#charodon

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I won’t claim to be a saint. I know I am not a good person, and I am alright with that.

Despite my many wrongdoings, there is one thing I am not. I am cruel, viscous, a criminal, a murderer.

I am not a monster.

I know what a monster is. I’ve seen one. I’ve fought one. I’ve survived facing one.

Our first encounter was the most frightening. I was still new to the territory, I only had a few members in my gang. We weren’t very organized yet. We were rookies.

We did not know we stumbled into the territory of Cutlass. An honest mistake, yet it cost the life of one of my friends.

I could only watch as she ripped my friend apart. She started small, tearing his fingers off digit by digit. Then his hands. His feet. His forearms and lower legs, then upper arms and thighs.

She finished by ripping his head off. Slowly. She smiled the whole time, her golden tooth flashing, and her eyes bright with excitement.

Apparently she was feeling generous, because she then offered me a deal. An easy one. It should have also been impossible.

“Fight me,” she said, bright pink eyes upturned in her wide grin, “if you last for half an hour, I’ll let you and the remainder of your crew go.”

I did not need her to tell me what would happen if I lost. I accepted the deal.

Cutlass was a brutal fighter. Despite a rather unimpressive physique, she was unnaturally strong and agile. She had no claws, she clearly had no need for them. Brute strength was more than enough to nearly rip my jaw off. The seawater surrounding us quickly turned pink.

She was wild, attacking and attacking and laughing and laughing. She maintained eye contact with me, and I could see something horrid behind the glass. Something unnatural, dark, and hungry. A twisting of sinister thoughts and dreams writhing grotesquely with the desire to see them through.

I clawed at her face in desperation to make her stop looking at me, yet that barely seemed to deter her. She barely reacted to any pain I inflicted, and it terrified me. It took all I had to just keep her at bay.

To this day, I don’t know how I survived those horrible thirty minutes. I think I impressed her. She still has the scars on her face.

I’ve gotten stronger after that first fight, my group has grown and we’re smarter now. I’m strong enough to actually pose some kind of threat. My scars are proof that I survived facing Cutlass multiple times.