This Beast-Tamer is a Little Strange - Chapter 792: Behind the Smile

Chapter 792: Chapter 792: Behind the Smile

The smile came easily. Too easily.

Her lips curved into the same soft expression she had worn countless times as a girl—when Bridge scraped his knees and cried, when Kain came running back from the market with dirt all over his face, when the younger ones in the orphanage begged for a story before bed. A smile of warmth, of comfort, of reassurance.

But beneath it, her chest thudded with nerves. Her hands trembled slightly where they hung at her sides, and she dug her nails into her palms to keep them still.

Because Kain’s grumbled thoughts about explaining for her were right.

It wasn’t his responsibility to explain her presence.

It was hers.

And how exactly was she supposed to do that?

What story do I tell?

A thousand possibilities spun through her head even as she kept her eyes fixed on her long lost brother’s stunned face.

She could say she’d been kidnapped. That was always the simplest explanation. Disappeared one day, taken by faceless men, dragged off into some underground hell. It was believable. It would gain her sympathy points and lower any guard they may have.

Or maybe she could claim she’d been trafficked, sold into another family, and raised under a false name. Adopted. The poor girl stolen from her home but given to strangers who cared for her in their own way. While the pity factor would reduce, it might reassure them and relieve any guilt they had regarding her disappearance.

Also, how to explain her reappearing in their lives?

She could go with the simplest option: say she had seen Kain on television. That she’d been watching the tournament, glimpsed his face, and something in her vague childhood memories stirred. She followed that thread until it led her here.

Each story had merit. Each story might earn sympathy and tears.

But obviously none of them were true.

And the truth—what really happened—could never be spoken aloud.

————————

Her mind drifted back, despite herself, to the day it all began.

She had been only nine years old, curious and restless, when she found the loose floorboard under her parents’ old room. Inside were two journals bound in black leather, filled with careful handwriting. Her parents’ handwriting.

The words inside had lit a fire in her young mind.

They wrote of a great cause, of a hidden organization that guided humanity’s future from the shadows in preparation of a doomsday-level threat that would one day arrive, called the Abyss.

They called themselves the Black Dawn—an organization that moved like chess pieces across the world stage, precise and inevitable.

Her father was a Bishop, her mother a Rook

The Bishop, her father explained in one passage, was a guardian of the Black Dawn’s ideology. Bishops helped steer the big picture of the organization due to their more tactical prowess, reminded its members of their greater goals, and provided ideological education. The Rook, her mother wrote, was more hands-on. Rooks handled the harsher work of eliminating threats and defending the organization from external enemies. Together, they had worked toward what they believed was a dream of human transcendence.

The words painted it in holy colors. Sacrifice for the future. Struggle for greatness. A noble chess match played on the board of destiny.

And she, young and impressionable, had read every page until her hands shook.

From that moment, she could not see her family, her orphanage, her life the same way.

How could she? Her parents had walked among giants. They had belonged to something greater than life itself. And here she was—just a girl stuck in a small city, patching clothes and soothing crying children.

She began to dream of following them.

At first, she told herself she could balance both. She could remain with her family while secretly seeking the Black Dawn. But every page of the journals had spoken of secrecy, of the need for clean breaks and hidden paths.

Contact with outsiders was a chain.

So, when she was thirteen, with Bridge and Kain already ten years old and less dependent on her, she made the decision to leave. Tears soaked her sleeves as she slipped away, choosing a ’higher cause’ over her family.

She let them all believe she was dead.

It was the only way.

But the Black Dawn she joined was not the one her parents described.

The reality was harsh, bloody, merciless. Children disappeared into the night and never returned. “Volunteers” were torn apart in experiments that promised new strength but left only corpses. Entire families were shattered, erased, as collateral for a greater goal.

At first, she told herself this was temporary—that she was seeing the ugly work that built the foundation of a better future. Surely her parents, who had written with such hope and reverence, had not been part of this brutality.

But as years passed, doubt gnawed.

Had the Black Dawn changed after their deaths? Or had her parents been blind, brainwashed, unable—or unwilling—to see the cruelty for what it was?

She didn’t know.

And that ignorance was a knife she carried in her chest.

———————–

Now she stood before Kain, heart racing.

The truth is not an option.

She couldn’t tell him she had left willingly, that she had sought the Dawn out, that she had chosen ideology over her family. She couldn’t tell him that she’d willing participated in the conduction of all kinds of horrors…

No, she would need to smile. She would need to weave a lie.

Kidnapped. Adopted. Searching.

Something, anything, that would let her walk back into his life without getting him on guard.

Because whatever else she might be now, she still needed him.

Her mission depended on it.

And yet… she could already see it.

In the way Kain’s gaze sharpened even through his shock. In the stiffness of his shoulders.

Suspicion.

Of all the family she might face, Kain was the one she was the least able to deceive and the one she most needed to win over. He was no longer the little boy playing all day with Bridge. He was powerful, cunning, and sharp-eyed. He would not accept her at face value.

Her stomach twisted. The smile on her face felt brittle, hollow, stretched too tight.

Could he already sense it? Could he already see the cracks in her façade?