Chapter 322: Rudy Redwood [Bonus - GT]

Chapter 322: Rudy Redwood [Bonus Chapter GT]

After about an hour of driving through the quiet city streets, he finally reached his private estate. The iron gates automatically opened as his car approached. He pulled into the sprawling driveway, where a servant stood waiting.

Rudy stepped out and tossed the keys to the valet. ℯℯ𝑙.

He walked inside his massive home, which was completely silent and mostly dark.

Far down the main corridor, a faint sliver of light leaked from the slight gap of a closed bedroom door.

Rudy walked over, knocked gently, and pushed the door open. Inside, a private nurse sat quietly in a chair, watching over a woman lying motionless on the large bed.

It was his wife.

The nurse stood up immediately upon seeing him. "She was waiting for you to return, sir. She just fell asleep a few minutes ago."

"Were there any improvements today?" Rudy asked, keeping his voice to a soft whisper.

The nurse shook her head sadly. "I am sorry, sir. Only some kind of miracle can heal her condition at this point."

Rudy nodded slowly. He stepped out of the room and walked further down the hall. A maid stood waiting near the stairs. "Would you like to eat, sir? Your dinner has already been prepared."

Rudy opened his mouth to accept, but then closed it and let out a tired sigh. "I will take a bath first. Please have my meal sent directly to my study."

He went into his master bathroom, took a long, hot shower, and scrubbed the sterile smell of the interrogation rooms off his skin. He stepped out wearing a luxurious silk night suit.

Walking into his private study, he stopped and stared at the huge, framed portrait hanging on the wall.

It was a beautiful painting of him, his smiling wife, and their young, vibrant daughter.

While he stood there admiring the portrait, the maid entered the study and quietly served his dinner on the desk.

As Rudy sat down and began eating in the silent room, his thoughts inevitably drifted back to the horrific dungeon tragedy that had occurred in District Seven almost three years ago.

Out of the two hundred brave adventurers who had marched into that dungeon and died that day, one of them was his daughter.

When the devastating news of her death reached them, his wife immediately collapsed. She fell severely ill and had remained entirely bedridden ever since. No doctor, magical healer, experimental treatment, therapy, or high-tier restorative elixir could fix her condition.

It was a deeply rooted, paralyzing mental shock that had completely shattered her mind.

Rudy often sat alone in this study and wondered how it had all gone so wrong. ’Maybe if I had strictly forbidden her from becoming an adventurer,’ he thought, staring at his half-empty plate. ’Or maybe if I had just stubbornly refused to let her leave the house on that forsaken day... she would still be alive right now, and my wife would be perfectly fine.’

His talent Intuition had warned him, but he felt the same every time his daughter left the house, so he didn’t stop her.

Nonetheless, it was far too late for regrets. There was absolutely nothing he could do to change the past.

Rudy couldn’t help but question his own grief. ’Do I simply not love my daughter as much as my wife did?’ he wondered, a familiar pang of guilt hitting his chest. ’Why was she affected so catastrophically, while I just felt incredibly sad, mourned for a few weeks, and then eventually returned to my normal, functioning life?’

The two hundred adventurers who died that day all had families. They were someone’s brother, father, mother, sister, lover, son, or daughter. Did all of their family members also collapse into permanent shock like his wife had?

He had no answers to those questions. All he could do was endure the crushing loneliness and force himself to live with it.

He didn’t even actually need to work as a police interrogator. His personal wealth was astronomical, having inherited a massive fortune from his grandfather, who had once been a legendary, top-ranked adventurer.

Rudy only worked the shifts to keep himself distracted. He rarely ever felt a genuine passion for his job.

But today was entirely different. His talent Intuition had told him to take this case.

He recalled the drone footage he had seen earlier where the towering headquarters of The BlueYorker’s Shield guild was burning uncontrollably and collapsing into a pile of rubble. For some inexplicable reason, watching that specific destruction had filled him with a profound, undeniable sense of satisfaction.

The families of the adventurers who had died that day demanded justice which was never given to them. Those adventures wanted to help people. Had the dungeon break occurred, the entire district would have collapsed and even the surrounding district might have been affected if the borders were set up.

They went on that dungeon expedition that day to help those people, and the same people forgot about them after a few weeks of the tragedy and lived a normal and happy life, while their families still mourned for them and waited for justice to arrive.

One of them was Rudy.

And now, justice was served. Someone had finally done exactly what he had always dreamed of doing but never could.

And that someone was apparently currently sitting in a holding cell, listed among the twenty-one suspects arrested near the blast zone.

’Should I even be doing this job right now?’ Rudy asked himself, pushing his plate away. ’Is it not a good thing that that hideous, corrupt corporate guild finally got exactly what it deserved? Instead of being branded a terrorist, whoever blew that building up should be hailed as a hero.’

He leaned back in his chair, staring up at the ceiling. "I will do everything in my power to butcher this investigation," Rudy muttered to the empty room. "I will make sure the real culprit never gets revealed and prosecuted."

After doing a brief post-meal workout and reading through a few more unrelated case reports to clear his head, Rudy finally went to bed.

Sometime in the middle of the night, his eyes snapped wide open in the dark.

His Intuition was at work again, and he had solved the case.

"Imposible..."

Rudy’s expression shifted rapidly from calm composure, to utter confusion, to intense curiosity, to deep concern, to sheer shock, and finally settling on absolute bewilderment in realization.

Every single interrogation chamber in Tartarus was heavily suppressed with specialized Mana-Nullification fields and gravity dampeners. The system was specifically designed to physically hold high-risk suspects in place, ensuring they could not try anything funny or utilize their innate talents to escape.

The interrogators themselves remained completely unaffected by the crushing fields because their uniforms were woven with specific counter-runes.

However, the suppression field was also utilized as a brutal form of psychological torture.

The intense magical pressure not only suppressed an individual’s physical abilities, but it also actively scrambled their neural pathways, making them completely unable to think clearly or remain emotionally stable. The agonizing shock left suspects highly agitated, disoriented, and desperate to confess to anything just to make the pain stop.

They couldn’t think straight or maintain a coherent thought, let alone move freely or hold a casual, sarcastic conversation. That intense mental fog obviously prevented them from consciously activating their talents, as using a talent always required voluntary, focused intent and action.

Standard interrogation protocol dictated that the suppression level should always begin at the lowest setting. The interrogator would then slowly increase the pressure as the questioning progressed to gradually break the suspect.

That was exactly how Solomon’s interrogation was supposed to go.

But Rudy was a broken, bitter man who hated criminals who hurt innocent people. His personal interrogation methods were notoriously brutal, frequently drawing harsh reprimands from his colleagues.

Although he had initially intended to reduce the suppression level upon realizing his suspect was just a teenager, Solomon’s smug face had instantly pissed him off for some reason. The boy’s arrogant personality made him furious, and his sarcastic, nonchalant way of talking enraged him even more.

So, Rudy had secretly cranked the suppression field to its absolute maximum output the moment he sat down at the table. Only he knew about the adjustment.

Despite enduring the maximum level of magical suppression, Solomon had not only moved his limbs freely, but he had also held a perfectly coherent, highly sarcastic conversation as though the crushing field wasn’t even affecting him.

And most importantly, Solomon had deliberately cut his own face to prove his healing talent worked, which... it itself, a feat that should have been physically and magically impossible under maximum suppression.

To Commissioner Vane, Deputy Chief Valerina, and dozens others, who were watching from the observation deck, it simply looked as though Rudy had completely disabled the suppression field to allow the boy to demonstrate his talent, which is why no one had been shocked by the healing display.

Because Solomon had acted so incredibly normal and maintained such a natural, effortless flow during the entire interrogation, even Rudy himself had been completely fooled into forgetting that the maximum suppression field was running.

Rudy let out a long, shaky sigh, staring up at the dark ceiling of his bedroom.

"The culprit... is that kid," Rudy muttered into the night.

"He is... just a kid..."