The Old Man's Interrogation
“Mmph! MMMMMMPH!”
The house was dark and empty.
A thuggish-looking man in his twenties, his body covered in scars and tattoos, sat bound to a chair with his mouth gagged.
He couldn't speak with the rag stuffed in his mouth, but his eyes were wide and furious, and he was kicking both legs against the floor, kicking up a full-blown racket.
Standing before him was Meilin, arms crossed. She'd been quietly shutting her eyes and exercising patience, but at last she couldn't take it anymore and snapped.
“Ugh, shut up! Sit still for one second!”
Under her intimidation, the man only struggled harder.
“Over here!”
Just as the atmosphere was turning hostile, Camibarez arrived with Simon in tow. Meilin glanced back at them.
“You're here?”
“What's going on? Who is this guy?”
At Simon's question, Meilin began her explanation.
She'd been diligently combing the village, asking residents about the Saintess candidate, 'Sasha' — but most of the villagers either claimed not to know anything or simply slipped away, giving her the cold shoulder across the board.
Except for exactly one man.
— What did you say? Why are you looking for that kid? Who are you?
He'd gone straight to a dead-serious confrontation the moment she asked.
When Meilin didn't answer, the man had pulled a dagger from his coat and lunged at her.
Judging by his looks alone, he'd apparently assumed he could take her easily — and instead he'd been subdued in a matter of seconds, ending up tied to a chair like this.
Is he connected to the people who took Sasha?
Whatever else was true, Meilin seemed to have handled her job properly. Simon approached the man with a satisfied expression.
“C-Careful, Simon!”
“It's fine.”
He untied the rag gagging the man's mouth.
“You little %$@&@!!!”
Cursing was the very first thing out of his mouth.
“You damn brats, how dare you! Do you even know who I am? I'll suck your eyeballs right out of your—”
“And who might you be?”
Simon asked.
The question was so brazen, so utterly casual, that the man very nearly answered on reflex before catching himself, his expression hardening.
“Like hell I'd tell you!”
Simon stared at him silently for a moment, then turned around.
Several villagers had stopped in their tracks at the commotion and were watching.
“Excuse me!”
Leaving the gangster where he was, Simon strode quickly toward the villagers.
The onlookers flinched and hurried away as if fleeing, and Simon matched their pace with long, quick strides.
“Do you know who that man is?”
He walked alongside them and asked, but got no reaction. So he changed his question immediately.
“We're looking for a girl named Sasha. Even the smallest detail would help—”
“Sasha?”
One villager's face stiffened.
“That freak can disappear or rot, for all I care.”
A freak, huh.
A brutally candid description. Simon etched the villagers' image of Sasha into his mind, then pressed on.
“Do you know why Sasha disappeared?”
“Ugh, what is it with you people pestering me? Who even are you?”
Now they were demanding his identity instead.
Word getting out that Kizen had come here would be a problem. Worse, this was the Neutral Zone, beyond Kizen's reach — he had no investigative authority to invoke.
[Kheheh! Seems you've gotten tangled up in a troublesome matter, lad.]
'This is where I use the adult's way — the one Dick taught me.'
[The adult's way?]
Simon rummaged through his pocket.
“Oh, look at that. I've got one of these in my pocket.”
He opened his palm to reveal a single gold coin.
The adults reacted instantly to the adult's way. Watching the greed warp their eyes, Simon smiled inwardly.
Incidentally, the Dark Alliance's currency — silver and gold — was accepted even here in the Neutral Zone.
“Just tell me about that man.”
Simon produced a second gold coin. One of the men glanced around nervously, then spoke in a hushed voice.
“Don't you dare say I told you. It's a gang. A gang. One of the biggest around here.”
“Ah. Which gang?”
“The Sentinel Gang. They're big enough to have a whole combat unit of necromancers with open cores. This village sits inside their territory too.”
Simon raised a third coin above the other two.
“The gang they call the 'Sentinels' — they're the ones who took Sasha. Am I right to think that? I don't want anything else, so if you agree, just nod.”
The man nodded, his face frozen stiff.
Simon gladly paid the three gold coins, then returned to the building where the gangster was being held.
“How's it going?”
Meilin asked. Sometime in the interim, the gangster had apparently said something else ill-advised — she was now gripping him by the collar and hauling him up.
“No luck. He wouldn't talk to the end.”
The gangster snickered.
“Obviously not! This territory belongs to us, so the villagers are on our side! If you've got that through your skulls—”
“Oh, you just said this was your territory.”
Simon replied with perfect nonchalance.
“How kind of you to volunteer it. There are plenty of gangs around, but everyone knows the Sentinel crew has this whole area in a chokehold.”
The gangster's face went rigid.
“So then. Can you tell me why the Sentinel Gang took Sasha — and where they took her?”
“Like I'd know!”
“Hey, you little — come on, seriously, just spit it out already!”
Meilin, unable to watch anymore, cut in, and the two of them started bickering all over again.
Simon quietly took a step back and glanced behind him.
There was Dick, just approaching. Simon held out his palm in a don't-come-any-closer gesture, then communicated his plan with a flick of the eyes and a few hand signals.
These two had been inseparable for their entire time at Kizen. Dick caught Simon's meaning at once, gave him a thumbs-up that said leave it to me, and vanished somewhere.
And a short while later—
“Heh heh. My apologies for the delay.”
Appeared Dick, disguised as an old man and draped in a strange, ragged cloak.
'...That's not a disguise. He looks like a genuinely old man.'
Dick was wearing a Bio-Face — a living skin mask — covered in wrinkles, and while his real face remained visible beneath it, the effect aged him by decades at a glance.
Add in the ragged cloak and the skulls strung in a line across his body, and the whole look was a far cry from the sleek, trendy image of the modern elite necromancer.
He looked like a necromancer of a very traditional sort.
“What's this old geezer supposed to—!”
Dick suddenly stepped forward and seized the gangster's eyes, prying them wide open, up and down.
“Hmmmmm.”
Overwhelmed in an instant, the man faltered and fell silent mid-sentence.
“And what was it you said you wouldn't do?”
At Dick's question, Simon played along on instinct.
“He refused to give up the information, Elder.”
The man thrashed in his bindings like he was having a seizure.
“You brought a torture specialist?! But it's useless! No torture you inflict on me will ever—!”
“Tsk!”
Dick let out a sharp cry.
“Don't insult me, boy. Torture is a ve-ery crude method.”
Imitating an old man's voice with astonishing realism, Dick picked up a pair of shears.
Snip. Snip.
Without a moment's hesitation, he cut away the man's bangs. At the sinister rasp of the blade, the gangster's expression hardened by the second.
Then Dick drew a Blood Potion from his subspace, dipped a fingertip in it, and began painting across the man's forehead.
“How do you like it?”
Dick said, pointing at the window.
In the reflection, the gangster discovered a dotted line drawn in blood across his own forehead.
It was a target.
For some reason, goosebumps erupted across his entire body, and he began to shudder violently.
“Information extracted through torture can hardly be called reliable. The surest method is—”
Dick took a scalpel from his case and closed his hand around it.
“to split open the skull, remove the brain, and examine it directly.”
“!!”
Dick was putting on a genuinely convincing necromancer act — so much so that not only the gangster but even Meilin and Camibarez, watching from the side, were rattled.
Dick produced a spike and began driving it into the man's forehead. As the massive spike sank more than halfway into his skull with a slow, steady shhhk, the man finally broke, weeping in sheer terror and starting to scream.
“Y-You insane bastards! Do this in the Neutral Zone and you think you'll get away with it?!”
“Worry not. Once the brain is out, your carcass will go to feed the wild dogs.”
Dick pressed the scalpel against the man's forehead. Blood ran down, veiling the man's vision in red.
Primal fear won out at last, and the man screamed.
“I'll talk! I'll talk!!”
But Dick didn't stop the scalpel. He drew it down in one long line.
“Please! I'll tell you everything I know! Just STOP that thing!!”
Only then did Simon grab Dick's hand and say:
“Let's hear him out first and decide.”
The gangster spilled everything, start to finish.
His gang, the Sentinels, had accepted a lucrative commission to abduct Sasha and bring her in.
He was a low-level grunt, so he didn't know who the client was — but the client had known that Sasha lived in this village, known her home address, and even known that the village lay within the Sentinel Gang's sphere of influence.
The destination, he said, was the Haldun Mountains.
“No need to split your skull after all.”
Simon said, straightening up.
“You'd do well to keep quiet about us. Well — if the gang finds out you leaked their information, they'll try to kill you for it, but that's your problem.”
The gangster nodded, tears and snot streaming down his face.
And so the four of them left the building. Dick pulled off his Bio-Face with a great pwoh!
“Ehaha! My acting was insane, right? Tell me it was insane!”
Simon gave him a light thump on the head in acknowledgment of a job well done.
Meilin and Camibarez, on the other hand, walked at a slight distance from him.
“Hey, commoner. Don't talk to me for the rest of the day. You gave me chills.”
“...Dick, that was scary.”
“It was acting!”
Dick protested, shoving the ragged cloak into his subspace with a wounded air.
Just then, Seywir appeared before the four of them as if dropping out of the sky.
“S-So, how did it go?!”
His voice was thick with anxiety and urgency.
“What about the Priests?”
Simon countered with a question of his own.
“I intimidated them, and they scattered and fled. It seems Sasha wasn't in their possession.”
“Just as you said, Agent Seywir!”
Dick chimed in out of nowhere.
“When you first told us not to chase the Priests and to investigate the villagers instead, I'll admit I was puzzled — but you were absolutely right, it wasn't the Priests, it was a gang that kidnapped her! You saw through it all again, didn't you?”
At that, Seywir — who'd gone blank for a moment — immediately flashed a supremely confident smile and swept back his bangs.
“Naturally! I suspected as much from the very beginning.”
“As expected of you!!”
While the two of them clicked into perfect sync, Simon was forcing out an awkward laugh.
'Well, those Priests were fakes anyway.'
And no wonder: the traces from that alley — the divine explosion, the shattered ground — had been wiped away without a trace.
“Right! So all that's left now is to track down the gang that took Sasha. What should our next move be?”
At Seywir's words, Meilin pulled a baffled huh? expression.
“You're the one who's supposed to give us orders, Agent.”
“H-Haha! If I simply handed you the answers, that wouldn't be proper training at all! Come now, put your heads together and think it through! How should we move from here?”
He was smiling, but the corners of his mouth were twitching. The whole air of it screamed, 'Hurry up and figure something out, you brats!'
Simon let out a small sigh and spoke.
“We got a map off the gang member we caught earlier.”
He spread the map out and pointed to one spot with a finger.
“A gang won't have the capital or the expertise to set up a teleportation circle. To climb the mountain, they'll have gone by carriage. The destination is the Haldun Mountains — a place with nothing there but the mountain itself. That's where the gang and the client will trade Sasha. And the client is most likely—”
“People from Efnel, right?”
At Meilin's words, Simon nodded.
With Efnel's intelligence network, there was a good chance they already knew Kizen was on the move. So they'd hired mercenaries to secure Sasha first and planned to exchange her for the money at the Haldun Mountains.
“The best option would be for us to get teleportation support ourselves, go straight to the Haldun Mountains, crush the gang, and rescue Sasha.”
Simon stopped there and stared quietly at Seywir's face.
Seywir hastily waved his hands.
“As I said before, teleportation is out of the question. Our coordinates could be exposed to Efnel, and besides—”
He offered excuse after excuse, but the real reason was most likely that he simply lacked the authority. Even with authority, a teleportation circle would be a heavy expense for Vengeance itself.
Only places like Kizen — or the money-flush Vanilla and the Ivory Tower — could manage something like that.
“......”
Apparently catching on at last, suspicion began to surface in Meilin's and Camibarez's eyes as they looked at Seywir.
“Then here's another way.”
Simon feigned ignorance and pointed at a river on the map.
“We go up this river and cut them off at the midpoint. The gang won't have made it up the mountain yet.”
“By river? But w-where are we supposed to get a boat...”
Simon looked straight at Dick. Dick curled his lips up into a grin.
“Guess I'd better check the mana engine on that boat, then!”