah, that’s fair. Plus I guess it would be more accurate to call myself a demon rather than a monster now huh?”

“Not quite yet, it’ll probably take decades for you to make the transformation into a demon. As I told you when you first came to this world, you are now a warlock, a human walking the path to become a demon. If I were an angel you would be called a paladin. Depending on just how fast your mana pool has grown though, I might be able to teach you a demonic spell soon. There’s just one problem though: Demonic spells mostly have to do with emotion, so I don’t know how well that’ll translate to you.”

“Can you do it with anger? If so, that’ll probably work similarly.”

I tilted my head in confusion and asked, “So you think that anger for you is the same for other people? Why? What makes anger specifically so special?”

Leo took on a contemplative look before explaining: “Because from what I understand, anger is not actually an emotion. It is a physiological response you have to emotion. It’s the brain kicking in the ‘fight’ option in the fight or flight reflex, which is why you can also see the most primitive and unevolved of animals expressing rage. I suppose considering that though you could also make the argument that anger is the first of all emotions to exist. So yeah, anything else that’s just or primarily a physiological response would also work, like hunger, thirst, or desire.”

I considered his response before realizing that that actually made a lot of sense, especially when he mentioned desire. Part of what made me so powerful even among the titled demons was the fact that desire couldn’t actually be fought off, only ignored. The normal defense for when a demon manipulated your emotions was to focus on an event that stirred an emotion counter to what the demon was forcing you to feel. For example, if they were lulling you into a sense of security, you would combat that by thinking about the time you were caught in an ambush. People had tried to fight off my instilling them with desire by remembering moments of contentment, but rather than neutralize my desire, they had cohabitated, making them mostly content with their lives, but with the exception of this one desperate need for whatever I made them desire.

I considered this as I watched Leo finish gathering everything he had a use for from the corpses. He had left all of the heavier armor and weapons alone, not having a way to conveniently carry them, but did end up with 6 new knives; most likely fodder for his experimentation in enchanting, a rather sizeable quantity of arrows, assorted materials for crafting, including a few tools whose purpose he wasn’t quite sure of, all of the clothes they had been wearing, as apparently he wanted to use the cloth (which had instigated a heavy round of teasing from me while he stripped them) and about a dozen heads, leaving him with a total of 15. Precisely as I had worried, he had stayed in the area surrounded by the pungent for too long, and predatory beasts had found him. I watched as he crouched low, preparing to strike, before finally catching a glimpse of the monsters. I saw a light of horror fill his eyes as he shouted,

“NOPE! FUCK THIS, I’M OUT!!”, and he sprinted away downstream, as fast as his feet could carry him.