My Wife and I Became Sages in Another World
Chapter 111: Control of the Underground

Chapter 111: Control of the Underground

Jen, the captive alchemist, kept telling me about the royal family and the empire after I told her I wasn’t from there.

The Empress had passed away a few years ago, and her oldest daughter took the throne. The second prince was at the border fighting in the war, and the third princess, who was Jen’s best friend, was helping with the paperwork from their palace.

When I asked her if it was the previous Empress who refused to help Kalusia, she confirmed it as she clenched her fist in apprehension, expressing how it bothered her that the new Empress had to clean up such a mess.

After leaving another food bowl for her, I told her to stay in that room for the time being as we still hadn’t taken care of all the bandits underground.

Jen looked confused when I said "we," so I told Vespera to come out of my shadow and introduced her to the alchemist.

At first look, the pink-haired girl was startled as Vespera suddenly materialized, but when she approached her, she complemented the looks of my companion, which boosted Vespera’s mood.

Leaving Jen’s cell, I kept on checking all of the different paths of the underground tunnels, using magic to boost my speed. Honestly, if it weren’t for Vespera, I would have gotten lost in the labyrinth.

Somehow, my companion could tell which paths we had already checked, so I just followed her instinctive directions as she pointed at me where to go.

At one point, we found a double door at the end of the hallway that definitely looked important.

After using my "search" spell, I could tell that there were people on the other side, so I told Vespera to join me and take them by surprise as we ran to the entrance and knocked it down with a kick.

Just as we thought, a dozen bandits were inside the spacious room filled with desks.

’This must be their meeting room or something like that...’ I thought as I knocked one of the bandits out with my bo.

They weren’t able to do much since Vespera and I were moving so quickly that they could barely tell what was happening before we were slamming their faces on the ground.

The room had three other doors, two standard and another double door at the back.

I asked Vespera to check one of the common ones while I looked at the other, and to my surprise, I found myself inside an organized office with one of the bandits sitting behind the desk, trembling in fear after seeing me.

"Wh-who are you!?" the man exclaimed, raising his sword towards me.

"I’ll ask the questions here," I replied, waving my hand and using air magic to knock the sword out of his hand, along with the desk and all of its documents, to the side of the room.

Leaving only the man trembling before me, I used gravity magic to make him kneel and scare him even more.

When I checked his neck, I noticed he didn’t have the mark.

"Hey, are you this scared of me when you are not even cursed?" I asked the man with a severe tone.

Some of the bandits were literally forced to commit crimes in order to protect their families, and it was easy to tell who was under threat by the black flower tattoos that they all had on their necks.

However, there were others who didn’t have that curse, which only meant that they were working for the Crimson Scorpions of their own volition, kidnapping and starving people on purpose.

This man didn’t have a curse and was scared to death after seeing me. It just made no sense to me.

"You have been kidnapping, killing, robbing people, and making entire districts starve... Yet, now you are here trembling on your knees before a 16-year-old." I said, raising the man’s chin with the tip of my bo to look into his eyes.

"F-Forgive me, please spare me!" the man exclaimed, but it only made me even angrier.

Not being able to hold back my anger, I punched the man in the face, breaking his nose along with a few teeth as he was sent to the back of the room.

"Please, mercy..." the man said again.

’Is he trying to make me angrier?’ I thought, widening my eyes and gazing coldly at the bandit.

"Stop asking for mercy and forgiveness. You didn’t show any of it to these victims, so stop asking for it, or I will make it worse..." I said, finally making the man shut up as he gulped down his words.

Calming myself down a little, I asked the man what he was doing in the office, to which he answered that he was tasked with communicating with their leader and telling him about the state of affairs at the capital.

"Perfect," I said with a sneer.

Grabbing the man by the collar of his shirt, I pushed him onto a chair and told him to write a letter to the leader saying everything was perfectly fine, and as he began writing, I watched closely from behind.

"That part looks good. Tell him you’ve been doing even better now..." I said, altering the message further to make it seem like the bandits were thriving here.

After the bandit was done with the letter, I proofread it and confirmed it looked good, prompting the man to use a strange magic artifact that summoned a ghostly owl.

When the owl grabbed the letter under its talons, the paper also turned a little transparent, like the spectral bird, and flew away while going through the walls as if they weren’t even there.

Threatening the man, I asked him to explain what that was, and he replied by saying that it was a magic artifact that allowed the person to send letters to anyone from anywhere.

It was a discrete form of communication, which I thought was pretty cool, but I hid my excitement since I was trying to threaten the guy.

Now that the letter had been sent, there was no point in using the bandit anymore, so I knocked him out and stacked his unconscious body with the others.

During the time that we had been taking down the bandits in the tunnels, Vespera and I were splitting the cursed members from the healthy ones. That way, we would know who were the real bandits later.

Leaving all of the criminals tied with Vespera’s spiderweb, we opened the double door that we hadn’t checked and found a massive dungeon-like area.

There were cells all around, but most were empty, making me wonder if they had already moved the people.

Nisa and Tony, the two members that I saved at first, told me that the leader had taken a big group with him to a city where they were sending the people they enslaved to other countries.

’What kind of country is buying slaves anyways...’ I pondered with annoyance.

Delving deeper inside the dungeon, we found another set of cells. This time, however, there were people inside.

The people recoiled in fear as soon as they saw us and crawled to the back of their cells. However, their worries started to dissipate after I pulled out bowls of food and started bending open the metal bars for them to get out.

A man and a woman couple were on one cell, an old man in another, a few kids bundled together in others. Honestly, it was pretty sad.

The old man introduced himself as Giovanno Lovegrad, which made me recognize his last name since it was the same as the alchemist girl from before, Jen.

He inquired about his granddaughter, so I told him that she was perfectly fine and that she had been healed of the curse, making the old man tear up with joy.

Giovanno told me that the dungeon we were located at was right under Romanov’s mansion, but the man hadn’t come to see his prisoners for a few days.

I told him that the leader had gone to another city, making the couple hug each other as they started crying, saying that their child had been taken on that cargo.

’If I remember correctly, he left a few days ago, and it’s supposed to be a one-week trip...’ I pondered, trying to see if I could catch up with them, which seemed possible.

I asked the old man if he knew more about Romanov’s residence, and he explained that, apart from the guards, it was full of servants and a butler who was overseeing everything while his master was gone.

My plan was to look around his home for clues and concrete proof of his crimes. Even though his underground dungeon was more than enough, I still felt somewhat unsure about the Empress and how she would react.

I didn’t know much about the Droman Empire and much less about the imperial family, so I wanted to make sure to deal with the problem efficiently.

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