Chapter 416: A Mountain Of Ground Meat
Chapter 416: A Mountain Of Ground Meat
The news spread through the family.
Two children in the hospital now.
Mika, broken and bandaged, fighting for his life.
Astrid, physically healing but spiritually shattered, having mutilated herself in her desperate attempt to sever all connection to demi-humans.
The family gathered. They cried. They prayed. They held each other and tried to make sense of a tragedy that made no sense.
The mysterious batte angel, ever the pillar of strength, tried to reassure them.
"This is the worst part." She said softly, gathering the sobbing daughters into her arms. "This is the lowest point. But it will get better."
"When Mika wakes up. When Astrid wakes up. They’ll heal. They’ll recover. And we’ll be here for them. We’ll help them through this."
"Everything will get better."
She believed it.
They all wanted to believe it.
But she wasn’t entirely right.
—
Mika woke up first.
And to everyone’s shock, he was...fine.
Not just physically—though his recovery was miraculously fast, his wounds healing at a rate that baffled even the most experienced healers.
But mentally? Emotionally?
He was the same Mika as before.
Joking. Teasing. Smiling.
And when asked about what happened—about the killings, the blood, the nightmare of that forest—he just shrugged.
"It was a tough situation. I did what I had to do. No point dwelling on it, right?"
The family stared at him, unable to comprehend how someone so young could be so...unbothered.
They had expected trauma. Nightmares. Years of therapy.
Instead, they got the same old Mika, acting as if he hadn’t just slaughtered over a hundred people.
It was confusing.
It was unsettling.
But it was also a relief.
At least one of them had come through unscathed.
—
Astrid was another story entirely.
When she woke up, the first thing she did was reach for something sharp.
Anything sharp.
She would have used her own teeth if she had to.
"I-I need to cut them off."
She muttered, her eyes wild, her body thrashing against the restraints they had been forced to put on her.
"All of them. I need to cut them all off. I can’t have them. I can’t be like them! Let me go!"
Her aunts held her down, trying to calm her, trying to reach the little girl they loved beneath the rage and pain.
"Astrid, please—"
"I HATE THEM! I HATE THESE TAILS! THEY’RE WHY THIS HAPPENED! THEY’RE WHY MIKA GOT HURT! LET ME CUT THEM OFF! LET ME—"
She tried to bite through her own tail.
Fauna had to physically pry her jaws open.
It went on for days.
The screaming. The struggling. The desperate, frantic attempts to sever every last trace of demi-human connection from her body.
Nothing they said could reach her.
Nothing they did could calm her.
Until—
Mika walked into the room.
—
No one knew what he said.
No one knew what he did.
The door closed behind him, and for a long time, there was only silence.
Nadia waited outside, her heart in her throat, praying to every god she could think of that her son could reach her daughter where no one else could.
And then—
Crying.
A child’s tears.
Nadia opened the door slowly and peered inside.
Astrid was in Mika’s arms, her face buried in his shoulder, her body shaking with deep, wrenching sobs.
But they weren’t angry sobs. They weren’t hateful sobs.
They were sad sobs.
Grieving sobs.
The sobs of a little girl who had been through something terrible and was finally, finally letting herself feel it.
Mika held her, stroking her hair, murmuring words too soft to hear.
And when Astrid looked up, all the rage, all the hate, all the fury was gone.
In its place was something else.
Love.
Gratitude.
And a desperate, clinging need to never let him go again.
—
But that love—that desperate, clinging need—it only applied to Mika.
For everyone else, things had changed forever.
Astrid became a different person.
The bright, social, outgoing girl who loved to play with anyone and everyone?
Gone.
Replaced by someone who kept to herself, who focused on one thing and one thing only: protecting Mika and driving demi-humans away.
She stopped playing with her sisters. Stopped joining family gatherings. Stopped seeking out connection.
When her aunts tried to hug her, she accepted stiffly, politely, but there was always distance now.
A wall that hadn’t been there before.
When her sisters called her name, tried to include her in games, she would look at them with eyes that seemed to look through them rather than at them.
But the relationship that suffered most was with Nadia.
From that day forward, Astrid would not speak to her unless absolutely necessary. She would not seek her out. Would not confide in her. Would not let her close.
Because in Astrid’s eyes, her mother had chosen the enemy.
When it mattered most—when Astrid had stood before the king, ready to deliver justice—Nadia had stopped her.
Her mother had protected the monster.
Her mother had sided with the demi-humans.
And that was unforgivable.
No matter how many times Nadia tried to reach out, no matter how many times she tried to explain, to apologize, to bridge the gap—Astrid wouldn’t let her.
The trust was broken.
And it would never fully heal.
—
Years passed.
Astrid grew.
She became powerful. Feared. Respected.
She poured all her energy into one goal: driving demi-humans away.
Protecting her world from their influence.
Making sure no child would ever have to go through what she and Mika went through.
In her mind, it was the only way to keep the world safe.
More importantly, it was the only way to keep Mika safe.
Because if the demi-humans were gone, they could never hurt him again.
That was her driving force.
Her purpose.
Her reason for existing.
And through it all, the only person she truly trusted—the only person she could open up to, be soft with, be herself with was Mika.
He was her exception.
Her anchor.
Her little brother.
The rest of the world?
They were potential threats.
Potential enemies.
Potential betrayers.
And she would never, ever let herself be vulnerable to them again.
Which brought them to now.
To this office.
To this night.
To Mika, finally calling her big sister after all these years.
And to the tears she shed as she held him, feeling, for the first time in so long, that maybe—just maybe—she wasn’t completely alone.
Because she had him.
She had Mika.
And that was enough.
That would always be enough.
—
Of course, there was no way Nadia was going to let the one who had caused all of this—the prince of that wretched race escape justice.
She had defended the king, yes.
But that was politics. That was duty.
That was the burden of her position, forcing her to prioritize peace over vengeance, no matter how much it cost her personally.
Inside, she was just as furious as Astrid.
Inside, she wanted to tear that prince apart piece by piece. Make him suffer. Make him scream.
Make him beg for a death that would never come.
So she did everything in her power to find him.
She deployed every resource at her disposal.
Sent agents across worlds.
Interrogated anyone who might have information.
Tore through the demi-human kingdom with methods that made even hardened warriors tremble.
Days passed.
Nothing.
The prince had vanished.
Not just him—every single person involved in the conspiracy.
Everyone who had any knowledge of the plan. They had all disappeared, as if the earth had simply swallowed them whole.
It was impossible.
There should have been traces. Clues. Something.
But there was nothing.
It was as if they had simply ceased to exist.
Nadia was furious. Frustrated.
Tormented by the thought that the monster who had done this to her children was out there somewhere, free, unpunished.
She felt utterly incompetent.
What kind of mother couldn’t even catch the person who had tried to murder her daughter?
But then—two weeks after the incident, a shocking report came.
It came from the demi-human world itself—the same world that had hosted that fateful party, the same world whose prince had orchestrated the attack.
A river had turned red.
Not metaphorically—literally.
The water, usually crystal clear and blue, had become thick with blood.
Villagers who depended on that river for their livelihood were alarmed and went to investigate.
What they found would haunt them forever.
On the shore of the river, there was a pile of meat.
Not just any meat—minced meat.
Ground so fine it was almost paste, mixed with fragments of bone, shredded tissue, pulverized organs.
It looked like someone had taken dozens of bodies and fed them through an industrial meat grinder.
But that wasn’t the worst part.
The worst part was what was visible within that horrific mound.
Fingers.
Demi-human fingers, sticking out from the crimson paste.
And not just fingers—
Hearts, still recognizable despite being torn and mangled.
Chunks of flesh with telltale demi-human markings.
The villagers who saw it didn’t just scream—they vomited. They ran. They cried. They had nightmares for the rest of their lives.
An investigation was launched immediately.
And when the results came back, the entire kingdom was thrown into chaos.
The meat pile contained the remains of at least ninety individuals.
And every single one of them was connected to the conspiracy.
The prince’s inner circle.
The warriors who had attacked the party.
The mages who had created the vortex.
Every single person involved in the plot against Astrid.
Including the prince himself.
The king had to identify his own son’s remains.
He found the eyes first—those golden eyes, so distinctive, so precious, the same eyes he saw in the mirror every morning.
They stared at him from within that mountain of gore, and he fainted on the spot.
His son had been ground into meat.
Everyone who had conspired to hurt those children had been ground into meat.
And no one knew who had done it.
Nadia read the report in stunned silence.
She should have been horrified.
She should have been disturbed by the brutality, the savagery, the sheer malice of what had been done.
Instead?
She felt relief.
Relief that they had received a fate far worse than anything she could have arranged.
Relief that, somehow, justice had been served.
But who?
Who could have done this?
The demi-human side wouldn’t have.
Even if they had caught the conspirators, they would have simply arrested them, or at most executed them cleanly.
They wouldn’t have...processed them like this.
Her own side? Impossible.
Nothing happened in her domain without her knowledge. If any of her people had been involved, she would have heard about it.
There were no witnesses. No evidence. No clues pointing to any perpetrator.
It was as if some invisible force had simply descended from the heavens, scooped up everyone responsible, and turned them into paste.
Nadia was baffled.
Completely, utterly baffled.
She needed air.
She left her desk and walked into the garden, hoping the fresh air and greenery would clear her mind.
That’s when she saw him.
Mika.
Walking in the opposite direction through the corridor that bordered the garden.
He was holding a bowl of ice cream, eating it with obvious enjoyment.
His steps were light. His expression was relaxed. He looked like any normal child enjoying a treat.
Two weeks.
It had only been two weeks since he had been lying in that hospital bed, wrapped in bandages, connected to machines, barely alive.
And now here he was, completely recovered.
Nadia smiled—or tried to. Her face, as always, didn’t cooperate fully, but the warmth in her eyes was unmistakable.
She reached out and patted his head as he passed.
He grumbled, slightly annoyed.
"I’m not a kid anymore, you know."
Nadia’s smile or the feeling of it remained.
"You’ll always be my kid, Mika, no matter what."
He rolled his eyes good-naturedly and continued on his way, spooning another bite of ice cream into his mouth.
Nadia watched him go, her heart swelling with love.
Her baby boy.
Her precious, sweet, gentle baby boy.
But then—
She froze.
Her entire body went rigid.
Because in that moment, as he passed her, she caught a scent.
Faint. Barely there. So subtle that anyone else would have missed it completely.
But Nadia had spent years on battlefields. Years surrounded by death and violence. She knew that smell.
Blood.
She smelled blood on her son.
Her mind, honed by decades of strategy and analysis, began working at full speed.
Pieces clicked together.
She thought about the massacre in the forest.
The bodies Mika had left in his wake. The brutal, vicious way he had killed. How he had torn through an entire army, despite being only five years old.
She thought about how the family had explained it away.
Desperation. Self-defense. A survival instinct that had awakened in him to protect his sister.
She thought about how quickly he had recovered. How normal he seemed. How utterly unbothered by the whole ordeal.
And she thought about the report on her desk.
Ninety-three bodies.
Ground into meat.
Dumped in a river.
A pile of flesh and bone and organs, so thoroughly destroyed that identification was only possible through the prince’s distinctive golden eyes.
The pieces clicked together.
A horrible, impossible, terrifying picture emerged.
’Could it be?’
’Could it be that Mika—my Mika—my baby Mika—’
She shook her head violently, cutting off the thought before it could fully form.
’No.’
’No, that was ridiculous.’
’Impossible.’
He was five years old. A child. Her sweet, precious baby boy.
There was no way.
No way he could have tracked down ninety-three people across different worlds, captured them, transported them, and then—and then—
She laughed softly to herself, shaking her head.
She was overworking herself. That was all. The stress of the past weeks had finally caught up with her, making her imagination run wild.
She needed rest. A break. Time to recover.
Mika was fine.
Her family was fine.
Everything would be fine.
She turned and continued her walk, forcing herself to relax, to let go of the ridiculous suspicion that had briefly crossed her mind...
...not even realising that there was a darkness raging in Mika that woud envelope whoever dare to lay a hand on his family.
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