Chapter 118: Defense
Issho remained in the auction hall.
The entire venue was still pressed flat beneath his gravity, nobles and merchants alike pinned to the floor with their faces pale and their mouths shut. The few guards who had tried to struggle were now lying even lower than the rest, their armor creaking under the invisible weight.
Someone had to keep them there.
Someone also had to make sure no fool crawled away and made the situation worse.
Hawkins stayed behind as well. Compared to Issho's quiet, mountain-like presence, Hawkins looked almost idle, standing near the aisle with a straw doll turning slowly between his fingers. His eyes swept over the collapsed crowd without much interest.
With those two guarding the hall, Axel had no need to worry about the front.
So the job of finding the captives fell to him and Eli.
Brenda led the way.
Now that her shackles, cuffs, and collar had been removed, she seemed lighter with every step. Her body was still weak, and her legs trembled now and then from the abuse and exhaustion she had suffered, but there was life in her eyes again.
That alone made her look like a different person.
The slave holding area was not far from the stage. For convenience, the auction house had placed the "merchandise" in several compartments behind the performance area, each separated by thick iron bars. The staff only needed to drag the slaves out one by one when it was time for their turn.
No one worried about escape.
Every slave wore an explosive collar.
Run too far, resist too hard, or try to remove it by force—and the collar would detonate.
For the auction house, the cages were not the true lock.
Fear was.
When Brenda appeared in the corridor without her collar, chains, or cuffs, the people behind the bars froze.
A moment ago, she had been one of them.
A woman sold on stage. A woman whose fate had already been sealed.
Now she was standing outside the cages.
Free.
For a brief instant, something flickered in the eyes of the prisoners.
Hope.
Then suspicion buried it.
Had she been bought by some strange, kind-hearted master?
Stories like that existed among slaves. Ridiculous stories. Desperate stories. A slave bought and set free. A beautiful girl saved by a benevolent noble. A tragic captive who somehow moved her owner's heart and gained freedom.
Most knew those tales were only fantasies people whispered when despair became too heavy.
A miracle, if it happened at all, happened to one person in hundreds of thousands.
And miracles never came in groups.
Behind Brenda came two figures.
One was Eli, sharp-eared, monkey-faced, and quick-eyed, the kind of man who looked like he could survive anywhere by talking fast enough.
The other was a child with white hair, exquisite clothes, and a wooden sword used like a guide cane. His eyes were closed, and his delicate features made him look less like a rescuer and more like a young master who had wandered into the wrong nightmare.
The prisoners stared.
Was he the buyer?
If so, Brenda might have been lucky.
Then Brenda rushed to the nearest cage, pressed both hands against the bars, and said with trembling excitement, "We're saved! They're here to rescue us!"
No one cheered.
No one shouted.
No one even stepped forward.
Instead, the eyes behind the bars turned colder. Some shrank back. Some lowered their heads. Some watched Brenda as if she had become part of a trap.
Brenda's smile stiffened.
"I'm telling the truth," she said quickly. "The auction outside—something happened. The guards are down. You can leave. You can all leave!"
Her urgency only made them more wary.
A staged performance.
That was the first thought in many minds.
The auction house had ways of testing slaves. They would offer hope, watch who reached for it, and then punish them until the others learned not to move.
A frail man and a child had come to rescue them?
The guards outside made no sound?
The auction had been stopped so easily?
What kind of joke was that?
If escape had been that simple, this place would have burned down years ago.
Brenda opened her mouth, then hesitated.
She could tell them what had happened outside. She could tell them that a Celestial Dragon had died, that the entire venue was being held down by one man's power.
But the moment the words reached her tongue, fear stopped her.
If she said too much, would she harm the people who saved her?
These prisoners had suffered the same fate as her, but they were still strangers. In a place like this, kindness could kill.
The silence stretched.
Then, from a small birdcage-like prison hanging at the side, a tiny voice spoke.
"I am Theresa. Please help me out."
The speaker was a dwarf.
The cage she was locked in had been specially made, with bars close enough that she could not slip through. Her small hands gripped the metal as she looked at Axel with bright, trusting eyes.
Several prisoners glanced at her.
No one warned her.
The dwarves had a reputation. Everyone knew they were absurdly easy to deceive, the sort of people who could believe a lie as long as it was spoken with a straight face. Theresa's trust did not prove anything.
Some even felt a bitter, ugly flicker of amusement.
Let her try, then.
If this was a trap, at least someone else would spring it first.
Axel stopped walking.
For the first time in a long while, he opened his eyes.
There was no discomfort from the light. His ability controlled the way it touched his eyes, so the brightness of the corridor meant nothing to him.
Brenda and Eli both stared.
"You can see?!" they blurted out at almost the same time.
Even the prisoners behind the bars reacted. A few leaned closer despite themselves.
If he could see, why had he been walking around with a guide cane this whole time?
Axel turned his head slightly and looked at Brenda, then Eli.
"I never said I couldn't."
The words were plain.
His eyes were not.
They were red—so vivid they looked almost wet, like fresh blood under lamplight. There was something unsettling in them, something sharp and predatory, enough to make the people who met his gaze instinctively fall silent.
Axel had opened his eyes because the prisoners' silence had bothered him.
With his eyes closed, his Observation Haki and calculations could give him outlines, positions, motion, and shape. But outlines could not show him hesitation. They could not show the way people looked at a chance and still refused to touch it.
Now he saw it clearly.
He faced the cages.
"Do you want to be rescued?"
The corridor was silent.
Then Theresa's tiny voice rang out again.
"Yes!"
No one else answered.
Not because they did not want freedom.
Of course they did.
Every person in those cages had dreamed of it. Some had prayed for it. Some had imagined the bars breaking, imagined running into the sunlight, imagined tearing the collars from their necks and being human again.
But they were afraid.
Before a slave could be sold, they had to be trained.
That training was not education. It was not discipline.
It was cruelty refined into a process.
Resistance was beaten out of them. Pride was starved out of them. Hope was turned into a weapon and used against them until they learned to fear even rescue.
Some had once been fierce. Some had once drawn blood. Some had once screamed that they would rather die than kneel.
Now their claws had been filed down.
Now survival was the only thing they still dared to hold.
Axel's gaze moved over them.
"I'll ask one last time," he said. "Do you want to be rescued?"
Again, Theresa answered without hesitation.
"Yes!"
This time, however, the others began exchanging glances.
A man with sunken cheeks stepped forward, gripping the bars with trembling hands.
"How can you prove you weren't sent by the auction house?"
The question opened the floodgate of fear.
"Yes… prove it."
"If we say yes and this is a test, we'll be punished."
"You say you're rescuing us, but where are the guards?"
"What happened outside?"
"What about the collars?"
Their voices overlapped, low at first, then rising.
Brenda's face grew pale with distress.
Eli grimaced. He understood their fear, but understanding did not make it less frustrating.
Axel stared at them for a moment.
Then he laughed.
It was not a warm sound.
"Proof?"
His lips curved, but there was no kindness in it.
"When did I ever need to prove anything to you?"
The prisoners froze.
Axel tapped the wooden sword against the floor once.
"I have no obligation to rescue people who won't even reach for freedom when it's placed in front of them. If all you can do is lie there waiting for someone to decide your fate, then maybe you're not worth saving."
The words landed like a slap.
Brenda looked at him in shock.
Eli sucked in a breath, but said nothing.
For the prisoners, however, Axel's harshness had the opposite effect.
A few of them stiffened.
Something about that tone did not sound like an auction house trick.
The auction house never spoke that way. It coaxed, threatened, tortured, and lied—but it never sounded genuinely annoyed that they lacked the courage to be saved.
One by one, several prisoners moved to the bars.
"We believe you," one said hurriedly. "Can you save us?"
"Yes, please!"
"We were wrong just now!"
"Please, get us out!"
Axel looked at them.
"No."
The prisoners went still.
"What?"
"Why?"
"Didn't you come here to save us?"
"I'm in a bad mood," Axel said. "I don't want to anymore."
The corridor fell into stunned silence.
It was such an unreasonable answer that no one knew how to respond.
Saving people was, in the end, a matter of the rescuer's will. Some rescued others out of kindness. Some demanded payment. Some wanted gratitude. Some wanted justice.
But this child had simply said he was in a bad mood.
It was absurd.
It was childish.
It was also terrifyingly convincing.
The prisoners' suspicion finally cracked.
More and more of them rushed to the bars, their fear turning into panic. The chance had been real. They had missed it.
"Wait!"
"Please!"
"Save us!"
"We want to leave!"
"We want to live!"
"Please, we were just scared!"
The holding area erupted into desperate cries.
Hands gripped the bars. Faces pressed forward. Voices trembled, begged, shouted, and broke.
"Clang!"
Axel struck the nearest iron cage with his wooden sword.
The vibration tore through the metal like a bell being hammered from the inside. The prisoners gripping the bars cried out as the shock rattled through their hands, forcing them to let go.
Silence returned in pieces.
Axel rested the wooden sword against his shoulder.
"I already said it. I have no obligation to save you."
His red eyes shifted toward the little cage.
"Right now, I'm only saving one person."
The wooden sword lifted.
"Theresa."
He swung.
The crude wooden blade, which should not have been able to cut anything sturdier than rope, slid through the iron bars above Theresa's cage with a clean, quiet line.
A narrow opening appeared.
The entire birdcage rose into the air.
The prisoners stared as it floated upward, passed neatly through the gap, and drifted toward Axel as if carried by invisible hands.
Theresa clung to the bars, eyes shining.
Axel caught the cage lightly.
Then, with a final tap of his wooden sword, he opened the little prison that had held her.
.....
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