Reasoning.
Reasoning.
You say you have a knack for chasing someone?
As soon as I heard Master’s words, I thought of a picture that was barely maintaining its shape as the lines were connected. The very picture that Master claimed to have painted exactly like my face.
Is it true that you really have a knack for tracking…?
I left behind the growing doubts in my mind and inspected the murder scene. If Master couldn’t get anything out of it, I had to get something out of here too.
There’s no way scientific investigations will be conducted in this world anyway, so it’s okay to touch it a little.
The first thing I did was lift up the head of what was supposed to be the secretary who was nearby and observe the severed section.
Contrary to my preconceived notion, the secretary was a middle-aged man with thick hair, and the cross section of the severed neck was very clean. As if it had been neatly cut with something sharp.
But if the neck is here, where is the body?
A sudden thought came to my mind and I looked around, but there was no corpse with a decapitated head anywhere. It was a bit vague to talk to Master because he was looking through the branch manager’s desk with very serious eyes.
“Giselle.”
“huh? why?”
At my call, Giselle stopped reading the papers scattered on the secretary’s desk and raised her head slightly in response.
“Why did you call me?”
“These heads… It seems that only the heads were brought back after killing them somewhere else, didn’t they?”
“Maybe?”
Even as she answered me, she quickly leafed through the papers.
“What are you looking at so intently?”
“If it’s not an opportunity like this, when will I go through the papers of the Imperial Wizard Association? I never learned to track enemies with corpse fragments in the first place. So I’m doing what I can. don’t you know Maybe we can glean some useful information here?”
I searched around meticulously, mainly in the secretary’s desk, in order not to disturb Master’s search in the branch manager’s office, but honestly, I didn’t get any clues.
Well, if you put your hair up like this boldly, it’s enough to clean up after work. Is it natural that it’s already neatly done?
“Did you pick up anything?”
Giselle’s brow furrowed slightly at my question.
“No, nine out of ten scraps of paper here are all documents related to penalty points. look here Seeing that he wrote this as a letter of reflection, even I am stunned.”
On a large white piece of paper she held out, it was written, ‘I will not make an accident in the future.’
“How the hell have these guys been rolling? I can’t believe it.”
Giselle never stopped handing over the papers, even though she complained a lot. As if trying to scrape something.
I looked around and turned my head, but Master, who had been searching the branch manager’s desk just before, was nowhere to be seen.
“hmm?”
Upon crossing the open threshold and entering the branch manager’s office, I soon realized where Master had disappeared. Beyond the bookshelves neatly cut in half, I could see a hallway that could easily fit one person.
But where the heck did you cut it? I didn’t hear anything break.
“Master?”
“Why are you calling? Yuna?”
When I called her name, Master stuck out her head from a hole in the side of the hallway and answered.
“What is this…?”
“Looking at the traces left on the floor, someone had disappeared into the bookshelf. So I cut it once. I’ll take a quick look, so wait a minute.”
“All right.”
Then, shall I look at the branch manager’s desk? It doesn’t look like I’ll be picking anything up.
After carefully examining the branch manager’s desk, I soon realized a small fact.
Garbage and leftover snack crumbs in every drawer. Crumpled pieces of paper. Unlike the secretary’s desk, which was filled with all sorts of paperwork, the wizard association branch manager’s desk was just a trash can.
In other words, this was never a desk for a person who worked.
Leaving behind the desk, which had nothing more to salvage than the secretary’s desk, I examined the neatly severed head of the branch manager. Looking at the cuts, all I knew was that the one who cut off the secretary’s head and the one who cut off the head of the branch manager were probably the same person. As a bonus, the branch manager was a young female magician.
“uh? what? Was there a secret passage?”
“Did you read all the papers?”
Giselle nodded lightly.
“huh. Roughly. I didn’t really have anything to do with this job. I did find some useful information.”
“What information?”
Giselle glanced at the secret passageway where Master entered and whispered in a small voice.
“There is a warehouse that we plan to raid tonight. I checked the shift times there. For some reason, it looked like he had put in a request to the Wizards Association, so I looked carefully and found that there was a real request.”
“Have you already decided to do the raid today?”
“It doesn’t really matter if you put it off until tomorrow…but you’d better get out of this city as soon as possible. As you may know, we’re not the only ones chasing relics. So, wouldn’t it be better if you acted quickly?”
Giselle was right. Since Liberatorio was chasing his mother’s holy relic with his eyes on, there was no time to spend leisurely. Despite that, I was walking around quite leisurely.
“Come to think of it, that makes sense. So, are you going alone with me and Giselle tonight?”
“I don’t mind taking you if you want to take more. Why? You just have to go and check if there are holy relics and then come out. why? Do you have anyone else to take with you?”
Then, all I have to do is put it in my mother’s pocket and go for a while.
“no. doesn’t exist.”
“okay. So what are you going to do tonight? stand aside for a second Let’s do one last thing.”
“What do you mean?”
Giselle smiled and slowly reached out her hand.
“like this.”
Black shadows danced as if they were alive. The borders of the shadows parted and licked all over the room like the tentacles of a mollusk.
“Even if I lose in terms of destructive power, I am confident in one applied power. I want to see if there is another hidden room other than that secret passage.”
After a brief shimmer, Giselle tugged at my collar and pointed to one of the drawers on the branch manager’s desk.
“Tear this off. I’m not strong enough to pull this off myself.”
“yes.”
Wooddeuk.
When I grabbed the drawer she pointed to and opened it, Giselle quickly reached into it, rummaged through it, and pulled out a small notepad.
“What is this?”
“I’ll have to check that out now. I just asked to open it because there was a hidden space on my desk.”
When Giselle turned over the first page of the memo pad, the scribbles, a development that was a ruse comparable to Master’s, showed off their appearance.
“Is it graffiti?”
“It’s graffiti.”
“Well, there’s no way that the magician’s hidden notepad has anything special written on it. But why did he hide this?”
After flipping through a few pages of scribbles, readable characters finally appeared. Although it was a very bad handwriting.
‘Oh, what should I eat for lunch today?’
‘It’s hard to pretend to be working.’
‘How many penalty points are there for beating the secretary?’
‘Looking at the top of the secretary’s head getting thinner day by day, it’s obvious that she’s losing hair.’
‘It’s tight. tight.’
Is it really just a notepad for writing things down? As my interest in the notepad gradually cooled down, Giselle poked me in the stomach with her elbow.
“Look at this.”
On the page she pointed to, ‘Pakppak keeps asking me to join him. plaguy. I refused because I didn’t like the tight-fisted face.’
A middle-aged male secretary and a rather young-looking female wizard have to do together…
“What do you think of this?”
“Ummm… I guess the secretary lacked rational charm.”
“I thought so too at first? But I don’t think it’s what we think it is. look.”
She quickly flipped through the notepad and pointed out certain sentences to me one after another among the lines full of nonsense.
‘I clearly stated that I declined because I didn’t like the face, not because I didn’t have enough hair.’
‘Pakppak kept asking me what the hell this problem had to do with my hair or face.’
‘Stupid, tight-fisted child. If your face tastes like rice, how do I work while looking at that face every day? A handsome man’s face is welfare. I’m dying to be bothered by the branch manager position, but I have to see your face again after work? Absolutely no.’
‘Bag bap bap bap bap. tight.’
‘Yesterday, on the way home from work, a man who introduced himself as a poison needle started talking to me. The man said it’s tight…’
‘… Actually, I already know. I didn’t say it because I heard it would be 1000 penalty points if I told anyone. I don’t want to be fired from the position of branch manager.’
The middle sentence was smeared blurry because of the needle mark. It’s so hard to tell what he wrote.
“I don’t think the branch manager’s secretary was always a clean person, right?”
“It seems so. In addition, I am a little suspicious of this ‘poison needle’ man here.”
“Looking at the nuances written there, the secretary and the man called Poison Needle don’t seem to have a cooperative relationship.”
“Do you think the man called Poison Needle killed these two?”
Giselle shrugged.
“I don’t know. There is too little information given to us right now. By the way, isn’t your teacher not coming too often? I think there is something down there. Shall we follow it soon?”
“I see.”
As soon as we entered the secret passage hidden behind the bookshelf, we were greeted by the stairs that seemed to have been descended by Master. As I walked slowly along the stairs, a smell tickled my nose.
“It smells like blood. That too has been a while.”
“Hmm. Then there is a high probability that the headless body is down here.”
As Giselle had expected, two headless corpses were lying on the floor. Master was standing next to the corpse and looking around.
“Master. Did you find out anything?”
“Anyway, it seems that there are people who are quite talented at erasing traces. Most of the traces have been erased, so I haven’t been able to get much.”
Master blinked his eyes slowly and continued talking without taking his eyes off the corpse.
“First of all, there are a total of three people involved with these corpses. Two of the three are male, and Yeon is taller than you, and the other females are quite tall for a female. The woman who appeared to be the branch manager was ambushed in this secret passage, and the secretary’s side was killed from above and only the body was brought back here. In addition, since there are traces of man-made natural phenomena left here, it is highly likely that at least one of the three is a wizard. And could you look over here for a second?”
Master slightly turned the branch manager’s corpse over and pointed to the hole in the back of his neck.
“These are traces of being stabbed with a very sharp awl-shaped weapon. It stung very neatly like a wasp stinger and fell off.”
Hornet…? Master may have just used a metaphor, but I remembered the word I just saw.
The word ‘poison needle’.
“It’s fair.”
Giselle, who murmured briefly, seemed to have remembered something similar to mine. Master looked at the expressions on the two of us and tilted his head.
“Did you find out anything else?”
I quickly explained to Master what I had seen in the notepad. After hearing all the explanations, Master pondered for a moment, then shook her head.
“It seems that there is not enough grounds to blindly connect the two. For now, there are faint traces of these three, so please follow me.”
As we walked down the dark hallway, a small door greeted us. When I opened the door, it led into a building that looked like an ordinary private house. Master escaped the private house following a trail that I couldn’t see at all.
“Here, the two are divided into one. The woman’s side came apart. But from here, there are too many people who have passed on the trail, so it seems that it will be difficult to follow them with only eyes.”
“Wait. The two men went that way and the woman went this way?”
At Giselle’s question, Master nodded slightly.
“It is.”
Giselle glanced at my face and muttered softly.
“If the woman didn’t change direction and continued like this, the Magician Association branch would probably come out…”
Quaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!!!
Before Giselle’s words could finish, black smoke rose with a loud explosion.
In the direction where the wizard association branch is located.
