Chapter 19 - Don't They Usually Cut Off at Least One Finger?

BOOM!

With a deafening crash, the iron door of Lowcat's hideout was torn loose. Ripped out hinges and all, it flew into the middle of the gambling floor and slammed down.

"Wh-what the hell!"

"Which bastard did that?"

The guild members playing cards sprang from their seats in alarm.

As the dust cloud cleared, a mass of shifting shadows appeared beyond the ruined entrance.

"Those starving dogs are making their last desperate stand..."

Recognizing the intruders, Lowcat's chief enforcer snorted and picked up an iron pipe.

"Hey, stomp them! Make sure they never walk agai—"

But the chief enforcer never finished his order.

WHOOSH!

A, the Houndry member at the front, closed the distance in the blink of an eye.

CRUNCH!

His fist sank deep into the chief enforcer's solar plexus.

"Guh, h-hurk...?"

The man's eyes rolled back, and he vomited blood. The destructive force was beyond anything human muscles should have been capable of producing. His body flew backward like a cannonball, knocking down three or four men behind him like bowling pins.

"Wh-what?"

"That bastard... How is he so strong...!"

They had little time to gape. Behind A, the Houndry members surged inside like a pack of starving dogs.

"Kill them all!"

A dark violet haze rose from their bodies: the blessing Daywin had bestowed upon them. Intoxicated by its power, they had become berserkers who felt neither pain nor fear.

CRACK!

Even an ordinary-looking guild member caught a wooden club swung by a Lowcat member with his bare hand and crushed it.

It was a one-sided trampling. Lowcat's elite, who had enjoyed a measure of renown in the Sixth District, were swept aside without putting up a fight.

Into that chaos slowly walked a man in a neat coat, utterly out of place on the blood-spattered battlefield.

The new Karma.

He made his way slowly into the dust-filled hideout.

"Urrgh... P-please, spare..."

"Shut up!"

THUD!

A swung his fist. He had pinned the Lowcat member he had met at the tavern against a wall and was hammering punches into him. Cracks spread through the wall, and the man's face was already battered beyond recognition.

CRUNCH!

Yet A didn't stop there. He grabbed the man by the hair and slammed his head into a nearby wooden table.

Watching him, Daywin shook his head.

'What's gotten into him? Why is he trying so hard...? Did something bad happen to him today...?'

BANG! BANG!

"You scum! How dare you look down on Houndry? How dare you doubt Lord Karma? Die! Die and atone for it!"

Half out of his mind, A trampled the Lowcat members.

Daywin briefly considered stopping him, but—

'Well, they're all the same scum anyway.'

Before long, several men were dragged out from the back of the hideout amid harsh shouts.

"Urgh! L-let go! Let me go!"

Lowcat's officers, and even its boss.

They were in a miserable state. Their expensive suits had been reduced to rags, and their faces were covered in blood and bruises. Yet their eyes still brimmed with malice as they yelled furiously.

"Kneel!"

A kicked the boss in the balls.

CRACK!

The boss dropped instantly, as if it were a knee-jerk reflex. Even as his legs gave out beneath him, he kept his head defiantly raised.

"Ptooey!"

He even spat blood-tinged saliva at Daywin's feet.

"Houndry... You crazy fuckers. Are you on drugs?"

"Watch your mouth."

A reached for the boss's hair, but Daywin raised a hand to stop him.

"So you're the fifth one? You look like a girl."

For a captive, the boss was remarkably brazen. He probably had something to fall back on, or someone behind him who frightened him more than Karma did.

The officers, by contrast, were far too quiet. They kept their mouths firmly shut and avoided his gaze.

'Hmm.'

Daywin looked down at their tightly closed mouths. Getting them to talk seemed likely to take time. Torture was a skill, too, and the Church actually had plenty of experts in it.

With his hands clasped behind his back, Daywin stepped toward the kneeling boss. Then he bent down to meet his eyes and asked into his ear the question he most wanted answered.

"A black envelope."

His voice dropped low.

"Have you ever received one?"

The boss's pupils contracted for an instant before returning to normal.

"What the fuck are you talking about?"

He merely sneered.

'Of course, he might genuinely not know. The Death God's cult wouldn't have sent the job to every organization.'

But that look just now suggested he at least had some idea.

Daywin stared at him, then slowly straightened. Instead of pressing him further or throwing a punch, he nodded calmly.

"You don't know... I see."

If anything, his response seemed to throw the boss off. Wasn't this usually the part where you cut off a finger or something and threatened him?

Daywin gestured to A, who stood behind him.

"Take him away."

019

The heads of criminal guilds who would normally have been snarling at one another, eyeing each other's turf, had gathered in one place.

Three guilds, excluding Houndry and Lowcat. These were the powers who divided the rest of the Sixth District among them.

"Lowcat went down?"

A man slammed the table in disbelief. The subordinate delivering the report nodded, his face deathly pale.

"Thirty minutes... They were wiped out in thirty minutes."

A cold silence fell over the cramped private room.

Thirty minutes.

An entire organization had vanished in the time it took to eat dinner.

"Hmph. Those bastards let their guard down. Bunch of morons."

A man with his hat pulled low snorted as he lit a cigar.

"He was the weakest of us all!"

"Mm, exactly. Besides, I hear this fifth fellow is a mage. He must have used some sort of trick."

"Didn't you say those sons of bitches have fewer than a hundred men now?"

The three bosses each raised their voices.

"Together, we have over five hundred. That's more than Houndry had at its peak. If we overwhelm them with numbers, mage or no fucking mage..."

"Together?"

"That's right... An alliance."

The boss with the snake tattoo extended a hand as if he had been waiting for this.

"Let's hit them right away. They say the Fifth Karma has pale skin and not a single callus. Apparently it's obvious he's never held a sword."

"Heh. Just some noble brat who's run away from home to play house."

The man in the hat chimed in, blowing cigar smoke.

"Yeah, let's go!"

The remaining man seemed to have no thoughts at all.

Judging by their bluster, they had more than enough spirit to unite the entire Sixth District already.

Under the table, however, it was a very different story.

Trembling uncontrollably, the snake-tattooed man's leg kept pumping like a sewing machine. The vibrations traveled up the table, sending ripples across the liquor in their glasses. He pinched his thigh, desperately trying to stop the shaking, but he couldn't control his instinctive fear.

The boss across from him was no different. He pretended to smoke his cigar with easy composure, but he had already chewed it ragged with tooth marks.

'Lowcat was taken out in thirty minutes.'

That fact lodged in his throat like a thorn.

Those men hadn't been weak. If anything, they were a cut above them, certainly not below. And yet Lowcat had been crushed without being able to do a thing.

'Weakened or not, Houndry is still Houndry. Karma is still Karma...'

Clearly, Houndry was moving to bring the Sixth District under its rule again. The marquis's purge had accomplished nothing. Despite their lord's direct military intervention, they were running wilder than ever.

'Truly a pack of mad dogs...'

As they masked their fear with bravado—

CREAK!

The iron door opened with a chilling noise.

Silence followed. All three bosses turned toward the door at once.

The click of dress shoes came from the darkness. Steady, unhurried footsteps.

The man who emerged over the threshold was the very person they had been sneering at moments before.

"...!"

The snake-tattooed man's jaw dropped, and the hatted man's cigar fell to the floor.

How?

How had he found this place?

What about the guards?

The men they'd stationed outside?

Daywin gave the men, frozen in shock and terror, a faint smile, as though he had arrived on time for an appointment.

"How convenient. You're all here."

Standing with his back to the door, he smiled brightly.

A few days later, in Marquis Fred's room.

"..."

He had seated me across from him, only to let a heavy silence hang between us.

Had about five minutes passed?

Marquis Fred set down his teacup and finally spoke.

"You... Do you have some grievance against me?"

Huh?

He'd summoned me out of the blue to ask that...? Talk about coming out of nowhere.

"No? A grievance?"

I gave a slight smile and shrugged.

"Nothing in particular."

"Nothing... you say."

The marquis smacked his lips, closed his mouth, and stroked his chin.

"Think carefully. Not even the slightest thing?"

"Truly, nothing."

His eyebrow twitched.

"If you have no grievance, why are you doing this...?"

"Pardon?"

"The marquisate has reeked of blood for days! I can't open my windows! Complaints from the residents are pouring in! Why did you suddenly start a massacre without consulting me?"

The marquis pointed at the pile of documents on his desk. Apparently, they were all complaints filed over the past three days. I didn't need to read them to know what they said.

"A massacre? That's an exaggeration."

"You were the one who said we should leave the useful ones alive!"

That only applied to Houndry. Whether members of other guilds lived or died was none of my concern.

"Well, I had a good reason."

"Good. A reason. I've been going mad wondering what that reason might be."

Wiping the sweat from his forehead, the marquis waddled over, his heavy body swaying.

"It seems the Death God's cult contacted other guilds in the Sixth District besides Houndry. I was looking for evidence of that."

Perhaps because I had suddenly brought up my original objective, the flush in his face gradually subsided.

"You mean... you were acting not as Karma, but as the Goddess's sword?"

"Of course."

"And did you find it? It's certainly a relief to know that all this uproar you've caused digging through the underworld wasn't merely a turf war. But did you find anything? A trail leading to the Death God's cult, I mean."

"Unfortunately, I have no decisive leads yet."

"Hmm... Perhaps it's too much to ask..."

Marquis Fred shook his head.

"Are you certain the Death God's cult is active? I'm beginning to wonder whether you might be mistaken. You said from the outset that you would pursue them, but by all accounts, the Death God's cult was already a hundred years ago..."

"I act according to the Goddess's will. Are you questioning the Goddess?"

"That... is not what I meant."

"The Death God's cult most certainly exists. I don't know where that black envelope was sent from, but..."

A knock sounded while I was speaking. When the marquis called for the visitor to enter, Lucia cautiously opened the door and stepped inside.

She slipped over to me, whispered in my ear, and backed out of the room.

"Daywin, what's the matter?"

"My apologies. What were we discussing?"

"You said you didn't know... where the black envelope had come from."

"Ah, yes. I don't know yet, but..."

A week had passed since I rounded up all the bosses, and today, one of them had finally talked.

"I have found out who else received a letter besides Houndry."