Chapter 15: Aren't You Two a Couple? Surely Sharing a Room is no Trouble?
Splash!
Icy water was thrown across the man's face, and he jolted awake instantly, eyes flying open wide.
"Hah—hah—!"
The man gulped down breath after breath. He tried to move his body, only to find that every inch of him was in agony, his 4 limbs pinned to a rack.
Unable to move. That was the state he was in.
The Masked Figure before him set the water basin down on the floor and stood to one side, arms folded across her chest.
She still wore the sa getup—a Cloak wrapped around her entire form, with nothing visible but those vivid green eyes watching him. Deeply unsettling.
He rembered it clearly: his entire crew had been taken down by her swift and nimble technique, every last one of them.
"Awake? Good. Let's have a talk."
The man looked around, trying to locate the source of the voice.
The room was a dark, damp basent. Before long, following the sound, he found the woman sitting in a chair.
She was idly playing with her nails. The table before her was covered in instrunts that would never pass any inspection.
Through the haze, he caught sight of a peculiar glove on the woman's hand, studded with several gems—he couldn't count how many.
"There's a saying that goes: the wise man knows when to yield."
"With all these instrunts at hand, I'm quite certain they'll loosen your tongue."
Cold sweat soaked through the man instantly. In a panic he thrashed his body, trying to wrench himself free from his restraints—but it was useless. He couldn't budge.
He shouted frantically, "I'll talk! I'll talk! I'll say everything!"
Smack!
The Masked Figure standing before him suddenly slapped him hard across the face.
"I haven't asked anything yet. What exactly is it you want to say?"
Leah toyed with the pliers in her hand, looked at him, and laughed.
The sharp slap brought the dazed man fully to his senses—and with it, fury overtook his reason.
"Do you have any idea what you're doing?!"
"Kidnapping! Unlawful torture! You—you'll be arrested!"
"And so what? When you end up dead in a gutter like a stray dog, do you really think anyone is going to care about who killed you?"
Leah rose to her feet, her eyes cold. She looked like soone who had done this kind of thing more tis than she could count.
The man thrashed wildly again.
"Damn you! Damn you! How dare you do this—what gives you the right?!"
Leah looked at him the way one looks at a fool. "Because I have money."
The man: "……"
A single sentence, and he fell silent.
"Just because you have money you think you're sothing? Just because you have money you can……"
"My brother is Viktor. He's a noble. A 3rd-Tier Mage."
The man: "……"
He said nothing more.
Leah picked up the iron tongs and tapped the table with them, then continued. "Since you already know you've made an enemy of our Clavena Family, you should have already prepared yourself for what cos next."
"Talk. Who gave the orders?"
"The Duke—it was the Duke who had us do it!"
His testimony hadn't changed from before. As if to make Leah believe him, he went ahead and gave her an address of his own accord.
"That's our base. You can go there, go and check for yourself!"
"The Duke gave us a large sum of money and told us to trash your shop today! I'm not lying, you have to believe !"
Seeing the man's frantic desperation, the Masked Figure leaned close to Leah and lowered her voice.
"He said the sa thing before. Could it really be the Duke?"
Leah clicked her tongue, completely unbothered.
"A clumsy attempt at framing soone."
"If you hadn't said anything, I might have still had so suspicions about the Duke. But the fact that you're insisting so hard on him actually clears his na a little."
The man blanked for just a mont—and in that brief instant, Leah caught it.
Seeing his reaction, she couldn't help but laugh again.
Her laughter, soft and lodious, gradually faded. She pressed a hand to her stomach and lifted a pair of enchanting eyes, smiling as she spoke.
"You actually believed that? I was bluffing you."
"But looking at your reaction, it seems it really wasn't the Duke after all. I thought as much—a Duke wouldn't resort to thods this crude."
The man opened his mouth, seemingly still wanting to say sothing, but Leah simply waved her hand.
"Alright. Finish him, Leon."
"Don't forget to remove his organs—they'll fetch so coin. Oh, and his associates too. Deal with all of them. Not a single one left."
Leah patted the man's face, smiling like a devil.
The man's body shook uncontrollably. He struggled in terror, desperate to say sothing.
But the next instant, Leah's palm turned over lightly, and a bottle of potion appeared in her hand.
The Azure-Blue liquid swirled in the lamplight, throwing off a dazzling sheen.
"What a sha. Even if you sold every organ in your body, your worth wouldn't co close to a single one of our products."
She smiled at him, swaying the potion back and forth before his eyes.
"And of course, this thing worth 1,000 Geo—in my eyes, it's just the sa as you."
"Worthless."
Smack!
The next instant, the bottle shattered against his face, crack—and burst open.
All he could feel was a great deal of liquid running down his numb face.
Red and Azure-Blue swirled together, making it impossible to tell whether it was blood or potion.
"You're insane……you're absolutely insane! Let go, let go!"
The man's voice trembled, his eyes stretched wide open.
Under the double tornt of mind and body, he was already a broken wreck.
Leah looked at the expression on his face and laughed again in spite of herself.
A beautiful smile—yet one that seeped into the soul like sothing demonic.
Beneath the man's bloodshot gaze, she let out a yawn, turned away, and said lightly.
"Wrap it up quickly."
"Yes."
***
Several hours later, Leon had taken care of everything.
She slipped in quietly through the window of Viktor's Study. With Viktor away, Leah sat at the writing desk, working through the recent accounts.
No one else was in the room. Leon pulled back her hood, revealing a head of pale golden short hair and a pair of long, pointed ears.
Those ears alone were enough to establish her identity.
An Elf.
"My lady, everything has been cleaned up."
Leah didn't look up, but she already knew who it was, and smiled.
"Good work."
"My pleasure, Miss Leah."
Leon continued, "I searched those n and collected quite a bit of coin. I also swept through their base—these people had recently co into a rather sizeable sum. Roughly 5,000 Geo."
Leah took the money pouch Leon handed over, weighed it in her hand, and set it aside.
"Quite a lot, actually. That man wasn't lying about that part."
Leon raised her head and couldn't help asking again.
"Was it really not the Duke who ordered it?"
Leah's hand paused. She laughed despite herself, closed the ledger, and looked at her with a smile.
"You believed it too?"
"What?"
She said with a grin, "Even if the Duke's suspicion is reduced to its lowest, that doesn't an he's been cleared."
"All we've done is add another direction to consider. But the fact that the Duke harbors hostility toward us hasn't changed."
"Perhaps soone is working behind the scenes, deliberately stoking conflict between our Clavena Family and the Duke, so that whoever is pulling the strings in the background can profit from it."
"Or perhaps the Duke simply can't stand the sight of us. After all, there's no reason the Royal Capital needs 2 of its youngest 3rd-Tier Mages."
Leon didn't follow the intricacies of noble scheming. She paused, then asked the question she had been most wanting to ask.
"Why……did you stop interrogating him?"
"He wouldn't have told us anything, because he doesn't know who the real mastermind is."
Leah flicked the coin pouch with her finger. Inside, the Geo gave a cheerful jingle-jangle.
"Using money as paynt is enough to tell you the other party wasn't anyone important. So all he could do was pin it on the Duke."
Leah added.
"Why do you think the Duke's daughter ca all the way to the Eastern District? And happened to run into a gang of shop-smashers right as it was happening?"
"And then on top of that, spent a small fortune to compensate us for the broken potions?"
Leon listened, furrowing her brow. She had heard that Erika had spent upward of ten thousand Geo simply as compensation—she still found it rather hard to fathom.
Could a person really be that kindhearted?
"Her explanation isn't sothing I'm inclined to trust."
Leah spread her hands, resigned.
"I've lived alongside Viktor for over a decade. I know better than anyone what kind of person he is."
"He has a talent for learning magic, yes. But getting him to actually teach soone? That'll be half a lifeti away. I'd wager that even at the Academy, he's relying on a Lecture Script written by his Teaching Assistant while he just rambles through it at the front."
"And yet Erika claims to be his student. What could Viktor possibly have taught her?"
***
At that sa mont, far away in the town of Sanchez, Weija let out a sneeze.
Viktor glanced at him sideways. Could a Crow even catch a cold?
Not that he had any real ti to spare on a sneezing Crow right now.
They had arrived at a small town at the foot of Mount Vesuvius. It was a modest place, and there was only a single inn to be found.
The Knights weren't particularly fussy about where they slept—so of them could manage a full night's rest leaning against their horses at a waystation.
But Gwen was a woman, and at the sa ti their Knight Commander whom they all respected, so the Knights insisted that Gwen absolutely had to spend the night at the inn and rest properly.
By the sa logic, Viktor was a Mage.
He too needed a decent sleeping environnt to replenish his ntal energy.
And so the 2 of them had no choice but to head to the inn together.
They had originally agreed on 2 rooms. Only……
"Innkeeper, are you certain there's really only 1 room left?"
Gwen looked a little anxious—sothing Viktor found rather amusing.
It was the first ti he had ever seen her this unsettled.
At that mont she looked as though she wished she could build an entirely new room out of thin air on an empty plot of land.
The innkeeper was equally helpless.
"My lady Knight, how would I dare deceive you? There is truly only 1 double room remaining."
"Besides, I can see from the look of you two—a man and a woman traveling together—that you must be a couple. Surely sharing a room is no trouble?"
Gwen, still anxious, was about to say more, when Viktor cut in before her.
"This room will do. We'll take it."
Hearing Viktor's words, Gwen's eyes went wide instantly, staring at him in disbelief.
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