Orichalcum (11) - The Flame of Civilization
Splash!! After the pirate ship sank, I dumped a bucket of ice water over the pirate captain I had bound in chains.
Huuuurgh!!
The pirate captain, rudely evicted from dreamland, expressed his extreme joy at this surprise ice bucket challenge. The idiot who had been gaping around like a moron spotted me and flew into a rage.
“You—you fucking landlubber bastard!! What happened to my men? What happened to my ship?!”
“Want to see them? Too bad. They’re dead.”
I slammed my foot into the chin of the fool who still couldn’t read the room. He tried to dodge, but with all four limbs tied it was pointless.
Thud!
The pirate captain rolled across the deck like a kicked caterpillar.
“Gaaah…!!”
“Hurts, doesn’t it? That’s exactly how my heart felt when you said that disgusting shit to my wives. Get up, you motherfucker. Today’s me is pitch-black dark dog mode.”
There was nothing else to do on the ship anyway, so I figured I might as well buckle down and train Lightning Missile. Perfect timing. Ever since Tirsi and Veronica joined the party my role had solidified into a pure damage-tank, so even though I’d learned the spell I barely had chances to use it. While I was at it I could practice other magic and work on no-chant casting too. It was the same kind of grinding I’d grown used to in K-RPGs. At this rate I was basically living out real-life Mabinogi.
“If you’re going to do it, I’ll come with you. There’s an interrogation room.”
Ursula had taken off her coat. The pirate captain finally seemed to understand his situation; his face drained of all color. Ursula was holding a set of work clothes, and the outfit looked exactly like the torture gear a slasher chasing final girls would wear.
Wow. This captain really has presence.
“Anyone want to come torture this bastard with me?” I asked the party. It wasn’t exactly the kind of thing you invite people to with a bright smile, but everyone was equally pissed off by the guy’s provocation, so I figured there’d be at least a couple volunteers.
Surprisingly, the only one who raised her hand was Veronica.
“What? I thought Franc or Larilura might go, but even you’re sitting this one out, Dana?”
“You said it’s an interrogation. Once that bastard gives up on living he’ll be cursing the whole time he’s getting beaten. I’d just get pissed off listening to it.”
“Ah, fair enough.”
Even if he acted like a piece of shit I could just beat him, but it would be bad if he died before the interrogation was finished. I turned to the only volunteer in the party—that Bicorn.
“But Veronica, why do you want to tag along? Is torture your hobby?”
“Foolish words. I simply have something I wish to ask the wretch.”
“Something to ask? Like clues about the island’s location?”
“Indeed.”
Veronica nodded at my question.
From the port at Mount ○○, sail straight for one full day. At the human-faced rock, turn right and continue for two days and nights. That was the Bicorn clan’s handed-down legend pointing to the island’s location.
“The other sailors didn’t know, but perhaps this fellow might.”
Even with an easy-to-recognize landmark called the “human-faced rock,” every sailor from both Ursula’s ship and the Golden Ship had shaken their heads. So she wanted to ask him to avoid wandering around lost.
“S-Spare me!! I’ll tell you anything, just spare me!!”
“I’ll spare you. But it’s noisy, so first we’re going to the room of truth.”
I dragged the pirate captain, Molto, to the solitary cell. The iron bars suggested it was a space meant for locking up captured pirates.
“You might not want to watch the kind of torture I do. You sure your stomach can handle it?”
Ursula, pulling the work clothes on over her combat uniform, looked worried about us. I was a little worried myself. I had adapted to this other world, but torture was still a first for me. Unless you were a psychopath, the thought of ripping out fingernails and toenails was enough to make anyone feel sick. Honestly, just imagining a paper cut was enough to give normal people goosebumps, right? People empathize with and fear imaginable pain far more than unimaginable pain.
If I smashed this guy’s balls with a monkey wrench I’d probably feel sympathetic pain and instinctively cross my legs.
“It’s fine. Let’s keep it cool, fun, and sexy.”
Therefore I had zero intention of copying the barbaric torture methods of medieval fantasy land. I, Nord, might be an otherworlder asshole, but I was also a 21st-century Earthling.
Mr. Tesla. Lend me your strength.
I picked up an iron rod from among the torture tools and chanted the spell.
"Mana of lightning flowing through the heavens."
"Become a single nail and pierce through."
⟨ Enchant ⟩ ⟨ Lightning Missile ⟩
Crackle!!
Sparks flew from the tip of the iron rod. I had enchanted it with Lightning Missile at extremely low output. I continued the preparations exactly like I’d seen in Korean movies.
Splash! Using the claws from Beast Regression I tore a round hole in the pirate captain’s pants, then used Water Creation to completely soak the fabric.
“W-What the hell!! You son of a bitch!! What are you planning to do?!”
Maybe because I moved without the slightest hesitation? Sensing that some unimaginably horrible torture was approaching, the pirate captain screamed and struggled. Ursula noticed and forced him down into a chair. Iron chains wrapped around his body.
“Huuuuuuuuuuuurgh!!”
Crackle! Weak electricity ran across his wet skin. The pirate captain, who had been squeezing out tears from pure terror, realized it didn’t actually hurt that much and started acting tough.
“K-Kuhahaha!! If you thought you could do anything to Lord Molto with something like th—”
“—Pika pika!!!”
“M-My, my my!! Myyyyyyyyyyyyy mymy mymy my!!!! My my my!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”
Cracklecrackle. Sparks raced up his thigh and scattered embers.
Anyone who lived through the same era as me—the nineties—as a zoomer would remember the electric shock toys at the stationery store in front of school. The kind you tricked the game machines with. Occasionally there were little shits who would press the thing against their friends’ bodies. What I was doing now was basically the 19+ horror-fairy-tale version of that.
“Where’s the money hidden, Lebowski!!”
“Ugyaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!!!”
The pirate captain let out a scream so horrifying it was hard to listen to and shook violently. It started looking a little dangerous—like his heartbeat was going haywire—so I lowered the output a bit.
Fuck, adjusting the output is harder than it looks.
Finding the right output for each person is going to be tough.
People in this world get physically stronger when they use mana, so the same torture would hurt some and barely affect others. This Molto guy was more fragile than I expected. Still, electric torture had a lot of advantages. With just this and a spear you wouldn’t even need proper torture tools. You could freely control the pain from “just beating” all the way to “one step before death.”
It was a creepy thought even for the person who came up with it, but the guy actually experiencing the pain and having to play “speak with your body” must have felt far more despair.
“I’ll do anything you say!! I swear absolute loyalty to the Witch of the North Sea!!”
The moment I stopped the electric torture, this son of a bitch raised the white flag in 0.1 seconds flat. The effect was undeniable.
“He says so, Witch. What should we do?”
When I asked playfully, Ursula checked the pulse of the pirate electric-barbecue. Then she answered coolly.
“Keep zapping him. The basics of torture are to drain their stamina first.”
“Bzz~ Bzz~!! Pika pika!!”
I shouted like a mascot and gripped the wooden handle of the iron rod. This slogan has absolutely no relation to any real existing persons or organizations. “Pika” actually came from Japan. Whether it’s pika or pikachu, it’s just an onomatopoeia for “sparkle.”
“Fuuuuuuuuck!!!! I said I’d do whatever you want!!”
“Then stay the fuck still. Honestly this is my first time so I’m not very good at it. This is your first time being tortured too, right? Want me to turn the lights off?”
“Kuhuuuuhuk… You motherfucker. If I just had an axe… just an axe…”
“So what if you did? Are you the god of axes or something? Should’ve aimed for my head back then.”
It was too late to start crying now. The age where tears could prove purity had long passed. He was a piece of trash who had committed murder, robbery, and all kinds of other crimes, so I felt zero guilt.
Circuit breaker—ON.
“Thick one, thick one~ I’ll give you electricity~ Now give me the information~”
Crackle.
And so, while receiving private lessons from the Witch of the North Sea—the one-hit KO instructor of interrogation techniques—I mastered Lightning Missile. Maybe because he was a field boss, the proficiency gain was ridiculously good.
“So there was a shift in the pirate power structure in the South Sea. How annoying.”
Ursula spoke while recording the information we had squeezed out of the pirate captain. We had used Clean magic to blow away the stench of burnt meat and moved to the office. Molto? That middle-aged man had already become a free information vending machine.
“But he had no knowledge about the island. We might end up wandering more than expected.”
Veronica muttered as if it were a shame. It was an enclosed space, but since everyone except her was a barbarian, she didn’t seem particularly bothered.
“Hmm. If we’re talking about a special sea around here, it would be the Mare Strait.”
“Mare Strait?”
Ursula showed Veronica a map. Veronica had bitten on her words like a fish taking bait.
“There’s a sea area famous for having unusual currents. The currents are so unnatural that even when I was in the navy, exploration teams would go there from time to time.”
“And? What did they find?”
“Nothing at all. The salvage unit would just raise the sunken ships nearby, add them to the tax revenue, and call it a day. Still, there’s a high chance they missed something.”
Unusual currents, huh. I ran the numbers through my elite oversized brain and spoke.
“Is that strait very dangerous?”
“No, not particularly. Even without my personal opinion, it’s a safe sea. The only thing you have to watch out for is the strange currents while sailing. Stopping by briefly won’t be dangerous.”
“Then let’s head there first. It might be familiar to you sailors, but as a continental bumpkin it feels suspicious to me.”
“All right. Since it’s on the way anyway, we can anchor at one of the nearby ocean islands. We came prepared to enter even more dangerous waters, so it’s no problem.”
“Still, it would be nice if the Mare Strait is the end of it, wouldn’t it?”
“No~ It’d be a shame, right? One heroic tale to brag about would disappear. Don’t you think?”
It didn’t mean shit to me. I shook my head.
“Our priority is reaching the island. We’ll divide the compensation properly, so please understand.”
“Sure. You guys should look forward to it too. We’ll split the treasure and magic tools we took from the pirates in half. The water-flow manipulation device is pretty valuable.”
Ursula left those half-joking words and went back to work. There was no reason for me to stay in the office either, so I stepped out into the corridor with Veronica.
Veronica, seemingly conscious of the sailors walking past, asked me through telepathy.
“Do you believe the Prophet’s island lies in that Mare sea region?”
“Yeah. That’s the only place with strange currents, right? Plus the island has a tropical climate all year round.”
The second law of thermodynamics, mentioned for the nth time. Heat flows from hot places to cold places.
“If the holy water’s barrier is an optical camouflage effect, it probably can’t block temperature either. The waves warmed by the island’s heat might be creating unnatural currents that don’t match the surrounding sea. It’s worth checking out.”
Ah, this was what they called “entropy.” Pure physics.
The people of Germania probably couldn’t find the island hidden by the barrier.
So they likely didn’t understand why the waves were acting strange and simply wrote it off as an “unknown cause.”
At my words Veronica almost reached for her horn before lowering her hand. She had hidden it with transformation magic.
“Then the human-faced rock in the legend must have been wrong.”
“Who knows. It’s been thousands of years. It wouldn’t be strange if waves had eroded it away.”
The golden age of ancient civilization happened thousands of years ago. And even further back was the age of myths. The odds that a rock primitive uga-uga people once looked at would still be around in the modern era were honestly pretty low.
Since we could reach the waters near the island with the information we already had, we would probably figure it out once we got there and looked around.
Special characteristic of archaeologists: Go there first, think later.
So if there was a place that smelled suspicious, it was fastest to start there. The barrier would let us—or at least Veronica—inside. There should be something to discover once we went.
I floated a small orb of electricity above my palm with no chant and thought that to myself.
Instead of getting bored because there’s nothing to do on the ship, let’s practice magic.
I might have gotten too relaxed thinking this was a vacation. When it’s time to study, I should study. It would be nice if I could master Freezing Hand before the journey ended.