I will strive beyond this cursed bloodline!

She felt dirty.

She had enjoyed the day with Eli-Eli as much as possible, but... That poor girl...Rossie it was?

She had done to her things she didn't want to do...Even if she needed to be sure...No...That was just her mind trying to justify her deeds...Her hideous, disgusting, and terrible deeds.

What was the difference between her and those crazy gods now?

What was the difference between her and their crazy acolytes?

Kings and mages summoning young foolish kids and then branding their [Soul] with their hideous mark...Or in the worst case scenario... Kidnapping souls before they went into the circle of transmigration...

Sometimes they didn't even care to look for victims that would like to do their bidding and just branded their [Souls] so they would do their work, and she...Had done something similar to them.

She knew very well that kind of Magic, she had studied it in the other world...[Aetheria] that forsaken place she had ended summoned as a ten-year-old girl.

And the same place that had branded her [Soul] so she would listen to the whims of a 15-year-old brat...She had lived in that world as nothing more than a drooling girl that listened to the whims of someone barely old enough to qualify as a grown-up..... And she hated with every fiber of her body those memories. The things that...[Hero] made her do. How he made a sport of finding new ways to abuse her and her healing magic.

The only good thing about that was when he finally managed to break her [Soul] and used the control over her brand to force her to [Restore] her [Soul] back to [Normal].

She still relished the memory of how he ordered "Restore yourself to normal" he said, and oh did she restore herself to normal... One of her favorite memories was of that day.

She [Healed] herself and then turned grabbed the very same [Brand] they had put in him and twisted it till he was nothing more than the remainings of a man with the intelligence of a slug. An improvement if she was being honest.

That did get her branded as [Demon] in the eyes of the church...But she didn't care. She went on a rampage burning their kingdoms, pillaging their libraries, learning their twisted [Mind] and [Soul] magic to be sure no foreign vestiges of that repulsive magic were in her.

Then using those same bits of knowledge to twist her [Soul] into something that would allow her to escape that place no matter the cost.

And even after all of that...After turning that cursed world into a mere mana source for her and the world around her...

She had used the same magic on that girl...Granted she had a reason...

HAH!

A reason...A motive...An excuse...

"We all have excuses..." Said Catherine to herself, she was in her living room thinking about her choices and looking at the papers on her coffee table.

There were two folders in there, one had the picture of a black-haired girl, with a normal upbringing, no red flags in her environment, no known association with criminal organizations or cults... Quite the average girl if one was to be honest. She awakened her magic at 12 on her birthday and her first release of magic made the cake cut itself and fly to all the attendees.

An honest and caring girl.

The second folder on the other hand held way less information and a picture of a scrawny pink-haired girl with dead eyes looking at the camera.

Rosalina Singh, previously Rosalina Williams...Previously Rosalina Smith...Rosalina White...Harriss...The list went on and on...Until she got adopted by the Singh family.

She awakened her magic at her alleged third-year party...Where she aged every single nonsynthetic thing to rotten components. The family didn't return her since they had just lost their daughter and paid quite the amount for her if the information she got from [The Traveler] was to be trusted.

After that event, she got magic schooling at home where she learned how to rein her magic and no further event got noted, but then again most of the people that went to her birthday parties got struck with a [Geass]. And she didn't want her debt to [The Traveler] to increase...

So she went to look into it with the idea of asking Eli-Eli's companion if that girl visited them or not. So when she found that girl in her daughter's apartment.

She lost composure and channeled her [Queen] persona, her ruthless, devious, and hideous self from her time in Aetheria...

She dug her mana in the body of that girl with reckless abandon not caring if she felt uncomfortable or not, she dug into her very [Soul] searching, questioning her, examining her body for the telltales of tampering in her very being.

And when that girl turned to the room where she could feel her daughter's presence, she lost it. The guilt came in rushing in and she faltered...She eased on her spells and noticed how the girl was crying.

She saw her reflection in the teary-eyed girl, for one second she doubted...She doubted if this was the right way to go at it... But then she turned her senses to her daughter, still sleeping unaware of the world. So she crushed that guilt.

She turned on one of the nodes in her [Soulscape], accelerated her own cognition, and then...She did something she had sworn to never do again.

She split her mind, on one side she shoved everything about the person she was in Aetheria, the ruthless [Queen] that sacrificed a world that had taken everything from her. And in the other half, she grabbed everything she was today...

The loving mother, the silly wife, the carefree Magical Girl...And then she covered that part and only left the [Queen].

After the spell finished she opened her eyes and...Didn't feel pity anymore, she had found the broken soul in the girl and so didn't keep pushing at her soul, so she just asked her questions to carry on.

"Have you met anyone that claims himself a [God] in a white room?" And in that split second where the girl didn't know what she was talking about. She felt it.

The hideous and repulsive twitch in her [Soul], a fragment had tried to hide itself in her [Soulscape]. So she trusted her arm into the chest of the girl and activated her magic so her arm could travel into her [Soulscape] to grab it.

She could feel how the [Fragment] was trying to tie itself to the girl's soul, but she just ripped it out anyway. The soul was already broken so what was another crack on it anyway.

She relished when the fragment tried to run away from her grip, so much that she didn't notice when her spell had ended and the girl was laying on the floor in a pool of her own blood, her shirt utterly destroyed.

But she just couldn't bring herself to feel, not with this [Fragment] on her hands...Not yet.

So she kept the facade, she allowed the [Queen] in herself to carry on with her needs, she spoke about allowing the girl to keep living with her daughter, and she ignored the fact of the missing student. The [Queen] in her didn't care about the well-being of mere peasants after all.

And the girl was quite good in keeping the apartment clean and if her spells had informed her well, she was quite good at cooking too. Besides she was devoted to her daughter, what more she could wish for?

The [Queen] had found her love of her daughter quite interesting too, so she even threw some bait to bind her more tightly to her daughter. Just like the bastard that had summoned her had bound her [Love] as a teenager to the idea behind a knight in shining armor...To the idea of a [Hero]...

She did the same to her, of course, the [Queen] in her didn't mind those antics, she even felt pleased at herself for reading the girl so well, since she could see the first vestiges of a emotion in her eyes at the mere mention of that possibility.

And after finishing speaking with her the [Queen] teleported her to the other side of the campus, leaving her phone with a pre-programmed spell to tell her to return when she had left the school.

Now...She needed to speak with her daughter, she needed to make sure no further damage had been done to her... It started easily enough.

A normal talk between a mother and her daughter...

Then [That] came to the surface, and after dealing with Alexanders and his antics (That man changed too much after coming to this world). Another thing showed up.

A dragon wearing the essence of her daughter...In magical terms, it was a familiar, but she didn't feel the telltale of magical manipulation in him. So that means he must come from the powered side of her daughter.

She immediately felt the [Queen] take control once again and she dealt with the thing quite easily enough, he was made of mana and as such the mastery she held was enough to rip it apart one mote of mana at a time if needed.

The poor thing only survived the [Queen]'s onslaught on the basis of him nurturing her daughter's soul...And him being bound to it.

She wondered if that dragon was also bound to the same cursed thing Alexanders had left in her daughter's soul. Since the thing didn't show up till she pulled her soul. But she didn't ask, she didn't want to bring that thing up again.

So her [Queen] half only gave the poor adorable thing some warnings and left it at it. Returning the control to her more caring side who went to explain to her daughter about [Idea].

And when she finished she stayed to sleep with her daughter. She needed to fix her mind after the split but for now...She just wanted to enjoy herself.

In the end, she needed to leave, so making sure her daughter was sleeping she left, first, she canceled most of the spells cast on her though. So many spells...

She took some of those memory banks too, her album of sleeping Eli-Eli would grow with this!

She would forgive that girl for this intrusion only on that basis.

...She wasn't being soft on her just because she rape-mind her, nor because she tore a part of her soul...Even if that part was a parasite trying to shift her mind from being a slave to a disgusting [Hero].

And before regretting more she teleported herself back to home.

Fused her mind once again and we returned back to the start...To her seeing those folders in her coffee table feeling the guilt hit her like a truck.

She must have spent a few hours crying till her hubby came, he like the man she knew he was didn't ask nor judged her when she told her what she had done.

He just asked if the girl was a danger to their daughter...And said he would go and judge her himself.

Hubby was the best at judging characters using one of his [Skills] even if she thought that the skill must have been wrong when he used it on her.

"Don't go too hard on the poor girl." She said while hugging the man with who she had spent almost 200 years as of now.

She knew that the girl wasn't a danger, not anymore...Her spells had given her quite the impression of that girl's mind...And it was so sad...Instead of the vibrant and bright place that she thought it would be by looking at her appearance and the environment she held in her adopted house...

There was a void...And an encompassing void... There was no life, no hope, nothing, it was as if that poor girl only saw the world in gray tones... Just a little bit of shining ray of hope was in that girl's world.

And at the end of it was a picture of her daughter "She needs Eli-Eli as much as I needed you..." Said Catherine while still crying and hugging the man she had married.

She didn't know what her hubby talked about with the girl, not what he saw in her. But he didn't say and she didn't ask.

She just wasn't sure if that girl would ever forgive her, she for once never forgave the kings or mages that had messed around with her mind at the very least.

She just hoped that if her daughter...That if Elizabeth ever found what she had done...She wouldn't hate her.

Was that much to ask?

Perhaps...

But she could hope...After all...Wasn't the job of a [Magical Girl] that?

To hope for a better tomorrow?

"I'm sorry..." She said that night while hugging and crying in her husband's arms. His mana was soothing, and she just wanted to finish dealing with the backslash from partitioning her mind.

Either way, she would need to schedule another appointment with her therapist... She would be so mad at her for using her old magic even though her [Core] was covered by the patchwork of a new type of magic