Netori: Stealing The Hero's Party!

Chapter 773: Before Chaos Falls

Before chaos shattered the mansion of the giants, Raven stood before Frazer’s group. Just behind him were Linkle, Helga, and Maria, each of them waiting for the questioning to begin and then conclude. But the companions of the false hero dared not speak a word. Even Josare, who’d been later thrown in the prison for her own involvement up to the point of betraying Frazer’s group, was sharing the same cell with them.

As for Frazer himself, he sat in a corner with his hands–his only weapons–chained to the walls. The sight was quite concerning and not simply because of their unusual silence. For none of them were secured with magic or some other mana-dampening apparatus; instead, it was only their bonds that were keeping them in the cell.

"Can’t they just break out from here?" Raven asked.

Taking a step forward, Linkle folded her hands and responded.

"I thought so at first, but apparently not. None of them want to escape since..." Taking a deep breath, Linkle turned her head towards Raven. "Their clans for which they were fighting are most likely dead now, and assuming they have nowhere else to go, this cell is as good of a place as any to spend the rest of their short days."

"I wouldn’t be so sure about that." Walking up beside Linkle, Maria grabbed one of the cell bars. "The giants are still saying that these guys saved the kingdom and not us, so it’s possible that they would be kept alive for much longer than at least I would prefer."

"We’ll see about that." Helga spoke up as well; however, unlike the others, she moved towards the cell’s door and shattered the lock with her grip. Lifting her head to look at the prisoners while everyone stared at her in confusion, the valkyrie opened the door and stepped right in. "I would rather have assurance that these morons wouldn’t try anything than trust blindly that they wouldn’t."

Moving closer to the enemy leader, Helga gently tapped him on his side with her foot to make him look up. But when there was no response from Frazer, she shook her head, and suddenly a coat much like Raven’s appeared on her shoulders. With her back facing the others, she leaned forward and grabbed the man by his skull. Her hand covered his mouth as she picked him up, and as he struggled against the crushing force of her fingers, Frazer finally looked up and met Helga’s gaze.

"Get over it, you fucking moron..." To the surprise of everyone, her voice felt much, much heavier than before. "Get used to it if you’re gonna be such a wimp."

Pushing his face against the wall, she jolted the other prisoners to their feet as well. Scared by the mere sight of their leader being shoved against the wall, they stood up quickly and pressed their backs against the bars that opposed Helga. While doing so, Muena caught just a flicker of the valkyrie’s face. The veins around her eyes were throbbing with grand vigor, and those once normal eyes had turned a glowing golden, the light of which was illuminating Frazer’s face.

"I’m gonna ask once and once only." Squeezing Frazer’s face more and more, Helga made his bones audibly crack. And while he still screamed in agony, the valkyrie asked her a question. "Tell me everything that happened and whether we should expect another stab in the back from you or your girls!"

Although he struggled quite a bit, as his spirit was broken further, Frazer eventually gave in. He told Helga and the others about how the devil woman had chained and violated him. At first nobody thought much of it, but as the morbid details were revealed about how she made him witness the rapes of other victims through her memories as if he were the one committing such crimes, everyone began to sympathize with his silence. Especially since plenty of those cases involved gore and the worst of the worst.

After all that, she forced her way with Frazer. His mind broken, he couldn’t resist against her, almost like a sex slave whose only job was to lie down while its master fucks it in whatever perverse way they prefer. His testimony was followed by a long silence, and in that time, Helga put her coat away and stepped back. The rest of their stories had to be matched individually, and so with a suggestion to Raven, she had the monster girls be trapped in the bracelet and only be let out one by one for questioning.

Each of them told stories similar to one another. Muena was the only exception, as she was the person behind this chaos. Her deal with the demon general had been for her own survival, while the deal the other girls had made with the dryad was about the survival of their whole clan. Brainwashing Frazer and using his powers to force the monster clans to do her bidding, which in turn helped the demon general expand into their territory, was Muena’s contribution to the ordeal.

"And then he broke the terms of the deal. What a surprise~" Maria mocked the dryad; however, at this point the dryad’s mind had numbed so much that she no longer cared if she died or lived.

"He would’ve killed me if I didn’t agree. What choice did I have?" Muena whispered, not to gain sympathy but to lay out how she felt now that things were much clearer to her.

"Whatever you say." Turning her attention to Raven instead, Maria shrugged her shoulders while forcing Muena back into the monster-holding bracelet. "What should we do about them now? The demon general’s servants and these monster girls are all inside the bracelet, and if you ask me, we should keep them imprisoned there indefinitely."

"If it weren’t for the giants painting them as the saviors of this kingdom, I may have agreed but–" Before Raven could finish his thoughts, a sudden crashing sound above them cut him off. Looking up quickly, he could see debris falling over them for just over a few seconds. "What was that?"

Though he had no clue then, once he learns of the giant’s tragedy, his plans with the prisoners will soon change.