Chapter 214: Interrogation |
After Fran finished dealing with that mercenary squad, she made sure that no one present was still capable of standing.
She used her longsword to stab every corpse lying on the ground, regardless of whether the bodies still twitched in resistance.
“Please... can’t you spare my life...?” one of the beastmen begged Fran as he lay in a pool of blood.
From the wounds covering his body, it was obvious that he was already gravely injured. There was not a single patch of uninjured flesh left on him.
Even if Fran had not finished him off, he might well have bled to death anyway.
Fran could tell that his desire to live was strong. He clearly did not want to die.
But Fran did not care in the slightest whether this beastman wanted to live or die. He had provoked her, and she could not be bothered to sort out who deserved to live and who deserved to die.
For her, the most efficient way to deal with this sudden incident was to make absolutely sure that the entire squad was dead.
She did not even walk over. Instead, she directly cast a spell from a distance: 【Great Fireball】.
At first, she had assumed it would be the 【Fireburst】 she had seen before, but to her surprise, the spell that appeared on her panel was this one instead.
As for the spell’s actual effect, Great Fireball was not quite the same as Fireburst.
Fireburst focused on the explosive nature of fire elements in order to inflict greater damage.
The Great Fireball, however, was different. Though it was also a First-Tier Spell, its emphasis lay in that one word: “Great.”
The greatest difference between the Great Fireball Fran had obtained and an ordinary Fireball was simply that it allowed her to form a much larger fireball.
Of course, a larger fireball naturally meant greater damage, but that still made it sound as though it was not even on the same level as Fireburst.
That said, Great Fireball had its own advantage. Once the fireball became large enough, it could strike enemies across a wider area, rather than targeting only a single opponent like Fireburst.
It could only be said that each spell had its own strengths.
There was one more thing about Great Fireball in Fran’s hands that pleased her immensely: every fire element she summoned could carry the effect of Dragon Flame.
Under the beastman’s despairing gaze, a mass of flame exploded over his body, staining everything around him red before, a few seconds later, turning it all charred black.
Fran also took the opportunity to clean up the surrounding corpses. Leaving them there would only create trouble.
And she had absolutely no intention of looting these mercenaries.
As far as she knew, by now, she had already grown somewhat dismissive of what mercenaries like them carried.
Even if she did loot them, she would probably gain only two or three extra gold coins. To her, that was hardly worth bothering with.
If she truly lacked money, then she could simply start a business making spell rings within the Northern Society.
Crafting spell rings would be far more profitable than wiping out a few mercenary squads outside.
Following the trail of the battlefield, she hurled fireballs onto every piece of gear those mercenaries had left behind.
Then a figure still twitching caught her attention and genuinely surprised her.
She saw a charred humanoid shape writhing on the ground, as though begging for someone to save it.
She recognized that figure. It was the beastman who had been the most arrogant at the beginning.
She had thought that, under the Dragon Flame-enhanced Flame Trap, he should have died beyond all doubt. Yet to her surprise, he was still alive.
That left her somewhat astonished.
Even a Half-Dragon who had drunk a Dragonization Potion, with dragon scales that gave special resistance against Dragon Flame, still had a considerable chance of being burned to death if directly struck by it.
And yet this man had actually endured a blast of Dragon Flame with nothing but flesh and blood, and still had not died.
Ordinarily, she should have followed up with a Fireball and eliminated any future trouble.
But before that, she decided to do something else first.
---
The basin of cold water that awakened Jeremy froze into ice shards the instant it touched his face, thanks to the freezing weather, and those icy fragments struck his skin.
He felt the icy water touch his face, and the scorched places on his body felt the sting of cold.
“Ss—!” At the same time, that freezing water seeped into his wounds, making the pain almost unbearable.
“What happened?” he gritted out through clenched teeth, hoping one of his companions would answer him.
But the moment he opened his eyes, his heart turned half-cold.
Standing beside him was a small figure in a robe, and he had seen that face very clearly just moments ago.
“It’s you!!” Jeremy’s charred face was full of shock. He had never imagined that this shorty was still alive, that she had not been eaten by his companions.
But immediately after that, a chill rose in his heart.
If the person before him had not been eaten by them, then why had his companions not done so?
Were they waiting for him to wake up so they could all eat her together? No, that was impossible. He knew perfectly well that his companions were all greedy bastards.
And even now, he still had not seen a single trace of his companions anywhere.
The only thing he saw was Fran standing before him.
A terrible premonition welled up in his heart.
At the same time, he could also feel the state his body was in.
It could not have been worse.
He was weak all over. From his thighs downward, he could hardly feel anything at all. Even moving his arms required an enormous amount of strength.
Meanwhile, several places in his body throbbed with pain, reminding him that he was severely wounded.
When Fran saw that Jeremy had awakened, she did not waste words with him. She directly gripped her purple dagger and drove it straight into his chest.
“Ahhh—!” Jeremy immediately let out a shrill scream. He could not understand why it hurt so much. In the past, even when a sword had been driven directly into his chest, it had never hurt like this.
This was the effect of Fran’s studies in Modification.
Within Modification, there were ways to numb the subject of a procedure so that the operation could proceed smoothly.
Naturally, there were also ways to heighten the subject’s senses so that they could adapt more quickly to a new organ.
At the same time, this was also a method of interrogating a target. It allowed the victim, under excruciating agony, to do nothing but reveal the information the interrogator wanted.
“What is your purpose in coming to the Northern Frontier? Why were you tracking those six people?”
Fran had no interest in stabbing him a few more times and then asking whether he was willing to talk. She simply asked her questions directly.
As a First-Tier Professional, Jeremy himself possessed a certain degree of mental resistance.
But the intense pain surging through his brain made thinking impossible.
Under that unbearable agony, he had no room left to consider whether he should hand information over to the enemy who had slaughtered his entire squad.
All he wanted now was for the pain to stop.
“We were hired by the City Lord of White Dragon Harbor... He hired many mercenary squads... He promised that whichever squad found that thing would receive at least ten thousand gold coins...”
“All I know is that thing was stolen by a group of thieves...”
Under the torment, after Jeremy spat out that intelligence, he also blurted out the location of the treasure he had hidden, along with a number of things he had done to betray his companions...