The Mask He Wears.

Hyde stared silently at the smile Tito wore with closed eyes. He couldn't tell if the smile came from the kindness of his heart or if he was just making a cheetah's face—one that looked pitiful and adorable but would feed on you the moment it got close.

'I never understand this guy, even with my vast accumulated knowledge of over ten thousand years. He is like a dark cave with a narrow opening. What does that guy even wish for?'

The answer to that would be peace—a true peace where people don't even talk to him. He had tried to make a family, but that failed tragically. There was no need for him to try again.

When you don't know the answer, it is better to give up than to waste precious time trying. After all, the more we live, the closer we get to dying.

On the contrary, Hyde liked to build things to cure the loneliness he felt. He never had any siblings and wasn't good at starting conversations. He was typically antisocial.

Being sold as a slave might seem like a curse, but the blessing was that he could fuse himself with the prison system, making it perfect.

With this, he never felt lonely and never once cried about missing his parents; after all, he could just create them from thought alone.

'I have become a god—something mortals like Tito will never understand.'

Wham!

After the end of his thought, Hyde was kicked in the gut by Tito and found himself coughing up a translucent liquid, his body crouching down to the ground.

He slowly turned his head up to look at the man now standing in front of him. However, all he could see in Tito were his eyes shining with a cold light that seemed to illuminate the whole foggy forest.

"Do you know they say that gods don't feel pain? I wonder if that's true."

Hearing those words, Hyde felt a shiver run through his body, and he immediately regretted showing Tito his version of the Hare and Baboon.

The intended lesson of that tale was to always be fearful of gods, but Tito took it as a warning to never trust one.

Realizing how madly insane the man before him was, Hyde quickly turned tail and ran. This place was his own godly domain, and he had over a million ways to crush someone like Tito!

Hyde laughed in his mind as he made a giant wall appear behind him through thought alone. With his vast intelligence, he quickly devised a way to stop Tito.

"You should have never gotten a wife in the first place. I'm sure you love her. As a god, I will make sure you get reunited soon."

Tito knew there might be traps hidden in the illusion, so he focused his ears on catching the sounds Hyde's footsteps made, ensuring he stepped wherever Hyde stepped.

Using this, he passed the spiked wall without any trouble. However, what he saw next stunned him a bit.

A woman with black hair was lying in a car that had its wheels facing the sky. The windscreen was shattered, with glass particles sticking to the woman's skin, increasing the amount of blood that flowed from her beautiful face.

Her pitiful hazel eyes, which trickled twin streams of blood, looked at Tito as she tried to extend her bloodied hand toward him. "Tito, darling... please save me."

Tito found amusement in his heart, and his lips curled into a smile as his feet did what they previously had, "How cute; she could have suffered a little more."

'What the hell?!' Hyde screamed in his thoughts, unable to believe Tito's reaction to the scene of his wife's death. But he immediately realized something.

'The name of Tito's wife was Blotto...' At that moment, Hyde felt powerless and stopped all his movements, as it felt like all the knowledge he had accumulated was fake.

Blotto—a person who is (very) drunk or intoxicated.

Intoxicated with what? Hyde pondered, and his super-fast brain set off enormous multi-functions that caused his nose to leak hydrochloric acid.

In the end, he couldn't understand why the inmate had chosen such a name for his wife. However, what freaked the Galactic Prison System out was that all the information it had about Tito was wrong.

The two-legged spider's world ability to read minds didn't seem to be working on Tito as he turned it into his own advantage.

'JUST WHAT KIND OF MAN IS HE?'

A crazy man would make his body endure intense pain to achieve his goals. But what about a person who makes his mind go through pain just to complete one checkpoint in life?

A devil...

That was all Hyde could conclude as he lifelessly turned his body around. All the illusions vanished, and the two were in a slick rectangular pathway with missing tiles. The walls were painted white, with doors here and there as they stretched out to two elevator doors.

Thanks to Hyde's skills, the second floor had already recovered its previous state. Layla lay somewhere near the middle, her head facing the lights resembling stars on the ceiling. She was soundly sleeping as if she had no troubles at all.

The prison system was about to raise its hands in the air to surrender and ask for a quick death, but a punch was sent to his large nose with a loud bam, making more hydrochloric acid leak from him.

Before he could do anything, Tito harshly kicked him in the head. Hyde fell to the ground with a loud thud and was lifted by the collar, meeting a pair of emotionless golden eyes that seemed to toy with him.

Even in the past, when both had been inmates on Earth, Hyde knew that Tito liked tormenting the weak. He would break them until they considered suicide as an option. If they proved to be strong-willed, he would just break their body parts.

'Why did this bully come to this world?!'

Maintaining his smile that hid a lot of things, Tito said, "Do you know why I chose the name Blotto? Because it means to be destroyed."

Tito took a small break as he began to whisper, "So instead of killing your pitiful life, I am going to destroy you until you kill yourself. However, the option of suicide won't be easy, as you have to open the prison cells along with other favors you will do for me."