Poverty makes me capable of anything.

An Ran followed the trail of blood and walked all the way to a house at the end of the narrow passage.

The room was tightly shut at that moment.

But Anran knew that this was her destination.

Of course, it wasn't because of some kind of intuition.

It was because there was a yellow question mark hanging on the door of the room.

Submit the task.

Born in the rain.

The task will be completed once you enter this room.

An Ran looked around, but found no one or any place to hide.

She put the bomb away and took out the signal detector. The original value of 200 had increased to over 400 by the time she arrived here.

Very competitive.

An Ran activated mechanical interference against the closed room.

The values ​​on the signal detector immediately began to fluctuate, from tens to hundreds, and never stabilized. In this state, those things were still unusable.

An Ran stopped using the skill and put away the signal detector.

She walked to the door, held her breath, and was about to test it when the door opened with a gentle push.

flash.

someone.

Just as An Ran drew her gun to fire, she realized that there was no one in the room. Instead, there was a device standing in the middle of the room emitting light.

The question mark is at the very back of the room.

An Ran walked in.

The surveillance equipment was in the corner, and the light-emitting devices were sources of interference. The cold silver exterior was seamless, and Anran couldn't even find a place to remove it for a moment. There was a work computer, communication equipment, and many other things in the room.

An Ran walked straight to the location of the question mark.

It was a picture frame.

A wooden square photo frame leans against the table, with a photo inside. The photo shows a young girl.

A girl who looked only fourteen or fifteen years old, with a very youthful face.

The girl was wrapped in a thick coat, and the photo only showed her upper body. She was slightly turned to the side and looked a little disheveled, but even so, it could not hide her charm.

However, the eyes, which should have been the most eye-catching feature, lost focus. Although the gaze was directed at the camera, it was scattered in all directions.

"That's not cute at all."

The date is in the lower left corner of the photo: July 4, 8094 in the Imperial Calendar.

No signature.

Anran took the photo frame into her hands.

However, the task was not submitted automatically, nor was there any prompt telling her what to do.

Emmm...

What should I do?

An Ran was extremely annoyed. She flipped the photo frame over and over several times before finally deciding to take the photo down.

As soon as she took it, she noticed something was wrong.

A broken razor blade and another smaller photograph fell out of the picture frame.

An Ran ignored the razor blade and instead picked up another photo and held it up to her eyes.

"..."

An Ran was stunned.

The subject of the photo is still the same girl from before, which can be seen from her face, but apart from that, An Ran can hardly see any resemblance. In fact, this photo looks like it jumped out of a horror movie.

The girl was dressed in tattered, coarse cloth clothes, her entire body covered in blood. A small round tag hung crookedly near her shoulder, bearing the words "Z118". Her right hand was raised in front of her, clutching a short knife that was dripping blood.

The girl's hair was loose, and compared to her previous lifeless eyes, these eyes seemed at first glance to be an unseen darkness, devoid of emotion, life, and filled with the will to die.

The photo also shows the date: July 3, 8094 in the Imperial Calendar.

"..."

"..."

"..."

An Ran found herself suddenly in a magical place, where she had become an observer and finally touched the plot fragment mentioned in the "Birth in the Rain" quest.

I traveled back in time to many years ago, standing beside the girl in the photograph, quietly watching the story unfold.

At this time, the girl was still a young child. Her family was destroyed in the turmoil, and she was subsequently taken back by an officer's subordinate.

However, this was only the beginning of hell. After meeting the officer once, the girl was taken to a building.

An Ran recognized the building as the one she had just been in, only it looked like it did more than ten years ago, unlike its current state of disrepair.

The girl, brought into the building, was quickly thrown into a cage and given the number "Z118." No matter how much she cried and screamed, no one showed her any sympathy. In the cages next to her were many other children, some older than the girl and some younger.

From that day on, hell descended.

"Return to the Cage" is the name of this place, and everyone imprisoned here possesses special abilities.

There are many people here who are called instructors.

Everyone has to follow the schedule every day, unless an instructor intervenes. However, instructor intervention often means disaster is imminent.

They might be dragged into the torture chamber, their piercing screams audible even from the training field below. Sometimes they would be dragged into a room next to the torture chamber, their cries of agony mingled with the instructors' unrestrained laughter.

At first, the girl didn't know what it meant, until one night, as she lay down, she saw an instructor walk into the cage of another girl living next to her.

The fear and screams could not stop the instructors' brutality.

He ripped off the girl's clothes and repeatedly whipped her body to stop her from resisting, and then...

"She's useless now, so we need to find her a new purpose, hahaha!"

A few days later, the girl was taken away and never appeared again.

The young girl was deeply shocked. She realized that even greater pain awaited her. In order not to become a useless person, the girl desperately tried to improve her abilities. Although she was occasionally abused, her exceptional talent prevented her from falling to the same level as that girl.

Time flies, and as the girl gradually grows up, she becomes numb and accustomed to blood, abuse, and the smell of blood and hormones. Suddenly, a new rule is promulgated in the cage.

Those children who are strong can lord it over the weak and have authority like "instructors".

This completely threw the entire process of recycling into chaos.

They transferred the humiliation they had suffered to others, and their desire for the instructors to ravage the girls at will also awakened. Even some strong female prisoners fell into depravity due to their desires.

The number of people in the cage is decreasing day by day, but the monsters bred there are growing at an astonishing rate amidst the struggles of wild beasts. The oppressed underlings will suddenly become stronger, fight back, and transform into the superiors.

The officer's goal was nearing completion. Each prisoner had been injected with drugs, and no matter how strong they were, as long as they still had the will to live, they would have to obey him.

But human nature is not so easy to grasp, and when it gradually evolves into bestiality, it becomes even more unpredictable.

The officer was unaware that some of the children had banded together.

They lost interest in this narrow cage of desire, living the same monotonous life day after day, and longed to explore the wider world outside.

July 3, 8094, when the calendar turned to this day.

A bloody massacre unfolded on the training ground.

A "powerful man" who attempted to rape a woman he considered untouchable had his genitals burned, and then everything spiraled out of control.

Sensing something amiss, the girl gripped her training knife tightly. When several boys from the "Union" approached her with wicked grins, the murderous intent hidden within her became uncontrollable.

Z118, a girl whose number is near the middle to late range, unleashed an incredibly powerful force.

She doesn't have any fancy moves; all she has is speed that leaves people completely unable to react and power that is impossible to resist.

"what--"

"do not want!"

"puff--"

The exceptionally ferocious Z118 hacked her way from the training ground to the main gate, mercilessly killing everyone who stood in her way, especially the instructor who had given her nightmares, who was cut into seven or eight pieces by a short sword.

Until the building's main entrance blocked the girl's way out.

It was a piece of metal half a meter thick.

Everyone knows there's a secret passage to get in and out of the building, but nobody knows where it is.

The allied forces had intended to force the location of the secret passage out, but things took an unexpected turn. All the instructors died in the riot, and no one was sent in from the outside.

They stared tremblingly at the girl who stood blankly at the door.

The girl was covered in blood, like a vengeful ghost, making people afraid to approach her and only able to watch from afar.

This is terrifying!

After standing there for a long time, a sealed window suddenly opened from the outside, and sunlight shone on the girl again.

The person who came in came from the Morning Star.

The leader was Ronse.

The officer had already been killed by them.

……

"Ding-dong! You have successfully obtained 1 story fragment for the story quest [Birth in the Rain]".

The notification sound in her mind brought An Ran back to her senses. She found herself back in the same room, clutching the photo in her hand.

This is the room where the girl killed the instructor in the plot fragment.

The Z03, Z05, Z14, Z09, and Z08 that she killed all appeared in the story. Except for the umbrella man in Z03, the others were all members of the joint riot.

"Z118".