Chapter 181: Keys

Should I wait, should I not?

I sat on my butt and placed a hand on my chin. Choices were here, I just had to pick one. First, I could wait for the moment this aunt person came back home, and then go forward with the interrogation. That was the convenient way to go. For obvious reasons, I preferred to have my mouse trapped in between four walls I fully controlled before I started to play with it.

Then again, there was no telling how long it would take for the mouse to come out of its hole, so I could always go after it without waiting. Or then, I could also still wait for my prey to come to me while in the meantime searching the house for information, too.

Well, what should I do? Briefly, I glanced around and asserted there wasn't much to search for, in such an unpleasantly empty house. With light steps, I wandered about the first floor: The house wasn't especially tiny. Quite the contrary. What made it look so empty must have been the size of it. For an empty house, there was too much room. And, what drove me to go after some group of people I never had heard of before was mostly curiosity. Maybe I could be curious again and explore the few dusty shelves and desks for documents about a possible mention of the word "thief."

Peeking out of the owner's bedroom, I considered what I should do with my empty schedule and how my plans would go, but then, the sounds of hesitant steps were heard down the stairs. With Mana Perception, I watched the young lady hesitantly go up. She was on her way to the intruder, with a frying pan in her hands and a very worried expression plastered on her face.

The intruder still stood in the owner's bedroom. The girl might have wished for it all to simply have been her and her brother's imagination running wild with anxiety when she heard the rustling of steps upstairs, but it wasn't. Somehow, the girl seriously entertained the thought. Still, her imagination wasn't wild at all. It was right and cautious. How could she even have imagined the loud steps she and her kid brother heard when I climbed up their house? Yes, I was still there.

"H-Hello...?"

So far, I waited in the dark. From inside the owner's bedroom, I was hidden in the shadows. I admired the girl's courage. At the same time, I did set my cold eyes on her, thinking about how much of an enemy she was to me. Well, she and her frying pan wasn't much.

I didn't have a reason to kill her. If you didn't farm them by the hundreds, non-combatant people didn't give many EXP points at all. Plus, she was the girl who could have picked up a sharp kitchen knife instead of just a frying pan in order to defend herself... so she didn't die today.

I made sure to swiftly jump out of the window from which I came in. For the time being, I let her off. Then again, she still didn't have me off her skin altogether.

The plan was unsure from the start, so it stayed that way. With my prey and interrogation in mind, I tracked my prey down all the way up to the woman's workplace, but it was a whorehouse. I couldn't run my interrogation there, so I took care of the other pieces of cloth for the time being.

An hour passed. No satisfactory information about the thief guild was gained. All I had now was a name. The Night Brotherhood. Since I heard the name from two unrelated criminals, I knew the organization had to be the real thing. It felt good to know that I started all this just on some sort of random impulse, but that it still paid off. A name. Still not much to go with, for now, but that was information.

And since I had nothing to do, then, I was back to the whore's rack, where the young lady and her kid brother stayed. The house either slept and I snuck in again, this time without alerting anyone, or the two hosts didn't, and I was about to have some fun.

I traveled back to it fairly quickly. A light was still on. Inside, both the young lady and the boy still were well awake, in the same room I had seen them earlier. The girl was resting upon a wall, on the floor, and she opened a book of tales on her lap. Earlier, she read, too. The boy was unchanged, too, and still fooled around with his knight and monster wooden figurines going all Graaah, Uwaaah, Mighty-Kick, and his "Die-die-die Monster Move!"

Crossing my arms upon my chest, I stayed motionless at the first step of the front porch. I had to give some thought to how I would go about pulling what I wanted to do here. Things wouldn't supposedly go exactly as planned, but the childish part of myself could rejoice that it was fun. When I set out to accomplish something, I decided that I would do it no matter what.

For the second I paused, I overheard the prey. The boy set aside his toys and complained. "...Nah! It's still weird, big sis'!"

"What is?"

"The chewin' in my stomach... don't want to stop! It still hurts me! I can't sleep!"

It was the boy complaining about the intense feeling of hunger. His sister confessed that she was the same. It was unfortunate, but they just had to wait. Auntie would surely come back with some bread and vinegar, tonight. "But... but... it still hurts in my tummy..." For the time being what she could do was to tighten the piece of garment wrapped around the boy's stomach, and she did. The starving duo went back to their own devices, enduring their pain. To read and to play.

But then, I knocked.

Knock, knock, knock.

Both of them froze for a moment, then. For the first half an hour after I first left, the trendy topic to gossip was about nonsensical theories they came up with about the intruder that came in the night. At some point, they just dropped the topic altogether as it caused them more anxiety than anything. Now, they were reminded of their game again. And who proposed a storyline in which the bad serial killer came to knock on their house again? Neither did.

The boy turned to his sister with a white, sunken face. All of a sudden, he had aged 10 years with his stress and seized his sister by her eye. Gloomily, he slowly shook his head at her. The lass herself wasn't unpanicked. Her throat cleared several times, then she let out a long, well-earned sigh. Because of her kid brother's reaction, she promptly picked up the frying pan next to her leg, with a grave expression.

I knocked a few more times, but now the boy's face suddenly lit up. This time, he grew 10 years back younger, had a healthy-red color to his face, and started, "Waaaw~ Just kiddin'! It's got to be auntie for real, this time—"

"Hush, now! Th-They don't have the keys...!"