Translator: Nox

Chapter 14

“Ugh… Haaah…!”

It felt as if his tongue were melting. The horrific hell of smelling his own flesh burning, the stench piercing his nostrils, made every second feel like an eternity. The blue-eyed demon didn’t give him so much as a chance to beg for mercy. He simply stared down with eyes that were chillingly indifferent.

After some time had passed, Oscar shifted his gaze away from the man.

His eyes landed on the Madam of the brothel, who had been quietly dragged in by the Wolves. She stared blankly at the center of this silent hell.

“Uh…”

Oscar, who had been crushing an adult man underfoot with ease, dusted off his hands and straightened his back. Only then was the man able to move; he let out a beast-like groan and crawled toward her on all fours. Even after turning a human being into a mangled animal, Oscar looked no different than the moment he had first stepped into the building.

“You’re here?”

His voice was low and smooth, sending shivers down her spine. All her rationalizations—about fifty million, about the raw gemstone—vanished like a receding tide in the face of primal terror. she collapsed, prostrating herself flat against the floor.

“I have done wrong.”

Oscar looked down at her impassively, and the Wolves moved ahead of their master’s command.

“I have done wrong, please forgive me.”

A large, heavy mass thudded down beside the prostrate Madam. Instinctively glancing sideways, she saw two men who looked neither dead nor alive.

“Agh!”

Horrified, she scrambled up and sat back on her heels. As she tried to scuttle away on her backside, one of the Wolves pushed her back toward the fallen men. Shoved by a brutish force onto the pile of what might have been corpses, the metallic, nauseating scent of blood pierced her lungs. Bile rose in her throat.

“Ugh, blegh!”

As she retched up everything in her stomach, a heavy pouch of money was tossed in front of her. The moment she saw the pouch stained with her own vomit, she realized the men beneath her were the ones who had brought the woman in.

Trembling, she prostrated herself again over her own vomit. Her forehead and hair became a tangled mess of filth, but she didn’t even notice.

She searched her mind frantically, trying to figure out why this was happening to her. Why this mysterious man was so obsessed with that woman, why he was doing this. But that wasn’t what mattered. They had been butchered like meat just for kidnapping the woman. Surely, she had even more reasons to be slaughtered.

“P-please forgive me.”

Step, step.

As the slow footsteps approached, she felt as if she might faint from the sheer terror. How foolish she had been to take pride in being a seasoned veteran of the world. Never in her life had she been this afraid.

“Forgiveness, please, I beg for forgiveness…”

All her thoughts of the law and evidence—the arrogance that had made her dare to defy him—felt like a dream.

Oscar stopped a single pace away from her and thrust his hands into his pockets. He stared down at the back of her pitifully shaking head. He took a moment to consider how to handle her.

Which choice would be most efficient?

The woman who Simon thought was digging her own grave was, in fact, quite lucky. It wasn’t wise to spill blood repeatedly in a tiny place like Pelfe.

“No guest stayed here tonight.”

The Madam nodded frantically.

“Yes, of course.”

“And there was never a woman bought for fifty million.”

“Naturally.”

“Clean this up.”

Oscar nudged the two bodies with his foot.

“Can I trust you with the disposal? If you’re not confident, I’ll do it myself.”

“No, no, please trust me!”

The Madam repeated the same answer over and over, hardly knowing what she was saying.

“Fine. Then I’ll leave it to you.”

The moment those chillingly gentle words fell over her head, she expressed her gratitude repeatedly, as if Oscar were her savior.

“Thank you, thank you.”

But it was too early to think she had survived.

“By the way, what did you feed her?”

Startled, she jerked her head up to see that Oscar was already standing by the bedside.

Oscar leaned his tall frame slightly toward the woman.

The woman, who had piteously used nothing but a single door as her shield, had changed in that short span of time. Her face, which had been deathly pale, was now flushed a deep red. Her eyes flickered in and out of focus.

“Haa…”

Her breath was heavy and languid.

Oscar had initially found it strange that the Madam had tried so hard to protect the woman through the crack in the door. He’d felt the same when he heard the price she’d paid. He wondered what anyone would do with a woman who couldn’t even meet another’s eyes at that price.

But seeing her like this, he felt he understood what the Madam had seen in her.

Oscar straightened up and looked back at the Madam.

“You managed to do something useless in that short time, didn’t you?”

Trembling, the Madam crawled toward the bed. She had never regretted her command to begin the training tonight more than she did now.

The woman was curled up on the bed, let out thin moans.

One look told the story. The drug had spread through her entire body.

Her consciousness was submerged, while her five senses were heightened to an extreme. In this state, the entire body became an erogenous zone. With every touch, she would flush and moan; in this industry, someone in such a state was referred to as an ‘instrument.’

It was the perfect condition for training, but for the Madam, whose life hung in the balance of this woman’s condition, every moan felt like years being shaved off her lifespan. She desperately tried to explain the situation to Oscar.

“Uh, well, it’s not a dangerous drug. It just, well, makes the body difficult to move and the senses sensitive…”

“Bring the antidote.”

The blunt interruption felt like a blade to her own throat, and tears began to stream down her face.

“I’m sorry, there is n-n-no antidote, ah—!”

She clutched her crushed hand and bowed her head. The weight of the gaze on the back of her head was heavier than the pressure on her hand.

“It’s not lethal! I gave her a mix of one drop of Eros and one-and-a-half drops of Exros. It… it will detoxify naturally with time.”

“Anything else?”

“No, nothing else! I swear!”

She appealed desperately.

“She was in training. It would be a loss for me if her condition became permanent! Please believe me. It will definitely detoxify on its own once time passes…!”

“How many hours?”

“B-between seven and nine hours. She will be awake by tomorrow morning! Please, believe me.”

“……”

The smell of cigarette smoke drifted again.

She knew instinctively that her life was being weighed once more.

Would he kill her once he finished that single cigarette? Just as her mind was about to go blank from the peak of her terror—

Flick.

The cigarette, still glowing with embers, was dropped beside her prostrate body.

She didn’t dare look up at Oscar; she only stared at the cigarette. Empty smoke rose from it, reflecting in her despairing eyes. As if they had been waiting, the Wolves began to move around her.

Silent tears poured down.

Her life, which had been like a trek through the mud, flashed before her eyes. Just when things were finally starting to look up.

Even as she thought that, her mouth moved incessantly, begging for her life.

“Please spare me, I’ve done wrong, please spare me.”

The fear of death made her lose all sense of time and space. Like a broken machine, she repeated the same words over and over.

How long had she been begging?

“You really should have known your place and kept things civil.”

At the sudden voice, she looked up with a start to find one of the Wolves glaring at her with annoyed red eyes. He lowered himself smoothly, like a sinking shadow, to meet her gaze.

“You said seven to nine hours, right?”

She nodded as if possessed. The man straightened up with the fluid grace of a predator and crushed Oscar’s still-burning cigarette under his boot.

“Don’t go wandering off. Stay put. Finding you won’t be a challenge, but if you make us look for you, I’ll be collecting a service fee on top of everything else.”

“Ye… yes…”

“Try living like a decent person for once.”

After tossing out those unfitting words, the man rummaged through the room one last time before disappearing through the door.

The Madam sat there blankly, her hand instinctively going to her throat.

But her relief was short-lived. If, by some chance, the woman didn’t wake up… A chill washed over her in the middle of the summer night, and she retched again and again, even though there was nothing left in her stomach.

---

The elite agents of the Marquis Reinhardt family, commonly known as the Wolves.

Back when the Reinhardts were a family of Marcher Lords, they were the family’s private soldiers, but as the years passed, they gradually retreated into the shadows.

They were given tasks that were more dangerous and more secretive.

Intelligence, sabotage, assassination, search and rescue.

As they began to carry out these missions one by one, they went from being a knightly order to agents, and eventually, they came to be called the Wolves.

The Wolves had only one goal: loyalty to the master who had taken them in and raised them.

With no country or kin, they belonged only to Reinhardt. Reinhardt was their nation and their people, and their master’s goal was their own.

To put that sickening loyalty another way, it meant that anyone who did not possess such devotion was either expelled or discarded before they could ever be called a Wolf.