I saw it.
Below Emilia’s waist.
Instead of the lower body that should be there, entrails were scattered everywhere.
“What the hell was that?”
I unconsciously let out a curse.
I wondered if I had just seen an illusion.
No, it had to be an illusion.
“What was that, you bitch?”
“······.”
I grabbed Jin by the collar.
But Jin only looked at me, a smirk on his face.
My right hand, holding the Vafe, trembled.
“It’s just as you saw.”
“What the…?”
I quickly rationalized in my mind.
What I just saw was a manipulated image.
If it’s Jin, it would be easy for him to manipulate the video through magic.
No, it wouldn’t even need magic.
With just simple props, that kind of disguise was possible.
Right. It was manipulation.
A clear manipulation.
To agitate me and make me lose my reason.
So there was nothing to worry about.
“You’re making unpleasant jokes, Crow Jin. You should immediately reveal Emilia’s location.”
“Well, I heard she’s dead.”
“Then at least tell me where the corpse is.”
“Ugh······.”
Instead of answering, he suddenly started laughing, and I unconsciously grabbed his throat.
Even when I tightened my grip enough to slightly hinder his breathing, Jin just looked at me and chuckled.
“How cute.”
“What?”
“It’s cute how you’re trying so hard to act cool and indifferent.”
What the hell is this crazy bitch talking about?
“I’ve been fooled by that kind of act until now, right? Your eyes are so blank and empty. But it doesn’t work on me. I can see right through your agitation.”
“Shut up.”
“Are you curious why you got caught?”
“Shut up.”
“It’s because you’ve already lost your psychological advantage. You know it, right? That you’ve already lost. You’re just denying it because you don’t want to believe it.”
“Shut up!”
I tightened my grip around Jin’s neck.
That thin neck was easy to grip with one hand.
I could easily strangle him to death.
No, if I really wanted to, I could break his neck and kill him.
I didn’t want to hear his voice anymore.
I wanted to make him unable to speak like this.
But I couldn’t.
There were still things I needed to hear.
“I told you to talk. Whether Emilia is alive or dead, tell me her location.”
“Ugh······.”
Realizing I was still choking Jin, I let go of him.
“Cough! Ugh······. If you’re in such a hurry, I’ll tell you if you hear me out.”
“What is it?”
“It’s about the process of how your attendant died. How about it? It’s not a long story, and I can tell you as much as you want, right?”
“······.”
My body trembled.
The process of Emilia dying.
Ultimately, it’s all fiction.
A well-crafted novel.
If it’s something like that, I could listen as much as I wanted.
As long as I could find out Emilia’s location.
“Fine. Tell me.”
“Alright. First, I slapped your attendant to wake her up. And then······”
She didn’t know anything about Emilia anyway.
She didn’t even know that she belonged to the kingdom’s intelligence agency or that her brother was part of the Crow.
So, while trying to come up with some tragic tale, she’d eventually expose contradictions.
I scoffed at Jin and focused on their story.
“There was a lot of resistance, you know? She took out a dagger from her skirt and attacked me. So I had to twist her wrist and subdue her right away.”
That’s a lie.
Emilia wouldn’t scream just because her wrist was twisted.
There was no way she’d be subdued like that.
“But she grit her teeth and came at me again with her other hand, you know?”
“······.”
“So I had no choice but to twist the other wrist and both ankles too. She let out a slight scream that was barely audible, I think?”
I got lucky and hit somewhat close.
Still, it’s nonsense.
“She’s a girl with strong mental fortitude. Looks like she’s been trained a lot. But girls like that have a misconception. They think they can endure even when pushed to the extreme. I needed to correct that thought.”
Nonsense.
“Torture usually becomes even more painful when there’s shame involved. What do you think is the most humiliating form of torture for a woman?”
This bastard.
It was starting to make me feel sick.
The impulse to just kill him grew stronger.
“That’s right. What you’re imagining. If I go into detail, it might shatter your weak and fragile mind, so I’ll hold back. Heh, aren’t you thankful?”
“Shut up with the nonsense.”
“Even if I’m being considerate······ tsk. Anyway, it took a really long time to break that strong gaze of yours.”
“······.”
“It turned into a gaze as if you’d let everything go.”
I was slowly regaining my composure.
I had caught evidence that it was clearly fiction.
No matter how painful it was, no matter the despair, Emilia would never bow down.
She had endured the harsh torture training of the intelligence agency.
Even if she were captured by the Empire and tortured, she’d be prepared to never spill any information.
But to think her mental state would break under just Jin’s clumsy torture?
That’s ridiculous.
“I thought at first that she had lost her mind. But no.”
“······!”
“She was just losing consciousness from losing too much blood. When I leaned in to listen to her breath, she spat at me. At that moment, I realized, Ah, I could still play with her a bit more. So I stopped the bleeding right away. I recently got interested in anatomy. It turned out to be really strange studying human structure in books. I thought it’d be nice to see one in person. Luckily, there was a textbook right in front of me.”
That’s enough.
“I started with the legs. The goal was to make Schlus Hainkel’s name come out. I thought I’d stop as soon as you cried my name.”
Stop it, you bastard.
“Wow. When I tore into the interior, it was just like the books said. Amazing, right? I thought she’d really pass out at that point, but shockingly, she held on even while biting her tongue. It was a bit pitiful. I didn’t torture her to extract anything. I just wanted to torment her. Maybe due to her loyalty to you, she kept holding on until the end, which made it both admirable and tragic.”
“Bullshit······.”
Loyalty to me?
Don’t say stupid things.
I was struggling to hold in my laughter.
It was so funny that my body was involuntarily twitching.
I was biting my teeth so hard to stop laughing that my molars started to ache.
My right hand, which was clenched into a fist, shook like mad.
“At that point, I felt so sorry watching that I thought it was time to let her go. The client had only ordered to kidnap and kill your attendant, not torture her. So I brought a saw to let her go comfortably. If she’s going to die anyway, it’s better to leave a clean upper body behind, right? Toss that dirty lower body away. So I started cutting slowly above the pelvic bone. By that point, her pupils were shaking, and it was a sight to behold. She must’ve believed I wouldn’t kill her. Her eyes suddenly changed to the color of despair······! That was so beautiful, you know?”
That was really nonsense.
Emilia must have already been prepared for death the moment she was kidnapped.
Knowing she was going to die wouldn’t make her despair.
There’s no way Emilia would have such a normal, girlish side.
She was just a deception machine who took orders to kill.
Everything she showed me was acting······.
“In the last moment. She was gasping for breath and shouting. Do you know what she said?”
“······.”
“Brother. Brother. She cried out for her brother, pathetically and sadly. Just kept calling for him until she died. Who the hell was she talking about?”
A nail had been driven in.
Brother.
At that word, I lost my reason.
I could no longer accept this fucked up story as just fiction.
“Say it’s a lie!”
“Ugh!”
“Say it! You fucking bitch!”
“Ugh······. It’s all······ true······.”
“Say it’s a lie! Right now!”
As I pressed on her uvula, she thrashed violently.
But I had no intention of letting go.
I had to hear the word “lie” come out of Jin’s mouth.
“I can tell you it’s a lie······ if that’s what you want. You want me to say it?”
“······.”
Jin’s satisfied smile made me feel like I was choking.
It was a smile soaked in superiority.
At this point, I had no choice but to acknowledge it.
I had lost.
I don’t even know who I was fighting against, but I had lost spectacularly.
“Just shut the fuck up.”
“Ahhh!”
I threw Jin onto the ground.
By now, a blue pillar of light had sprouted from my right hand.
I knew it was meaningless.
The Crow just follows someone’s orders, I knew that too.
Even in this shitstorm, the Crow could turn into either allies or enemies depending on who paid the bills.
Killing him was meaningless and would only cause loss.
But it couldn’t be helped.
I couldn’t suppress the boiling emotions within me.
It’s just text.
Just a fictional character I created.
Those excuses were already useless.
“Are you crying? Schlus Hainkel doesn’t cry for a mere attendant?”
“······.”
I just realized.
No wonder my vision was getting a bit blurry.
I had already started pouring out tears.
Now, a reason to kill Jin had emerged.
Having seen Schlus Hainkel crying, I couldn’t let him go to spread rumors.
So he had to die.
It wasn’t because I was overwhelmed with emotions.
It was a rational judgment.
Yeah, that’s right.
That’s how it was.
With that thought, I glared at Jin’s face and plunged the Vafe down.
*Crack!*
“Huh?”
“······.”
Right next to Jin’s face.
The Vafe had embedded itself into the ground.
As I opened my fist, the Vafe was pulled back into my hand in an instant.
I had just caught a glimpse of something shiny from inside Jin’s pocket.
“What is it? Are you not going to kill me? Ah, are you going to torture me the same way and then kill me?”
“No.”
I reached into Jin’s pocket and pulled it out.
It was a cute white handkerchief with a small pink ribbon attached to it.
A handkerchief that Emilia occasionally showed me, though not often.
And that handkerchief always held magical power.
The kind of mana only Emilia could emit.
“What the hell······ Aah!”
I placed my hand on Jin’s chest and squeezed it tightly.
I felt all the mana coursing through his body.
And I sensed the strange flow hidden behind it.
I would not be fooled again.
“Uaaaargh!”
*Fwhoosh!*
I pulled my arm back sharply.
The skin that I had gripped ripped away, but the feeling was too bizarre to be just tearing flesh.
What came out in an instant condensed into one spot and then turned into a blood-red bean shape.
No matter how I looked at it, it looked like it was alive, pulsating.
Was this Jin’s entrails?
It seemed he used that camouflage technique to cover his own entrails with Emilia’s exterior.
“Fuck.”
*Crack!*
I stepped down hard on it, feeling sick, crushing it completely.
Once I took a breath, the thought of Emilia surged back in.
I slowly turned my creaking head around.
Wondering if it was there.
And if so, what state it would be in.
I suppressed my dread and barely shifted my gaze.
“Ugh······.”
“Hah.”
There it was.
The one I had been searching for.
[Quest Completed]
[You have received 8 shop coins as a reward.]
As if to confirm it, the quest completion window appeared.
It was truly certain.
There was a slight blue bruise around Emilia’s eyes, but there were no serious injuries.
Her two legs were still intact.
Seeing her chest rise and fall, she was clearly still breathing.
Having just stopped crying,
I felt my heart swell with emotion and tears were about to spill again.
Just moments ago, I had nearly killed this child with my own hands, and the thought was terrifying and dizzying······.
“Ugh······.”
“Are you feeling a little better?”
Emilia slowly opened her eyes.
My body moved on its own.
Before I knew it, I was tightly embracing Emilia.
But the first words that stumbled out of her half-conscious voice were –
“Brother?”
“······.”
Just a little.
Just a tiny bit, my mood was disrupted.
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