As I kept the shop’s owner stuck to the counter with gravity magic, I asked him again for information on Abel’s mother, and just as his bones were close to cracking, the man began speaking.
"Look... kid... I can’t talk, or we all die... You understand!?" he said in between his struggles.
"You are gonna die now if you don’t talk. Let’s make a gamble..." I said, releasing the gravity spell from the man and allowing him to sit up straight.
"You tell what I want to know, and I promise nothing bad will happen to anyone in here. But if you don’t tell anything, well..." I said with a serious tone.
"Fine... I get it, kid. You are powerful..." said the shop owner as he fixed his jacket that had been slightly folded by my magic.
The shop owner’s na was Erden, and he explained that the day Livia disappeared, he had heard a commotion as soon as she left the store, but when he went out to check, he only saw a hooded man.
"The Sand Cobras strike and nobody sees. Is that right, old man?" said the man with the white robe as he turned to look at Erden.
Erden told that the "Sand Cobras" used to be a myth among their nation where people talked about a group of bandits that were so secretive and so powerful that they could commit cris and nobody would notice.
It made sense why there were no districts that seed the most affected by bandits like in the empire, so I thought these guys were smarter simply by the way they were doing things.
The Crimson Scorpions at the Droman Empire ended up destroying so districts so severely that it was impossible for the empress not to pay attention to them. In fact, it was the sa reason I found them so quickly.
However, the Sand Cobras seed to target certain people instead of entire districts, which made their group harder to locate since I didn’t know where they would attack next.
Erden knew that what he heard the hooded man saying was a threat, basically telling him that he had seen nothing or he would be killed.
Right as he said that, I used my search spell and felt a person standing right next to the shop on the outside.
’He was right. Soone is tailing him right now...’ I thought, slowly walking towards the wall.
I could feel the person standing on the other side of the wall, but if I left the shop, he would probably flee before I could look at them, so I had a different strategy in mind.
Covering my arms with MP, I used earth magic to drive my hands through the wall and grabbed the person by the arms, opened a hole, and pulled them inside the shop before promptly fixing the wall again.
It was a man wearing a white hood like the one Erden had described, which made glad that I had grabbed the right person and not a random dude walking by.
Erden and the won were scared, not only after seeing pull a person through a wall but because of the outfit he was wearing.
Apparently, the people in the capital knew not to ss with anyone wearing these clothes as it could bring misery to them and their families.
The hooded man didn’t say a word. Even after being surprised at getting pulled inside out of nowhere, he kept his composure as I held him down on the ground.
"So, are you from the Sand Cobras?" I asked, placing my bo against his neck.
However, the man didn’t say a word and bit his lips as if trying to keep himself silent.
I grabbed the man’s cheek and turned his face to the side, giving a clear view of his neck, and noticed the flower tattoo of the curses that the bandits at Droman had.
"Another cursed group of bandits..." I muttered, pulling out a holy panacea from my void pocket and feeding it to the man.
As the flower tattoo disappeared, I told the man that he was able to speak and suddenly started to blabber all about the Sand Cobras.
He said that people were being taken and were either cursed to work for them or sold as slaves to other nations, which was pretty much the sa situation as in the Droman capital.
The country of Aridonia didn’t have noble families or anything similar to it. The only family that was considered above the others was the royal lineage. The rest of the social classes were based on people’s inco.
A wealthy rchant in Aridonia would have a lot more influence than a middle-class worker, but in countries like the Droman Empire or the Sephyr Kingdom, being a noble would put them above any commoner rchant, no matter how wealthy they were.
The bandit told that the leader of the Sand Cobras was a wealthy man nad "Caleb," who worked as a doctor.
Unfortunately, Erden and his workers had heard everything, so now they were in danger of getting assassinated since they knew the identity of the boss.
Nonetheless, one of the workers stepped up while trembling, saying that Caleb was the doctor who was Livia’s boss.
’So, the doctor kidnapped his own assistant and his wife?’ I pondered before asking for directions to both the mansion and the hospital where Caleb worked.
Now that Erden, the workers, and the bandit were in trouble, I told them to co with so that my companions and I could protect them, and they agreed as they had no other choice.
The problem was that I didn’t have a safe place to take them. In the Droman capital, we found an abandoned house that was inconspicuous enough not to catch attention, but we were staying at the inn in Aridonia, so I had to think of another way to keep them safe.
For the ti being, I took them with to my inn room and waited for my companions to return and share our gathered information.
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