Still looking pale, Ellie took out her handkerchief and held it in front of her mouth. “The only thing I was able to grasp was that his derangement was the result of someone killing his lover. It appears he swore vengeance on the murderer.”
“Wait,” I said. “He was out for revenge?” I had my own vendetta against the former members of the Concord of the Tribes, and I couldn’t help looking at this demented Master with a hint of empathy in light of this new information.
Ellie’s voice interrupted my moment of contemplation. “However, there was something quite abnormal about his thirst for vengeance.”
“How do you mean?” I said.
“Well, his desire to get revenge was so strong, it made me feel ill, as you can see,” Ellie pointed out. “But I also got this strange impression that something had compelled him to be this way. It’s only a supposition, so I cannot swear by it...”
“How strange was this impression you got?” I asked.
“Well, I’ve never come into contact with someone as disturbed as this man, so my impression may simply have been the product of that bewildering experience,” Ellie said quickly. “It was only my personal opinion, and nothing more.”
She even waved her hands sheepishly as she said it, and while she was making that adorable gesture, the fake C’s lips moved slightly. We were only able to hear what he said due to our superpowered hearing.
“Lily, forgive me,” he muttered. “Your retribution remains...”
He was unable to finish his sentence, leaving his hoarse words to drift away mysteriously. But it was easy to guess that Lily was this fake C’s lover, and that it was her murder that had driven him into such a psychotic rage to get revenge that the only solution to stop him wrecking everything in sight had been to seal him inside a coffin. His emotions were so deep, they caused him to utter those words in his final moments... I mused. But Ellie thinks something forced him to be this way?
Like Ellie said, she had never encountered someone quite so unhinged before, so her reaction to what she’d felt might have been mistaken. Yet this crazed desire for vengeance carried with it the whiff of suspicion that his behavior was involuntary, and since those two aspects were obviously in conflict with each other, it left a strong impression on me.
At that moment, the fake C’s body completely turned to ash, leaving us with no way to extract any more of his memories. Since there was no use asking any more questions on the subject, I decided it was time to move on from the fake C.
“Mei, gather up his ashes and give him a proper burial,” I said. “Be sure to treat his remains with care.”
“Of course, Master Light,” Mei said with a bow before using her Magistrings to sweep up the fake C’s ashes. My plan was to take his remains to the bottom of the Abyss and bury him there.
I turned to look behind me. “Okay, I think it’s now time to move on to the next item on our agenda. Sorry that I kept you both waiting, Suzu and Lock.”
Standing behind all of us, Suzu shook her head, which her talking musket, Lock, translated for her. “My partner says she didn’t mind waiting at all. It didn’t bother me at all either. Anyway, are we free to release our prey now, Lord Light?”
“Yes, please do, Lock,” I said.
I had sent Nazuna, Suzu, and Lock on a mission to capture our target—Prince Voros of the Demonkin Nation—and he was the one lying motionless at Suzu’s feet. When they’d finally caught up to him, Suzu hit him with a paralyzing bullet. Nazuna had served as Suzu’s bodyguard throughout, but instead of summoning her to this arena too, I’d asked her to stay behind in the Abyss and hold the fort in place of Mei.
I looked down on Voros. We hadn’t been able to get much information out of the fake C, but I was sure we’d be able to get a whole lot more info out of the member of royalty responsible for backing Doc’s human experimentation. I reflexively treated Voros to a frosty smirk.
For those interested, I had purposely asked Suzu to bring Voros to this arena so that he could witness the fake C lying vanquished for himself. In a change to our usual methods, I’d decided I wasn’t going to get Ellie to read his mind, but rather make him tell us what we wanted using his own words. And we were quite willing to use every method at our disposal to get him to talk. Suzu canceled the paralyzation ailment on Voros, and the demon prince scurried backward in an attempt to get away from me. Once he felt he was far enough away, he started spewing a filthy stream of insults at us.
“Y-You foul wretches!” Voros yelled. “Don’t you know who I am?! I’m the crown prince of the Demonkin Nation! B-But did you just say you’ve defeated C? That’s impossible!”
“No, we haven’t defeated the real C,” Ellie corrected him. “That man wasn’t who you thought he was. He was merely a Master with an extremely high power level.”
Voros immediately recognized her voice. “Wait a minute! You’re the Wicked Witch of the Tower, aren’t you?! So you’re the one who triumphed over him? Or perhaps you’re actually C yourself?!”
I had thought Voros would have already known what had gone down, because he’d been right here in the room when I was praising Aoyuki for defeating the fake C. Sure, he’d been paralyzed at the time, but I’d assumed his ears had still been working perfectly fine. As for how Voros could have recognized Ellie from just her voice, she had appeared as the Wicked Witch at the chaotic summit in the Duchy, and the two had exchanged words.
Ellie rubbed her temple, irritated by this needless line of questioning. “Yes, it is I, the Wicked Witch of the Tower. But I am not the C you seek. In any case, who I am is irrelevant.”
“What are you going to do to my kingdom, you vile witch?!” Voros shouted at her.
✦ ✦ ✦
He must not have cared about what we had to say to him, because all he did after that was glare at Ellie with needlelike intensity. By this point, she was done with putting up with his arrogant and domineering attitude, and she was on the verge of blasting the prince with her murderous aura. Of course, if she went ahead and did that, she might literally stop Voros’s heart due to the difference in their power levels, so I raised my hand to tell her to stand down while I approached the demon.
I had a number of things I wanted to ask Voros, but I knew I wouldn’t be satisfied by just reading all of it in a report that Ellie had written up for me after probing his mind. No, I wanted to ask him myself why he had allowed Doc to revel in his cruelty and how he could have been so heartless toward humans. I already knew he was the acting king of the Demonkin Nation due to his father, the real king, being bedridden through illness. That meant Voros was the one who’d funded Doc’s laboratory of horrors, and who’d authorized people to supply Doc with human slaves and the magic tools he needed. I was going to make sure Voros paid for what he’d done, though the severity of the punishment could more or less depend on what he ended up telling me. But first and foremost, I wanted to ask him about Doc’s atrocities, not as Dark the adventurer, but as Light.
“Voros, crown prince of the Demonkin Nation,” I began. “There’s something I want to ask—”
“Now we have nothing left to resist this witch!” Voros wailed, completely ignoring me. Of course, the naked lack of respect shown toward me had Mei, Aoyuki, Suzu, and Lock steamed, as well as Ellie, but Voros paid them no heed and carried on acting like he was a damsel in distress in some play.
“My great nation will be enslaved by the witch, just like the Elven Queendom was,” Voros lamented. “But while you may have my body to do with what you will, you will never enslave my soul, foul witch! My pride shall never be broken by lowly, worthless inferiors like you people!”
Voros’s face was so exaggeratingly earnest, he really did look like a lead actor meeting his tragic end in the final scene of a play. I just stared at him like he’d grown a second head, unable to utter a word in response. What the heck is he going on about? I wondered.
And it wasn’t just me who was taken aback by this display. Everyone who had been mad at Voros only seconds before now had invisible question marks over their heads. Voros finally noticed that we were totally lost and decided to shine some light on his twisted logic for us.
“It’s just like you inferiors to be so ignorant,” Voros grumbled before launching into a lengthy explanation in which he did the following things: