Asa began to feel he needed to talk to the BOSS about Behe.
Behe is Asa's crony, known for his hard work and meticulousness. He actually skip work today, went to Asa's office, pulled out Asa's drinks and snacks, and began to eat and drink.
He was even wearing a printed shirt and slacks! It's incredible.
Asa even dare to assured his father that he hadn't seen Behe in anything other than his professional clothes in at least 50 years.
He even refuses to change into his clothes when they go out to the beach. Asa thought that Behe was the only one who seemed particularly strange even after every of them was pretending to be human. So Asa is upset that the BOSS has put the weird Behe in charge of communicating with partners instead of he.
However, these minor grievances never affected his friendship with Behe or his awe for the BOSS. So Asa's concern about seeing Behe so out of character today is real and acute.
Unfortunately, his caring inquiries failed to assuage Behe's fears and received no reasonable answers. Behe simply repeated that he was very, very upset and needed to come to a safe place like this to eat his way back to feeling safe.
This actually flattered Asa a little. It showed that Behe thought Asa's office was a safe place. And rightly so. It is well known that, after the BOSS, Lord Azazel has the greatest strength and friendly in all hell. Even the BOSS came to the world to open a company, also appointed him to be responsible for the security work. This is enough to show that the BOSS thinks highly of him.
It is impolite to disturb the BOSS, so it is normal to seek Asa’s protection. Asa decided this was what Behe had in mind.
As long as he's there, the office is perfectly safe, and even an archangel can't invade it. With that in mind, Asa glanced at the surveillance camera again.The screens, which hang on the walls and are divided into hundreds of tiny panels, faithfully show the building from place to place. And Asa can tell all the normal from the abnormal at a glance.
It's one of the powers that he has preserved, beyond man. But even with this power, he couldn't figure out what made Behe so insane.
Asa can't help suspecting that Behe's current depression is due to the two human friends hired to travel to another world by BOSS. Unlike demons like Asa, Behe is friendly and approachable to humans. He makes friends with humans, and he feels sad about the loss of his human friends. He has a long memory of himself and each of his friends, from two thousand years ago to the present day.
To be honest, in this respect Asa did not quite understand Behe.Asa has always felt that humans are like leaves on a tree. Even though each leaf has veins and gestures, they are essentially more like a part of the tree of civilization than an individual. They are constrained by the tree from which they were born.They are bound to her all their lives and die if they break free. Even after death, they will eventually become humus at the bottom of the tree. And Its corpse will feed the tree into its next metabolic cycle.
The life of a leaf is much shorter, much smaller, much less interesting than the life of a tree, much less large and complex. So Asa has always been more concerned with human civilization itself than with individual humans. He sets himself up as a historian, and a good historian should always look at the human race as a whole, or at the very few individuals who dominate the changing times. If he does occasionally focus on a relatively ordinary person, it is often to see him as a representative specimen. To Asa, Behe's act of genuinely befriending the humans he knows is like that of a schoolboy who talks to leaves. There are children who mourn the death and fall of leaves and keep their remains in safekeeping. But children who do this tend to forget it all in a few weeks or days, not Behe. He has a good memory. All in all, Asa thought Behe's behavior was stupid and childish.
But he certainly wasn't going to say, "Hey, buddy, don't be upset about your mortal friends. Forget about the bugs. Let Lord Azazel show you some fun." That's a stupid, tasteless thing to say. He saw Behe and the other guys from hell as friends and family, and instinctively wanted to protect them. This instinct became gentler as he came to earth to pretend to be human. We must admit that this gentleness can sometimes represent weakness, but we must also realize that it is less likely to offend than it should be.Asa recognizes and accepts this change in himself, so it is necessary to find a good way to comfort.
But Asa is really not good at this. He has to try to come straight to the point, and if he can't, he has to consult someone who is better at channelling other people's emotions.
Asa listened to Beech chew potato chips, codified the words he was about to utter, and finally spoke: "Bro, we should be happy for your human friend."
Behe's chewing stops and he glares at Asa. Asa was not good at distinguishing between expressions of anger and confusion, but he could not stop. "Maybe the humans can't take it for a while, or maybe they find it a disaster, or maybe you can't take it very well --"
Asa's voice broke. He saw Behe looking for something. He feared that Behe had been provoked by his words and was going to attack him, but he was not afraid. Adjusting his posture to rise from his chair to ready meet the attack, he continued, "But it's not a bad thing to work for the BOSS."
Asa searched for the right, less offensive words for the BOSS, and was pleased to see that Behe had no intention of taking it out on him. Behe was just going to take a sip of coke. So he went on, reassuringly, "Although the BOSS is a horrible bastard to humans --"
"To us, too." Behe, taking a swig of carbonated drink, interrupted and added.
"Yeah, he's a horrible bastard anyway." Asa is increasingly certain that Behe is complaining about the BOSS for his human friend, "but working for him isn't such a bad thing."
'Yes, after all, the BOSS is fair and takes care of his subordinates.” Behe agrees.
"Well, he's a good boss. He will pay and take care of his subordinates enough to safeguard their rights and lives. So you should be happy for them. Even if they don't understand it for a while, they'll realize later that working for the boss is better than working for some other capitalist." Asa tried to paint Behe a bright future for her two friends.
This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it
"But those guys have a job as game anchors." Behe wondered.
"The owners of livestreaming platforms are also capitalists." Asa added.
Behe scratched her head. The exchange seemed a little too abstract: "I don't quite understand what you're getting at, man. But if you have to wrestle with the subject. I have to say, there are people who see live streaming as a worthy cause. It gives them a sense of accomplishment and happiness. This is something that the BOSS's job cannot provide for them. Besides, the relationship between a host and a live-streaming platform is not an employment, not work for."
Asa is not about to contradict him: "You're right, and I have to admit that taking a job from a BOSS means they have to give up something.But..."
But Asa was interrupted. Wearing a printed shirt for the first time in fifty years, the beefy monster made a stop sign: "I say dude, did you get the wrong idea and think I'm moping because of Chisel and Poet?
It was Asa's turn to wonder: "I seem to have guessed wrong?"
"You're missing the 'again'. When have you ever guessed right, bro?" Behe's voice had a weak, angry resignation. "It's always the same with you. You're always thinking about things you don't know, making meaningless guesses. I know I should be happy that my friends are in the BOSS's good graces, and I am.You don't have to lecture me."
Behe paused, noticing that the corners of Asa's eyes were drooping, a sign that his friend was now grieving. So Behe lowered her voice. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to accuse you. Brother. In fact, I'm happy that I'm better now because of your concern."
"Much better?” Asa looked at Behe, who was opening a new bag of chips.
"HMM...Probably not that much, but at least a little. Anyway, thanks for your tolerance and concern, bro." Behe began to munch on chips. Asa was grateful for his willingness to accept his concern, but worried more about his state of mind.Behe chewed her chips even louder.
Behe's attention to image and politeness is to a certain neurotic degree. His habit of dressing professionally all year round was only one manifestation of this complex. On weekdays Behe was extremely restrained in the volume of his meals, and that meticulousness revealed a fearsome persistence.
Now he was eating in a normal, even rude, voice. Asa couldn't put his mind at ease.
Suddenly, Asa had an Epiphany. He thought of a more roundabout way to try it: "Can you give me a little metaphor for how you're feeling?"
Behe stopped refusing. His face grew worse as he thought for a moment. "Let's not talk about this, Asa, please, buddy. I feel bad."
“There's nothing wrong with that. Your resistance to looking him in the eye is really bad!” Asa's voice rose. The tall, pale man stood up, walked over to Behe, grasped her shoulders with his big, bony hands like roots, and growled in an exaggerated and serious manner, "Brother, you monsters are more sensitive than we demons. This is a fine gift most of the time, but it makes your spirits more vulnerable."
"Is that true?” Behe hesitated. He had never thought or admitted that he was vulnerable.
"Of course. It's not that you're vulnerable, it's just that a greater sense of perception makes you more likely to be hurt, just as a more observant person is more likely to detect ugliness that would normally go unnoticed. The more you perceive, the more you realize, the more you feel, the more chances you have to get hurt."
"Is that right?” Behe began to be lost.
"Sure, bro, so we're going to deal with it." Asa's voice rose louder. "Like a meeting with the Noonday Demon, which must not be avoided or ignored, I will face it with you."
Behe was silent. "Even though I know the metaphor you're using is depression, but you are going to be with me against another demon is too surreal. Don't forget you're a demon yourself brother. "
"That's not great. What demon is more strong than me? Except the BOSS." Asa eases embarrassment with laughter, "so try to use similes. What the fear is like, what it reminds you of. Maybe it helps us recognize your fear, or maybe what you're afraid of is real and we can got warn by your presentiment ."
Behe began to laugh, too, more or less from the heart. He really appreciated and wanted to respond to his old friend's concern, so he thought about it, and before his face got any worse, he got the result and said, "Just like it's September 28. I'm feeling like it's September 28th. I feel like tomorrow is September 29th."
"...That would be downright scary.But you can rest assured, brother, that day is a long time off. The 29th of September is six months away, and the 29th of September is six months away. It is the safest time of the year!" Asa shuddered when he heard the date, and then smiled reassuringly.
As proof of their present safety, he pulled out his cell phone and showed it to Behe. "Look, brother, it's March 23, long before that horrible day! We may rest assured --"
Asa suddenly couldn't continue because he saw Behe's face change as she stared at the screen of his phone. His face changed from human to a giant cat face, then disintegrated inch by inch from face to body, until it became a mud-yellow chaos that had expanded several meters in length and width. As he transformed, his face grew more frightened, as if he had seen the end come. And when he had lost his biological form, a shrill scream broke out of the earthy chaos.
The shriek shattered Asa's eardrums and stunned the countless other demons who worked in the same building. Asa freed some of his powers before the eardrum healed, and managed to control Behe and turn him back into a human. Seconds later everything was back to normal, and an exhausted Asa had no time to take back his horns and stare at Behe from inside the sprawling security center. "Behe, you need to give me an explanation."
Behe kept ducking back into the corner. He was almost speechless, with tears streaming down his face and unintelligible noises coming from his mouth. Asa took two steps in Behe's direction and suddenly realized that Behe was not hiding from him, but from his phone.
With a kind of unspoken bad foreboding, Asa picked up his phone, which he had just dropped, with a slightly shaking hand. He told himself that his hand was shaking because It was too much work subduing the mad Behemoth. But this self-hypnosis evaporated the moment he saw the screen.
The position of the date showed that today was September 29.
The phone was shattered into a pile of electronic junk by the spasm of Asa's hand. Asa felt something, pulled by some indescribable sense of destiny, looked at the hundreds of surveillance images on the screen.
In the battle before, Asa had kept those screens intact because of his professional ethics. But in the process of turning his head, he began to pray that the screens were damaged so that certain images would not appear.
Unfortunately, demon prayers don't work very well.
So he saw, in the middle of the screen, the surveillance frame representing the entrance to the building, a man standing there.
The person on the screen looks up in the direction of the camera. His gaze travels through space and time and seems to fall on Asa.
He was an unremarkable man, average-looking, average-built, with untidy hair and even a little shabby in his clothes. He had no watch or glasses and looked like someone who might pass you at any time on the road.
But Asa knew who he was. Even though Asa had never seen the face, he knew what the deranged date and unexpected visitor meant.
Instead of screaming, because screaming was pointless, Asa began to wonder whether it would be better for him to meet his death decently and calmly without resistance or to fight and die decently and bravely. Before Asa could reach his conclusion, his mobile phone ringtone rang from the pile of scrap metal components.
He didn't know how to press and answer a pile of scrap metal components, but the person on the other end wasn't going to wait for him.The ring stops, the voice rings, and the caller is the BOSS.
"Azazel, we have an important visitor today. Please take the department heads to the ground floor to meet he, and then invite he to my office."
"Remember to be respectful."
"Make a good impression on my dear eldest brother, Mike."