“Most things can be turned into a little bit of extra coins in hand.” - Old Mercenary saying.

“... We must admit that we are rendered speechless for a moment. Most impressive handiwork, Madam Edelstein,” commented the Crown Prince when he came to the encampment not half an hour after Gorev reported the situation to him, asking for the mercenaries to wait since he could not make a decision. Unlike his guard, the Crown Prince saw Elfriede’s handiwork with the captured assassin straight on and had not even blinked an eye.

“Thank you, Your Highness. I assure you it hurt him far more than it did me,” said Elfriede as she gave a polite bow to the Crown Prince. She was still clad in the same bloody clothes as before, though she took the opportunity to at least clean up her face and hands in the meantime. “In fact, it was a rather pleasant exercise to de-stress with, I would say.”

“May we ask for the… remains to be turned over to us? We have a feeling that just showing it off as an example of what awaited them might get a couple of the others to talk on the spot,” asked the Crown Prince more timidly than usual. Despite the composure he presented, he too was clearly rather distraught by what Elfriede had done to the captured assassin. “Not for free, of course. Some of the… topics this man mentioned prior to his demise hold great interest to us, so we would like to see it confirmed or otherwise, if possible.”

“Not my call to make, Your Highness. Rein?”

“I think you can have the body as a bonus as thanks for your generous employment, Your Highness,” said Reinhardt as if he already had an answer prepared. The Crown Prince had provided the company with a sizable bonus to thank Elfriede for literally taking a bolt meant for him, on top of the agreed-upon pay. Reinhardt knew better than to try to milk the well-paying customers and to return them some gratitude instead when he could. “Would you like it packaged neatly? Would be less messy to transport it that way, and you can also spring it as a surprise for your unaware captives.”

“Please do, Captain, and thank you for the generosity,” replied the Crown Prince with a slight smile as he shook Reinhardt’s hand with his own. Seeing that the business was concluded, Elfriede waved a goodbye at them as she left to get herself a proper wash, as her clothes were still soaked with her victim’s blood. The Crown Prince sighed and shook his head as he watched her walk away. “Graf Harscape had warned me on what to expect, but that just now… was beyond my expectations, to say the least.”

“Friede is a nice woman once you get to know her, just don’t get on her bad side, at all costs,” replied Reinhardt with a smirk, purposely not mentioning the Crown Prince’s slip of the tongue. The dwarf must have been quite shaken to accidentally omit the royal “we” he usually termed himself with. Then again, those who saw Elfriede’s “handiwork” tend to have that sort of feeling. “We’ll have it packed in a few minutes for you to take away. Loren? You heard it, get that carcass nice and cleanly packed.”

“Understood, Captain,” replied Loren as he gave a salute and left to find a couple others to help him with the corpse’s packing.

Reinhardt himself looked at the dead assassin’s corpse and remained unperturbed. Probably it was his familiarity with dead bodies on the battlefield that the sight of a corpse that had effectively been flayed alive, all the nerve endings exposed and purposely stimulated with salt and acid, didn’t even make him blink. Then again, he’d seen his wife do worse, but she had no compunction to not touch the face that time.

Sometimes the deft and practiced way she skinned a person’s face off in the most painful way possible gave even him the shivers. Thankfully the Crown Prince had asked for the assassin’s head intact and thus she had adhered to that, leaving the dead man’s head unblemished, if forever locked in a rictus of extreme agony and pain beyond words.

Given how simple the dwarven idea of torture tend to be, he had little doubt that at least a couple of the weaker-willed assassins would squeal for all they’re worth when they saw their comrade’s fate.

As for whether the information that came out of their mouth would be of any worth or were merely fake information planted to create discord, that would be up to the Crown Prince and his staff to decide and cross check on. Information gained off torture were notoriously unreliable as people often just said what they thought their torturer wanted to hear to be let off.

When the torturer in question only wanted to inflict them with the most amount of pain and suffering possible, that rather changed the equation, though.

Still, the Crown Prince’s men will have a lot of things to verify and cross-check with other sources they had in the near future regardless. Reinhardt only took a rough glimpse at the report Loren gave him – mostly confessions about the people involved in the attempt – and shelved it in the back of his mind. Politics of this sort weren’t something he was keen to get involved in.

Honestly, it was relatively irrelevant whether the Crown Prince’s uncle was truly the one who hired the assassins or not anyway. Reinhardt knew that the Crown Prince was wily and ruthless enough to make sure to pin the blame on his uncle – his only real opposition at court – either way, regardless of the other man’s guilt or innocence.

If his uncle was truly the one responsible for the assassins, it just meant more things the Crown Prince could use to topple his uncle’s influence and faction, which Reinhardt thought was an inevitable result either way given the Crown Prince’s stronger backing, which included the current king.