A Thorough Organization Crushing!

The Royal Capital at noon.

A scruffy-haired man was pulling a handcart along the paved stone road.

On top of it were many bound men loaded up.

A washed-up-looking old man was pushing from behind the cart.

One of the bound men, a man who could do nothing but groan through his gag, thought to himself.

This wasn’t how it was supposed to go…。

Ever since long ago, the man had desperately wanted to live an easy life.

He had thought working seriously was stupid.

For that reason, he had a good build and strong arms.

If he got violent, he could force through any selfish demand.

Most people listened if you hit them.

This world was easy.

But he had gone too far in his village and had been forced to run away.

He had thought that if he made it to the Royal Capital, violence would somehow solve things, but it became a real hassle.

Territories and turf and all that.

What a pain in the ass, the man had thought.

That was when he joined his current organization.

They had taught him who to beat up to make the most money.

Beat people up, make money, then live it up.

Liquor, women, food. It had been a good life.

Recently, a rival organization had collapsed on its own, and he had been able to spread his wings even more and rampage freely.

Apparently the boss had played his cards well.

Today, the job had been to mix poison into the Puchi Elixirs in the warehouse and get paid in gold coins.

It should have been easy.

But when he tried to pour in the poison, two men appeared and attacked him without a word.

Even though one was a thin, scrawny man and the other was a washed-up-looking old guy.

Their attacks had been faster than anyone could imagine from their appearance, and each blow had been heavy.

As a result, he had been beaten to a pulp without being able to do a thing.

Even so, the man had tried to fight.

No matter how many times he was thrown to the ground, he got back up.

His companions had already crouched down and lost all will to fight.

I won’t be satisfied unless I land at least one punch!

But even that wish had gone unfulfilled, and the two men had thoroughly beaten him down.

To the point that he could no longer stand from the pain.

Even then, when he kept cursing at them, they had thoroughly destroyed his elbows, knees, shoulders, and hip joints.

It was a different kind of pain than before. Agonizing pain wrapped in the terror that he would never move again.

Before he knew it, he had been crawling on the ground like a worm, crying and begging for forgiveness.

As he was bound without ceremony, he had thought.

—What the hell are these guys… they’re way too strong….

Because violence had been the one thing he was confident in, losing in a head-on fight had shattered that confidence.

And the fear that his body would stop moving again had broken his spirit.

With tears welling in his eyes for the first time since childhood, he trembled like a baby rabbit.

After that, he was tied up, loaded onto the cart, and taken somewhere.

They walked calmly through the daytime streets with the bound men loaded on the cart.

—Even though this was a completely abnormal situation, strangely enough, nobody noticed anything was wrong.

Why the hell is that… ahh, it hurts.

My life… this wasn’t how it was supposed to go.

A back alley in the Royal Capital.

I was pushing from the back of the handcart. Edgar was pulling it from the front.

The cart stopped in front of a staircase leading underground.

Edgar came around from the front of the cart and pointed at the stairs.

“It’s here.”

“Got it.”

With Edgar in the lead, I followed after him.

We went down the dim staircase. A stale smell stabbed at my nose.

When we got underground, there was one man standing in front of a door.

He frowned when he saw us.

“Who the hell are you bastards?”

“You could say we’re garbage cleaners, I guess?”

“Your buddies are already loaded up.”

“What did you say!? —Guhff!”

The man clutched his stomach and doubled over.

Apparently Edgar had punched him, but I hadn’t even seen it.

We quickly tied him up and opened the door.

Inside was a tavern with a counter and table seating.

Rough-looking men were scattered all over the place.

When they saw us come in, they stood up.

“What do you want?”

“Who the hell are you?”

“You wanna go, huh!?”

About seven men came in to surround us.

So I told them. While secretly compressing my Serâge. Two hundred meters ought to do it.

“I’m Alec, owner of Puchi Eli. I heard you’ve got some business with us, so I came myself. Be grateful, why don’t you?”

“What!?”

“So it’s you!”

The men bristled.

Then a man in the back of the shop shouted in a deep voice.

“Perfect timing. Boys, do him in ‘for real’!”

“”“Yeah!”““

At the man’s order, the men pulled weapons like knives and axes into their hands.

Edgar and I took our stances barehanded.

—I screwed up, I should have brought a normal sword.

Right now, all I had was my usual black single-edged sword.

I clicked my tongue inwardly, but it was already too late.

The men came charging at us.

Inside the cramped tavern.

Against two people, it was hard to throw punches.

At that moment, one of the men Edgar had taken down collapsed right in front of me.

In the man’s hand was a somewhat long shortsword.

—Oh, this’ll do nicely.

I quickly picked it up and raised the sword.

It was shorter than usual, but I poured Serâge into it the same way and activated a holy sword technique.

“Hah!”

The sword’s trail flashed, and I slashed the two men in front of me in a cross.

Holy sword technique—Saint Cross!

I slashed at the men’s chests and necks.

“Gwah!”

“That hurts!”

The men dropped their knives and clutched the places where they had been cut.

—But.

Though there was blood, there were no wounds.

“”“Huh?”““

“Justice Slash—Hah!”

I stepped in even further and split him cleanly in two from head to toe.

“Gyaaaah!”

The cut man screamed as he sprayed blood.

He collapsed to the floor, but he wasn’t injured.

The man watching beside him opened his eyes wide and trembled.

“W-what the hell is this? How is this happening…?”

“What do you mean? If you’re not injured, then that means I haven’t used violence, right?”

“Huh? What are you saying—!?”

“—Hah!”

Without another word, I slashed the man diagonally.

He crouched down, apparently from the intense pain, but though blood came out, there was no injury.

—That’s right.

When I used a cheap sword, the Serâge poured into the blade leaked out all over the place, so the target was healed at the same time as being cut.

An attack that ought to be called Heal Slash.

Because of this, I had struggled terribly when exterminating beast-type monsters and dealing with bandits.

Still, it might have been just right for beating people up without killing them.

Especially now that my Serâge had increased recently, wounds healed quickly. They were healing instantly.

Beside me, Edgar lightly took down a third man.

The way he reliably knocked them unconscious was amazing.

Just what kind of training had he gone through, anyway.

After the remaining two were down as well, I left the tying up to Edgar.

I headed toward the back of the shop.

Then a rugged man with an eyepatch stood up.

“Hey, hey. You know who we are, don’t you? If it’s now, I’ll let you off—”

I turned back and asked Edgar.

“What are this guy’s charges?”

“That guy’s the boss of the organization, Gadwin. Murder, kidnapping, and illegal narcotics trafficking.”

“I see. —Then, Gadwin. You’ll pay for the crime of opposing me.”

“Don’t screw with me! —Take this!”

Gadwin threw a small pouch at me.

When I cut it down with the shortsword, white powder burst out all around us.

I brushed it away with my free hand, but some got into my eyes and mouth. It stung.

“Kuh! —A numbing drug!?”

“Heh heh, it’s worse than that. It’ll drive you insane for a whole month!”

“I see—Hah!”

Even while compressing my Serâge, I shouted and released the Serâge inside my body.

For an instant, a pale blue-white light flared around me.

That alone blew away the white powder.

It got in Gadwin’s face.

“Uwah! What the hell did you do—ptui, ptui! Uuugh!”

When Gadwin collapsed, his body twisted and writhed like a snake.

Apparently the drug had taken effect.

I looked around the tavern.

“Is that everyone?”

“No, there’s one more. The strategist—there.”

Edgar’s figure blurred like heat haze.

And then, when he appeared behind the counter, he grabbed a small man’s scruff.

The man trembled and let out a pathetic voice.

“Eeeek! Please forgive me! I was always just following orders because I was told to!”

“I heard you handled disposal of the slaves Thomson killed, right?”

“T-that was because the boss accepted the job….”

“And I heard you were the one gleefully cutting up the slaves who were still alive and disposing of them.”

“W-how… how do you know that…?”

“—The weaker they are, the more they like hurting people who are already helpless.”

Edgar bound the small man so tightly his bones might break. With a dull cracking sound, the small man screamed.

Then he dumped all of them onto the tavern floor.

Edgar said,

“What should we do?”

“Hm? They didn’t just try to come after me, they tried to make Liricia suffer too, so I have no intention of letting them off with just this. And if their counterfeiting of Puchi Eli products and poison-mixing had succeeded, the damage would’ve been no laughing matter. Don’t we need to teach it to their bodies so they’ll never feel like defying us again?”

I said that while pouring Serâge into the sword I’d raised and making it shine.

Edgar nodded, his scruffy hair swaying.

“That’s the right answer. With guys like this, if you don’t break their spirits too, they’ll just become a pain later.”

Edgar answered in an awfully calm voice, then cracked his fingers as he walked forward.

The bound men shuddered in terror.

“W-what are you planning to do!?”

“Hey, stop!”

“P-please help meee!”

My sword swung, and Edgar’s fists roared.

“Gyaaaah!”

“It huuurts!”

“This is too cruel!”

“I’ll give you money, so let me go!”

“I’ll even give you the beauty I forced into slavery!”

“I’ll talk, I’ll tell you everything! I’ll tell you all the blackmail material too, so just spare my life—”

The men let out pathetic screams, and then cried as they begged.

I stopped my swinging sword and asked in a low voice.

“If Liricia and I had not resisted and had simply been at your mercy, and we cried and begged, would you have spared us? —Well, answer me!”

“O-of course we’d spare you, we’d spare you!”

“Obviously we’d help you, so help me too—”

The other men also stumbled over their words, but in obviously false voices they blurted out things like “We’d have spared you” and “Of course we’d have helped.”

Then Edgar looked down at them from beneath his scruffy hair with a gaze cold enough to freeze.

“I can speak the languages of many countries. But I never learned the language of scum, so I don’t really understand what you’re saying.”

“N-no—owww!”

“Forgi—gyaah!”

“Help—higii!”

After that, even when the men cried and apologized, I kept swinging my sword, and Edgar kept swinging his fists.

While we were at it, we also made them tell us where the evil god statue was.

However, no matter how much we interrogated them, we learned that the cursed bouquet was not their doing.

And when their eyes finally turned vacant, we at last carried them out of the tavern and loaded them onto the cart.

—We might have gone a little too far.

I was glad Liricia hadn’t had to see a situation like this.

The air of the Royal Capital was turning lukewarm under the languid afternoon sunlight.

When Edgar went around to the front of the cart and began pulling, he looked back at me and said,

“I thought this kind of work was my specialty alone, but when you get serious, Alec-san, you really go this far.”

“Was that a problem?”

“No, being soft is the real problem. There are people you absolutely must never compromise with. —I mean, I kind of thought heroes were softhearted by nature, but as expected of you, Alec-san.”

“Well, I no longer need to behave like a virtuous hero. There’s no image left for me to protect anymore. The only one I want to protect is Liricia.”

“That resolve is insanely strong. Even if there were ten thousand of these guys, they still couldn’t have beaten you, Alec-san.”

“Then shall we finish this up?”

“Right away.”

Edgar cheerfully pulled the cart. The rattle of its wheels echoed through the narrow road of the back alley.

And so we pushed the cart toward the knight order’s station.