L4 The Lord Learns a Lesson
“Listen up, kids! You better eat every last bite!”
The director’s voice echoed through the orphanage cafeteria.
Mealtime tended to be quite noisy, since the children were always talking and laughing, but her yell still rang out loud and clear.
“What’s this? There’s still food on your plate!”
“I’m on a diet.”
The director’s brow furrowed as she looked at the girl’s food.
By this time, most of us were entering our teens and approaching puberty.
“Don’t be ridiculous. You’re like a bony little chicken! You have to get fat before you can go on a diet!”
“Whaaat? But you’re fat and you still aren’t on a diet, Director.”
“Of course a little child like you can’t understand the appeal of my alluring body! If you don’t eat, your chest will never get any bigger!”
The girl in question glanced down at her chest, and I remember watching her reluctantly resume eating.
I was very jealous of her meal.
At the time, I could still only have a liquid diet.
My body required more nutrients than the average person’s.
The IV constantly attached to my arm helped compensate for that, but it still wasn’t enough; only with the addition of an easily digestible, highly nutritious liquid diet could I manage to make ends meet.
My body was weakened by the venom my organs constantly produced, preventing me from digesting anything else.
So I was envious of the other kids who could eat all the solid food they wanted.
But I never said that out loud.
Everyone in the orphanage had a handicap in one way or another.
The girl who claimed to be on a diet looked like a normal human, but she was undoubtedly a chimera, too.
She had apparently been given DNA from many different kinds of animals, which all had different effects on her body, though each individual effect was slight.
Still, even if each one of them was small, the overall effect was too large to ignore.
And there was no way to fundamentally cure our conditions, only to treat the symptoms.
Because we were born with these bodies.
The only way to truly fix us would be to literally remake us.
That was impossible with the level of medical technology at the time; I doubt even Potimas could have done it.
We had no choice but to deal with the bodies we’d been given until we died.
And there was no doubt that death would come for us sooner than it would for a normal human.
Not one of us ever thought that we would have the same lifespan as an ordinary person.
Perhaps that is why we each started vaguely thinking about the future.
When we reached puberty, we graduated from being innocent children and took our first steps toward adulthood.
That was when we first started thinking about what it would mean to be an adult.
And wondering if we would even live long enough for that to happen…
One day, Lady Sariel came back, dragging two battered-looking kids behind her.
Not again, I thought to myself, exasperated.
The children in question were two of the quickest to start fights out of all the kids in the orphanage.
Whenever they started fighting outside the orphanage, Lady Sariel always punished them and brought them back here by force.
She knew these were no ordinary squabbles between children.
As chimeras, the two of them were stronger than normal humans. If they punched an ordinary child with all their might, they could seriously injure or even kill them.
Which is why Lady Sariel always ran to collect them right away.
These two weren’t the only ones who got into trouble.
The handful of kids who were able to leave the orphanage were always causing some kind of commotion, and Lady Sariel came to get them every time.
We weren’t forbidden from leaving the orphanage, but there were only a few of us kids who could actually go outside.
In my case, it was because of my health.
For the others, it was their appearance.
The orphanage was in a remote area, but it wasn’t completely uninhabited.
Technically, the people who lived nearby had been informed of the orphanage’s unique nature.
But that didn’t mean they would unconditionally accept the chimeras, whose appearance immediately distinguished them from normal humans.
Children who were around the same age were all the more merciless.
This is all secondhand, since I was never able to leave the orphanage myself, but I heard that some kids really did have rocks thrown at them.
I remember being shocked that such a clichéd scene could actually happen in real life.
But even if it sounded like a fairy tale, this was our reality.
It was clear what the other people who lived near the orphanage thought of us, even if they didn’t all throw rocks like some of the children did.
To them, our existence was a nuisance.
And when they already shunned us like that, any trouble we caused would give them an even worse impression of us.
That’s why Lady Sariel always went out to retrieve the kids before that happened.
But obviously, it didn’t feel good for us to be disliked, either.
The two kids that Lady Sariel often brought back were short-tempered and quick to fight on the basis of “an eye for an eye!”
Since the neighboring kids lashed out at them, they lashed out right back.
That’s just how those two were.
Fortunately, thanks to Lady Sariel, the two of them never actually managed to get in a full-on fight with the kids who lived nearby.
But that doesn’t mean they never tried.
In truth, they did raise their hands to strike, but were stopped by Lady Sariel before they could follow through.
If their hands actually made contact, I doubt those kids would have escaped unscathed.
And then it would be impossible to repair the relationship between the orphanage and its neighbors.
Even without that happening, the fact that they tried to start a fight still remained, forming a gulf between us.
The gulf became a sense of loathing that showed in the locals’ attitudes, and the orphanage kids resented that and caused more problems.
This vicious cycle was already well underway by the day of these events.
So we were all the more reluctant to leave the orphanage.
But there were still the active types who refused to be penned up and continued to go outside, and the problem children who brazenly ignored the concerns.
“Let go!”
One of those problem children was thrashing around to escape Lady Sariel’s grasp.
Sariel obeyed his request and released him.
“Geh?!”
What happened when she let go while holding him in midair?
Obviously, gravity sent him crashing to the floor.
The unfortunate child hit the ground face-first and crouched down, clutching his nose.
“Why’d you let go?!”
“That is a highly irrational complaint.”
Lady Sariel coolly brushed off his response.
To some people, that might seem like an attempt at provocation, but we’d known Lady Sariel long enough to learn that this was her default mode.
She was a very peculiar person, to say the least.
Her expression rarely changed.
Since she always looked indifferent, it was easy to assume she was cool and collected, but it didn’t take long to realize that wasn’t the case.
In a word, Lady Sariel was a weirdo.
She was a little bit off from other people, in various ways.
At times she seemed to have deep knowledge that none of us had, yet other times she didn’t understand things we didn’t even have to think about.
Her behavior was very irregular.
This instance was no exception: She released someone when she was told “let go!”, then when the boy smacked his nose as a result and asked “why’d you let go?!”, she claimed he was being “irrational.”
I don’t think Lady Sariel was trying to make fun of the boy in that exchange.
She wasn’t annoyed, either; I think she just observed impartially that the boy was contradicting himself and decided to inform him that it was irrational.
Of course, this is all just speculation on my part. Unfortunately, it was impossible to tell what Lady Sariel was really thinking.
Her behavior was so astoundingly far removed from our idea of common sense that even we couldn’t completely understand her.
In terms of knowledge, she was so wise and well-informed that it seemed like there was nothing she didn’t know; when we were young and asked “why?” about everything, she answered each question without a moment’s hesitation.
But when it came to people’s emotions or ways of thinking, she suddenly seemed clueless.
It was as if she understood the range of human emotion in theory, but couldn’t put her understanding to practical use…
In fact, when I learned that she was an angel and not a human, it made perfect sense.
All the more so when Gülie told me about the nature of angels later on.
Humans and angels seem to have fundamentally different thought processes.
From what he told me, angels are faithful to the mission they’ve been given, and they never waste time thinking about anything else more than necessary.
However, Lady Sariel was not an ordinary angel, but a “lost angel,” an unusual position that was likely why she became so close with humans.
“Dammit! Next time I see those kids, I’m gonna punch ’em in the face!”
“Violence is not the answer.”
The boy punched the floor with his free hand, still clutching his nose with the other.
“Violence is a crime. Assault and battery.”
“Shut up! Besides, they’re the ones who started it!”
“Even so. It is wrong.”
Lady Sariel knew every law of every nation.
Since the mind of an angel works so differently from that of a human, I don’t know how much she truly understood us in the end.
But I think she learned by studying laws that humans loathed violence.
“Those jerks…”
The other boy she’d captured, who had been silent all this time, finally spoke.
“They were making fun of us. Of the orphanage, of Lady Sariel…”
He bit his lip in frustration.
I understood how he felt.
We were a family, an irreplaceable one.
How could anyone stay silent if someone spoke ill of their family?
“Even then, violence is not the answer.”
“Why not?!”
“Because that is what the law has decided.”
Lady Sariel’s response was brief.
Since the law said it was forbidden, it must not be done.
“So you’re saying the law is always right?!”
“No.”
This response seemed to negate her previous statement.
She wasn’t saying that we had to obey the law because it was correct?
“Then why do we gotta follow it?!”
“Because if you do not, you will be judged accordingly.”
“And that’s a good enough reason not to break it?!”
“Yes.”
Lady Sariel wasn’t talking about good or evil.
She was simply teaching us that if we resorted to violence, we would be arrested, whether the violence was just or not.
“If they attack you with words, you should argue with words of your own, not actions.”
That was logical enough.
But the local kids were discriminating against us just because we were chimeras.
They used the circumstances of our birth, which we couldn’t possibly change, as fodder to insult us.
Even if we wanted to argue against them, they were already convinced that we were inferior.
Logic wouldn’t work on that kind of people.
“How are we supposed to do that…?”
The boys were even more aware of that than I was, since I’d never actually interacted with the local kids myself.
They weren’t willing to listen to anything we had to say.
But we couldn’t use violence, either.
There was no way out.
“Think on it.”
That was Lady Sariel’s only response.
“What is the best approach? What is the worst? You should always be thinking about these things. That is how people grow.”
…I don’t know if just thinking about it could possibly solve this problem.
Lady Sariel’s words were good ones, but I’m not sure if they were entirely suited to the occasion.
There really was something strange about Lady Sariel.
But we could all tell that she was trying to give us advice because she cared about us.
That sentiment alone was what saved us.
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