Chapter 81
After Eden disappeared, Sena turned to the mysterious man and asked.
“Hnngh, hk! Who the hell are you?”
“There’s no need to reveal my identity to someone who’s about to die.”
“You’re clearly a demon…. Are you a demon who fell for a human and is pretending to be one, just like me?!”
Sena too had hidden her identity and lived quietly when she was with the Young Baron. If this man harbored the same feelings, it would explain why he had sided with the Hunter and harmed Sena.
“Fall for a human? As if I would do something that pathetic.”
But the man’s response was cold, as though he had heard something absurd. He crouched down in front of Sena and tilted his head to one side. His purple eyes were filled with deep contempt for her.
“You still don’t know who I am?”
The man’s aura, which had been faint while the Hunter was present, grew steadily. Sena felt an instinctive terror and her teeth began to chatter like she was freezing.
‘How in the world was he concealing an aura like this…?’
She had done nothing wrong, yet she felt the urge to drop to her knees and beg. If her head had still been attached to her body, she would have thrown herself flat on the ground and begged for mercy.
‘R-right. Like he said, there’s no way I wouldn’t recognize a demon this high-ranking….’
The woman had called the man Bezel.
Bezel. Sena repeated the vaguely familiar name in her head, stealing glances at his face, when her eyes suddenly went wide.
Of course. How had she not realized? Bezel was another name for Lord Beelzebub. Demons were sometimes called by different names depending on the region where humans lived, and Bezel, formed by removing and rearranging a few letters from Beelzebub, was one of them.
“Ah…. L-Lord Beelzebub, please forgive me. This lowly demon dared not recognize such an esteemed presence and has committed a grave discourtesy.”
Sena’s face went so pale it turned blue with fear. Beelzebub was a high-ranking demon who ranked among the very top even in Hell. He was someone that a middling high-ranking demon like her would not dare look at directly.
‘No wonder I couldn’t remember his face properly!’
The last time she had seen him was hundreds of years ago. And even then, she had only stolen a glimpse of him from far away at Lord Lucifer’s banquet hall.
“There is something I want to ask you.”
“Please, ask me anything!”
“When you said you wanted to become human, did you mean it sincerely?”
Bezel bent his knees to match her eye level. When Sena hesitated and could not answer easily, a gentle smile rose on his sculptured face as if to tell her she could speak freely. Forgetting to even gauge his true intentions, she nodded as if spellbound.
“Yes, th-that’s right. My beloved told me I absolutely must become human….”
“Beloved….”
The word, which had no currency among demons, seemed altogether foreign to him, and Bezel rolled it around in his mouth several times. Thinking he might not know the meaning of the word, Sena quickly opened her mouth.
“Humans call the one they cherish by that….”
Her words could not continue. Thunk. With a chilling sensation, her vision flooded red.
“…Ah.”
When she blinked her trembling lashes, the blood that had pooled in her eyes streamed down her cheeks. It was as if she were weeping tears of blood.
When had he even attacked?
The hand movement slicing through her forehead had been so swift she had not even seen the sword being drawn. While she choked and gagged, unable to even scream, the sword sank deeper and deeper into her skull.
“Sena, was it?”
“Nngh…! N-, L-Lord… Beelzebub…!”
“I wish to offer my congratulations.”
For what, exactly?
As Sena squeezed out the last of her strength to look up at him, Bezel leaned in close and whispered.
“You are already human. The pathetic way you love and yearn for a lowly human makes you no different from them at all.”
Just as humans belittled the thoroughly contemptible by calling them beasts, demons labeled those like Sena a disgrace to demonkind. He went one step further and considered Sena not a demon, but a human. She had abandoned the most basic pride of a predator. From the moment she fell for her prey, she had already ceased to be a demon.
‘To think I’m human.’
Sena rolled the familiar yet unfamiliar word around in her mouth. It was something she had yearned to hear, even if only in her dreams. But now, on the brink of death without having fulfilled her promise to the Young Baron, Beelzebub’s words were nothing more than mockery.
‘Just one more…. If only I had eaten one more liver!’
Tears rolled down from the whites of her eyes, turned red from burst blood vessels.
They said your life flashed before your eyes when death came, and it was true. Through her fading vision, the events from the past several years rapidly surfaced and vanished.
Among them, one lingered before her eyes far longer than the rest. It was this memory–
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