My Bugged System Made Me Too OP!

Tara ignored Yuan once again, her gaze remaining fixed solely on the white demon mask as if the guild master simply didn’t exist.

She leaned as far forward as the heavy iron collar would allow, the chain pinning her to the floor pulling taut with a harsh, metallic rasp.

Her focus was entirely on Noah, her voice trembling with an intensity that seemed to drain her remaining strength.

"All I can remember about my childhood are blurry images and darkness," she spoke, the words falling like heavy stones in the quiet of the dungeon.

As she spoke, her body shivered uncontrollably. The tremors started in her shoulders and traveled down through her chained arms, causing the thick black fetters to rattle rhythmically against the stone walls.

It wasn’t the shivering of a person who was cold, but the deep, bone-shaking vibration of someone reliving a primal terror.

Noah, with his enhanced senses and his eyes fixed on the [Eye of Truth] display, easily noticed the physical manifestation of her trauma.

The way her skin paled and her breathing hitched told him more than her words ever could.

Noah’s eyes narrowed behind the mask, the glowing blue sockets pulsing with a steady light as he processed this new information.

’All she can remember is darkness... and blurry images...’ he thoughw. ’Is that what’s making her so afraid?’

He realized that the "Fear" he had seen listed under her emotions wasn’t a fear of the present—of Yuan, the chains, or the guild’s prison—but a lingering, inescapable dread from a past that was shrouded in void.

To have no foundation of self, no memories of family or light, was a psychological abyss that Noah, even with his own history of neglect, found difficult to comprehend.

Yuan, who was standing by his side, was also incredibly confused.

The guild master’s anger had been replaced by a stunned, wary silence.

He had interrogated hundreds of prisoners, from rogue mages to common thieves, but he had never heard a high-level assassin describe their existence in such fragmented, eerie terms.

Normally, killers like Tara were driven by ideology, greed, or revenge—tangible things that left a trail.

To hear that she was essentially a ghost within her own mind was a concept that challenged his understanding of magical psychology.

He wanted to interrupt, to demand to know what she meant by "blurry images," and to force her to be more specific about the timeline of her childhood.

He took a half-step forward, his mouth opening to bark out another question, but he stopped himself at the last second.

He looked at the way Tara’s eyes remained locked on Noah, completely bypassing his presence.

He decided to leave the questioning to Noah, knowing fully well she wouldn’t answer him anyway.

To intervene now would only break the fragile flow of her confession and risk her retreating back into the wall of silence that had frustrated the guild for hours.

Tara continued, her shivering intensifying until the chains wrapped around her torso began to clink together in a frantic, metallic chorus.

Her eyes looked through Noah, staring into a distance that only she could see.

"Then one day, I started seeing normally... except I couldn’t even control my body," she said, her voice dropping to a whisper that sounded like dead leaves skittering across the floor. "It is like watching a game character... except you’re not the player. You see the hands moving, you see the blade striking, but the ’you’ inside is just a spectator, screaming in a room with no doors."

Noah’s eyes widened, and a deep, heavy frown formed on his face beneath the safety of the mask. The description sent a cold jolt of realization through his core.

’She couldn’t control... her own body?’ The concept was horrifying. It went beyond mere possession or mind control; it sounded like a total displacement of the soul, where the physical vessel was piloted by an external force while the original consciousness was relegated to a helpless observer.

It explained why her "Sense" stat was so abnormally low; she had been disconnected from her own physical senses for so long that her mind had lost its ability to properly perceive the world.

"What do you mean... by that?" Noah asked. He stepped even closer to the bars, his white hair catching the flickering candlelight as he loomed over the prisoner. "Are you saying you were a passenger in your own skin?"

Tara bowed her head, the sudden movement causing the chains to clink and rattle as they strained against her neck and wrists.

The black iron collar bit into her skin, but she didn’t seem to notice the physical pain, her mind clearly lost in the past.

"I don’t know how many years have passed since it started," she said, her voice breaking with a sob she refused to let out. "But the things I saw myself doing... the people I killed, the places I burned... the thoughts I had, none of them were mine. I watched ’me’ think about murder as if it were a chore. I watched ’me’ smile as I took lives. None of it was me."

Her body shook even more violently as she spoke, her strength failing her as she slumped forward into the pull of the ceiling chains.

"I was stuck inside that cold shadow... and it dug into my soul each day," she gasped, her breathing becoming ragged.

Yuan glanced at Noah, shifting his gaze from the shivering woman toward the white demon mask that obscured the man’s features.

Even through the design of the mask, Yuan could sense that Noah was just as surprised as he was.

The atmosphere in the underground chamber had shifted from a standard interrogation to something far more incomprehensible.

Yuan, a man who had spent decades navigating the complexities of the magical world and the politics of the Adventurer Guild, found himself momentarily speechless.

This wasn’t what he had been expecting at all. When they had descended into these dark, damp halls, Yuan had anticipated a battle of wills—a series of lies, deflections, or perhaps a stubborn silence born of loyalty to an underground syndicate.

He had expected to hear about gold, power, or a personal vendetta against the guild. Instead, he was faced with a woman who claimed to have been a ghost in her own flesh, a passenger in a body that committed atrocities while she watched from the void.

Even though a part of his cynical mind wanted to believe she was lying to gain sympathy or to manipulate the powerful magus standing before her, he doubted that was the case.

The raw, visceral terror in her voice and the rhythmic rattling of the anti-magic chains spoke of a truth that was too painful to be a mere fabrication.

He had never heard such a thing before, and everything got even stranger the more he thought about it. In all the archives of the guild, there were records of possession, of mind control, and even of parasitic mana-entities that could influence a host.

But those cases always left a trail; the mana signature would be double-layered, or the victim’s behavior would show signs of internal conflict.

What Tara described was different—it was as if her entire biological and spiritual structure had been rewritten to accommodate a secondary consciousness that had complete priority over her own.

It made the "Shadow Woman" less of a title and more of a literal, terrifying biological classification.

They went silent for a few seconds, the only sound being the flickering of candle lights, and the labored breathing of the woman in the center of the room.

Finally, Noah broke the silence.

"Those blurry images..." he asked. "Can you make out anything from them? Any specific colors, a face, or perhaps a symbol that stood out?"

Tara glanced at him, her dull brown eyes searching the empty sockets of his mask for a moment, as if looking for the source of the voice that had granted her freedom.

She then bowed her head to the ground, the movement causing the black iron collar to scrape against the stone floor with a harsh, grating sound.

She seemed lost in thought, her brow furrowing as she tried to reach back into the abyss of her early childhood.

She remained like that for several long moments, her body still occasionally jerking with the remnants of her shivers, as she sifted through the fragmented, dark memories of a life that had been stolen from her.

Finally, she let out a long, shuddering breath and spoke with a wistful, heartbreaking tone.

"Sorry... I can’t..." she whispered, her voice cracking. "They stay blurry, drifting just out of reach whenever I try to focus on them."

The disappointment in her voice was palpable, a reflection of her own frustration at being unable to provide the one thing that might help the man who had saved her.

Noah sighed, his eyes narrowing.

He stood up straight, his arms crossed over his chest as he looked at the woman who was wrapped in enough iron to stop a war elephant.

’This... certainly runs even deeper than I expected,’ he thought, his mind racing through the implications of her story.

He had come here looking for an organization, but he had basically found a fundamental violation of the laws of nature.

There was a force out there capable of turning humans into... shadows. Not just giving them shadow-affinity magic, but fundamentally altering their soul and body so that the shadow became the dominant entity.

The thought itself felt very strange, especially how she said the shadow was basically a different person entirely.

It implied that there was a consciousness within the shadow element itself, a predatory will that could be grafted onto a human host to create the perfect, unthinking killer.