Mark looked at the blonde man lying on his side on the ground, crying and clutching his broken arm as the blood soaked through his uniform.
He was about to continue with the questions when a voice interrupted him from the other side of the camp.
"Master!" Rose shouted from a distant area among the rubble. "Could you co here for a second?! You have to see this!"
Mark turned his head in the direction of Rose’s voice.
The vampire was practically on the other side of the camp, standing beside Alice, and both of them were looking down at what from where Mark was appeared to be large boxes covered with dark fabric.
"We’re on our way!" Mark called back.
Then he turned toward the others.
"Bring him with us," Mark said, gesturing toward the officer with his eyes.
"As you command, Master," Ely, Aria, and Yuki replied at the sa ti.
Ely didn’t waste a second and kicked the man in the back, making him stumble forward.
"You heard the Master," Ely said, looking down at him. "Walk."
"I-I can’t..." the officer groaned, clutching his broken arm against his chest. "My arm is—"
"You walk with your legs, not your arms," Ely cut him off. "And if you don’t start moving I’ll break those too, so decide."
The officer got to his feet as best he could, tripping over his own feet, and began walking in the direction Ely indicated.
Mark had already started walking toward where Rose and Alice were, and as he got closer, what from a distance had appeared to be boxes covered in fabric began to take on a different shape.
They weren’t boxes.
They were tal cages with thick bars, covered with dark fabric to hide what was inside.
There were at least eight or nine of them, arranged in a row behind what had been one of the largest tents in the camp.
But most of them were destroyed.
The bars were lted, the fabric covering them was charred, and inside were bodies unrecognizable from the burns.
’This was definitely Rose’s doing...’ Mark thought, glancing at the burn marks surrounding the destroyed cages. ’Her area spells during the fight must have reached this zone.’
Mark kept walking toward where Rose and Alice were waiting.
Both were standing in front of the last cage in the row, and also the only one that had been left intact.
"Master," Rose said as she saw him arrive. "Look at what we have here."
Mark stopped in front of the cage to look inside, and what he saw surprised him.
"Oh..."
Inside the cage, huddled in a corner with her knees pulled to her chest and her back pressed against the rear bars, was a woman.
Her skin was bronzed, a warm and uniform tone that looked natural, not the product of sun exposure but of her own genetics.
She had black hair, long, falling over her shoulders and down her back in disheveled strands.
Her eyes were golden, and at that mont they were wide open, fixed on Mark with an expression of terror.
But what surprised Mark wasn’t her face, her skin, or her eyes.
It was her ears.
Two long black rabbit ears that rose from between her hair and stood up above her head.
The woman was wearing worn, dirty brown clothing that barely covered her body, torn in several places.
On her wrists and ankles she had shackles connected to each other by a short chain.
And around her neck there was a third shackle, thicker than the others, with a chain that was fixed to the floor of the cage.
’So this is what Ely ant by demi-human...’ Mark thought, watching the rabbit woman tremble with fear as she looked at him.
"What do we do with her, my lord?" Alice asked from his side, in a tone noticeably softer than usual.
Mark didn’t answer right away.
He stood looking at the woman for a couple of seconds, studying the red marks on her wrists where the tal had scraped against her skin for who knows how long.
"...Free her," Mark ordered.
"Right away, my lord," Alice replied.
She approached the cage and grabbed one of the bars with one hand, then pulled.
The tal bar tore from the structure with a sharp screech.
Alice tossed it aside and grabbed the next one. Then the next. And the next.
In under ten seconds, an entire side of the cage had been ripped away, leaving the entrance completely open.
The rabbit woman, seeing the bars of her cell being torn off with bare hands as if they were twigs, imdiately reacted by pressing herself even further into the opposite corner.
Her black ears flattened against her head, her body curled in on itself, and a trembling whimper escaped her throat.
Alice stepped into the cage and walked toward her.
"Co here, I’m not going to hurt you," Alice said in a gentle tone.
The rabbit woman shrank even further.
Alice crouched in front of her and grabbed the chain connecting the shackles on her wrists.
"Easy," Alice said slowly. "I’m just going to take these off."
She closed her hand around one of the links and squeezed, making the tal break between her fingers with a dry crack.
The wrist chain fell to the floor.
Then she did the sa with the ankle shackles.
And finally Alice grabbed the neck shackle, the thickest of all, and broke it the sa way.
While Alice was doing all of this, Mark had moved to the entrance of the cage and was speaking in a soft tone completely different from the one he had used throughout the interrogation.
"Hey," Mark said, crouching slightly to get closer to her level. "Listen, we just want to ask you a few questions and then you can go, alright?"
But despite Mark and Alice’s attempts to calm her down, she kept trembling with fear.
"I promise we’re not going to hurt you," he said, trying to sound friendly. "The people who had you here are all dead now, and no one is ever going to—"
Mark couldn’t finish the sentence because the rabbit woman lunged forward with a speed he hadn’t expected, launching out of the corner of the cage in a single motion.
Throwing herself directly at him.
"Huh?!"
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