The Demon (2)
I reached out to Judak and asked him about demons.
"Uh... how am I supposed to explain this?"
Watching the replies pop up one after another on my screen, I paused, fingers frozen over the keyboard. The cursor blinked alone in the empty input box as I sank into a brief deliberation. I had no idea how to explain it. Was I really supposed to tell him that Pet had beaten a cat into submission, dragged it home, and claimed the thing was a demon? Whether he'd even believe it was questionable, but beyond that, I still didn't know what a demon actually was. In hindsight, panicking and firing off a message to Judak without thinking it through might have been a mistake.
With the conversation ended, I let out a short sigh of relief.
"Phew. Smoothly dodged that one."
It wasn't as if I'd told a complete lie, after all. Even I couldn't say for certain that the black cat was really the demon I was imagining. To put it bluntly — a genuine demon, subdued by Pet? Then how exactly would that be any different from a stray cat mutant with a horn on its forehead? Granted, a strangely sinister, otherworldly aura had radiated from the creature's body. But I'd felt that same kind of aura from Pet often enough that pinning the thing's identity on its aura alone was a stretch.
"Hey! You done washing it?"
When I hollered at the closed bathroom door, Pet's face poked out through the gap, just its head peeking through. It shook its head side to side. No.
"How long does it take to wash one cat?"
I grumbled as I got to my feet. I couldn't smell a thing myself, but Pet had been horrified, insisting the thing reeked. Now that it was inside the house, a good scrubbing could hardly hurt. Pet had volunteered to do the washing before I could ask, so I'd left the job to it — but apparently things weren't going smoothly at all.
Then a thought brushed through my mind and stopped me mid-step. Wait. There was no way Pet knew how to wash anything properly. Being a spirit at its core, it hardly ever got dirty or smelly to begin with. On the rare occasions a bath was needed, I had always been the one doing the scrubbing.
"Please tell me you at least know which shampoo to—"
Uneasy, I flung open the bathroom door and stepped inside — and promptly shut my mouth.
"...What are you doing?"
The bathtub was filled to the brim with water. Pet clutched a single hind leg of the unconscious black cat in both hands, endlessly repeating the motion of dipping it into the water and pulling it back out.
The trouble here was that Pet was simply too small. Its arms weren't long enough to lift the cat clear of the tub, so even when it managed to raise the cat above the surface, half of Pet's own face was submerged. An unintentional water-torture scene. To be fair, the torture victim was unconscious, and the torturer bore no shred of malice.
'If this were an ordinary stray, it would've crossed the river of the dead long ago — and then some...?'
I walked over to Pet, which was squeaking with effort as it bobbed the cat's hind leg up and down, and plucked the limp leg up out of its hands. The creature was astonishingly light. Definitely no ordinary beast, then. I gently pressed my ear between the wet fur near its heart. Thankfully, a faint but steady heartbeat reached me. In other words, I had just averted the great catastrophe of Pet brewing a pot of cat stew.
"Is it really a demon?"
It was breathing, but it looked far from well. I set the soaked cat down on the bathroom tiles and concentrated energy into my fingertips. I would feed it Nutrients. I'd tried it once before, on a whim, injecting some into leftover bean sprouts from a ramen dinner — with Nutrients hardly in short supply, it was a luxury I could afford. I still remembered how the half-dead sprouts had eerily regained their vigor and stiffened back to life. And if the alien energies clashed and something went wrong, I could simply cut the infusion and retract it.
Warily, I channeled Nutrients into the cat's body.
At once, the unconscious black cat floated up into the air and began to glitter with light.
"???"
Thump.
I reflexively severed the flow. The instant the Nutrients stopped, the cat flopped powerlessly back to the floor. I reached my finger out and fed it again — it glowed and floated up. Cut the flow. Down it went. Fed it. Glow, float. Cut. Drop.
I was several rounds deeper into this fascinating little experiment when—
The cat sprawled across the floor abruptly snapped its eyes open and shrieked.
"AAAGH!"
Startled by the unexpected sound, I staggered backward in fright. The bathroom filled with a shriek like grinding metal.
—!!
With a perfectly calm expression, Pet hefted a weapon far larger than its own body and trained it on the cat. Armament that suited its small, soft frame not at all — and yet, in this one moment, it was the most reassuring sight in the world. Before I knew it, I had hidden myself behind Pet. It felt completely natural.
"Ah."
By the time my reason returned and I registered my own stance, it was far too late. There I was, crouched behind the back of a tiny thing that didn't even reach my knees. The composition was devastating.
Pet, evidently equally dumbfounded, quietly lowered the club it had been holding and turned to look at me. Its expression said, 'No, seriously? That scared you?'
"..."
Unable to meet Pet's eyes, I averted my gaze. Even without a mirror, I could feel my face burning red in real time.
Before long, the commotion that had filled the bathroom died down. This whole fiasco had been Pet's fault to begin with. There it had been, torturing a perfectly innocent(?) demon.
'You don't breathe yourself, so you just assume nobody else needs to breathe, huh.'
I made a point of blaming Pet to rationalize my own behavior. If I didn't, I could tell my self-esteem wouldn't survive it.
Pet, as if to say it understood, quietly patted my ankle from below. That comfort made me feel even more pathetic.
"Haah..."
I let out a familiar sigh. For the record, spirits like Pet don't breathe — not in any biological sense. It would sometimes puff out its chest and mimic breathing, but that wasn't real respiration. According to the report on spirits Judak had sent me a while back, it was something like playing a character — a bit of cosplay. Not entirely pointless eccentricity, either: imitating the behavior of other living things apparently helped a spirit form an independent sense of self, or something along those lines. As a postscript, the report noted that spirits being unable to speak — and not particularly wanting to — probably fell along the same lines.
"So what's wrong with you, then?"
I asked the black cat, which at some point had flattened itself into the corner of the bathroom. For all that dramatic glowing earlier, it was frozen stiff, prostrate as though paying homage to an emperor.
"Uh... yeah. Sure."
I nodded, nonplussed. Were demons all in the habit of groveling to this extreme?
"To be granted an audience with Your Gracious self, I cannot contain my rapture. That I should cross the boundless otherworld and arrive in this place is chance, and yet no less than destiny. This, too, must be the fervent wish of the supreme divine spirit. This humble one's name is 'Baphomet.' O most exalted of spirits, who bearest up heaven and earth."
—?
Pet stared dead at the demon, its expression asking, 'What in the world was that supposed to be?'
I was every bit as dumbfounded, but I quickly forced myself to accept it — so this was just how demons talked, huh? Come to think of it, there was no guarantee a real demon would match my imagination. Take the classic images: a clean-cut elite con artist in a crisp suit purring, "Fufu, thank you for your patronage, dear mark," or an arrogant demon king bellowing, "You lowly humans!"
Pet was shooting me a helpless glance, as if to ask, 'So how am I supposed to react to this?'
'Ahem. I just need to match the tone, right? I'm clearly the superior party here.'
I cleared my throat once and conjured the most solemn voice I could manage. Thank goodness my hobby of studying Sino-Korean vocabulary and archaic words had come in handy.
"I, too, am most gratified to make thy acquaintance... I-I shall gladly welcome thy visit~"
'Is this how you do it?'
—????????
This time Pet's face flooded with disbelief. The look said: 'Who even are you? How can you spout all these smug, high-and-mighty lines that basically brag, I'm this smart, by the way?' It even seriously wondered, 'What is this? When did the loser of a master I know get swapped out?'
That was a bit too cheeky, so I gave it a knuckle rap. Calling me a loser, of all things.
"Ooooh! Truly my joy overflows, O supreme and peerless one. I humbly dare to look up and ask after the honored name of Your Holiness."
"...My name is Lim Hanyul~"
'Ahem. This is more cringe-inducing than I expected...'
Even as the words left my mouth, shame crept over me.
"A true name most befitting the majestic presence of Your Holiness. I shall carve it into my very bones and never, ever forget it."
"...."
When I'd studied this stuff and written it out with a brush, I'd never felt this way — but saying it out loud was another matter. And maybe it would've been different if my counterpart were a dignified middle-aged man or a stately old scholar; as it was, I was having this conversation with a stray cat flattened against the bathroom tile, and it was starting to grate on me. If this went on much longer, my clenched molars were going to crumble first.
Using Pet beside me as my excuse, I made the demon an offer.
"Ah— our s-servant cannot follow our discourse~ Lower thy words and speak plainly~"
"I am but overwhelmed by Your Holiness's mercy, vast as the sea. I shall heed your instruction."
Pet quietly gave me a thumbs-up. Truthfully, I was the more grateful one.
"I thank you for your mercy in sparing my life and granting me your true name. I will repay this debt someday. Please, permit me the honor of repaying you."
"...?"
I nearly nodded before suddenly doubting my own ears. 'Someday?' Didn't that mean that for the time being, it planned to lick its lips clean and bolt off somewhere?
Whether it noticed my eyes narrowing, Baphomet averted its gaze and clicked its tongue, very softly.
Tsk.
Sneaky in a way only a demon could be, huh?
Pet, arms crossed beside me, shook its head in disgust. It shot the demon a glare, as if to say it had seen through the thing way back when it was spouting gibberish no one could understand.
For what it was worth, I was pretty sure Pet's whole act was a concept too.
Looking back and forth between the black cat crouched on the bathroom floor and the spirit standing beside it, I muttered under my breath.
'Why is it that everyone around me turns out to be exactly this kind of creature?'