Beast Slayer Online: Initialization
Copyright© 2026 by CaffeinatedTales
Chapter 47: Something Moved Under Ice
For the first five minutes of the interrogation, Lannor did not ask a single question.
He only worked.
The triangular studs along the outside of his glove pressed deep into Villis’s skin, then dragged, slowly, slowly.
The earlier punch had been sudden and brutal. This was different. The pain of flesh being peeled away bit by bit under steel and raw strength was something Villis could feel completely.
And for a man who had just lost all sensation below the waist, whose sense of safety had collapsed into nothing, that slow agony was enough to drive him mad.
“AAAAH! AAAAH!”
The screams sounded ready to rip his throat apart.
“Ask! Just ask already! I’ll tell you anything, anything you want! Just kill me afterward! Ask me! ASK!”
Villis clawed frantically at Lannor’s steel bracer. Fingernails tore backward from the nail beds, leaving bloody streaks across the metal.
It accomplished nothing.
Against the craftsmanship of a master-grade School of the Bear cuirass, and against Lannor’s own monstrous strength, Villis’s struggle barely existed.
Lannor ignored every scream. He kept working until the five-minute alarm Mentos had set rang softly in his mind.
Only then did he stop.
By now, Villis was terrified.
Logically, he knew his information mattered. Otherwise there would have been no torture.
But Lannor’s method, the sheer indifference of it, the way he had simply started carving for five uninterrupted minutes without caring whether the prisoner could endure it, shattered logic beneath raw fear.
Villis had known he was going to die from the moment his spine snapped.
But he did not want more pain before death.
Not even a little.
Blood speckled Lannor’s face. He looked at the prisoner calmly.
That calmness chilled Villis worse than the torture itself.
“First question,” said the witcher, loosening the fist pinning him down slightly. “Were you after me specifically?”
“No! No! I didn’t even know who the fuck you were! We just saw two unlucky bastards traveling alone and thought...”
A coincidence.
So revenge was unlikely after all.
Which meant another possibility had just become real.
The words burst out alongside Villis’s sobbing gasps.
“Ah. I understand. Cannibals have it rough. Makes sense you’d want to stockpile food, right?”
Lannor sounded utterly unconcerned by the part Villis himself could barely say aloud.
“Second question. The child kidnappings across Velen, that’s your people too?”
“Yes! Yes, us! Children ... children taste better, but we also need coin! After we came to Velen, someone started offering good money for children!”
Lannor watched him and nodded without expression.
Even cannibals could not live entirely outside society.
Salt. Iron. Cloth. Lumber. Livestock.
Cannibals needed all of it.
To produce everything themselves would require enough manpower to become a small nation.
But once you participated in trade, once you had money, those supplies became easy.
Which meant the two worst ongoing crimes in Velen, the cannibal cult and the mass disappearance of children, were now almost certainly the same organization.
Yet no satisfaction touched Lannor’s face.
He was no detective. Solving cases did not excite him.
To him, the merging of those crimes only hardened a resolve that had already been written in blood.
Whatever else those bastards had done, the moment they shot Bernie and took White, their lives became payment owed.
“The motives are clear enough,” he said quietly. “Now for the important part. Just one question.”
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