The sound of fist striking flesh echoed through the back alley.
"Gehah— p-please, stop already... I'm begging you, I was wrong, I was wrong, so..."
A man in his twenties lowered his head toward the person he had picked a fight with—Rei.
Having taken several punches to the face, it was already swollen beyond recognition.
Blood dripped from his nose and mouth, rattling his breathing. What lay scattered in pieces across the ground, catching the moonlight and the glow from the main street, were no doubt his teeth.
Looking utterly battered, the man wished he could go back a few minutes in time and tell himself never to pick a fight with the person standing before him.
If things had gone according to his plan, their positions would have been reversed.
He had come looking for his favorite prostitute, only to find her gone from the brothel without explanation. Half in a fit of misplaced anger, he had decided to teach Rei a lesson—someone who, by all rights, was too young to be wandering a pleasure district like this one.
It could only be called spectacularly bad luck. He had picked a fight with the wrong person.
"Is that so? Personally, I'd be happy if you played with me a little more. I haven't had many chances to move my body lately, and the sensation of punching someone does tend to dull without practice."
"Hiii! Hiii! I-I'm sorry! I was wrong! I'll give you money, anything, just please!"
"My, how strange. Weren't you just boasting about being an E-Rank adventurer? And yet here you are, putting on such a pathetic display over something this minor. Could it be you're a fraud?"
Faced with Rei's full smile, the man could feel nothing but terror.
It was true that he was an E-Rank adventurer—but that was E-Rank within the nation of Reblurina. Compared to the Guild in Gilm that Rei was familiar with, screening in a small nation where dangerous monsters never appeared was inevitably more lenient.
...Though while powerful monsters were absent, bandits roamed the region instead.
(Besides, a large-scale entertainment district like Mejougo... existing out here, deliberately offset from the capital, Rossi. Come to think of it, for bandits, this would be a perfect target, wouldn't it?)
And yet, no bandit attacks ever occurred. Why?
Rei thought about it and immediately understood. If the organization running Mejougo was the same one Ajas had belonged to, it wouldn't be surprising for them to have an arrangement with the surrounding bandits.
Fundamentally, bandits established a hideout somewhere and operated primarily around that base. Of course, that was only the general pattern—there were also bands that wandered while raiding wherever they went. But if asked which was more common, it was overwhelmingly the former.
Setting aside overconfidence, then, it stood to reason that Mejougo had no cause to worry about bandits. With that understanding, Rei turned his gaze back to the man trembling before him.
(To extract information, I should thoroughly break his will first.)
He smiled and spoke.
"Now then, friend. Since the timing is perfect, would you mind keeping me company for a little experiment?"
"...E-experiment? What kind... what kind of experiment?"
Facing the man's evident trepidation, Rei broke into a full smile.
"How long a person can keep it together while having their bones broken one after another... that sort of experiment. Don't worry—I may not look it, but I'm fairly confident in my technique. I'm sure you won't die."
"Hiii!"
The man must have sensed that every word was unmistakably serious. A stifled scream escaped his lips.
"I-I'm sorry! I really am sorry, so please! Stop! R-right? L-look, I'll give you everything I have!"
He thrust the leather pouch containing his entire fortune toward Rei with trembling hands.
But Rei, still wearing that full smile, simply shook his head.
"Nobody said anything about wanting money, did they? What I want is to find out how many bones I can break. That's what I'm after. Don't worry—I may not look it, but I pride myself on being quite skilled at breaking bones."
"N-no! That's fine!"
"No? Ah, you mean you'll gladly volunteer as my test subject? How generous."
Rei deliberately misinterpreted the word and took a step forward. The man, every trace of his earlier arrogance gone, frantically shook his head.
"That's not what I meant! I'm telling you to stop!"
"Japanese is a rather difficult language in certain respects..."
"J-Japanese...? What the hell is that?"
Whether he couldn't grasp the meaning of the word or had simply never heard of such a language, Rei didn't know. But realizing he had slipped, he furrowed his brow slightly—then, a moment later, smiled again and addressed the man.
"It's nothing. ...Now then, shall we get started? Are you ready? Though I confess I have no idea what kind of preparation breaking bones requires."
"Wait! Wait, please! L-listen. I was wrong to pick a fight with you. I've already paid for it, haven't I? So just... please!"
The man's eyes brimmed with fear, and he bowed his head deeply as if to hide it.
Seeing this, Rei judged that his will was already sufficiently broken. He stepped closer and rested a hand lightly on the shoulder of the man, who was still trembling with his head down.
The man's body shuddered at the touch, but Rei spoke to him without dropping his smile.
"Alright. I have a few things I'd like to ask, and I'd appreciate it if you answered them. Do that, and I might just let you go. ...Of course, if you claim to know nothing, or worse, if you lie to me... well, you understand what happens then without me spelling it out, right?"
"I-I understand! I'll tell you anything I know! Just please, let me go!"
Rei nodded in satisfaction at the man's words and demeanor. He let several seconds of silence pass to drive the point home before speaking again.
"Then tell me a bit about Mejougo."
"About Mejougo...? W-what do you want to know? Like, recommended prostitutes and that sort of thing?"
"Hmm... unfortunately, not quite. For instance, running a place like Mejougo would require various special exemptions and arrangements, wouldn't it?"
"...I don't know the details, but probably so."
There was no point asking an adventurer about the town's management or the permits behind it. While there were certainly intelligent adventurers out there, the one trembling before Rei was exactly the sort of rough, simple-minded man the word "adventurer" typically conjured to mind.
Realizing he had been foolish to ask complex questions of such a person, Rei moved on.
"Next question. There are a lot of prostitutes in Mejougo. How do you think they gathered this many?"
"Hah? Even if you ask me... people from villages who can't make a living, or ones who want easy money. Isn't that how they end up here?"
The man answered as though he had no idea what Rei was getting at. His confusion was genuine—he truly seemed to believe the women had come to Mejougo of their own volition to become prostitutes.
The man's personality was crude, but precisely because of that, he was simple and clearly no good at keeping secrets. In that sense, he was an ideal source for information.
However, that same simplicity also told Rei he likely didn't have much to offer.
(I got ahead of myself. They conveniently picked a fight with me, so I thought I'd be able to extract all sorts of useful information... No, it's too early to give up. There might still be something.)
Swallowing his mild disappointment, Rei pressed on.
"Next question. Mejougo isn't an ordinary town, as the name 'entertainment district' implies. And as I said before, a place like this naturally has someone pulling the strings behind the scenes—someone other than the noble officially entrusted with governing it, yes?"
He was referring to the kind of people one needed to pay protection money and security fees to.
Officially, some noble probably governed Mejougo, but Rei suspected that was just for show—a surface-level arrangement at best. The organization truly calling the shots was almost certainly the one Ajas had belonged to.
"I... of course I know about that. But what are you planning to do with that information?"
Rei said nothing. He simply smiled.
The moment the man caught that expression, a chill ran down his spine. Despite it being a sweltering summer night where sweating would be perfectly normal, he felt his sweat run cold.
"No, nothing! It's nothing, so please don't worry about it!"
As the man blurted this out in a panic, Rei kept his smile—but something in it shifted, and he spoke.
"You're a smart one. ...If you'd shown that intelligence a little earlier, you might have avoided this situation entirely. Well, I'm just happy to be gathering information. So—what's the organization's name?"
"...Jaya. They're called Jaya."
Bingo, Rei murmured to himself.
He had, naturally, already heard that name from the Gilm Intelligence Unit. Its appearance here was entirely expected.
But blurting it out carelessly would have aroused suspicion, so he hadn't been able to ask Kotonara about it during the carriage ride.
"Ohh... Jaya, huh. So that organization runs Mejougo?"
"Y-yeah, that's right. But Jaya's an organization with real power in this country. Word is, someone connected to the nation's upper echelons is part of it. It's not something you want to cross lightly."
He spoke with certainty—likely because he understood firsthand just how much power Jaya held in Reblurina.
(The man who picked a fight with me at that bar and told me about Mejougo never mentioned Jaya... Well, maybe he thought it went without saying. Or perhaps the name is well-known in Mejougo but not so much outside of it.)
Musing on the fact that the man before him had become an unlikely source of intelligence, Rei prompted him to continue.
"And where is Jaya's headquarters? Could you tell me that?"
"L-like I'd know! For starters, Jaya is a criminal organization!? They've got ties to the nation's upper echelons—there's no way a small-timer like me would know something like that!"
"...I see. Well, I suppose that was to be expected. But you might know of somewhere that isn't the headquarters, correct?"
"W-well... I know of one place, but... anyone who knows even a little about Mejougo would know it."
"For a criminal organization, isn't it a problem for so many people to know the location of one of their bases, even if it isn't the main headquarters?"
Rei found the man's tone slightly questionable, but the man nodded without any particular hesitation.
"If something happens in Mejougo, you're supposed to report there. So..."
A police box? Rei wondered for a moment, but if Jaya effectively ran Mejougo, such a facility would make sense. Causing a disturbance in Mejougo meant throwing mud in Jaya's face. Even knowing that, with taverns and prostitutes everywhere, people were bound to lose control.
Moreover, people came to Mejougo from beyond Reblurina's borders as well. Many probably wouldn't even recognize the name "Jaya" if they heard it.
Rei continued pressing the man for information, but as the man himself had admitted, there was nothing particularly vital. Still, Rei squeezed every small detail he could out of him.
When he learned that the man's favorite prostitute had vanished from the brothel without a trace, and that this was the reason for his irritation and his attempt to take it out on Rei...
Rei could only sigh.