A Serpent's Tale
Chapter 337: Another Sin Upon Them

Chapter 337: Another Sin Upon Them

The leader turned to me, the scary face she put on towards the aristocrats having vanished instantly for a much softer and kinder expression and tone when addressing me as she bowed once again.

"Of course. We’ll get right on it." She then turned to address the rest of the acolytes and gave them their orders, "Zaryssa and Kreyzia, you two go and fetch the Vial, since they won’t be needing it anymore."

Two of them nodded and left he chamber to go fetch this vial, but what’s so important about it? And if it’s so important, then why is it in a place like this? Actually, I still don’t know where here even is.

"Wait a second, what happened to their masks?" The leader suddenly blurted out with a mild hint of distress in her voice. Should probably learn her name if I’m going to be talking with her a lot.

"I took them." There was immediate relief visible on her face upon hearing that.

"If they’re with you, then that’s fine. I can rest easy knowing that they’re in your care."

I thought now was likely a good a time as any, so I started my line of questions, "Actually, there are a few things I need to ask you first. The first one being your name."

The woman’s pupils shrank and her body went into a still shock. I squinted at her as if to ask, ’What the fuck are doing?’

She trembled and started crying, which I thought was weird.

"I-I’m sorry... I-I just didn’t think that y-you’d want to learn my na-ame..."

... Seriously?

She’s crying over that? She’s ACTUALLY crying over that? I’m... Just going to try and get past this quickly.

"Well, yeah, I need to know your name so that I can properly address you." I stated with a hint of obviousness.

"O-Oh... Right..." She immediately stopped crying, or at least tried to, and did her best whilst blushing to put on her professional persona once again and answered, "My name is Shayllaa, Fangbearer of Kinlo city."

"K-Kinlo?" I was not expecting to hear that I was in that city of all places.

"Yes? Wh- Oh, right. I forgot they kidnap you from wherever and bring you here. Where exactly where you before this?"

"Krara city."

This time she was the one that was shocked. "Krara city?!? From all the way over there?"

"Yeah, Krara city." I should note that these two cities are basically on opposite sides of the kingdom, hence our extreme disbelief.

"Also, what’s the date today? If I remember correctly, it was the fourty-first when I fell asleep before waking up here."

"It’s uh, it’s the fourty-second." Shayllaa answered nervously, her eyes darting away from me awkwardly.

...

"They kidnapped me and brought me here all in less that a day?" I blurted out absentmindedly, my gaze vacant and my mind wandering through nothing.

"It would appear so, my lady." Shayllaa bowed apologetically.

"Uuuuhhh... I’ll deal with that later I guess..." There was an awkward moment of silence after I said that, before I quickly went to ask my other questions to move away from said awkwardness, "Anyways, my next question is who exactly are these people?"

That was enough to instantly get Shayllaa out of her embarrassed state and into her reverent one once more as she explained, "Well, as you know, they are extremely wealthy individuals who fund nearly everything within the kingdom, and they are normally in charge of major businesses. They are the Oligarchs of the kingdom, and have been controlling it from behind the scenes with their wealth."

Ah, so they’re not quite aristocrats, but oligarchs. That actually makes more sense now that I think about it.

I decided to pry a little further for anything else she might know, "Anything else I should note about them?"

She looked up for a second contemplatively, and then lowered it to look at me, "No, not really. Though some of them do seem to be absent right now. But don’t worry, we won’t let them escape their fate. They will fall just like the rest."

"Right, I did think that there was an odd number of people here, and the amount masks of each variant seemed to be a bit odd also. Speaking of, do you happen to know what the masks are made of?"

"I’ve never gotten a close look at them personally, so I only know that they’re made of some kind of metal mainly. If you show them to me, I might be able to identify them."

I reached into my [Multi-Dimensional Storage] and pulled out the two that were obviously metal and presented them to Shayllaa so she could get a closer look at them.

She leaned in and inspected the two of them, starting with the golden-bronze one. She squinted her eyes and I could tell that she was taking this as seriously as if her very life depended on it.

"This one is made some combination of Glofir and I think just simply bronze?" She answered somewhat hesitantly after a short while.

I looked at the mask myself and tried to remember what kind of metal Glofir was and if I’d heard of it before as well as what its properties were. And I did remember, it was basically just gold that had been naturally imbued with fire mana from the surroundings.

Then she turned to the other one, and spent only a few seconds on it before she recoiled in shock, like she’d just seen a ghost or something.

"Th-This is... But how is... Wait... But then- That would mean..." Amidst her varied reactions to this mask’s material, I was just left befuddled with many questions running through my head.

First of all, and I think the most prevalent of them all, what the fuck even is this stuff? Secondly, what is causing her to freak out like this? And lastly, why is she freaking out over this?

And as I was thinking all of this, I saw her become even more furious and turn back to the oligarchs with a chilling murderous intent.

Speaking of, this whole time we’d been talking, said oligarchs had kept their mouths shut, for fear of possibly leaking anything else that would make their current situation worse for them, if that was even feasible.

"You..." Shayllaa spoke with a deep, gritty tone, one that came from the fury within her body fuelling it with a near unstoppable power. "You’re the ones who stole it..."

"You’ve yet to answer my question." I pointed out, to which her head snapped back to me, this time maintaining the same furious rage rather than the mellow attitude she’d taken with me before.

"They stole this metal from us." She said plainly, trying to maintain her decorum when speaking to me, but her anger was still so obvious with how her voice trembled as she spoke.

"That still doesn’t answer my question, nor does it explain why this is so upsetting to you lot." I replied bluntly with hints of impatience.

Shayllaa took a deep breath, trying to calm herself down, but the boiling wrath within her had grown too large for her to do so, but she tried anyways before finally answering my question.

"This mask is made of an unbelievably rare metal that is exclusive to our race as a whole, and only the Sect may distribute it. But at some point, long before I was even born, our supply, which was rather small, had been stolen. And this is where it ended up."

She pointed at the mask in my hands and I looked at it closer, seeing that it had some kind of pale white hue to it as well as the silver sparkle. That must be why when I took a glance at it earlier, it looked like an off-silver colour.

Search the lightnovelworld.cc website on Google to access chapters of novels early and in the highest quality.