I’m Quitting Everything and Selling Cola

Chapter 140

Chapter 140. Counterattack

Gideon Belheim was born the third son of an utterly wretched commoner.

A birth that no one had wished for.

Baron Belheim, who kept Gideon's mother as a maidservant, could not restrain his midnight desires. Whether he had any intention of restraining himself in the first place was itself questionable. He had simply exercised his rights over his property.

A few months later, when his mother's belly began to swell, he tossed her a pittance and dismissed her. The lives of the powerless were often like that.

After her dismissal, his mother drifted between various jobs and raised Gideon. Gideon, for his part, tried his utmost to be of help to her. He rummaged through other people's rubbish to collect firewood, and picked up rotting fruit dropped on market floors to stave off hunger.

But there is a limit to what a five-year-old boy can do.

The winter Gideon turned six. The biting winds of the North left an incurable illness in his mother's lungs. Her coughing grew sharper as the night deepened. Without a doctor or even a proper remedy, his mother died coughing up dark red blood onto the cold floor of their room.

A worthless death.

Absurdly, the nobleman who heard the news belatedly came looking for Belheim.

'I am sorry.'

It was likely the greatest apology a refined noble could offer his own illegitimate child. With these few words, he took Gideon into his manor.

The manor was splendid beyond any comparison to everything glittering he had seen combined in his entire life. That night, he saw that among the food the servants were discarding, there was warm bread—the very thing his mother had longed to eat one last time.

Faced with this absurdity, Gideon did not grow angry. He did not shed tears.

He simply harboured a question. Why is the world not just?

He found his answer.

The world is not just. Nor is it broken. No one ever decreed that it should be either. There were simply people—like his mother—who had not understood the world and had lived by the wrong rules.

From that day on, Gideon lived in the study. The Belheim family had been in the banking business for generations, and within the study slept hundreds of years of history on how money and power moved. There he learned numbers, memorised laws, and studied how human greed became money.

'What does a bastard child intend to do, learning such things?'

Despite the glares of the servants and the mockery of the legitimate heirs, he did not miss a single day in the study, making his presence known.

'From tomorrow, you will assist with the work.'

The opportunity came to twelve-year-old Gideon.

Handling everything perfectly from the very beginning, and after bone-scraping effort, Gideon had before long found himself going in and out of his father's office. Baron Belheim must have recognised the extraordinary talent and cold-bloodedness of this bastard who carried his blood. Every effort had been an effort to appear precisely that way in his eyes.

The Baron took Gideon in as his illegitimate son.

'You are Gideon Belheim from now on.'

'It is an honour. Father.'

Adopting a bastard as a son. It was a remarkable affair with few precedents in all of Britannia's history. That in itself spoke to how powerfully Gideon's presence had come to bear upon the family.

And in the year he turned fifteen.

Gideon handed over all of the family's records of misconduct and classified secrets to Devon Trust, a rival family.

The Belheim Barony crumbled to pieces. Targeted investigations were launched, the barony was stripped away, and every means of earning money and every asset were seized overnight.

It had been exceedingly simple. Like demolishing a building—one need only bring down a few of the most critical pillars.

'You wretch! I took you in when you were fit only to live like a beast……! And this is how you repay me—betrayal!'

Gideon could not understand the Baron's fury. If anything, he found it laughable. He had simply shown the man what he himself had been doing, in a slightly different fashion.

'I only did as you taught me.'

Gideon's life continued along the same trajectory thereafter.

In exchange for leaking internal information, he was hired by Devon Trust, and following a predetermined set of rails, he rose through rank after rank at a breakneck pace until he became Branch Manager. He brought Devon Trust under his control without great difficulty, and old Count Devon, in order to keep hold of him, even offered his own daughter.

But still it was not enough. Looking upward, he saw that above lay a true 'rampart' positioned at far greater heights.

That was a world of monsters born with bloodline and innate talent—one that could never be scaled by individual ability alone.

The tower Gideon had built, and the tower he would spend the rest of his life building— both were things that could crumble before the whims of those people.

And so Belheim joined hands with the Order.

From that moment, he had steeled himself. He had known that one day, a moment as painful as this would come.

"Mr. Jurgen, I am sorry. I truly wanted things to go well between us."

It cannot be helped.

He would kill Jurgen. He would kill Aiden beside him. He would kill the investigators dispatched from the kingdom.

Belheim held an important role even within the Order. The Order would not carelessly discard a piece as valuable as Belheim.

They would arrange a new identity, or find a means to alter his appearance, or manipulate people's perceptions and make it a perfect crime.

In keeping with that— the assassins the Order had attached this time as their disposable tail were likewise the Order's finest.

"Please, go in peace. I shall visit your graves occasionally."

Yet the situation was the complete opposite of what he had anticipated.

"Where do you think you're going— tch— you miserable little wretch."

An assassin, reversed and taken down in an instant.

"Shall you give me a score for old times' sake?"

"Will you be handling this?"

"My body's been itching a bit lately, what with resting so long."

"Don't do something foolish and get yourself hurt."

"Yes, sir!"

Two men exchanging idle banter in front of the Order's finest assassins.

Belheim swallowed without realising it. Before he could give any instructions, the remaining assassins moved.

Three of them rushed toward Aiden like shadows.

Blades thrusting in simultaneously from three directions. To Belheim's eyes, it was a flawless combination with no conceivable space to evade.

"Come now, how unsporting. Let us go one-on-one."

Yet Aiden—who looked as though he would while away his days idle in a casino—was faster than all of them.

Aiden's form blurred, and sparks flew through the air.

A single dagger struck the corner of the warehouse with a sharp sound. One of the assassins tumbled straight to the ground.

Another was caught helplessly as if falling into Aiden's arms—

Crunch!

—and crumpled, neck twisted, to the floor. The last one was kicked in the stomach and flew like a cricket ball, crashing into the corner of the warehouse.

The End Order assassins, heedless of fear, kept hurling themselves at Aiden like moths to a flame without pause.

The result did not change.

Aiden's movements would blur, and another assassin would fall— and just when it seemed they had finally caught him, it was nothing but an afterimage.

It was a one-sided thrashing, like a grown adult playing with children.

―Thud!

The assassins exchanged glances and swiftly pulled back. On the floor, nine bodies were already strewn about.

"You two……"

Belheim could not continue his words.

Y&P Trading Company was nothing more than a company that had grown meteoric only a short while ago. Aiden had joined as head of security only recently. And yet the Order's blades snapped with pathetic ease.

The thing that warranted the most caution, above all else.

"Well?"

No matter how he looked at it, Jurgen—standing at the back in complete ease—appeared to outrank even Aiden.

He had known that Jurgen was concealing his identity. His shrewdness was consummate, and his ability was excessively perfect. Even so, the reason he had joined hands with Jurgen was that their interests and methods had aligned. He had assumed Jurgen was an ambitious man of the same breed as himself, seeking to extract honey from Rosemore through Penelope.

"Who are you……?"

But now, Jurgen looked utterly unfamiliar. Perhaps it was the composure Jurgen displayed without a hint of faltering even in this situation that was driving such thoughts.

"—————."

The assassins began to murmur something. They were chanting a spell in tones like a low frequency.

"Aiden?"

"It's fine. As long as it's not that strange self-detonation one."

"That it is."

"Wait—you can actually understand what they're chanting now?"

A startled Aiden promptly stepped back.

In an instant, the assassins' entire bodies flushed crimson. Even for the battle-hardened Aiden, that was truly one of the most troublesome things out there.

Their movements quickened, their strength grew. Yet for all that, the durability of their bodies plummeted drastically, and even a light collision caused flesh to rupture across their bodies.

One might wonder what harm that could possibly cause—but the problem was that their bodily fluids turned viscous and acidic. When concentrated acidic fluids detonated, the damage was on par with a shotgun blast, and it had been a vicious technique that had produced an appalling number of casualties.

Before over a dozen assassins rushing silently forward, Jurgen drew out his Alchemy catalyst.

It was the moment Belheim blinked.

―WHRAAAAAASH!!!!

There was no explosion. Only a cold so deep it froze even sound spread densely outward.

In the middle of the warehouse, a pure white snowfield unfolded. And across that snowfield, in various places, stood bizarre human-shaped statues.

Just as they had been in the instant before detonating—locked in the posture of their fierce charge. Even the droplets of acidic solution that had begun to scatter through the air were frozen solid, and the sight of them resembled conifers blanketed in snow.

In a white world where even time seemed frozen, Jurgen stood in solitary splendour.

"Ha."

Belheim let out a hollow laugh. Even that laugh turned to diamond dust and scattered.

There is a word for when one encounters a being like this.

"Mr. Jurgen, you are…… just what……"

A monster. A monster of diabolical talent that Belheim, with individual ability alone, could never have hoped to surpass.

"You chose the wrong opponent, Gideon Belheim. You should have laid everything bare before me at the time."

"……"

"I truly had hoped it was a misunderstanding or a mistake."

"I see……"

Without hesitation, Belheim drew the pistol from his breast and pressed it to his own temple. Yet even that was not permitted to come to pass.

Clink.

At the very moment Belheim moved to pull the trigger, the pistol slipped from his hand and fell upon the snow. All Jurgen had done was flick a finger from a distance.

"Did you think I would let you die, Belheim?"

Jurgen approached slowly, toward a Belheim who had crumbled. His voice carried neither pity nor anger.

"You still have your uses."

Jurgen picked up the pistol where it had fallen in the snow.

Then, before Belheim's eyes, he gripped it lightly. The pistol, made of solid steel, crumbled like a rotten leaf and trickled through his fingers.

From the very beginning, even escape through death had not been permitted to Belheim.

"Aiden, restrain him."

"Yes, sir."

Shuffling forward in a crab-like side-step, Aiden snapped handcuffs onto Belheim's wrists and fitted a gag.

'No, this man has grown even stronger than before.'

He had been enough of a monster even then—but now he had become a being of an entirely different dimension.

'I think he could even beat Lady Isolde?'

It was truly fortunate he had never had to fight the boss. Aiden murmured the thought, which he had lost count of how many times he had thought by now.