Menu

Recognizing Argo's voice, Moro figured there had been some progress in the intelligence work.

As for Argo's rather distinctive opening line, he could not be bothered to respond to it.

His silence made the call awkward for a moment.

Argo scratched her greasy hair and could only get straight to the point to break the silence.

"Big spender, you're in a very bad situation right now."

"I can see that."

Listening to Argo's warning, Moro lowered his head and glanced at the corpse beneath him.

The trip from Yorknew City to the outskirts took about an hour.

For Argo to gather such crucial intelligence within that time was enough to prove she was quite capable.

With that in mind, Moro shifted his gaze and quickly looked toward the road in the distance.

Following that road would lead into a wilderness.

The private shooting range he had bought was located in that wilderness.

But now, it seemed the range was probably no longer safe, so there was no point in going there again.

As for his daily training afterward...

He would have to find another way.

At first, Argo wondered how Moro could have "seen" it, but she quickly caught on.

"You were attacked?"

"Yes. You almost got to make twenty billion for nothing."

"That really is such a tra... Mm, no, I can't put it that way. If you died too cleanly, not only would this money burn a hole in my pocket, I might get dragged into it too."

Argo seriously refuted Moro's statement.

She had just taken on such a huge job, only for the client to die the moment he stepped out the door.

How was she supposed to keep doing business after that?

"Enough. Get to the point."

Moro wanted to see how much Argo had uncovered.

Hearing that, Argo immediately switched into work mode.

"The ones tracking you are the Gambino family and someone named Clyde. Big spender, you know about the Ten Dons, right?"

"I do."

Moro's gaze flickered slightly.

Argo continued, "Gambino is the surname of one of the Ten Dons."

"..."

Moro was somewhat surprised, but he quickly calmed down.

The Ten Dons—

The ten highest-ranking leaders of the world's mafia, each controlling the mafia forces in ten regions across the six continents. They were also the organizers of Yorknew City's grand annual auction.

If it was an enterprise belonging to one of the Ten Dons...

Then their ability to casually "issue" death certificates for others, as well as Molena's business dealings with them, made a little more sense.

Moro remembered that at the Yorknew auction three years later, Chrollo would hire Illumi to assassinate the Ten Dons.

To kill the Ten Dons, Illumi had specifically summoned the Zoldyck family's ancient ancestor.

And to find the location of the Ten Dons' gathering before the deadline, he had no choice but to enlist Kalluto, who possessed a person-finding ability.

From that alone, while there had been an element of racing against time, the fact that Illumi had summoned that old monster Maha was enough to show that the Ten Dons were not so easy to deal with.

Moro suddenly wondered whether Kalluto had already awakened his person-finding Nen ability by this point.

With Kalluto's ability to help, finding Feitan would not be difficult.

And Silva and Zeno of the Zoldyck family—he wondered if they accepted kidnapping commissions in addition to assassinations.

And speaking of finding people...

Palm's image flashed through Moro's mind.

Deep Sea Fish, her Conjuration specialization ability, was also an extremely useful person-finding ability.

He just did not know Palm's circumstances at this point in time. Besides, Palm's teacher, Nobunaga, was extremely wary of her using that ability.

Leaving aside how he would explain knowing about Palm's Deep Sea Fish ability, money alone would probably not be enough to pry Nobunaga's mouth open.

"However, according to what I've found, the Gambino family isn't directing this matter. It's Gambino's son, Nolan Gambino."

Argo's voice pulled Moro back from his thoughts.

The son of one of the Ten Dons...?

Moro paused slightly before hearing Argo continue.

"Using his father's influence, Nolan started a business called 'Menu' in areas protected by the Ten Dons' name."

"On the surface, it opens hospitals in various places. In secret, though, it engages in human trafficking."

"That so-called menu breaks down 'a person' into different commodities with transactional value."

"That way, buyers can choose whatever they need from the menu—organs, blood, things taken from the human body. Some buyers even purchase whole people to use in... experiments."

"With deals like this, matching criteria are the most important thing. And the clients this organization serves are no ordinary people."

At that point, Argo hesitated and slowed her speech.

"Big spender... If you don't have any conflict with Nolan, then the reason his men are tracking you—and may have already attacked you—is probably because you were 'matched.'"

"Is that so..."

Moro neither confirmed nor denied it.

At the start, it was most likely because some buyer needed something from his body that he had been forcibly added to the menu.

But tonight's attack...

It was probably no longer just about meeting a buyer's needs. They must have discovered that he had killed the cargo truck drivers.

Argo did not know about that, however, so she could only assume that some part of his body matched one of the buyers' requirements, which was why Nolan's men had come after him.

But there was a problem here—

Gale had helped settle those human cargo victims at the time. So even if Nolan investigated afterward and determined that Gale had not deliberately targeted the transport truck but had merely encountered it by chance...

Anyone with half a brain would not seek revenge against one of the Twelve Zodiacs over a truckload of human cargo.

After all, anyone capable of building a fringe business like Menu into something so large surely understood how to read the situation and would not sacrifice the greater for the lesser.

Unless the potential value of that truckload of human cargo was enough to make the people behind Menu refuse to let it go.

If that was really the case...

Then Nolan had likely first determined the relationship between Gale and the matter before feeling safe enough to continue tracking down the escaped human cargo victims.

Moro believed that Gale's accidental involvement was probably why Nolan had not traced the matter back to him right away.

Looking at it that way, once Nolan's men found the other human cargo victims, there was no way he could keep the fact that he had killed the two transport drivers hidden.

"Argo."

"Yeah?"

"Help me investigate something right now."

To confirm his suspicion, Moro needed to know the other human cargo victims' current situation.

He handed the matter over to Argo.

Ten minutes later.

Argo sent him a video.

Moro opened it.

Immediately, agonized screams blared from the phone's speakers and echoed across the plains.

It was footage of a living person being tortured.

Moro watched only briefly before silently closing the video.

The person being tortured in the footage was one of the human cargo victims who had been in the same transport truck as him.

Moro's expression remained blank, but when he turned his head and glanced at the back of Vaughn's head, now part of a corpse, his eyes became exceptionally cold.