"Ray! Ray! What should we name our kittens?"
"I dunno… Kitten A, B, C? I'm not good with coming up with names." Adam sighed as he had been asked the nth times with the same question in the span of ten minutes.
Yes, Kuroka is finally pregnant. Hooray… 🎉 🎉 🎉
Anyway, I am not depressed and contemplating going to the supermarket to buy milk. No, I'm just exhausted because Oh Boy. I look down on the abysmally low fertility rate of the Eldritch Race. In the end, I sort of gave up on natural impregnation and got it done with my power. Don't tell Kuroka though because she insisted on wanting it to feel special. But she didn't think about me getting milked dry 24/7 to hit that abysmally low success rate.
Enough of my rants.
So, after Kuroka is finally pregnant. The both of us are lost on what to do next. The vacation during our honeymoon is starting to get stale after visiting a few dozen worlds.
"I'm asking a serious question, Ray!" Kuroka pouted while still looking down at her abdomen and rubbing it for the past hours or so.
"And I am telling you the truth, wifey. I'm bad at coming up with names. Maybe you could consult the girls? They are their future siblings after all." Ray suggested while laying on his back with his body spread eagle, feeling the cold breeze washing through his furs.
"Not a bad suggestion." Kuroka thought and nodded.
"Yeah. But before we leave this world. There is something I wanted to do." He turned around and climbed up to his paws and stretched lazily.
Kuroka sort of understands why Adam meant and pouted. After all, she finds it weird that he would come to a modern Earth for no reason.
Under the top of the skyscraper, Kuroka could see with her enhanced vision. A pair of mother and daughter ganged up upon by a group of people wearing trench coats and carrying briefcases.
"Why did you wait to save her only after her mother was killed?" Kuroka wonders and watches the girl trying to escape from her killers that are hunting her down like prey.
"Well three reasons actually. First, I need her to be desperate or else my offer wouldn't work. Second, if her mother is still alive, I cannot adopt her. Third…" Ray turns to look at her with curiosity. "Are you okay with me taking another wife? You know, just after I married Ravel not too long ago. Besides, I doubt Sirin would be happy to hear that news."
"I don't mind." Kuroka actually said with a contemplating look on her face. "When I think about it, having a proper mother with experience on raising a baby."
"Didn't we have Grayfia for that?"
"Yes. But I wouldn't trust a Devil to raise my kittens knowing how twisted their sense of morality is."
"Aren't you a former Devil yourself?" Ray points out which words Kuroka has, stuck on her throat and stares dagger at him.
Ray gulped and quickly coughed. "Alright, I'll see myself out." He said before he opened a portal and jumped into it.
———
In the alley, Ryoko Fueguchi was trying to hold off the CCG Investigators while allowing her daughter to escape.
Ryoko felt a pang of regret, to leave her daughter this early in her life. She wished she could accompany her until she grew up, finishes school and become a respectable adult, to get married and have a child of her own, to become a grandmother herself.
Unfortunately, life is unfair. She questioned why heaven was unfair to her and her child. No one wishes to be born as a Ghoul. No one wishes to be a monster, hunted down like a plague to society for the rest of their life. Living like rats scurrying in the shadows, forever unable to be accepted into society.
She unfurled her butterfly wing like appendages and stared at the CCG Investigators. She can feel and see the hate in their eyes. She does not blame them because Ghoul is an existence that preys upon human flesh they couldn't consume anything else but human flesh. A curse upon their existence in exchange for a superhuman power. However, unlike other Investigators that one in a gray coat and sunken face of a dried corpse hunts her family down as if they are animals. He sadistically toyed with her with the Quinque made from her husband that the investigator killed.
Ryoko's face hardened with resolve. If possible, even if she has to die. She wished to kill that man because if not… if she doesn't, her daughter will be next on his list.
"Wonderful… such a wonderful expression. Turn out monsters like you can also feel hatred and desire for revenge. But fret not, I will be kind and let you die with this." The Investigator clicked the button before the briefcase burst open and released a familiar Kagune which left Ryoko stunned and gasping in horror.
"Familiar doesn't it?" The investigator said while smiling sadistically, reveling in her grief and growing anger.
Overwhelmed by her emotions, Ryoko forgot her initial goal to hold off the investigators and charged madly at the gray coated investigator while roaring in anger. But…
*Puchi!*
Wet sounds of something being stabbed was heard followed by a shower of splattering blood.
Ryoko felt a numbness spreading in her stomach before she felt something warm raise up her throat and overflowing to her neck. She touched the warm substance and looked at it. It was her own blood.
The sadistic Investigator then clicked another button that cause the pale yellow plated appendages fashioned like a whip to grow thorn like protrusion on its side looking like body of a centipede as he pulled his Quinque back, gouging Ryoko's innards out as she lifelessly fell to the ground.
Ryoko can feel her body grow colder as her warm life fluids leaked out the hole in her stomach. She whispered the name of her daughter, praying for any god out there to protect her dear child now that she couldn't.
Just as her last bit of life was about to be extinguished, she heard a muffled voice in her ears.
"Well, you lack some curves but look passable enough. Anyway, I heard your prayer and heeded your call. However, I wouldn't just grant a wish for free. Are you willing to pay the price?" The ethereal voice reaches her ears.
Price? For her daughter, she is willing to offer anything, even her soul if needed. All she wished for is her daughter to grow up safely.
"Without hesitation, huh? Fine, I shall accept your soul as payment and our pact is sealed. Sleep well and put your worry to rest. Our daughter will be safe by your side by the time you woke up." The voice said again.
Ryoko felt all her burden freed from her heart as her consciousness faded off with a blissful feeling like being enveloped in a warm cradle.
———
After Ray sealed his pact with Ryoko, he finally appeared next to Ryoko and his shadow spread beneath her and swallowed her in while being dragged by tentacles which confuses the Investigators.
"What! My Kagune!" Mado screamed when Ryoko suddenly disappeared after the cat appeared.
"Hmn. Yours?" Adam asked with displeasure in his voice.
"He can talk!" The other Investigators immediately become wary and point their weapon at Ray but he ignores those fleas.
"Yeah! She is my prey! I want to add her Kagune into my Quinque collection! It would have been a masterpiece!" Mado rambles off in his bout of insanity.
"I tolerate your attack on her because she isn't mine yet. But after she is mine, you still dare claim she is yours?"
The alleyway suddenly swallowed by pure darkness. The investigators tried to keep themselves calm by the sudden occurrence but someone suddenly shrieked, attracting the attention of his comrades. Soon another joined too until Mado and his junior left.
"W-What is happening!" Amon panicked, struck by illusion and fighting an non-existent enemy while being led away.
Ray can't kill Amon since he still has his script to play. Mado however, his death is of little effect to the timeline which is convenient.
"Kasuka…?" Mado shambled forward at the illusion.
"Is that really you, Kasuka?" He hugged his smiling dead wife that suddenly appeared in front of him with an inviting open arm.
"I really mis…" His voice stuck in his throat when his wife that he hugged suddenly shriveled into a wrinkled dry skin and bones filled with all sorts of disgusting creatures.
In his reflex, Mado attacked the thing pretending to be his wife with hin Quinque, stabbing her in the same manner he did to Ryoko. But then, in a blink of an eye. The shriveled corpse suddenly turned back into his wife, stabbed by his Quinque and with a betrayed look she stared at her venomously.
"N-No… I-I… I…" He shambled back, unable to believe what he had done. Then he stared at his bloody hands.
"NOOOO! MOTHER!"
Mado then lifts his head back up to see his daughter standing before his dead wife that he killed, face drenched with tears and turning to him with hatred.
"HOW COULD YOU? HOW COULD YOU KILL MOTHER!"
His daughter charged at him, wanting to kill him for what he did. But then, in the next moment. He felt his hand move and he heard the similar wet stabbing sound.
When he opened his eyes to look at his action, he saw the look of surprise on her daughter's face. His Quinque had stabbed her too. He fell to his knee, cradling his dying daughter's head that stared blankly at the void, lifeless and dead.
"No! I didn't do it! It's not me! I didn't do it! I didn't… Aaahh Ah… Ahahahahaha!"
"Well, that was a boring one." Ray appeared as all the illusion vanished. He looked at the driven mad Mado and scratched his chin with his paw, feeling the punishment was unsatisfactory. But then he got an idea.
"Well, I'll just fix your mind and erase your memory so you will repeat this purgatory for eternity." Ray said and Mado was dragged away into the prison in his Shadow Space.
Once he dispelled the domain, Kuroka stood in the alleyway with Minami, Ryoko's daughter, sleeping on her shoulder while being carried by Kuroka.
"Sheesh, I didn't take you to be a cruel one, Ray." Kuroka commented with a look of pity for Mado.
"He deserves it for having the audacity to covet what's already mine." Ray snorted before opening a portal.
"Hmn… so, you would do that for me too?" Kuroka asked out of curiosity.
"Who knows." Ray shrugged and hop into the portal, leaving Kuroka pouting before entering the portal too.
—————
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