Witch trials

"Phoebe." the Pope lowered his head, his gaze was obscure, "you are our best nun, this battle with the witch, you must do well to play the role of a spiritual symbol, do not let the people blindly believe in the full Baola , her compulsion is extraordinary, you have to win her. "

"Afterward, I shall allow you to go to the island."

"But I'm not of age yet, can I go too?" Phoebe asked with an innocent expression and a puzzled tone, "Isn't the City in the Sky only for grown-up nuns?"

Looking at Phoebe's innocent and beautiful appearance, the Pope's eyes smiled meaningfully, "There are exceptions."

"The last Queen of Specials has temporarily left the island due to business, and it just so happens that a position has opened up for you to take his place and continue to fulfill your duties as a Sister on the island, purifying everyone who comes to the island of their filthy desires, and you seem to have all the potential for that, so I'm giving you permission to come to the island ahead of schedule."

Phoebe winked as she grinned, "So I thank His Holiness in advance?"

Not hearing Phoebe's questioning tone, the Pope nodded rather smugly before waving his hand, "Go on down, I'll explain the details to the Lord Bishop who's taking you, for now I'll discuss other matters with him."

Phoebe curtseyed nicely and retreated.

After Phoebe's departure, the Pope's face quickly grimaced, "Is the continued output of male eels getting any better?"

"No." The bishop shook his head with a somewhat fearful expression, "In the beginning, the female eels that we stole continued to produce all female eels, but then gradually, there began to be one or two male eels in 10,000, and we were very happy at first because this way these male eels could be used to □ with all of the female eels, unlike before, when there was only a single male eel that could be used to □, and this way the rate of production would be accelerated, and we let all the women turn in their own indigestible eels, that is male eels, to the Holy See, saying that we would dispose of it, but in reality, we were turning these male eels over to the Church. speed would be accelerated, and we had all the women at that time turn in the eels that they could not digest, that is, the male eels, to the Holy See, saying that we would take care of them, but in reality we were releasing these male eels into the waters everywhere."

"Soon, we have ushered in the eel explosion period, this time in fact, the eel output rate has been a little out of control, eels everywhere, some people open the faucet will drill eels out, the Holy See would have wanted to call a halt to the eel program, but because of the people at that time in this case, on the contrary, to the eel solution to the Holy See more and more reliance and trust, not only can every day to collect a large number of eel bones by the households to digest their own, and the momentum and income is higher than the day, so the Pope acquiesced in the continuation of the eel program. Not only were large quantities of eel bones, which were turned in by the families themselves after digesting them, collected every day, but also the prestige and income increased day by day, so the Pope at the time acquiesced in the continuation of the eel program."

The Bishop swallowed, "But by the time it got late, when the first witch appeared, the Pope was shocked too, and he really moved to pause the program, but the full Baola showed up."

"As soon as she appeared, she attracted the attention of all the people, she appealed to the people not to blindly allow women to swallow eels, to look for other ways, and is willing to come out of their own first to solve everyone's problems, and soon she formed the Holy Women's Patrol, at that time the Holy Women's Patrol was an independent of the Holy See's self-initiated organization, to solve the problem of the speed of the leader of the whole Baola's attitude Thundering and pro-people, people gradually, than up the Holy See, more willing to go to the full Baola to solve the problem, the Holy See's power is gradually weakened, in the full Baola implied twice, want to collect her Holy Women's Patrol was rejected, which made the then Pope infuriated, increased the male eel fish put efforts."

"Under these circumstances, witches then began to appear in heaps, and the Papacy kicked off the witch trials, which All Baola did not approve of, and she flagrantly opposed them and stood against the Papacy."

"But at a later stage, both eels and witches were getting more and more numerous, and the people who had been under the protection of the Holy Maiden Patrol finally lost control, and they fell to the Holy See, and at this time, you seized this opportune moment, and succeeded in judging the whole Baola, and after the whole Baola was tried for apostasy, the country was finally under the control of the Holy See once and for all, even the Holy Maiden Patrol had been incorporated in the Holy See."

"We finally stopped the eel program, but, but ......"

The Pope finished the second half of his sentence in a somber tone, "But the output of male eels is completely out of control."

The Bishop shuddered and nodded, "Yes! The male eels collected from all over the country that the reserve witches can't digest are now able to fill up the pool under the Sky City Prison, and this amount is still climbing, we simply don't know how many wild male eels there are in the wild ......"

"This male eel is but, but ......" the bishop couldn't help but shiver and break down and cry out, "but it takes our intestinal fluids to dissolve it Your Holiness!"

"Shut up!" The Pope viciously interrupted the Bishop's screams, "Don't I know that? Why else would I hide these male eels on Sky Island to isolate them from these female eels?!"

The bishop shivered at the roar, paused, and quickly spoke again in a whisper, "Why are there more and more male eels, and wasn't it always female eels that had been producing before?"

The Pope also fell into an eerie silence.

Right, weren't all the eels produced by females in the beginning? Why did they suddenly start producing a lot of male eels?

The other end.

The night was silent, everyone curled up on the ground and fell into a deep sleep, the full moon hung in the sky but was half obscured by a huge island.

Bai Liu sits on the top floor, his eyes narrowing a bit as he looks out over the island.

"You're up here by yourself, are you planning to talk to Jiayi about something?" Tang Er hit is still awake, he and Bai Liu are both used to keeping watch for the others, the first night in the game is usually the first night they don't sleep and the others do, so when he saw Bai Liu come up, he followed him up as well.

Tang Er sat down next to Bai Liu and looked at him with a biased head, "You still can't worry about Jiayi, right?"

After all, it's the first time I've ever taken on the privilege of taking a tactician, and it's still such a critical round.

"No, she is more thoughtful and stable than me." Bai Liu shook his head as he looked up at the island, his tone calm, "I was thinking of something else."

"What is it?" Tang Er asked.

"Jiayi just told me that she was told by the witches' side that the mass of contaminated eels were all female eels, that male eels are indigestible to the witches, but that male eels are rare." Bai Liu was thoughtful, "Any living thing has a tendency to overpopulate, and in a species that has overpopulated it's rare for there to be so many females than males, there are usually more males than females."

"A creature that is tasked with reproduction will indeed mass produce females in the early days, but when the number of females arrives at a certain amount, it's the other way around, and the creature will start mass producing males again. This is the way to achieve overpopulation."

Tang Er hit a little puzzled, he hesitantly asked back, "You mean ...... there are actually a large number of male eels that witches can not digest exist, right?"

"Well, that's my personal guess." Bai Liu took a pause, "Any kind of monster has its corresponding weaknesses and ways to destroy it, this is the setting of this game, I was actually thinking that if the witch's digestive fluid can't destroy the male eel, then according to the symmetrical setting of this game, the one that can digest the male eel should be ...... "

Tang Er hit the floor slowly, "Male digestive juices."

Bai Liu smiles, "bingo, that's what I was thinking, and I was thinking a little more egregiously, I think it might be intestinal fluids."

Tang Er hit a chill down his spine as he looked at Bai Liu's wicked smile and helplessly held his forehead, "I finally understand why you're drawing me up here to talk to me about this, Mu Sicheng could cover his ass and jump up in fear when he hears what you're speculating about this setting."

"Why are you guessing it's intestinal fluid?"

"Because if the liquid that allows males to digest eels is also saliva, then it's unlikely that it hasn't been detected under these circumstances." Bai Liu rested his cheeks and spoke in a lazy tone, "Now the eels have become so excessive that we need to go abroad to smuggle women over to solve the problem, but ordinary civilian families can't afford to pay the price of purchasing the services of prepared witches, and because of the large-scale witch trials, there is no longer a single female in many families."

"In this extreme and desperate situation, it is also the case that there will be males who go to imitate the behavior of witches to swallow eels and try to digest each other."

"At least two of the men in the pile we rescued downstairs had done this, and they had strange scratches on the corners of their mouths, still fresh."

"If this speculation of assuming that male digestive juices can digest eels is true, then at least the upper digestive tract, which is easy for the average person to experiment with, is unlikely, or the situation with the witches wouldn't be so lopsided, and then I think the lower digestive tract, which is comparatively more difficult to experiment with, or which is rarely thought of, is more likely."

"Also known as the gut."

"Jiayi and I have the same guess, but currently there is no suitable candidate for the experiment on her side, so there is no way to come up with the most accurate conclusions, in order to avoid entrapment, so she has not informed the witch of the conclusions she has deduced for the time being." Bai Liu swept Tang Er hit a glance, "So our mission tomorrow is not only to save the witch under trial, but also another one."

Bai Liu smiled and said, "-that would be to capture a priest from the ecclesiastical jury and experiment on Jiayi."

Cold and sweaty, Tang Er beat a long breath, "That's no problem!"

He was scared to death! Just now when Bai Liu swept him a glance he thought Bai Liu was going to say that since there was a shortage of people, why don't you go over and do experiments for Jiayi, it's not like this person can't do this kind of thing!

At the other end, the Papal Palace.

The smile on Phoebe's face as she walked out of the main hall disappeared for a split second into an expression of bemusement as she walked briskly through the gardens and before reaching the Sisters' Hall, looked over to the stairway to her right that led straight up to the island, and her vision paused for an unmoving moment.

The ladder was shrouded in a silver-blue shroud of light, and she'd tried twice to get up it on her way here, and had gotten nothing but seventeen points of blood lost - it was like that Pope had said, no one could indeed get up there without the key.

But the [scepter], which is the key, is held in the Pope's hand for a moment.

This Pope must have some special monster setting or buff on him if he could lock Heart in a prison, and she'd better not do anything rash until she knew more.

But that didn't mean she couldn't move either.

"Qi Yifang, the Bishop will issue me a mission later to take care of some witch trials, remember, wherever he tells me to go, you and Liu Ji will apply for the tribunal." Phoebe gave orders to Qi Yifang in a cold tone.

Qi Yifang asked suspiciously, "What is it for?"

Phoebe looked up at him, not a trace of emotion in the pupils of her turquoise eyes, but a pure smile on her face as she folded her hands and prayed in a reverent tone, "What else can I go do? To send the Inquisitors to hell, of course."

"- Isn't that the essential work of a nun?"

The Pope can't be moved, so let's start with the priests at the bottom and see what tier of the Church the monsters she can kill with her hands are on.

Qi Yifang was creeped out by Phoebe's laugh, but as a league-quality player, he knew the moment he realized that Phoebe had gotten tactician privileges, he knew that the only word he could say to Phoebe was, "Yes."

"Tomorrow is a tough battle, so get some rest tonight." Phoebe smiled and waved her little hand at Qi Yifang, "Remember to pray before you go to bed, so the Lord will bless you with a good night's sleep."

Qi Yifang : "...... Good, good QAQ."

Woo-hoo, Queen, miss you!

Phoebe Returning to the Sisters' Hall, she stood beside her white lace bed, which was sprinkled with silvery-white moonlight, and slowly raised her head to look out at the incredibly bright moon, which spilled over her long, curly blonde hair, glistening, and she looked indifferent and saintly, her turquoise eyes like emeralds on a crown of laurels, glowing with a misty halo, and she closed her eyes, folding her hands together against her breasts Prayer.

She always stood and prayed, she never knelt to anyone, not even when she was praying, and there was no one in the world who could make her kneel, not even God.

"May the Lord protect ......" Phoebe opened her mouth and suddenly paused before she shrugged her shoulders indifferently, "Of course it's okay if you don't, I'll give them hell myself. "

When she had finished she lay down on the bed, with her head in the very center of the pillow impartially, and not a wrinkle in the coverlet, and she folded her arms over her breast, a very regular way of sleeping-a way of sleeping which her devoutly religious mother had taught her to do, as if in prayer.

All things she once didn't understand and found troubling, but she'd gotten used to them.

She had been noticed by her father for as long as she could remember.

Her father looked at her incredulously, and in a rare move, took her over his knee in the midst of a pile of boys, removed the gun she had clutched in her dead hand, and asked her, "Why did you point a gun at your brother? And you loaded it? Who taught you that?"

How did she answer that? It was like, "Kill him and I'll get the bear he's holding, it's mine, I've warned him three times and he hasn't given it back."

"No one taught me, but I've seen you use it."

Her father asked the creature that supposedly was her brother to return the bear to her, but the other would only cry and bite the bullet and wipe his own tears with it, so without hesitation she grabbed her gun and gave the bear a shot in the little boy's hand, and the massive recoil of the gun dislocated her arm right out of its socket, and everyone stood up, including her father.

"What are you doing Phoebe?!" Her father looked at her in amazement.

The stupid boy who had originally grabbed her bear grabbed the gun-shattered remains of the bear ragdoll and sat on the floor in shock, peeing all over the place, and she looked at her father but laughed outlandishly, "He touched the bear and dirtied it, and I don't want it anymore, but he can't have it either."

Her father looked into her eyes as if he had seen a monster, and as if he had seen a genius, and he inquired of her in awe, "What do you feel now, Phoebe?"

Phoebe's brow curled up in a smile, "I feel very happy."

--a pure harnessing of power, the joy that comes from threatening an opponent.

Since then, no one in the Sinchimani family has ever dared to take what belongs to her, and her father married her real mother, a woman of unknown origin, into the Sinchimani family in order to give her a legitimate contender for the heirship.

The woman was stunned at the first sight of her.

She stood next to her father, dressed exactly like a little boy, wearing little boy's riding boots, a small jacket, her blonde hair cut only centimeters short and tucked into a cap, and simply saluted politely to her own mother, whom she had never met, "The Sinchimani family welcomes you, Mother."

-She looks exactly like her father.

That night, her mother sat on her knees at the foot of her bed and prayed all night, and with tears in her eyes, she said, "I'm sorry I was too late, and that they made you this way."

"You look nothing like your cold-blooded and cruel father ......."

"I'm sorry, I shouldn't have said that about you." She placed her hand over her heart and prayed reverently for her, "The Lord will protect us."

"Mom." Phoebe who was lying on the bed spoke very coldly, "The Sinchimani's don't believe in gods we only believe in ourselves, I respect your beliefs but if you want to pray you can go back to your own room, if that's not enough I'll have the servants build you a special prayer room, if that's okay please go back to resting, I have firearms class in the morning. "

Her mother knelt at her bedside in silence for a long time and left, disoriented.

There was a brief ripple in her days after picking up her mother, who was really a very strange woman, always with unrealistic expectations and wishes, always with unfathomable tears and prayers, always with delusional yearnings for freedom, talking to herself all day long about how she hoped that the Lord would bring about the destruction of the family of darkness, so that she and her children would be able to regain their freedom.

She was surrounded by people who whispered in her ear that her mother was actually crazy.

But Phoebe doesn't feel that way; she thinks her mother should be normal, but normal people don't survive in the Sinchimani family.

Just a poor, helpless, normal human being.

As her mother once again begged Phoebe with tears in her eyes to join her in prayer, Phoebe looked at her mother with downcast eyes and very rarely agreed to this waste of her time working on her fighting skills and firearms.

"Only five minutes." She said calmly, "I can pray with you for five minutes on Monday, Wednesday, and Sunday."

Her mother wept with joy and said, enough is enough child.

She was dressed in the nun's habit, and when her mother said she would kneel to pray Phoebe coldly refused, and there was nothing her mother could do about it, so she had no choice but to kneel beside her and pray.

"Praying that my Phoebe may escape as a bird to the paradise of freedom."

Phoebe indifferently read along, "Praying that all those idiots in training today will fly gun themselves to an infinite hell."

Phoebe's mom: "......"

After three or four unsuccessful attempts by her mother to correct Phoebe's prayers in tears and laughter, Phoebe finally fell in love with this pre-bedtime prayer to verbally send others to hell (?). Her mother, whom she had always found weak and incompetent as a normal person in the Sinchimani household, condoned her cursed prayer behavior.

Wasn't this a dishonor to her devout faith? Why don't you accuse her of doing something wrong, but instead, every time you hear her finish cursing, just cover your face and laugh helplessly from the sidelines?

Finally, once she asked the question, her mother looked at her with a smile and stroked her forehead hair, "One's unrealistic belief in the gods is a kind of escape from one's own weakness, and you are right, praying is indeed a very weak act, and there is no way I can get you out of Sinchimani's house, no matter how much I pray; and on that premise, I have no way to blame you for being right."

She asked, "Then why pray?"

"I am not praying to God." Her mother answered her very softly, "I am praying to my soul, to yours, and I am trying to tell them to have love and hope in their hearts even if they have to be trapped here for the rest of their lives, both you, and I, and to remain as our souls were originally intended to be, and to wait for the day to come when they will be transformed into birds and fly away from here."

"Even if that day is the time when death comes."

"It's just a reminder."

Her mother, in her nun's habit, knelt reverently before her, clasping her hands with her eyes closed in the moonlight, and whispered softly, "Hara my child, Phoebe, and I, will one day have the freedom we want."

She looked at her mother's face, devout to the point of being almost holy in the moonlight, and realized for the first time that the woman possessed a power she had always ignored.

--a power very different from holding a gun, a sense of conviction that guns and outside forces cannot destroy.

She believed in something, even if it wasn't going to come true, and Phoebe, for the first time, saw such a strange belief-a weak, pliable, yet indestructible belief that she dared to say she wouldn't stop praying for it even if her father held a gun to her mother's head.

Phoebe had always been taught by her father that the weak could be broken, but she felt at the moment that no one in the Sinchimani family could break the mother she was praying for.

But she deserves to be a weakling, but she is clearly a weakling.

Phoebe doesn't like weaklings.

But she extended her daily prayer time with her mother to fifteen minutes.

Gradually, as she grew older, her superiority among the heirs became more and more apparent, and her father's subordinates, whose attitude toward her at first had varied from disapproval to admiration of her excellence, only to follow each time with the remark, "It's too bad Phoebe's a girl."

Phoebe had heard the phrase so many times she'd become completely desensitized to it.

Except that her father also lamented every time, "Yeah, it would have been nice if she was a boy like Daniel."

Daniel was another of her father's children, three years her senior, another heir to her father's great favorites, and had had much the same experience as she had-had married Daniel's mother as his first wife, and Daniel, like her, resembled both their fathers.

The resemblance can be described as personality or appearance, they are both standard blonde hair and blue eyes, in Phoebe cut short hair in men's clothing, the two stood together almost like twins, as the same high and cold strong.

Of course they never stand together.

Just as the offspring of a lion will fight for the food that is fed to them before they even open their eyes, the other person's identity over their own, which they realize more than anything else before they realize that they are [siblings], is that of a [competitor].

"It's almost time for the heir selection." Her father patted her on the shoulder, "Phoebe's always had the best grades, and aside from her gender, she's the perfect heir."

"I've been thinking about it all night, if she manages to win among the heir selection, then I'm basically okay with her identity, as for the troublesome matter of gender, I'm going to let her always show herself to the outside world in male attire."

"Always in male attire?" A subordinate joked, "What a cruel father, Phoebe hasn't developed yet, how are you going to make her pretend to be a man at a later stage?"

"What's in it?" Her father said gently, "A corset will do, she won't develop any more."

"Phoebe is cruel as a man, strong as a man, and her only fault is that she isn't really a man, but the good thing is that she's not at all weak, and won't be able to suffer even the bit of corsetry."

So that night, Phoebe was subjected to a tight corset, and her mother, who was nearby, held up the corset with an expression that dropped off in a complete trance, "What is your father going to do?!"

"You're only ten years old with such a tight corset! It'll crush your chest out of shape!"

"And not start wearing them today." Phoebe lay impassively on her bed as she yawned, "I'll wear it whenever I start to develop."

"No!" Her mother got serious in a rare moment, "You can't wear this! You're a child, you're going to develop as you should, and no one can disrupt your normal growing up process!"

"I'm not obsessed with boobs." Phoebe turned her head lazily to her mother who was sprawled out on the edge of the bed, "It's just an organ, size doesn't matter, and if you have to gird your breasts to win the heirship, so be it."

"That's not the problem!" Her mother retorted harshly, "The problem is that you can obviously win without girding your breasts! Why do you need to bunch!"

"Can you win without a chest harness?" Phoebe asked, puzzled, "The subordinates said the boobs would be too big and jiggle all the time, affecting the speed of the gun draw, didn't they?"

"Go to hell □□□ dog men!" For the first time ever, her mother exploded in her presence, and she explained to Phoebe gravely, "Did anyone ever tell you that having too big of a dick affects how fast a man can run?"

Phoebe thought back and she rubbed her chin, "That's not true."

Daniel should be developing, right? He didn't see a crotch jam when he was speedrunning.

Her mother asked, "Then why do boobs affect the speed at which you put the gun through?"

"Why not let the tools adapt to the organs that humans already have, and have the organs adapt to the tools that humans invent? Humans can invent different underwear for gender, why can't they invent different guns?"

Phoebe There was a subtle pause as she looked at her suddenly enraged mother, "Calm down."

"But this corset won't please my father if I don't wear it." Phoebe Spreads her hands in a flat tone, "He's not dead yet, and I can't disobey him, at least not explicitly, let alone you, of course."

Her mother wilted quickly, and looked tearfully at Phoebe.

After a moment's interval, her eyes lit up, "I can alter this corset for you so that you can wear it, but not squeeze it."

"Try it on?" Her mother nervously handed it to her after the alterations, "Is it still stringy?"

Phoebe took the corset, which appeared to be little altered, paused, then put it on, "No more strangulation."

She would have been suffocated to even catch her breath in them before, but now she had a gap to breathe.

Watching her mother stay up all night altering and mending corsets next to her was a ...... marvelous feeling for Phoebe.

She didn't really care much about it, something like her breasts failing to develop just seemed inconsequential to her, and her seemingly gentle and soft mother would get so mad over something so inconsequential, and then go out of her way to modify her clothes just to give her a gap where she could catch her breath.

With her power as a weakling, there was only so much leeway she could be given at Sinchimani's house.

Her mother let out a long breath, "That's good."

Phoebe looked at her, tempted to tell the other woman that in the Sinchimani household it was pointless for the weak to struggle for this gap, but looking at the way her mother had begun to pray on her knees again, she swallowed the words back down.

Her mother knelt at the foot of her bed and prayed reverently, "May both my children and I grow up and die free."

After her mother had prayed and left, Phoebe looked out the skylight at the moon and wondered what freedom was.

Phoebe reached out and touched the corset under the pillow that was a little looser so that she could continue to develop normally, and she stroked the fine stitching on it and thought to herself - is this freedom?

What a fragile freedom.

Soon enough, the heir calendar was coming up, and after all the children had been given a taste of what tomorrow's calendar would entail, they all crouched in place and bawled, and the only ones who managed to keep their manners and say goodbye to their father before leaving were her and Daniel.

But she saw Daniel's hand rotate twice as he opened the door, his hand shaking terribly, his apple-green eyes empty and clouded-the servant who was to top the apple had been left to him by his mother, and was one of his most devoted servants and playmates.

She was the one who ended up reaching down and helping Daniel swing the door open.

As she left, she could still hear her father's grumbling behind her, "This batch of kids are so spoiled, they should have been weaned off their intimacy sooner."

"They are the ones who can be betrayed at any time in the future, how can they inherit the Sinchimani family if they don't even have the courage to raise a gun to those close to them."

The subordinate next to you exclaimed, "Yes, back then, when you found out about your wife's betrayal, you killed her with hardly any hesitation, which can be said to be very thunderous."

"My heir should have that kind of demeanor." Her father returned lazily, with regret, "Daniel's a cold-hearted boy, but he's actually very affectionate, not as much as Phoebe, who had a falling out with me for a while after I killed his mother."

"I hope he doesn't let me down this time around and can muster up the courage to pull a gun on his own mother tomorrow, just like Phoebe did."

There was a pause in Daniel's back as he walked ahead, and Phoebe could clearly see his fists clench before he walked away.

Phoebe turned her head and went coldly back to her room, she opened the door twice this time as well before opening it, not because her hands were shaking but because they were sweaty - why they were sweaty Phoebe couldn't quite figure out, she knew she wasn't a person who had sweaty hands easily or she wouldn't be able to hold a gun.

But why?

"You're back." Her mother opened the door and inquired carefully and worriedly, "You look terrible, what was the heir trial about?"

Phoebe looked into her eyes and that feeling of sweaty palms came back as she took a deep breath and told her everything.

But to Phoebe's surprise, her mother was very calm about it, saying, "You are free and able to fight for the heir, so if you want to shoot me, shoot me."

"In every way, you're the best kid I've ever seen, and I'm sure you won't miss a beat."

Phoebe sat on the edge of the bed, her hands just starting to shake at this point, "What if I miss?"

"Then I might die." Her mother's voice was as calm as a windless lake under the moon, and she actually smiled demurely as she said it, "But better to die at your hands than at the hands of the rest of the Sinchimani family, right?"

"You'll see my soul turn into a little bird and fly away from here."

"Mom." Phoebe interrupted coldly, "I don't believe in fairy tales."

Her mother sighed regretfully, "Okay."

When she prayed that night, her mother prayed those prayers as she always did, and instead of standing, she very rarely and sat up at the end of the bed, looked out the window at the moon, closed her eyes, and for the first time prayed in her heart in a genuine way:

"God ...... I hope you bless me not to miss tomorrow."

"Of course it's okay if you don't bless it." Phoebe opened her eyes, she looked at her mother's face with her eyes closed and still praying, her eyes glazed over and she took a deep breath, "I'll make sure I don't miss."

The next day.

After everyone had fired their first shots, and the whole field was in chaos, Phoebe's mother half-crouched with a suspected bullet, her mind blank for a split second-she knew perfectly well that she'd hit the apple, so why did she fall down?

Soon, someone came up to inform, "A bullet from one of the other children flew over the barrier we had erected and grazed the lady's arm."

"Shall we pause?" His father inquired of her in a seemingly gentle manner, "I'll put her in a different position to continue topping the apples."

While her expression was cold and unforgiving, her chest rose and fell violently in that corset - she was thankful at the moment for the little gap that allowed her to breathe properly in this situation, otherwise she would have suffocated from lack of oxygen.

"Temporarily ......" she was just about to lower her gun and speak when she saw her mother's muzzle through the scope.

Her mother, half-kneeling on the floor, a prayerful position, with the apple placed on her head, looked at her, with tears in her eyes, but no fear at all in her countenance, and said-- [Shoot.

[You'll win, you can win, you're a genius.]

[You won't miss.]

"No pause." Phoebe said calmly, "Stabilize Mom where she is and keep changing apples, it'll be over soon."

She pulled the trigger.

--As she had done before, ten shots, and she didn't miss a single one.

Her father looked at her with awe, as if at a formed leader, and said tersely, "You're perfect like a boy, Phoebe."

"That's not really a compliment, Father." Phoebe lowered her gun with a cold expression, she shook her hand, which was numb from the shock, and looked around the room, "I'm a lot better than those other boys you call me."