She had fully expected to need to encourage him at least a little bit, but much to her self-satisfaction and amusement, it was like he just snapped under the pressure of her presence.

“So be it, I... I will be better off a- a prisoner of Snow De- Ikesians, than a disgrag- disgrace to my own,” he said in that awkward Pateirian accent, voice trembling as he audibly struggled to maintain a clear diction. “I can uh… Yes, I can tell you the place we used to stage this-this would-be assassinini- assassi- assnanininni- assassinaation, as we-eell as the supposed locations of lord-d Mu and lady Zemin. Th-though I do no-ot think you wish to know where they ARE, but where they WILL BE. To spring an ambush, you see.”

Disgusting. Somehow, an upright man trying to be sleazy was even more bile-raising than an actual sleazebag. Zel squeezed him for the basic information, dangling him half a meter above the ground the entire time. The guy just hung in her grip like a cat that got caught in the rain, stuttering out answers.

The staging ground turned out, unsurprisingly, to just be some abandoned building on the outskirts of the city, which could be reached by going through a clearly-marked path in a section of the old tunnel networks, accessed from this very section of back alleys.

Zheng Zemin and Luo Mu were, supposedly, in an underground safehouse connected to the “Deep Tunnels”, and the man seemed utterly convinced that it would be pointless and risky to try rooting them out as compared to just catching them as they tried to leave the city through their usual path.

So strange. She felt no duplicity, no attempts to lie or even say half-truths. It really was like this little man’s loyalty to the divine empire had just utterly snapped. Zel bound him and brought him back through the tunnel, certain that he voided his stomach at least twice over the short walk.

She led him through that tunnel on a leash, one attached to a knot that bound his arms behind his back and fixed them to his torso with a hellishly tight belt of rope. Not a bit of surprise came upon Shang when he saw that the tunnel was full of corpses, but then he saw the reflections and counted the corpses.

There weren’t even half as many recognizable corpses as the number of his men. For every intact dead body, there was a pile of depersoned body parts and gore. And the tunnel, oh the tunnel, it was slick.

Floor, walls, ceiling, an entire section of the tunnel was painted red. The rancidness of disembowelment already wafted towards them. Disgusting though it was, Shang was used to this. He had encountered worse-smelling things, even eaten worse-smelling things.

But he had never seen such brutality.

It didn’t look like a battle had played out, or even a slaughter.

It was more like an unfettered force of nature had swept through the tunnel.

Severed and stomped-open heads littered the floor alongside severed limbs bent in unnatural ways, intestines and stomachs and brains and livers were splattered wherever one looked, and the holes… Oh the holes.

Perfect semi-circular craters all over, as if someone had just gone at his men with a legendarily-sharp ice cream scoop. Cylindrical channels gaping in what few heads were still intact. Knowing that he had willingly surrendered to the perpetrator of this violence was enough to make him add the contents of his stomach to the mess.

Shang told himself that it was because the belt of rope was so tight, even if he himself didn’t believe it.

They emerged surrounded by armed people, among which were Estoras, the Mercenary, and Zefaris. It took some explaining to say that she had captured the presumable commander of this ill-conceived assassination attempt, and that he seemed fully prepared to forsake his loyalties to the Empire for some strange reason.

Zefaris interrupted the conversation with a simple statement, a concern-filled accusation of carelessness: “You’re covered in blood.”

“Most of it isn’t mine,” excused Zel.

“I can see the bullet holes!” the markswoman burst in exasperation.

“...Ah, right. That.”

Zelsys let go of her captive, took a deep breath, and gritting her teeth, flexed. Tendrils of blood ejected six small-calibre bullets and three musket balls from already-sealed bullet holes on her arms and legs to a cacophonous clattering noise. She rolled her shoulders and with a smile said, “There. All better.”

Raising his eyebrows, one of the Grekurian guards questioned, “Don’t Ikesian muskets have a hot enough load to shoot clean through a man and wound a second?”

“Shooting meat is one thing. Shooting braided steel is another,” Zel boasted, even as waves of wrenching pain pulsed from every newly-reopened bullet wound.

Minutes later, the town hall was confirmed as secured with minor injuries but no fatalities among the few staff members who had been present for the assault. Estoras led a small group of trusted individuals to his office alongside the two captives, as the young boy turned out to have been searched and then simply sat down under guard in one of the town hall’s break rooms.

Both the top and bottom floor had far less gore than Zelsys had remembered, and almost no actual corpses. They were, instead, filled with little piles of extremely fine ash. As they made their way through, a small group of workers were already busy cleaning what stains still remained, two of them drinking from bottles of Riverside Remedies Liquid Vigor as they invoked techniques that, somehow, made the bloodstains pale and vanish. Estoras admitted that he considered his office to be perhaps the safest room in all of Willowdale, and that it would’ve taken multiple shots from a cannon twice the size of the one found in the tunnel to break down the door. The entire time a sizable crowd remained in front of the building, at the behest of the governor himself, as he promised: “I will personally see to it that you are provided with the information which you demand.”