"Mr. Oran! I'm here to pick you up!"
Shak ran over from the side, waving his arms, his voice still carrying the same delight it had a month ago.
"How did you get those injuries?"
Shak had more than one wound. Aside from a scrape on his arm, the rest were bruises—clear signs of a fight.
Oran knew that quite a few people on Merfolk Island were not friendly toward humans.
Hody Jones and his group in the original timeline were exactly that kind of people. Arlong at least knew to look after his own kind, but Hody Jones had gone so far off the deep end that he could kill even his fellow fish-men without hesitation.
If Shak's injuries had been inflicted by people like that, Oran would have to find a way to deal with them. Otherwise, they would become a problem sooner or later.
"It's nothing serious. I got into a fight with a group of human traffickers earlier. Fortunately, we won in the end."
Merfolk Island did not simply refuse to fight back against human traffickers. It was just that some pirates were too strong to defeat, and some traffickers were fish-men themselves.
Not everyone would stand by and watch their kin get abducted, especially those who had suffered such painful experiences before.
"What do human traffickers do? Do they sell people?"
"That's right. They tear people away from their families. They're utterly beyond saving. Anyone who does that deserves to be hanged."
It was the first time Lyliana had heard the term, and she could sense the intense disgust in Oran's answer.
Lyliana understood what it meant to take someone away from their family. Based on that description alone, she had already put that entire group on her list of bad people.
"Eh, this is...?"