The capital of the Oykot Kingdom, at the residence of Ali, leader of the Salt Gang.
Gold-inlaid candlesticks cast a flickering yellow glow, making the mounted heads of wild beasts hanging on the secret chamber's walls look even more ferocious.
Ali sat in a broad sandalwood armchair, his knuckles unconsciously tapping its smooth armrest with dull thuds.
Before him, the trusted subordinate he had sent to watch Hamlet Fishing Village stood hunched over, incoherently describing a sight he had witnessed not long ago, something that could overturn an ordinary person's understanding of the world.
"...He s-suddenly appeared! That Armored Man, without any warning, like-like he'd stepped out of thin air! He stood right between the bandits and our fishermen... Then he just... took one look! Really, sir, just one look!"
The subordinate's face was deathly pale, cold sweat pouring down his forehead, as though remembering it was torture in itself. "Then... then the bandits charging at the front, forty or fifty of them, didn't even make a sound. A line of blood appeared around all their waists... and their upper bodies just-just slid off! The ground was covered in... guts, blood... The ones behind them were so terrified they collapsed, pissing and shitting themselves..."
At first, Ali did not even react, as though his brain refused to process such absurd information.
Only when his subordinate's terror gradually slowed his speech, and he repeated the central fact-"one look killed forty or fifty bandits"-several times in increasingly blunt, disjointed words, his voice thick with tears, did Ali's well-maintained round face, usually wearing a shrewd smile, slowly darken. It became like leaden clouds before a downpour, so sinister it could have dripped water.
He waved a hand, cutting off his subordinate's trembling additions, and said hoarsely, "Tell me again, from beginning to end.