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I could try to talk you out of this. It wouldn't be, on the surface, a betrayal of my job. I am indeed magically bound to try to stop you, and it was indeed done with the full blessing of the godless council that runs this place, another part of their payment to keep her around. The how of it's up to me. But fundamentally, I'm here to express on behalf of the city that we are not interested in any do-gooder heroes with their noble intentions killing the hag above me. Yes, though she eats humans. Eats babies, and with particular relish. Her favorite delicacy is those medlar stillbirths that rotted through before they even formed, and just yesterday she slurped one right out of the bucket it was brought in.
Maybe there's supposed to be a wizard in this tower instead. Some expensive prick who shoots fireballs if we're ever attacked by, I don't know, the kinds of dragons fireballs do anything to, and fuck-all the rest of the time. Maybe you didn't even hear about the hag first, you just saw the bodies she has hanging outside the upper levels like a butcher's shop and knew in the instant of visceral revulsion that whatever was going on inside was a moral wrong.
What fucking good is a wizard? What fucking good is your god to us either? Do you know the kind of stuff hags can do, and without asking for a wheelbarrel of gold? You're surprised someone so green's giving you a good fight. I don't look my age, is the thing, and not one wound's ever scarred. Eyes don't quite match at the moment, but that's a hard detail to make out while crossing swords. When we're done here, if I'm still any sort of alive, she'll string a needle with rendered gut and have me fixed better than new with skin flayed off a corpse.
I'd like to be able to say, at least you were nice enough to the girl at the bottom. You extended her the grace of assuming sans evidence she was some poor soul forced to be here, same as you're assuming with me, or maybe you just figure everyone secretly agrees with you. She's ugly enough it's a bit hard to tell her age too, isn't it? Coarse face, eyes and skin piss-yellow like she's about dead of drinking, a nose so scrunched it's almost not there at all, and of course that huge froggy mouth surrounded by thin lips. She's somewhere in her twenties, but I go with girl as a better term than larval hag. So really, and she knows it, you're not any nicer than the last guy who near sliced her in half soon as he came in.
They don't scream like humans. It's this nasty wet sound, like overripe fruit popping. Kind of sound that'd only make you want to keep stabbing.
But you're dumber than he was, and didn't put together why it's so well known that we're always looking to hire an uglier girl to serve the hag.
Hags begin outgrowing their cuckoo-protection at puberty, and a long and awkward puberty it is. Usually by the time one's visibly a hag, she's been pushed out of even the fringes of civilization for decades, and as she comes into her power, she's going to amuse herself by blighting all those crops she was accused of blighting with her nasty face as a kid. By that point, it'll be at best a coin flip on if she's willing to deal at all with what desperate people inevitably seek her out or if they get plunked right into the pot. But people like a tale about a monster who's as vain as she's vile, spread it about until it reaches even the boxed ears of a gawky little thing who doesn't yet know she's a hag. All hags eat people, but they're a lot more willing to end a drought than unleash a plague if you don't make them really hate you first.
I've come to think that's really my job. That girl down there, when I cut your throat, will know I didn't treat this murder attempt as a forgivable little lapse anyone could make. Will know I didn't want you to get to walk back out to the rest of your life, maybe to go kill someone else a city over, maybe to change your mind and come back for another try. That girl doesn't even live here yet, you know? The basement's hers, but least for now she lives in an apartment elsewhere. She goes to the market like anyone else, there's a place she likes to eat at with cheap meat pies that're mostly gristle, and if, your god willing, you took your sword to cut her down in the street there, you'd be strung up for it. If you manage to get past me and do somehow murder a hag as old as my dead grandmother's grandmother, you'd face the same fate, or have to cut down any number more people in escaping this city's justice.
So even if you could be talked out of this, you have to die after deciding to come in here to kill someone. The best I can do is be the one to do it, put you down same as I would a mad dog, rather than let the hag chew you up still alive. Not her usual thing, but hate's quite the spice. People have beaten me twice, have been kind enough both times to leave me without that killing blow, and I could hear all the screaming, that high human sound, while the girl bandaged me up. Barely even drooled while she did so. Ah, you'd think that sounds bad too. But she did bandage me up instead of snacking on me or the bandages, so if that night she licks the brain out of a dead man's skull, well - what's it to any of us?