Chapter 32 - Cooling Gas

Chapter 32: 32 - Cooling Gas

"What did you do to my mate?" Kurus hissed, noticing the gag around my mouth had been removed.

"I was just checking whether she had been fiddling with the weights," Dickhead lied through his teeth, gesturing at the restraints around my wrists and ankles. "The gravitational fields around them need recharging every seven days. Things always get messy when Precious decides to take matters into her own hands, that’s why I would rather be sure than sorry."

Barely understanding what he was speaking about, Kurus gave Dickhead a second look. "How will you enter Beast Kingdom? You are cold-blooded. You have no mating bond with my mate either."

"I always have my way." Dickhead gave way for Kurus to examine me more closely, knowing the snake beastman didn’t trust him as much as he wished him to, "The world I came from was also inhabited by beastmen, but the balance between females and males was reversed. Females had to fight among each other for the right to breed."

"Is my mate from there too?" Noodle asked.

"No." Vick took that as his cue to end the conversation and retire for the night. He had set up his bedroll a short distance away, watching as Kurus took his place beside me.

My peripheral vision was good enough to see what was happening around me despite keeping my gaze at the sky.

Dickhead had a pocket dimension as well, and it seemed to be much larger than Noodle’s. Both Noodle and the eagle called him cold-blooded, which made me suspicious. Dickhead’s words just now sealed the truth... I had no idea my ex was a beastman as well. I didn’t remember his body having any signs of his rank either.

But one thing was certain: it was above Kurus’s royal rank. An apex? The highest rank of beastmen, the ones who were practically walking weapons of mass destruction? Most likely.

I thought he was one of father’s experiments. Dickhead never talked about his past, and I never bothered to ask. Falling for your father’s experiment seemed like the most pathetic thing to do, so at least I could rest easy knowing I had not been attracted to a test subject.

"I got you some snake meat, mate." Kurus dangled a lizard with its limbs cut off in front of my face. As if that the missing limbs would turn it into a snake. "It is fresh. You haven’t eaten anything."

He was trying to appeal to my tastes as he pierced the "snake" on a stick. He propped it near the embers where the heat would slowly cook its flesh. With my washed clothes bundled on his shoulder (my worn shirt, pants caked with dried scorpion blood, my underwear, and the stolen cloak), Kurus went to hang them to dry on a low branch.

I noticed he hated dirt and unclean things, his nostrils flaring every time I got dirty. He needed river breaks often and took another swim after doing the laundry, but it seemed to do nothing to improve his mood this time. The more he thought, the darker his aura became, until he was no better than the shadows in the forest.

He returned to my side and tried to give me water to drink. A leaf shaped like a bowl was held to my lips. "Drink, mate. Or you will die."

The water spilled down my chin, soaking my shirt and the ground beneath me.

Kurus gave Dickhead an accusing glare, as if he had something to do with my current state. "How long will the serum last? When will she respond again? She won’t eat. She won’t drink. She doesn’t even excrete waste." His tail swished, hissing angrily. "You said it was to calm her down, not to make her worse."

"Relax. She can move, eat, drink, and also excrete waste. It’s just her way of punishment us," Dickhead said, not even bothering to open his eyes. "It might last for a day or even weeks...season...s."

"Seasons? I can’t wait that long. Turn mate back to normal." Noodle’s eyes rounded as he looked at me. "Breeding season is coming... My body will demand to reproduce, so I need to get cooling gas before my next breeding heat."

I turned my head slightly toward him, giving him a sliver of attention. He had been suppressing it for fifty or so years, as he claimed, and I wondered how.

Dickhead seemed curious as well, "Cooling gas?"

Noodle explained how cooling gas was a special gas that prevented beastmen from going into heat. It could only be produced by rare beasts called "Gasums". Their fur was blue, and they could be identified by the small, red gas canisters they carry. They usually produced this gas to defend themselves against predators by releasing it in an area.

The side effect of the gas was that it reduced all desires, killed instincts, and made the one who inhaled it into a peaceful creature. Gasums live near the most dangerous areas of the forest, often surrounded by primals (large, highly aggressive beasts).

Kurus sat next to me, his body casting a shadow over mine as he tried to block the cold wind with his back. "I can’t go with her when she is like this. It’s too dangerous."

What a way to say: I’m not fucking you; I would rather risk my life to get some cooling gas than stick my dick in you. It felt like a slap in the face, but the pain was dulled by the fact that I didn’t want to be fucked by him either.

"You can leave her in my care and go alone," Dickhead suggested, receiving a ’another fool who thinks I will leave my mate’s side’ look from Noodle.

"Once she starts talking again, I will take her with me to get the cooling gas." Kurus picked up the meatstick and hovered it in front of my nose.

The smell of cooked meat wafted into my nostrils, but I kept my lips sealed.

"Don’t you have a mate now? Why would you need a cooling gas?" Vick asked, finding Kurus’s obsession with feeding me and keeping me clean a good time to poke at him.

"She is my mate. Only one." Kurus snapped, clearly irritated by the question. "I don’t want to breed her."

"Why?" Dickhead asked.

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