BFT | Chapter 30

1.

At dawn, Lyall woke from sleep. The beast was sleeping soundly, his face buried against Lyall’s chest.

Lyall got up carefully. His mind stayed tangled all the way from the solitary cell to the staff housing. He had already decided he would leave Abaddon Prison tonight, no matter what, but that sick, uneasy feeling refused to go away.

That bastard... What was his reason for staying here, even if it meant going so far as to drag me into bed twice? And he was too desperate.

No matter how desperate his reason was, it still wasn’t an excuse to keep committing disgusting sexual crimes. Now that Lyall had confirmed the beast’s intelligence was perfectly intact, there was no point dragging this out. He had to leave this place. The reason he had told the beast he would keep living with him was separate, too. It was a measure to keep the beast from continuing those sly little schemes.

“He wasn’t planning to stay with me just until I got used to the human world.”

“He wanted to take me as a mate.”

The beast had said that only to make Lyall panic and fluster himself. But Lyall wasn’t stupid enough to be fooled three times.

Lyall went into his room and more or less threw down the bucket. Just thinking about having to endure the beast being defiled by the prisoners again today made his blood run backward. They would all be executed within twenty-four hours anyway, but even so, a violently furious rage surged through him, hard to bear. Lyall gathered every shred of reason he had and forced himself to calm down.

I’ve held it in for more than two months. I only have to endure today.

Ever since the beast had come to Abaddon Prison, Lyall had developed the habit of checking the clock often. He would stay holed up in his room, waiting all day for night to come. He had also picked up another habit, which was imagining things whenever he had a moment. In his fantasies, Lyall killed the men who had dirtied the beast in all kinds of cruel ways. Human methods of killing still didn’t satisfy him, so he even indulged in absurd fantasies of transforming into the Demon King and inflicting impossible torture with magic, staring down at the floor as he did.

Lyall opened the window. Beyond the outer wall surrounding Abaddon Prison, only a barren wasteland stretched out. Because it was Sunday, a priest riding a donkey was entering Abaddon Prison. Even so, the chapel in the detention center would no doubt be empty again today. The old priest who always followed when the beast’s stillborns were buried in the wasteland and prayed for them was someone Lyall respected almost as much as the prison warden. Thanks to that, the two old men had the good fortune of being excluded from Lyall’s kill list.

Inside the guardhouse window at the prison gate, two guards were sitting face-to-face and playing cards. Two guards took the gate watch in rotation each day. The guards on duty tonight would have their necks broken by Lyall’s hand. The thirty-seven guards living in the staff housing would be pulped by an axe. Imagining himself personally harming the guards soothed Lyall a little.

He closed the window and turned around. Looking at the calendar on the wall, Lyall mentally ran through today’s schedule. Just then, when his eyes caught the milking date marked on the calendar, a thought flashed through his head.

Could it be?

Three times a week, Lyall handed over the beast’s milk to the Abaddon chaplain assigned to the prison. That meant once they left Abaddon Prison, the beast could no longer send milk to the baby. Lyall sat on the bed and stared downward for a long time.

Was the calf staying here because of nursing?

If that was the answer, then Lyall couldn’t force the beast to escape either. It was him who had failed to understand why they kept taking the beast’s milk periodically, even though they could have found a nursing mother anywhere. He was the foolish one.

The baby got sick because it couldn’t drink the beast’s milk.

Lyall counted the days. When the chaplain assigned to Abaddon had said that higher authorities had sent a letter ordering them to bring the beast’s milk regularly, that had been eight days after the baby was born. So that was it. At first the baby had been fed human milk, and then something had gone wrong.

Lyall got to his feet and paced the room, lost in thought. If it was because of the baby’s nursing, then he had to postpone escaping Abaddon, but thinking of extending these horrific days indefinitely made the back of his head ache. Lyall was a typical macho man who had grown up hearing things like, “If you can’t protect my woman, then you’re not even a man.” By his standards, not being able to rescue the beast right away was deeply humiliating.

He couldn’t take it anymore and slammed a fist into the wall. The wooden panel shattered like paper. Lyall kept punching the wall again and again, then glared at the floor.

In a situation this humiliating and hopeless, his hatred for humans surged anew. He wanted to grab an axe and hack every prisoner to death on the spot. He wanted to cut open the bellies of the high priests and the holy knights, pull out their innards, and burn them. He wanted to bring unspeakable despair to every human who had dirtied the beast.

He wanted to destroy this world completely, by the most vicious means possible.

The next second, the floor trembled faintly. Lyall jerked and looked up. Before long, the entire staff housing started shaking side to side.

An earthquake...?

Lyall dashed out of the room at once. In the violently shaking underground solitary cell, the beast was crouched under the iron table, trembling all over. Lyall swiftly removed the steel bracelet from the beast’s wrist. He threw a blanket over the beast and scooped him up, then ran and left the detention building in one go.

The ground was still shaking. Prisoners clutched the iron bars on the windows and screamed. The priest stumbled out of the detention building, his face drained of color, and the guards also rushed out of the staff housing.

"Warden!"

"We heard something breaking inside the detention block! Look at that window, the prisoners on the left side of the second floor aren’t showing themselves!"

"Those bastards are going to start a riot the second they come out! We have to bring them down now!"

Sure enough, shouts rose from the stairs inside the detention building. Lyall set the beast down beside the priest.

"Please keep an eye on this one for a moment."

The priest nodded and quickly motioned for him to go. Lyall locked the detention building’s main door from the outside. Immediately, the door began rattling with loud bangs.

"Open the door, you bastards!"

"You want us to die?!"

The prisoners kicked the door and spewed filthy curses. The guards shouted back just as fiercely.

"You’re dead either way!"

"Die in there!"

"An accident’s better than being executed or hanged!"

Judging from the prisoners’ voices, the number of inmates who had broken out of their cells was at least fifty. The door wouldn’t hold much longer, but fortunately, the earthquake was gradually easing.

Lyall jerked his chin at the guards.

"Come with me."

From the warehouse beside the detention building, Lyall and the guards gathered axes, knives, iron clubs, and the like.

"Kill every prisoner that comes out."

Lyall said this as he headed for the detention building with an axe in hand. Even if they killed every escaped prisoner, it would still be fine as long as it was treated as a riot case. Lyall and the guards stood tightly pressed against the side of the main door. The hinges on the door loosened, and before long the door slab crashed down. Prisoners surged out in a flood. Somehow they had found chairs, fire pokers, and similar makeshift weapons.

Lyall waited until the leader came right up to him, then swung the axe. The blade sliced through the back of the leader’s neck. The neck was cut so deeply that white bone showed at once. Blood burst upward violently. The prisoners behind him were splashed with it. Someone shouted,

"Kill them all!"

Lyall kept swinging the axe. The guards joined in and butchered the prisoners indiscriminately. The prisoners swung their tools desperately too, but they were no match for a gang of guards armed with weapons. In the blink of an eye, dozens of corpses were strewn in front of the gate. Some prisoners coming down the stairs saw the carnage and turned tail in a panic.

Only then did Lyall lower his axe. He and the other guards were all drenched in blood.

"If the aftershocks keep coming, the whole detention center might collapse. This building is so old...."

"Let it collapse. Who cares if those bastards get crushed in it?"

"Are you stupid? If they all die, we lose our jobs. We’re guards, guards."

"Then you’re saying we should evacuate them outside? Losing the job is better. The moment those bastards come out, a riot’s going to break out!"

While the guards argued, Lyall fell into thought. Even if the prisoners got crushed under Abaddon Prison and died, the only ones who would lose out would be this side. The beast would just be moved to another prison and subjected to the same thing.