"Hiss..."
As her adoptive father spread the crushed herbs over Gavo's swollen calf, a piercing pain immediately shot through her badly injured shinbone.
During the earlier fight, Gavo had used the recoil from kicking off the wall with her right leg to borrow Mir's own force and turn it against him.
That highly effective punch had clearly gone beyond what her body could bear.
After all, her body right now was still that of a little girl around three years old.
And as the price, the shinbone in her right leg had very obviously developed a fracture.
Now that the effects of Attack on Bat-Man had faded, she had regained her normal ability to feel pain.
After fastening a simple splint made of sheet metal around Gavo's injured right leg, her adoptive father lightly knocked her on the head with a trace of reproach.
Seeing the stern gaze in his eyes, mixed with a bit of heartache, Gavo lowered her head and poked her fingers together in front of her chest, trying to act cute and muddle through.
But that deliberate little act very obviously dealt mental damage to someone else.
"Tch..."
A voice tinged with disgust came from the other side of the garbage shack, and Gavo immediately turned to look.
It was Rabbit-Mouth, whose entire face was written over with revulsion and discomfort.
After sensing the cold stare hidden behind Gavo's mask, he obediently shut his mouth and lowered his head to look after Mir, who was still rolling his eyes back.
Why were these three here?
That was also something Gavo wanted to understand.
Just when she had been about to knock them all unconscious and throw them outside so that the underhive at night could provide them with twenty-four hours of quality sleep...
Her adoptive father, who had come searching for her with a lamp, happened to appear.
No matter how she explained that they were bad people, her adoptive father still insisted on dragging Mir back home on the cart.
And Rabbit-Mouth and Fish-Eyes, worried about Mir, had stubbornly followed along.
That was also why Gavo was still wearing her gas mask even inside the house.
At first, they had thought that once they arrived on the other party's turf, they would be lucky if they suffered only humiliation or a beating.
But what happened next completely exceeded their expectations.
That horribly ugly mutant not only took out food and warmly treated them, but also had the violent mask freak relay that they could stay here for the night to avoid the dangers outside.
In the underhive, that level of treatment while sheltering under someone else's roof was practically a miracle.
Before this, Rabbit-Mouth had even suspected he might have to offer up one of his legs as dried meat just to pay for the lodging.
Even though a heated can of corpse-starch was already sitting in front of him, he still did not dare eat it.
Because he still had not recovered from the shock.
Why were they being given food?
Could it be... to calm down the ingredients?
At that thought, Rabbit-Mouth immediately curled up nervously in the corner.
His eyes darted about, flickering between confusion and vigilance.
While Rabbit-Mouth's thoughts ran wild, Fish-Eyes drooled at the sight of the food, and Mir slept like a baby, Gavo's adoptive father stood up after finishing the treatment on her leg.
Rabbit-Mouth caught, out of the corner of his eye, the sight of the man picking something up and walking in his direction.
"What are you doing?!"
He immediately jumped up in alarm.
Then, a water flask filled with clean water was handed over to him.
Hearing the water slosh softly against the inside of the flask, Rabbit-Mouth went blank for a moment, then unconsciously licked his cracked lips.
That was right.
He had not eaten properly in a long time, and it had also been a while since he had drunk any water.
And judging from the crystal-clear appearance, this was precious clean water.
Water was not actually scarce in the underhive, but clean water was exceedingly rare. The gangs held it tightly in their grasp, and anyone outside the gangs had to pay an enormous price to get it.
For feral children with no stable productivity of their own, even a single mouthful of clean water was an unimaginable luxury.
The face of the malformed man before him, twisted by facial tumors, forced itself into a horrifying smile through a trajectory of motion so unsettling it made the heart tremble.
"Mm ah ah."
As he opened his crooked mouth and made strange sounds, his other hand also moved in signs.
"Father thinks an idiot like you isn't eating because you're thirsty. He's telling you to drink some water first, then eat."
Gavo translated in a bad mood.
Looking at the water flask in front of him, Rabbit-Mouth sank into profound bewilderment and shock.
His life was the life of many feral children.
Because of his obvious physical defects, he had been abandoned by parents who were already unwilling to raise children in the first place.
In the dangerous underhive, he had suffered through endless hardship, living a life no better than livestock.
He had fought rats for food in rotten mud, and crawled beside factory runoff channels to lick foul, acidic water.
Only after forming a little group with Mir and the others had he gradually begun to live something closer to the life of a normal underhive resident.
The cruelty of the underhive had long since been engraved into his soul, until he no longer trusted anyone and regarded everyone except his brothers with hostility.
In his understanding, everyone should be like that.
Using that cruel worldview as a shell, he had struggled on through the mud of this garbage pit.
But the actions of Gavo's adoptive father were like a bolt of lightning, shattering the shell he had used for so long to protect both body and mind.
For the first time, he felt naked and exposed in the brutal world, and endless confusion and helplessness swept over him.
His split lips trembled as he asked the one before him who had shown him this charity:
"Why?"
The answer to that question was also something Gavo wanted to know.
Although in her previous life, the great eastern nation of ancient Terra had the custom of bringing out good things to entertain guests...
That ancient habit from M3 clearly could not have survived all the way to a hive world in Segmentum Obscurus.
And even that custom was only followed as an unwritten rule when material conditions did not threaten one's own survival.
In other words, her adoptive father, who lived by scavenging, clearly had neither the duty nor the spare means to give to others.
Especially not to feral children who had taken the initiative to provoke her and insult him.
"Mm ah..."
As her adoptive father made a familiar set of signs, Gavo instinctively spoke the same words he had repeated so many times before:
"Kindness is the greatest virtue, and virtue is humanity's most precious wealth."
"Do not abandon virtue because you are weak, and do not ignore virtue because you are strong."
"As children of the God-Emperor, we should love our brothers and sisters equally, just as the God-Emperor loves us equally."
From chatting with Old Bill, Gavo had already learned where those words came from.
They were part of a sermon once spoken by an Ecclesiarchy priest who, on a whim, had come down to preach in the underhive.
Although that priest had never returned after that day, Gavo's adoptive father, who had happened to overhear the sermon, had from then on treated those words as sacred truth.
Rabbit-Mouth opened his mouth, but for a long while, not a single word came out.
After some time, Gavo finally heard him murmur in a voice as soft as a mosquito:
"...I'm sorry..."
"Hm?"
After he said those words, Gavo could not tell whether it was just her imagination...
But Mir's eyelids, though he was still unconscious, seemed to tremble ever so slightly.
(End of Chapter)
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