Chapter 6:The Beastfolk Children

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The room was dark. Within the shadows were boys and girls with nervous looks on their faces, their bodies writhing. There were four girls and three boys, seven children in total. All of them were around my age. They were all naked, all with beast or elf ears. Their hands were bound behind them, and they all shrank from me.

Sweet, innocent girls, naked and cuffed. I never thought the day would come when I would see this. What a precious sight it was—like a young version of Kannon, the Goddess of Mercy, a Buddhist Bodhisattva. This was Eden. No, perhaps it was heaven. Had I finally arrived in heaven? No, I still hadn’t found the green baby yet!

This was no time to get excited. With only one exception, their eyes were all swollen from crying, and several had bluish-black bruises on their faces. My head cooled immediately. They were crying and screaming, so they probably got hit for being noisy.

The same thing had happened when Eris and I were kidnapped. In this world, kidnappers showed no concern for the children they took captive. Ruijerd must have heard them being mercilessly tortured from his spot in the neighboring room. That was why he couldn’t hold himself back.

From a quick glance, they didn’t seem to have been sexually abused. Perhaps because they were still young, or perhaps because it would lower their sale value. Whatever the reason, it was the one mercy amidst this misfortune.

Normally I would look at naked girls and hope they'd allow me one quick grope of their breasts, but right now, my inner pervert had been weakened. I had just decided to become a Wise Old Sage before disembarking from the ship, after all. Sadly, my new profession hadn’t increased my intelligence at all.

Three of the girls were still sobbing, tears running down their cheeks. Two of the boys regarded me with terrified looks on their faces.

The third was crumpled on the floor, barely breathing. I healed him first before removing the shackles from his wrists. His mouth was gagged so tightly I couldn’t get it off. With no other choice, I had to sear it off. It might have burned him a little, but I figured he could handle it. I did the same for the other two boys, healing them and taking off their wrist cuffs.

“U-um…who are…?”

The words were spoken in the Beast God tongue so I was slightly taken aback, but I could speak it, at least. “I came to save you. You three, go act as lookouts at the door. If you see anyone coming, tell me immediately.”

The three of them exchanged nervous glances.

“You’re men, right? You can at least do that, can’t you?”

Their expressions hardened and they nodded, running off toward the door. There was no other meaning to my directions. It wasn’t like I just wanted them out of the way so I could ogle the girls without interruption.

Ruijerd was causing a ruckus above, so probably no one would come this way. Still, we couldn’t take any chances. Before I entered the room, I had set my demon eye to show me one second into the future, but I wouldn’t be able to see anything if I didn’t look behind me.

I proceeded to remove the girls’ shackles. Some were more well-endowed than others, but I didn’t discriminate. I admired them equally as I took off their binds. I also didn’t touch them more than was necessary. I wanted them to think of the Rudeus before them as nothing short of a gentleman.

I also healed their bruises. It was my time to enjo— err, I meantreat their wounds. After all, you had to touch someone to heal them. So there was no other meaning behind it. Yes, one of the girls did have bruises on her chest, but I swear I had no ulterior motives.

This one had a broken rib. That couldn’t be good… And this other had her femur broken. Those men really had been vicious.

The girls hid themselves with their hands as they stood up. They removed their gags themselves. Was it my imagination, or was the strong-willed girl with cat ears glaring at me?

“Thank you for…hic…saving us.” The girl with dog ears thanked me as she shyly hid her body. She spoke in the Beast God tongue, of course.

“Just to make sure, you can all understand me, right?”

When they all nodded, I breathed a sigh of relief. Apparently my Beast God tongue was intelligible.

It seemed Ruijerd still wasn’t done, and I couldn’t lead these children through a slaughterhouse. It might cause them further trauma, so maybe I would just admire this scenery for a little bit longer…or not. I should probably ask them about what happened.

“If you don’t mind me asking, why were you all brought here?”

“Mew?”

I directed my question to the cat-eared girl, the one who seemed the most headstrong. She was the only one among the seven who didn’t have a fresh trail of tears down her cheeks. Instead, her body seemed to be the most battered, broken and bruised. Not quite as bad as what Eris had experienced, but her injuries were still the worst. Second worst was the first boy I helped, but unlike that boy, she still had a spark of life in her eyes.

This girl might be even more strong-willed than Eris. No, she was probably older than Eris had been back then. If they were the same age, there was no way Eris would have lost.

Okay, what the hell was I getting all competitive over?

By the way, this girl’s breasts were the second largest in the group. I could see them getting obnoxiously big as she got older. The number one spot went to the dog-eared girl from just a moment ago. To be so advanced at such a young age…she’d be ridiculously sexy when she got older. Outrageously so.

“We were playing in the forest when a strange man suddenly grabbed us, mew!”

It was a shock to my system. Mew! Her sentence ended in “mew”! A real mew! Completely different from Eris’ imitation. This girl was a real, genuine cat beastfolk. It wasn’t just because she was speaking in Beast God tongue either. She definitely said “mew” at the end there. Amazing. I wanted to grope her breasts.

No. I couldn’t get distracted. “So that means all of you were taken against your will?” I tried to tamp down my emotions and remain cool as I asked.

The girls all nodded. Good. If they’d been sold by struggling parents, or sold themselves because they didn’t have the means to live anymore, then our efforts to free them would have been in vain. Good. We were saving people. I was really glad about that.

“It’s over.” Ruijerd had returned. The mossy green color was gone from his scalp, and a forehead protector was fastened around his head. His clothes were pristine. There wasn’t a single drop of blood on them. I would’ve expected nothing less.

“Good work. Were there any other people held captive?” I asked.

“None.”

“Then let’s find some clothes for these guys. They’ll catch a cold if we leave them like this.”

“Understood,” Ruijerd replied.

“Okay, guys,” I told them. “Please just wait a little bit longer.”

We split up and started searching for suitable clothes. We couldn’t find anything for children. Their clothes must have been stripped off and discarded when their captors abducted them. But what for? I didn’t understand. It was a mystery to me why they left these kids naked. Not having clothes was a serious problem. We couldn’t even take them into a clothing store if they were naked.

“Hm?” I happened to glance out the window, only to see a mountain of dead bodies. Each of them bore a single stab wound, either in the heart or the throat. Seeing something like that would have terrified me long ago, but this time it was reassuring. Still, I didn’t expect there to be so many of them. The smell of blood hung thick. It would lure monsters.

Let’s burn these quickly,I thought, and stepped out of the building.

I stood before the odorous mountain of corpses and created a fireball. A radius of five meters seemed appropriate for this use. In fire magic, increasing the power of a spell also increased its size for some reason. I didn’t want to smell the stench of burnt flesh, though, so I decided to incinerate them in a single blast.

“Whoops!”

The resulting fire was clearly too powerful, because it instantly spread to the building. I quickly turned to water magic to extinguish the flames.

That was close. I almost turned myself into a pyromaniac.

Aw crap, maybe I should have stripped them of their clothes first, I thought. They would probably reek of blood and turn my stomach, but they could still be worn after I washed them.

“Rudeus. I’m finished.”

As I was preoccupied with those thoughts, Ruijerd came out of the building. The children were all with him, all clothed. By clothed, I meant they were all in feathered robes.

“Where did you find clothes like that?”

“I cut the curtains.”

Oho. You are a clever one, I thought.A true font of wisdom.