Chapter 35
Before long, the sixth and seventh executives of the mafia alliance had fallen.
By this point, Dominic too had realized one thing. (Belatedly, though.)
‘They’re all beasts, aren’t they?’
More precisely, they were beastmen.
Beastmen with an unusually high proportion of fur.
Humans, who had no fur to begin with, discriminated against beastmen, and
even among beastmen, there was discrimination based on the proportion of fur.
Apparently, they claimed they were closer to humans, or something.
Thanks to that, while beastmen were slaves subjected to discrimination, heavily furred beastmen were untouchable outcasts.
Such beastmen had become family bosses who secretly ran a city in this marquisate.
‘Should this be called success, or corruption?’
They had seized power, so one could call it success, but having abandoned all human decency, they had become closer to beasts.
Accordingly, Dominic classified them as officially certified beasts.
In any case, the family bosses were all beastmen.
One fact could be deduced from this.
‘Aha. The Godfather is a furry.’
No, he wasn’t.
In a world where loyalty was hard to come by, especially in the underworld, the Godfather had chosen the persecuted beastmen as his own hands and feet.
He had bound them with their fear that leaving the Godfather’s shadow would force them to return to the past, and with gratitude for having been saved by him from that past.
But Dominic’s thoughts never reached that realization—or rather, he didn’t let them.
After all, he had already cut down seven of them, and the time to take down his father was drawing near; knowing the truth would not change anything.
But Jane, having partly escaped the demon of revenge and begun to recover her reason, thought differently.
‘Something... familiar.’
The Godfather’s actions felt familiar to her.
His face and identity were both unknown.
But there was something familiar about his actions.
And when she saw the alliance executives refusing to betray the Godfather even at the moment of their deaths, she realized the source of her déjà vu.
‘Like me.’
She had been saved by a nameless swordsman whose face she did not know and was following his shadow, while the family bosses had found peace beneath the Godfather’s shadow.
Though their lives and aims differed, both were blindly loyal to a single person out of indebtedness.
That did not mean she felt compassion for the bosses she had killed so far.
They had killed the people precious to her.
If she had somehow managed to assassinate the Godfather, they too would have proclaimed a bloody fight to the death.
That was why she would continue her revenge as well.
Everyone who had followed in the nameless swordsman’s footsteps had lived out their allotted years and died, leaving only her, a member of a long-lived race, so she would simply see this duty through to the end.
And now, a sliver of possibility existed for her.
‘I’ve reached the Fourth Tier now, too.’
Through repeated trials and arduous marches, she had entered the Fourth Tier.
Following Dominic’s advice, she had honed her techniques and trained her body through pure enlightenment untainted by murderous intent.
In some ways, Dominic could be considered her fortuitous encounter.
However, she was not arrogant about her accomplishments.
‘I don’t think I can stand against the Godfather.’
She guessed the Godfather was Fifth Tier.
Since he controlled the marquisate from behind the scenes, it was a reasonable estimate.
And it would not be an exaggeration to say that the chances of her, merely at the beginning of the Fourth Tier, standing against the Godfather approached zero.
‘I may have to rely on the butler’s help for the final battle.’
She wanted to complete her revenge alone.
If a third party intervened and took her final revenge away from her, she felt she might go mad right in front of them.
That was why she had made handling it alone a condition of their contract at the beginning of the journey.
But Dominic had now become almost like family to her in spirit.
Sharing their pasts had been part of that.
As a result, their bond had grown deep enough that even completing her revenge together with Dominic would count as completing it.
‘Come to think of it, only two are left now.’
She had dealt with seven, and only one of the Godfather’s executives remained.
At this rate, all that remained was to deal with the other two, take down the Godfather, and liberate the marquisate.
She had also considered the possibility that the marquis might shelter the Godfather or step in personally, but she had already discussed that possibility with the narrow-eyed tax official.
- “If the marquis’s side makes a move like that, we’ll step in ourselves as well.”
The marquis was not one of her revenge targets, and the authorities had said they would counter them with public authority, so she could hardly have asked for a more reassuring backer.
Of course, despite saying this, neither she nor the narrow-eyed tax official considered that possibility very likely.
Since the marquis had shown no reaction even as Count Rex gradually devoured the cities, they assumed he was either incompetent or indifferent.
(For the record, Dominic knew nothing about the situation and merely nodded.)
Still, she was grateful for the words alone, and in her heart, she had come to trust the narrow-eyed tax official to some extent, though not as much as Dominic.
(For the record, Rex had never heard this either, but it fell within the undercover knight Duke’s discretion, so it was not an abuse of authority.)
Having finished her thoughts, she prepared for a showdown with the boss outside the eighth city.
‘Who will the eighth executive be?’
The executive’s title, tier, and fighting style were known.
Rending Tiger (裂虎), Camilla.
She was a villainess famous for her particularly cruel nature, even among the alliance’s executives.
True to the meaning of her title, she was a tiger beastwoman who tore people apart with a saw as large as a greatsword.
If someone begged for mercy, she sawed through their ankles; if they begged her to kill them, she sawed through their lower body; and if they lost a fight, she sawed through their waist.
The punishments in the city she ruled were likewise so cruel that it was practically an SM theme park, so the name Camilla was very well known.
Ironically, however, no one knew anything about her past because she always went around wearing a mask.
Jane was intensely curious about the face and past hidden beneath that mask as well.
But since the masked eighth executive’s past had no bearing on her revenge, it remained nothing more than simple curiosity.
No matter how tragic her circumstances might have been, the fact remained that she was a bitch who deserved to die.
“I’ll be counting on you again today.”
Outside the eighth city, she asked Dominic for his help.
The old butler drew two swords and charged openly toward the city gate as always.
By now, Jane also quietly cheered him on as she watched his back.
And as always, she prepared for battle with the eighth executive.
Completely unaware of what would happen in that city.
***
After forcing their way through the city gates and streets, the group reached the mansion where the boss was located.
While the narrow-eyed tax official cleared out the grunts with large-scale magic, Jane confirmed the plan with Dominic.
“I’ll handle her. The rest, in the meantime...”
“I’ll handle them.”
The old butler, Dominic, discarded his worn sword and drew a new one from a corpse.
There was hardly even anything to call a plan.
While Dominic handled the family boss’s close aides, she would handle the alliance executive—the boss.
Recently, there had been cases where another family boss joined in and created a double-boss system, but in those cases, Dominic handled the intruder.
Remembering that, she looked toward Dominic before entering the battle in earnest.
“Now, if another one just barges in...”
···you can deal with it too.
Even if Dominic took revenge on her behalf, she did not think she would feel particularly bad about it.
But she could not finish her sentence.
Boom!
The villainess Camilla smashed through the wall with a massive circular saw and launched a preemptive attack with the double-bladed saw in her other hand.
‘Oh. The boss is jumping out of the field. Is this a new gimmick?’
While Dominic was having that useless thought, Jane let out a groan and blocked the attack with her sword.
Graaak!
When the tiger villainess pulled back her saw, Jane’s blade was ground away amid a shower of sparks.
“Guh!”
Dominic stood there blankly and watched the fight.
His role was to prevent anyone from interfering in this duel, and based on that one exchange, he was certain Jane would win.
‘I don’t know who taught her, but she’s a real beast.’
To Dominic, Camilla was a beast in the truest sense.
Not a wild warrior, but a beast itself.
The feral warriors Dominic knew at least possessed a rational instinct for combat.
If you thrust here, you died; if you fled here, you died. A barbarian warrior swung their body or weapon according to that feral instinct.
Compared to them, Camilla was a beast.
She thrust when she shouldn’t, adding another stab wound.
She pulled back when she shouldn’t, adding another slash.
There was no meaning behind her actions; they were simply full of waste.
Unlike Jane, who was also Fourth Tier, Camilla’s Fourth Tier was little more than a symbol of raw strength.
She seemed to have diligently practiced with and taught herself how to use the saw, but to Dominic’s eyes, she was nothing more than a monkey running wild with a saw.
‘She must have advanced by only taking down people weaker than herself.’
If you overwhelmed people below your tier with sheer strength, you could muddle through somehow.
But in a battle against someone of the same tier, your shortcomings were exposed like this.
‘It looks like it’s about time to finish this.’
No sooner had Dominic made that prediction than Jane discarded her sword, gripped her dagger in reverse, and slashed upward from below.
It was the technique she had used to cut Dominic’s mask when they first met.
Unlike Dominic, who had delicately cut away only the mask, Jane’s attack left a clear slash across the skin beneath the tiger woman’s mask.
Seeing this, Jane once again realized just how extraordinary Dominic was.
‘No matter how I think about it, Dominic doesn’t seem like a Third Tier.’
Even though she now possessed greater strength and reflexes than Dominic, she still could not reproduce his technique.
That was why Jane believed Dominic was an old man who had once reached a realm far beyond her, but had for some reason abandoned all of that attainment and enlightenment and descended from it.
Jane pulled her thoughts back from their brief detour and examined Camilla’s face now that the mask had come off.
Then, upon seeing what was beneath it, Jane’s eyes grew as large as moons.
“K?”
“Long time no see, J.”
Camilla was one of Jane’s comrades who had once opposed the mafia boss.
*
A hundred years ago, when word spread that the nameless swordsman had died, those throughout the marquisate who owed him a debt of gratitude took up arms.
Most of them never stopped resisting until the moment of their deaths, but because of their limited lifespans and insufficient cultivation, only Jane remained.
Or so she had thought.
When a comrade she had believed dead appeared from beneath the mask.
“How did this happen···”
Though a long vertical slash had opened across her face, Jane was certain that the tiger beastwoman before her was Camilla.
But she was very different from the Camilla Jane knew.
That tiger beastwoman had always been an honorable warrior who hated hypocrites, and her weapons had been a greatsword and a spear.
She had been a bold, hearty woman, far removed from the sly cruelty of the current Camilla.
Jane could not even imagine that she had transformed like this.
“···What happened to you?”
“What do you mean, what happened?”
Camilla wore a combative smile and licked the blood running down her face.
There were many things Jane wanted to ask.
What had happened, why was she doing this, and so on.
Jane knew the exact sentence that encompassed all those emotions.
“Why did you change so much!?”
As if she had been waiting for that question, Camilla planted her two massive saws into the ground, stood at an angle, and answered.
“I haven’t changed.”
“What?”
“I’m only killing those who betrayed him, and those who oppose him.”
Camilla’s answer was more than enough to confuse Jane.
That person.
It was the name K had used for the nameless swordsman back then.
But those who had betrayed him?
Those who opposed him?
Jane’s mind was filled with confusion as she struggled to follow the context.
Noticing Jane’s state, Camilla looked at her with pity reserved for the ignorant and opened her mouth.
“I’ll tell you only because it’s you. The Godfather··· He’s the swordsman we pursued so relentlessly.”
Clang.
Jane’s sword rolled across the floor.
'Wow, this is so much fun.'
And Dominic watched the two of them with keen interest.