#027. The Noble Escort is Too Kind (2)

#027. The Noble Escort is Too Kind (2)

Gomorrah could hardly believe his predicament.

Just hours ago, he had been the most influential figure in Sodom Village.

The village chief’s guards were a deterrent against adventurers, but even they were forced to grovel at his feet.

And what of the support from the Capital Noble Council?

His reliable backing and the official noble title ensured that no one without an equivalent title would dare oppose him.

‘That fool, Diego…’

That madwoman who’d crawled out of the alleys not long ago was a noble?

That’s laughable.

Her looks, her monstrous strength… even if she wasn’t a commoner, if she were a recognized member of a noble family, she wouldn’t have been rotting away her life in the alleys in such a miserable state.

“Damn it. Damn it all!”

Most infuriatingly, adventurers and guards, allied now, slowly advanced, their pikes leading the way, blocking every exit from the intricate alleyways.

Thanks to the farce of his own line of adventurers collapsing in the brothel’s disgusting lubricant, most of the village’s forces had joined Teresa and the guildmaster.

There was nowhere left to run.

“I can’t accept this. I still have things I must do!”

If he could just hold out for a few more years, he would find the funds and opportunities to realize his long-held ambition.

“To think I would let the effort I poured into securing a Saint’s Absolute Restoration – something that can only be invoked once every few years – for my child be squandered like this!”

Yes, he had to live.

This was no time to writhe in humiliation.

He had to grit his teeth, endure, and desperately cling to life.

Even the foul sewers held no terror for him.

He knew this place: a facility where monsters proliferated due to contaminated water discharged from the mana disposal system, managed by grinding down low-level adventurers like rats.

If a danger they couldn’t handle emerged, their lives would signal the crisis like canaries in a coal mine.

A canary with weak lungs couldn’t withstand noxious gas, and would fall dead to the bottom of its cage.

The same went for low-level adventurers with poor physical abilities.

Sacrifice the lives of adventurers to detect danger, dispatch a high-ranking adventurer clan for a precision strike to extinguish the immediate threat, and then bury the casualties as if nothing had happened.

Safety management?

No one cared about the safety of a canary.

They used canaries because they lacked the skill to use advanced equipment, because money was precious, wasn’t it?

Even a man like him included this particular location in his patrol route without fail.

The periphery of a secret passage leading outside the village.

A hidden escape route he kept open, for a day just like this.

“This is the end. I’m getting out of here, and I swear I’ll bring you all down. Theresa, Sodom, the village chief and the guard, the pigs in the Adventurer’s Guild, every last one of you!”

“Too bad. I wouldn’t want to see that happen.”

A thrown dagger, fast as lightning, embedded itself in Gomorrah’s forearm.

He cried out in agony as three more daggers followed in quick succession, piercing the back he was using to open the emergency exit.

*Thwack, thwack.*

From the dirty, tangled alleys to the sewers beneath.

Theresa had pursued him with a speed that could only be achieved by tracing his path without a single misstep.

“Did you know? So many people are scared witless by the shit you’ve pulled that the sewer rate has gone up. Thanks to you, I’ve had to memorize the roads in this disgusting place.”

The sewers.

Theresa’s very first commission had been to hunt giant rats in the sewers.

A bottom-tier quest from the Adventurer’s Guild.

And a profitable one.

The first hunting ground she brought the children to.

She’d brought them hoping they’d give up, but she hadn’t wanted them to die.

That was why she’d eliminated every potential threat.

She might not have known about the secret passage, but she knew exactly where Gomorrah was headed. It was easy to tail him just by listening to his footfalls, the vibrations, and his enraged shouts.

*Screeeech-*

*Thump!*

As the heavy door to the secret passage swung open, Gomorrah, blood streaming from his wounds, desperately threw himself inside.

The consequence of exploiting adventurers and residents with unbridled greed manifested even in the excess flesh that ballooned his body. That’s how he could keep moving with such tenacity, even after being stabbed so many times and losing so much blood.

“If you cherished your own child, you should have understood that other people’s children are precious too. If you understood the power in the words of someone in authority, you should have learned to keep your promises. You’re just a selfish pig who only cares about himself. It’s no wonder you didn’t see this coming.”

Because he didn’t understand others, he couldn’t understand Shoah’s rage.

He couldn’t understand Ian’s rage, or Theresa’s rage.

Teresa Fati’s fury, the Adventurer’s Guild’s anger, the villagers’ wrath – Gomora knew none of it.

Gomora was a fool, utterly ignorant.

In a world where ignorance was a straight path to death, there was no more fitting reason, no apter cause of death, than this.

“Kheh, Khahaha!”

Staggering, dragging a leg from the repeated daggers, he flung open the exit with his left arm in place of his unresponsive right, revealing the landscape beyond the village.

Even as death drew closer with each passing moment, Gomora clung to his last hope.

A support request, sent via communication artifact.

From the instant he sensed things had gone awry at his manor, he activated the distress signal, pleading for aid from the Hero Party, whose influence he had cultivated within the Noble Council.

The price would be steep.

Savings he’d carefully amassed, time he’d set aside to search for his son – at least a year of it, gone.

He could bear it.

The year lost could be recouped through even more ruthless and blatant exploitation.

‘Actually, this is perfect. That damned safety, safety, safety. If I can frame the Guild Master, accusing him of using adventurers to assassinate nobles, driven mad by greed as he howled about safety… Then the Guild Master position is mine.’

He could bleed adventurers dry even more aggressively, more openly, and no one would be able to stop his rampage.

If the Hero Party had any sense, they wouldn’t come alone.

Elite forces, the kind mobilized even for engagements with Hero-level and massive raid bosses, would follow.

The tribute he paid to the Noble Council, the kickbacks that went to the Hero Party, weren’t insignificant.

He deserved to have that level of service.

“You’ve come?”

“You’re… the Pugilist from the Hero Party!”

A bestial girl, rabbit-kin, exposing a belly adorned with fluffy fur and sharp claws hidden beneath, her eyes gleaming with a prim sharpness.

Pinky, the rabbit-kin Pugilist, arrived at the exit, accompanied by her squad of bestial Pugilist guards.

The appearance of an elite combat unit, the same ones deployed to hunt down group-leader raid-level monsters.

He was saved.

And he had won.

So many soldiers, lying in wait.

Teresa was finished.

She couldn’t possibly escape from here alive.

Even if she turned and ran, the bestials’ physical abilities far surpassed those of humans.

She would inevitably be caught and killed. That outcome wouldn’t change.

“Having fun running wild, huh? Your time’s up. The tables have turned. Now *you’re* the one running!”

Gomora roared with laughter and shouted at Pinky.

“Miss Pinky! Kill that adventurer, Teresa!”

“Believe me, I really want to? But the situation is, shall we say, complicated.”

“What do you mean…”

“We’re not the only ones here, you see.”

The bestials didn’t attack.

Looking closer, they were wary of each other.

It wasn’t just the combat unit.

He hadn’t realized it, accustomed to viewing rabbit-kin as docile beasts, but there were two factions of bestials present.

Pinky’s Beastman Fighting Brigade.

And…

“What’re you gawking at?”

The beastmen from the encampment near Sodom Village.

Even Hanyanya, their cat beastman guard captain.

It’s absurd.

Teresa had only just returned.

There’s no way they could have relayed the news to the beastman encampment and called for reinforcements this quickly.

If it was a pre-planned scheme, he wouldn’t have failed to notice.

He was simply caught off guard by a sudden spark and couldn’t react in time.

The beastman encampment’s movements eluded his surveillance.

That leaves only one explanation.

Reinforcements were called after the incident, and they departed at the same speed as Pinky and the Beastman Fighting Brigade from the capital.

“That wench… a Guild Courier! It was the work of a rogue from the Courier ranks!”

Innate thieves whose livelihood was their quick feet and ability to deliver messages.

It was the secret to how the beastmen from the encampment, having received ‘Courier’ Yuzu’s message, arrived in time to confront the beastmen before the Hero’s party got here.

“Hanyanya, that state you’re in…”

“You were too slow, so I paid the price with my body, nya.”

Even so, the Fighter Pinky of the Hero’s party, with far greater mobility than her subordinates, arrived before them.

The beastman guard captain, who, upon Ian’s advice, returned to the exit to secure their escape route in order to hinder her, had her nails broken and her entire body covered in cuts before the strength of such a different class of being.

Yet, she survived.

“Though my body is lacking, I’ve come to repay the favor.”

“We can’t just idly receive protection when you’re exerting yourselves for the likes of us.”

The assassin, Shoa.

An adventurer-turned-prisoner and the last miner thrown into the mines to work off his debt.

It was thanks to these pushed-to-their-limits individuals joining that Hanyanya was able to withstand.

“If you kill me, both the Imperial Aristocratic Council and the Hero’s Party will move.”

“No. Once the easy target is gone, the Hero’s Party will lose any reason to intervene, and the Aristocratic Council will agree to negotiate. You’re not the only noble in this village, after all.”

“You were…excommunicated, weren’t you?”

Teresa flinched, startled for the first time at Gomora’s sinister smile.

“There’s no way someone with your beauty and skill wouldn’t have been chased out of her family, forced to hide in a backwater village like this. You’ll undoubtedly pay the price for invoking the name of the Starsepia family. That family will use the Aristocratic Council to erase any stain on their lineage that you represent.”

“…”

She couldn’t deny it.

It was the plain truth.

She had disappointed her family, squandered their support.

She crossed the line of her own volition.

And was disowned.

“Your children will be the same. Now that your existence has been revealed, the Starsepia will no longer tolerate a bloodline born from a stain on their family.”

“…!”

“Khehehe. You killed them. You killed your children… Gerk!”

What did it matter, in the end?

“I am a mother who cherishes her children more than anyone. I care not for the gaze of houses, nor for the Aristocratic Assembly. I need only see one thing: the future of my children.”

The tenacious life of Vice Guildmaster Gomora was severed by Teresa’s hand.

“Hiyah! You’ve done it. Truly confident you can handle the fallout?”

“Am I. And you? Do you have the confidence to return alive after battling me here?”

Pinky gazed down at Gomora’s corpse, riddled with daggers.

“I concede. Still, next time, we choose the battlefield first. Be ready.”

The Sodom village’s armed uprising tumult concluded with Gomora’s death and the retreat of Pinky and her anthropomorphic combat unit.

“See that? This is how adults resolve things.”

“…Amazing.”

In the eyes of the young mind manipulator, no victory declaration by her mother could have been more reassuring.