The first couple of chapters involves the MC waterboarding and torturing a high school girl...

Honestly I have no idea how to rate or review this story. The writing/translation is pretty good, but I dropped it by chapter 5 because the content is just so messed up.

Despite the short number of chapters so far, the reasoning behind character actions is well written and understandable. Our main character is doing extremely f*cked up things for good reasons, as well as acting as an unreliable narrator for why they do what they do.

If anybody does some mtl or the chapter number gets fairly high, please, please message me because this has extremely high potential and I am very interested in where it goes.

Pure insanity.

Ellen is such an understandable yet incredibly evil person that I can't help but wish for this novel to continue on her wicked ways. She is insane, unstable, racist and filled with so much hatred, I just can't help but love her. The author does a wonderful work with her, and the way she slowly goes insane. The way her schizophrenia builds up over time is absolutely terrifying and at the same time sad. A lot of side characters get a bit more screentime in the later chapters, but... more>> it's not much. But it's good that way.

The character progression Theo has is not satisfying, but it's completely understandable, just like Ellen. That's what I love about this novel. These people are all sinful and ignorant in their own ways, completely flawed yet doomed to go insane together.

The end is just as expected, and honestly, it is satisfying. It's not what you think, the end of this novel actually pays off. There is no philosophical posturing or anything, just an insanely suicidal person getting tied down in life after commiting war crimes and the husband she loves, and a lover she adores. It's not a happy end, but it is far happier than the protagonist or Theo deserve, and they both convey that, yet the author isn't bestowing some cosmic karma on them for that. They just move on, as best as they can. So yeah, I love this novel. It is dark, portrays the mental collapse of an already mentally ill person and the mental collapse of a mentally sane person as they entangle themselves in a relationship of love and hate. So much hate. Shame it got DMCA'd, but thankfully I got a copy.

10/10 <<less

Very good, but not easy to read – psychologically speaking. My review may contain light spoilers for those who wish to be "shocked" by the content of the novel, but they're descriptions of the background and the status quo, not the main plot line from my point of view, so I won't be using spoiler tags. For those with "lighter constitutions", I recommend reading my review before reading the novel.

The story deals with the aftermath of some sort of riot or uprising, leading to thousands of deaths, and the following... more>> persecution of demons officially held responsible. Supposedly they were the trigger and many people were killed by them as well, but humans participated in the riots as well.

What I found to be a notable omission is that the living circumstances of the demons and their social position before the uprising are not mentioned at all. There's a brief mention of human vagrants participating or causing separate riots, so presumably there's some social inequality (well, also it's an aristocratic society with some wealthy families, but that doesn't necessarily mean widespread poverty if the society is prosperous as a whole), but it's not addressed whether the demon uprising may have been caused by oppressing them in the first place.

Anyway, that much to the setting. The protagonist is someone from a noble family in charge of the secret police mentioned in the title and was raised to fulfill that role in the future. In the events prior to the beginning of the novel she lost her parents and her sister.

As a consequence of this, she and her brother who has taken over the household are basically committing genocide, treating demons worse than animals, enslaving the ones who don't resist and killing the rest, including burning them alive. They detain and torture humans who they believe are sheltering demons, even though most of those were not involved in the uprisings.

However, despite those atrocities, the MC is not a psychopath. As much as she's traumatised and depressed because of the events prior to the beginning of the novel, her own actions including ordering the torture and death of demons, killing them herself, and torturing her own friends and acquaintances for information are inflicting additional trauma on herself. She has physiological reactions to these events and her interactions with others and occasionally contemplates su*cide.

By this I don't mean to justify her actions or paint her as a hero – she's clearly a villain, and it's one of the things that makes the story interesting to read – but a tragic one. <<less

While first couple chapters somehow are not clear, the first scenerio is about our MC torturing her friend and her brother about their parent hide the demons. But as story goes on its getting logical and linked. MC is kinda insane and brutal to demons, just like frieren (she must be proud of her). I think there should be tags misunderstand and time travel ... more>>[MC is kinda insane and brutal to demons, just like frieren, she oathed to kill every each demons in the world for tragically mu*dered her family, there is absolute no sympathy for them at all, but the original MC is hindering her actions, by chapter 45+, she s*icideded and somehow a system window appear for oMC, the loop start for one of the hero groups again, not sure what happens next because it feed onward chapters] <<less