Eren turned to Eliza and Reen while pointing a finger at Ivor– shock and unbelief were written all over his face– before speaking up in a loud voice:
"Those sods think Ivor is the Osan Woods Butcher!"
Eliza chuckled for a while before nodding at his statement. Eren looked back and forth between Reen's, Eliza's, and Ivor's faces. The slap-fest victim was also confused about what Eren had said for a while. It took him a while to process half the stuff Eren was saying and immediately had a frozen-in-fear look painted over his whole being:
"What… What nonsense are you sprouting? I'm no Osan Woods Butcher, you dimwit. And who are you guys? Who is this bitch Reen…"
Ivor was about to curse Reen some more. By then Reen was also too shocked to feel down about her separation from Eren. And when she heard Ivor cursing her, her anger exploded. She disappeared from her spot and appeared right next to Eren before continuing the slap-fest again.
Pataaaaaah!
Pataaaaaah!
Pataaaaaah!
Pataaaaaah!
Reen smacked Ivor hard. It was all thanks to her suppressed rank that the guy was alive. Otherwise, his face would have become a meat patty.
"Haah! That…. That felt good."
Reen felt her palms go numb after she kept on slapping Ivor for a minute. But instead of noticing the sore palms, she felt a lot of her stress had been released. One had to say that Ivor's entry was an apt mental relief for both the demon beast and her master.
Reen's stressbuster slap-fest on Ivor kinda altered the sorry state of Ivor's face for worse again. It made Eren laugh a bit.
Technically, the butcher wasn't in a healthy mental state at the time. But seeing Ivor do worse than him in almost every way soothed him a little. He forgot about his problems for a while and just enjoyed laughing at the guy's misery.
"Hahaha! Ivor, meet Reen. You made a pact with her within the Osan Woods.
Baah! This is hilarious. I thought my luck was terrible. But dude, you've outperformed me. Hahaha!"
Eren said to Ivor while trying to control his laughter. Osan Jr had started to realize that he was being framed for something he wasn't part of. But he still wasn't aware Reen was the same ill-famous demon beast that the OWB had tamed. He wasn't even aware that he was standing there.
"Eren, what is going on? How… How did I get tagged as the Osan Woods' Butcher?"
Ivor asked with a trembling voice. But unlike before, his eyes were calm. As if he had been snapped out of his sorry state. In the ranking war, he had become the same cold-blooded novice who had become famous in LA for his bold battles.
"How, you ask? I don't know much either. Sage Eliza, please tell us how they get this wrong with the OWB?"
Eren redirected Ivor's question to Eliza because he wasn't aware of it himself. The Sage ranker smiled before answering:
"I'll tell you what Arthur told me. He told to me how the research facility that was used to artificially create Reen was attacked by a monster horde one day. Of course, the facility was protected so nothing happened to it.
But that disturbance somehow caused a malfunction in the mana supply and maintenance array unit that was supposed to imbue mana into Reen's form.
Originally, she was only supposed to have an F-Rank with a reworked mana core. The type of experiment being conducted, along with Reen's constitution and the array's malfunction, enabled her to become a D-Rank in a short amount of time. Fufufu! Can you guess what happened next?"
Eliza would always try to hide her laugh with her left hand, which would suppress the noise of her chuckle. Eren took note of this personal trait of hers and spoke up:
"So they weren't expecting to find a D-Rank entity there. I can guess that Reen must have woken up and wreaked havoc at that place before escaping."
Eliza looked at Reen and smirked before saying:
"This rogue beast of yours almost ate everyone working there. Then she took control of the demon beast to hunt the escaped ones and ate them too. Only then did she leave the research facility.
The research papers my clan had on the supposed creation of an artificial demon beast did talk about the appetite problem of the beast because of her mana-induced rapid cell regeneration. But I didn't think it would be to this extent.
Anyway, Reen escaped. That almost caused Arthur to go insane. He must have expended a lot of his wealth on that experiment.
When he learned about the tragedy at the research facility and the case of Osan Woods' Butcher, he tied the two events together. He concluded that Reen's escape was preplanned by the butcher. Reen ended up becoming his familiar after all."
Eren had a blank face as he opened his arms to receive the hug Reen was giving him at the time. She rested her head on his chest and he caressed the back of her hair before replying:
"That Arthur guy is really... something. Why does he think everything is a conspiracy? Somebody should fucking make him realize coincidences do happen in real life."
Eliza shook her head and laughed before narrating the story further:
"Arthur was pissed at the Osan Woods' Butcher to say the least. He wouldn't have batted an eye had he– or you– killed thousands of people. But this was the money that he had put on the line. Plus, the deal with me was not something he could or would willingly break. He was already running behind schedule.
So he used various methods to hunt the butcher. I must applaud you for the way you covered your tracks because you remained in the shadows even after he hired a panel of historians to track you down."
Eren couldn't figure out whether the applause was genuine or not. But he bowed his neck a bit to receive it. But Ivor almost screamed at Eren after hearing Eliza's explanation so far:
"Ho… hold down! Who is the Osan Woods Butcher here?"
