“What.”
Only then did focus return to his eyes. He always smelled of alcohol, but today it was particularly foul.
He looked like someone who had been drinking from dawn straight through to morning. That guess was probably not far off.
The two of them simply looked at each other in silence for a moment.
Ranok looked at the bottle still clutched in his hand.
Visibly expensive liquor. True to his notorious reputation for pouring every coin he earned solely into drink, expensive bottles rolling across the floor of his home was a common sight.
For someone who drank that heavily, Casioth’s body looked flawless on the surface.
The muscle supporting his sturdy frame appeared solid at a glance, and his handsome face showed none of the redness that comes from alcohol the body can’t process.
But that didn’t mean excessive drinking wasn’t destroying him from the inside.
That was simply his youth and his body — trained to a degree that challenged the limits of humanity — holding up under the strain. But the moment it exceeded those limits, it would come crashing down all at once, like a dam giving way.
Ranok sighed. He would have preferred to leave it alone if at all possible — but no matter how he looked at it, this had gone too far.
“Stop drinking.”
However wide the room was, it was still just a room. Having made up his mind in an instant, Ranok crossed directly to Casioth and snatched the bottle from his hand.
“……?”
Casioth, stripped of his drink in a single motion, looked blankly back and forth between his empty hand and Ranok’s face.
No matter how many times Ranok had entered the bedroom before now, he’d always been thrown out at the threshold — he had never made it this deep inside.
Under the pretense of respecting some kind of boundary, Ranok had limited himself to once a day, and always stayed at the doorway — but now that he had suddenly crossed that line without warning, Casioth wore the face of someone who didn’t know how to react, blankly staring for a long moment.
But he caught up to the situation quickly, and his expression twisted into a sharp scowl.
“……Prince, I may be lowborn, but I’m not stupid.”
Before Ranok could even ask what?, Casioth continued.
“I have a rough idea why you’ve decided to put yourself under my roof.”
“You do?”
“Yeah. Honestly, what kind of lunatic would barge into my place after hearing my reputation. I may have had people calling me the next Sword Saint once upon a time, didn’t I.”
“……Ah.”
Ranok quickly caught on to what Casioth had misunderstood.
In short, Casioth currently believed that Ranok’s decision to put himself under his care wasn’t simply about finding a place to stay — but rather a choice to protect himself from potential external threats.
No — he was certain of it.
In truth, external threats didn’t feel like threats to Ranok at all — but from the perspective of someone who couldn’t possibly imagine that the former Second-in-Command of the Demon Clan was living inside this seemingly helpless prince, that was the most rational conclusion one could draw.
“So for a while, I’d decided to just leave you be, no matter what you got up to.”
Casioth said that and slowly rose from his chair.
Ranok still wasn’t quite used to Casioth naturally looking down at him with that door-panel of a frame.
Surely our kid wasn’t this tall — there’s clearly a difference of years…… he was thinking — but a hand that gripped his shoulder firmly forced him to stop.
“……As long as you don’t cross the line.”
In that instant, Ranok’s field of vision flipped.
Thud.
Oh.
Ranok registered belatedly that his body had somehow ended up lying on Casioth’s bed.
In an instant, a man of massive build filled his entire field of vision. The man who had pinned Ranok beneath him and taken the upper hand looked down at him with unhurried ease.
“Prince, I was lowborn — the kind that people like you wouldn’t spare a glance.”
Of course, someone like the prince would have grown up sheltered, with no knowledge of that. The voice carrying those words held not a single trace of warmth.
“In that world, the weak got devoured on the spot. The place was full of people who didn’t care whether it was a woman or a man, as long as they were worth having.”
Especially me — I was decent-looking enough that there were plenty who came after me. I half-killed all of them, obviously. The face that surfaced at those memories looked exactly like someone dredging up scenes they found utterly revolting.
“That world — you’d have no idea, would you, Prince.”
Of course not. Not Ranok, and certainly not Milano Mortiel, who had been raised in comfort and knew nothing of that life.
“Shall I show you?”
Casioth’s face did something rare — it almost smiled. A strikingly handsome man straddling you and saying something like that — wouldn’t anyone, man or woman, feel at least one beat of their heart quicken?
Of course, to Ranok, it was plain as day that Casioth’s eyes held not even a trace of arousal.
Casioth, looking down at him, was probably seeing the same thing reflected back.
For two grown adults lying together on a bed, the air between them was remarkably dry.
“……”
Ranok’s heart, looking up at Casioth, was not pounding — it was perfectly still.
His mind was busy calculating why someone who had done nothing but throw him out and snap at him would suddenly be pulling something like this.
It wasn’t that Ranok hadn’t understood what Casioth was saying. Not just from his words moments ago — the hand casually grazing down Ranok’s torso made it impossible not to grasp what he meant by this.
The problem was that the touch was thoroughly awkward.
“Hm? What do you think.”
It’s not like he’s suddenly attracted to me, Ranok was coolly reading the situation when Casioth’s prompting voice drew a small sigh out of him.
If he wanted to play along, there was nothing stopping him.
But the issue was that Ranok hadn’t yet fully calculated exactly what the other person wanted out of this.
Was it a joke? It didn’t seem like his personality was suited to that kind of joke.
……This looked more like a threat, if anything.
But the other party was none other than Ranok. He had not lived so short a life as to be rattled by something like this.
Above all, he was someone who knew perfectly well that Casioth, despite carrying on as though he’d had his fair share of rough experience in his youth, had absolutely none of that kind of experience whatsoever.
Does he think an ignorant prince, faced with the threat of being pinned down by a man, will panic and run?
Well — whether he actually intended to go through with it or not — if he was going to use it as a threat, wasn’t this too clumsy a way to go about it?
Ranok sighed quietly.
“If you’re going to pin someone down——”
Ranok opened his mouth and, shifting the knee that had been vaguely bent, pressed it firmly against Casioth’s groin.
“You should’ve made them spread their legs first.”
“……!”
At that, Casioth went rigid as a statue.
As though he had been dealt a perfect counterattack by someone he had never once imagined would fight back — completely neutralized, like a grazing animal laid out before a predator.
“You should’ve pushed between my legs.”
If you were going to pin someone down, naturally you’d push between their legs — but Casioth was currently just straddling Ranok rather awkwardly on top. Classic lack of experience.
Ranok looked at the man who had climbed on top of him claiming to be a threat without even covering the basics, and tilted his head.
“It’s not as though you’re a virgin or anything……”
Ranok trailed off mid-sentence. It was because he finally took in Casioth — who had gone completely still and drained of color.
Hm?
Ranok lifted his knee away from where he’d been pressing firmly against Casioth’s groin.
Even after the solid pressure was gone, Casioth remained frozen as though his most vital point were still being held in an iron grip.
“Oh. Right.”
At that moment, Ranok recalled something.
Something he had thought of when he first heard Casioth’s reputation from Dain.
It seemed the rumors were fairly grounded in fact after all. The reason he had no interest in women. The reason that, with a face like that, his history with women was suspiciously spotless.
The talk of him being a sodomite — or impotent.
In this moment, Ranok understood the truth behind those rumors.
That talk was wrong. Casioth Mordian was not a sodomite-or-impotent — he was a sodomite and impotent at the same time.
By pinning Ranok down, he had proven himself a sodomite — and by giving off the unmistakably awkward air of inexperience, he had revealed his lack of it.
If there hadn’t been someone in particular he’d had feelings for, there was no reason to have held onto his virginity all the way to this age — which meant Casioth had probably……
Ranok found himself looking at Casioth with something close to pity before he even realized it.
“Casioth, that might just be from drinking too much.”
Having arrived at this grand realization, Ranok offered an awkward attempt at consolation.
“Excessive drinking makes it difficult to get an erection. Did you know that?”
It was true. And for someone like Casioth, whose very breath carried the scent of liquor, wasn’t it only natural?
No matter how young, no matter how well-trained the body — there was no stopping the alcohol from killing what was below.
But at Ranok’s consolation, Casioth’s face grew increasingly dark and ashen — before flushing a vivid, burning red.
“Fuck!”
It was the first time that face — which had never once reddened no matter how much he drank — had gone truly scarlet.
Casioth grabbed Ranok by the collar.
And with tremendous force, hauled him upright — then dragged him by the scruff toward the door.
“Get out!”
He flung Ranok out through the door like a pile of laundry being hurled aside — and then slammed it shut with every ounce of force Ranok had ever seen from him.
