Norton ignored him.
The boy did not seem discouraged. Or rather, Norton had never paid him any attention all this time, and he was long used to it.
The boy placed the pastries on the ground in front of Norton, taking care to wrap them in a clean cloth. Then he hugged his knees, letting his luxurious clothes get dirty. Resting his head on his knees, he stared without blinking at Norton, who was wrapped in rags before him. A melancholy somewhat out of place for his age appeared on his face.
But paired with the defined features of his European child's face, it gave him something of the air of a little prince from a storybook.
"Mr. Beggar, what do you look like?"
"Mr. Beggar, what are you drawing?"
"Mr. Beggar, Jennifer said she doesn't like playing with me. She said she likes Henry."
"Why is that, Mr. Beggar? She said before that I was her favorite."
Well, damn, he's a little simp too!
Listening to the boy's innocent words, Norton felt they were completely at odds with his own somewhat perverted mind.
The feeling made him deeply uncomfortable.
Good thing he wasn't Father Norton, or things would probably look very different right now.
Norton turned his gaze away from the boy, leaving a bit of red behind.
The scarlet of his eyes sweeping through the air, of course.
The boy poured out his seemingly sorrowful heart to the so-called Mr. Beggar, assuming that since he had accepted his kindness, he would listen to him. But he had no idea that the beggar before him had not taken in a single word.
Norton crouched in the corner, gazing at the distant Church while the boy beside him continued to pour out his melancholy feelings.
His nails, pushed out as the flesh of his fingers withered, looked somewhat long and narrow. Yet like steel blades, they could leave deep scratches in the ground, allowing him to make a simple sketch of the pattern he wanted.
Norton was sketching a simple layout of the Church and the positions of the Church knights and missionaries that he had determined by sound.
All the time he had spent hanging around the Church lately had not been without results. Judging by sound and smell, he could roughly determine how the people inside were distributed.
For example, where there were lots of people and it was likely a lodging area, where people relieved themselves, where there were fewer people, and where heavy footsteps and the sound of armor suggested Church knights were stationed...
The advantages granted by super hearing, super smell, and super vision covered every aspect. It wasn't like those superheroes in the movies he had watched in his previous life, who had all kinds of superpowers but seemed as if they didn't know how to use them at all.
With his current physical abilities, Norton was fully capable of guarding against sneak attacks. With his hearing and sense of smell, he could even detect a fly passing within a hundred meters of him. That was one reason he still hadn't moved away.
His physical abilities were so formidable that they gave him confidence.
For now, all he feared were the Church's special methods and being ganged up on by things like Werewolves! That was why he had been carefully observing, trying things, and experimenting here, to see whether he could become someone who didn't eat beef in this world.
Time passed slowly, and the sun gradually sank in the west.
The boy, having poured out his troubles to Norton, left him feeling satisfied. He didn't seem to care whether Norton had been listening at all; he merely needed a tree hollow to confide in. Or perhaps he thought Norton was just like the little monsters hiding in tree hollows in fairy tales, always ready to listen to him pour out his troubles.
Norton reached out and erased the pattern he had scratched into the ground, which looked like a mess of scribbles. Then he stood up, ready to return to his bell tower and reproduce the whole thing on its wall.
Norton started to walk away, but suddenly stopped.
The spot where Norton had been crouching was the only reasonably clean place on the street. And there, on the cleanest-looking part of that one patch free of mud, lay a delicate pastry wrapped in a fairly clean white cloth.
Norton glanced at it, then got up, picked it up, and tossed it onto the side of another street.
He, Norton, didn't eat the kind of food humans ate.
Norton's life returned to silence once more.
Although His Holiness Adam, the new pope, had established the so-called Eye of Holiness, it didn't seem to be much use in any respect.
Norton didn't know much about other places, but the Eye of Holiness members in Lino City had made no progress at all in all this time.
Though these Church knights, brainwashed and indoctrinated by the Church to the point of being almost fucking idiots, still went out every night, they visibly returned empty-handed.
Oh, no, they had something to show for it. At the very least, they had hunted down three Werewolves.
That made Norton extremely happy.
He had known his decision to enter the city to hide from the Werewolves had been the right one.
He had seen Church knights hunting Werewolves with his own eyes.
Although the Church had trained these knights to be somewhat wooden, their combat skills were truly exceptional.
And that was without any Gold Saints showing up! If those Gold Saints did appear, Werewolves probably wouldn't be the only ones in danger.
But those biological weapons seemed to be activated only when needed. Norton had observed the Church in Lino City for almost half a year, and still hadn't spotted a single Gold Saint.
All in all, the change of pope hadn't had too great an effect on Norton's life for the time being. He could still hide in Lino City and live in peace, stalling for time so he could grow.
A few months passed, and those two damn bats who always liked to flaunt their affection in front of Norton finally had a baby.
It was born while hanging upside down, right on Norton's chest, against his dry, wrinkled skin.
"Squeak, squeak, squeak..."
Not long after it was born, the baby bat spontaneously learned to hang upside down. That really opened Norton's eyes.
And the little thing actually drank its mother's milk! The mother bat might have felt that Norton, who often went a long time without eating, needed nourishment too. She even flew over and hung upside down on his face, wanting him to have a taste...
"Thank you so much!" Norton's hoarse voice rang out atop the bell tower. He took the mother bat off his face, then removed the baby bat hanging from his body and hung them both on a branch nearby that he had set up especially for them to hang from.
Come to think of it, the top floor of the bell tower was fairly dark because it was sealed off, making it a good place for these light-averse animals to live.
No one would have imagined that a family of four lived in a place almost no one had ever climbed to since it was built.