Chapter 269: The ruined mansion

"Why is there smoke coming from behind the walls...?"

As soon as Cranberry's feet touched the ground after Zombie stopped a few hundred feet before the Prides mansion, she noticed that something was off.

The outside of the walls was slowly getting reclaimed by the wild plants, and one wing of the main gate looked like it has been broken down and restored by someone with no skill or taste whatsoever.

Similarly, instead of the propped guard standing in front of the gate, there were two pathetically armored unshaven, drunk-looking ruffians, barely able to hold themselves up thanks to the DIY spears in their hands.

"..."

The temperature around the red-haired girl dropped as her ice-cold glare seemed to have affected her surrounding.

"Zombie... that damned parasite did say that my actions don't matter, right? So it doesn't actually matter who I'll kill..."

She asked without actually turning to the blue undead and just confining to glare at men at the gate.

"If you ask me, the less living in this world, the better."

Zombie shrugged his shoulders with a clueless expression.

"Funny. That's the exact same thing that I was just thinking too..."

The red-haired girl nodded her head with not even a trace of a smile on her face and instead clenched her hand on her baseball bat so hard that her knuckles turned white before she stepped towards the gate.

---

"...uugh... uh? Huh?! Who goes there?!"

One of the guardsmen shook his head and was even able to focus his eyes on the approaching red-haired girl.

*WHOOOOSH*

*SPLAT*

"Huh...?"

The girl didn't activate any skill or anything, she just waved her weapon in the direction of the gate as if threatening the two men, causing the one one who noticed her to tilt his head in disbelief.

"Oi. Grape, look at that..."

*squelch*

"HUH?!"

The guardsman scoffed and tried to nudge his comrade to bring his attention to the weirdo approaching then but only ended up pushing his elbow into the bloody piece of meat stuck to one of the gate wings instead.

*WHOOOSH*

*SPLAT*

But before he could do literally anything else, the red-haired girl waved her weapon again and the insane shockwave crushed against the remaining guard and turned him into mincemeat embedded into the other gate wing.

---

/Low-level player characters defeated

Master receives EXP

"Low-level... Low-level...? My family mansion was taken over by some low-level TRASH?!"

Cranberry gritted her teeth and growled, barely able to hold herself back from leveling up the whole estate just to cleanse that disgrace.

"Maybe those two were the only low-level ones?"

Zombie pointed at the mutilated corpses slowly sliding down the gate and shrugged his shoulders.

"That's not my point! What the hell is my father doing?!"

*WHAM*

Cranberry growled and turned the entire gate into splinters with a single angry kick.

"...!"

"!!!!!!!!"

Which of course caused a huge uproar amongst all the bandits camping out in the courtyard - but their panic was nothing compared to the shock and disbelief that Cranberry experienced.

The barbaric bandits were gathered in the courtyard and cooking food by a large pyre they put together by salvaging anything flammable from the mansion itself.

The main ingredients fueling the happily crackling fire were...

Books.

Cranberry could only recognize them because some of the priceless ancient tomes she and Zombie got from the hidden elven village were more resistant to fire than the rest - but even so, all the pages were already blackened beyond the saving point, a proof enough that this wasn't the first day of the genocide of the priceless tomes from the Prides' library.

"..."

Zombie glanced at the red-haired girl and even he felt a chill of fear seeing the deathly pale face of the villainess.

"Zombie, is my father here?"

She asked, barely opening her pale lips.

"No. I don't see his life signature anywhere within twenty miles. And the same goes for anyone we know if you care about that."

He said after looking around with reddish glowing eyes.

"That's a shame. I should definitely kill that brainless idiot for allowing this to happen...!"

She trembled from pure aggression coursing through her veins.

"Get away from here for a minute. This place isn't the Prides mansion - my home wouldn't fall into the hands of some trashy bandits... this fake mansion needs to be destroyed."

She added ignoring the approaching bandits while gripping her black baseball bat with both hands as her body and eyes began glowing with increasingly blinding light.

"Sure. Just don't overdo it. I'll wait for you by the old goblin nest we destroyed when we were kids."

Zombie nodded and declared.

"No. That's too close."

But the red-haired girl shook her head and rejected his proposition.

"Huh? Too close? What do you plan on doing here...?"

The blue undead waved his arm in disbelief and asked in confusion.

"Wait for me by the spot we got Blueberry at."

She instructed him instead.

"There?! That's not even in Pride's territory anymore! You're going to hurt yourself!"

Zombie frowned and shook his head in protest.

"Good. Then I will have an excuse so you would kiss me. Go. Now."

She shrugged her shoulders and shooed him away.

"Tsk...!"

*BOOOM*

The blue undead clicked his tongue before disappearing to the sound of the explosion.

"Huh? Wait! Did she finally admit to wanting to kiss me??"

Zombie realized while flying through the air.

*»'«±|÷$÷}•>]^{%|.€¡$ $«÷¤*

But in the next moment, an explosion so huge that even his tremendous leg power couldn't carry him to safety fast enough shook the world as the earth beneath fell down into a seemingly bottomless chasm.

Thankfully for the blue undead, the shockwave that followed immediately blew him just beyond the void.

/Multiple low, mid, and high-level player characters defeated

Multiple low, mid, and high-level monsters defeated

Master receives EXP

"Wow... that was something else..."

Zombie whistled in shock looking past the slew of system messages that popped up in his field of vision down the newly created canyon.

"Huh?"

His eyes began glowing red as he searched for the red-haired girl's life signature somewhere below, ready to go rescue her, but to his great surprise, he found her already waiting for him by the very spot she told him to wait for her!

Zombie didn't waste any time and got to her within a second.

"Are you okay? I hope you know that even I know that this was reckless."

The blue undead shook his head, walking up to the red-haired girl staring at her feet as her arms were hanging down her sides with no strength whatsoever.

*thunk*

Even with that she somehow managed to hold on to the black baseball bat until that point, though as soon as Zombie spoke up, the weapon had slid out of her hand and bounced off the ground with a heavy sound.

"Hey, what's wrong? That's not like you - I've never seen you lose control like that aside from that one time when you beat me up. But that was when you were scared to death about your mother punishing you..."

"...haa..."

The blue undead tilted his head cautiously as he approached the red-haired girl - that slid right into his arms and sighed heavily.

"Everything is wrong. Everything."

Cranberry's shoulder trembled as she ruined her forehead against Zombie's chest, hiding her crying face.

"Maybe I can offer you a helping hand then...?"

"...!"

A new voice joining in surprised the master-servant pair.