"Noro-san."

The hooded giant looked up, the dead mouse caught between his kagune forgotten and casted aside.

"What kind of character do you want to be?"

The speaker, a small girl, was looking at him from the other side of the room. Her knees propped against her wooden seat, her body leaning against the back of the chair, and a pencil spinning between her fingers with a fluidity that he couldn't hope to imitate. The girl's hair took the form of multiple green strands that barely reached past her shoulder, each strand covered in a substantial amount of grease and filth from the lack of regular cleaning. Her skin and clothes were also not exempt from impurity, as the redness of dried blood and the brownness of earthly filth stood out against the whiteness of her shirt and the blackness of her pants.

Yet, in spite of her filthy exterior, in a sense, Noro still found her to be a paragon of purity. Perhaps, it was her pristine innocence.

Positioned behind the girl was an old patio table of cracked wooden planks. On top of it, at the far right corner, lied a stack of timeworn storybooks, all of them detailing varying fairy tales, folktales, myths, and legends. Lying near the center of the table was a spiral notebook with pages wrinkled and blurred from water damage. Occupying the left corner of the table, balancing a flickering on top of its ebony wick was a half-melted candle, stuck to the wooden surface by a glob of solidified wax.

Noro made the connection right away. The girl had been blabbering about wanting to write a book recently. "...I haven't really thought about it."

His honest answer drew a look of disappointment on the girl's face, but she quickly buried it under her usual cheerfulness as her lips curled into a small grin.

"Do you want to know what kind of character I want to be?"

Noro could tell that there was something behind those shut teeth that made her grin the way she did. Something that she had to exert great effort to keep behind the glossy bars of her oral prison. But he knew that the girl wouldn't tell him what it was just yet. At least not until he humored her enough.

"A princess perhaps?" He ventured a lazy guess, his attention shifting back to the rat trapped in the grip of his kagune. To quench his boredom, he gave the rat another squeeze and was delighted to hear the sound of cracking bones. Perhaps he missed a few earlier.

The girl scoffed.

"A princess? That is so last year! If anything I—"

Suddenly, she stopped, having noticed her caretaker's inattentiveness. Catching the rotating pencil in between her index and thumb finger, the girl tossed it towards her caretaker point first, as if she was throwing a simple dart. The projectile didn't reach its target though, as Noro casually snatched it off the air with his own fingers and proceeded to snap it in half. There wasn't even a need for him to look up.

The girl let out a cry of distress at the destruction of her pencil. "Oh no! Not Tobi!"

"Tobi?" There was an unfamiliar shift in the robed man's usual serene and uninterested facial feature. It was a smile. A smile of amusement that hid at the corner of the man's lips. It was barely noticeable, but Eto was proud to have triggered it.

"You should stop talking to your pencils and start making real friends, Eto."

At his words, Eto pouted. Her cheeks inflated as she displayed her obvious annoyance. "It's not my fault no one around here wants to play with me. Apparently I looked too weird to them or something."

A single hand fell on top of her left eye, and bitter resentment weaved itself into her next words. "I blame everything on my birth defect."

The room fell silent as Eto waited for some sort of response from her caretaker who distracted himself by continuing to toy away at the deceased rat.

Eto narrowed her eyes in suspicion at his behavior. What was originally just an attempt at entertainment now seemed far less innocent. It was as if he was using his antics with the rat as an excuse for his silence. Eto could tell that he was hiding something, but made no effort to draw further attention to it.

The robed man was always a bit of an enigma. In that even though they had already spent eight years with each other, Eto's knowledge of her caretaker was minimal at best. She still couldn't tell what kind of things he liked to do for leisure, or how his childhood was, or even more important questions like what kind of women he preferred. Instead, she was forced to make guesses and assumptions whenever she caught her caretaker's eyes lingering on a woman for a tad bit too long, all the while she glared at those women with a little more hatred than usual.

"Noro-san, do you think I'm pretty?" The words left Eto's mouth before she could stop it and the girl quickly hid her face behind the back of the chair to avoid her caretaker's curious gaze. Though she didn't try to retract the question as it was something that she was genuinely interested in.

Her question was followed by a prolonged silence as the sheer awkwardness present in the room fueled the growing redness of her face. At this point, the girl was pretty sure what the answer would be and was upset with herself for leading her self-esteem into this brutal murder.

"I'm going to go find us some food." The man finally spoke. Eto only nodded in acknowledgment at his words. She wasn't surprised. She would want to find an excuse to remove herself from the room as well if she was asked such a strange question.

"You want to come with?"

It was an unexpected invitation, but one that she appreciated. "Yeah."

In her story, she was a character of god-like power. And with the power she possessed, she spread joy to those who deserved it and pain to those who didn't. The world that she lived in was one that she designed personally. It was a world where discrimination of any kind had long ceased to exist, and ghouls and human lived harmoniously. It was a world where she could relish in the warmth of her parents' bosoms and grasps their hands with her own. But most importantly, it was a world where she would mature into a desirable bride, with Noro, the person who had cared for her for twelve years as her groom.

But she supposed she should keep those thoughts to herself. At least, she would for now.

"Noro-san...do you think I'm a piece of trash?"

In front of them was a mountain of bodies, all of them deprived of life and forced to remain stacked on top of one another until it was their turn to face the trials and tribulations of pointed teeth and robust jaws. Surrounding the mountain of broken corpses was a miniature fence of disembodied hands and legs, and if one tried hard enough, one would be able to spot an occasional eyeball sandwiched in between those limbs. A slippery veil of red covered the floor of the tunnel—a direct result of the carnage that unfolded just mere moments ago.

"I mean I wasn't able to put anything you taught me into use. And—" What initially started as calm self-deprecation proved to be a nothing but a fragile illusion, as the cracks of the girl's voice betrayed her and exposed her emotional vulnerability. Her remaining words became lost in a series of sobs, as tears trickled down her cheeks restlessly.

Sitting to her right, panting heavily against a granite wall, was her long-haired caretaker. With one of his hands, he covered the bleeding hole drilled into his waist, while with the other, he held up a half-eaten leg that he removed from his fallen enemies. The spaces in between his teeth were filled with pieces of minced meat, and the man's face, which was usually stoic in appearance, had contorted into one of visible agony. It was her incompetence that caused her caretaker to get hurt, and that thought alone was enough to cause a familiar pain to surface in her chest again.

For Eto, the pain in her chest was worse than any physical injury that she could have sustained, as this one wasn't just going to go away once her body finished repairing itself.

The hooded man eyed the girl tentatively, unsure of what to say. It was obvious that their enemies' trash talking had done some lasting damage and that the girl needed some words of comfort after her lack of performance in combat. But at the same time the man found himself unable to completely ignore the frustration that he felt when he once again had to put his own life in jeopardy to save her own.

The child was simply too clumsy and too weak-willed. In that the slightest miscalculation was often enough to send the child into a panic-stricken state where her footwork became erratic and her entire world became solely inhabited by an overwhelming fear of death. Noticing his silence was causing the girl further harm, Noroi ultimately decided to shove his own personal feelings aside. "...I'm sure you were just caught of guard. Don't worry about it, I wasn't expecting there to be so many of them either."

The much taller ghoul's answer wasn't enough to satisfy the younger ghoul as she pressed on. "But what if I wasn't caught off guard? What if I was just too weak to do anything? What if one day I—"

A dismembered arm was thrown in front of the girl, cutting her off long enough for the older ghoul to throw in a suggestion. "In that case, then you should eat more."

Eto looked at the disembodied arm set in front of her uncomprehendingly, her nose wrinkling in disgust as she recalled the meat's putrid taste. She then shifted her gaze towards her wounded caretaker, the expression of confusion and disgust on her face masking the feeling of anger bubbling underneath. "Eat more? What? Is feeding me these rotten meats once per month not enough for you. If you think I'm useless, just say it. Don't try to change the subject—"

Noro remained unintimidated under the intensity of his ward's emotional tirade but instead raised his voice accordingly to talk over her, though not loud to the point that it would suggest anger or frustration. "By eating the "rotten meats," you will increase the concentration of RC Cells in your body. With enough RC Cells, a kagune mutation known as "kakuja" might be possible. Obtaining a "kakuja" will be your objective."

The girl went silent, her eyes traveling back to the dismembered limb offered to her and lingered there as she stared at it in momentary consideration. When she turned to face Noro again, the look disgust, anger, and confusion had been replaced by one of uneasy skepticism. "And that "kakuja" is supposed to be able to help me out?"

"Yes, if you can get it to cover your entire body, I believe you can afford to get hit a couple times or two in battle."

A pale hand seized the dismembered leg and brought it up to her mouth, her pink lips parting away as they revealed the pearly blades hidden underneath. The girl lowered the meat before she could take a bite out of it, having decided that whatever power her caretaker was talking about wasn't worth shoving down such foul tasting food down her mouth.

"You know, your father also have a kakuja—"

She took a bite out of the leg and swallowed.

There had been rumors that suspicious individuals were wandering the grounds of the 24th ward once again.

She said she wanted to go with him. She told him that she wanted to defend her home with her own hands. But he told her to stay, telling her that it was too dangerous, that it was different from all the other fights they had partook in in the past, that she could get seriously hurt, that he might not be able to protect her, and that he wouldn't know what to do if he lost her.

Even though she knew that the man's words had no romantic implications, it still made her happy that someone would be lost without her, that someone valued her to the extent that they would rather only endanger themselves than to drag her down with them.

When the older ghoul gave her a pat on the head and an affectionate smile, Eto found her unspoken worries and unexpressed concerns vanquished in an instant. A smile was a commodity that the older man's face rarely carried, but it was always something that inspired confidence and admiration within the young ghoul when it was there. She always thought her caretaker looked better whenever he smiled, but like many of her other grotesquely inappropriate thoughts for the much older man, she decided to keep the thought to herself.

Before he left, the man instructed her to dig around the area under her bed, claiming that she would find something that belonged to her if she did. She thought it was a gift that he had prepared for her, so she told him that she would wait for him to give it to her himself. After he came back, of course.

"Noro-san, you will come back right?" She called out as the older man took steps towards the entranceway of the cavern, momentarily freezing him in place.

"I'll try." It was an answer that promised nothing, but she thought it was good enough.

So, as the hooded ghoul took the final steps towards the exit of the room and disappeared behind the walls, the younger ghoul sat on her bed...and waited.

She wiped them all out. The briefcase-carrying men. She killed them all. The ones who stayed behind, at least.

The floor of the tunnel was littered with the corpses of fallen investigators. Their quinques scattered uselessly across the battlefield. Murderous crimson crystals littered their flesh, depriving their body of senses and their eyes of light.

"You can't do anything." These were the words that her caretaker said to her on a particular bad day.

When she first heard it, she ran away. As you would when someone you cared about so much revealed how useless you were to them.

It wasn't that he was wrong. But because he was right.

That day, she proved that she couldn't handle the truth. He ended up having to find her and apologize to her.

Noro was too right. Right to the point that he could be a prophet or a fortune teller. She really couldn't do anything.

Even now as she walked the trail of corpses, she still had to rely on the strength she stole from others. She still had to rely on the strength of her mutated kakuho.

The lone ghoul continued to make her way through the bloodied underground, her steps steady and her disposition pleasant. When she came across the body of a blonde investigator, she stopped and pulled the woman up by the bloody blonde locks attached to her head. She could tell that the investigator was still alive, even if barely.

"Go to hell."

"That hurt."

Eto smirked and put a hand through the blonde investigator. A scream of pain. The hand exits, pulling with it the remains of a human intestine.

She let go of the investigator's hair and allowed the blonde woman to fall face first onto the floor. She then stood patiently as she waited for another response from the investigator.

"Eat shit" The woman barely managed to squeeze the words out of her dying body, but it still possessed the same level of defiance and power as before. Powerful purple eyes bore into Eto with their angry gaze, unwilling to falter in intensity even as the soles of the ghoul's feet hovered above them.

It was quite unnerving how she saw no fear in the dying woman's eyes. It displeased her greatly. It confused her greatly. With a stomp of her foot, she crushed the very things that caused her such distress, shattering the woman's skull and flattening the woman's brain in the process.

Crouching down, the ghoul took a bite out of the woman's flesh. Then another and another. The sweet taste of human flesh driving her into a frenzy as she attacked the remains of the woman with her teeth. Only when she devoured both of the woman's legs did she manage to stop herself.

She might have won the battle today, but it wouldn't be long before they send reinforcements. For now, she needed to send a message.

Ripping out the woman's heart, the young ghoul took a bite out of the meaty organ before tossing it to the other side of the tunnel with great reluctance. She'd rather eat it all if she could.

Removing another sizable chunk of flesh from the female investigator's body, the young ghoul proceeded to make her way home, eating and discarding pieces of the woman's flesh in the process. All the while, she wondered if Noro would be proud of her if he was still here right now.