560: Fun Life
Hearing those words, Olivia felt her grasp on the world slip away.
“N-no… That’s not true,” Olivia said, her hands shaking, as she looked into Ophelia’s eyes. “That’s impossible!”
“Honestly, you never fail to disappoint me,” Ophelia said and moved the palm of her hand over her face. As she did that, her face changed.
“NOOOOOOOO!!!” Olivia screamed. And that was when “Ophelia” blasted Olivia with her lightning magic, knocking the distraught ninja girl away.
“I thought you’d recognize me sooner,” “Ophelia” said as she got back on her feet. “Considering you were the one that taught me this skill. I guess using it all this time I ended up perfecting it. After all, I did fool dear daddy.”
“E-Emily…” Olivia struggled to speak. Her body barely responded to her. She didn’t feel the cold stone floor she laid on. She didn’t even feel the pain anymore. She felt as if she was floating, yet unable to do anything. Although Emily’s facial features had noticeably changed, it was no doubt still Olivia’s sister that stood in front of her.
“Been a while since anyone called me that,” Emily said and ran her fingers through her pink hair. “Like the new color? I dyed it as soon as I could. It lessened the strain of using Shadow Body Swap, since I had to concentrate on one less thing. But now it takes no effort at all to maintain.”
“That’s because after spending all this time with a different face, you’re growing into it,” Olivia explained without even thinking. For a second her mind defaulted to a casual lesson she used to have so often with Emily, as if to not deal with the horrific reality.
“Oh, is that it?” Emily smiled. “Then it will get increasingly easier going forward.”
Olivia looked at Sofia. The cat girl still had the chains in her hands, awaiting further instructions, and showed no signs of surprise that her master had just swapped faces. The bunch of kids were a different matter, but they were so rattled with sheer dread all this time that it was too hard to tell one way or the other.
The kids! Olivia realized. Then everything… It wasn’t Belmot. It wasn’t Ophelia. It was Emily!? No, that can’t be! There were countless disappearances before.
“What have they done to you!?” Olivia cried out. “You’re not this monster! W-we can make this right! You’re a sweet girl who—”
“Oh, shut the fuck up!” Emily rolled her eyes. “What the fuck do you even know about me? ‘Can’t do this’, ‘don’t do that’! ‘Don’t go there’, ‘don’t talk to that boy’, ‘stay away from those guys’! Just in the last six months alone I’ve lived more than all those years with you!”
“Lived more?” Olivia asked. “Torture? Murder? What are you saying?”
“I was your fucking prisoner! Never get to do anything fun, living off scraps! I might as well have been dead!”
“I was trying to keep us alive in a world overrun with demons! The only ‘fun’ people have found here is getting drunk, high, and fucking anyone and everyone all day long!”
“Yeah, amazing, isn’t it?”
“Amazing!? People here have lost all their senses! They cheer for the most brutal acts possible to get the next level of excitement!”
“Oh, and you’re above brutality?” Emily asked. “What would you call threatening to cut a boy’s dick off just because we made out once? You think I wouldn’t find out?”
“He was selling Black Pixie Dust!”
“Yeah, he was fun! God forbid I had some of that in my miserable existence!”
“And this is your idea of ‘fun’?”
“Was what we had before your idea of ‘life’?” Emily asked. “I did wait for you, at first. But thirteen days… I wanted her to suffer as much as she made me suffer. And I quickly realized how much I liked it! Couldn’t enjoy her screams, of course. Can’t have daddy’s precious daughter screaming at the top of her lungs for days on end, so I had to make due with just her expressions. That’s when I got creative. The knife skills you taught me helped to a point. After that I improvised. You see, depending on the tool and the force—”
“STOP!” Olivia looked away from Emily in tears.
Emily shrugged. “Anyway… Despite experiencing first-hand Ophelia’s “personality” during my early days here, I still needed more information to pull off my impersonation. It was a lot of work juggling so much at once! Sofia and Portia came in handy, and I was not nearly as keen on turning them into supper as Ophelia was. Though I did consider it when Ophelia kicked the bucket on their watch.
“I was scared or getting rid of the corpse too, since I still thought I needed her body around for successful Shadow Body Swap. The smell quickly got out of control. That’s when I carved out whole floors for myself. Daddy likes to spoil his princess. And I will become a princess! First a princess, then a queen!”