Chapter 34

Days later, and the girl still couldn't speak, not being able to utter a word. 

So, since she couldn't tell us her name, nor could she write, we decided that it was better to have something to call her, instead of "that child".

After consulting with her, we had decided on the name - Eve.

We resumed our adventuring activities during that time, alternating which of us stayed with the child, as we still hadn't come a a consensus about what to do with her,

Since none of us wanted to leave her with an orphanage, for fear of her being enslaved due to her elven heritage, elves are considered subhuman in this nation.

The Slane Theocracy used to advocate for the protection of all humanoid species, such as elfs, dwarfs, and a few other rarer races, in addition to humans. Believing that uniting our combined power was the best route to the safety of us all, since on average we are vastly weaker, and the teachings of the Great Gods did not go against this notion.

However, after what happened to my mother, the Theocracy threw away all that, and started actively engaging in slavery, that was mostly targeted at elves.

I suppose you could say that my birth was a sort of catalyst that made this world spiral into an even more negative trajectory.

There was already quite a bit of racial tension, but due to the actions of the Elven King, he condemned millions to untold pain, making way for a war that would take more lives than any of us could spare.

And in the Re-Estize Kingdom all of this was worse by far, slavery wasn't just practiced on those they considered subhuman, it was also frequently used on their fellow humans, due to all sorts of reasons, such as debt, crime, war prisoners, or were just plain unlucky.

But, I guess that as long as there is an incentive, discrimination is bound to run rampant, people will just naturally look down upon those they view as different from them, whether they do this subconsciously or with full knowledge of their actions, in the end the result is the same.

Despite many not necessarily agreeing with the idea of slavery, since they are the ones most affected, most of the common folk are merely indifferent to these issues, having more pressing difficulties. 

And that is what I view them as, issues.

Problems that prevent us from reaching our potential, because I know that one day we'll sorely need it.

Because at this point, I'm the only thing that stands in the way of the eradication of the world as we know it.

Going back to the girl we found, we had tossed around the idea of just keeping her with us, but that was quickly shot down, by none other than Bastien.

Somewhat surprising, because of his temperament, as well as the fact that he was extremely good at handling children, given his age, I had speculated that he might have had kids before, but that was not my place to know.

If he wished to keep his past to himself, that is his right, something I could somewhat relate to, though for me, it was life and death.

This all continued on for several weeks, and still, nothing, it would seem like she had become mute, and it would seem that it was not just a temporary thing, but might be something that she would have to work towards for a long time.

If it was just physical, there would be no problem, since my healing was advanced enough to heal almost any wound, but unfortunately, it was purely mental, and for all of my prowess, I was not exactly adept in the ways of consoling another.

It was like every time she tried to sound out her voice, she was back in that pit, back in hell, where if she made an inkling of a sound, she was dead.

Made into an inflated doll of stitched flesh.

But, we had finally reached a solution, at least, one take had a decent chance of working.

Proposed by yours truly.

The idea was, in principle, taking her back to her people, to bring her to the Great Forest of Evasha, home of the elves.

When I first spoke out about this idea, they were firstly shocked that I was considerate enough to do so much for her, it would have been funny if it wasn't so sad.

Then, they were completely against it, not because it wasn't something they wanted to do for her, but because it had way too many variables for it to be feasible.

They quite literally listed out all the ways it could go wrong -

The elves we find could refuse to take her in, we could get into conflict with the residents of the forest, what would they think of an elf that was being escorted by humans, especially due to the tension between our races.

Another one would be that it would be extremely dangerous to bring a child through that forest, it being notorious for housing powerful monsters, and they might not be a threat to us, there is no guarantee that we would be able to protect the child.

We were little traumatized from escorting the noble on the mission all those years ago, and we didn' exactly want to do that again.

Since then we explicitly avoided those kinds of quests, due them being a pain, of course there are exceptions.

And , after much discussion, and planning out how we would handle each scenario, I was able to convince them that this was a reasonable solution, and since there wasn't a better idea, we would go through with this plan.

But as we were explaining all this to the Eve, whom's real name we couldn't even learn -

"What do you mean you don't want to go?!"