Ch. 244 All Today 2

Velmount Capital: Camp Nou

Velmount was located to the west of Artheris. The journey to its capital did not take particularly long, as the city was situated relatively close to the coastline.

And ever since Fury's "incident" back then, Camp Nou had been relocated another hundred kilometers inland, farther away from the sea.

Princess Nora looked at the back of the young man, Dan Burn, walking ahead of her.

What she was thinking about was the fact that this was a return to a place where Fury had once shared a history...

A bitter history, and one that was difficult to forget.

Princess Fiorentina led them aboard a tram that carried them into the capital, where towering black spires pierced the sky and thick fog created an eerie, imposing atmosphere.

"Let's get off."

Princess Fiorentina waved everyone over and paid the fare, signaling the tram conductor to stop and let them out.

Faint, pale lights pierced through the fog, illuminating the depths of the valley within Camp Nou.

The first thing that appeared before them was a weapon-forging foundry, where sparks flew from the blacksmith's hammer as he meticulously worked at his craft.

Further inside, they encountered similar establishments: shops selling combat equipment, weapons, and even things such as hair, fingernails, and sacrificial animals like black goats, rats, and wild boars.

Everything was arranged neatly and systematically.

It was nothing like a noisy, filthy open-air market. This place was regulated, maintained to a high standard...

And remarkably clean.

"Do you know why there are so many shops like these around here?"

"Because this is the bounty hunters' district, right?"

"Correct."

The place Princess Fiorentina had brought them to was none other than the headquarters of Velmount's Black Wheel Bounty Hunters' Guild.

There were numerous bounty hunter associations and organizations, much like different companies operating in the same industry. And naturally, this particular guild was filled with bounty hunters from every corner of the world.

There were affiliated bounty hunters, independent bounty hunters, and hired guns.

They had everything.

A gigantic board, stretching across an entire wall, displayed hundreds of job postings that were replaced and updated every day.

Some contracts came directly from the military, while others were posted by private individuals.

This was a mechanism actively supported by Velmount's central government. They could use this place to scout talented individuals for military recruitment or establish potential alliances.

Sometimes, when a mission was particularly dangerous and the government didn't want to risk its own personnel, they would simply put the job up on the board as well.

Many high-ranking generals of the Lone Star Army had climbed their way up from being bounty hunters themselves.

Even the late Sir Harry Kane had started out as a bounty hunter.

Dan Burn and his two students stood staring at the hundreds of bounty postings covering the wall.

He pointed upward.

"I used to have one up there."

"Really?"

"A long time ago."

"Where did it go now?"

"Probably crumpled up and thrown away."

Dan's gaze drifted away from the board and wandered across everything around him.

The buildings, the walls, the bricks, the lights...

It was as though he were replaying some kind of scene inside his head.

"Do you remember how much your bounty was back then?"

"I've forgotten."

"1,250,000 credits."

Vicky casually supplied the answer.

"You actually remember that?"

"I remember everything."

The people they had arranged to meet finally arrived.

Zeedee had undergone a rather noticeable transformation. Her hair had grown considerably longer, and her entire appearance had changed so much that she was almost unrecognizable from before.

But now...

She had officially become an independent bounty hunter in Velmount.

She wore a brown leather jacket and trousers, with metal balls and various bladed weapons hanging from her outfit.

"Lady Freya! It's been so long! Did you miss me?"

"sigh."

"I missed you too, Lady Freya."

(Her voice suddenly changing)

"Your Highness~! It's been such a loooong time! Have you gotten bigger since I last saw you~?"

She rushed over and hugged Dan before anyone else, completely ignoring Nora.

Another member of Fury's personal guard stepped forward.

The sound of iron cowboy-style boots striking the ground caught everyone's attention.

A woman dressed entirely in black leather, resembling a vampire hunter, approached them. Sharp metal chains were threaded through her belt, and a bandolier of firearm ammunition crossed her chest. Even her hat was made of black leather.

Valencia.

"Valencia... A pleasure to meet you... Your Highness..."

Her voice dragged on, sounding as though an old witch were living inside her throat.

Rafinya felt uneasy.

This was the first time she had ever met Valencia.

"Your students... have such... healthy, beautiful skin..."

Her deep red eyes shifted toward Rafinya, fixing on her as though she were about to drink her blood.

Unlike Princess Nora, who had visibly recoiled the first time she encountered Valencia, the young woman didn't immediately back away.

She simply looked disgusted by the woman's behavior.

"Valencia is now an A+ Rank Bounty Hunter."

"Oh? Really?"

Her name here was Vanginkel.

"I even... passed... the licensing exam..."

Nobody knew how she had managed to qualify for the examination, but a license was a license. As proof, she held out her bounty hunter permit for Nora to see.

Valencia had first appeared in Velmount under the identity of Vanginkel.

Taking advantage of the bounty hunter system, her background and personal history were never thoroughly investigated.

Her pale complexion led everyone to assume she came from Snowhaven. Meanwhile, her fiery red hair, tied back into a ponytail, had become her distinctive appearance, one that regular guild members had grown accustomed to seeing.

Valencia had begun building her reputation as Ms. Vanginkel ever since she was assigned to Velmount to hunt down Shadows on Fury's behalf.

She started with small contracts and gradually worked her way up to increasingly important assignments.

Her favorite jobs were those that required her to travel far away, into remote and isolated places where hardly anyone ventured...

For reasons no human could ever understand.

And she always returned with a 100% success rate.

Eventually, she began attracting considerable attention, whether the assignments involved hunting monsters, thieves, pirates, or murderers.

The name Vanginkel became increasingly famous.

Even so, she continued working alone and rejected every offer to join a team.

Aside from her striking appearance and impressive success rate, there was something else people often discussed.

The evidence Valencia brought to the guild to collect her rewards was...

rather disturbing.

For instance, on one occasion, she had dragged the entire corpse of a sailor into the guild to claim her bounty.

Although his identity could still be established because his face remained relatively undamaged, the rest of his body looked as though it had been ripped apart by some gigantic beast that had devoured his internal organs and drained every last drop of blood from him.

Almost every case in which she brought back a corpse looked like this.

A firearm shouldn't have been capable of doing something like that.

People speculated that Ms. Vanginkel must have been combining black magic with her knowledge of firearms...

But who really knew?

It's not as though she could transform into some enormous monster and eat them herself, right?

Fiorentina's Safe House; Somewhere in the Metropolis of Camp Nou, Velmount

"Let's get straight to the point. This is information gathered by the intelligence division in cooperation with Valencia. It's extremely reliable, and there's a very good chance we'll be able to capture some major Shadow figures if we strike here."

Vicky removed her hat.

"The place is Millwall."

Millwall was a city to the west of Velmount, bordering the sea.

In the past, this city had once served as the location of a major military base for the mighty Velmount army.

Even Nora and Rafinya had learned about this place since childhood.

But more importantly...

Millwall was the former Camp Nou.

"Why? What's there?"

There had been rumors circulating among bounty hunters about a mysterious client who went by the alias "Antlers."

This client frequently hired hunters for transportation escort missions.

Normally, such contracts should have compensation determined by the value of the goods being protected. The client was also expected to inform the hired hunters about the nature of the cargo they were assigned to guard.

But "Antlers" was a client who never disclosed what exactly the highly skilled bounty hunters were being hired to transport.

Instead, the client paid them in several grams of gold, immediately and without any conditions.

It was clearly intended to discourage them from asking too many questions.

This strange arrangement naturally made bounty hunters suspicious.

What could possibly be so valuable that the client was willing to pay in gold bars, with the single condition that nobody was allowed to pry into the matter?

Some believed this was simply an excessively generous client.

Others suspected the cargo must be some kind of illegal and extremely dangerous weapon.

Some even went so far as to speculate that the alias might belong to a foreign royal family.

But for Valencia...

The moment she saw that unusual method of payment, she immediately knew something was wrong.

By ordinary human standards, people would pay in credits instead.

But this client was paying in seemingly unlimited quantities of gold.

"The Shadows possess the art of alchemy. They can even turn ordinary dirt into gold using their own technology."

Princess Fiorentina's intelligence division had spent years tracking down the mysterious client known as "Antlers."

The frequency of contracts posted under that name had noticeably decreased over recent months.

Working alongside Valencia, she had managed to get an opportunity to accept one of the transportation escort contracts from this mysterious client.

The difficulty was that the client always hired bounty hunters in large groups, gathering as many as possible and forcing them to work together whether they liked it or not.

This severely restricted Valencia's movements, making it difficult for her to do anything that might attract attention.

But that didn't mean it was impossible.

She took advantage of a brief moment when everyone was resting to secretly inspect the cargo they had been assigned to protect.

The result left her astonished.

It consisted of animal bones.

Nobody could identify what kind of animals they belonged to...

There were so many of them.

But they were remarkably complete and clean skeletal remains, collected in such large quantities that she began to feel uneasy about what the client intended to do with them.

"They reminded me of... His Highness's Warehouse."

Valencia explained.

"I couldn't smell any blood. I knew immediately that these piles of bones were raw materials for something."

She managed to trace the shipments and discovered that the cargo from every single contract was being transported to one and the same destination.

That destination was Millwall.

There...

Deep inside an uninhabited forest, Valencia discovered that a group resembling some kind of cult was living in the area.

However, she couldn't get any closer.

Those people appeared to be exceptionally vigilant and cautious.

Nevertheless, there was something Valencia and Freya managed to observe while following them.

They were all members of a cult, and every single member had frightening tattoos on their bodies.

Thanks to Zeedee's keen senses, she could immediately tell...

This was the same group of people we encountered aboard Nora's train.

And most importantly...

They discovered pieces of gold scattered among the grass near the cult's dwelling.

"Their base is here. They have to be somewhere in this area."

Vicky used a red pen to mark out the area on the map for her elder brother.

"They're hiding in Millwall, and this is their main headquarters."

"We're going to storm the place and wipe them all out."