Interest and Scars
The front door on the first floor of the mansion flew open with a violent bang, nearly shattering off its hinges. The thunder of heavy military boots mercilessly trampling the reception room carpet echoed up through every floor. A dozen fully armed mercenaries. Gomez sauntered in behind them, using their bodies like a meat shield. Shing! Black shadows slid out of the darkness like oil, the tips of their blades silently pressing against the mercenaries’ napes. Emotionless killing machines. These were Victor’s finest assets—trainers hailed as the best on the continent, each one refined with overwhelming potential. Cold sweat instantly beaded and dripped from the mercenaries’ foreheads.
I leaned back deep into the sofa, locking eyes with Gomez.
“Oh my, my dear customer. No money to repay your debts, but it looks like you’ve been feeding those worthless mutts pretty well, hmm?”
Gomez smacked his lips over a massive hunk of meat in one hand as he crossed the carpet. He walked straight behind me and shoved his bloated face toward Silvia, who stood perfectly straight. Sluuurp— Haaa. The greedy rasp of him inhaling her scent. That single repulsive sound alone filled the reception room with a slimy discomfort, as though his tongue were dragging across our eardrums.
“You don’t even need sauce for the meat. Lady Silvia’s scent is the ultimate seasoning, you know?”
A filthy line that mixed truth and provocation. Instead of answering, I tossed a heavy leather pouch onto the table. It landed with a solid thud. The tie came loose, and a dazzling stream of gold coins spilled out.
“This month’s interest—six hundred gold pieces.”
The scent of money made Gomez lift his head from Silvia. He stared at the pile, yellow teeth flashing with bits of meat still stuck between them, and smiled unpleasantly.
“Oh my, my dear customer. It’s good you’re paying your debts, but…” A thick, bloodstained finger plucked up one coin. “Isn’t this money technically mine anyway, you know?”
The brazen bastard. I dropped an old ledger onto the table with a sharp clap.
“The rats you planted in my prostitution and drug businesses.”
Gomez’s snake-like eyes snapped to the ledger. The total his little spies had skimmed from my operations reached a staggering two thousand gold. Naturally, every coin had flowed straight into the underground vault of Gomez’s company. I laid the undeniable proof of embezzlement right in his face, leaned back, and spoke.
“Shall we settle the full two thousand right here?”
“Hmm…”
“Or should I recoup my losses by interfering with your shops again, like yesterday?”
The open threat of total business disruption and physical retaliation made the muscles in Gomez’s face twitch. But he quickly shrugged and let out a shameless laugh.
“Aww, and here I thought it was something serious. Those friends kept sending me money, so I figured they were just trying to impress me. How was I supposed to know it wasn’t theirs to give, you know? This has nothing to do with me, so let’s just forget it ever happened. Come now, let’s clear up this nasty atmosphere—”
“…Pfft.”
It happened in that instant. Amid the razor-sharp tension, a faint chuckle slipped from one of the mercenaries’ lips—whether at the absurdity of Gomez’s excuse or because he simply couldn’t hold it in.
The greasy chatter flowing from Gomez’s massive frame cut off dead. He turned his head with agonizing slowness to stare at the man behind him. An unnatural silence crushed the reception room. Gomez strolled forward with heavy, leisurely steps.
Crunch!
“Gyaaaaaaaagh—!”
Gomez tore the mercenary’s entire cheek off like a wild animal. The man collapsed, spraying a fountain of blood across the floor. Chomp. Chomp. Gomez greedily chewed and swallowed the raw flesh filling his mouth.
“Oh my. Muscular men always have that gamey stink. Truly unpleasant, you know?”
Blood dripped from his lips. He ran his tongue slowly along the corner of his mouth, licking it clean.
“When subordinates forget their manners, the master has to shed blood. It’s ruined my appetite so completely that I’ve forgotten what we were even talking about.”
The sheer audacity—devouring his own subordinate to bury the embezzlement. He cracked his oily neck and exhaled a turbid breath.
“Six hundred gold for today’s interest will be enough.”
As he turned away, pretending composure, I spoke to his retreating back.
“The reason your head is still attached to your neck even though you rampage like a mad dog in the heart of the capital.”
“……”
“Do you really think it’s thanks to that repulsive face of yours?”
Gomez’s heavy steps toward the doorknob stopped. He slowly turned back, that oily smile still glued to his face.
“Oh my, comments about my appearance wound me deeply, you know? No matter how much I wish to resemble you, dear customer, I could never carve lines into this fine face, could I?”
He stroked his thick jowls and sneered. I let out a low scoff.
“True. Draw lines on that lump of lard and you’d look exactly like pork on a grill.”
“……Heh heh. I never realized our dear customer had such a sharp tongue.”
Displeasure darkened his eyes at the verbal sparring, but I dropped the most lethal card onto the table with a light flick.
“At the very least, you need a ‘duke’ or higher backing you if you want to avoid getting roasted in a place like this and remain a little piglet, don’t you think?”
The air in the reception room froze solid. Gomez’s snake-like eyes turned venomous. A sickeningly thick killing intent burst out of him. Thick veins rose on his meaty fists as if he might draw a weapon at any second.
The standoff stretched taut for a moment. Then his facial muscles twitched, and he forced out a distorted laugh.
“……Puhahaha! Oh my. You must have hit your head quite hard rolling around that gambling den last night, dear customer.”
He glanced around with exaggerated flair.
“There are many eyes and ears here today. I’d be worried someone might actually believe that nonsense.”
Having fully regained his composure, he stepped close to Silvia beside me. His filthy gaze crawled over the cleavage visible above her neat uniform.
“Our dear Silvia. It seems your master’s delusions have grown quite severe. You must attend to him with the utmost devotion.”
“……”
“Purely for nursing purposes, of course. Heh heh.”
The moment Gomez’s greasy laughter and the tide of mercenaries withdrew, I snapped my fingers once in the air.
“Save me, please save me! I beg you!!”
The managers Gomez had planted—now beaten bloody—were dragged forward. I gave Silvia an order.
“Register them at the slave auction.”
Even if I spared them, Gomez would butcher them to keep them quiet. A traitor would always betray again. There was no reason to make exceptions to a truth that held across every age and land. They had already caused massive losses through embezzlement; there was more than enough legal justification to demote them to slaves.
“Aaaaaaaaagh—!”
Leaving behind the reception room still thick with the metallic stench of blood and the screams of the rat-like men being dragged away in long red trails, I headed straight for my office.
Second floor of the mansion. My office. Four worn ledgers lay open across the desk—slave trading, prostitution, drugs, and contract killings. The four businesses Victor had operated.
With a pen heavy with red ink, I slashed a merciless X across the drug ledger. The business carried too much risk and was impossible to control. It would be shut down. In its place, I would pressure and coax the cartels into a pharmaceutical enterprise that monopolized the distribution of “legal magic tobacco and stimulants.”
On the prostitution ledger I wrote Premium Salon. The existence and format of the Golden Toad’s double ledger that I had uncovered last night had ultimately come from the information that spilled out when humans revealed their primal instincts. From now on, every piece of gathered intelligence would be cross-verified and graded. I was building the perfect database with which to seize the cartels and nobles by the throat.
Elina stood at attention beside the desk in a crisp mansion uniform, posture rigid. Without lifting my eyes from the ledgers, I rolled a dark-blue pill across the desk.
Clack.
“Eat it.”
Elina’s gaze locked onto the pill. An intermediate Mana Stabilizer.
“This is…”
“One per day from today onward. In exchange, I grant you the right to ask me questions.”
Her hand shook as she swallowed it.
Gulp.
The moment the pill went down, Elina’s body began to tremble faintly. Whether from her blocked mana circuits being forced open or from her senses growing hypersensitive, a deep flush raced from her neck to the tips of her ears.
“Hngh…”
Even the brush of fabric against bare skin seemed too much; her waist twisted. Haa. Hot, sweet breath leaked from her parted lips. Her tear-filled eyes lost focus and slid stickily down the back of my chair.
From the tips of her toes to the crown of her head, a strange ecstasy stood every hair on end. She forced strength into her buckling legs and clutched the collar of her uniform as though her life depended on it.
Thorough control paired with calculated reward. Yet in her eyes, it seemed to register as her master’s twisted form of respect—consideration for her shattered pride.
The wet sound of her ragged breathing mingled with the scratch of pen on paper. After a long stretch of thickened air, the lips of the woman still wandering the boundary between slave and noble daughter finally parted.
“Master. If you permit it… I would like to ask my first question.”
I dropped the pen onto the desk. Clack. The crisp sound cut through the office. Her red lips parted wide enough to show her neat lower teeth as she struggled to steady her breathing.
“I have held nothing but a sword my entire life. I know nothing of the nighttime arts that please a man.”
Her wet eyes swirled with shame and confusion.
“How can I prove my usefulness… without being thrown to the goblins…”
Instead of answering, I crooked a finger. Elina stepped forward. I took her right hand—the one hardened by calluses from a lifetime of swordsmanship—and pulled her white palm straight to the scar on my face.
“……!!”
Her bloodless lips trembled under the senses magnified by the Mana Stabilizer. Every one of her five senses, flung wide open by the drug, drank in the temperature of my skin and the rough, torn texture of the scar with horrifying clarity.
“Do you think that if you fawn over me like a cheap whore, I will gladly spare you?”
“Ah…”
“It seems you have no idea how your family tried to cut off my breath.”
Her hand covering my face began to shake violently.
“When you were shouting about a knight’s pride on the front lines, where do you think that enormous war funding came from?”
“……”
“Your family fed me a supply chain of quality slaves. I trained them, inflated their value, and sold them. Every astronomical coin of profit was used to gild the glory of Valois.”
Elina’s shoulders began to tremble like a tree in a storm.
“Was that all? The expensive, troublesome assassinations of your political rivals were also my job.”
“……Ah.”
“Then one day, an imperial noble appeared mixed among the slave carts your family sent. The loose end of a perfectly executed assassination contract was leaked directly to the authorities by your own house.”
A meticulously designed severance of ties meant to destroy Victor.
“Even as every asset was seized and a cold blade carved the flesh from my face, I still didn’t understand why.”
The tips of Elina’s white fingers, pressed fully against the viciously twisted scar, curled with delicate care.
“Only after surviving in the back alleys and crawling back to the main Valois estate did I learn the full truth.”
“Master…”
“They could no longer trust the mutt that cleaned up their filth, so they disposed of the used tool. That is why my life was shattered.”
The unspeakable filth I had been forced to swallow in the gutters just to crawl back to this position. She must have thought I was nothing more than a madman intent on violating her. Yet her pupils shook wildly as they absorbed the ruined texture of my skin.
The family she had believed worthy of her life and pride. The noble glory of Valois had been built on one man’s blood and flesh—an ugly hypocrisy. The sword she had swung for honor was now carving her own heart to pieces.
Instead of pulling away, Elina traced the grotesque scar with trembling fingertips, as gently as if it might break. Thick tears fell from her eyes without pause.
Slump.
Her legs gave out. She collapsed helplessly at my feet. The tear-soaked face that nearly touched my toes carried far more than simple submission.
Elina could not speak. She only gasped with rough, choking breaths.
To hammer the final nail into her completely collapsed ego and the empty void left behind, I gripped her chin and forced her face upward. Her tear-drenched eyes trembled dangerously.
“Discard the name of House Valois.”
“…Hic.”
“There is no honor left to protect, no worthless pride remaining.”
I gently wiped the tears from the corner of her eye with my thumb.
“Do not think you can repay the horrific debt your family left behind with nothing but your despair and tears.”
“……”
“Become the sharpest blade that tears apart everything standing in my path. Or rather, accomplish anything and everything I desire. That is the price of sin you will pay for the rest of your life.”
The cruel declaration—to erase every trace of her past and be reborn as a tool solely for me—became the only rotten rope her lost soul could cling to.
Her two pale hands clutched the hem of my trousers with desperate strength. It was the moment a collar was fastened around Elina, the woman who had once planned to take my life—one that not even death would remove.