I drank a delicious cup of black tea while I was thinking about that, half-joking, half-serious. Since I got sweaty during training, I stood up to take a shower.

Clack.

“Sorry for the intrusion.”

If you’re sorry then just leave.

I didn’t say it out loud since there was no one in this world who knew about social etiquettes, so I silently turned to the voice.

“Can’t you just enter through the door?”

“No one told me I can’t go through the window.”

He wasn’t wrong.

That surprised me.

Satisfied with my lack of retort, the owner of the voice closed the huge window down from the ceiling and walked in an easygoing manner. He was a brazen man. I didn’t recognize him.

He had short, smooth, well-groomed silver hair and pointed, amethyst eyes. He had a tall figure and wore something like a black military uniform.

Goat-like horns stretching out from the back of his ears; a long silver tail like a lizard’s with beautiful scales springing out from his tailbone – these indicated that the man was a demon.

Without the intention of backing away, the man just silently waited for me to approach him, and then curiously looked at me when I was close enough to touch him.

Mm, good-looking guys were even more handsome up close. Demons were really blasphemous creatures.

“Are you the Demon Lord’s treasured food? You smell good, are you injured?”

“Really? That’s because I was bitten just a while ago. I just wanted to ask… can you still come back even if you go to the dragon’s lair naked?”

“I’m a demon of Hydrod, a high-ranking species of dragons, so I could nap there naked and still remain unscathed.”

I see. I realized that he was someone who could accidentally turn me to dust, so I decided not to go against him. I didn’t want to become a victim of natural selection.

“I’m Gardvine. You can call me Gard.”

“I’m Shal. Did you need something?”

“Nah. There’s been a rumor in the castle that the demon lord started to keep a hero, so I thought I’d take a peek.”

Gard examined me without reservation. So, he was just an onlooker.

It wasn’t very pleasing to be stuck with a man taller than myself.

Gard nodded after observing me as much as he wanted to, then reached for my neck and stroked it.

His long nails touched me and my body unconsciously stiffened, but he seemed to be careful not to hurt me.

“I don’t see any marks, are you a blood-sucking virgin?”

“N…o… It’s on my fingers… I always tell him to drink my blood without holding back but he gets very mad.”

“Pfft! Seriously? Did you really say, that? Hahaha!”

Gard took his hand off me and started laughing with amusement. What’s so funny? I don’t understand it at all.

Gard had been laughing at me for some time when his smile warped into a grin, as I had no idea what was going on and let out a question mark. He then laughingly told me:

“The demon lord, see, is from a demon race called the Kudlakion; to put it simply, they are huge, black, sort of foolish, strong wolfish demons. They can also be called vampires. They’re rare, you know~ Demon lords are high-ranking demons, despite the fact that even the monsters hardly come across them.”

“In the human realm, we rarely see the demon themselves… If they’re also rare in here, then they’re rather substantial. I guess they’re like a secret SSR character from gacha that’s only available for a limited time, with no probability increase.”

“Gacha? I don’t get it. But yeah, their favorite food is a human’s lifeblood. Do you follow?”

“Right. The only reason why he didn’t kill me even though I was an enemy, was to become his delicious dinner. But even though they don’t show up to humans, their favorite food is lifeblood, huh.”

“Heheh. Ah, that’s just to avoid inciting discord1Literally ‘honne and tatemae’ where ‘honne’ means ‘one’s real intentions’ and ‘tatemae’ means ‘one’s behavior in public’. Despite loving human blood (honne), they don’t show up to them (tatemae). I assume it’s to avoid war, discords, etc.… Anyway, my point is, asking a Kudlakion to suck your blood is like begging them to have sex with you.”

“…………”

BANG! A shock came through me as if I was struck by lightning.

‘Heheh.’ Gard laughed at me again as I had gone stiff, but I was at loss for words.

…I understood what Azel meant by calling me a perverted hero.

He probably thought that I was some kind of shameless guy who kept on asking someone of the same gender to hold me.

Exposing my neck and saying something like that on our first meeting, what a degenerate. Asking to be sucked to death was equivalent to having a desire to die during sex.

I gently moved my hands and held my head in silence. I won’t say anything anymore. I’ll make sure that I won’t say such a thing ever again.

“By the way, the common invitation phrase of Hydrods is ‘poison me’. If someone says something like ‘I want to taste your poison’, I’ll welcome them completely. It’s okay if you say it too, you know?”

“How can the seduction of demons be so extreme?!”

I thought I was being extremely decent as I pushed Gard away, who was urging me, saying ‘Come on, say it. Say it now.’ and yelled at him.

From the country I came from, saying “There’s no one home tonight.” was considered a bold invitation. Their extreme invitation phrase had a different kind of principle from normal races.

I had decided to clear up the misunderstanding next time I meet with Azel.

Gard had already been clinging on to me as he pleased without regard to my feelings full of regret and shame. Even when he finally held me up in his arms and licked around my neckline, I couldn’t bring myself to care. Well, humans were probably quite the delicacy for the demons, but even so, he was licking too much.

“You smell great after all that sweat and blood. I’m not the bloodsucking type, but I can tell that it looks delicious.”

“Stop, it tickles.”

“Hmm… Shouldn’t you resist other than with your mouth?”

Though I wasn’t struggling despite being held in his arms, I honestly told him to stop and Gard looked at me with a concerned face as though he was looking at a child. Don’t make that face.

But, this mentality of letting sleeping dogs lie was a weakness that I was well aware of.

Sensing my discomfort, Gard put me down and stroked my head with a fatherly face, saying ‘There, there.’

“Don’t be like that. Bad demons will get to you in no time. First of all, drive out those who come in through your window right away. Except for me though.”

“Are you even considered okay?”

“I’ll be wherever and whenever I want.”

“Heheh.” The way he laughed and the words he spat out showed an arrogant image, but I thought that perhaps this guy was just naturally doing things at his own pace. That was what I learned in this short time.

“Hah,” I let out a laugh mixed with a sigh, grabbed the hand roughly stroking my head and pulled it off me.

“Hm?”

I looked up at Gard who tilted his head on one side and gave him a peace sign.

“It’s resistance.”

“Seriously?”

His perplexed face was a bit cute.

It was amusing, so I flicked my finger to his forehead as a counterattack or something, but Gard didn’t even move an inch.

And his head was hard. My finger hurt a bit. So tough.

Grab.

“Whoa,”

However, he immediately went on the offensive, and tragically lifted me up. He placed his hands on my sides like how you’d hold a child and swung me around.

“Aha! That’s hilarious! You’re so fun!”

Whoosh, whoosh! Gard spun relentlessly in very high spirits, but I was feeling very uncomfortable. Stop. My internal organs.

“Try to resist this one~”

“Guh, oghu, ubueh–”

More importantly. My internal organs.

I somehow tried to utter a word as I endured the feeling that my lower body will be torn off and spatter somewhere; but this simple-minded centrifugal force didn’t listen to me at all. And I couldn’t talk.

I don’t want to know how fast a high-ranking demon could float and spin, and I don’t ever have any plans of knowing it…!

It wasn’t until sometime later that Gard eventually released me, when he muttered, “Crap, I feel nauseated.”

I thought I was going to die for the second time in the demon lord’s castle. I had enough.