Karl had expected this question at one point and he was ready with his answer. He had no interest in little girls so that was obviously not the reason why he has suddenly became submissive to Weiss.
When he had seen her, he had immediately realised her true identity as the current baroness of the Souran territory. At the same time, he had realised many other things too.
He was aware that the young baroness was not more than 15 years old and suddenly he found that she was at least an official knight.
For someone to become an official knight at 15 was not unheard of. There were many rumours, legends and stories about some people accomplishing this.
But most of the time, the people who had accomplished this feat were either great heroes or had the support of a large superpower behind their backs.
But that was not the case for this young lady before him. The information that the count had provided clearly showed that the Souran family was nothing special.
They did not have much money and even their secret arts were not of a very high quality.
So her managing to become an official knight in such a short period of time was nothing short of miraculous.
With this realisation, Karl had immediately became sure that the future potential of this lady before him was going to be very high. She looked to have the fate of hero from the legends. And currently his life was also in her hands.
For these reasons, Karl had immediately came up with an idea. If he could not defeat her, then he should just join her. This was his idea.
In this way, not only would he be able to save his life, he would also be able to make connections with a great person with astonishing potential. It was like killing two birds with one stone.
...
After Karl was done explaining his thoughts to Weiss, he bowed his head toward her and tried to sound as sincere as possible and said -
"Young Miss Souran, I'm not lying or trying to deceive you. I genuinely want to pledge my loyalty to you. I will mend my ways and I will also do my best to keep my impulses in control. I will be yours and only yours blade, ready to be used in away you want. So please, just don't kill me and give me a second chance."
Hearing everything that Karl said, Weiss started to think of a new plan. There was no way she was suddenly going to start trusting someone who had came here to spy on her and kill the inhabitants of this land.
But if Karl was willing to listen to her even if it was temporarily and only on the surface, she could use him for various things.
Having a decently powerful knight under her was a very useful thing. And if Karl decided to betray her at some point, then Weiss could just get rid of him and be done with it.
Karl was with the impression that Weiss was also a low level knight just like himself. With how insanely young she was, he could not even imagine that she had already reached the mid level knight realm.
And Weiss using the forest and her marksmanship to defeat him and not challenging him in a direct combat had also given Karl the impression that even if she was strong, he was definitely stronger than her in direct combat.
With his circumstances and experiences, it was a perfectly valid assumption to make.
But in reality, that was not the case at all. With her power as a mid level knight, Weiss could defeat Karl even in a direct clash without much trouble.
This was reason why Weiss was considering of using him without the fear of being betrayed. For him to betray her, he first needed to earn her trust.
As Weiss had never went anywhere outside the Souran territory before, her experiences about the outside world was very limited.
So as she was planning to go to a city soon, having someone like Karl who was knowledge about city life would be very beneficial.
But there was also the risk of him betraying her in troublesome moments or leaking her truth to others like his organisation or the count. So sudden making his her subordinate was not a simple decission to make.
After thinking about this matter in details, Weiss decided to do a bit more investigations first before coming to a final decision.
If she could provide Karl with some kind of benefit that would stop him from betraying her in the short term, then that would be for the best.
And as for what kind of benifit she was going to give him, Weiss had something in her mind already.
So for this day, she decided to stop the interrogation and to return back to her castle. Karl was obviously going to stay in this cave and tied to the chair.
Weiss even injected a little bit of the paralysing poison into his body to make sure even if the ropes came undone for some reason, he would still not be able to run away.
As for his food, he was not going to get any for the rest of the day. Weiss had allowed him to eat some of the food that he had in his bag and he would get his next meal when Weiss would come here the next day.
...
After returning back to the castle, Weiss first met up with butler Robin and they reviewed some of the reports about the hunters together.
This task did not take too much time and they were done in just half an hour. Weiss was quite satisfied with the amount of beasts that the hunters of the village had managed to hunt down since the new rules were implemented.
Adding that to the beasts that Weiss had also taken down, the total number would almost tripled. And if Weiss could sucessfully sell all of them for a good price then she could immediately solve quite a bit of the monetary problems that she and her territory was having
After this she went back to her own personal room and locked herself in. Then she took out the Bloody Slaughter Secret Art again and started to read it more thoroughly.
The benefit that Weiss was planning to provide to Karl was the elimination of the danger associated with his knight secret art.
For a knight, his knight secret art was the most important thing. It was not impossible for someone change into a completely different secret art later on but it was an extremely dangerous thing to do.
As the life core of a knight was created based on the nature of the secret art, if they switched to a different one, then that new secret art needed to have some similarities to the previous one.