A Secretly Capable Child Is Seeking For Her Dad (Novel) - Chapter 94
Chapter 94
===================
Translated by Sylph
Read it only at Novelbyu.com & Utoon.net
===================
[This morning, this week’s levy will come to a close! If you exceed the deadline, 1.3 times will be added to next week’s levy amount, and severe punishment will be imposed, so keep it in mind! That is all!]
It was, quite literally, the sound of a loudspeaker loud enough to tear one’s ears.
Tie was so startled that she unsteadily rose from her place.
Then his gaze met Veil and Basto, who had likewise gotten up.
“What was that just now?”
At Veil’s thick voice, Tie shook her head as if he did not know either.
Basto, still not fully awake, also looked around with a bewildered face.
It was then.
“Tie. Look over there.”
Lucarion, who had been standing by the window since who knew when, said.
Tie hurriedly approached Lucarion’s side.
Soon the child’s eyes widened as she looked outside.
“Big brother Veil, what’s that?”
However, Veil too, standing beside Tie and looking down at the plaza with a confused expression, was much the same.
In the plaza, which had been empty until yesterday, dozens of large chests had somehow been set in a circle along the edge.
And people, despite the early morning, were busily coming and going around them.
Among them, Veil spotted the people they had met yesterday at the pub and the innkeeper, and narrowed his brows.
“Why are those people over there….”
“Big brother, huh? What’s that black thing?”
Tie pestered Veil again, pointing somewhere.
Following the child’s hand, they saw a large-built man grunting as she loaded something onto a big cart.
The man was neatly placing the things he had brought on the cart into a chest.
Veil’s expression darkened.
“…It’s coal.”
“Coaal?”
“Yeah. If you burn that, there are a lot of things you can do.”
Tie tilted her head.
It already looked like it had been burned by fire, but they were going to burn that again?
It was then.
“Catch him!”
Suddenly, a rough voice rang out from the opposite side of the plaza.
When they turned their heads, they saw a child hurriedly running from one side of the plaza to the other.
Tie’s eyes widened.
“It’s that kid from yesterday!”
That brat who had tried to pickpocket Veil’s necklace the previous night.
However, the fleeing child soon tripped over a stone in the plaza and fell.
The knights who came running did not miss the chance and snatched the child’s clothes.
“How dare you lay a hand on tribute goods meant to be presented to the lord!”
“L, let go of me! Let go!!”
The knights’ hands handling the child were brutally rough.
At the sight of them dragging the child off somewhere, Basto covered Tie’s eyes.
Perhaps frightened, Tie buried her face deep into Basto’s hand.
Meanwhile, Veil continued to observe the situation in the plaza with his complexion stiffened.
Even though a child had been taken away, the people in the plaza did not move.
They only gazed blankly with dark expressions at the alley where the child had disappeared, then went back to their own business.
While looking over them, Veil’s eyes soon halted on one particular point.
Now that he looked, on top of each chest was a black brand, as if it had been burned on with a heated iron.
“Pluvius, Adren, Quill….”
They were unmistakably surnames.
After thinking for a moment, Veil muttered,
“…This village. They’re collecting coal as tribute.”
“Catch him! Catch him-!”
But then, once again, a loud voice came from a corner of the plaza.
The commotion was coming from the place where the knights had dragged off the pickpocket brat.
When they shifted their gaze, the pickpocket brat was crossing the plaza again, somehow having escaped.
One cheek now bore a wound that looked rather deep.
Veil swallowed hard without realizing it.
Tie and the other members too watched that scene with sweaty hands.
“What are you doing! Why aren’t you catching him already!”
The knights holding swords again yelled at the residents standing in the plaza.
However, the residents avoided the knights’ eyes and stood in place, while the brat deftly slipped through the gaps and hid behind the chests.
And then, while the knights approached and looked the other way,
“…Gasp, he went into the puuub!”
he quietly disappeared into the pub run by Adeline.
“Find the brat!”
“Yes, sir!”
The knights began tearing through the plaza.
“You damned brat! Come out at once!”
It was when the knights’ shouting outside the window was the only sound.
“Did you all see it too?”
The door burst open, and Nordix, Enzo, and Raul came in.
Nordix was holding several dried herb roots and bandages in his hand.
“I wanted to pretend I hadn’t seen it, but that child. The bleeding looked rather severe.”
He continued with a considerably tense expression.
“A small tavern in the village would not have a proper hemostatic, would it.”
* * *
Tie clung to Basto’s back and quietly held his breath.
When he raised his gaze, he saw Lucarion guiding the way ahead of everyone.
“This way.”
Lucarion had been quickly crossing between the narrow alleys since a little while ago.
That was because he knew the back way leading to Adeline’s pub.
Veil, breathing hard, asked,
“Hey, Kkamang. When did you even check out the roads?”
“Yesterday. You all were sleeping.”
“You don’t sleep?”
“Not particularly.”
Lucarion lightly omitted what came next.
It roughly amounted to saying that the village atmosphere had seemed dangerous, so he had stood guard.
It was while Tie was sending Kkamang fervent eyes of admiration at that cynical figure.
“Here. This door.”
At last, Agabert’s party reached their destination.
Adeline’s pub, which they had visited yesterday.
Only, it was the back door, which could be entered only through the narrow alley.
“What in the world is all this, in a place we came to rest….”
When Veil opened the door first, the dark interior of the pub spread out before them.
The glittering lights they had seen the previous night were gone, and all the chairs were up on the tables.
At a glance there seemed to be no one there, but Veil said calmly,
“Come out. I know you’re there.”
Then, from beyond the bar, there came the sound of a small intake of breath.
And before long,
“…What brings you here? Business hours are over.”
Adeline, in comfortable clothing, revealed herself from beyond the bar.
Upon seeing Adeline, Tie got down from Basto’s back and hurried over there.
And he held out Nordix’s herbs, bandages, and disinfectant with a tearful face.
“Big sister! Tie saw it at the iiinn.”
“Saw what?”
“A friend with blood coming from his face running to the puuub!”
Adeline’s Adam’s apple moved slowly.
She looked back and forth between the Agabert members and Tie with troubled eyes.
Veil, who had been silent, opened his mouth again.
“We have no intention of harming your people. And we have no intention of telling the men outside that the pickpocket brat hid here either.”
“….”
“So come out, will you? I clearly said I know you’re there.”
Basto narrowed his brows.
Then he looked at Veil as if asking what he was talking about.
But the moment he laid a hand on Veil’s shoulder.
With a strange creaking sound, the cupboard occupying the left wall began rotating as a whole.
And then the hidden space behind it appeared.
Inside were around fifteen villagers, staring with startled eyes.
* * *
“Old granny Mikhail, are you insane?! What do you mean by opening the hideout door from there!”
“What did I do.”
“If they go and report us to the lord! Don’t you know both Adeline and all of us are finished then?!”
Tie watched the people spitting as they argued, a little cowed.
Angry men.
Women sighing while each held her young child wrapped in her skirt.
Even the inn grandmother, who had stood blankly and said nothing from just a moment ago.
“Say something, will you!”
“I told you. That they know we’re here.”
“Wh, wh, what?”
“I only opened the door because they said they knew, so shut up.”
The man, his eyes wide, furrowed his brows.
But then Adeline stepped in.
“Mister, calm down. Elder Mikhail is right. They already knew. That there was a hideout beyond the cupboard.”
Only then did the villagers look at the Agabert members.
Veil, with an indifferent face, adjusted Tie in his arms.
“Yeah. But putting that aside.”
Then he brought out the question he had wanted to ask for some time.
“What in the world is everyone doing here?”