Tamed Monster - Chapter 92

Don’t make me any angrier than this, he seemed to warn her.

If he didn’t want her to hate him, he shouldn’t have revealed he was a monster in the first place—yet now he expected her to somehow accept and understand what kind of monstrous being he truly was.

Sylvia lost her appetite completely. Seeing him stare directly at her while prying his stick out of the freshly killed fish made her stomach sink, erasing all the hunger she’d felt just moments earlier.

Still, she couldn’t refuse to eat. She needed the energy. She might not be so weak as to require three meals a day, but she did need to eat at least once daily if she wanted to keep moving.

Especially since she needed to be prepared in case that monster changed his mind and attacked her; she had to keep her strength up.

“Hah… There’s no monster as good-natured as me, you know. But my wife just doesn’t see it.”

“…”

“She has no idea how lucky she is to have a husband like me. Where else would you find a male this skilled at hunting and fighting? And with a c**k that works so well, too. She knows all of this, and yet she pretends otherwise, and that’s what really frustrates me.”

He called it ‘pretending’. As if her fierce rejection of him was nothing more than a coy act.

Did he really not understand the gap between monsters and humans? Despite having lived over ten times longer than Sylvia, who was only in her twenties, he somehow possessed this bizarre flexibility in his thinking that she couldn’t begin to fathom.

“What good is it, being a ‘nice’ monster anyway?”

“Hm?”

She’d muttered the question under her breath, but he caught it. Reflexively, he responded with a thoughtful “Hm?”

It was a fair point. If you were born a monster, being loved by humans was pretty much impossible. Even Kuinan had thought the same thing when he first met Sylvia.

“Maybe it matters a little. You’ll be going through a major change soon. After that, you probably won’t care much about what species you are, either…”

Sylvia was gradually becoming more like a monster. Kuinan had no idea how close she’d get—no one among the monsters did. The few who’d tried either succeeded or failed, then lived apart from the rest, hiding their mates.

Kuinan himself would likely end up doing the same.

“What change?”

Her voice trembled with anxiety, but Kuinan just turned his head and began wading leisurely through the knee-deep stream toward higher ground.

Sylvia followed after him, asking three more times what kind of change he meant. After everything her sly husband had put her through, she was practically traumatized by the word ‘change’. Forgetting for a moment that he was a mad monster, she ended up raising her voice.

“What do you mean, what change?!”

But instead of focusing on her anger, Kuinan only seemed pleased that she was comfortable enough to speak to him so informally. When he sensed her fast approach, he whipped around.

Seeing her charging at him through the water, then suddenly freezing with fear, made his eyes flicker with amusement.

…Ah, this isn’t fun anymore.

He mumbled to himself, and she stopped dead in her tracks. Blood dripped from the dead fish in his hand, where he’d gripped it by the gills. The sight of him standing there, expressionless, with the dead fish and the severed arm of his friend camouflaged as just another piece of dead flesh, was chilling.

It was a perfect portrait of what a monster really was.

“Don’t give me that scared look. Every time you do, it drives me crazy with frustration.”

He’d harmed countless humans, but Sylvia—at least in his mind—was something precious, someone he cherished and tried to care for. It felt deeply unfair to him that she continued to distrust and shun him, even now that she knew what he was. She had no idea how much it hurt him.

“As if you’re the only one with feelings. Humans really are rude, aren’t they?”

He muttered this, mimicking the way she always lumped an entire species together in her insults, and turned his back on her.

Whatever emotions she was directing at him from behind, he couldn’t read without looking. Most likely, she was thinking, “What is this monster even saying?”—but he could imagine it well enough to give a bitter laugh.

The two of them walked on in silence for quite some time after that, not saying another word until they found a patch of dry ground where they could build a fire.