Beast

After a long nauseating moment behind the stage, where he could only saw other people boasting about a better life at some rich people house and hearing them crying at the end. His turn finally came. He’s usually sitting with them, the people who were chained and watching other people go with envy or pity. The gazes of those people keep burning on his back even when he reached the stage. He won’t waver, he shall not.

~*~*~

The stage is quite large for the boy standing in the middle, unmoving. Seeing the lanky figure of a seemingly underage dirty looking kid with dark skin and unkept hair, not the appearance that the crowd would look at with interest. The audience went silent, some of them keep telling the kid to do something and some other just yelling at the presenter to do something about it. But whatever done to that kid didn’t make him budge, not even a little bit.

The crowd start to lose patience and the presenter started to sweat, nothing could make this kid move be it jeers or torture, as if he’s presenting a statue and not a human. The kid is now in a bad shape but still stood like a log. “He’s not dead, isn’t he?” says a figure in the crowd. It’s not even the bidding time yet, it would be a trouble if the product become defective. Or worse, dead.

At this time a bid rise from the west side, it’s a person in a hood, hiding their face with a mask, the build made it hard to distinguish the gender, but the faint smile made the mysterious person looked somehow intimidating.

“It’s not yet the time for bidding.” Says the presenter. All the people in the hall are also staring at the person clad in black who just broke a rule. The person in question just stayed silent for another few seconds before opening their mouth.

“It’s not even half of the usual performance time but you already damage your goods to almost the breaking point. I remember that this one goods of yours almost doesn’t have any chance to be sold, I’m afraid I’ll have to drop my low bid to none if you keep damaging that kid.” That person said with a husky voice, small but enough to intimidate the crowd.

The hall went silent for a while, a man walked on the stage and whispered something to the presenter. The presenter awkwardly agreed and begin the bidding session.

“Cough. After some consideration, we decide to start the bidding session.” The presenter said awkwardly, followed by a bid rising at the west.

“Three Thousand Wert!” the presenter said, the person clads in black still smiling while the room is filled with laughter. At least a slave would start from Ten Thousand Wert, but the person did not even give a third of it.

Amidst the sea of laughter, not one of them even want to raise the bid until another bid raised from the north side, “Ten Thousand Wert!” the presenter yelled.

The bidding board is held by a toddler, he seems to be calm, but the swelling eyes could already give out the fact that he just cried for quite some time. Philip moved his gaze to see the man holding the kid, he looked like a man with some prestige. It’s a shame that all of that are just to cover his dirty personality.

Talking about dirty personality, it reminds him of the curly long hair he always saw back in the village. Alfred always tried all sorts of method to beat him, sadly he’s gone before that day comes.

There’s only two people bidding for him, but the number increased higher than he thought. Unlike the others he didn’t have that much expectation, he wished for his bid to be as low as possible, but the number right now is just a few thousand wert before reaching average.