My Only Protector Is a Killer - Chapter 1
I. The Last Judgment
The first time they met was at a scene of brutal carnage.
What was scattered everywhere was human blood, and what lay piled on the ground without a single gap to step through was human flesh.
Just as the butcher, having finished everything, was about to leave, someone curled up between the stinking lumps of meat suddenly sprang out.
“Please, take me with you!”
The man wiped the blood splattered on his hood and turned around. A girl with a thin, emaciated body, disheveled hair, and shabby clothes staggered toward him.
Though she didn’t appear particularly threatening, she made it clear she was unarmed by raising her open palms above her head. Her complexion was pale from starvation, and her expression was somewhere between crying and smiling.
“Please… take me with you. No— please save me.”
He stood still, watching her approach, faltering and finally collapsing at his feet. His left hand was stuffed into his jacket pocket, while his right hand still gripped a machete.
“I was held by those people for a whole month. I almost starved to death… Thank you for saving me.”
Her claim of almost starving to death didn’t seem like a lie. The naturally thin girl, weakened from hunger, had trembling legs. Her eyes anxiously scanned the surroundings, and her bony arms, covered in goosebumps, were constantly rubbed by her hands.
However, no matter how miserable her appearance or tragic her story, the man had nothing to do with it. He had simply eliminated unnecessary obstacles for survival, and she had coincidentally survived in the process. He hadn’t saved her, nor did he have the slightest intention of being a hero.
Glancing at the girl, who pretended to be pitiful with her eyebrows furrowed and her large eyes brimming with tears, he turned his head away.
“W-Wait! Please, hear me out!”
Even as the girl babbled something, he didn’t hesitate to move his feet. Realizing this, the girl, who had seemed so frail as if she would collapse from hunger at any moment, abruptly changed her attitude.
As if she hadn’t just been sitting on the ground, she jumped up and hurried to catch up with his long strides. While his heavy boots made a thudding noise on the floor, the girl’s bare feet made almost no sound as she followed him.
“Hey, wait, how can you just leave behind someone who was on the brink of starvation?”
She pretended not to notice the fact that the man had just committed a massacre. He had released the ‘slaves’ locked behind bars in the facility with the push of a button, leading the ‘masters’ to be mercilessly slaughtered without him having to lift a finger.
Since she lacked the strength or weapon to kill the bastard who had starved her, she had stayed hidden until the chaos was over, waiting for a chance to escape. The man, having done this countless times since the end of the world, had seen plenty of leech-like survivors just like her.
“What I’m saying is… do you have any food? I’m not asking for much.”
The girl, so emaciated it was hard to tell if she was a child or an adult, seemed oblivious to her predicament. Instead of chattering away like this, she should be treasuring her saved life and running far away from him.
The fact that she couldn’t sense the immediate danger meant one of two things: she was either a naïve fool who knew nothing of the world or a reckless idiot resolved to die.
The man holding the machete briefly considered whether to swing his right hand or not. The mere act of hesitating was itself an exceptional level of mercy, something he would only occasionally grant to dogs or cats, but never to humans.
Whether or not she noticed his right hand tightening and loosening repeatedly, the girl awkwardly lifted the corners of her mouth and looked up at the man’s eyes from under his hood.
“Just… one can of food would be enough.”
A can of beans, sardines, corn—anything would do. Preferably canned food.
She swallowed, whether out of nervousness or hunger, and her hesitant, fidgety demeanor made her look like a teenager confessing love for the first time. The man nearly let out a scoff, remembering a mundane day from before the apocalypse.
This girl wasn’t a naïve or clueless fool. She was a cunning survivor, willing to feign shyness even in front of his machete to achieve her goal.
