IRE 39

chapter 39

When I tightened my grip, Ildre began struggling in my hand.

After deflecting with one hand every flail of fists and kicks he tried with his arms and legs, I grabbed the back of his head and slammed his face into the ground.

Kraaaak!

“Guh—!”

I heard the sound of his nose and lips being crushed and mashed. When I lifted his face, a few teeth fell out and scattered.

Looks like I’d misjudged the force. It wasn’t that I’d lost control of my emotions — it was that my strength, boosted by the system opening, still felt unfamiliar to me.

I clicked my tongue and brought his ruined face closer.

“First question, you trash.”

“Kack…! cough! Aah…”

He could only moan in pain and couldn’t hold a normal conversation; I frowned at his pitiful state.

“Hey, you’re going to cry over pain at this level? Pull yourself together.” Irian had endured flames of healing consuming and restoring his entire body for days while sober. If he, who was used to pain, didn’t react so weakly, then not every traitor had the same steel nerves as him.

“Tch. What a nuisance.”

I roughly healed his wounds with my healing fire. His pupils began to focus. Seeing that, I dragged his head close to me.

“You’d better get your head straight and answer properly. Being uncooperative won’t do you any favors.”

“…Pft.”

His spit vaporized in the air from the flames I’d used. I’ll take most taunts, but filth is not to my taste. I slapped his cheek with my palm.

“Gah!”

A few more teeth flew out with a clack. Worried I might make him lose all his teeth and impair his speech, I decided not to touch his face further.

“Do you not understand the situation?”

I placed my hand on his elbow, then applied pressure and twisted the joint until it crushed.

“Aaaaahhh!!”

A scream rang out. At that instant I felt many presences moving outside the house. The sentinels must have reacted to the elf’s screams. Whether or not he’d intended that, it was laughable.

“I—”

He started to speak, then made a strangled laugh from deep in his throat.

“Huh, hahahaha… I, I—”

His eyes shone coldly. “You asked why you were caught so easily, didn’t you?”

“What?”

At that moment the air outside soured; a murderous intent shot through the space. I felt arrows flying. The piercing power behind those arrows seemed ferocious enough to pierce through the house’s walls and impale anyone inside — even the three sisters in the room.

My eyes narrowed. I focused, and my perception slowed as if time itself had been stretched. Even in that slow-moving world, Ildre’s gaze remained fixed on me. His deep anger and hatred felt familiar and yet almost trivial—because I’d seen far deeper, purer emotions before.

So I formed my mouth slowly and said inwardly, ‘Did you think I wouldn’t know?’ The moment horror washed over his pupils—

“Aaah!”

“Grah!”

Screams came from outside the house. At some point this small house had been surrounded by a veil of the flames I’d created. The spirit-fire I formed burned only what I willed to burn. It didn’t scatter useless heat; it incinerated only the arrows and left the house’s occupants untouched. Only the flame’s color entered the room, bathing the living room in shifting, colored light.

The flame barrier dropped only after the hostility outside was snuffed out.

“What the—!”

“You should’ve thought a little deeper.”

They should have considered what surviving the ambush by the dark elves and Irian’s attack would mean. If they thought they could capture me with just this one’s and a few sentinels’ ambush, then honestly… they weren’t that clever. I did not want to believe for a second that they were that stupid — I didn’t want to think we had been fooled by such fools all this time.

I grabbed his collar and pulled him up. Dragged and unable to stand on his own, Ildre was led along by my hand as I told Keres, “Stay by your sisters. The screams will have frightened them; calm them down.”

“Don’t do anything dangerous,” she said. I snorted.

“Unnecessary worry.”

When I confirmed she went into the room, I headed outside.

“Ughh…”

Being dragged along without strength, Ildre made suppressed groans. The pain was written all over his bloodied face. Irian had been able to control and suppress his pain; he’d been adapted to it so much that normal torments didn’t even show on him. I, who had no particular knack for torture, could only repeat the crude work of burning and healing him — more like menial labor than artful torture.

Compared to that, these fools crumpled and wailed under relatively little pain. Not all traitors were like Irian.

Still, I couldn’t let my guard down. Seeing him slowly losing his wits made me want to relax, but I wouldn’t allow it.

“Hey, wake up.” I slapped his face a couple of times to stop his dilating pupils. This time I controlled my force so as not to pull out more teeth.

“Guh…”

“You’ve got friends waiting, so muster some strength.” The elves who’d been burned by my fire and fallen were hiding in the trees near the house; their legs had been burned, and half their lower bodies had been destroyed. Some had plummeted and one had apparently broken his neck and died.

“Tch, they die so easily.”

Still, five remained. With their numbers, I had some room to breathe.

I gathered them together and placed Ildre in front of them; including the corpse, seven of them groaned and lay about.

“You organized the place well if nobody came until it got to this point,” I said. Though this place was a remote corner of Chitaen, supposedly set aside for those of the beast-people sisters, it was still within the town. Traffic was sparse.

Even if they’d tried to muffle the screams, they couldn’t have masked them from all the elves’ hearing. Seeing how they’d left such a gap, I couldn’t decide whether they were brilliant or foolish.

First, I addressed Ildre, who glared at me with wide eyes. “From now on I’ll ask you questions one by one. Answer well and this will be over quickly.”

“Who would—answer to scum like you—!”

I ignored him and burned off the tip of his index finger. He opened his mouth in a scream; I frowned at the sight.

“Why the dramatic whining? If you don’t want more pain, answer properly. I’m the one asking here.”

“Guh…”

Ildre clutched the charred base of his finger; his pupils clouded with pain. “Again. First question: Are all the informants in Chitaen you lot?”

“…Kill me.”

He said gibberish. Flames licked.

“Gaaah!”

“Answer again.” This time I burned off his thumb and spoke calmly. When I’d burned Irian there’d been so little reaction that it had been hard to know how to inflict pain for maximum effect; this one gave varied responses depending on how I seared him. It was oddly interesting — maybe I didn’t need to study torture techniques after all. The way he writhed made it clear that burning could be an effective torment.

“Talk.” I burned his middle finger this time. His screams burst forth again and the other sentinels nearby started regaining consciousness. Even so, with their lower bodies burned to the knee they weren’t fully sane yet.

I told them, “You too, one by one. If you answer I’ll give you a quick death.” No one answered. I shrugged and burned his ring finger, while Ildre still only screamed and glared. “If you want me to stop, say it. I still have many fingers left.”

His ring finger. When one entire hand was finally burned away, Ildre started crying.

…This much crying? He was very different from that other one. ‘Pathetic. Or was that other one simply exceptional?’ I banned that useless thought and tried to wipe images of Irian from my mind. I’d been comparing these fools to him all along. Shake it off. This lot might be Irian’s subordinates or comrades, but they couldn’t be the same person. Stop judging them by that standard.

My focus should be on locating the traitors and saving the forest, not on comparing or designing torture methods.

“Okay, I’ll speak… so, so… cough cough!” He started to give in easily.

I found the whole thing somewhat trivial as I questioned him again. “First question: Are the informants in this forest all you?”

“cough! cough… Is that the first question?” Ildre, hacking and catching his breath, asked. I debated whether to torch his other hand, but decided to show mercy once.

“I said I ask the questions, Ildre. I’ll let this one slide but not the next. Your job is to answer my questions.”

“…”

“Again. Are the ones here all of them?”

“Krkkk… kekek… krhahaha…” Suddenly Ildre began laughing. Could someone break down so quickly? He’d been fairly sane a moment ago, albeit battered. Then the other sentinels began laughing too — perhaps echoing Ildre, driven mad by the agony of having their lower bodies burnt off. One by one they mimicked his laugh.

I frowned. “What’s so funny?” I asked.

Still smiling in a mess of tearful, pained laughter, he spoke — a grotesque mix of sorrow and mirth.

“Did you ask if we were all of them?” He looked like a wreck that couldn’t clearly laugh or cry. “Earlier you told me to summon spirits, remember?”

His ramblings frayed my patience. They didn’t answer, and I briefly considered burning another finger, pondering whether their delirious talk was worth indulging. “You seem to know about us to some degree,” he said. “So you know at least… hahahaha…”

“I told you to answer. I didn’t ask you to act like a lunatic.”

“Kraaaah!!”

There was no reason to watch his nonsense any longer. It was too petty. “If you pull that trash again, I’ll burn your whole face.”

I seared the wrist above where his fingers had been until it was ash. That shocked him back to obeying promptly. He sobbed and answered with tearful pleas.

“We, we… Chitaen… they’re all in cahoots!”

“…What?”

“Hey… have you ever seen a spirit-summoner here even once?” Hearing that, I realized.

“…No way.”

At that moment, a sentinel who had been groaning behind me spoke with venom. “You said to think deeper. And you said—what? That you’d cleared the surroundings well?”

His words dripped with anger and hatred.

“You should’ve thought deeper yourself.” Like a beast growling, he muttered lowly and I extended my hand. His venom turned into cries of pain. “Right. I was mistaken.” These were Irian’s troops and comrades, no doubt. Of course they would have prepared a contingency for when Irian’s identity was exposed — that much I knew better than anyone.

I sighed deeply. “So you were playing right into their hands again.”

At once I remembered why I’d wondered how they’d caught me so easily. From the start, he’d intended to be captured by me. He’d sought to draw my attention and divert mine from the elves of Chitaen.