"Happy birthday to you, Pig."
"Happy birthday to you, Pig."
Howie the spider robot sang awkwardly in Eastern Continent language as he celebrated his owner's birthday around twenty-seven candles.
After all, she couldn't understand him anyway.
It was Lydia's first birthday spent in someone else's company.
Yes, no one had ever accompanied her on her birthday before.
Her alcoholic father had run away immediately after her mother became pregnant with her.
Her mother had also seen her as a burden. After caring for her for only two months, she had dumped her at an orphanage and run away as well.
That was perfectly normal in the Tribe. Perfectly normal.
The Tribe called itself a children's "paradise," and it did offer plenty of benefits. The orphanage had taken her in and promised to find her a loving family.
Yet the orphanage itself was a jungle where the strong preyed on the weak. From the age of three or four, children learned to lie, bully others, and disguise themselves in order to compete for better adoptive families...
In that environment, she had begun to hate others, to hate all humans.
That included those seemingly kind-hearted adoptive parents.
There had been a well-off middle-class family, the kind with an annual income of five hundred thousand, and the children at the orphanage had fought fiercely over them.
She had originally won, but someone had shoved her into a filthy ditch at the last moment. The respectable middle-class couple had been disgusted by her and chosen another, more obedient girl instead—the girl who had actually led the others.
Ironically, that seemingly respectable middle-class couple had been perverts.
The children they adopted later vanished without a trace. Rumor had it they died of illness.
The case was cracked a year later. The couple had enjoyed abusing