Chapter 114
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Translator: 8uhl
Chapter: 97
Chapter Title: Elliot Ready Vernonham
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“I thought you were leaving for the capital. Changed your mind? Why are you still hanging around?”
Knox asked Ethan, lifting his chin irritably. His attitude was quite condescending, causing Ethan’s face to crumple in anger.
“Not anymore. Things changed.”
Cherry immediately answered for Ethan.
“We figured it would be faster to find the underground passage to Notium, so Sir Ethan has decided to help clear it.”
Since the overland route was blocked at Westmore anyway, this might be much more efficient. They had already seen the passage connected to the Brunel police station, so there was hope.
“Looks like everyone’s here. I brought the bastard.”
Just then, Vanilla appeared in the salon. In her grasp was a man, bound tightly with ropes.
He was the sniper from the Kintne survival camp. The one Jose said was a terrible shot.
“Was his name Charlie?”
“It’s Charlie Green.”
Vanilla answered Harrison’s question immediately and forced the man to his knees before them. Then she slapped the struggling man hard across the cheek. He quieted down a bit.
Cherry was no pushover herself, but Vanilla seemed to have even less interest in pretending to be refined.
‘Then again, is Knox the only one here who actually looks like he's from the upper class?’
Harrison glanced at Knox. Leaning back languidly on the sofa, Knox was smiling leisurely, as if he found the situation highly amusing.
‘Although, come to think of it, Knox’s tastes are rather unique, so he doesn’t exactly look like a classic aristocrat either.’
Vanilla pulled the sock that had been stuffed into the trembling man’s mouth. As soon as his mouth was free, the man cried out as if screaming.
“P-p-please, spare me! Spare me!”
“He’s noisy. Should I gag him again?”
As Vanilla looked around and spoke, the man, terrified, immediately clamped his mouth shut.
It was time for the interrogation, but for some reason, Cherry just sat there blinking, while Knox and Ethan also seemed to have no intention of speaking first.
Harrison had no choice but to step forward and question the man named Charlie Green.
“You. Where did you say you were from?”
“F-from Kintne.”
“You even had the trappings of a search party. I take it you’ve set up a survival camp there?”
“Yes, yes. We’re using the entire Sinclair Hotel as our camp. There are about fifty survivors.”
“So they outnumber us.”
Ethan retorted in a negative tone, but Cherry shook her head.
“Not really. A good number of them died here. The village chief counted heads while incinerating their bodies at the disposal site. Judging by the body parts and scraps of clothing left by the monsters, he said it looked like about fourteen, not including the ones impersonating the Royal Army.”
Fifty minus fourteen is thirty-six.
Fifty wasn’t a small number, but not all of them would have high combat abilities.
Even Charlie Green, the hostage before them, wasn’t a professional sniper. Jose had said his skills were abysmal and very clumsy. He was certain that someone who had likely never held a gun before was given the role of sniper simply because he had some aptitude for it.
With all but one of their combat-capable members out of fifty annihilated, their losses must have been substantial.
“Wait, they’re using my hotel as a survival camp? Wow, the nerve. They’re staying in my hotel while trying to rob me?”
Of course, they didn’t know Cherry was in Brunel, but from her perspective, that’s what their attempt to occupy Brunel looked like.
But, thinking back on their recent conversation, hadn’t Cherry started using Ethan’s manner of speaking?
Ethan seemed to notice this too, giving Cherry a peculiar look, but she herself was oblivious, completely focused on examining Charlie from every angle.
Harrison immediately shot Ethan a fierce, angry glare. How dare he be a bad influence on his precious lady. When Knox followed suit, glaring at Ethan reproachfully, Ethan raised both hands as if he had no idea what was going on.
“Sir Ethan, why did you suddenly raise your hands?”
“That’s a good question. I have no idea myself.”
At Cherry’s question, Ethan lowered his hands and scratched his cheek awkwardly.
Their gazes returned to Charlie Green.
Harrison once again posed a question to Charlie.
“So. What is your objective?”
Charlie cautiously studied their faces.
The one who questioned him, Harrison, was a man with extraordinary crossbow skills. Another was a highly skilled policeman, and the woman with the striking looks across from him was good with an axe. With monstrous strength, at that. The blue-haired woman who had dragged him here had also casually blown a monster’s head off with a shotgun.
Charlie had watched the whole scene from the rooftop while tied up by Jose.
If he crossed these people, he could die without a trace. No, they wouldn’t let him die an ordinary death. They might torture him to the point where he’d beg for death. Compared to these people, ‘El’ might as well be a kitten on a hearth.
Charlie quietly swallowed a dry lump in his throat. He had to answer carefully.
“As you know, our objective was to occupy Brunel. And to enslave any survivors.”
Harrison recalled being told they planned to seize the mountain behind Brunel and use the villagers as laborers.
“And the reason you specifically targeted Brunel was because of the mountain?”
“That’s right. Because of the mountain behind this mansion. A large river flows beyond it. The mountain isn’t very high, so it’s not dangerous, and it seemed useful for hunting wild animals and gathering food, so we wanted to secure it. Kintne is all flatlands, so there’s no place like this.”
“This wasn’t your idea, I imagine. To know so much detail about this mountain, the leader must be either originally from Brunel or a Kintne native.”
At Harrison’s words, Charlie nodded meekly. Then he spilled everything he knew.
“Yes, yes. Elliot Ready—we call him El. He’s the leader of our camp. I heard he used to be the manager of the Sinclair Hotel’s Kintne branch.”
The manager of the Sinclair Hotel’s Kintne branch.
But Harrison had never heard the name before. And he knew the list of managers for every Sinclair Hotel branch inside and out.
Harrison stroked his chin, lost in thought. Elliot Ready. Not a manager, but he’d heard the name somewhere. Where was it...?
‘The manager of the Kintne branch is Maddox. Could it be him? He might have changed his name after the fall.’
Meanwhile, Cherry, who had been listening quietly, flared up.
“Ah! Elliot, that son of a bitch!”
Cherry shot to her feet and shouted. Everyone turned to look at her.
“Hotel manager, my ass! That guy’s a noble!”
“You know this Elliot Ready?”
Harrison asked Cherry, puzzled. She nodded vigorously, then clenched her fists and ground her teeth.
“Elliot Ready Vernonham. That’s his full name.”
A middle name meant he was a noble. Harrison ran through the genealogies of the capital’s prominent noble families that Cherry might know, but the name Vernonham wasn’t among them.
“That bastard. I met him once, a long time ago. I was nice enough to take him to a party as my partner, and you know what he did? He had the gall to tell me not to act so high and mighty when I wasn't even a noble!”
Cherry shouted, thoroughly agitated. Harrison had never seen her so worked up, bad-mouthing someone like this.
Wasn’t this the girl who held her head high even when pointed at by high society, who would sneer back at her accusers? The girl who would rather spend time primping than waste it on bothersome gossip...
“You accepted a partnership request from such an ill-mannered cur?”
Knox asked Cherry, his brow furrowed in clear displeasure.
“It was a favor for my father. The son of a childhood friend or something? His face was handsome, so I accepted without much thought. Just by his looks, you’d think he was the perfect gentleman.”
At this, the three men were once again reminded of how much Cherry loved a handsome face, and they fell silent for a moment.
Even so, Harrison mulled over her story. A favor for Chairman Sinclair... The incident seemed to vaguely ring a bell.
“And he was a psychopath. We went to a party at Baron Wipend’s estate. The baron’s son was looking down on him a bit. Well, since Elliot had looked down on me for not being a noble, I had no reason to help, so I just let it happen. Anyway, the party got boring after that, so I went out to the garden, and I heard a strange noise.”
Cherry shuddered, as if the memory of that day disgusted her.
“In an empty part of the garden, Elliot was stabbing the Baron’s son in the thigh with a sword. But you know what was even more chilling? He was smiling while he did it. With eyes that looked like he was ecstatic with joy. And what was it he said then?”
*A guy like you belongs right here, under my boot.*
Cherry muttered the last words softly, mimicking Elliot, and shivered again.
“Ugh, he’s such a psycho, even just thinking about it.”
“Ah. I remember that incident.”
Ethan said.
“It was an unsolved case where they never caught the culprit, wasn’t it? The Baron’s son confessed that he’d stabbed himself in the thigh. He ended up losing the use of that leg. So that’s the truth.”
“He was blackmailed. The Baron’s son had some dirty habits of his own. The bastard’s hobby was toying with the servants of the estate, breaking them, and then throwing them away. He was apparently into men, too. Elliot saw him harassing one of the servants in the garden that day. Who knows, maybe he secured evidence later. In any case, the Baron’s son never opened his mouth about Elliot.”
This Elliot fellow was bolder than Harrison had thought. For a powerless, unknown noble to do something like that to the Wipend family.
“That’s when I made up my mind. All men are the same anyway, so I might as well just look at their faces.”
“That’s a strange conclusion to draw.”
Knox pointed out, but Cherry didn’t seem to be listening.
Charlie, who had been listening quietly, couldn’t keep up with the frantic back-and-forth and was left in a daze.
“He’s a real psycho. The signs were there from the start. He’s the type to kill someone with a smile on his face.”
The son of Viscount Vernonham, and yet neither Knox nor Ethan had ever heard of such a family.
“They were nobles in title only. He barely managed to pay off his gambling debts thanks to my father. For a guy like that to pull off something so audacious is actually pretty impressive. I’d heard a rumor that Viscount Vernonham had recently gone down to Kintne after racking up more gambling debts, but I can’t believe he’s still alive.”
Cherry let out a sarcastic exclamation of awe.
Charlie flinched, finding her even more terrifying now.
He was already scared after witnessing her smash a monster’s head with an axe, but the chilling flow of the conversation was something else entirely. In fact, it wasn’t just Cherry—everyone here was a little off.
Then again, with the way the world was now, it was a miracle anyone wasn’t completely insane.