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Chapter 360c
🕑 Added 2025-08-23 15:00:14 +0000 UTCChapter 360c
2-in-1-chapter
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Leo didn’t explain further. The man didn’t ask. He simply nodded, then waved his hand.
He and his people turned and walked away, leaving Big Goldtooth staring, dumbstruck.
“Wait! Wait! Hey! Aren’t you supposed to be international relief? Why are you walking away?!”
Leo crouched down beside him, the smile on his face like something infernal.
“They are relief workers, yes. But they’re not idiots. Why should they waste sympathy on you? If the roles were reversed, and it was them lying here, would you have spared them?”
He leaned closer, his tone cutting. “If you’re not a fool, why treat others as fools?”
“Now then, it’s just us here. We can have a proper talk. Tell me, do you really want to drag this out all night, or would you rather confess quickly and have me grant you a death without pain?”
“Fair warning: I never studied anatomy. My hand might not be steady. I’ll try to keep you alive until morning, but it’ll hurt. Still, I think I’m generous, don’t you? Generous enough to make you cry with gratitude.”
Leo’s grin stretched wider, inch by inch.
Big Goldtooth broke.
Even with V’s boot crushing him and the cold barrel pressed into his face, he writhed on the ground in sheer panic.
“No! Don’t! Please, don’t do that! I’ll talk! I’ll tell you everything!”
“Then speak quickly. No nonsense. First, tell us why you were chasing us.”
“Because someone in your group is our target.”
“Who is the target?”
“The biological son of the President of Bolivia.”
Leo, V, and Lucy exchanged a glance.
“The President’s son?”
Leo thought it through. The three bodyguards working for the arms dealer could not possibly be the President’s son. The members of the international aid organization were all Westerners—Europeans and Americans—not likely either. That left only one possibility: the civilians who had been arrested along with the aid workers.
“So you were pursuing us just because you wanted the President’s son dead?”
“No, no,” the thug with the gold teeth shook his head frantically. “Of course not. We wanted to capture him alive, to force the President to step down.”
“You really expect the President to give up his power over his son?”
“Don’t underestimate the bond. The President treasures this boy. He’s the only son he has, and it’s said he would do anything for him.”
The thug continued, “From our intel, the ones guarding him weren’t elite soldiers. Just some aid workers, six mercs, and a businessman. Two of the mercs were women. We never expected you all to be so… capable.”
Leo narrowed his eyes, his mind quickly combing through memory. His recall had always been sharp, and since coming into this world it had only grown keener.
In the group of civilians, he remembered a boy, around his teenage years, dressed in the same dirt-stained clothes as the others. But unlike the rest, the brand of his clothing had been an international luxury label. At the time, Leo had noticed the detail but paid it no mind. A child’s clothes had nothing to do with him.
Now, listening to the confession, it fit too neatly. That boy was almost certainly the President’s son. And even if it turned out otherwise, asking a few careful questions later would bring the truth to light.
“Is that all? Don’t drag it out. Tell me how you knew where we were, who tipped you off.”
The thug answered, “We planted two moles near the President. One acted as a dull, slow-minded man—people thought he was just simple and honest. The other pretended to support all of the President’s policies, but secretly fed the son ideas of peace, of rejecting war. It was his influence that drove the boy to flee the capital.”
Leo frowned. “And the President never noticed his son’s change?”
“Our man told him to keep up the appearance of normalcy in front of his father.” The thug sneered. “Don’t act surprised. If the boy wasn’t already a weak idealist, how could we have brainwashed him so easily?”
Leo could hardly fathom it. In a country riven by conflict and collapsing governance, how could the President’s son be so soft? Weakness meant death, plain and simple. Worse still, he had let himself be convinced to run away from the capital under enemy manipulation.
But then again, Leo knew the world was filled with all kinds of people. Diversity meant there would always be those whose choices defied reason to outsiders, but seemed perfectly rational to themselves and their followers.
The thug went on. “When our men caught him outside the capital, he realized quickly that the one who urged him to leave had been working with us all along. That mole dropped the act, but the other—the one who played the simpleton—stayed at his side, feeding us signals.”
“That’s everything. Now end it. No torture. Just kill me.”
He wasn’t a fool. He didn’t beg for his life, knowing Leo’s group wasn’t the merciful kind. All he wanted was a quick death. Growing up in a war-torn country, he had never known peace, and to him, dying quickly was better than dragging it out.
Leo gave V a nod.
Without a word, she pulled the trigger.
Bang!
At point-blank range, the kinetic sniper round punched a hole through the thug’s skull. His body convulsed once, then went slack as the light vanished from his eyes.
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When they regrouped with the international aid workers and the civilians who had been moved earlier, Leo relayed what the thug had confessed. He explained what he intended to do next and asked them to cooperate.
Then he led them directly to the civilians. It took little effort to identify the President’s son and the mole planted beside him.
“You’re Diego Castillo, son of President Antón Castillo?”
Leo looked at the boy in front of him. The youth’s features were fine, his expression visibly nervous. His eyes darted sideways instinctively, but he didn’t speak.
At that moment, one of the supposed civilians—actually the mole—stepped forward. He said nothing, only positioned himself in front of the boy protectively.
Leo activated his tactical goggles and scanned him.
He had no intention of trusting the thug’s words blindly. If this had been a ploy of misdirection, accepting it at face value would have been a fatal mistake.
But the scan confirmed it. The gold-toothed thug had spoken the truth.
There was no attempt to play games with Leo.
Perhaps it was as people said, that one’s words softened when death approached. Or perhaps the man with the gold tooth was simply afraid that lying would earn him a more painful death.
Now, standing in front of Leo, the one who had been shielding Diego Castillo truly was a plant embedded by the anti-government guerrillas.
How did Leo know? The explanation was simple. His tactical goggles showed that the man had a tracker implanted in his body. He was the one who had drawn the guerrillas here.
“So it was you who brought them down on us. Take him away.”
“What?”
Before the man could even react, the international relief organization’s operatives who were standing to Leo’s left and right surged forward and pinned him down.
The man tried to resist, but after several strikes from rifle butts to his face and head and a few solid kicks to his stomach, he went limp and quiet.
Dragged off like a dead dog, he was hauled away by the relief operatives.
Watching this, Leo suddenly understood why, in European and American fantasy stories, priests were often depicted as hammer-wielding, armored warriors. Whoever said a healer could not hit people had clearly been locked inside stereotypes.
Diego—the son of the president—watched his supposed trusted follower being beaten down and tried to step forward to stop it, but a middle-aged white man caught him from behind and restrained him.
At Leo’s signal, Lucy played back the recording of what the man with the gold tooth had said before his death.
Leo, V, and Lucy had heard the words with their own ears, and the relief operatives had been briefed before they came here. Only Diego was hearing it for the first time.
When the boy had finished listening—especially to the part that revealed how the trusted confidant who had always stood by him had in fact been a guerrilla plant, using him as nothing more than leverage—he stopped struggling.
His eyes, full of betrayal, fixed on the man who was now held down by the relief operatives.
The man, realizing his position after hearing the recording, thrashed even more violently.
“Drag him farther away and then…”
Because there were still children and civilians present, Leo did not allow the man to be executed in front of everyone. He told them to drag him out of sight. There was no need to finish the sentence—everyone knew what it meant.
“Fine, you win. As you expected, I am Diego Castillo. Anton Castillo, the president of Bolivia, is my father.”
The boy clenched his fists, his brow furrowing, his face taking on a serious expression.
“But if you think you can get something from me, then you are sorely mistaken.”
Leo shook his head. “No. I do not want anything from you. All I wanted was to root out the infiltrator beside you, so that he would not interfere with me.”
“Really?”
Diego did not want to believe it. Since childhood, everyone who had drawn near him—except his father—had done so with ulterior motives, all of them hoping to use him to reach the president and gain benefits.
Even the two people he had trusted the most had betrayed him, one after another.
So how could he believe that Leo was truly different?
But the fact was, Leo only smiled without a word.
He left Diego with nothing but his back as he turned and walked away.
Diego froze. Leo’s actions were not calculated restraint—they were genuine disinterest in using him.
Leo went on to assign people for night watch and sentries, urging everyone else to rest, as they would need to rise early and continue their march the next morning.
Even though the area was not far from the battlefield, the guerrillas also needed to rest at night, especially now that the pursuers had been wiped out.
