Chapter 97
“I thought you were leaving for the capital. Aren’t you going? Why are you still lingering around like this?”
Knox asked Eden, tilting his chin up sharply. His attitude was so overbearing that Eden’s face instantly crumpled.
“I’m not going. Things changed.”
Cherry immediately answered on Eden’s behalf.
“We thought it would be faster to find the underground passage leading to Notium, so Sir Eden decided to help us clear the way.”
Since the path above ground was blocked at Westmore anyway, this might be a much more efficient route. They had already seen the passage connected to the Brunel Police Station, so there was hope.
“Everyone’s here. I brought that bastard.”
Just then, Vanilla appeared in the salon. In her hands, she held a man bound tightly with rope.
He was the sniper from the Kintne survival camp. The one who, according to Hose, had terrible skills.
“Charlie, was it?”
“It’s Charlie Green.”
Vanilla answered Harrison’s question immediately and forced the man to his knees in front of them. She then delivered a sharp slap to the struggling man’s cheek. The man quieted down significantly.
Cherry was tough enough, but Vanilla seemed to have even less interest in pretending to be refined than Cherry did.
‘Come to think of it, is Knox the only one here who actually looks like a member of the upper class?’
Harrison glanced briefly at Knox. Leaning back against the sofa, Knox was smiling leisurely as if the current situation were highly entertaining.
‘Well, strictly speaking, Knox has quite unique tastes, so he doesn’t exactly look like a traditional aristocrat either.’
Vanilla pulled the sock out of the trembling man’s mouth. As soon as his mouth was free, the man let out a scream-like plea.
“P-P-Please spare me! Spare me!”
“He’s noisy. Should I gag him again?”
When Vanilla looked around and asked, the man’s eyes widened in terror, and he clamped his mouth shut instantly.
It was time to begin the interrogation, but for some reason, Cherry just sat there blinking, and Knox and Eden didn’t seem inclined to speak first.
Left with no choice, Harrison stepped forward and questioned the man named Charlie Green.
“You, where did you come from?”
“K-Kintne. I came from Kintne.”
“You guys were quite organized for a search party. I take it you’ve set up a survival camp there?”
“Yes, yes. We’re using the entire Sinclair Hotel as our camp. There are about fifty survivors.”
“They’ve got us beat in numbers,” Eden remarked in a cynical tone, but Cherry shook her head.
“No, they don’t. Quite a few of them died coming here. The Village Chief counted them while incinerating the bodies at the disposal site. Based on body parts eaten by monsters and discarded clothing, he estimated there were about fourteen of them, excluding the ones impersonating the Royal Army.”
Fifty minus fourteen left thirty-six.
Fifty wasn’t a small number, but it was unlikely they were all high-level combatants.
Even Charlie Green, the hostage before them, wasn’t a professional sniper. Hose had said his skills were abysmal and extremely clumsy. It was clear that someone who had likely never held a gun before was forced into the role of sniper simply because they showed some modicum of talent.
With almost everyone possessing any combat ability dead except for one, the other side must have suffered a significant blow.
“Wait, they’re using my hotel as a survival camp? Wow, the nerve. They’re staying in my hotel and they came here to rob me?”
Of course, they wouldn’t have known Cherry was in Brunel, but from Cherry’s perspective, their attempt to take over the village looked exactly like that.
However, reflecting on the conversation just now, Harrison realized Cherry was suddenly using the same speech patterns as Eden!
Eden seemed to have noticed this as well, as he watched Cherry with a strange look in his eyes, but she herself was oblivious, focused entirely on scrutinizing Charlie from every angle.
Harrison immediately shot Eden a piercing look of fury. How dare he corrupt his precious young lady with such foul habits? When Knox also glared at Eden as if scolding him, Eden threw his hands up in the air as if he had no idea what was wrong.
“Sir Eden, why did you suddenly put your hands up?”
“Exactly. I’m not sure myself.”
At Cherry’s question, Eden lowered his hands and scratched his cheek awkwardly.
Their attention turned back to Charlie Green.
Harrison threw another question at Charlie.
“So. What was your objective?”
Charlie cautiously gauged their reactions.
The man questioning him, Harrison, possessed uncanny skill with a crossbow. Another was a highly skilled police officer, and the flashy woman across from him was an expert with an axe—and possessed monstrous strength to boot. The blue-haired woman who had dragged him in had also been blowing monsters’ heads off with a shotgun like it was nothing.
Charlie had watched the whole scene from the roof while bound by Hose.
If he messed with these people, he might die without even a bone left to bury. No, they wouldn’t let him die a normal death. They might torture him until he begged to be killed. Compared to these people, El might actually be as harmless as a kitchen cat.
Charlie swallowed hard. He had to answer carefully.
“As you know, the objective was to take over Brunel. If there were survivors, we were going to turn them into slaves.”
Harrison recalled the mention of taking over the mountain behind Brunel Village to use the villagers as laborers.
“And the reason you specifically wanted to take over Brunel was because of the back mountain?”
“That’s right. Because of the mountain you see behind this mansion. A massive river flows on the other side of it. The mountain isn’t very high, so it’s not dangerous, and it seemed useful for hunting wildlife and gathering food. Kintne is just a plain, so it doesn’t have a place like this.”
“I doubt that came out of your head. Knowing that much detail about the mountain means the leader is either originally from Brunel or a Kintne local.”
At Harrison’s words, Charlie nodded obediently. He then began to spill everything he knew.
“Yes, yes. Elliot Ready—we call him El. That man is the leader of our camp. I heard he used to be the manager of the Kintne branch of the Sinclair Hotel.”
The manager of the Sinclair Hotel Kintne branch.
However, Harrison had never heard that name before. He knew the list of managers for every single Sinclair Hotel branch by heart.
Harrison stroked his chin, lost in thought. Elliot Ready. He wasn’t a manager, but it was a name he’d heard somewhere. Where was it…?
‘The manager of the Kintne branch is Maddox… could it be him? He might have changed his name after the collapse.’
In the meantime, Cherry, who had been listening quietly, flared up.
“Ah! That son of a bitch Elliot!”
Cherry jumped to her feet and shouted. Everyone turned to look at her.
“Manager? No way, that guy’s an aristocrat!”
“You know Elliot Ready?”
Harrison asked, puzzled. Cherry nodded vigorously, clenching her fists and grinding her teeth.
“Elliot Ready Vernonham. That’s his full name.”
Since he had a middle name, it meant he was a noble. Harrison tried to recall the lineages of influential capital nobles Cherry might know, but the name Vernonham wasn’t among them.
“That bastard. I met him a long time ago. I was nice enough to take him to a party as my partner, and he had the gall to tell me not to act all high and mighty since I wasn’t even a noble!”
Cherry shouted, sounding extremely worked up. It was the first time Harrison had seen Cherry get this heated while badmouthing someone.
Wasn’t she the girl who, even when countless socialites pointed fingers at her, would keep her head held high and mock them in return? She was the type to spend more time on her appearance rather than wasting it on tedious gossip…
“You actually accepted a partner request from such an impolite man?”
Knox asked Cherry, his brow furrowing in clear displeasure.
“It was a favor for my father. He said it was the son of a childhood friend or something? He was handsome enough, so I accepted without thinking much of it. Judging by looks alone, there was no finer young lord.”
The three men fell silent for a moment as they realized once again that Cherry truly, deeply appreciated a handsome face.
Amidst this, Harrison chewed over her story. Since she mentioned it was a request from Chairman Sinclair, he felt like he might vaguely remember this incident.
“On top of that, he was a psychopath. We went to a party at Baron Wifend’s estate. The Baron’s son looked down on him a bit. Well, I didn’t see any reason to help since I’d been insulted for not being a noble too, so I just let it happen. Anyway, the party got boring later, so I went out to the garden, and I heard a strange noise from somewhere.”
Cherry shuddered, looking disgusted as she recalled that day.
“In the deserted garden, Elliot was stabbing the Baron’s son in the thigh with a sword. But what was even creepier was that the bastard was smiling while he did it. He had eyes that looked like he was having the time of his life. And what was it he said?”
A guy like you belongs right here, under my feet.
Cherry whispered the words, mimicking Elliot, and shuddered again.
“Ugh, just thinking about it makes him seem like such a psycho.”
“Ah. I remember that case,” Eden said.
“Isn’t that the cold case where they never caught the culprit? I heard the Baron’s son confessed that he stabbed himself in the thigh. That young lord ended up losing the use of that leg. So I finally get to know the truth.”
“That’s because he was blackmailed. The Wifend boy played quite dirty himself. His hobby was toying with the mansion servants and then tossing them away once they were broken. Plus, it seemed he was into men. Elliot witnessed him harassing a servant in the garden that day. Who knows, maybe he even secured evidence later. Regardless, the Baron’s son never opened his mouth about Elliot in the end.”
This man named Elliot was bolder than Harrison had thought. For a powerless, nameless noble to pull something like that against the Wifend Barony.
“That’s when I decided. Since all men are the same anyway, I might as well only look at their faces.”
“That’s a strange conclusion to draw,” Knox pointed out, but Cherry didn’t seem to be listening.
Charlie, who had been listening in silence, was in a daze, unable to keep up with the frantic back-and-forth of the conversation.
“He is a total lunatic. He was rotten from the start. He’s the kind of guy who would commit murder with a smile.”
He was said to be the son of the Viscount Vernonham family, but neither Knox nor Eden had ever heard of such a house.
“He was a noble with nothing but a title. He barely managed to pay off his gambling debts thanks to my dad. For a guy like that to pull such a bold stunt, it is quite impressive in its own way.”
Cherry spat out a sarcastic exclamation.
Charlie cringed, finding her even more terrifying now.
He was already frightened because he’d seen her crush a monster’s head with an axe, but the flow of the conversation here felt quite bloodthirsty as well. In truth, it wasn’t just Cherry—everyone here seemed a little bit off.
Then again, looking at the state of the world right now, it was a miracle they hadn’t all gone completely insane.
