A Modern Man Poisons Another World (3)
Splash!
The assassins came to their senses under the cold baptism of water slapping them across the face.
"Hah!"
The first thing they checked was the state of their bodies. Unfortunately, their hands and feet were bound to the chair with rope, so they couldn't move so much as an inch. About all they could manage was turning their heads and breathing.
As for the location... the damp air and the faint breeze seeping through cracks in the ceiling suggested it was underground. I hadn't been aware this mansion even had a basement like this.
One of the assassins, whose every thought was plainly visible in the movement of his eyes, shouted at me.
"Kh! Just kill me, then!"
Should I kill him if he asks me to? Order someone like that to do something, and he'll turn stubborn as a mule and refuse to do it. So no, I wouldn't be granting his request.
"No."
The moment I refused, he tried without hesitation to bite off his own tongue. But before his teeth could cut through, my fingers made sure his mouth stayed firmly shut.
"Tell me who hired you. And how you found me."
"Whether I talk or not, you'll cripple me either way. So to hell with it—I'm not saying a word."
"Fine. Keep your mouth shut, then. I'll get to torturing you."
SPLASH!
I grabbed the back of his head and shoved him into the water tank. He held his breath for a while, and then—blub, blub—little air bubbles began to rise. Finally, he convulsed, thrashing against his bindings as he expelled the last of the oxygen trapped in his lungs.
What if he never opens his mouth? No problem. Even if he kept it clenched shut to the very end, my brilliant deductive reasoning would let me narrow things down considerably.
For starters, the culprit had to be one of the wives who was physically weaker than her husband. If she'd married down, she wouldn't have cared whether her husband found out—she'd have worn a brazen expression, like so what if you know? So it had to be a wife who'd married up.
And since she'd judge that her husband might grow suspicious of her, their marriage couldn't be on good terms. At minimum, a couple with at least one child.
How many wives meet all these conditions?
...Way, way too many, actually.
This wasn't going to work.
Splash!
I grabbed him by the hair and hauled him back up. The assassin, lungs surely burning from all the water he'd swallowed, coughed violently and vomited it out in agony.
I slapped his cheek, urging him on.
"Come on, you rotten bastard, open your mouth already."
The assassin wore an expression of sheer disbelief. He was too busy gasping for breath to speak, but the sentiment came through loud and clear.
"If you'd just opened up nicely, I wouldn't have had to resort to torture. Which makes you the bad guy—the bad guy who shut his mouth and forced me to become a torturer."
"...You're completely insane."
Clearly, this man wasn't in any state for a rational conversation.
SPLASH!
I dunked him under again. He floundered around like a fish hauled up onto land.
Splash!
"Gahk—wait, wait a moment..."
After a few rounds, his willpower seemed to be gradually crumbling. Only after his belly had swollen up with water did he finally speak, with the politest of tones.
"I'll talk. I'll tell you everything..."
Would have been so much easier for both of us if you'd come out like this from the start.
The mastermind had apparently tried to conceal their identity in their own way—hiring a subcontractor of a subcontractor of a subcontractor of a subcontractor of a subcontractor—but the loose ends had been sloppy. Or maybe they simply hadn't had the time to clean up properly?
Either way, if the goal was to make the trail impossible to follow in reverse, they should have hired someone to kill the topmost subcontractor. That would have given me some genuine difficulty in my search—but thanks to their negligence, I managed to find out exactly which adulteress had tried to have me killed.
A few days after the assassination attempt, as the sun peeked its head up over the horizon, I set out toward the mastermind's residence.
The guards posted at the mansion's entrance stopped me in my tracks.
"Who goes there?"
"A mage here to see the Count. Is he in?"
"The Count is not so idle as to meet any stray who shows up at his gate."
"Well, you see, I have a feeling the Count would very much like to meet me..."
"Save the nonsense. If you won't leave, we'll use force."
The guards rested their hands on their sword hilts. Paying them no mind, I calmly checked my wristwatch. The hands were just ticking past eight.
According to my research, this was precisely the time the Count left his mansion.
Clop, clop.
Right on cue came the sound of horse hooves. A single carriage was making its way toward me along the road leading out from the mansion.
One guard unlocked the firmly sealed iron gate, while the other shoved a hand against my chest to keep me from causing any trouble, trying to push me back from the main gate.
Clop, clop. The carriage glided past me, entirely on course to ignore me completely. Through the small window, the Count himself didn't spare me so much as a glance—clearly used to scenes like this.
I slipped free of the guard's grip and shouted at the carriage.
"My Lord Count! Might you be in need of a Paternity Test Kit?!"
He'd be interested, wouldn't he? I couldn't say whether he'd attended the black market auction or not, but surely he had at least some suspicions? If nothing else, it was strange that the Countess had been in such a frantic hurry to eliminate me.
Had my prediction been right? The carriage, which had been rolling leisurely along, came to an abrupt halt. Then the door swung open, and the hulking figure of the Count stepped down.
He gestured to the guards holding me back, and the one gripping my collar withdrew.
"A face I haven't seen before."
He stood well over 180 centimeters tall, the Count looming over me so thoroughly that his shadow fell across my face. His fists were each the size of an adult woman's head. If he turned out to be unhinged and threw a single punch, it would feel like getting mauled by a bear.
The Countess rushing to deal with me so quickly was probably partly a matter of their difference in standing—but perhaps she'd also been trying to save her own skin.
"I'm just an unnamed mage. The artifacts I make, however, are rather well known."
I showed him the Paternity Test Kit I'd brought along. The Count's pupils blew wide open at the sight of a full stockpile of the kits—ones I had deliberately kept scarce and hard to obtain.
"Seeing that, I have no choice but to believe you, whether I want to or not. So what brings you to me?"
"My Lord Count, are you aware that a certain mage has recently become quite unpopular among the noble ladies?"
"First I've heard of it."
No surprise there. That particular gossip had circulated only covertly among small cliques in women's high society. Without Muriel's information network, which permeated every corner of the Empire, the only people who'd know would be the parties involved themselves.
"But I can well imagine it."
The Count tilted his chin toward the Paternity Test Kit.
"Seeing as the things you make are busily exposing their transgressions, one by one."
"Precisely. As you've guessed, my Lord Count, thanks to these kits I've earned the hatred of women who weren't content merely to commit adultery, but went on to bear another man's child. And a few days ago, there was an attempt on my life."
"And?"
"I dug into who had hired the assassins. And at the end of that trail, my Lord Count, I found the Countess's name."
I watched his reaction carefully. If theirs were a normal marriage, such a slur against his own wife would have drawn visible displeasure. But if the rift between the two of them was real, as my investigation suggested—if he was already harboring suspicions about her—then he would react quite differently.
And...
"Hoh."
His reaction was the latter. Resting his chin in his hand, the Count allowed the corner of his mouth to curl upward slightly. As if he'd been waiting all this time for an opportunity to press his wife.
Just as I'd found in my research.
"It may be an insolent thing to say, but the only people who find these kits inconvenient are exactly those sorts of people—which is why I felt I had to inform you of this, my Lord Count. And why I thought you might need one of these as well."
"So you've brought it here to sell it to me at an outrageous price?"
"Would I do such a thing?"
I could get away with it, sure, but why bother? On the surface, it would look like I was slandering his wife—so if I charged full price for the merchandise on top of that, the optics would be terrible. I'd already earned a decent fortune, so there was no need to be greedy.
And so, for once, I went positively radical.
"I'll sell it to you at one-tenth the average black market price."
Even that was a hefty sum—because the black market price was itself abnormally inflated thanks to my deliberate throttling of supply.
Blissfully unaware of this, the Count looked rather pleased with my flattery. Well, of course he would—the price of hunting down his wife's infidelity had just, by sheer luck, dropped dramatically.
"Good. Come inside."
With the Count's approval, the path into the mansion lay open before me.
Shall we go have a look at the lovely face of the lady who tried to have me killed? I do hope it curdles beautifully when she sees the very man she meant to murder walking into her home on his own two feet.
The Countess. The Countess who rolled around in bed with another man while her husband waited at home. The Countess who wasn't satisfied with a mere summer fling and just had to bear another man's child. The Countess, cuckoo-like, who'd passed off another's chick as her precious darling child.
The more I thought about it, the more infuriating she became. What a lunatic.
You're done for.