I stood in front of my prisoner, a man lying on his stomach with a strip of fabric tying his arms behind his back.
“Are you ready to start talking?” I asked, looking down at him.
He rustled around, but didn’t answer. Probably checking his Health to see how much more punishment he could take. Or he was thinking about trying to escape. Or activating some communication Spell.
“If you don’t answer in ten seconds, I’m going to kill you,” I said in the most threatening tone I could muster. I couldn’t give him time.
“Y-yes, I can talk,” he finally said.
“Good. Are there any others around here?”
“No, no. Just me.”
“Hm.” I glanced around. He could’ve been lying. I walked a bit further away from him – taking care to ensure he was always in my sight – checking around trees and rocks and inside bushes to try and see if there were any more invisible enemies around here. Nobody, it seemed like.
But just as I thought that, I heard movement. Footsteps, and rustling bushes. My head snapped in that direction, but nobody was in vision yet, so I hid behind a tree. I’d use the prisoner as bait – they’d run up to free him, and that would be when I’d strike. As carefully as I could, I peered around the side of the tree to see how many enemies there were. Two figures, a Human and a–
Wait. It was Erani and the Dryad. I walked out from my hiding place, hands up to ensure they wouldn’t attack the moment they saw me – they were both obviously on-guard.“Oh, hey,” I called out. “Don’t shoot, please?”
“What the fuck is going on?” Erani asked, gesturing wildly to our surroundings.
“Uh, yeah, so, basically,” I coughed, “we have a prisoner now.”
“What?! How? Where’d he come from? Are we in danger?”
“No idea on all three of those questions,” I said.
“Do I kill bad guy?” the Dryad asked me.
“Probably not. As long as he doesn’t try to escape, don’t attack him.”
“Why keeping bad guy alive? Kill bad guys.”
“We might be able to get information from him. About the other bad guys. So we need to keep him alive, that way he can tell us.”
The Dryad furrowed her brows at that, obviously pondering that as a possibility. Seemed like Dryads normally operated on more of a ‘kill first, ask questions later’ philosophy. Made sense, since they couldn’t normally ask their enemies questions in the first place.
“I found this guy watching me while I practiced,” I said to Erani, who was glaring at the prisoner with caution. “He’d turned invisible. Probably a scout, or something. He told me he’s willing to talk, but who knows if he’ll be honest.”
“I’ll tell the truth, I swear!” He called back to us. “Please don’t kill me!”
“If I see a single person come over here,” I called back to him, “the first thing I’m doing is taking away the last of your Health. Do not call for reinforcements. If you do, you’re only killing yourself.
Erani pulled me aside and whispered in my ear. “Are we actually killing him? I know we have to kill to survive sometimes, but this…”
“We at least need him to think we’ll kill him,” I responded. “He’s already too low on Health to survive much more damage. So that’s pretty much the only threat we have left. If people come… who knows. It’d probably be good to get rid of an easy combatant in the first place when the fight starts. We let them free him, and we just have another person to fight.”
I glanced over and saw him with his head angled in an odd way, like he was trying to turn his ear directly toward us. Shit. I knew he had a high Dexterity – that Stat enhanced senses. It was possible he could hear our whispering.
“Yeah, we’re definitely letting him go if he gives us the information we want. If he doesn’t talk, or calls people in, we just need to get rid of him.”
Then, I messaged the Dryad. “Tell Erani that the prisoner can hear us talk aloud, and she needs to agree with what I just said to make sure he’s afraid enough to talk.”
A moment passed, and then Erani spoke. “Yeah, that makes sense.”
I took a breath, then turned to the man and started walking toward him. He shivered as I approached. Once I got close, I crouched down at his head, looking him in the eye. “Hey, kid. What’s your name?”
“N- Nantuth.”
“Okay. Listen, Nantuth. I won’t hurt you as long as you help me. I need you to tell me what you know. Got that”
“Yeah, yeah, I promise I’ll talk. I’m really low on Health, though, so don’t–”
“Why were you out here?” I interrupted. I was still tensely glancing at our surroundings. At the very least, I needed to get the basic information as soon as possible.
“To spy on you. Get information. The leader said–”
“Who’s the leader? Are they near?”
“Some Demon. And no, he isn’t near here – I’ve never even seen him. But King Koinkar was talking about what he wanted us to do. Said that if we take this final stand and kill you, the Demons’ll leave us alone for good. And they’ll help us rebuild, and give us enough food and shelter to help everyone they’d displaced. Plus they’d offer their forces to help us defend our borders, since so many people died or fled during the invasion.”
Yeah, that was bullshit. I had no idea whether it was the king who was lying, or the Demons, but I highly doubted that the Demons would help out the kingdom that much. Even if they killed me, they’d have no reason to try and repair relations with this place afterward – they’d obviously shown how easily they could destroy the kingdom if they wanted to. And it wasn’t like they had empathy for us Humans. It was just a hollow incentive for the soldiers to kill me.
The man – Nantuth – watched me stare at him while I thought about this. “P- please don’t take my soul,” he stuttered out.
I was suddenly yanked out of my thoughts by his words. “What?”
“I- I don’t know much, but I promise I can be useful if you leave me alive. Just, please, don’t take my soul if you do kill me.”
“Since when could I take fucking souls?” I squinted. “What does that even mean?”
“B- but the Demons said you could. That’s why they’re here, right? You took some souls from them, and now they’re trying to get their property back. A- and if you kill us, you’ll take our souls, too, to make yourself more powerful.”
I rubbed the bridge of my nose, speechless. Seemed like the Demons had done more than just make false promises to get the Humans to fight on their side. “I… no. That’s not what happened. I just fought some Demon that left the Underworld, and now they’re after me because I killed their friend, or something. It’s nothing like that.”
He just stared at me, obviously only half-convinced.
But I wasn’t here to argue, so I just continued. “Okay. So, this Demon leader wanted you to follow me and get info. How much have you reported back to them?”
“Just some basic stuff about your direction of movement, so far. But I’m just one person. We have a rotation of scouts to come in and trail you. This is my second shift, but there are a bunch of them.”
“How many people have gone before you?”
“I don’t know. But, but I have gotten some basic information from the last ones that followed you. I think they’ve been doing this since you got through that barrier they set up.”
Shit, I scowled. How much could they have gotten about me? Probably eavesdropped on our conversations, but what else? They at least knew about Ethereal Armor and its effects, but maybe we could keep Expedite hidden from them? We could feed them bad intel, as long as we knew when and where the scouts were. “How long have you personally been trailing me?”
“An hour. I was supposed to take care of you for as long as you were in this part of the forest. Someone else would take over once you got into the wasteland.”
I nodded, then had an idea. “Good. You told the truth, for the most part. We were aware of the scouts, and you repeated what we already knew. If you’d have lied, we would’ve killed you. Keep it up for a bit longer, and we’ll let you go.”
He paled, then nodded shakily.
I got a message from the Dryad. “Your lover says question, ‘that to scare prisoner?’”
Not a perfect translation, but I got what Erani had probably asked. “Yeah, just a lie to make sure he stays honest.”
“Where do you report to?” Erani asked. “Do you teleport, or travel?”
“Teleport,” he said. “We’re supposed to use Message Paper to talk to someone back at base, and they take us in. So, so I don’t know how to get there. Honest.”
I frowned. “Message Paper? Do you have that on you?”
“Uh, yes. In my pocket.”
I instantly dug through his pockets and felt it. Must’ve missed it during my previous search, since it was such a small item. The paper was a small piece with a tiny scrap of charcoal to draw on it. I’d heard about the stuff before – mark on this one, and another one that’d been paired with it would get the same markings. “This is the only way you can communicate with your base?”
“Yes, yes, that’s it. I promise.”
I nodded, pocketing the paper.
“Back in that base you get teleported into, did you see your surroundings? Any identifiable landmarks?” Erani continued her line of questioning.
“No, we stayed in a single room to report before being taken back to the kingdom with another teleportation. No windows or anything.”
“Who’d you report to?”
“One of those big Demons. They all look alike.”
“And that was the only person in the room with you?”
“Yeah. I swear, I have no idea where it is.”
“What were the surroundings like? Temperature, humidity, anything.”
“It- it’s cold, and feels hard to breathe. Like we’re high up.”
I frowned. The mountains?
“Do you know anything about their plans?” I asked. “What they’re setting up, what type of questions they ask you.”
“They- they asked me to pay real careful attention to what direction you’re going, and how close you are to Kingdom’s Edge. Whether you changed directions, talked about changing directions, things like that. The other stuff seems normal. How many times you Leveled up, how many monsters you killed, that sort of thing.”
I nodded. Seemed like they were planning on setting up some sort of trap. Could they have been the ones to send the Dragon on that rampage? Maybe they convinced it to attack us, or something.
I sighed. We’d need to ask this guy as many questions as we could. Probably wouldn’t get another opportunity like this to get information about our enemies.
After a while of questioning and confirming, asking the same questions again later to make sure he didn’t contradict himself, and ensuring he couldn’t escape, I felt like we finally had a good amount of information.
We ended up pulling his shirt over his head and taking him off, away from the area I’d caught him and to some other random part of the wilderness. That way if he did call for help, they wouldn’t know exactly where he was. We took some other safety measures, like searching him even more thoroughly multiple times for any sort of Enchanted items he might’ve had alongside those ten rings.
We also made him cast one of his spells over and over again until he couldn’t every few minutes to ensure his Mana was consistently drained. He had something that made a bow shot fly faster and straighter, so we just had him shoot a specific spot way off in the distance with it to ensure he cast it without hurting anybody. And we took care to ensure he was as restrained as possible while he held his bow to do this.
Unfortunately, as a Ranger, he was what was considered a Mixed-Type Class. That meant he had some Spells, but also some Martial Arts and other things. So even with a totally drained Mana pool, he could still use Stamina to activate other abilities. That was how he’d done that weird short-range teleporting thing that let him dodge my Rays of Frost while I chased him – it was a Passive Martial Art that drained Stamina to instantly avoid any damaging Spell projectiles that would’ve hit him.
But, thanks to my build, his Stamina was already significantly drained. And since Stamina regenerated much more slowly than Mana, we were in the clear for a while, in that aspect.
We moved him periodically throughout our interrogation – especially every time we had him empty his Mana, since he had to see to be able to do that – but eventually we got it done, and got pretty much all the information we could out of him.
We’d all but confirmed that, whatever the Demons were doing, it had a lot to do with setting up some sort of trap in Kingdom’s Edge. They asked their scouts to make sure they listened to every last word we said whenever we talked about travel plans, and to even record our exact word-for-word conversations in a notebook they had. It was really creepy reading through Nantuth’s notes – seeing my exact conversations with Erani, recorded in a notebook that even included things like my inflection when speaking, and how many seconds our pauses lasted.
Some other stuff felt notable, too. It seemed like the kingdom had fallen to its last leg because of the Demon invasion and the amount of resources they kept spending to fight us. Tons of people had fled – especially anyone with a halfway-decent Level – and there were riots and protests in just about every major city. A couple smaller villages had even been slaughtered when they decided to stop providing food to the kingdom as form of protest. But even that didn’t stop more from following in their footsteps.
It was nice to see that the general population disliked the Demons, at least. I’d pretty much only ever seen the people hunting me, which were probably the ones that believed their lies – or at least, the ones that thought the best course of action to get rid of the Demons was to just kill me. It made sense, in a twisted way – it’d be easier to kill one man than fight off the Underworld’s forces.
But still, it was worrying to see just how much the kingdom was spending to kill me. Really, it was an almost suicidal amount. I hadn’t tried on the rings the scout had – they could’ve been trapped – but Nantuth said that all ten of them were invisibility rings. That was how he could stay hidden for so long – he didn’t have any sort of Spell or Talent that could do that. They could all turn someone invisible for thirty seconds as a one-time use ability, afterward they’d go inert and lose their Enchantment permanently. And apparently every single scout got ten of them to watch over me with.
They were committing countless soldiers to their different projects. I hadn’t really thought about it, but that barricade they’d set up – it spanned multiple days’ travel of land. And every single section of it was manned by dozens of Humans and hundreds of landmines. Those things were expensive to make. Not only that, but they’d also burned a massive portion of the forest to push me into it. Swaths of land, villages and towns burned to the ground, farmland scorched. The entire kingdom took a toll from that maneuver.
And now, they were committing even more to this? The ten rings in my hand – at least, the ones that weren’t used up already – would be worth at least ten silver. Each. And they were giving every scout ten of them? Not to mention that they were apparently setting up another ambush for us in the mountains. They were instituting drafts, buying so much Enchanted gear that they’d resorted to sending out scavenging parties to find more gear on the corpses of dead adventurers in the forest, and selling their already limited food stocks to fund their military.
The kingdom was killing itself. It turned out that every single nearby country had completely cut off all trade with them, and refused to even consider helping them after what’d happened. I mean, it made sense that these countries would want to turtle up, focus on defending themselves in case the Demons attacked them next, and try not to provoke the Underworld, but still. The fact that they’d even cut off trade showed just how much confidence the rest of the world had in the future of this place.
In the end, though, there wasn’t too much else that Nantuth knew that could help us in our current situation. Seemed like the Demons knew to keep their scouts on a need-to-know basis, since they were the ones most vulnerable to being captured and interrogated. But we still got information, which was helpful.
I turned to Erani after we moved him to a new stretch of forest for the last time. “So, got any more questions?”
“No. And we should probably get out of here soon. Even if he didn’t contact anyone, people will notice when he doesn’t turn up when he’s supposed to. Dragon should be gone, anyway, so we just need to go.”
I nodded. “So… what do we do with him?”
“I– I thought you said you’d let me go,” the prisoner said. “P- please don’t kill me.”
I really didn’t want to kill him. He’d been nothing but helpful – even somewhat sympathetic to our plight, after some time. He’d apparently been forced into the military because of a draft that’d gone out, so he didn’t want to be in this situation. But if he got back to his base, he could still tell the enemy what he’d told us. Hells, they’d probably torture it out of him even if he decided to help us and keep it all secret. And if they knew what we knew, our intel would become useless. They’d just change their plans.
“Why you not talking anymore,” the Dryad asked.
“We’re done asking him questions,” I responded. “Just trying to figure out what to do with him, and then we can go.”
We could throw him into the forest without his gear, that way he wouldn’t be able to communicate with the enemies until he got to them physically, and it’d take him a while to get to them to do so. That’d probably give us enough time to get away and fight through their ambush without them knowing what we knew. But then, he’d probably just die out here and it’d be the same thing as executing him. We could take his stuff and throw him into some nearby village, but first we’d have to find one, which would be dangerous, and he’d probably be able to find some way to contact people in there. It was hard to find a solution that worked.
There was the possibility of taking him along with us, I thought. He didn’t exactly seem eager to help the Demons, so I didn’t think he’d try to sabotage us and run back to them. Hells, some of his abilities seemed pretty useful in a fight. Maybe he could help us out at points.
I turned to Erani to ask her what she was thinking, but then I heard a sudden noise and a flash of movement to my left, and the man’s head fell from his neck.
He’d been decapitated.
The Dryad lowered her whip, which was now stained in blood.
There was a moment of pause, before I realized what’d just happened.
“What the fuck did you just do?!” I demanded.
She looked at me innocently, tilting her head as though she had no idea why I was even asking her that. “This is bad guy. Bad guy not useful anymore. So should die. So killed bad guy.”