I Was Just Enjoying the Discipline - Chapter 3

The guard raised the heavy iron baton in his hand and slammed it against the bars several times. The deafening clangs exploded through the prison like peals of thunder.

The piercing noise made Sophia flinch. She clapped both hands over her ears as her body instinctively recoiled. The other prisoners reacted much the same way.

At last, the earsplitting racket subsided. Silence settled over the prison once more, but the air remained taut with fear and anxiety, as though both might erupt at any moment.

The guard lingered for a moment, savoring the sight of the terrified humans. A satisfied smile tugged at his lips before he finally turned away. Only then did he return to his duties.

‘Looks like that’s the end of today’s harassment.’

Sneaking a glance at the guard’s retreating back, Sophia slowly let the tension drain from her body before quietly surveying the cell around her.

Every villager imprisoned alongside her wore the same expression: faces etched with exhaustion and terror. They looked haggard, as though a single night had aged them by years.

As if they were avoiding a contagious plague, no one ventured too close to anyone else. They seemed to instinctively know that holding hands with someone paralyzed by the fear of death would only intensify their anxiety rather than ease it.

In the entire prison, Sophia was the only one who looked remotely composed. Had the shadows not concealed her expression, she would have stood out as deeply suspicious.

There was, however, one other person who was unusual in a very different way. The woman who had cried without pause for half a day.

Lavina, the heroine of the novel.

“…Sniff.”

Curled up with her knees drawn tightly against her chest, Lavina wept softly. Yet even against the prison’s bleak, unforgiving backdrop, her beauty seemed to shine undiminished.

Soft golden hair cascaded all the way to her waist, though it had long since fallen into disarray. Her slender shoulders trembled with every sob, hunched inward as she hugged herself. Whenever she lifted her face from where it rested against her knees, her eyes were red and swollen from crying.

Yet none of it was enough to diminish her beauty, not even the hollow despair clouding her blue eyes. If anything, every misfortune that had befallen Lavina only seemed to accentuate it, as though her suffering existed solely to make her shine all the brighter.

‘No wonder the demons are obsessed with her.’

Sophia clicked her tongue lightly to herself.

There was something about Lavina that stirred the cruelest impulses in others. Her breathtaking beauty was part of it. So were the kindness and gentle nature that matched it. And above all, there was how heartbreakingly vulnerable she was to misfortune. She was the perfect prey for demons.

That was why the guard had slammed his baton against the bars earlier, simply to frighten the prisoners. He had wanted to see Lavina shudder in terror.

Sophia had noticed the newcomer repeatedly stealing glances at her. He wasn’t foolish enough to lay a hand on a human destined to become Lord Eligos’s prey. Instead, he satisfied himself with petty intimidation, taking pleasure in tormenting her just enough to watch her fear.

It was a vile, cowardly, and contemptible form of amusement — no different from cornering a tiny animal with nowhere left to run and delighting in its panic.

Even so, Sophia couldn’t exactly blame them. They weren’t human to begin with, and expecting demons to possess consciences or compassion was foolish. If they had been capable of such things, humans would never have been dragged here in the first place.

‘Still, she’s crying an awful lot…’

Lavina hadn’t eaten a single bite all day. She had done nothing but cry. At this rate, Sophia was beginning to worry she might collapse from dehydration before anything else happened.

The others, however, were hardly in any better shape. The only difference was one of degree. Every last one of them was drowning in despair, worn down by exhaustion and fatigue. Those who weren’t crying simply no longer had the strength to shed tears.

Enduring that suffocating silence while never knowing when death might come for them — that alone had drained them completely. Only Sophia, armed with knowledge of the original novel, remained relatively calm.