bookbashuk Chapter 110 : Chapter 110
Chapter 110 : Chapter 110
Chapter 110. Immediate Execution by Hanging
“Weren’t you all having a great time just now? Talking about how ‘Cicero would become a corpse,’ and how ‘the Northern Territory would still be yours to command.’”
She blew away the nail dust, lifted her eyelids, and looked at them with eyes full of mockery.
“Come on. Say it again to my face.”
The entire room fell into deathly silence.
The nobles who had just been shouting about purging the ruler’s side were now trembling like sieves.
Baron Kyle swallowed hard and forced himself to maintain the last scraps of so-called noble dignity.
With nothing but bluster left, he pointed at Esmeralda.
“Y-you have some nerve! I am a hereditary baron! I am a noble! You do not have a warrant. You cannot trespass and arrest me like this—”
Pfft.
Esmeralda could not help laughing.
She stood up and walked over to Baron Kyle.
He was so frightened that he stumbled backward again and again, only to step into empty air and fall straight off the table, landing face-first on the ground.
“A warrant?”
Esmeralda pulled a pale blue stone from her waist.
It was a sound-recording stone.
And not just any version.
It was the high-sensitivity model improved by Professor Logaris West.
Not only could it record them shouting in a cellar, it could probably even capture a fart under a blanket with perfect clarity.
She lightly tapped it with her finger.
Bzzz—
That familiar voice echoed through the cellar once more.
“As long as Cicero dies… there will be no one left to help Her Highness draft those damned laws…”
“Everyone, bleed a little… kill without leaving a trace…”
Every sentence.
Every single word.
All of it was perfectly clear.
It was Baron Kyle’s bold and heroic speech from just moments ago.
Even the cheers from the nobles below had been recorded as well.
The nobles who had still been clinging to a shred of hope heard the recording, and their expressions instantly turned ashen.
It was the color of utter despair.
This was ironclad evidence.
There was no way to deny it.
“Th-this is forged! This is slander!” Baron Kyle collapsed on the floor and made his final struggle.
Esmeralda put away the sound-recording stone.
She no longer had any interest in toying with them.
“I never intended to reason with you anyway.”
She waved her hand.
“Take them all away.”
The moment the order fell, the Shadow Guard, who had long been poised to strike, charged in like wolves pouncing on prey.
These pampered lords, who normally lived in luxury and could barely even hold a sword properly, were more fragile than newborn chicks before the well-trained Shadow Guard.
“Do not hit my face! I am a viscount!”
“Ow! My leg!”
“Spare me! I only came to watch! I did not contribute any money!”
Screams and pleas for mercy rose one after another.
But the Shadow Guard paid them no attention.
There was no interrogation.
No pointless talk.
Every one of them was roughly pinned to the ground and bound hand and foot in specially made Anti-Magic shackles.
A few minutes later.
The dozens of great nobles who had looked so proper just moments before were now chained together like livestock awaiting slaughter and dragged straight out of the cellar.
Baron Kyle got the worst of it.
Because he had resisted the hardest and would not stop cursing, the Shadow Guard had given him special attention.
His jaw had already been dislocated.
Now he could only drool from the side of his twisted mouth, unable to speak at all.
Outside, deep drag marks were left across the snow.
…
The next morning.
Central Plaza, Winter City.
The sky had only just begun to brighten, yet the plaza was already packed with people.
The news had spread even faster than the wind.
It was said that a whole group of great lords had been arrested last night for plotting rebellion.
For commoners, this was the sort of earth-shattering news one might see only once in a hundred years.
Standing on the platform at the center of the plaza was Cicero.
Today, he had deliberately changed into an even sharper black formal suit.
A golden badge representing the Chief Judicial Officer was pinned to his chest, making him look solemn and imposing.
Behind him, thirty-seven nobles knelt in the snow.
They had already been left freezing there for an entire night.
Their faces were bluish with cold, their eyebrows covered in frost, and there was not a trace left of their usual arrogance in their shivering forms.
“Citizens of Winter City.”
Cicero’s voice spread clearly through the entire plaza by means of Amplification Spellwork.
He did not use obscure legal terminology.
He knew perfectly well that the common people below did not understand that sort of thing, nor did they want to hear it.
“Something very interesting happened last night.”
Cicero pointed at the group kneeling behind him.
“These lords, who normally hold themselves high above everyone else, gathered together for a meeting because they were dissatisfied with what I have done.”
“They believed that I, Cicero, had blocked their source of wealth. They believed that as long as they killed me, the money I had taken back from them and handed over to city hall for roads and schools would flow back into their own pockets.”
The crowd below began to stir.
Cicero paused, then took out the sound-recording stone.
“Words alone prove nothing. Let us hear these lords’ true thoughts for ourselves.”
That recording rang out across the plaza once again.
When the lines “That Cicero is a devil,” and “As long as he dies, the Northern Territory will still be ours to command,” reached the crowd—
The entire plaza exploded.
It truly exploded.
Everyone knew what Cicero had been doing these past few days.
The baron who had crippled a commoner with a kick and been fined into ruin.
The viscount who had seized a common girl by force and been arrested.
Those incidents had already made the common people regard him as a just and upright official.
And now these vampires actually wanted to kill him?
They wanted to kill the only official willing to speak for the poor?
“Animals!”
No one knew who shouted it first.
But the next instant, the crowd’s fury surged like a flood bursting through a dam and drowned all reason.
“Kill them!”
“These bastards still want to stand on our heads!”
“Beat them to death! Protect Lord Cicero!”
Rotten vegetables, foul eggs, and even snowballs mixed with stones rained down upon the platform.
The kneeling nobles were struck until their heads bled.
Terrified, they curled themselves into balls and cried for their fathers and mothers.
They could not understand it.
These lowborn wretches, who normally lowered their heads and bent their backs whenever they saw them, who did not even dare breathe loudly in their presence—how did they dare treat them like this today?
The times had truly changed.
Cicero looked at the furious crowd with a cold gaze.
This was public sentiment.
And it was exactly what Sylvia and Logaris West wanted.
Once this fire was lit, no old force would be able to stop it.
He raised a hand and pressed it downward.
The plaza fell silent at once.
Everyone stared at him eagerly, waiting for his judgment.
Cicero turned and looked at Baron Kyle, who was still drooling.
“According to the Northern Territory Special Public Order Act and the Regulations on the Crime of Treason.”
Cicero took out a verdict that had already been written in advance.
The paper snapped noisily in the cold wind.
“The defendants Kyle von Griffin and thirty-six others organized and plotted the murder of high-ranking officials of the kingdom, with the intent to overthrow the current regime. The facts are clear, and the evidence is conclusive.”
“The sentence is as follows.”
Cicero took a deep breath and spoke that blood-soaked phrase.
“All are sentenced to immediate execution by hanging.”
“The sentence will be carried out at once.”
The moment his words fell, a row of enormous wooden gallows that had already been erected at one side of the plaza came into full focus.
Thirty-seven coarse hemp ropes hung down like the mouths of venomous snakes waiting to strike.
Several burly executioners stepped forward and dragged the nobles, whose legs had gone too weak to stand, onto the trapdoors as roughly as if they were hauling slaughter-bound poultry.
No matter how they cried or begged for mercy, the cold, coarse hemp ropes were still mercilessly slipped around the necks that were usually wrapped only in silk cravats.
Because Baron Kyle’s jaw was dislocated, he could not make a sound.
He could only twist his obese body frantically, his eyes bulging as though they were about to burst from their sockets, while tears and snot smeared across his distorted face.
He was unwilling to accept it.
He still had gold hidden in secret compartments in his cellar.
He still had connections he had not yet called upon.
He was a noble baron.
How could he be hanged before these mud-legged peasants like the lowest kind of thief, dangling there like a strip of cured meat?
Unfortunately, no one cared what a fat pig awaiting slaughter thought anymore.
Thud!
Cicero’s heavy strike fell like a funeral bell.
“Carry out the execution.”
Clang!
All thirty-seven trapdoors were released at the same time.
Those unsupported bodies dropped instantly, only to be jerked to a stop in midair by the ropes.
Crack—crack—crack—
The brittle series of neck bones snapping under their own weight sounded in rapid succession, as dense as festival firecrackers.
Reflexes of the nervous system made all thirty-seven bodies convulse and spasm violently in the air.
Their feet kicked wildly at empty space, as if performing the final absurd and grotesque tap dance of their lives.
The cold wind howled past.
Gradually, the struggling stopped.
In the air above the plaza, only thirty-seven corpses remained, swaying gently in the wind.
If one ignored the twisted expressions on their faces, the row of hanging bodies, swaying one after another in the wind, carried a strangely eerie sort of childish harmony from a distance.
They looked almost like a line of oversized weather dolls hung up in prayer for the Northern Territory’s cursed blizzards to end at last.
Only these dolls had been made from noble lives.
The plaza fell into dead silence.
Then, a deafening roar of cheers erupted.
The sound shot into the sky, louder and more fervent than any grand celebration.
For that one moment, even the bitter, knife-like wind of winter seemed to turn warm.