Around a month later, after the alliance with benefits between Kars and Mei Mei was formed, the outer district of Jinkai City in the morning could be seen visibly bustling with activities like usual, as many travelers and merchants flow through the streets of Jinkai, bringing in goods, gold, and people to feed the insatiable beast that is the mercantile city-state.
In the shabby tavern, somewhere tucked between a rundown brothel and an abandoned church, the scent of cheap ale and unwashed bodies fills the air of the building interior as the drunkards and gamblers gather around tables, laughing, shouting, and drinking as they throw dice on the wooden tabletops to gamble their money away despite the sun still being up in the sky.
While the people were enjoying themselves, the tavern door suddenly groaned as a tall, cloaked figure shoved it open, letting in daylight that lit up the interior briefly, causing all heads to turn to the figure, not because cloaked figures were unusual, but because this one gave off such an obviously dangerous feeling that even the loudmouth drunkards became quiet.
The cloaked figure paused just inside the threshold of the tavern, ignoring all stares as they scanned the room before spotting what they were looking for and striding toward the farthest corner, where a wimpy-looking man with an ape-like face and short brown hair in dark brown leather armor hunched over an empty mug at the table while the other people in the tavern turned away from the cloaked figure and got back to what they were doing previously but a little quieter this time.
The cloaked figure arrived at the table and unceremoniously slid into the seat opposite the wimpy man without invitation, placing their arm in a loose black sleeve and a hand in a black, fingerless glove on the tabletop, making the ape-faced man flinch at the sudden company as he looked up from his mug.
"You—you're quite early..." he stammered, eyes darting to the cloaked figure's face under the brown hood with recognition even though he only saw the lower half of the familiar face with dark skin, a scar on their left cheek, and long gray hair.
"You got my message, then?" The ape-faced man swallowed hard, his right leg nervously shaking from habit, and his voice cracked slightly as he glanced around the tavern, ensuring no one was listening to them too closely.
"You know that I can't read," the cloaked figure said with their voice deep but unexpectedly feminine, and then they pulled off their hood, finally revealing a frowning woman with grey feline ears on top of her head, a reddish-brown left eye, and a white eyepatch on her right eye underneath her bangs. "You're lucky that there is someone nearby to read it for me..."
"Ah shit, I forgot... my bad," the ape-faced man winced as he had forgotten that the woman in front of him is not literate to read or write, just like most people that can't afford to hire a teacher or go to school for such things. "Guess I'm too much in a hurry to reach you..."
"Hmhp..." With a huff, the feline woman's long feline tail flicked irritably beneath her cloak, but her face was not changing much as she leaned forward, her single eye narrowing at the ape-faced man who called her here.
"So what's this about this time, Saruda?" Her attitude toward the man who is her mercenary comrade was like that of a relative who got contracted by a troublesome cousin who is definitely going to beg her for money after a sob story. "Are you managing to get yourself in trouble again?"
"A-ahahaha, well, kinda, maybe, but we are comrades, so we must help each other, right?" Saruda starts to laugh with a forced jovial expression after the feline woman has already seen through him as he grabs a mug and raises it to his lips but remembers halfway through that it is empty, so he can only awkwardly put it back down on the table.
"Y-Yeah, you're right. I might be in a little trouble here..." Saruda admitted begrudgingly as his eyes moved between the feline woman's unimpressed expression and the tavern door as if expecting trouble to burst through any second.
"Look, Ghislaine, I swear that it's not my fault this time," Saruda said pleadingly, leaning in close towards the feline woman as his hand shoved inside a hidden pocket underneath his leather vest to grab something. "And you're the only one who can help me with this!"
"Cut the bullshit," Ghislaine cuts him off and gives Saruda a glare, her fingers tapping the table impatiently. "So who did you piss off? Another merc guild's captain? Another merchant's wife?"
"You better have a good reason this time." The feline woman huffs with an annoyed look, making Saruda avert his gaze from her, his throat bobbing as he swallows with some difficulty.
"Worse," he whispered with a dread in his voice as he was finally going to reveal what was going on with him. "It's the Blood Fund..."
"The what...?" Ghislaine's single eye widened before she frowned hard. The tavern noise faded into distant murmurs as the name "Blood Fund" hung between them. She knows what it is, and she doesn't like where this is going.
"You stupid ape," she growled. "What the fuck did you do?"
Saruda's fingers trembled as he finally pulled out a crumpled parchment from his vest and put it on the table, a promissory note stamped with the Blood Fund's skull in a swirling vortex insignia. Despite not knowing what was written on the paper, Ghislaine could still see the numbers written across it were so obscenely long that she felt her head spin.
"I-I got in trouble with the Juju gang, alright?! And they made me sign this to get them compensation money from the Blood Fund...!" Saruda hissed, his fist slamming on the table. He basically was forced to borrow money to buy himself a way out from being butchered and sold off on the black market, but he is still going to end up as a slave and lose his freedom.
"I don't have a choice, Ghislaine; it's either this or they butcher me and sell my organs to the black market!" His voice was filled with despair and resentment as he really doesn't know what to do to pay this huge debt he was forced to shoulder. "I only have three months to find money, but there's no way I could possibly find enough money in this timeframe..."
"You signed this?!" Ghislaine's feline tail bristled under her cloak as she snatched the promissory note off the table, her single eye scanning the numbers with growing dread, and even if she doesn't understand the exact number, she still can tell that it is a lot of gold coins. "Do you have any idea what the Blood Fund does to those that can't pay their debt?!"
"What can I do?" Saruda seemed to shrink under Ghislaine's glare as he looked down helplessly, his hand reaching toward the empty mug again by habit. "The Juju gang had me by my balls, and those guys at the Blood Fund just smiled and didn't give a damn while handing me the quill and needle. You know how they operate... they only care about who will pay them and who they can put a debt collar on..."
"You idiot..." Ghislaine muttered before she sighed and slapped down the paper in her hand on the table to vent her frustration. She can't believe Saruda has gotten himself in trouble again so soon after only a week of him barely getting out alive from brawling with another merc in the random alley when he was drunk.
"Please, Ghislaine, can you seriously help me out here?" Saruda's whisper was barely audible over the tavern's noises, his fingers clutching the mug as he looked at her with despair and desperation in his beady eyes. "You know they're not going to stop at only me if I can't pay back the loan..."
"Damn it." Ghislaine's ear twitched as she exhaled through gritted teeth. It is well known that if you can't pay the blood debt, then the boss of the slum will come to personally extract anything valuable or even take your family or relative if you yourself are unable to work to pay off your debt. Worst case, some even got their souls ripped out, according to the rumor.
"Fine, I'll help, but you realize that even if we sold every scrap of things we own, it probably wouldn't cover a fraction of the debt, right?" she muttered, agreeing to help while giving the overjoyed Saruda a tired face before Ghislaine then tossed the promissory note back to him as Saruda hurriedly grabbed it and put it back inside his vest.
"There's only one way out of this," the feline woman suddenly said, her voice low enough that the surrounding chatter slightly drowned it out, but Saruda still heard her. "We must fight the Juon Jun Ju family to take back the loan money so you can pay it back."
"Fight them? Are you insane or stupid? The Juju gang has hundreds of guards and mercs under their command, you know?" Saruda facepalms himself and feels speechless by the muscle-brain plan of fighting one of the Jinkai council members that Ghislaine just suggested to him. "Best-case scenario, we'll be very lucky to be dead before they capture us alive..."
"Tsk, then you'd better start thinking of other ways with that ape skull of yours," Ghislaine growled with annoyance at the rejection of her reasonable plan. "Because we only got three months before the slum boss decided to pay you a visit!"
÷×÷×÷×÷×÷
On the same day in the late evening.
"Kars? Who are you visiting this late?" Sophia in a purple nightgown is lying sideways on the bed, watching Kars dress up late at night with curiosity and a healthy dose of suspicion on her face.
"Someone who thinks they can just leech off my business without investing anything worthwhile in return." Kars muttered in response without noticing his concubine acting like a jealous wife as he put on his jacket, the dim lamplight casting sharp shadows across his manly face as Sophia propped herself up on one elbow, her bare shoulder slipping free of the silk gown.
"Oh, you're finally going to do something about those leeches?" Sophia knows exactly what he's talking about, as there are some people who use Kars' Blood Fund as a place where they get rid of people like garbage dumps while they also took a huge loan in other people's names without having to pay back their loan and let the victim shoulder their debt.
It's a recent problem that Kars was ignoring at first since it only happened once or twice a month, but now the number of such cases has shot up to hundreds with thousands of gold coins' worth of loans lost per case and per week, so inevitably, something must be done to stop it, which fell on Kars's lap, who had to teach these people a lesson on why they shouldn't do it so brazenly and make an example out of them to deter the others from such loose-hole behavior.
"Alright," Kars hums as he pulls the hood over his head and turns to look at Sophia on the bed. "There shouldn't be any smartasses who think they can get away with it consequence-free after this night."
"They are going to suffer for making me do such annoying work..." Kars almost growled as he walked to Sophia and then leaned down to kiss her deeply with his lips lingering just long enough for her to feel butterflies in her tummy. "Sleep. I'll be back before the moon falls."
"Yes, please come back soon." Sophia nodded with a blush as she sank back into the pillows, watching Kars go out of the bedroom with a predatory glint in his amber eyes.
"Ahh, he's so hot... when he's murderous," Sophia murmured into her pillow, biting her lip in arousal as the distant step of Kars grows distant...