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Warning: This chapter contains descriptions of strong child abuse.

In the summer after Rir reached five years of age.

An overwhelming number of magic beasts attacked the hamlet. The cause was the appearance of a strong monster in the area, which resulted in the lower ranked magic beasts fleeing from it.

Almost all wolfkin were able to fight, and naturally Rir’s parents were among them. They left her with the parting words “It’ll be fine, we’ll be back before you know it,” and then went to join the monster extermination. They never returned.

Due to the emergence of such a large number of magic beasts, half of the villagers able to fight perished. The reason there had been this many casualties was also due to the strong monster that had appeared being SS-Rank, so it had caused even A-Rank magic beasts to flee.

Of course, the children, still unable to fight, had remained in the hamlet. While there were barely any of them where both parents came home, Rir was the only one where both had died. Furthermore, in a stroke of bad luck, her grandparents also died in the battle, and even her other relatives (an uncle and an aunt) were gone. From one moment to the other, Rir had become an orphan.

The villagers held long discussions about who to take her in. Seeing how many households suffered casualties, there was no animosity towards Rir and her late family, but while there weren’t few who wanted to take her in, they simply weren’t able to. However, in this desperate situation, there was just one married couple who offered to adopt her. They were fierce fighters, so both of them had survived the battle.

Said couple didn’t have children and the villagers furthermore had a favorable impression of them. Consequently, the village chief entrusted Rir to them. This was the beginning of Rir’s personal hell, which would last for a decade.

The couple was very talented at charming other people. Thus, no one had noticed their savage nature.

The reason they took Rir in was likely that it allowed them to inherit the land her parent’s used to own. Those plans bore fruit, and they managed to take possession of both her and her family’s property. Of course, that meant they had no use for Rir herself.

She was still a child, so even supposing they didn’t need her, they could still raise her until she reached an age where she could fend for herself. This was not the idea the couple came up with.

For the first one and a half years, they raised Rir comparatively normally. Although they fed her, they neither talked nor listened to her, merely telling her to stay quiet. They also physically restrained her to prevent her from going outside, so no one would notice the state she was in¹.

They obviously didn’t get rid of her excretions, instead they untied her at night and forced her to deal with it herself.

After one and a half years had passed, Rir turned seven of age.

She was abnormally bright, so through the couple’s conversation, the voices of others she heard from outside, and what she remembered from her parents, she taught herself how to discriminate between what she needed to survive and what she didn’t. This happened unconsciously, since she had nothing to do.

On one such day, maybe because they thought the time was right, the couple decided to effectively erase Rir’s existence from the village.

They took her outside. For her, this was the first time in over a year to be brought there. To the forest, where her late father used to work.

While she didn’t know what changed their minds, Rir hoped that she might be able to live a proper life from now on. However, she was wrong. She came to that realization, once they had gone deep into the forest.

They tied her to a tree². Then, as Rir was unable to resist, the couple cut off one of her ears and most of her tail, which are considered highly important to beastfolk. Moreover, to deliberately torment her and inflict pain, plus to make it look as if she truly had been eaten by a magic beast… they sawed them off with a knife with a poor cutting edge.

The young Rir obviously fainted in agony. The ears and tails of beastfolk are rather sensitive.

This came as no surprise, but she cried and screamed. Still, they were in the middle of a forest. Her tormentors were hardy fighters who survived the battle with the magic beasts, so they had taken her to a place where no one from the village would notice them.

At a later day, the couple put the cut off ear and tail on a piece of cloth and presented them to the village chief, crying crocodile tears as they lied that “Rir was eaten by a magic beast”.

Her burial was held on the very same day. She was now effectively dead. From that point on, she was no longer treated like a person. Her being sold into slavery then and there… likely would’ve been scores of times better.

The couple found hurting the young girl a good way to vent their daily frustrations, so they started to frequently abuse her. At the beginning, it was comparatively small things.

They gave her food as they used to, and she was merely forced to do all the household chores. Mainly cleaning, doing the laundry, and taking care of the livestock. When they found the manner she did those chores lacking, they used cigarettes³ to burn her and repeatedly punched and kicked her.

However, the bright and dexterous Rir managed to complete these tasks flawlessly as she grew older.

Under these circumstances, she did reasonably well, spending her days almost never speaking other than the times she talked in her childish manner (obviously, since she never had a normal conversation since she was five) to the livestock, and before she knew it, she had passed her 11th birthday.

1. Not even close to normal, just ignoring a kid and never talking to them is abuse. Also, why wouldn’t the other villagers grow suspicious when the lively girl who was often out and about never shows her face again?
2. The original is 気に縛りつけらる (“being tied to feeling”). I assume that’s an error and supposed to be 木に縛りつけらる (“being tied to a tree”). 気 and 木 are homophones.
3. Would an isolated village in a quasi-medieval society have cigarettes?

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