The Art of the Public Execution
The square, with the wagon parked to one side and twilight settling over it, resembled a colossal arena. On the stage stood Count Gasten gripping a voice-amplifying magic orb, along with the slave trader. From the wagon’s cargo bed, the grotesquely congealed corpse of the variant Twin Head Ogre emitted a fishy stench that blended with the crowd’s cheers, forging a strange kind of frenzy.
At the peak of that frenzy, Count Gasten stood atop the wooden platform and adjusted his grip on the magic orb.
Gasten’s finger pointed straight at Elina standing behind me. His voice dripped with oily pity. Not a bad delivery.
The crowd’s gazes turned into sharp arrows, piercing me. Elina’s shoulders shrank beneath the weight of humiliation. Just as she opened her mouth to protest, I offered Count Gasten the most harmless, courteous smile in the world.
My unexpected display of humility filled Gasten’s eyes with the arrogance of a victor. He thrust his chin upward and launched into an even more bombastic speech. Shielding himself with the safety of the citizens and wielding the Empire’s state of emergency like a spear, his well-oiled fallacies flooded the square. Greed, wrapped in plausible packaging, tickled the ears of the masses.
Gasten alternated his gaze between me—wearing an expression of being moved by his claims—and the crowd, clearly pleased. Convinced he held the upper hand, he tightened his grip on the magic orb and delivered the finishing blow.
“Waaaaah—!”
Patriotic flames flickered in the eyes of the citizens gathered in the square. The crowd, swept up in a sense of justice, shook the ground with their roar. Not a bad line.
Like pouring cold water over that heated fervor, I gently layered on my own soft rhetoric.
I spoke to Gasten in a low voice, yet clear enough to reach every corner of the square.
And now to drive the nail in.
Gasten’s face began to flush with panic. Before he could open his mouth to refute me, I took one step further and hammered the nail deeper.
I remembered. The people at the auction who had stared at Elina with eyes burning with lust. The bidder who had shouted two hundred and fifty gold coins once the real race began. That had been Count Gasten. His desire to both acquire Elina and replenish his own lacking virility, mixed with the wish to make me suffer, had led to this farce.
I deliberately put on a remorseful expression and, with a motion that was both gentle and rough, pulled Elina’s slender waist toward me, pressing her firmly against my chest.
Elina’s body, trapped in my embrace, stiffened with a start. The warmth of my palm against her waist and the blatant contact that publicly declared her as ‘my possession’ before the crowd made her breathing quicken. A flush of shame mixed with a strange thrill climbed all the way up her neck.
Count Gasten looked awkward at the way I had reframed his auction defeat as a failed attempt to rescue the lady, yet with his dignity now greatly restored, he could only clear his throat and express a sour regret.
He maintained a decent network with other nobles; there was no need to make an enemy of him. I stroked his ego just enough and cast my fishing hook.
A perfectly baited hook.
It was like throwing a hook straight at Gasten’s mouth.
The crowd cheered.
“He’s right!”
“The Count will buy it and donate, won’t he?”
“For Count Gasten to step forward for such a good cause…”
Gasten had suddenly been cornered into buying virility tonic at full price, but with the citizens watching, he could not refuse. Moreover, receiving priority purchasing rights in a market where supply had dried up was not a bad deal from his perspective either. He looked at me, smiled thinly, and wrapped up the scene.
You look like you could use some tonic yourself.
With Gasten retreating, I subtly released Elina’s waist and signaled the slaves. In response, the wagon slowly began moving again toward the monster dismantling yard on the capital’s outskirts.
Honor to the attention-seekers, profit to me.
I walked past Elina, who was staring at me with eyes mixed with confusion and awe, and climbed into the wagon. Elina followed shortly after, but the heat filling her body showed no sign of subsiding.
The heavy rumble of the wagon’s wheels rolling over the granite road filled the interior like a lullaby. Outside the window, hundreds of people still trailed behind the wagon. I watched the bizarre yet fervent procession with detached amusement and let out a low, soft chuckle.
The memory had suddenly surfaced—of the disinfection truck that used to roam the neighborhood spewing gray smoke, and how we children would run after it. Even when we crashed into each other in the blinding fog or slammed into telephone poles and got nosebleeds, we found it so much fun. Whether in this era or that one, rare spectacles are always the same.
What snapped me out of that pointless recollection was the gaze fixed on me from inside the wagon. I turned from the window to find Elina staring at me with a smile that had not faded since earlier. Her blue eyes, catching the glow of the sunset, held a vitality clearly different from before.
“Did an ogre hit you in the head? Why are you smiling so much?”
At my indifferent rebuke, Elina flinched and quickly erased her smile, then shook her head with a slightly hurt expression.
“…It’s nothing. I simply wanted to thank you for saving me earlier.”
“Don’t misunderstand. As I said before, the situation arose because you let your guard down.”
“From now on, I will undergo grueling training so that I never suffer such humiliation again.”
The determination in her voice stretched the air inside the wagon taut. While we spoke, the wagon finally arrived at the familiar monster dismantling yard. The moment it stopped, the yard’s owner—who had handled the basilisk last time—his wife, and their two daughters came out to greet us.
But they soon had to doubt their own eyes. The enormous crowd following the wagon and the sheer scale of the variant Twin Head Ogre rising like a house from the cargo bed left the owner’s family gaping in unison. In particular, the wife and two daughters stood among the cloud-like throng, staring at the monster atop the wagon as if enchanted.
“Is that really an ogre?”
“It has three heads!”
The innocent exclamations of children whose eyes had grown as big as fists from the front of the wagon mixed with the murmurs of the crowd, and the owner’s family blended right in. Beside them stood the combat slaves I had stationed in advance, serving as both reliable shields protecting the family and warning beacons blocking prying eyes.
“I’ve dismantled Twin Head Ogres many times, but I’ve never seen one this massive in my entire life!”
The owner bowed, his voice filled with awe. I stepped down from the wagon and asked him,
“Is the basilisk dismantling finished?”
“We just completed it. You can take it right away. But that thing over there…”
I left the owner’s admiration for the variant Twin Head Ogre behind and recalled the passionate lecture Theo had once given while tapping on an empty chalkboard.
The key to the tonic lies in the serum at the junction where the two hearts meet! Because it has two hearts, the concentrated serum at the point where the blood crosses grants berserker-level strength by expanding the body’s blood vessels. And the nerve stem connecting the two brains…!
I looked the owner straight in the eye and made my request.
“The serum from the junction where the hearts meet, and the nerve stem connecting the brains. Perfect extraction without any damage. Can you do it?”
The owner scanned the monster corpses on the wagon once more. The variant’s blood vessels were as thick as ropes at every joint. He swallowed dryly and nodded heavily.
“…It won’t be easy, but it’s not impossible. Trust these hands that have grown thick with work in this trade.”
I tapped the wagon’s railing lightly and asked,
“Would it be all right if I observe the process directly?”
The owner’s eyebrows twitched. To dismantlers, butchering methods and procedures were like secret arts. They were strictly confidential, never shared even with others in the same industry. The owner looked troubled, wiping sweat from his forehead with a rag as he fell into deep thought.
But soon, he glanced back and forth between my slaves lined up behind the wagon and the mountain-like variant corpse, then spoke heavily, as if having made up his mind.
“…Normally this would be absolutely impossible, but if not for Master Victor, we would never have had the chance to even touch such a monster. Very well. Please come in.”