Underworldly Dealings X

They brought all the bodies into a big empty house and out of the open. Kies watched as Falte went through each of them one by one, looting valuables and grabbing anything that looked important. Ammine and the other two demons went back to sleep right after the fight. Right now, it was just him and Falte. They had been planning to go through everything tomorrow morning but Falte couldn't fall back to sleep since he took a face-full of poison and was completely awake now.

"Not this. Not this either. Grrr..." Falte grumbled as he went through the bodies. "Hey, take a look at this." Falte threw a folded-up piece of paper at Kies. It landed on the floor in front of him with a soft clunk and he bent over and picked it up.

Kies unfolded the paper to see what it said but found that it was encoded. Instead of letters, everything was written in numbers. "It's encoded as well," he informed Falte.

"Again!? Ugh, should've kept one of these b*stards alive."

This wasn't the first message they found that was written in code. On the table behind Kies, there were five other letters just like the one they just found. And now it was six. Kies folded the paper back up and tossed it onto the table with the rest. After Falte finished going through all the bodies, he was planning to try to decipher them and figure out what they said.

"Nothing on this one either." Falte tossed another body into the pile on the left where all the bodies that he finished searching went. Kies was pretty sure that on average, each body weighed a decent amount, and yet the demon was throwing them like one would throw a ball. It was amazing how strong he was even though he looked so frail. Demons were really physically strong in general.

Kies watched Falte repeat the same process with the next body, then the next, and then the next. It went on for another twenty minutes until Falte finally finished going through the last body. "This one's dry too. Just another fodder I guess. Though... he did have this," Falte spun a silver chain around his index finger. "Quite ugly and not my style, but it should still fetch a pretty coin nevertheless."

"Now what do we do?" Kies asked. He was a little restless after having to sit by and do nothing and watched Falte search each and every body.

"Carry all that back of course," Falte pointed at the things behind Kies on the floor and on the table like it was obvious.

"All of this?"

"Yes, all of that. They're all useful things. Though don't those bottles. I'll handle them. Don't want you poisoning yourself," he told Kies. There were several bottles containing liquids of various colors and all of them were poisonous according to Falte. "Actually, can you even get poisoned? Does it have any effect on you?"

"Um... I don't think so, but let's not find out." Kies didn't want to be a test dummy and in the case that poison did still affect him, he didn't want to find out right now, or ever, as a matter of fact. Speaking of which, how did Falte survive the poison from before? He was an assassin so he worked with it but that didn't mean he was immune to it, right? He should at the very least have gotten poisoned.

Kies asked the demon about this and he responded with, "That poisonous gas never touched me for your information. As for how? That's a secret. Can't go around giving all my tricks away now can I?" Falte smiled and pointed at one of the bottles and said, "But if you can identify what's inside that bottle, I'll tell you."

Falte was going to play this game again. Kies went over to the bottle and peered inside it. It was a black liquid that filled the container up to the brim. If Kies remembered right, every single of the bodies had a small sack of this in their mouths. It was likely poison for them to kill themselves if they ever got caught to prevent any of them from revealing anything.

"It's poison," Kies stated the obvious.

"Of course it is... What I'm trying to ask is if you could figure out the name of the poison."

"No." Kies knew nothing about poison, so how was Falte going to expect him to answer that question. He really thought that the demon would tell him about how he survived the poison, but apparently, he wasn't planning to.

"Well, at the very least, can you guess what it does?"

"It kills you," Kies stated the obvious again.

"..."

Falte was not amused with Kies' answer. "Of course it kills you. What kind of poison doesn't kill you? I mean, there are poisons that don't kill, but what use are they other than for torturing?" The demon gave up and walked past Kies and picked up a couple of bottles of poison and brought it back to the other house. "Let's just get this done already," he sighed.

Kies went over to the table and picked up all the folded papers along with a bag of coins and jewelry that Falte had plundered from the poor assassins and carried them back to the house. He made several trips back and forth and eventually moved everything of value to their base.

The loot took up half of the room and there was now hardly any space for them to put their feet. But Falte didn't seem to mind that. The demon laid down on the bed and took the encoded messages and began deciphering them. While he did that, Kies went outside the house as there was much more space outside than there was inside, and sat down. After not even sitting for a second, he got back up and changed his mind.

Kies called upon the winds to assist him and climbed back up to the roof where he had been before all of this had happened and sat down. The house creaked under his weight and it sounded like it might fall over at any moment but it was surprisingly a lot more sturdy than it looked. He estimated that the roof could probably hold ten of him before it caved in from the weight.

A few minutes went by and Falte called Kies back down. "I finished decoding them," he told him. That was quick. Kies slid down the roof and went back into the house to find Falte with a conflicted look on his face.

"What does it say?" he asked.

Falte scratched his chin. "Well... There's good news and bad news. Which one do you want to hear first."

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