Revenge (6)
Revenge (6)
"That person... who is he?"
As Alice, who had entered the room, and I both remained silent, Mia Crowfield asked in a somewhat uneasy voice. To be more precise, she seemed unable to grasp the nature of the situation at all.
But I didn't answer. Neither did Alice.
I simply walked slowly forward and looked down at the man's face.
The man kept his eyes fixed on the floor.
What should I do?
The truth was, the situation was rather ambiguous.
It was a fact that this man had beaten me. I doubted he intended to kill me, though. I did lose consciousness, but I woke up again right after.
Since Claire had been able to escape alive in the original story, the beating that had turned me into pulp was probably just 'processing,' literally. If he was going to sell me to a corpse fetishist, it would have been better to take me somewhere, kill me, and hand me over fresh, rather than kill me on the spot and transport me.
Should I grab him by the hair and force his head up?
I considered it seriously, then decided not to go that far. If I did something like that while crouched down like this, the inside of my skirt would be completely visible to this man. And to Alice and Mia Crowfield, who were standing... well, neither of them was in uniform, so maybe it didn't matter.
Huh.
Was my grudge so shallow that I could think about things like this with the man I'd tried so hard to find, and had given up on, right in front of me?
"..."
Well, one thing was certain.
That night, if it hadn't been me, another girl would have suffered that fate. There were other orphanages besides the one we were in.
"About ten years ago."
After carefully organizing my thoughts, I finally opened my mouth.
"There was an orphanage that burned down. Do you happen to remember it?"
"..."
The man didn't answer for a while.
Just as I was beginning to think he had no intention of responding, the man answered in a rough voice.
"I remember."
He used polite speech.
He might not have known who we were or why we were doing this. But he couldn't fail to recognize the Imperial Crest, the Gryphon, vividly emblazoned on the armor of the knights who had stormed into this building. It was a symbol recognized even by commoners in neighboring countries, let alone spies.
Though it was a crest one rarely ever saw up close and in person like this.
"Were you in the vicinity?"
"I was."
Did he know why I was asking this? Maybe he just thought that not answering properly in this situation would be far more disadvantageous.
"At that time... there would have been a woman beside you. Do you know where that woman went?"
At first glance, she had looked like a noblewoman, but upon closer inspection, there was something excessively flamboyant about her attire. Selecting and processing the children had been this man's role, but that woman had held an important role too, so she must have been nearby with him.
"... The last time I saw her, she was in the imperial capital."
"..."
I closed my mouth and stared quietly at the back of the man's head.
His hair was thick. It looked like the hair of a man who had never known hardship. Well, living while playing that kind of role, he probably hadn't experienced 'true' hardship. At the very least, he must have earned dishonest money and spent it shamelessly.
I slowly straightened up and looked around.
From the moment I had entered the room, my gaze had been fixed on the man, so I hadn't been able to take in my surroundings. Now they came into view.
It looked different from how I remembered it.
The atmosphere had changed considerably since my last visit. Well, it would have. To decorate it this luxuriously, he would have had to put up new wallpaper, at least. Ten years had passed, and back then, the wallpaper in this house... it must have been stained all over with opium smoke and the bodily fluids of people.
"Is this house your property?"
I asked as I slowly walked around the room. Everyone in the room was holding their breath. Mia Crowfield, naturally, and even Alice, who had been so assertive up until she brought me here, and even the knight pinning the man down with his knee.
"... It is."
"You must have worked hard."
It was difficult to buy even a single room in a house like this with ordinary wages. It wasn't simply a matter of high land prices or expensive housing. It was because the wages paid to laborers themselves were absurdly low.
Wasn't it that wonderful era, the Belle Époque?
An age hurtling toward the extremes of capitalism. Where anyone could earn money by working, and live honorably on honestly earned wages.
And where even those who paid the wages could adjust the amount as they pleased.
There were no laws to protect tenants. To pay the monthly rent, you had to labor fourteen hours a day, and working late into the night, you were bound to get drowsy.
If you dozed off, your hand got caught in the press. Once your hand was severed, you were severed from your job. Then the laborer would scrape together his remaining money and crawl into an opium den, or drink and cut reality out of his life. He would wander the alleys, smoke opium and drink with the coins he got from begging, and when his stomach and liver finally gave out, the last thin thread of his life would be cut, too. In the embrace of our great motherland, the Aetherna Empire.
On the streets of the Empire.
And this man must have worked terribly hard at cutting those lives. He had used children who were far too young to work, even by this world's standards, as his materials.
"..."
The man couldn't answer.
"You sold fantasies so that laborers weary of life could find comfort."
Through opium.
"..."
"You gave value to young children who would have otherwise frozen to death worthless on the streets, and offered them the chance to contract with a suitable employer."
The chance to sell their bodies.
Whether they wanted to or not.
To children far too young to even comprehend it.
"..."
The man said nothing.
No, could he not speak? Because he understood the meaning behind my words?
"Is it not something to be proud of? Are you not the very kind of person who brightens the darkest corners of our great Empire?"
Before I knew it, I had made a circuit of the room and was standing in front of the man once more.
He still showed me only the back of his head.
The wallpaper in the room was by no means cheap. Neither was the solid wood of the bookshelves and desk. Nor the Mana Stone lamp on the desk.
The curtains, the mattress, the leather-bound hardcovers packed into the bookshelf, the silk drapes, the high-quality shirts hanging on the coat rack, the wristwatch and pocket watch neatly placed on the desk.
Not a single item was cheap.
In this cramped room, those expensive things blended together to look simple and cozy at a glance, but examined one by one, they revealed how luxuriously this man had been living.
Come to think of it, it was the same back then.
The fur trim on the coat he wore. The cane he carried.
Not one thing had looked cheap.
I could easily imagine what he had sold to earn that money.
"How did you acquire this mansion?"
"..."
"Who introduced you to it?"
I heard Mia Crowfield draw in a sharp breath, but I didn't turn around.
My head was still directed at the back of the man's head.
"Did you, by any chance, have a personal connection with someone in this territory?"
"The Imp—"
At my words, Mia Crowfield took a step forward and raised her voice, but Alice seemed to have stopped her. Her sentence was cut off mid-speech. Her reason, which had flown away for a moment, must have returned when Alice grabbed her shoulder.
"..."
The man was silent.
Bang!
A loud noise rang out. A small shriek came from behind me. The knight who had been pressing down on the man's arm looked up at me. Through the slit in his helm, I saw his eyes, wide with surprise.
The man's head slammed into the wooden floor with a loud crack, then bounced back up.
The neatly combed hair on the back of his head was disheveled. It was fortunate it hadn't cracked open.
Fortunate? Even if it cracked, I could just rewind.
What happened to the man's face? Did his nose break after being mashed into the floor like that?
I heard a low groan of pain. Since his head didn't slump forward limply, he didn't seem to have been knocked unconscious.
I set my foot back down on the floor and asked slowly.
"Answer me."
"..."
I decided to count to five silently.
5, 4, 3—
"You go too far."
With two seconds left, the man spoke.
His voice had been normal just moments ago, but now it was harsh, as if it had been ground against the floor. Moreover, the words seemed to escape through clenched teeth.
"Too far?"
When I asked again, the man continued.
"... Had the Imperial household not already known about it?"
"..."
The room fell silent.
I shifted my gaze back toward the knight's face.
Just like when I had swung my foot earlier, I saw his eyes, wide open.
"Could you bind this man and step outside for a moment?"
At my calm remark, the knight nodded.
"The conversation will continue after he has left."
"..."
The man gave no answer.