Two Men See It Through to the End (2)
Sometimes, when you watch a crime movie or a drama, you notice a certain kind of scene.
They stage it somewhere already a little dim, a place that takes an atmosphere dreary to begin with and pushes it further into gloom—construction sites, docks, vacant lots, clandestine meetings in dark mountains, abandoned buildings. Nothing but dingy, uneasy locations. Sit with enough of them and even the person watching starts to feel depressed. You have to wonder whether the location scouts chose them for exactly that.
Well. It was understandable.
The subject was crime. You could hardly shoot that somewhere bright. Crime was not something a person did with head held high, out where anyone could see.
But...
If you're that brazen about it, is it even a crime?
If a man could face himself without flinching, and if what he did could be laid bare before the world with not one speck of shame beneath the open sky, then it was not a crime at all.
So...
"No need to hide. Just plant yourself somewhere bright and own it."
"......"
"Am I wrong?"
"......"
"This little shit won't even answer."
Lee Han clicked his tongue and scolded him, muttering that, true to a spell-slinger, the man's character was rotten. An adult asks a question, and he doesn't even answer.
"I heard the cake here is incredible?"
"The world's really come a long way. Who would have thought there'd be a café for commoners."
"They say the owner is some black-haired young lord. You don't think..."
"Oh, please. As if it would be him. Ho ho!"
A dessert café. One of the places lately in fashion in the Royal Capital, famous for selling dessert and coffee cheap enough that even commoners could walk in freely. Most of the customers were women, but a man turned up here and there, which was proof enough that the lure of something sweet did not bother sorting people by sex. A bulky knight sitting in a place like this, then, was hardly strange.
"Sir, are you ready to order?"
"One fruit crepe cake, and one milk tea."
"And the gentleman seated across from you?"
"Just a coffee. Oh—and this one likes ice in his, so pack it full."
"Ah... understood."
For an instant the waitress turned a cold look on the blond man sitting across from Lee Han.
"Face is decent enough. That palate is a crime."
She muttered it as if she could not fathom how anyone could be so uncivilized as to put ice in coffee.
The blond man, however, was the very picture of injustice. He had no hobby of icing his coffee. So why should he be saddled with this misunderstanding, and why could he not even correct it? In his heart, Huey de Byron was beating his chest.
Unfortunately for him...
"Mmph..."
The man could not open his mouth. He could not so much as twitch a finger. Rolling his eyes was the whole of what he was permitted to do. Huey had been stripped of the freedom of his body.
...Not by choice.
He turned a resentful gaze on the knight who had taken that freedom from him.
The knight, for his part—
"Oh, they really load the fruit into this cake. Not bad. I could get used to this place."
—was simply pleased to have found a fine café worth becoming a regular at.
A full seventeen hours had passed since Huey de Byron was taken.
He was an honored guest of the kingdom. By now a great many troops ought to have been pulled out to search for him, and the mages of the Magic Tower ought to have been chasing him in a frenzy. That he was still a captive after seventeen hours was strange enough on its own.
And then there was this.
Lee Han took a long, noisy sip.
"Been a while. Yeah. Coffee's meant to be iced."
"......"
"What? You want some?"
"......"
"Why won't you talk, you?"
"!?!"
Sitting brazenly in a café, and still no one could find him. If that was not a twist, what was?
Perhaps because he knew it.
"How are you even alive, with not one of your colleagues lifting a finger to save you? Honestly, I figured I'd run into a spell-slinger or two. Turns out they're all resting at the Royal Castle. Well, their character was always that trash, so it isn't exactly strange."
"...Mmph!"
Lee Han needled him, and the blond mage flared. Unable to answer the mockery, and perhaps ashamed of that fact, his face ripened a furious red. Less shame, it seemed, at being jeered at as a spell-slinger than at having it exposed that the great renown of the Magic Tower's great disciple was, in truth, worth nothing at all.
To Lee Han, it was hardly surprising. From the moment you called them a gathering of spell-slingers, he had been certain there was no such thing as camaraderie among them.
How many of those things have I bagged?
Back when he had been working like some spell-slinger hunter, he had seen them swarm in packs often enough. Never in his life had he seen creatures with so little ability to work together. Extreme selfishness. Mages were nothing but social misfits who cared only for their own research and their own amusements.
University group-project teammates. And every last one of them a troll.
In that sense, he had already expected that kidnapping this one would not raise much of a fuss. Dodge the soldiers, and that was enough—enough that he even had the leisure to sit out in the open in a café.
...Some of that leisure, admittedly, came from the brazen conviction that kidnapping a blond spell-slinger was hardly a crime in the first place.
Anyway.
"Way I see it, I could stroll around in broad daylight for two days or a week and nothing would come of it. It isn't just that the soldiers are useless. The guild boys are giving me a hand. If I felt like it, I could have you missing for the rest of your life. So. Think you can start answering my questions now?"
"......"
"Greg Bin. Where's that bastard? You know. Don't you, Blondie?"
"!"
"For the record, if you don't talk today either, I'm going to have to use some regrettably rough methods. So do me a favor and finish this while you can still do it the nice way."
Teeth ground.
"Right. What kind of conversation was I expecting with a spell-slinger. Stupid of me."
Lee Han grumbled. Conversation was something you had with people. You did not have it with the sort who slung spells.
Except—
"Mmph—!"
You insane bastard, you have to let me talk before I can say a damn word!!!
Huey de Byron, his mouth locked for all of seventeen hours, had never been so wronged. Please, just let him speak—!
......He thought he would go mad.
At present, Lee Han's Gyeong was driven into Huey de Byron's body. If one were to compare it to a technique, it was not unlike Pressure Point. Hands, feet, and the muscles of the mouth had been rendered properly useless, and from Lee Han's side it was an obvious precaution. For those who used magic, tongue and hand signs were as good as a blade. Letting the man open his mouth meant handing him an excuse to attack, which meant Lee Han could not permit him to speak. That conversation was impossible was simply something that had to be borne.
Except.
"I told you blinking is fine. Any kind of signal is fine. And you keep trying to talk with your mouth. Why can't you take a hint?"
"...Mmph!"
"Little shit. Nothing on you but pride."
Lee Han knew the man was not refusing to cooperate merely because his mouth would not open. This was defiance, plain and simple. Pride, maybe. Or maybe the bastard was simply that bad at reading a situation.
...Someone might say, then why not just torture him.
A spell-slinger mixes five parts truth, three parts lies, and two parts pure invention. Damn them.
The man who had hunted more mages than anyone knew it. Torture did not do much good on the sort who used spells. You could give them pain. You could not believe the words that came out. So he had to make the man speak of his own will, by his own choice. Otherwise the truth would never come.
...And yet.
Time keeps slipping.
Precious time kept slipping, and he could not wage a war of attrition forever. He could always go straight at the sultan and hunt the Illegal Mage that way, but if the man went to ground in the meantime, that would be its own headache. So he needed this one's cooperation.
And this one, surely...
He knows.
Lee Han was certain the blond mutt knew the Illegal Mage existed. It was not mere instinct. He was probably the knight who had hunted mages harder than anyone in the last hundred years, and the judgment came from experience and knowledge.
So.
...No helping it.
It would tire him a little, but he made up his mind to hear the answer by a slightly more certain method from here on. Directly from Blondie's body.
"You're probably thinking something like this. 'Why did this madman suddenly kidnap me and start looking for an Illegal Mage out of nowhere?'"
"!"
"And this, too. 'Even if he is looking for an Illegal Mage, he ought to ask for cooperation politely. Why is he doing it like this?'"
"...???"
"Looks like I hit it."
The man looked utterly dumbfounded. You know all that, and you still treat me this way? That was the face.
"So why am I making your life miserable anyway? To explain, we go back about two years. Among the spell-slingers I caught, there was one called Christine. An Illegal Mage, famous for human experimentation."
"!!"
Huey was aghast.
Christine, master of lightning magic. Even in the Magic Tower, that was a famous name.
Once.
"—Out of his own mouth, he told me he'd belonged to the Magic Tower."
Huey went dead still.
"And I heard something interesting while he was at it. 'Mages who've once belonged to the Magic Tower have their every movement reported back to the Tower, even after they're driven out.' Was that it?"
"......"
"...Right. So that bastard was telling the truth."
"!!"
For an instant, goosebumps rose all over Huey de Byron.
He had not said a word. And yet this ill-mannered knight looked, for all the world, as if the two of them were holding a conversation.
...How?
A situation beyond understanding. Before the terror of the unknown, the mage trembled.
Ugh. My head.
But unlike the man shaking with fear across from him, what Lee Han was doing was not so very difficult.
Which stood to reason.
Reading the heartbeat and the muscle contractions all at once is a grind.
He was merely imitating a Lie Detector.
...A trick, perhaps, that only he could pull off.