The Meat Was Gone
City life was convenient. So long as you had enough money, you could cover food, clothing, and shelter without much effort at all. Nature, by comparison, was a pain in the ass. You had to solve most things yourself, which meant life was always busy.
A human body wasn’t lonely. If you looked around, there were always plenty of people who looked just like you. A monster’s body, on the other hand, was lonely. Finding another of my kind was next to impossible. Compared with the life of a human living in a modern city, life as a monster was nothing but inconvenience.
And yet, for some reason, if I counted everything all the way back to my previous life, this moment felt like the most fun I’d ever had. Maybe it was because a life full of drawbacks finally made its strengths visible. I had to walk a long way to find food, I had no proper cooking tools, and I had to sleep in a gloomy cave, but that only gave me a handful of small, simple goals to chase. Once I had goals, my motivation came rushing in. In a word, I’d found the engine that drove my life.
It was different from modern life, where you worked like livestock, got your pay every month in exchange for your labor, and were chewed up like a cog in a machine. I was a free monster. Nobody put their hands on me. This world was a vast blue meadow, and I could walk whatever path I chose.
"MIRACLE MORNING!"
I came to my senses under a blanket that was soft and warm and absurdly comfortable. Beside my head sat a hard wooden rest I used as a pillow substitute—a bit like the wooden pillows you’d find in bathhouses or old inns, and I’d grown rather fond of it.
"All right, let’s do our best today."
I folded up the blanket and got moving. I stepped out of the cave, walked to the riverbank, and plunged into the cold water.
Splash!
I scrubbed the dust and grime off my scales carefully, waiting for my foggy head to clear. After a quick wash by the river, I lay down in a sunny patch and let my body dry. The sky was blue, the sun was bright, and a cool breeze was blowing.
According to Lucy, autumn would be over soon and winter would be coming, but since I’d been living in such a chilly cave, it still felt like spring weather to me.
"Nice weather."
The words slipped out before I could stop them.
Once I’d dried off enough, I got back to my feet. All right, then. What should I do today?
I already had plenty of food. I’d gathered edible fruit and stored it away along with meat from the giant boar. The cave I lived in stayed cold. If even I, who didn’t usually feel the cold much, thought so, then by human standards this place must have been freezing.
Deep inside the cave, frost had formed. It was the perfect place to store and age food. In other words, I was using the back of the cave like a refrigerator. The only problem was that I had nothing to put the food in, so today I meant to make some containers. I’d already made a chopping board, after all. With enough effort, this shouldn’t be too hard.
I picked up one of the logs stacked near the river. The wood I’d taken from the forest where I’d first seen the elf was incredibly useful. It didn’t rot like ordinary wood, and it could also be used to make fire. On top of that, it had given me a chopping board, a pillow, and now it was going to give me containers too. It was a true giving tree.
I worked the log with gratitude. Making a storage container from it was simple enough: break it with brute strength, carve it out with my claws, and scrape the surface smooth. My claws were sharper than saws and harder than iron.
Hollowing out the square-cut log and making space inside for the contents wasn’t difficult at all. Because my hands were my own fingers rather than tools, I could handle the work with far more precision. The shape slowly started looking convincing, and my confidence rose with it.
I even made a lid to go on top, then lifted the finished piece and turned it over in my hands.
"I could sell this."
It looked rough around the edges, but as long as it was sturdy and did the job, that was enough. I made about five of them, then stacked my things neatly into a tower and picked them up carefully before heading back to the cave.
The cave was spacious enough that I could live there comfortably even if I grew several times larger. It stank faintly of old earth, and sunlight barely reached inside, so it wasn’t exactly a pleasant place to live. But at the moment it was the only place I had to sleep, so I was living with the resigned spirit of some poor young man crammed into a no-frills monthly boarding room.
Still, it had its merits. The entrance was hidden by trees and grass, so the inside wasn’t easy to spot, and there wasn’t even a common insect around. It was a pleasant place to sleep. Besides, it even had a natural refrigerator Lucy’s house didn’t.
After I woke up the first time and escaped here from the full moon that kept stirring me up, it had probably been a stroke of luck.
"Ahhh, so this is what they mean by a full-option isekai life…?"
Wait.
Why the hell was one chunk of meat missing?
I’d already processed the meat and split it up. It had come out to five pieces. I’d eaten three, so there should’ve been two left. But there was only one.
It had definitely been two yesterday, and there was no way I’d eaten it in my sleep.
And there wasn’t a single living thing around the cave except me…
Shit, was there a ghost in here or something?
A chill ran down my spine.
I packed the meat and fruit neatly into the container and sealed the lid. Then I narrowed my eyes and roared at the top of my lungs.
"If you’ve got any sense, come out now. I’m giving you five seconds. Five, four, three, two, one. You ghosts hiding in there—what, you think I can’t see you? Get the hell out of my house before I exorcise you!"
Hah. The exorcism ritual had been a success.
When you got scared, sometimes you just had to shout like that. It was the best way to calm down. I must’ve made a mistake somewhere. Meat didn’t have legs, after all.
Still, it was unsettling, so I decided I’d hole up in the cave today.
"Guess I’ll sharpen the kitchen knife while I’m at it."
I took up the kitchen knife and ground it against a whetstone.
Satania clapped a hand over her mouth.
Hidden away, she watched the enraged monster bellowing in fury, and squeezed her eyes shut.
W-w-w-what do I do…?
Satania had once been the owner of this cave. Her true identity was a demon—a being different from the Ains, humans, and monsters. She was a resident of the other world known as Gehenna, a powerful race capable of bringing about miracles in exchange for blood and life.
Humans and Ains believed demons were the same sort of creatures as monsters, but the truth was different. Demons, like humans and Ains, were intelligent beings created by the gods, beings with human hearts. Demons were afraid too. Monsters were afraid too. There was no such thing as a living creature without fear.
Who wouldn’t be terrified when a black-scaled dragon flew into a rage after realizing its meat was missing?
She had grown sick and tired of the empty, monotonous life in a hollowed-out hell, so she had come down to the human world. After that, she’d hidden among humans, caused one trouble after another, endured and survived them all, and then, when her identity as a demon had finally been exposed, she’d fled to the Great Forest and been living quietly in hiding ever since.
No matter what hardships or ordeals she suffered in the human world, she had always sworn she’d never regret leaving the boredom of hell behind.
And now she was pounding the ground in regret.
If she’d known things would turn out like this, she’d have stayed quietly in hell…
I should’ve run away sooner…
Unlike ordinary living creatures, demons had a very strange sleep cycle. They could live for years without sleeping and still remain fresh as ever, but once they fell asleep, they tended to sink into a deep slumber for at least a month.
After fleeing human eyes and making it to the Great Forest, Satania had settled in this cave. Nestled in a blanket and pillow stolen from some rich house, she’d thought it was safe enough here and slept like a log. When she came to, she’d ended up stuck in an awkward cohabitation with an unknown monster.
Satania had woken up back when Behemoth had shut himself in the cave for a week, refusing to accept reality. When she realized he still wasn’t leaving, she gave up on escaping too and retreated to the deepest part of the cave.
But if things stayed like this, she’d either freeze to death, get eaten alive, or starve to death. Dead was dead either way.
So she’d gathered her courage and ventured as far as the area Behemoth used as a refrigerator. In the end, she’d lost to her appetite and was stuffing herself with the meat in front of her when Behemoth returned to the cave.
And this was what had happened.
Satania wasn’t the kind of person who lost easily in a fight, no matter where she went. She could toy with most imperial mages with nothing more than magic, and even the monsters in the Great Forest that thought themselves hot stuff were still a cut below her. Satania knew she was strong. She’d milked plenty of recognition out of that back in the Empire.
But just as a normal human couldn’t beat a tiger, even a strong demon like Satania was nothing more than a delicious lunch in front of Behemoth.
He had dropped to the floor and seemed to be searching for something. In his hand was something chillingly large—a huge kitchen knife.
Looking at the monster, Satania thought, Can I… can I really get out of here alive?
All she could do was stare back with tears brimming in her eyes.