For Fujino Asagami, Roland's quiet words were far more shocking than when he had killed those delinquents earlier. She stood frozen, her face pale, and her previously indifferent expression began to change.
"You mean... my inability to feel pain..."
"Of course I can. Haven't I already proved it?"
Roland answered with a smile. Congenital insensitivity to pain was a disease caused by an exceedingly rare genetic mutation.
Pain, in essence, was a response to abnormalities affecting vital functions, and a warning to the brain.
Losing the sense of pain meant being unable to respond to the body's warnings or avoid danger, making it very easy to go to the extreme of self-destruction.
But Fujino Asagami's condition was somewhat more unusual.
"Besides, what you have isn't congenital insensitivity to pain, but a disease called neuromyelitis optica. That's what caused your current condition. After all, your other senses are weak too, not just your sense of pain, aren't they?"
"Neuromyelitis optica?"
Fujino turned the unfamiliar term over in her mouth.
"This sort of illness also causes deteriorating eyesight, even blindness, and diminished sensation. So your family apparently thought it was a good opportunity and used drugs to deprive you of your senses."
Fujino Asagami's inability to feel pain had been induced after birth. Its root cause lay with her original family, the Asagami Family.
Although they had declined somewhat by now, the Four Great Demon Hunter Families had once been quite renowned in the hidden world. Before the rise of magecraft, those abnormal individuals passed their powers down through their bloodlines, surviving and expanding by eliminating demonic aberrations born of things such as distortions in nature.
But as the times advanced and order took hold, such calamities instead grew increasingly rare, and the demon hunter families gradually lost their place. Those as