This Beast-Tamer is a Little Strange

“Lord Wrath,” the baby’s head said from inside the toad’s mouth, voice deep and measured, “you have been summoned by the Council.”

The stone beneath Asmodeus’s feet cracked in a spiderweb pattern.

Not because he did not understand.

Because he did.

The so-called ‘Council’ sounded dignified, almost important. One might assume it existed for planning, for strategy, for the careful shaping of the Abyss’s future. That was certainly how it was described. In reality, such notions were pointless. Abyssals did not debate paths forward—every action they took was already determined by the will of the Great Mother. What need was there for discussion when choice itself was an illusion? The Council was nothing more than a pretense: an excuse for ancient, powerful beings—creatures who had existed for millennia with nothing left to surprise them—to gather together in search of entertainment, usually at the expense of one of their own.

Wrath too, had enjoyed finding entertainment by harping on the mistakes of his fellow demigods.

But, based on recent events, he had a feeling that this time the laughter would be aimed at him.

His breath dragged in, sharp enough to make the nearest captives whimper.

The baby head continued, unhurried. “Attendance is required. Your presence has been requested. Your recent conduct has been—”

Asmodeus moved.

His clawed hands closed around the toad’s entire torso as though he were pinching a swollen insect.

The toad’s four gold eyes did not widen. The baby’s pitch-black eyes did not blink. It didn’t plead, didn’t bargain, didn’t even pause.

It just kept speaking from inside its own execution.

“—discussed.”

Asmodeus squeezed.

The toad burst.

Dark fluid and shredded flesh splattered across the polished stone. The courtyard’s crimson veins flared brighter in response, as if the floor itself approved and was hungrily eating up the flesh.

The baby head popped free for a fraction of a second—still speaking, still calm—before Wrath’s aura slammed down and turned it into mist.

The building around them did not survive the follow-through. After all, Asmodeus wasn’t a being whose wrath could be easily assuaged.

A ring of force rolled outward, scouring the courtyard. Columns cracked. Relief carvings of rage fractured into rubble. All nearby abyssals were simply erased, not because Wrath targeted them, but because they had been foolish enough to exist within the radius of his mood.

A few that had been smart enough to escape the second the messenger arrived, breathed sighs of relief from a distance as they watched the entire castle begin to crumble.

Captives screamed.

Then their screams cut off.

Asmodeus’s eyes burned as he stared at the empty space where the messenger had been. His humiliation did not soften. It sharpened.

He could taste it on his own tongue.

That stupid fort.

That golden dragon that had turned a sure victory into his defeat.

And the most humiliating fact…

He had fled.

He had fled, and he had done it in front of others.

The courtyard trembled again as his claws dug in. The lines etched into his horns pulsed hard, as if trying to warn the world that a bomb was about to blow.

Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, nobody remained alive around him to blow up at.

“Council,” he snarled, and the word came out like a curse.

Then he launched.

He tore upward with such violence that the air above the courtyard split like a wound as he flew at a supersonic speed. He carved a straight line through the city, and everything beneath that line paid for being in the way.

Obsidian building roofs caved.

Bone towers sheared.

A river of lesser abyssals scattered, not in panic—panic was for those with lives worth losing—but in instinctual avoidance of an incoming storm.

Anything that failed to get out of his path was mercilessly destroyed.

Wrath did not look back.

He never did.

The city swallowed his departure the way it swallowed everything else: without protest.

For several breaths, only dust and drifting ash remained in the courtyard.

Then something moved.

From beneath a slab of collapsed stone, a pair of stubby legs pushed.

A baby head wobbled out.

It had no body.

It had two frog legs attached directly to its jawline, as though the Abyss had stopped caring how bodies were supposed to be put together halfway through the process.

Its pallid blue skin was scuffed. One cheek had a crack running through it like porcelain. Its eyes were still pitch black, still glossy, still full of that calm emptiness that made sane things feel sick.

It paused, looked around at the wreckage, and released a long, tired sigh.

“Of course,” it muttered in the same adult voice, rubbing its tiny face with one of its remaining two frog legs. “Of course he did that again.”

It blinked once, slow.

Then it stared at the space where its original body had been obliterated.

“Just once,” it mumbled, waddling forward on damp little legs, “I would like to deliver a message without being disassembled like a poorly made toy.”

It hopped over a severed claw from an unlucky abyssal, stepped around a pile of captives that had become a pile of parts, and clicked its tongue.

“This is why they always send me for these annoying tasks,” it complained to nobody.

“H-help me…”

The baby head paused at the edge of the ruined castle where a severed head and torso of a captive woman was opening and closing her mouth, somehow still alive. The baby’s mouth expanded 10-fold and engulfed her in one gulp.

“Mmm…yummy…at least I’ve gotten the bare minimum of compensation.” It continued while giving one last pass over for anything else that may still be alive and need to be ‘put out of its misery.’

“The Council won’t even thank me,” it said. “They’ll just write ‘delivered’ and pretend they didn’t bet on whether I’d survive.”

It hopped once, then twice.

“So annoying. And he wonders why everyone is so eager to mock him,” it added, voice flat.

Then it was gone, swallowed by the city’s twisting paths.