195 The Charter That Will Mark
The Demon Mansion was in many ways a bizarre place, but Alexis had never seen anything so unpleasant as she saw that night. When she was invited to enter, Marie and Masink immediately led her to the dining room to dine with them.
However, when she arrived in the room, she found various children sitting on chairs at a long table. All these children had paranoid looks on their faces and were staring at the half-dragon, perhaps thinking that she was an accomplice of the demons.
“Who are these cute children?” Alexis asked the couple with a fake smile on her face.
“These are our sons.” The couple said together, and Masink pulled Marie closer by the waist.
“I see… you have many children.” The half-dragon could count nine children in total, and it made her relieved that she hadn’t destroyed the Mansion with a <Divine Blast> when she had the chance.
“Yes! They are very beautiful, aren’t they?”
“Yes…”
The girls and boys at the table had different features from each other. While some of them had curly hair, some had straight or curly hair, not to mention the various other characteristics that they didn’t resemble the two demons in anything. Maybe the demons believed that Alexis was dumb or didn’t just care about her opinion, so they didn’t bother to take the children away from the table.
At the moment she sat down at the table, the S-Class thought while looking at the children:
‘Hold on tight, kids. We will get you out of here.'”
Meanwhile, on the house’s second floor, Luke had found a strange fusion of animals on the wall.
“Fuck… this is something only a motherfucker could do. Those demons are sick…” Luke muttered to himself as he stood.
If he ignored the fact that that thing was a mixture of animals of different species, to Luke, it was still bizarre to nail a corpse on the wall like this one was.
Below the exhibited animal was a table with many different papers on it. Luke tried to read them as fast as he could, find more information about the plans of the demons on the continent, and what Masink and Marie were doing in Latgor.
‘Account plans, Credits to receive, intercepted letters, more intercepted letters…’
All the letters that were sent by messengers through post offices in other cities were immediately intercepted by the demons, and Luke noticed that they opened them all.
‘Why they would bother to read each one if it’s easier to burn them?’ Luke wondered.
The half-wolf didn’t understand that this was essential work to keep up appearances. If the letters went unanswered, the families of the residents of Latgor would get weirded out and would trigger authorities or travelers.
Since it could take all night for Luke to check every piece of paper in that room, he focused on his sense of smell and realized that Marie’s scent had recently been on the large desk in front of the enormous pane of glass in that office. This pane of glass provided a wide view of the blacked-out city, which to Luke was a horrible thing to see in the winter, considering that the low temperatures tended to drop even lower in the coming days.
Arriving at Marie’s desk, Luke finally found some relevant information in a letter that seemed to have been written very recently.
[Hello, Doctor Vinigo. I am Marie De Luca, current Countess of Latgor, a town located south of Suzano.
I hereby express my wish that my husband, Masink De Luca, and I may eventually work together with you to share our research about the Chimeras.
Since we met with you in Stahurt a few years ago, my husband and I have become interested in the creation of an artificial monster. Since there is no Dungeon in Latgor, we figured that this was the perfect place to research this kind of alchemy without attracting too much attention.
Also, I learned from a memorandum from Arzen that you have settled in Oukiwa and are continuing your research there. Arzen didn’t tell us whether you have made the progress you wanted or not, but know that if you have, THAT man will be very happy.
If you have succeeded, talk to the Patriarch of the Noble Family called Smak…]
The letter stopped being written before the last word was completed; however, the half-wolf was no fool and completed it mentally. “The Smakusa? Shit…”
To Luke, the whole context of the letter made it clear that the Smakusa were closely connected with the demons, and who knows, maybe they were even helping these monsters. In either of the two alternatives, the worrying scenario would become even worse. The Smakusa Family had always been one of the wealthiest families in the entire Broteforge Empire, owning most of the fleets of ships, rafts, and boats in the whole Empire. This nautical monopoly guaranteed total control of the continent’s entrances and exits, which made the hypothetical scenario of an alliance with the demons even more distressing.
Immediately, Luke folded the letter and placed it in the inner pocket of his overcoat.
Soon after, his ears flickered as they detected the sound of footsteps coming up the stairs. Luke looked around, looking for a place to hide, but found no closet, so he used the Skill <Invisible Trail> to run behind the office door and hide.
The person who opened the door was Marie, and she found the room exactly as she had left it before she left the door to answer the door.
Marie naturally walked over to her desk with no concern; however, when she realized that the letter she had been writing was no longer there, her throat was suddenly slit by a cold blade.
On reflex, the demon woman teleported forward and placed her hand on her throat in an attempt to cover her wound.
At the same time, she tried to scream for her husband, but her throat hadn’t yet regenerated. “Aagh—”
Seeing that the Countess didn’t regenerate as quickly as Beherith and that she couldn’t scream, Luke spun the small obsidian sword, unconsciously made the first training stance of the Sea Ornament, and tried to slash the woman again.
Marie dodged the stab, teleported to the right of the half-wolf, and punched him in the face with her right hand, throwing him against the wall to her left.
The entire Mansion could hear the noises Luke made as he was thrown across two rooms with the force of a single punch.
Masink immediately dragged his chair back and looked at the half-dragon.
Alexis immediately shouted at the edge of the table: “<Morning Sage>!” And she beamed a few feet forward, managing to grab the demon by the collar and press him against the wooden floor. “Get out of here, kids!”
All nine children started screaming and running to the house’s front door, further alarming Marie, who was on the second floor of the house.