He had rolled and crawled through the underhive, soaking himself in endless blood.
That blood and those screams had clung to him like parasites on bone, tormenting him through countless days and nights.
He suffered.
He hated.
He raged.
He hated the parents who had abandoned him, hated this underhive that twisted human nature, hated the source of all this misery.
That hatred burned his soul like poisoned fire every moment, filling him with a suffocating despair.
To escape that despair, he decided to climb out of the mire beneath his feet.
Through one act of plunder after another, he gradually clawed his way to the top of the underhive.
But when he stood upon the heads of all other scum, having climbed a staircase of corpses built from both the guilty and the innocent, he still did not find even a moment of peace.
The fear and hunger of preying on life had never left him.
When he finally realized that, and looked down at his feet once more, the only thing reflected in the pool of blood was a beast burdened by endless corpses.
Cunning and cruel.
Vicious and cold.
The boy with the severed hand had already died on the night he was abandoned.
What remained alive now was only the bloodthirsty lone wolf called Griffin.
Only at this moment did he finally understand why Gavo's gaze had always pierced him, and why he had developed such special feelings toward this little one.
Because he longed for redemption.
Bang!
With the roar of the logging gun, the boltgun in the defense captain's hands was blasted away.
Feeling the furious glare from that man above, Griffin showed a faint smile.
The one he was saving was not Gavo.
It was the self from that abandoned night.
If no one else was willing to save him, then an evil man would become his own savior.
Even if it was self-deception, he did not care.
Griffin fired wildly. For a brief moment, he actually suppressed the Planetary Defence Force from below.
"Bastard!"
The defense troops had never expected Griffin to go insane enough to attack them first, and under his ferocious firepower, they were forced into cover for a moment.
But as the logging gun's drum ran dry, the well-trained soldiers immediately began returning fire.
Veins bulged across the captain's forehead. In fury, he snatched up the fallen boltgun and fired directly at Griffin, who still stood there unmoving.
A crushing sense of death rushed toward him.
Adrenaline surged. Griffin instantly raised his iron hand and placed it in front of the armor over his chest.
Boom!
With the detonation of the bolt round, the lone wolf vanished beneath a burst of smoke and debris.
The captain showed a satisfied smile and then swung the gun toward where he expected Gavo to be.
But when he found the nearly inhumanly fast figure again, he realized Gavo was now sprinting toward the outer left side of the purification tower.
"Hmph. Trying to run?"
He sneered and raised the barrel, aiming along Gavo's path.
Just as he slowly began to squeeze the trigger, that familiar roar rang out once more:
"All members of the First Warband! Scatter to both sides of the purification tower immediately!"
The defense captain stared in shock toward the black smoke from the earlier blast.
His pupils trembled as Griffin suddenly burst out of the cloud.
Although his iron hand and armor had both been blown apart, and blood was streaming down from his forehead, he still wore that same savage grin and charged forward at astonishing speed.
The rest of the warband had no idea why he was ordering this, but out of sheer trust in Griffin, the strongest Weeper, they immediately scattered like a tide.
"Fire! All of you, fire!"
The defense captain roared, his face flushed red with rage.
But before his men could find good firing positions, a massive explosion thundered from the base of the purification tower.
Boom!
After that deafening blast came violent shaking.
In horror, the Planetary Defence Force soldiers saw that the purification tower, which had stood for more than a hundred years, was now beginning to tilt with slow but unstoppable certainty.
And the tilt soon became collapse.
Under earth-shaking noise and tremors, tens of thousands of tons of tower wreckage and the pure water inside it poured down onto the ground, instantly becoming a man-made catastrophe.
Under the wash of the flood, the maniacs could no longer pursue the First Warband that had just escaped death.
...
"Come on. We need to fall back to the eastern district. Only then will we be safe."
Having lost his iron hand, Griffin's figure looked more stooped than before, but he still walked ahead with unwavering eyes.
Gavo looked at the strange light shining in his eyes and, for some reason, found him both familiar and unfamiliar.
The road ahead was not difficult. By the time dusk approached, they had successfully withdrawn from the north, which concealed enormous danger, and returned to the eastern edge of the underhive, to that scavenger settlement.
Looking at this familiar place, Gavo could not help sighing.
The gears of fate seemed to turn here. Every time she arrived at this place, it came with another turning point in her life.
"A very familiar place, isn't it, little one."
Griffin's voice sounded behind her.
It was already dusk. The underhive night was approaching.
She turned to look at Griffin and was startled to find that, under the blood-red light of the setting sun, his formerly exhausted self had somehow become invigorated instead.
"Sharkteeth. Medic. Little one. Come with me."
He spoke calmly, but his voice carried a force no one could refuse.
Under his lead, the four of them went to one corner of the garbage mountain.
Once they arrived there, he could no longer hold himself up. He dropped to his knees in agony and vomited violently.
A huge amount of blood mixed with fragments of organs poured uncontrollably from his mouth.
But even in such a miserable state, he still refused Sharkteeth's support and slowly rose to his feet by himself.
"Medic. Can I still be saved?"
He turned to Medic. After listening for a while against Griffin's collapsed chest, the latter gently shook his head.
"I see..."
Griffin said with a trace of regret.
After wiping the blood from the corner of his mouth, he turned his eyes toward Gavo.
At this moment, two similar yet utterly different lights collided.
Looking at the little one before him, Griffin opened his mouth, wanting to teach her a few final truths.
But when the words were about to come out, he found he did not know what to say.
He had always thought that he wanted Gavo to become the next him.
But only recently had he understood that what he truly sought was his own redemption.
She would not become him.
And he did not want her to become him.
He drew out the logging gun that had been with him for so many years, chambered it with his teeth, and placed it into Gavo's hands.
With his only remaining left hand, he lifted her gun-holding hands, just as he had done two years ago.
But this time, he pointed the barrel at his own chest.
(End of Chapter)
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