BFT | Chapter 21

"Please don’t do this"

The beast wrote on Rlyel’s palm. Rlyel grabbed her shoulders and shoved her roughly back onto the bed. Rlyel himself sat down beside the beast, interlaced his fingers, and steadied his breath for a moment. His anger was boiling so hard he felt like he might go mad.

"Maybe..."

Rlyel glanced sidelong at the beast and said,

"Are you doing this because you don’t trust me? Because you’re afraid I’ll hand you over to the Vatican and make a fortune... is that why you refuse to escape?"

The beast quietly looked at him. It was a complicated look.

"Look at my situation"

"I have no choice but to be cautious"

It meant she could not trust him. But that did not seem to be the sole reason for refusing to escape.

"Is that why you hid your true nature from me for more than two months? Because you doubted me?"

"I couldn’t tell what kind of person you were, or what you were thinking"

"You hardly ever spoke in front of me, after all"

"You were kind to me, but I couldn’t rule out the possibility that you were only doing your duty, or that you had been ordered by your superiors to look for my weakness"

"Anyone in this situation would be cautious while considering countless possibilities"

The beast’s words were logical and reasonable, but resentment still surged up in Rlyel. He was almost stunned that she had doubted him, of all people. He had been so certain that he had done everything possible to show he was on the beast’s side, trying his best to make her as comfortable as he could. Even if he had hardly spoken, his actions should have made his sincerity clear enough, yet to judge that effort as mere job performance and even suspect it as espionage left him reeling.

Did none of my effort show in her eyes?

Still, to the beast, Rlyel was no different from the guards, a perpetrator. Whatever the reason, he had abetted a sexual crime. At that thought, a deep sense of self-disgust settled over him, along with that same damnable question. It was a question he had asked himself hundreds of times every day since the beast had been locked in Abaddon.

Why am I a commoner? If I had been born a noble, I would have freed the calf from here long ago.

Despite the body of a war god like Ares, Rlyel had spent his life wandering the darkest bottom of the world. Since birth, he had been a prisoner with his limbs bound by invisible chains. Even the powerful chains Zeus used to bind Prometheus to the rocks of the Caucasus probably would not have been as strong as the class system of the human world.

Still staring at the floor with his head lowered, Rlyel did not notice when the beast sat down closely beside him. Then she held out a hand before his eyes and wrote hesitantly.

"Will you really smuggle me out?"

"Of course."

When he answered coldly, the beast’s fingers paused. At that honestly startled gesture, Rlyel could not help finding her cute.

"Even after sleeping with me, you still don’t want to do me this favor?"

"Right."

Rlyel answered firmly again, then snorted a laugh. The beast’s flustered reaction was somehow both cute and laughable. To be honest, until just the day before, the beast had been a difficult, mysterious monster to Rlyel. But after they started communicating, his impression of her had shifted in an unexpected direction. How should he put it, stubborn and meticulous, but with a slightly dim side? A young fool?

Rlyel tapped her cheek lightly with one hand.

"You must really be confident in your own charm. Sorry to disappoint you, but if you thought one night meant I’d become your slave, you were mistaken."

"......"

"I’ll be honest while I’m at it. From the start, I never had any intention of agreeing to your request. Last night was rape. I didn’t hold you because it was a bargain, I raped you because I was angry."

Looking straight into the beast’s eyes, Rlyel added, "Even if you’d changed your mind halfway through, I probably would have gone all the way anyway. You know better than anyone that I was desperate to sleep with you. The excuse just came at the right time. An excuse for me to rape you without having to think too long about it."

"Do you perhaps feel guilty? I don’t mind"

At the immediate answer, Rlyel froze.

"In our world, mating takes a different form from humans’"

"Dogs and cats mate with whoever catches their eye when they’re in heat, right? It’s similar to that"

"Even during mating season, we fight each other, and the one who wins takes the one who loses"

"We fight only with our fists, with magic completely excluded"

"That’s it"

In other words, the elaborate preliminary rituals human men must go through to be granted a human woman’s hand in marriage, the long process of offering gifts and catering to her whims, did not exist in the devil world.

"So it’s just a fistfight in name only. In the end it’s just male devils taking female devils one-sidedly. Devils really are evil, just like ancient barbarians who kidnapped women with fishing nets and made them wives...."

"To add more detail,"

The beast cut off Rlyel’s words.

"Demonkin are only weak at the half-human, half-demon stage. Once they transform into complete forms, regardless of sex or race, they gain powerfully muscled bodies"

"In our world, females can fight males with their fists too"

"And it’s not rare for females who like a certain male to overpower him with force and mate with him"

Rlyel had lost his words. He had carelessly believed that while male devils might be one thing, female devils would probably look like nymphs. He had not even considered that there might be no bodily difference between sexes the way there was with horses or cows.

So that’s why she wasn’t a beast for nothing.

He had never agreed with the human nickname for devils, beast, as much as he did now. Their intelligence might only have been higher, but the operating principles of devils were exactly the same as beasts. Just as dogs and cats use mounting to establish hierarchy and pack order, the basic ecological principle in the devil world was also the law of the jungle, where the strong subdue the weak.

Then Rlyel turned chilled. It was because he had absentmindedly thought that, by the logic of the devil ecosystem, there would be no major problem if he kept taking the beast. He felt like a madman for even thinking that.

Rlyel chastened himself.

"I’m human. I don’t know about you, but I’m uncomfortable."

"You’re uncomfortable because you mated with me? You said you wanted to sleep with me. That doesn’t make sense."

"One thing I do know is that humans are capable of deeper and broader thinking than devils. I’d need someone like Aristotle to make you understand human ways of thinking, so I’ll give up here."

"Are you mocking me right now?"

"The warden chief seems to know more than the prince of this country."

"Aristotle"

"Reading is a hobby of mine, you know. And no matter how stupid the prince of this country is, I doubt he doesn’t know Aristotle."

Rlyel abruptly stood up. Thinking of what would happen here in an hour made anger rise in him again. He yanked open the iron-barred door roughly, then suddenly looked back. The beast was hanging her head, staring only at her toes.

"Hey, how did you get caught by humans in the first place? Since there’s no historical record of devils ever being captured, it seems like your kind almost never come down to the human world either..."

Rlyel asked the question that had been bothering him all day yesterday. The beast only lifted one hand and wrote.

"I don’t much want to talk about it"

"To sum it up, I was extremely unlucky"

"You secretly came to the human world often on your own, didn’t you? Disguised as a cat or pigeon or something. You got curious about the human world, learned human language too.... Then you were caught by the holy knight order and brought here.... Right?"

It was the conclusion Rlyel had reached after turning it over in his head all night. The beast slowly raised her head. In the eyes looking at Rlyel, an openly incredulous expression was written all over them.

"Are you an idiot?"

"If I knew how to transform into a cat or pigeon, would I have been caught by those holy knight bastards?!"

"...See you later."

Rlyel left the solitary cell. The underground entrance was already swarming with prisoners. Enduring the disgust, he passed them by and suppressed the ache rising in a corner of his chest.

The beast had said that unlike humans, she did not suffer a huge mental shock from this sex crime, but Rlyel was different. Despair surged up as if his whole body were falling into a dark swamp. As time passed, it became even clearer. He was in love with the beast. Deeply, to an embarrassing degree. Endlessly.

He should have stopped at sympathy.

Instead, he had fallen in love.

And perhaps, from the beginning.

Why had he fallen in love with such a devilish being, of all things?

And it was his first love. Because of his low birth, Rlyel had lived his life without ever marrying or even dating. More than that, he had never once fallen for anyone at all. He had never even imagined being in love with someone, yet this was how it had turned out. As the common saying went, he had fallen prey to a devil’s trick. This love was rather a misfortune, a disastrous natural disaster.

Having grown up harshly, Rlyel despised humans to the core. He had never resented God, but that was not because of piety. It was because he believed humans were evil for disobeying God’s teachings. The reason the world was hell was also not God’s fault, but human beings bringing it upon themselves. And now Rlyel was engulfed in fiercer hatred toward humans than ever before. He wanted to personally crush every human who had dirtied the beast to death with his axe, one by one.

Just hold on until midnight today.

Rlyel leaned against the wall and pressed a hand to his forehead. Daylight filtering in through the barred window cast a dense lattice of shadows over the executioner’s body.