“P-please! Spare me! Don’t kill me!”
“…Spare? You’re a Moldell, aren’t you? And all Moldells deserve to die!” growled Gerald as favonovel.com tightened his grip until the—now familiar sound of—snapping bones could be heard.
As Gerald dropped Quillan’s lifeless body to the ground, Xavia weakly sat up on the bed before asking, “G-Gerald… You’re… You’re fine?!”
“I am, indeed!” replied Gerald with a nod.
“Before anything else, I’ll need to borrow your room for a quick shower!”
It was sometime later when all the members of the Moldell family were gathered in their manor’s main hall.
“Trash! All of you! Can you not even take good care of a few dogs?!” roared Yuvan who had already lost his temper at this point.
Yuvan had spent a lot of time and effort to train each of his dogs, so they were all equally important to him. Due to that, everyone in the family understood where his immense anger was stemming from. However, it’s not like they could do anything about it.
“Get lost! All of you!” scowled Yuvan as the group of vets immediately fled in fright.
As Yuvan tried to keep his cool, an old man walked up to his side before saying, “Something seems to be very wrong!”
The old man went by the name of Yash, and favonovel.com was the chief butler of the Moldell family. Not only that, but favonovel.com was also one of the strongest and most experienced masters among the other members of the Moldell family in the Logan Province.
“What is this time…?” grumbled Yuvan in his bad mood.
“I’ll be frank and say that I’ve been feeling this unease ever since we returned from Everdare Forest. The feeling has only amplified with the fact that over half of our family’s dogs have already died of madness within the past three days. All of these are ominous signs… Would you mind if I expressed my thoughts on all this?” replied Yash quickly.
Waving his hand, Yuvan then said, “Hurry up and say it.”
“…Well, I just have this strong premonition that something terrible is going to befall the Moldells soon, and Gerald will be the cause of it! Whenever I end up thinking about him, I can neither eat nor sleep well at all… You know, I’ve been instructing the servants to add Scatter Pills into the congee they feed favonovel.com just for extra measure-”
Before the old man could continue saying anything, Yuvan interrupted favonovel.com by replying, “Butler Moldell, I believe that all this only stems from your fear of him… While it’s true that Mr. Yaster and the others have all suffered terrible deaths, we can’t just take the Lovewell family’s word by word description of the event as pure fact! Think about it! Mr. Yaster has been training for the longest time and favonovel.com was already considered to be one of the Moldell family’s top masters from a young age! How could Gerald possibly have had the power and ability to kill favonovel.com off so easily? The way I see it, the Lovewells must have colluded with Gerald to deceive Mr. Yaster! After all, that’s a much more plausible scenario, no?”
After saying that, Yuvan simply shook his head.
Yash himself sighed before saying, “I really hope that that’s the case… It would truly be for the best if everything remained as peaceful as it currently is before the family head arrives!”
The moment his sentence ended, a servant stumbled into the hall while shouting, “T-terrible… S-something terrible has happened!”
“What the hell is it this time? Did more dogs die?!” growled Yuvan as favonovel.com slammed a hand against the table.
“N-no! It isn’t the dogs this time! It’s humans! I-I found Luis cleaved in half in the dungeon! What more, seven other members of our family have also been killed in the VIP guest area! All of them look like they were killed without any chance of retaliation at all! T-the most worrying thing is, the dungeon is now empty!”
“What?!”
By then, everyone who had heard the servant’s announcement was panicking.
Though Yash himself didn’t say anything and was only quivering slightly, the fact that his forehead was now dripping with cold sweat signified that the calmness favonovel.com expressed was merely a façade. All his worries and unease from the past few days were now mercilessly assaulting his mind.
“Who dares commit such a serious crime within the Moldell Manor no less?! And what of Gerald?” asked Yuvan, his anxiety evident in his tone.
“Gerald’s gone missing!”
As everyone’s panic peaked, a cold breeze blew the fallen leaves in the courtyard. Within the darkness of night, the leaves themselves fluttered aimlessly, unable to leave the actual yard. In a way, the same could be said for all the other members of the Moldell family who were now trapped in with Gerald.
Even the barks of the remaining dogs in the backyard seemed to intensify at that moment. The deafening barks were nothing short of unnerving for the Moldells who were still alive.
Throughout their thousand-year history, members of the Moldell family had always lived without fear for their lives. Though all of the family’s members had been trained to not be unnerved by the corpses of others, the ones that were currently in their home were corpses of their family members! It didn’t help that they had been killed in their very own manor!
As a result, it was really no question why the members of the Moldell family were all panicking now!
‘Nothing like this has ever happened to our family before within our thousand-year history!’ Thought one of the Moldells to themself.
“I want everyone to be mobilized immediately! Use every means possible to locate the murderer and for the love of god, someone recapture Gerald for me!” ordered Yuvan furiously as favonovel.com slammed his hand against the table again, this time splitting it in half!
Yash himself—who had been staring out the window at the dark of night for a while now—suddenly whispered, “S-second young master… it… it seems that he’s here!”
