novelraw Chapter 65: The witch of slot.
Chapter 65: The witch of slot.
Hatred...
That was the very first emotion Echidna ever understood.
Before love, before hunger, before fear, there was just pure... unfiltered hatred directed at her very existence.
The world she was born into didn’t deal in shades of gray neither did it deal with pity.
There were humans, weak but many in number, clinging to their "righteousness" and "morals."
And there were demons reveling in their strength...
The only law in this world was survival of the fittest, if you weren’t strong enough, you would have everything taken away from you.
Echidna was neither a human nor a demon. She was both... A half-breed.
Or rather what people loved to call a mistake.
In the small human village where she grew up, she learned quickly to hide.
She filed the small, budding horns on her forehead down every morning until her forehead bled, and she covered the wounds with her thick bangs.
She wore long sleeves to hide the patches of scales that sometimes formed on her forearms when she got angry...
It was really a curse to live as a halfling, all she wanted to do was to live like a normal human being however that wasn’t possible.
Her parents, two foolish souls who thought love could bridge a war of species, tried to protect her.
And like all others... They had failed.
She could still remember them... even after all the suffering she went through, she didn’t hate them but she hated the memory.
She had been ten years old and had come home late from foraging in the woods with a dead rabbit in her hand. Her father normally let her hunt and she was proud of her catch today.
However when she reached the house, the door to their small cottage was broken off its hinges.
Inside, she could smell what she had become accustomed to... Blood. She entered inside the house where she had grown up and unlike others times, this was different.
Her mother lay across the dining table and her father was on the floor.
There was so much blood.
She tried to convince herself that they were sleeping but it didn’t look like they were sleeping.
Their bodies were completely broken.
Before she could even drop the rabbit, she could hear the villagers shouting outside.
"There she is! The demon spawn!"
"She finally snapped! Killed her own parents!"
Echidna didn’t understand.
She hadn’t done this.
Why were they saying that? Why were they blaming her for what she had not done?
She looked outside... The villagers stood there with their torches burning bright in the night.
They didn’t want justice.
They wanted an excuse... it seemed they wanted to purge the abnormality they had tolerated for a decade.
The village Elder pointed a shaking finger at her. "She murdered her parents in cold blood and hid in the forest! Burn the witch! Burn the murderer before she kills us all!"
They moved toward the house... each villager was carrying a weapon, some were holding Pitchforks, others were using crude swords and even some kids were throwing stones.
Echidna ran.
She ran until her lungs burned like fire.
She ran into the deepest, darkest part of the Great Forest.
A place where her father had warned her not to go.
She was just a child... she hadn’t done anything wrong, even though she had been ostracized amongst the villagers and couldn’t make friends... She didn’t think she did anything that prompted them to do this to her.
Were they the ones that killed her parents? She wanted answers but they would not come to her.
Days became nights and hunger became a constant companion. It wasn’t that there weren’t creatures to hunt, but she was seeing oversized rabbits that could break trees in half and didn’t want to take her chances.
She was ready to lie down and let the beasts of the forest finish what the villagers started.
Then, she met Him.
She had been huddled under the roots of a massive dead tree, shivering from the cold rain that was falling... She felt her body shiver.
And then she sighted a figure approaching through the downpour.
He wore a heavy hooded cloak that completely obscured his face, the only thing she could see were his eyes... they were completely crimson in the darkness, it made him look like a true devil.
The devil was coming for her and there was nothing she could do about it. Did she even want to survive? She wanted to join her parents up there.
He stopped in front of her.
She expected death or the same disgust she saw in the villagers’ eyes. It wouldn’t surprise her...
Instead, a hand reached out from the cloak.
It held a piece of dried salted meat.
Echidna snatched it... she didn’t care if it was poisoned and then devoured it like a wild animal.
The man chuckled.
His voice wasn’t as devilish as she expected, it sounded nice... A little more refined than her father’s voice.
It was the first time a person other than her parents had laughed at her without malice.
"Interesting," the voice from the hood said. "Little one... what are you doing in the dark all alone? Don’t you know it isn’t safe?"
That was the first time she had met him...
He didn’t offer her comfort and he didn’t offer her a home. He offered her something much more addictive: purpose.
He let her tag along, treating her like an amusing stray dog he hadn’t decided to kick yet.
But he talked to her and taught her a lot about herself... Things that she didn’t even know.
One of the times she could remember was when they were under a campfire.
"Your human half is weak as all other humans are..." he said, his face still hidden from her... but now she could see his long horns. "Your demon half is power and it will help you survive. Stop fighting it... Let it consume you and become a true demon, Little One."
Under his guidance, she stopped filing her horns.
She let the scales grow.
He forced her into fights with forest beasts far larger than her, watching impassively as she clawed and bit her way to survival.
When she won, he gave a curt nod.
When she failed, he left her to bleed for hours before healing her with a casual wave of his hand.
He truly had the qualities of a devil...He was cruel. He was distant and he even used her to test his own theories on magic and cross-breeding.
But Echidna worshipped the ground he walked on.
She was with someone who looked at her and didn’t see a mistake, even her mother couldn’t completely do that and she did what anyone who loved the attention would do... She attached herself to him with a desperation that bordered on madness.
She would kill for him.
She would die for him.
She just wanted him to stay.
But good things never lasted for half-breeds.
Six months later, a hunting party from a neighboring kingdom, led by a group of high-ranking Paladins tracked them down.
They weren’t looking for her; they were hunting the source of dark energy in the forest.
They found Echidna alone at the camp. The hooded man had left two days prior on some unknown errand telling her to wait.
The Paladins didn’t ask questions... They saw a demon girl, and they attacked.
Echidna remembered the hooded man’s words.
’... Let it consume you and become a true demon.’
She didn’t run this time.
She screamed and unleashed everything she had held back her entire life. The forest exploded with dark mana.
It was a slaughter.
With the experience from the fights with beasts, She tore through their armor like paper.
She ripped throats out with her bare teeth.
The forest ground turned red around her.
She killed ten... twenty... thirty highly trained soldiers.
But there were too many.
A holy lance, glowing with divine light, pierced her chest from behind. The pain was blinding. She fell to her knees, coughing up blood onto the snow.
As her vision faded to black, her last thought wasn’t of her parents.
It was of the hooded man.
She had failed him.
She was dying alone in the snow, just like a useless mutt after all.
Then came the cold.
It was not the cold of death... It was something more...
Echidna’s eyes snapped open.
She wasn’t in the forest anymore... She was in a vast obsidian throne room.
And more than everything, she was alive and the hole in her chest was gone.
Sitting on the throne above her was a woman of unparalleled beauty and terrifying presence.
She had silver hair that flowed like liquid moonlight and eyes that held the cold indifference of a glacier.
The Devil King.
"Pathetic," the woman spat. "To think such raw darkness was wasted on a creature with no ambition."
Echidna tried to move, but her body refused to obey.
The sheer pressure emanating from the woman pinned her to the floor.
"I brought you back from the void, little mutt," the Devil King said, standing up and walking slowly down the steps. "Because I have a use for you."
Echidna was given a new name and a new title. She became Echidna, the Witch of Sloth.
One of the Seven Deadly Witches, the personal guard of the Devil King herself.
Her sloth wasn’t about laziness. It was born from an utter lack of interest in anything the world had to offer.
Nothing excited her.
Nothing motivated her.
The battles she fought for the Devil King were boring; the enemies were too weak. She killed them with a yawn, yearning for the days in the forest with the hooded man.
She served the Devil King faithfully, but her heart remained empty.
Until the day the Devil King shared her true goal.
They stood on a high balcony overlooking the Demon Realm.
"All of this," the devil kingl said, sweeping her hand across her kingdom. "The armies, the power, the conquest. It is all for one purpose. To prepare the world for His arrival."
"His?" Echidna asked, leaning against the railing with her usual bored expression.
"My one true love. The Harbinger."the devil king raised a hand, and the air shimmered, conjuring an illusion. It was a memory, projected for Echidna to see.
It was a man in a hooded cloak, standing amidst a battlefield of corpses with dark energy swirling around him like a loyal pet.
Echidna’s breath hitched.
Her heart, which hadn’t felt anything in decades, slammed against her ribs.
It was Him.
The way he stood... The aura he projected....
Even without seeing his face, she knew.
The mysterious man who had saved her, used her, and given her value was the Devil King’s beloved Harbinger.
A terrible realization washed over her.
She had gotten him.
He was right there, in her grasp, and she had let him slip away because she was too weak, too stupid to realize what he was.
Decades turned into centuries.
The Devil King fell, assassinated by the hero’s party, and went into dormant recovery, leaving the Witches to manage the crumbling kingdom.
Echidna waited.
She slept whole years away, letting her sloth consume her, waiting for the sign that He had returned.
And then, the summons came.
She answered it.
And she saw him.
..
[A/N]
I am surprised I managed to write this Chapter, despite the fact I’m practically running for my life in Nigeria rn. Lol, please pardon the low quality.