Day Six
"Is it really all right to just leave her like that?"
The warden, who had been gazing out the window, turned at the question from behind him.
What met his eyes was a young prison guard — still young, possessed of exceptional ability power, and someone who had volunteered for Tartaros after losing his parents to a villain as a child. Because of that, the young guard's hatred for villains ran so deep that even the warden could not fully rein it in.
Even so, that did not give the young guard the right to pass judgment on Tartaros's inmates as he pleased.
"It's fine," the warden said with a faint smile. "However heavy her crimes may be, that doesn't mean she isn't a prisoner of Tartaros, does it?"
But even those words failed to soften the young guard's rigidly set expression. And no wonder.
What a nuisance. Of all people, a girl who committed the crime of devouring hearts has to show up in front of a guard who lost his parents to the Heart Devourer.
The warden muttered to himself. Outwardly the young man before him struck a thoroughly serious pose, but the warden knew better. The moment he looked away for even a second, that young guard would ignore every rule and regulation of this place and tear the girl — Cheon Seo-ah, who even now was wandering the yard with an innocent look on her face — into a thousand pieces.
Of course, the warden had no intention of simply standing by and watching if it came to that.
Meanwhile, as the warden spoke with the young guard, Cheon Seo-ah was touring the Tartaros yard, thoroughly absorbed in sightseeing.
"They call it the worst prison on Earth, but from the outside it doesn't look all that different from any other prison."
In its broad outlines, Tartaros was no different from any other penitentiary. The only real distinctions were that every inmate wore a device somewhere on their body to suppress their ability power, and that every guard watching over those inmates was an ability user of considerable strength. Thanks to that, Tartaros had never once suffered a successful escape in its entire history — this despite countless attempts to spring prisoners from the inside, and just as many schemes to overthrow Tartaros itself.
So Cheon Seo-ah wandered the grounds with curious eyes, taking in every corner of Tartaros and surveying the inmates scattered across the yard, when—
Thud.
"Ah."
She collided with someone and staggered; an affected little whimper, like bad acting, rang in her ears. Her gaze drifted of its own accord toward the person she had run into.
"Are you all right?"
Cheon Seo-ah tilted her head and asked. The man she had bumped into was a prisoner nearly two meters tall with a massive frame — yet somehow this giant was the one groaning after colliding with a girl who stood under a hundred and sixty centimeters and looked frail enough to snap. By any ordinary standard, it made no sense.
The man, for his part, twisted his face into a snarl and bellowed at her question.
"You crazy bitch! You hit someone, the least you do is apologize first, don't you?!"
Even with his ability suppressed, that did nothing to restrain a person's presence — the killing intent and sheer pressure they could project. And so the murderous aura the man unleashed as he shouted at Cheon Seo-ah began to spill out in every direction.
The inmates here, however, were all the worst of the worst — villains who had committed crimes so vile that "the scum of society" barely covered it. None of them flinched at the killing intent of a man whose offenses, by Tartaros standards, barely ranked as a misdemeanor. They simply watched the man and Cheon Seo-ah with idle interest.
"If we look at this rationally, aren't we both at fault? Yes, I failed to notice you — but you saw me and deliberately walked into me anyway."
"What the hell is this bitch babbling about?"
Cheon Seo-ah kept talking as if his killing intent were nothing more than a mild breeze, and the man's face contorted again. At the same time the muscles sheathing his entire body rippled. Once, he had been called the Crusher, a figure of terror to countless people. Born with a monstrous physique and gifted with Iron Skin — an ability that could turn every inch of his flesh into steel — he had, quite literally, crushed every human being who displeased him. He could not use Iron Skin now, thanks to the suppressor, but that did not mean his innate strength had vanished with it.
"You fucking bitch—!"
Whoosh—!
Unable to contain the rage boiling up inside him, the man swung his fist at Cheon Seo-ah. A fist the size of a pot lid cut through the air with a vicious sound, streaking straight for her face.
And yet Cheon Seo-ah did nothing at all. To everyone watching, it looked as though her ability was sealed, her body no stronger than any ordinary girl's, and so she simply could not react in time.
That was not why she failed to move.
Crunch—!
"Gyaaaaah!"
A hideous scream burst from the man's mouth. The fist he had thrust at Cheon Seo-ah was completely shattered, splintered bone punching up through the skin.
The surrounding inmates snickered at the man howling and clutching his ruined hand.
Stupid bastard.
You ought to know where you are before you start throwing your weight around.
Then again, he's only been here a month.
Tsk tsk. This is why the dumb ones always pay with their bodies.
Their mockery washed over the man's ears. Gritting his teeth hard enough to crack them, he somehow swallowed down the pain.
And where was this place, after all? Nowhere but Tartaros — the worst hell currently in existence on Earth. Ordinary prisons forbade fighting among inmates as well, of course, but they rarely enforced the rule with any real rigor; most facilities quietly looked the other way when prisoners settled scores among themselves. Tartaros was different. Here, even the most trivial dispute between inmates was not tolerated. A brawl carried the risk — however remote — of damaging the devices that suppressed their abilities. The suppressors themselves were not so fragile that a petty scuffle would break them. But what if an inmate staged a "petty scuffle" as cover and deliberately tried to smash a suppressor? Even if the odds of success were about the same as winning the American Powerball seven times in a row, Tartaros refused to accept even that worst-case possibility. And once, in the past, an outside villain organization had actually tried to overthrow Tartaros by just that method.
Cheon Seo-ah watched the man with his completely pulverized hand for a moment, then turned and walked away without a word of interest.
"Hmm."
Back in the solitary cell assigned to her, Cheon Seo-ah wore a peculiar little smile.
"This is genuinely entertaining. I never expected an ordinary human would bare killing intent at me."
She murmured to herself. In the cultivation world where she had spent so long, such a thing could never have happened. To cultivators, ordinary mortals were less than insects — bugs you could crush with a flick of the wrist at any time. Mortals knew that all too well, so even if the cultivator opposite them was only at Qi Condensation, they never dared to provoke them. One wrong move and not only they, but their families, friends, acquaintances — everyone connected to them — could be reduced in an instant to raw material for refining a spirit pill.
To have such a rare experience — no, an experience she had never even imagined — here on Earth.
But.
"That doesn't mean I can simply let it go."
Cheon Seo-ah was a cultivator of the Demonic Cultivation Arts. Ordinary cultivators were already sensitive to grudges and debts of gratitude, but those who practiced demonic arts were more sensitive still. The nature of their training meant they accumulated grudges constantly; you never knew when a cultivator bound to you by enmity might come calling. And so, like countless other practitioners of demonic arts, Cheon Seo-ah settled every grudge with absolute finality. Once a grudge was formed — no matter how trivial — she killed its source on the spot, so thoroughly that neither rat nor bird would ever know.
Therefore—
"Hello?"
Flinch—!
Late at night, Cheon Seo-ah tore open space, stepped through, and smiled brightly as she spoke. The place she had appeared was the cell of the man who, only a few hours earlier, had swung a fist at her in the yard and had that fist shattered by a guard.
The man went wide-eyed at the girl who had popped out of empty air with a soft pop. And it was not only the man with the ruined hand. Four inmates shared the cell in total, and every one of them started at Cheon Seo-ah's sudden arrival.
"Y-you! How—!"
"Don't tell me you can use your ability?!"
"Teleportation! That's teleportation, right? Isn't it?!"
The three inmates other than the man with the shattered hand shouted in frantic excitement. They had no idea how this girl could possibly use her ability at all — but if that ability was teleportation, it was a windfall. Handled right, they might escape this hellish place! Hope bloomed in all three pairs of eyes.
Of course.
"Mm, you're being rather loud."
Cheon Seo-ah had not come to break them out. She frowned as if the screeching of insects around her were genuinely unpleasant, and flicked her hand.
In that instant—
Crunch!
The bodies of the inmates still screaming for her to get them out of there were crushed flat into strips of dried meat. There was no scream. They never even registered that they had died.
The man who had watched the entire thing trembled from head to toe.
"S-spare me!"
He had a fairly clear idea why Cheon Seo-ah had come. Someone who could use her ability — an ability that could get her out of this hell — and yet still chose to appear here? There was only one reason for that, wasn't there?
"I—I was wrong earlier! Please! Please just let me live!"
"You want to live?"
Cheon Seo-ah smiled sweetly at the man as he begged for his life through tears and snot. A flicker of hope rose in his terror-stained eyes, and he nodded—
"I don't."
Crunch—.
Cheon Seo-ah refused him flatly. At the same moment, the man, like the three before him, was crushed into a strip of dried meat and died.
"Mmm. That feels better. As expected, once a grudge is formed, settling it promptly is the proper way."
Cheon Seo-ah spoke with a thoroughly refreshed look on her face. Had anyone else seen that expression, they might well have wondered: between the man reduced to jerky and Cheon Seo-ah, was what had passed between them truly something grand enough to be dressed up in a word like "grudge"? But when the person involved herself called it a grudge, no third party had any right to argue.
Having finished everything, Cheon Seo-ah returned to the solitary cell originally assigned to her.
And the moment the morning sun rose, Tartaros descended into chaos.