The stone flew in a slow, graceful and—most importantly—quiet arch and hit a tree on the opposite from me side of the camp. Alerted by the sound, the sentry reflexively looked there, which was when I pounced on him from behind.

What a poor sentry he was. He didn’t notice a thing until I had one hand on his mouth, stifling any screams, and used claws (they poked through the special holes in my gloves and broke another piece of my disguise, but I needed my main weapons always ready) on another to cut his throat.

But to give him credit, even as I was killing him, he found in himself to grab a dagger from his belt and stick it into my arm. I clenched my jaws, but made no sound, and simply held the man in his death throes.

Then I carefully put it down and only then, swearing in my head, pulled the dagger out of my hand. It pierced my left forearm through, right between the twin bones, and the wound send sharp impulses of pain at me whenever I tried to turn my wrist. I ignored them, and with a dagger now, went to the tent.

I usually preferred my claws to weapons, but that only because the weapons in Hell were worse than my claws. This dagger, long and strong and sharp, was better. I used it to cut through the wall of the tent.

That wasn’t a completely noiseless process, no matter how hard I tried to make it such, and when the hole in the tent was big enough to see the two people sleeping inside—a man and a woman, both clothed and looking away from each other—the woman stirred.

I moved. Her eyes opened just when my arm reached her mouth. The confusion and panic were the only thing I could see in her eyes, and I knew she would struggle because of them even if I tried to threaten her now.

There was no point. Right now, it was a game of speed. She bit my hand, but didn’t pierce the leather glove. Her haphazard flailing of arms was of no use—my dagger found her throat faster than she could do much of anything, and if she had her own weapon in reach, she forgot about it.

The last member of this party woke up with a gasp and tried to sit up, only to hit the roof of the already skewed tent, pause, and end up pulled outside by his collar and with my dagger a hairbreadth away from his Adam’s apple.

“Don’t try to escape or attack me, or you will end up like your companions out here,” I said in my friendliest tone. I found that, coupled with a show of violence, was more intimidating than threatening roars. “You don’t want that, do you? I just want to have a friendly chat with you. What’s your name?”

“G-gleidon,” the human, whose whiteness was now approaching that of snow, stuttered out. Looking dazed, he touched a speck of blood from his female companion on his cheek, and then stared at the smear on his finger in silent horror. “What happened to Mina and Rast? Did you kill them?”

“Yes, yes. Do you want me to kill you, too? If no, then you better remember it is I who asks the questions here.” I smiled under the leather mask that hid the lower half of my face. The upper half, though, was more than enough for the human to grow so weak in his knees that I had to hold him up or he’d fall.

My wounded arm protested at this, and after some consideration, I let the human fall to his knees as he wanted to. I crouched next to him, my dagger not leaving its position at its neck for a moment.

“Don’t you worry so much, my friend Gleidon—what a nice name, did you come up with it yourself?—I won’t bite. I didn’t come here to eat people—I had plenty of that back where I came from. Though, I can make an exception for humans who don’t answer my questions…”

“I-I didn’t come up with it, my Pa did. Don’t eat me, creature!”

Ah, I terrified the human so much that he was answering rhetorical questions now. And pissing himself, too. That’s just the right state of terrified. I began my interrogation.

I soon learnt that these three indeed were adventurers and were patrolling the mountains’ foothills in search of monsters that migrated here at spring. Which now was—the very beginning of it. More importantly, I found that Tinaris was two more days of travel away, but at least I was on the right side of the mountains.

And the human’s tunic was too narrow for me in the shoulders. But the other human’s was too wide. Too wide was better than too narrow, though, so I set on that—and there were even spare sets in the adventurers’ backpack that weren’t dirtied with blood, along with food and many more things a traveller needed. Starting with supplies to clean and bandage my wound.

I left the corpses where they were—they won’t tell anyone about me now—and continued my journey in lifted spirits. If these humans, soft and weak, no matter their adventurers’ powers, could make the track in two days, I could make it in one. And in human clothes, I looked much more human-like.

Though, there was no avoiding hiding my face. A single glance at my red skin and inhuman eyes with yellow whites and dark crimson, almost black, iris, was enough to tell that I wasn’t a human. That left only one option for my species in their eyes—a monster.

I chuckled to myself. The truth was much worse. No monster could compare with the cunningness and ruthlessness of a demon. We were special souls, and this was why there were so few of us, even though humans died every day.

Natural selection of the worst kind.