The corner of his mouth twitched wildly, but he instantly seized on the most critical flaw. His expression turned deadly serious as he stared at Rimuru floating in the air.
"Then let me ask you one thing."
Eddie stood up. Though his body was still weak, he straightened his back, his sense of justice and a reporter's stubbornness coming to the fore.
"How is what you're doing now any different from Carlton Drake?"
The words rang out, instantly wiping away the room's lighthearted, goofy atmosphere.
Rimuru paused, surprised that he had brought the issue into the open so directly.
Eddie grew more adamant as he spoke, his tone increasingly grave.
"Why does Drake deserve to die?"
"He claims science comes first and treats human lives as expendable. He takes homeless people and people from the bottom of society, forcibly bonds them with Symbiotes, experiments on them alive and tortures them at will. For the sake of his technology and his ambition, he disregards all life."
"What about you?"
Eddie stared at Rimuru, his gaze sharp as a knife:
"You're also planning to capture Symbiotes and use living aliens as experimental material, for your technology, your armor and the bottleneck in your cultivation."
"You won't let Drake experiment on humans, but then you turn around and experiment on Symbiotes yourself?"
"Isn't that a blatant double standard?"
"What exactly is the difference between you and him?"
The air fell deathly silent.
Even Venom immediately shut up inside Eddie, not daring to make a peep.
[...]
[Could you not be so confrontational? We're not going to die here today, are we?]
Venom cowered deep inside Eddie's cells, trembling and not daring to interrupt.
He understood human speech and instantly realized something.
The gentle big shot who had given him chocolate was actually planning