BFT | Chapter 32

Were there even a hundred prisoners left now? It was practically a kind of food shortage.... He had to come up with a plan.

That was when the beast was busily turning things over in his head. The warden paused his axe work for a moment and wiped his chin with the back of his hand, then unexpectedly met the beast’s gaze. Blood soaked his face, and the warden’s eyes narrowed slightly. Soon after, he looked away from the beast, and a strange smile formed at the corner of his mouth. Oddly enough, it looked almost like a chuckle.

What’s so funny?

After the guards finished setting up the tents, they gathered the corpses and burned them. By early evening, the guards had shoved the prisoners into the tents, layered chains over them, and locked them in with padlocks.

"No food?"

"It’s too cramped! We can’t even sit down!"

When the prisoners complained, the guards shouted back with sneers.

"If you’re hungry, bite your tongue off and die!"

"If it’s cramped, then pile on top of each other! You bastards sleep like that every day anyway!"

It seemed the warden had cut off their meals in order to sap their energy and keep them from starting a riot. His on-site command style was smart. If he had been born a noble, he would have shown his ability in the palace. Unfortunately, he had been born common. Though he had a body as formidable as a fully developed demon, he was wandering the darkest bottom of the human world.

There probably wasn’t a system more absurd than class in the human world.

Still, what happened today made one thing clear to the beast. He had long had an uneasy impression of it, but the warden’s violence was monstrously excessive. In that sense, the warden and Arthur were the same kind of person, both born wrongly as humans.

Once things had settled, the warden called Gavin over. They muttered among themselves for quite a while longer, then brought food from the warehouse and lit a fire in a corner of the yard to cook. The smell of burning corpses and grilled sausages mixed together like dough.

When night deepened, the warden walked over to the beast. His face was clean, apparently after washing somewhere, but his clothes and hair were still soaked in blood. Wordlessly, the warden took hold of the beast’s arm and helped him up.

"I decided I’m the one watching you."

Only after they entered the tent did the warden speak in a low voice.

"For now, it’s just the two of us staying here. Unfortunately, I can’t take off the ankle cuffs. They’re hard, but sleep here."

The warden spread out a sleeping bag on the floor and lit the brazier. The beast sat on the sleeping bag and pulled down the blanket. In one night, it would be Monday. He had to switch bodies with Arthur, but from the way things looked, tomorrow he would probably have to spend the whole day with the warden.

How many days would this last?

There was only one way to keep Arthur Prince’s soul hidden inside the beast’s body from being discovered. While Arthur stayed there, he would have to cast magic on his own body so it slept deeply. He would also have to ask the warden not to wake him while he slept. As long as it wasn’t about escaping Abaddon Prison, the warden seemed polite toward him and probably had plenty of his own work to do, so he would likely agree.

The problem was mana consumption. Casting a sleep spell would inevitably use mana. As things stood, he couldn’t get any demonic energy from the prisoners, so this was a serious problem.

Meanwhile, the warden had taken off his shirt and was wiping his body with a towel. Built men usually had thick torsos, but the warden’s body was all muscle with no excess fat, which gave him an impression of agility instead. His solid upper body, stained with blood, almost looked as though it had been red from the start.

The beast watched him silently for a moment, then tapped the warden’s knee with the tip of his toe. The warden twitched and looked down at him.

"Your name is Lyall Hill?"

"Lyall Hill"

"Is this the spelling?"

The beast wrote it in the air, and the warden rolled his eyes left and right before saying, "You didn’t know? All this time?"

The beast nodded. The warden looked genuinely dumbfounded.

"The prisoners and guards only called you the warden."

"I only realized it when the prisoners just now called you Lyall Hill."

"You could’ve just asked me my name."

"You didn’t ask mine either."

"Well, I didn’t have a chance to ask. I was planning to ask soon enough anyway."

"I don’t have a name."

In truth, the beast did have a name. But it had been given to him as a gift, and he did not want it spoken by anyone’s mouth.

I’ll give you a name.

A lonely feeling welled up in him. Trying to shake it off, the beast quickly went on.

"Demons don’t give names to individuals."

"We have strong individual tendencies, so we don’t get along well with one another, and after the parenting period, parents and children part ways and never see each other again, so names aren’t needed."

"It’s not like there aren’t races that travel in groups, but even there, they never exceed ten members."

At the beast’s explanation, the warden sat down beside him while wiping his shoulder with the towel. He looked a little flustered.

"Then what should I call you?"

"You can just call me you like now."

"No, if you’re going to live in the human world, you need a name. Fine, I’ll come up with one for you later. But if you guys don’t have names, how do you call each other?"

"We call each other you."

"Or first, second, and so on, according to rank."

"We don’t have many personal pronouns, and we don’t have honorifics at all, so we even call the Demon King you."

The warden frowned more deeply, as if even more bewildered.

"How can you... Then do you call your parents you too?"

"No."

"We call them our caretakers, our father-body and mother-body, and there are at least basic rank titles like Demon King, administrator, subordinate, and mentor."

"Demon King, administrator, and subordinate make sense, but mentor... So there are schools in the demon realm too?"

The warden asked with interest. The beast shook his head.

"There are no schools. A mentor is a one-on-one instructor assigned by the administrators when a fully developed demon is learning advanced magic."

"In the demon realm, only the Demon King and the administrators live together in an organized society like you humans do."

"Most demons only live together during the child-rearing period."

"There are sometimes pairs that keep living together because they get along well, but that’s very rare."

As the warden listened, his expression turned strangely subtle. After staring at the beast in silence for a long while, he said, "Have you ever fought one of your own kind with your fists?"

The beast immediately understood the meaning behind the question. The warden was remembering something the beast had said before.

During breeding season, we fight each other, and the one who wins takes the one who loses.

We compete using only our fists, completely excluding magic.

In other words, he meant whether the beast had ever bred with a member of his own race. Before the beast could answer, the warden seemed to come to a conclusion of his own.

"Right, I won’t ask about who won or lost. But...."

The warden trailed off and shut his mouth. A mask-like blankness spread across his face as he lowered his eyes. Then he lifted his head and looked straight into the beast’s eyes.

"Honestly, the surest way to keep you safe is for you to return to your own world. Is there any chance you could summon your mate into the human world? I know a witch who can perform a black mass."

The beast looked at the warden in silence. He had never imagined those words would come from the mouth of a man who had openly shown possessiveness toward him.

"That’s impossible."

"I’ve heard demons are lacking in compassion too. But if you ask, maybe your mate would agree."

The beast shook his head.

"The witch you know is a fraud."

"If humans want to summon a demon, they have to perform human sacrifice with living offerings."

"Depending on the rank of the demon being summoned, you’d need anywhere from at least thirty to as many as two hundred living sacrifices. There’s no way that’s possible."

The warden stared downward and remained silent for a long time. The beast realized he had sunk into self-loathing. He was furious at himself for feeling relieved at the fact that there was no way to send the beast back to the demon realm.

What a complicated guy. He wants to let go of the thing he desperately wants to possess. Is this what they call the ‘human contradiction’?

By demon standards, humans were full of contradictions. Unlike demons, who used equivalence as the basis for everything, humans were tormented by conflict because they placed shame at the bottom of their emotions and cared so much about judging good and evil. That was also why demons always took the form of a bargain when tempting humans. If a demon gave one thing, the human would give another in return. End of story.