After the bloody tournament ended that afternoon, Noah left the massive venue alone.
He dismissed the armed servants from the Leiden household who had originally come to escort him back to the estate, choosing to wander through the crowded streets of the Imperial Capital by himself.
Unlike when he had first entered the city wearing roughspun cloth, he was now dressed in the luxurious, tailored silk clothes Laims had specially ordered made for him.
Anyone who looked at him would immediately assume he was the spoiled young heir of a powerful noble house.
Because of that, the commoners on the street desperately scrambled out of his way, unwilling to get too close.
After all, if a peasant accidentally bumped into a noble in this city, even some joking, fabricated excuse about "damaged pride" would be enough to have the commoner publicly executed by the city guard.
'What's going on up ahead?'
Noah noticed a massive crowd of people gathering in a large plaza down the street, murmuring quietly as though they were watching some kind of public spectacle.
He didn't walk directly into the mob.
Instead, he followed the sloping street upward, taking a side alley, and found a high vantage point from a stone balcony where he could look down over the heads of the crowd.
"This is..."
The horrific sight below made him frown in genuine disgust.
In the center of the cobblestone plaza stood over a dozen heavy wooden crosses nailed deep into the ground.
At that moment, every single cross had a battered, bleeding person tied to it.
Their injuries were horrific.
Their bodies were covered in deep, rotting lacerations and unmistakable signs of brutal, prolonged torture.
They were simply bound there, left to rot in the sun for all to see.
Hundreds of citizens stood around the plaza watching the spectacle, yet everyone looked utterly, casually used to the sight.
Noah even overheard two women near the front row discussing what ingredients they were going to buy for dinner while standing less than ten feet away from such a gruesome, bloody scene.
Among those bound and bleeding on the crosses were young women, even crying children, and not even frail, elderly grandparents had been spared the torture.
Noah focused his vision and quietly Appraised the dying people tied to the wood.
To his surprise, he discovered that the elderly man in the center had once held a high-ranking official position within the Empire's civil government.
There was absolutely nothing in the system's appraisal data to indicate the man was a traitor or a criminal.
He and his entire extended family had been tortured and humiliated like this for only one single reason: he had been a political enemy of the Prime Minister.
The finer details of the political dispute couldn't be learned from a basic scan, but this was undoubtedly the horrific, rotting result of the Empire's unchecked corruption.
After hearing Laims's bleak explanation over wine the previous night, Noah thought he already understood how bad things were.
He truly had not expected the depravity to have reached this sickening extent.
Simply becoming a political rival of Minister Honest was enough to receive this kind of apocalyptic treatment.
Even high-ranking Imperial officials had absolutely no way to resist the purge.
The Minister's political power was clearly even more terrifying and absolute than the Emperor's own.
If the young Emperor weren't a brainwashed puppet, then when issuing a mass-execution order like this, he would still have to care about his public reputation at least a little bit—worrying about whether the history books would curse him as a bloodthirsty tyrant.
But the Minister didn't care about history.
No matter how excessive, illegal, or brutal his actions were, as long as the orders were spoken through the young Emperor's mouth, they became an absolute, unquestionable imperial decree.
"What are you looking at?"
A cold voice suddenly came from right behind him.
Noah had already sensed her approaching footsteps a block away, so he remained perfectly calm and didn't flinch.
He just pointed down at the bloody crosses standing in the plaza below.
Esdeath followed his gesture and looked over the balcony railing.
With a genuinely puzzled expression, she tilted her head and asked, "Do you like watching torture?"
'...What?'
Noah turned to look at her with a deeply helpless, baffled expression.
'How did your brain even arrive at that conclusion?'
"Then are you pitying them?" Esdeath asked, her blue eyes narrowing.
The two of them seemed to be operating on completely, fundamentally different wavelengths of basic human empathy.
And yet, somehow, they were still able to communicate.
Esdeath looked down at the dying people being persecuted below.
She folded her arms casually across her chest and said in a voice as cold as ice, "The weak are meat, and the strong eat them. That is just how this world works. The only reason they ended up nailed to those crosses is because they were too weak to kill their enemies first. They have no one else to blame but themselves."
Watching this flat-chested little girl seriously expound such a brutally cold, Darwinian theory of life, Noah actually found that this person was oddly interesting.
He leaned against the stone railing and asked, "So, by that logic, that means you must consider yourself one of the strong?"
Esdeath stared right at him.
Her eyes suddenly filled with a wild, violent excitement. "I was just about to verify that."
'This boy—he's strong!'
Compared to the crowded arena, her primal senses were even sharper right now.
Precisely because they were standing alone on this balcony at such close range, she realized that the heavy, dangerous aura radiating from him was far beyond what she had felt when they had merely exchanged glances from afar.
Up until this exact moment in her life, she had never met someone her own age who could actually fight her.
This was the very first time!
Trembling with excitement, she licked her lips and lowered her center of gravity slightly, dropping into a predatory stance from which she could explode into top speed at any millisecond.
Seeing her settle into a fighting stance, Noah remained smiling, leaning casually against the railing.
He asked, "Are you planning to attack me right here?"
This time, Esdeath gave no verbal reply.
She wore a genuinely "happy," psychotic smile and lunged viciously toward his throat.
Seeing how straightforward and purely physical her assault was, Noah didn't even draw a weapon.
He silently placed his palm flat against the stone floor of the balcony.
Looking at the boy, who seemed completely relaxed and full of fatal openings, Esdeath didn't hesitate at all.
She raised her leg, intending to strike his head cleanly off his shoulders with a brutal roundhouse kick.
But the exact instant she lifted her pivot leg off the stone, a strange, terrifying sensation of total weightlessness hit her.
She felt as though she had just stepped onto a sheet of frictionless, greased ice, and she instantly lost all her balance.
"Huh?"
Whoosh.
Her sharp kick swept harmlessly past Noah's face, missing by an inch.
Because there was zero gravity holding her down, the sheer momentum of her own missed kick sent Esdeath's body spinning wildly out of control.
Her vision blurred as she whirled through the air several times before gradually coming to a stop, suspended upside down.
Once she stopped spinning, she realized with utter horror that she was actually floating three feet in midair.
Neither her hands nor her feet could reach the stone floor, leaving her with absolutely nowhere to brace herself or generate force.
She was completely helpless.
The boy stood up, dusted off his pants, and slowly walked over to her floating form.
He reached out one hand.
Flick.
Noah casually flicked the little ice girl right on the forehead.
"Uwah?!"
It was only a light flick to the forehead, but in her zero-gravity state, the tiny amount of kinetic force sent Esdeath tumbling backward through the air.
She floated helplessly for ten feet before finally drifting outside the operational range of his Weaver magic.
Thump.
Gravity slammed back into her.
Esdeath fell from the air and landed hard on her backside against the cobblestones.
But compared to the dull pain in her tailbone, she was far more shocked by the impossible, reality-breaking experience she had just endured.
Her mind was completely filled with short-circuiting questions.
Her big blue eyes were full of sheer confusion as she stared blankly up at the smoggy sky over the Imperial Capital.
'W-What just happened?!'
Why had she suddenly floated up into the air?
And it had only been a tiny flick to the forehead—how the hell had it sent her flying backward that far?!
'Was the gap in our strength really that huge?!'
'No! Impossible!'
Esdeath hurriedly scrambled to her feet, her face flushed red with anger and embarrassment.
She glared at Noah, who still wore that infuriating, calm smile, and demanded, "What the hell did you just do to me?!"
Noah raised one finger and placed it gently in front of his lips.
"I'm not telling you."
"You—!"
Even though twelve-year-old Esdeath possessed the strength to rip grown men apart, her personality was still, at its core, not that different from a normal child's.
For example, she absolutely hated losing!
Highly indignant and refusing to accept the humiliation, she declared, "That trick didn't count! Let's do it again! A real fight this time!"
Seeing her stubbornly drop into her fighting stance once more, Noah just sighed and shook his head.
"It's a pity," he said, feigning regret, "you've already died once."
"What?"
"Don't you understand? If I'd acted on that thought earlier, you'd already be dead. You've already died once. Why would I fight an opponent I've already killed?"
'Hmm...'
Esdeath looked deeply troubled.
She clutched her head in her hands, clearly conflicted.
It was true: if her opponent had pierced her skull with a sharp weapon just now, she would have been dead for certain.
This realization only deepened her confusion.
"I don't understand. If I've already lost, why didn't you kill me?"
Suddenly, she remembered conversations she'd overheard as a child between her father and others about her mother.
"Could it be... are you after my body?" Esdeath asked, her expression completely serious.
In her worldview, relationships were always transactional: predator and prey.
The strong survive, the weak lose everything.
When the stronger party deliberately spares the weaker's life, it's usually for mating.
The strong need a host to bear offspring. The stronger the host, the better.
This was how she herself had been born.
Her father was the chieftain of the Balut tribe, the strongest warrior in their clan, and he had claimed the most beautiful and powerful woman—her mother.
And Esdeath was indeed exceptionally strong!
Thinking about it this way, everything seemed to make perfect sense.
Only a true warrior could win the most beautiful and powerful woman—her mother.
And she was incredibly strong!
Thinking about it this way, everything seemed to make sense.
But this answer shocked Noah to his core.
That's way too criminal!
Even though he was no longer in his original world, the minimum three-year prison sentence for harming a minor remained deeply ingrained in his soul.
Assaulting a minor? Five years' detention, with harsher penalties for aggravated cases.
Public indecency? Life imprisonment, minimum.
"Hey, hey, don't just assume people's motives," Noah snapped. "I'll tell you straight—I prefer mature, voluptuous women! I'm not interested in flat-chested lolis like you."
"Flat... lolis?" Esdeath paused, startled.
She instinctively touched the slight bulge at her chest, then realized she had been rejected.
'I don't understand.'
'At twelve, is this size considered big or...?'
She knew she was still developing, but she couldn't predict her final growth.
Come to think of it, back when they used to hunt on the border, everyone always competed over the size of their prey—bigger was always better.
'Does that principle apply to breasts too?'
'But if they get too big, wouldn't it hinder movement? That could affect hunting...'
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