Waving off Durghan, Varoon, and the others, Oolga wore a bright smile. She was off of war duty today, since something else had come up.

Even if my brother and I aren't that close, he at least knows me this well, huh?

Enough to know that she was scary.

Oolga and Durghan shared the same father, but different mothers. Their mothers happened to belong to different villages, so they didn't meet until much later in life. Still, Durghan was competent. The same as Oolga, he held far greater intelligence than his peers. Unfortunately, the biology of Orc males worked against him, limiting that potential.

Well, it might be that he was just more limited from the onset, but she chose to give him the benefit of the doubt, saying that it was the fault of his gender. And it wasn't far fetched either, since Durghan seemed to prefer to devote what intellect he had to studying combat.

It was that. Others might not see the clear difference between the Mind and Soul, but Oolga knew. Durghan’s Mind was firmly positioned toward being a War Orc: he was enamored by tactics and technique. His Soul, on the other hand, was perfectly content with being an Orc. The Mind had influence over the Soul, but they were still separate things.

The direction Oolga’s Mind favored… that was harder to pin down. Perhaps only Oolga herself understood the minute intricacies, but there was a simple explanation for the slow-witted.

War.

Not the honorable and skillful war of the War Orcs, but a chaotic and bloody war, as blind as justice which, ironically, would be absent against its onslaught.

It isn't something that you can outright tell people you want. No sane person could hope for a chaotic and endless war, so any person who wanted it could only be called insane. In that case, for what reason did Oolga want it? What was the goal?

No one knew the answer except for Oolga herself. Nobody had ever realized her desire in order to question her about it. She personally found it strange that the few people who noticed her mask never attempted to pull it aside. Some were afraid of what they might find, like Rigdam and her brother. Her only son had been shown behind the mask against his will, and wanted nothing more than for the mask to become the reality, or for the whole masked Monster to bleed and die.

It wasn't like Oolga herself didn't realize that she was poisonous. There was a time when she had wanted to be accepted as the toxic creature that she was. The result was that her only son had been scarred for life and driven to hate her.

“Hey, Varoon baby, do you want to know what momma sees in your future?”

“My future? Momma see it? What, momma?” the baby Orc on her lap tilted his head up to look at her.

“Chaos,” a slightly younger Oolga smiled warmly. “The screams and blood of allies and enemies. Their cries twine together in the air. Their blood pools together on the ground. War between all races will rage without end, until only you, baby, and a few of our kind are standing atop the mountain of corpses. Young and old, weak and strong, men and women of every race. We will step on them all without mercy, and bathe in their innards. Doesn't it sound good baby?”

Of course, Oolga’s child was the Orc Lord, the destined bringer of war and carnage. How good would it be to finally share hearts with another person? But, in the middle of stroking her child’s head, he brushed her hand away.

“Momma, is you a demon? When the men leave for pillage and hunt is good, but instead of see nightmares like that, even getting eaten is better. Mommas sense of joking sucks.”

Ahh… Ahaha, ha. Of course. This wasn't her child. This one was a mistake. It was a mistake, right?

Truly, she was glad when Varoon turned out not to be the Orc Lord. If the Orc Lord had truly reacted to her heartfelt sentiment that way… Still, she learned her lesson after that time. She shouldn't share unnecessary things. She shouldn't try to unnecessarily guide actions. And so, when her second child was born, the genuine Orc Lord, she raised her at a distance. All of the love and support the child could want was offered freely. As for her deeper thoughts--and most thoughts, actually--they were sealed away tightly.

Even someone like me has feelings too, you know?

Being rejected by her own offspring twice in a row would be unbearable. She especially didn't want to lose Vyra, who she treated as her ultimate destiny to raise.

...Vyra had noticed the mask by now. Withholding information and keeping secrets are only different in name, and since the other party couldn't clearly know her intentions, it was received poorly. Most likely, Varoon had prompted Vyra against her, and she happened to possess such a rare and useful skill like . So Vyra had certainly noticed the mask.

… Why wasn't she shunned? Why wasn't she welcomed? How was it that the treatment her daughter gave her didn't change even the least bit? Oolga only allowed herself to be emotional about it briefly, and set out immediately after to analyze it. She saw four main possibilities:

First, her daughter was painfully stupid in some areas, and didn't realize what the mask meant. Second, her daughter was a similar type to herself, and so she wanted to respect the mask’s boundaries. Third, she was pretending that she hadn't noticed the mask, because she knew what it meant and couldn't bear it. And fourth, she had already seen enough disturbing things that the meaning of the mask was no notable issue.

The ones she least wanted to be true were the first and third cases. For her daughter to be stupid, or to hate her, she didn't want that. Oddly enough, she wasn't drawn to the second option either. Oolga wanted to share hearts with someone, but if that heart was identical to her own, then what was the point? Though, she would still welcome her daughter, even if she turned out to be crazy.

She had no basis to judge the fourth point. Of course, Vyra wasn't even a hundred days old yet. What could she have seen? Even targets for wouldn't turn up many shocking results in a remote village like theirs. Logically, there was no basis to think the fourth option might be correct.

What kind of half-assed idiot would say that?

There obviously were many things to suggest that Vyra had seen more things than her age and location should allow. First, the Lord Spirit was housed within her, and it had seen countless lives, deaths, triumphs, and atrocities. If, perhaps, it shared those experiences with the host, it would make sense for the girl to be desensitized. Additionally, there were a great many things that Vyra knew and spoke about which she should not have experienced. Either, she was impeccably creative, intelligent, and imaginative, or she had learned these things somewhere else.

Somewhere like in another world.

Vyra had never told her about remembering her past life, but Oolga had been able to extract the information from others who did know. Irsha, specifically, was quite earnest in wanting her blessing to mate with Varoon. The mood was guided to a malleable place, and the desired information was harmlessly obtained. But the thought Oolga had when she first grasped that information went like this:

It somehow seems like everyone even somewhat near her besides me knows it already?

Her daughter did not confide this secret to her. Either it was retaliation against her tight-lipped mother, or it was to protect her from the implied meaning:

Momma, I'm sorry, but I have another momma back in my old world. It can't be helped that I can't see you as my actual mother.

Something like that, perhaps?

Because ultimately, as neither of those were things she wanted to hear, she had left the subject alone. Though she did sometimes wonder what that other world was like if it could desensitize someone to the point where insanity was a non issue.

But, well, that was that and this was this. She had a duty to perform; this wasn't just a day off for her.

Ah, but it might as well be. Picking apart a Mind is as much fun as cleaving apart a Body. It’s also a fun I don't get to have often, due to a lack of hostile, thinking captives. I wonder if this could maybe become a mother-daughter day?