The air in the room felt frozen.
Only the faint chirping of crickets from the lawn outside drifted in through the window.
Holding up the demon head, Ian stared nervously at the door blocked by the wardrobe. He kept whispering into the demon's ear, "Hurry up and tell him no life-form can resist a demon's temptation. Tell him his son put up heroic resistance, but in the end still lost to you, you wicked demon."
"And make sure you emphasize that it was such a stubborn resistance that even you admired it. It just couldn't be helped, because you were too strong."
Ian kept his voice as low as possible, barely more than a mosquito's buzz.
Even so,
he was still tense as hell. He was already regretting not teaching himself Klingon on the way home. If he had, he could have used nerd language to encrypt his conversation with the demon.
"I..."
Thanks to its senses, the demon head could clearly feel just how overwhelming the presence outside the room was. There was no way it dared say something so suicidal.
It hesitated.
It was only a minor demon, which was exactly why it had been sent ahead in the first place. Unlike the great demons, it had absolutely no backbone when facing Superman.
Superman had low magic resistance?
The demons who believed that all had graves buried under eight hundred feet of weeds by now.
Just as the bull-headed demon was preparing to resist to the bitter end,
Bang! Bang! Bang!
Ian's hammer came down on it again.
"Hurry up and tell my father that I fought hard against your temptation on a spiritual level, but couldn't hold out. And don't just repeat my words directly this time."
He even added a warning.
"I can't do that!"
The demon clenched its teeth and put up a very stubborn resistance.
However,
Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang!
The dull impacts on its skull really hurt. Really, really hurt. There was an inexplicable pain to it, like it was striking straight into the soul itself. The bull-headed demon was almost impressed it had managed to endure eighteen blows.
Unfortunately, it truly could not endure the nineteenth.
Really, the enemy was just too strong.
At that moment, it agreed completely with that statement.
Since resistance was impossible, the demon could only choose obedience.
"Superman! Your son... your son really is strong-willed... but... huh? Keh keh keh? Demons don't laugh like that. Ow! Fine! I'll laugh! I'll laugh!"
"But, heh, keh keh keh keh, my temptation is terrifying, terrifying, terrifying... I didn't forget the lines! I was just building the mood!"
"My temptation cannot be resisted by any life-form! I am the mightiest demon in Hell! See? I said it smoothly! With real force! I've heard lines like this before! I know how to do it!"
...
The demon was clearly seething.
Ian, meanwhile, was cursing internally. He was absolutely sure that with delivery this bad, the demon would never make it in politics. At best, it might land some guest roles in Hollywood.
And just after the bull-headed demon obediently finished reciting its lines, the room sank into another silence so deep that even breathing felt loud.
Outside the door,
there was no response at all.
Ian pricked up his ears, his guard raised as high as it could go.
Then,
his instincts suddenly sent a chill running down his spine.
"You do know I can see and hear you coaching a mutilated demon through a speech, right? Along with your arrhythmic heartbeat."
His father's voice abruptly came from behind him.
Ian whipped around.
There,
Clark was squeezing his way in through the bedroom window.
Calling it not very large was only true relative to Superman's broad frame.
"Damn it! I forgot to lock the window!"
Ian glanced in alarm at the hammer in his hand. For one tiny second, he wanted to test father-son affection in a far more direct way, but in the end he did not have the guts to make that move.
Eyes wide, he stared at Clark, who had now fully forced himself into the room, quickly hid the hammer behind his back, and held his breath so hard he barely dared exhale.
If Ian was this scared,
the demon head was even worse.
"He's right! This little brat coached me into all of it!"
Its survival instinct was still incredibly strong. It instantly started throwing blame around. After all, among demons, betrayal was practically a flower language.
In response,
Clark merely straightened his rumpled shirt and gave the demon a cold look.
"You do realize the person you're accusing is my son, right?"
His voice carried a kind of seriousness that made the demon's scalp go numb. For the first time in its existence, it understood what it meant to be trapped and hated from both directions.
Granted,
it had never been a person to begin with.
Because of its demonic senses, it could feel Clark's terrifying bioelectric field and that horrifyingly pure soul. The pressure was so immense that scarlet sweat began pouring from the severed demon head.
Sizzle...
The sweat dripped onto the wooden floor and corroded tiny black marks into it.
At that moment, the demon felt an even greater wave of pressure, enough to make its soul tremble.
"You do know I paid for this floor, right?"
Clark's voice dropped at least eight octaves lower than usual. Ian could even hear him grinding his teeth.
To a frugal farm boy,
damage to a floorboard was no small thing.
"Not my fault! This genuinely has nothing to do with me!"
As expected of someone who truly knew his father, Ian reacted instantly. Like tossing away something red-hot, he threw the demon head at Clark.
Clark caught it hard in one hand, hard enough that the demon's skull started deforming. Still, for the demon, it did not hurt nearly as much as Ian's cursed hammer.
Facing the possibility of being crushed to death, it managed one last desperate burst of intelligence.
"What if I said I'm not a demon? What if I'm actually just a very useful trash can? Would you believe me?"
The demon's voice had turned shrill, and it did not dare meet Clark's eyes.
"I'm very valuable! I can function as a garbage disposal unit! I can absolutely make enough money to pay for your floor!"
At this point it had already started stealing Ian's ideas.
"??????"
Clark looked at the creature in his hand claiming to be a trash can, then looked at his son's face, which radiated absolute innocence. The corners of his eyes twitched several times before he took one long, steady breath.
He seemed to be trying very hard to calm down.
"Tomorrow,"
Clark finally said, his voice noticeably restrained,
"I'll get you a cabinet. A big one. Something safe and secure enough for you to store your... strange toys in."
There was a very obvious pause before the word toys.
"Huh?"
Ian had been bracing for paternal discipline.
He had not expected actual fatherly love instead of Clark immediately pulling off his belt.
"Really? That's allowed?"
He still had not fully processed it, so the cautious question came out softer than usual.
To be honest, Ian had always assumed Clark was the extremely old-fashioned type.
"As long as you stop hiding this kind of thing under your mother's bed and mine, and as long as you use proper safety measures, then yes."
Clark looked incredibly helpless.
Even so, he still nodded at Ian.
As someone who had once been an unusually special child himself, Clark perhaps understood better than anyone how to accept a child's strange side.
His own parents
had already given him the best example possible.
And now,
it was his turn.
(End of Chapter)
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