Beast Slayer Online: Initialization
Copyright© 2026 by CaffeinatedTales
Chapter 47
For the first five minutes of the interrogation, Lannor did not ask a single question.
He simply worked.
With the outer edge of his glove, with those three-sided studs, he pressed deep into Villis’ skin, then dragged, slowly, slowly.
It was nothing like the sudden, explosive punch from before. This time, as steel and brute force peeled skin away by degrees, Villis could feel every shred of it with perfect clarity.
And for a man who had only just lost all sensation in his lower body, whose sense of safety had collapsed in an instant, that kind of slow pain was enough to drive him mad.
“Ahhh! Ahhh!”
The screams sounded as though they might tear his own throat apart.
“Ask! Just ask! Ask anything and I’ll tell you, I’ll tell you everything, just kill me after, please, ask me now! Ask me now!”
Villis clawed wildly at Lannor’s steel bracer. His nails bent back and split, leaving bloody streaks across the metal.
But whether one considered the quality of a high-grade School of the Bear harness, or Lannor’s sheer arm strength, Villis’ struggle meant nothing.
Lannor ignored the shouting and kept working, right up until the five-minute alarm Mentos had set rang out.
By then, Villis was terrified.
Reason told him his information was valuable. Otherwise there would have been no point in torture.
But Lannor’s manner, the way he did not care whether Villis could bear it and simply started with five full minutes, gave off the chilling sense that he did not care in the least whether Villis lived or died. That crushed reason beneath raw fear.
Villis knew he was going to die. He had known it the moment his spine broke. But he had no wish to taste more pain before death. None at all.
Lannor, his face flecked with blood, looked at the man under torment with complete calm. Yet beneath that calm, Villis felt cold spread through his whole body.
“First question. Were you here for me?”
The Witcher eased the pressure of the fist pinning Villis down, just a little.
“No! No! I didn’t fucking know who you were! We just thought we’d seen two unlucky bastards alone on the road, and then we wanted to...”
A coincidence?
So vengeance was no longer likely.
But at the same time, that made another possibility real.
The words came out mixed with the man’s howling, as if speaking itself were a way to vent pain.
“Ah. I understand. Life is hard for man-eaters, it makes sense you’d want to lay up some provisions, doesn’t it?”
Lannor seemed not to care in the least for the words Villis found too shameful to finish.
“Second question. Was it your lot who’ve been abducting children across Velen as well?”
“Yes, yes, us. Children ... children taste better, but we need money too. After we came to Velen, someone offered a good price for children.”
Lannor looked at Villis and nodded, expression untroubled.
Even man-eaters could not truly live outside society.
Salt, iron, cloth, timber, livestock, even cannibals could not do without such things.
And if they meant to provide all of it for themselves, the labor required would be enough to form a small society of its own.
But the moment one participated in trade, the moment one had coin, all of it became easy enough to acquire.
Which meant that, as of now, the two vilest major cases in Velen, the cannibal cult and the large-scale disappearance of children, could be treated as the work of one and the same gang.
Yet there was no satisfaction on Lannor’s face, no pleasure at solving a case.
He was not a detective, and had no taste for investigations.
For him, the merging of the two cases only hardened a resolve that had already been written in blood.
Whatever other filth these men had done, the moment they shot Bernie and took White, blood became the price Lannor would exact from them.
“The motive’s clear enough. Now let’s speak of what actually matters. Just one question...”
The five fingers of the studded glove spread, then came down over Villis’ crown.
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