Chapter 82 The Human Demon War
"I\'m glad you\'re well now, Sylph," Shade said with a charming smile. Now that I get a better look at him, he\'s actually very handsome… I can understand why Nepheline would fall for him. As we moved closer to them, he gently petted my head.
"Ah, little Sylphy! Aquarina\'s been missing you for a while, you know? It\'s so hard to calm this girl down when she\'s babbling about you all the time! Seriously, she can\'t stop thinking about you!" said Nepheline soon after. Then, she suddenly held me with her strong arms and kissed my cheek.
"M-Mom, don\'t say that!" Aquarina cried in response.
"Hahaha! What\'s wrong? You have to tell Sylph how important she is for you, or she\'ll never understand your feelings, dear. She seems like the oblivious type," Nepheline said with a chuckle.
Huh? What is she even talking about? Oblivious? Me? I\'m pretty good at picking up on things, so I\'m not really oblivious. I know very well that Aquarina loves me like a sister, so that\'s why I\'m precious to her. Of course, the feelings are mutual in that regard!
RUMBLE…
Suddenly, my stomach roared like a deadly beast, a monstrous bear of sorts.
"Ugh… I\'m hungry." I sighed.
"Makes sense, you haven\'t eaten in over a week…" mother said in response.
"Let\'s prepare you a big feast, Sylph," said my father after that.
"I can\'t wait!"
At the end, my parents prepared a large amount of food. It was mostly a lot of grilled meat cut into strips, rice, boiled potatoes, fruit punch, and other stuff that was definitely scrumptious, to say the least.
I ended up enjoying them a lot, but I still couldn\'t get that thought out of my head. For some reason, Aquarina seemed to be trying to distract me all the time, going so far as to even spoon-feed me rice with meat curry and all sorts of other food. There were even desserts, all sorts of delicious pies, apple pie, pineapple pie, and so on…
"Hehe, here\'s another bite of apple pie. Your favorite, Sylphy~!"
Surprisingly, Aquarina wasn\'t getting sick of feeding me, moving a fork with a big piece of apple pie closer to my mouth.
I couldn\'t help but feel like a baby while she did that, but I still took her invitation and ate the apple pie with a smile on my face.
"It\'s so good… I love the cinnamon…" I said with a sigh, sipping on some tea.
"Aquarina\'s becoming very close with Sylph…" my mother could not help but say.
"Indeed… what should we do about this?" father wondered.
"What\'s so wrong with it? Aren\'t they like sisters?" said Shade, not noticing the problem.
Hearing that, Nepheline, my mother, and my father looked at Shade while raising an eyebrow.
"Right, you\'re the oblivious type. I almost forgot," mother said soon after.
"Eh?" Shade uttered in confusion.
"Well, I don\'t think it\'s a bad thing. Let the girls be girls. They\'re still very little so I don\'t think anything big will happen until they become teenagers…" Nepheline said sometime later.
"I don\'t know what sexuality Sylph might develop, but it\'s quite clear at this point that Aquarina is…" mother said.
"Yeah… well, let\'s just let it be," father said with a sigh.
"Indeed, no point forcing anything. We aren\'t like this," mother added, effectively ending the conversation.
What were they even talking about? Don\'t they know I can hear them? Maybe they think that because they\'re whispering, I won\'t hear them.
Well, let\'s better leave it at that for now. I don\'t want to bother anymore with this.
At the end, I finally decided to ask them about what I heard from the demons.
I was curious as to what they would respond to this… I was already someone that had matured mentally, after all. Even if I know what my parents had done… I don\'t think I\'ll stop loving them.
But I still wanted to know.
Of course, this was a very sensitive topic. Even Aquarina felt surprised and fell silent when I asked about the part regarding "killing thousands of children". Unexpectedly, my parents and her parents suddenly fell silent as well, looking at each other after that. They knew this was a heavy topic to talk about, but we were already exposed to it, so there was no turning back. Ignoring the topic completely would only worsen the situation. With that, they had to quickly clear things up before more misunderstandings could be made.
"What we had done is indeed atrocious," father said in all honesty.
"Indeed." Mother nodded in response.
They immediately began with a bomb.
"We admit it," said Shade soon after.
"Even if we had our reasons, it\'s still a sin," Nepheline added.
"Eh? W-What\'s a sin?" Aquarina asked.
"However, Hell wasn\'t completely right either. We didn\'t kill children. Instead, we took responsibility for it… because it was our fault, we let that… happen…" father said, only to let out a long sigh soon after. His face grew with discomfort with each passing second.
"You let it happen?" I asked.
"In the continent of Gallatea, there are four major kingdoms, Sylph. Listen well. Among these four kingdoms, the strongest and biggest kingdom, and the most involved in the war against the demons several years ago, was the Holy Kingdom of Uegenne…" mother started to explain.
"This kingdom also represents the gods and was the one that led the charge against the demons that invaded from overseas, crossing the sea and heading directly to the Demon Continent," father continued.
"Those bastards are why we don\'t want to meddle anymore with other kingdoms and chose to live in isolation," Shade said his piece.
"In short, they were the ones that guided us at first… the ones that helped us the most…" Nepheline told us.
"However, they were also the ones that hated demons the most. When we first started, we had to deal with large tides of demons rushing at us constantly. It wasn\'t easy, but it made us grow the resolve to help our people and save humanity… we\'ve slain many lives… these demons… they weren\'t monsters, they were people like us. Simply put, they fought for their own goals, for the goals of their countries… to protect the world from us," father said.
"But like any war, we had to fight to survive and protect our people… even if it meant taking the lives of these soldiers, thousands of them… however, they were prepared for it. After all, soldiers were prepared to die," mother added.
"As we defeated the generals, with them finally beginning to fall back, an all-out attack at the Demon Continent began…"