Chapter 699 — The Unshakable "Tenant"
Blade of Dawn · Page 2 of 5
This was a fellow to watch carefully. After all, he was still drunk, and there was no telling when he might mistake a guard coming to inspect the cells for another duelist and send an arcane missile his way too.
The "tenant" in the second room on the right had been here quite a while: a druid of unknown origins, locked up for unlicensed spellcasting and illegal entry. In Maximilian's eyes, this taciturn druid was a somewhat "safer" sort, gloomy temperament notwithstanding.
After confirming that the drunken arcanist was still raving, Maximilian went straight to the cell of the druid named "Badwindel" and rapped his baton on the alloy bars inlaid with magic-conducting material. "Hey, inspection time."
In the tiny cell, a middle-aged man in a gray-white prison uniform sat on his bunk with his back to the door. Hearing the noise behind him, he stirred his arm and said without turning his head: "Hold on, I'm just about to solve this one."
"...Ha, you really have made yourself at home," Maximilian said, half angry, half amused. "I never should have gotten you a math textbook to pass the time—just look at what you've drawn all over the walls!"
In the tiny cell, almost every wall and stretch of floor had been covered in a dizzying array of numbers and symbols, along with improvised poems and short phrases—a lively sight indeed. Scribbling on cell walls could be called a "cherished hobby" of many prisoners, and the guards had always turned a blind eye to it, but this was genuinely the first time Maximilian had seen anyone write two whole walls' worth of equation systems and verse. This was truly the most peculiar prisoner he had ever met.
Maximilian, who had once spent a short time as a knight's apprentice, could read, but what that Bad on the walls had written was still beyond his understanding. He could only judge by instinct that the prisoner in there must have some background—though what superhuman didn't?
Inside the cell, Bad on his bunk finally finished solving his equation. The middle-aged man with the scruffy beard and hair stood up, setting down the scratch paper and pen in his hands as he said: "Don't worry, sir, I'll wipe it all off myself afterward."
"Of course you'll wipe it off—because you'll be writing new equations!" Maximilian glared at Bad through the bars. "I came to inform you that your detention period is up again. You can leave tomorrow. Once you're out, go to the Administrative Hall right away and register for a population transfer..."
The warden was barely halfway through when he saw Bad in the cell casually fish a small, hard, secretly hoarded piece of flatbread out from under his pillow and fling it at the wall not far beyond the bars. With astonishing wrist strength, the scrap of bread struck the wall like a stone shot; a layer of protective light rippled across the surface, and an alarm immediately began to sound...
Maximilian and the two guards, who had just walked in, had no time to stop him.
"Damn it! You can't keep using this trick to extend your detention every time!" Maximilian shouted furiously. "This is a prison, not a hotel where you can keep extending your stay day after day! Do you even hear—what are you two standing there for? Go turn off that blasted alarm!"
The two guards rushed off in a fluster to silence the alarm, while the drunken arcanist in a nearby cell began raving loudly. Bad, in his cell, shrugged at Maximilian: "It's nice here. I'm not going anywhere."
"Next time I'm going to search every last thing in your cell—your pen and your flatbread, I'm taking them all," Maximilian said angrily. "Then we'll see how you cause trouble."
Bad thought it over, then said quite seriously: "I'm not a frail mage. I could set off the alarm with a booger if I wanted."
Maximilian: "..."