Creak—
Evan pushed open the door to the captain's cabin. As he had expected, it was empty.
Tap... tap... tap...
Military boots rang crisply against the floorboards. Evan did not search the desk drawers or the locked wooden chests where treasure might obviously be hidden.
Instead, his gaze swept over a large wardrobe standing in the corner, and he walked straight toward it with an amused expression.
"I'll count to three. If you still don't come out, I'll shoot."
"One, two..."
"Don't shoot! Sir Navy, I surrender, I surrender!"
With a bang, the wardrobe door flew open from within, and a short, white-haired old man in robes tumbled out.
"Sir Navy, I'm not a pirate! I was forced! Please don't kill me!"
With white hair and beard and a robe draped over his body, he looked like some secluded master—at the very least, an old man on Gandalf's level. Seeing him sprawled on the floor and desperately begging for mercy struck Evan as profoundly out of place.
Hearing the old man's words, Evan glanced at the prompt that had appeared in Data Vision. A faintly amused curve touched his lips as he asked unhurriedly, "Is that so? If you're not a pirate, why were you hanging around with pirates?"
"Sir, I'm merely an ordinary scholar from the Sessaly Kingdom. While traveling through the New Continent, I was captured by that damned pirate captain, Skuk, and forced to manage his charts. I really am not a pirate!"
The old man's blue eyes darted about. He was clearly quick-witted, but before Evan, that cleverness had been used in the wrong place.
Evan could not see his exact thoughts.
But through Data Vision, Evan could judge whether he was lying from his breathing, heartbeat, and changes in his eyes. Besides, the Needletail Petrel