[ Chapter 4 ]
“….Is this how it ends? Just when I was starting to live my life, to die like this?”
Without even realizing how desperate I was, my inner thoughts burst out in a voice. However, no one in the corridor responded to anything I said, and the silence continued to linger.
I wanted to live. There was no reason why. If I had to find a reason, it was because my mom and dad died in a car accident. They must have been in pain and suffering when they died. At least, I hoped I wouldn’t have to suffer a painful death.
The pale finger resting on my knee slowly curled into a fist. It was such a small hand that I wondered who I could fight against.
But it’s okay.
This character, Lemony, had a slender frame compared to the average woman, but she couldn’t feel pain. This feature made her have a strange personality similar to a psychopath and was associated with death, but it wasn’t a bad thing to survive.
At least, I wouldn’t feel any pain.
All right, let’s get up.
After a while, I got up and pulled out the sword strapped around my waist. I wasn’t sure if this would be enough, but I thought it would be better to go down than to just sit there without a plan.
I carefully descended the stone stairs, but each time the sole of my shoe touched the ground, I heard the unpleasant sound of damp dust being crushed. I descended all the way to the 6th floor, but the view was the same.
Torches lighted intermittently in the abyss-like hallway without windows. Most of the prisoners locked in Building B were beast-like demons. There were no windows, probably because their keen sense of smell or physical abilities made it possible for them to escape through them.
The corridor was clean. No, there was nothing in here other than useless lumps of dust and spiders crawling up the ceiling.
Still, just to be sure, as I was carefully inspecting the corridor, the entire corridor suddenly shook with a loud noise. My whole body shook at once, and it felt like my brain was rattling. My arm hair stood up and my heart screamed like crazy.
I quickly tried to act nonchalant, gripping the sword with both hands as my face turned pale. Another faint sound echoed down the corridor.
The noise continued for some time, and something seemed off. I realized that it was the sound of footsteps. I realized that it was the sound of footsteps after facing a figure that popped out through the shadows.
“Senior Lemony! Save me!”
He was a man dressed as a prison officer. The light from the torch reflected the dense legs crawling across the ceiling above the man running madly so that his arms and legs were barely visible.
It was a giant centipede, like an airplane seen up close.
Thirty pairs of legs covered in black hair moved like snakes. Even the thick and heavy body seemed like it could fall off the wall any moment due to its weight, with the black shell-covered tail making a thumping sound as it hit the ground, sounding like “thud, thud”.
The terrifying yet eerie demon hesitated for a moment as it looked at me.
It felt like our eyes met.
Its pupils, with almost no white, flickered as they reflected the fire. It stood upside down like a bat, confirming my presence. Then, as if it would fall to the ground and attack us, it came down and chased after us.
It seemed to have become even more aggressive as its prey doubled.
Unfortunately, my lack of pain did not correlate with my fear.
Before I knew it, I was running away with my prison officer colleague, biting my lower lip until it bled.
“Officer Lemony! Senior!”
My lungs were pounding like balloons, but suddenly a scream of terror erupted behind me.
“Se—Senior!”
The male officer was sobbing and panting, clearly out of breath. It was evident that he had lost the strength in his legs.
In the movies, usually, the person who helps the injured one dies first.
“…..run fast.”
For about half second, I thought about leaving him behind and running away, but when I saw tears in the man’s eyes, my heart softened, and I quickly took his wrist. The demon chasing us had the characteristic of looking like a giant centipede. I feel like I’ve read about it in a novel before.
“Third-class demon prisoner?”
When I asked, just in case, the man who had followed me laboriously replied.
“Huh, yes, yes…”
My guess was correct.
He was a third-class prisoner, a demon who crawled up the ceiling and accidentally escaped. In the early part of the work, there were two extras that Deon killed, and that was Senafi and me. According to the description in the novel, it was said that it had “iron-like legs in his pupils like a centipede.”
“You have a sword, right? You have to stab both eyes of that monster with sword.”
The man freaked out at my words.
“If I could, would I have run away? Anyway, Senior Lemony. Did you put the shackle on the first-class prisoner?”
This man had no intention of fighting. He was a prison officer, but could he really be that weak? As I helplessly glanced around, I felt something long and thin, like a cane, brush against the back of my boot. It was the antennae of a giant centipede.
I got goosebumps all over my body.
“If you can’t do it, then just run!”
“Aren’t you the senior here? Please solve the problem, whether it’s a first-class prisoner or a Senafi!”
He seemed to have a bulky physique similar to Deon’s but appeared to be more scared than me.
“Why are you doing this? Don’t cling onto me like that!”
“Senior, why are you suddenly using polite language and acting so out of character?”
He finally grabbed me by the shoulder and stuck to me. He seemed to think that he had a place to lean on because he was probably higher in rank.
The problem started from here. In the struggle of pushing and pulling, I ended up tripping on his leg and stumbled to the ground. With a shrieking scream, my sight was spinning toward the ground. When I looked up, the man had already fled far away.
“Senior Lemony, hang in there! I’ll find someone to help right away!”
“Ugh.”
I was speechless, but it wasn’t the time to lament.
I shook with fear as I raised my sword, but suddenly chills ran down my spine from my lower back.
“….?”
Drops of moisture fell from my forehead. As I reached up to touch my head, a thick, cheesy substance stretched and oozed between my fingers.
What is this?
…Saliva?
Suddenly, a loud noise struck the ears, and fear engulfed the whole body. When I came to my senses, a huge shadow was covering my palm and knee, which were supporting the floor.
No way.
…No way.
[Emergency detected. Prison officers and all staff, please calm the prisoners and keep stay in your place. An emergency has been detected…]
In the midst of the stillness, the emergency bell started ringing again.
It was a demon. When I realized there was a huge centipede behind me, I was overcome with a physiological fear and tears streamed down my cheeks. But I had to survive. I had managed to survive until now, and it was too unfair to die because of just a demon.
“Eyes, you have to attack its eyes…”
Ignoring my chattering teeth, I raised my head, and black pupils with no whites filled my field of vision.
“Queaeaek!”
I thrust my sword into the open mouth of the demon, which was still agape. I wasn’t sure if I had pierced its throat, but from the other side, a painful groan escaped. However, I didn’t have time to waste.
The alligator-like jaw muscles of the demon were crushing the dagger into pieces.
“Ah…”
Suddenly, I felt stupid for trying to go down to the first floor with just a sword.
It’s impossible to fight against this kind of opponent.
If I’m going to die like this with just one demon, how could I have thought about running away to the first floor? Am I going to die now? To die in an instant like this?
A hot feeling rose in my eyes. Was it because I felt unfairly treated? Or was it because I was scared?
Or was it because, as a weed, I was resentful of being born with such a limited lifespan?
“Queaeaek—!”
I couldn’t help but cry out at the roar again. But I had to survive. As black blood splattered and covered one of my eyes, I barely managed to pull out my dagger and try to thrust it again into the demon’s eye.
But before I could do anything, a huge and fast object smashed into the demon and me, causing me to fall backward, and something heavy pushed against me.
A sharp fang was stuck in the monster’s eye.
The monster whose eyes were pierced was swung here and there by someone like a herbivore that had been hunted, and then fell somewhere.
It was a black panther.
I couldn’t fully capture the presence of the massive oppression and weight in my vision. However, just by the blood-red pupils shining eerily in the darkness, I knew it was Deon.
As soon as I made eye contact with the divine being, I felt overwhelming tremors and fear at the same time. At that moment, I realized that I had trespassed into an area that I should not dare to enter.
The black shadow cast by the torch approached me. I unconsciously gripped the whistle tightly.
Deon’s footsteps approaching me stopped. However, with a subtle, narrowed gaze, as if I had made a mistake, he glared at me and took another step forward.
He wasn’t trying to help me. It was a slightly uncomfortable gesture of almost handing over his prey to something like senafi.
I need to run away. I need to move my legs and do something.
Since I met a wild beast’s sharp eyes, my entire body had been frozen. I felt like a deer caught in a trap.
Calm down.
It was then that I realized that I was holding onto the whistle.
“Stop right now, Deon.”
As I raised the trembling hand holding the whistle, a sharp scream like a woman’s echoed through the corridor.
With the sound reverberating, the beast’s pupils expanded as if to swallow me whole. The intense red afterimage was so powerful that it made my neck stiffen, as if it had cast a spell on me, rendering me unable to move.
“Anyway, Senior Lemony. Did you put the shackle on the first-class prisoner?”
However, they say that when a person feels the threat of death, they secrete adrenaline.
That was the case for me right now.
When my eyes met with the giant divine beast, the words of the man who ran away quickly crossed my mind. This was it. I searched through my jacket and found something cold and metallic in the back pocket of my pants.
It was a large set of shackles made to fit the size of a black panther’s front paws. It was the thing that the man had mentioned.
In 『The Shackles on My Hands』, a device that allows for romantic encounters in a prison-like setting was placed here and there, as is typical of R-19 novels. It was probably the intention of the original author to use the handcuffs as a prop to increase Deon’s appeal as a prisoner.
However, I had to put the shackles on the black panther to stay alive. When the shackles were raised to the black panther’s forepaws, the holes of the shackles shrank, reducing them to the size of Deon’s human wrists.
The shackle blocked the prisoner’s magic. Therefore, Deon would no longer be able to transform into a black panther.
Although human Deon was still scary, a human was better than a beast.
“…Deon, think of it as a bracelet. Put it in. Sorry.”
I wasn’t in a position to apologize. But under his intense and burning gaze, an apology slipped out of me without realizing it.
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Thank you for reading!
