TW: Murder, child abuse, suicide, dark themes
There's a TL;DR at the end of the chapter for those who would prefer to skip this chapter.
At Yves' seemingly random question, I nodded. I'd seen dead bodies, but I'd never seen anybody die in front of me.
Yves seemed deep in thought at my response. He looked troubled.
Yves reached for the hair stick in his high ponytail and took it out of his hair. It was more like a thick needle than a hair stick.
Yves suddenly covered my eyes with his hand. I could only see darkness in front of me.
I tried to swat his hand away, but his words came faster than my actions.
"Don't do that, just hold my hand."
There had to be a reason why he had blocked my sight. Instead of trying to push away his hand, I put my hand over his. It didn't seem like he was doing this as a joke.
My vision was dark, but the sounds were clear as day. Jab, jab, along with the sound of screaming.
After a few moments had passed, Yves removed his hand from my eyes. As the bright light shone in my eyes, I started to look around. Just as I expected, all of the people I had tied up previously were dead.
However, there weren't any visible injuries on the bodies. If you just glanced at the bodies, they looked asleep.
Yves wiped the blood off of his hair stick-needle combo and looked at the bodies of the guild employees, then began to speak.
"This is probably better than being tortured to death."
I closed my mouth after listening to Yves speak. I had originally thought that there was no need to kill everybody here. To be killed because they had failed a mission. This was something that I always thought, but the underworld really was incredibly cruel.
Yves and I rode the carriage to the leader's villa.
Inside the carriage, Yves sat me down on his lap and stared out the window. I swore that I wouldn't stay on his lap. But when Yves handed me the special edition of 'Today's Economy' magazine, I decided to play along.
Yves, who had been silently looking out the window, suddenly began speaking to me.
"Shushu."
"What?"
"When we get to the villa, cover your eyes on your own."
He brushed my black hair as he spoke.
"Because you're going to see a lot of things you shouldn't see."
Yves' face was full of murder as he said this.
Not long after we got on the red carriage, we arrived at the Lunaasha guild leader's private villa.
The villa was located in a wide open field on a hill. The villa stood directly below a giant moon that looked like it filled up the entire sky. The moon looked a lot larger here than anywhere else. The moon felt oppressive instead of gentle.
There was a quick search before we were allowed in the villa, but because we were in a red carriage and we looked like innocent children, they let us go.
I later learned that children being sent in was a common occurrence, so there was no difficulties when we entered.
When I asked why so many children entered the villa, Yves responded with silence.
When we entered the villa, I saw a lot of rooms. I wondered why there were so many rooms and what they were being used for.
When I turned my head around to take a look, Yves told me that it would be better if I wasn't curious about it. I usually tried my best to take advice to heart, so I just nodded and started to focus on finding the document.
The villa was quiet, but when I closed my eyes to focus on the different sounds, I thought I could hear someone's pained screams and moans from somewhere inside. When I focused on the sound, I heard a small, mosquito-like voice here and there.
Yves seemed to hear it as well: with a scowl on his face, he tried as much as he could to avoid the hallway with the lined-up rooms.
When we entered right before, the guards had told us the leader's room was the biggest room on the third floor. It seemed we were heading there directly.
Yves and I walked up the stairs to the room on the third floor. The villa had a confusing layout that made it hard to find, but Yves knew the place well so it didn't matter.
Yves knocked on the door. But no sound came from inside of the room.
It didn't matter too much because our goal wasn't to meet the leader, but to collect the documents that he should have received earlier. All I had to do was use magic to search it out and collect it.
Yves didn't like that I came to the villa, but he had also wanted me to come. It was because of the search magic that I could do that could find an object just by knowing some of its characteristics.
When we didn't hear a response after waiting a bit longer, we decided to go into the room. When we went in, the first thing we saw was a small child. There was a musty sort of smell in the room. It turned out that it was the child.
Yves frowned and tried to cover my eyes, but I brushed his hand away.
(TW: Depictions of child abuse, child injury)
"Uuuu, heugh….. Euuugh….. I'm sorry….. I'm sorry….. I'll do better."
The blue-haired child's skin was tattered, as if they had been sliced through with a sharp object. In addition, multiple bones seemed to be broken, with their limbs twisted in wrong directions. Dark, dried blood covered the boy's body, and his hair was stuck to his forehead with dried blood.
In front of the young boy was a food tray, the kind that you used when you ate. Inside it was food with the boy's vomit.
"I won't do it. I won't. I'm sorry."
With empty eyes, the boy stared at the floor and continued to apologize, scratching the sofa with almost nonexistent nails. The sofa looked absolutely tattered from all of the scratches.
I couldn't think. The only thing I felt was absolute shock. Seeing a boy with such extensive injuries made my head hurt, like I was about to remember something but not.
Yves watched me and sighed, covering my face with his jacket. I could see that he felt a lot of guilt towards me.
Yves approached the child and brushed his hair back. The child shook at the unfamiliar move, then looked at Yves. The blue-haired child's silver eyes stared into Yves' silver eyes.
As if he had just come to his senses, his empty eyes gained a light back in it and stared right at Yves. As soon as he noticed him, the child ran towards Yves with his broken body. His broken legs limped, but the blue-haired boy grit his teeth and endured the pain.
Even though it was obvious that the boy had never seen Yves before, he held an incredibly murderous look in his eyes as he looked at him.
The boy began to strangle Yves. I had been completely still from my shock, then regained my thoughts as I saw this situation unfold before my eyes. Unbelievable situations continued piling on top of each other in front of me.
I tried to help Yves against the sudden attack, but as if he had expected it, Yves simply slapped the child's hand away and escaped his grasp.
I had no idea what was happening in front of me. The child had definitely seen Yves for the first time in his life today, why was he trying to kill him with such murderous intent?
Yves sat on top of the child and restrained them so they couldn't move. Then, he took out a healing potion and poured it onto the child's skin.
"What are you doing?!"
The child watched as his skin healed and yelled. As if the child had been screaming often, his voice was so hoarse and scratchy that it sounded like an old man's voice.
Yves looked at the boy and smiled.
"Where's the leader?"
"Hand that over right now!"
The child ran towards Yves and tried to take the potion in his hand, but Yves didn't give it over so easily. Yves wiped the smile off of his face and spoke again, voice cold.
"Where's father? I'll give it to you when you tell."
"Uuugh, you…"
"I also have poison. Don't you need it?"
"…..!"
As he said that, Yves put his hand in his pocket and took out a bottle of poison. Purple liquid sloshed inside a small bottle. To see that he was carrying around such a dangerous thing. My face stiffened.
"He went to the basement. He was holding a bundle of weird papers. Now hand those over!"
When the child tried to take both the potion and the poison, Yves let him go and handed him both.
The boy stared at the two different kinds of liquids with a joyful expression on his face.
(TW: Suicide, child death)
He looked back and forth at the healing potion and the poison before drinking the poison without hesitation. He immediately dropped to the floor. He had dropped dead in an instant.
A complicated emotion filled my chest. I almost forgot what I was doing here, but now wasn't the time for me to stay surprised. This place was more dangerous, dirtier, and scarier than I could have ever imagined.
I pushed down my emotions as much as I could.
I immediately used my search magic to look for the documents we needed. There were documents in the room, but it wasn't what we wanted. It was documents regarding the members of the guild. There were also documents about Shunivalen in there. Of course, most of the information in that particular document was forged by Yves.
I sighed, staring at the useless piles of documents in front of me. My head hurt, but even that was a familiar feeling that helped me focus on something other than the scenes that continued unfolding before me. I felt like I had seen something even more cruel before this.
"It doesn't look like it's in this room. They said that the leader went down to the basement with suspicious papers so let's go down there."
Yves stared at me, now completely calm, and followed me out with a surprised look on his face.
"Sorry. I didn't know he'd be in the leader's room like that. Just as I thought, I should've have brought you here."
Yves said to me as we walked down the stairs to the basement. I tried my best to stay rational and listened to what he had to say.
"It's okay. Let's get the information we need to expose him and get out. And can we free the other kids in here?"
Yves listened to me speak with a bitter smile on his face, muttering, "Even if you let them go, most of the kids here would choose to stay."
I was reminded of Yves' warning from earlier as I thought of what I had just seen. He had said that I'd see a lot of things that I shouldn't have to, and it was true. I didn't know it would be this bad.
The child from earlier seemed to be around my age. To see a child who looked like a middle schooler attack Yves with such empty eyes. The boy that had attacked Yves moved more like he had been programmed to do so. He didn't look like he was aware of his surroundings.
He looked like he had struggled for a long time. The child's skin had been peeling and there wasn't a single patch of skin without scars. There wasn't a single part of his body that didn't seem to be in pain. Moreover, the child had chosen to drink poison instead of the healing potion in front of him. What kind of crime had he committed to be punished to that extent?
TL;DR: Yves and Shushu, after rummaging through the carriage, do not find the documents to incriminate Yves' father (also the guild leader). Yves proceeds to murder everybody in the carriage (citing that they'd be better dead by his hands than tortured later on), and the two ride the carriage to the villa. (For those who are flying the Yves flag, he bribes Shushu with a magazine and gets her to sit on his lap throughout the carriage ride as he brushes her hair. He also covers her eyes with his hand to block her from seeing him murder the people in the carriage.)
Inside, they find a young child, approximately Shushu's real age, who has been severely abused who chooses to commit suicide and prompts Shushu to understand the cruel reality of the underworld. Yves struggles with the guilt of having brought Shushu into this whole mess. At the end of the chapter, Shushu and Yves learn that the leader is in the basement instead of his private room, and begin to walk down to meet the leader…