BFT | Chapter 12

"A human tongue cannot take that shape. This was also cut out when the horns were severed. Without its tongue, the beast cannot cast magic or curses. And without the horns, it cannot fully transform into a goat demon. From what the holy knights observed, the beast is also not very intelligent, so there is no need to fear it."

"God above...."

The superintendent muttered in a trembling voice. The senior priest waved a hand. "Let us speak for a moment."

"The reason we brought the beast here is..."

After hearing the senior priest’s explanation to the end, Rlyel felt as if his mind had become even more tangled. What the priest of God was ordering them to do was the sort of thing only a devil would do. To have hundreds of prisoners impregnate the beast.

"That... if you do that... c-can she even get pregnant?"

The superintendent asked, looking dazed. The senior priest answered calmly.

"She can."

"Then... if we do that... she won’t die...?"

"She won’t die."

Rlyel’s forehead went cold. He immediately understood what process had produced the senior priest’s unwavering certainty.

"That is an evil beast. Remember that showing pity toward it is an act of heresy."

"Um... the reason for impregnating the beast is..."

To the superintendent’s question, the senior priest said simply, "You do not need to know. Just make sure your security is airtight."

With that, the senior priest and holy knight left Abaddon Prison.

Inside the superintendent’s office at the staff residence, the superintendent and Rlyel remained silent for a long while. The superintendent, no less stunned by the sudden blow than Rlyel, seemed utterly bewildered. After a long time, the superintendent was the first to move.

"We’re lowly commoners, aren’t we? We ought to know our place."

Right from the beginning, the superintendent firmly shut down any objection Rlyel might have had.

"Now then, let’s do our duty as caretakers and make some relevant regulations. You hold the pen and write this down. First rule. The beast must be referred to as the communal latrine."

At that disgusting term, Rlyel had just lifted his quill when he looked up. The superintendent clicked his tongue.

"Why do you think the priest asked for secrecy? If this leaks outside, the whole of Europe will be shaken. We need any outsiders who come and go through Abaddon Prison to never notice anything suspicious from the prisoners’ conversations. It’s not like the prisoners will obey this well, but if we draw up regulations first, later we can at least make the excuse to our superiors that we did what we could."

As a veteran who had managed this place for over forty years, he was thorough. Rlyel lowered his eyes and wrote down the regulations. The superintendent even asked for his opinions.

"What about a ban on beating?"

"Add it. If we’re at it, add a ban on insults too. Nobody will obey it anyway."

The superintendent also wrote in a ridiculous rule.

"Ninth rule. Prisoners must be completely naked when going to use the communal latrine."

"In case they’re carrying weapons?"

"No. It’s cold out, isn’t it? The underground corridor will be even colder, so would they really want to stand in line naked for a long time just to do that? It’ll be miserable to watch for the guards, though."

The "regulations for using the communal latrine" were finally completed at dawn. The superintendent stood up.

"Don’t think too much about it. That thing only looks human, but it’s a beast, isn’t it? Baphomet is famous for being lustful, so the beast will probably welcome the prisoners’ attention. We can only hope so."

"......"

"I ought to get some sleep. You should check the underground solitary cells for a bit, see if there’s anything that could be used for suicide. Let’s start the communal latrine tomorrow."

That meant they were to let the prisoners carry out a mass sexual assault starting tomorrow. Carrying a torch, Rlyel headed for the underground of the prison camp and made his decision without the slightest hesitation. He would quit as warden chief today.

The underground corridor was far too dark. It was the kind of dense darkness one might only see when a living person was buried in a coffin. Even the solitary cells remained silent, looking like walls coated in black tar until Rlyel drew near.

Only after Rlyel entered the cell did the torchlight reveal the beast dimly. She was still sitting on the floor, looking down. Half swallowed by the darkness, she looked like a sign exposing the horrific future that awaited her.

Rlyel deliberately kept his eyes away from the beast and hung the torch on the wall bracket. Prisoners often tore apart the wooden boards laid on the floor to make weapons. It was not uncommon for one to try to kill himself by stabbing the carotid artery with a nail ripped from the metal frame of a bed. The senior priest had declared the beast to be unintelligent, but one could never be too certain. Devils were cunning, and she might be pretending to be stupid while waiting for a chance to escape.

Having to search around in such dimness, where one could barely see anything anyway, made irritation well up. Rlyel impulsively glanced sideways at the beast, then froze. Beneath her hair, the neckline of her dress was faintly stained red and wet. He felt relieved, thinking perhaps she had picked up a nail or something from the cell floor and stabbed her own throat.

Good. Better to die than be handed over to the prisoners.

He decided he would finish what had been only a failed attempt at suicide for the beast. Rlyel approached her and carefully pushed back her hair. The stain on the neckline of the dress, as if dyed with purple pigment, was indeed blood.

Just as he was about to inspect more closely and sweep her hair over her shoulder, the beast slowly raised her head. The moment her face was revealed, Rlyel caught his breath without realizing it. Bright blood had dried around the beast’s mouth. It looked like traces of bleeding when the tongue was cut out during capture by the holy knights. The blood staining the neckline seemed to have come from the bleeding that never stopped.

After hesitating briefly, Rlyel put two fingers into the beast’s mouth. Even such a small touch brought a tightening tension that made his heart constrict, and his fingers kept faltering of their own accord. Only after he forced the mouth open did the inside come into view. The tongue had been cut so badly that if it had gone even a little deeper, she would have died instantly. There were also many wounds on the palate and the inside of the cheeks.

After confirming that the bleeding had completely stopped, Rlyel withdrew his hand. A faint warmth lingered on his fingers, stained with the beast’s saliva. For some reason, his whole body shivered, and even his heart thudded hard.

Why was he like this?

He had seen countless horribly mutilated corpses. He himself had personally carried out many executions by beheading, dismemberment, and quartering[[2]]. There was no reason at all to be shaken by a cut tongue, yet Rlyel could not get back up and just stared at the beast’s face. He could not tear his eyes away.

Seen up close, the beast’s face was beautiful enough to leave anyone dazed. White skin, clear even in the darkness. Cornflower-blue eyes. Yet there was no life in her face, and her pupils were unfocused. With no trace of intelligence to be found, that face carried the innocent impression of a child.

Rlyel was seized by an inexplicably strange sensation. It felt as if a cold blade had suddenly pierced straight through his heart. At the very first moment the beast’s face had been revealed.... His chest ached as if a nail had been driven into it, all the way to his fingertips. This bewildering physical reaction was something he had never experienced in his life.

For a while, the beast and Rlyel remained silent, holding one another’s gaze. The first to look away was Rlyel. Lowering his eyes, he soon frowned. Now that he looked, the beast’s chest was wet too. It just wasn’t blood.

Frozen stiff, Rlyel grabbed the shoulders of the beast’s dress with both hands and pulled them down. The dress was loose and boxy, so it quickly slid to her waist, exposing her chest. The beast’s chest was as flat as a man’s, but that did not mean the priest had lied when he said she possessed a woman’s breasts.

Rlyel could not tear his eyes away from the beast’s chest. The sweet fragrance that had brushed his nose when he fastened the iron bracelets around her wrists had come from that flat chest. From around the nipples all the way down to the lower belly, it was soaked in a milk-white fluid.

He had guessed the beast must have suffered something terrible at the hands of the holy knight group, but once he saw the evidence with his own eyes, Rlyel’s scalp tingled. He did not want to think deeply about what had happened to the offspring the beast had given birth to.

Rlyel steadied his breath and stood up. He took sheets and several towels from his own room and returned to the underground solitary cell. After wiping the beast as cleanly as possible, he laid her on the bed and covered her with a sheet. Only after bringing firewood and lighting the fireplace did Rlyel leave the cell. He had never felt so conflicted in his life.

The voices of the prisoners waking to greet morning were already making Abaddon Prison noisy in every corner. Even the kindly superintendent did not consider them human. To Rlyel’s eye, after his rough upbringing, the Abaddon prisoners looked like beasts that could only speak human language. They relied on violence to solve everything, could not count past five, were nine times out of ten illiterate, and could not think of anything beyond physiological needs.

Rlyel decided to leave this beast den at once. Without wasting time, he went straight to the superintendent’s office.

"You’re here?"

The moment Rlyel entered the office, the superintendent brightened and said, "You came at just the right time. I was planning to put you in charge of the communal latrine anyway."

At the unexpected words, Rlyel lifted his head.

"Now that I think about it, if I let the guards manage the communal latrine, it’s obvious what would happen. Even if it’s a beast, that would be pitiful, wouldn’t it?"

That meant she would be sexually assaulted by the prisoners in the daytime and by the guards at night.