Chapter 429

Let’s think this through.

Should I really give the Austro-Hungarian police the answer? At a time like this?

First off, this is where I stand right now. I can’t go back to Germany and threaten them with, “Tell the Austrian government the truth right now.” There are two main reasons why I can’t do that.

First, the person who made this decision in Germany was none other than Adrian Askanien. Every order issued by the government and military personnel I’ve seen, including the Commander, essentially came from the mind of the 89th Unit’s Askanien. His decision is already the best possible conclusion in itself. If anyone other than Adrian Askanien were to arbitrarily add to or modify his orders, the result would inevitably be inferior to the original.

The government officials would never admit it themselves, but in the end, they are nothing more than ordinary people among countless others. All they have done is receive their instructions from the simple, clear, one-line judgment of a strategist born with extraordinary talent, a judgment he reached in mere seconds.

Everything begins with accurately understanding the level of both myself and my enemy. I want to keep as many possibilities in mind as I can, but I have no choice but to assign an extremely low probability to the possibility that Adrian Askanien’s decision is wrong. Just as he always has, he will win against the Imperial political sphere this time as well.

Second, it is always better to minimize the amount of truthful information we share with the enemy. This is the most fundamental and obvious reason I don’t question Adrian Askanien’s decision, and I already pointed this out earlier.

Assuming that what we’re dealing with here is not a bluff or an operational deception, but a painfully pure fact, if we are going to make the selfless, bizarre, almost unprecedented choice of telling the enemy, “We’ve deciphered your cipher and we’re already tracking you,” a choice that would likely go down in modern history books for more reasons than one, then the return we gain from revealing that information must be certain enough to more than offset the risk. Only then can we avoid opening an entirely new chapter in foolishness.

I had asked myself this earlier. “But things are different now. We could be completely ruined if this goes wrong. Shouldn’t we rely on someone else’s help?”

But the answer was simple. We must not forget the old saying: too many cooks spoil the broth. When the number of variables beyond our control increases exponentially, a group’s decisions inevitably drift farther from the optimal choice. It is such an old and familiar problem that it has survived as a proverb.

In a battle of information, we cannot control the dozens, hundreds, or thousands of nodes that can branch out from a single low-level government official. That is precisely why the German Empire sent only two people to Austria.

In short, it comes down to this.

First, if there is even a possibility that the culprit is somewhere within the Austro-Hungarian government, the Imperial Family, or any of their affiliated institutions, we must refrain from sharing information.

Second, we must refrain from sharing it even if there is no culprit within the government or related institutions. The moment we begin cooperating with the Austrian government and the tens of thousands of police officers under its authority, information about the Atropos cipher will inevitably leak somewhere and eventually find its way outside. If the culprit’s side includes someone capable of reading the movements of the market quickly and accurately, things become even more difficult for us.

Then why should I give this ‘government investigator’ the answer now?

First of all, I can’t just take the desk lamp and run. Taking it itself isn’t the problem. The problem is what we would do with it afterward, and how we would deal with the aftermath. Of course, we could physically return to Germany right away and hand the lamp over to the German Investigation Bureau (a). But if we did that, the Austrian Investigation Bureau would soon realize that the lamp had inexplicably disappeared from the room. Rumors would spread that the culprit must have tried to destroy the evidence because there had been a clue hidden in the lamp—rumors that would have them halfway to the correct answer.

Even if we pinned the blame on Markus, we could easily predict that it would ultimately produce the same result. The culprit, who was surely watching the progress of the investigation closely, would find out as well. Put another way, the moment someone stole the lamp, the culprit would become certain that the net was tightening around them.

To put it in visual terms, we are standing in a completely open plain, while the thief who stole the lamp is inside a pitch-black forest from which he can observe the entire plain. Keeping that image in the back of my mind, if I put myself in the position of the Prime Minister’s killer, I can clearly picture the choices the culprit might make from here on out.

Therefore, I handed the desk lamp over to the government investigator (b). The government investigator would collect the fingerprints left on it, share the records with his superiors, and proceed with the investigation based on them. The lamp might disappear in the process, but that was hardly something to worry about. If anything, it was good news. There was no need to think too hard about why.

If there was anything to worry about, it was the possibility that the culprit might choose to wipe out the Austrian Imperial Family instead of simply getting rid of the lamp. But that possibility had existed from the beginning anyway. We were moving forward while accepting that certain risks were unavoidable and trying to maximize the potential return. At this point, it would be better not to let those risks scare us into backing down.

Now, let’s visualize (b). We are carrying our cargo across an open plain where every move we make can be seen, while the culprit is inside a forest on high ground. We are tightening the net around him, but the advantage still belongs to the culprit, since the person who became suspicious of the lamp is nothing more than a single investigator. In case (a), even if the culprit frames the investigator, the lamp ultimately won’t remain in the investigator’s possession. The culprit will realize that a third party has intervened in the case. But in case (b), that doesn’t happen.

If I had to reduce the difference between (a) and (b) to a single idea, it would be this: handling the lamp in (a) is like “breaking through a wall from the outside, entering, and then coming back out,” while (b) is like “breaking through a wall from the inside and making your way out.”

“Fingerprints? Where exactly? Don’t tell me you mean the glass here…?”

Markus’s junior examined the desk lamp with a puzzled expression. He clearly found it strange that I had suddenly pointed at the lamp. That was only natural. Like the cinnabar vase and sachet, this was an object that had already been deemed not worth investigating.

“Yes. If possible, do it right now. Every second counts.”

“Excuse me? Ah, yes. I’ll collect them right away. But why…?”

I didn’t answer. I walked past him, stepped outside, and stamped my foot to warp away. I couldn’t afford to look suspicious, so I somehow forced my legs to stay steady. The moment I arrived, I entered the hotel and found myself inwardly scolding the painfully slow elevator for once. The needle on the indicator moved far too slowly.

Ding—

The doors opened with a clear chime, and I hurried to Room 6013. I stood there holding my breath. After a short while, Narke’s voice struck directly into my mind.

— “Come in.”

Marcus, the owner of the room, went to the bathroom again. Sorry to keep sending him to the bathroom, but it couldn’t be helped. I handed the investigation report to Narke, hung the jacket and robe back where they belonged, and dropped into my seat. I didn’t forget to get rid of the residual mana, either.

We talked until Marcus politely said, in his own words, “I think I should get some sleep now,” and then returned to our room.

“Whew….”

Narke must have used far too much mana over those ten minutes, because he immediately dispelled the illusion magic and collapsed face-first onto the bed. He really had overdone it in one way or another all day. At the very end, he’d even had to create an entire person from scratch… And he must have had to include the ‘me’ he had manifested with divine power in his conversation with Marcus. I couldn’t even begin to imagine how much mana that had taken out of him.

Before I even had time to tell him to get some rest, he suddenly sprang to his feet, covered his nose, and hurried into the bathroom. He came back moments later with a perfectly clean face.

“…Are you alright?”

“Of course I am~ I’ll recover quickly if I rest a little.”

Narke took out the potion Leo had given him, downed it in one go, and dropped back onto the bed. He offered one to me as well, but I already had my own—the ones I’d been carrying in my belt clutch had simply been packed into my luggage—and we hadn’t been able to bring many because of security concerns, so I needed to conserve them. No, actually, it looked like I might have to hand all of mine over to Narke, too.

“So, then. Lukas.”

Narke looked at me as if urging me to tell him what I’d seen. I began explaining in terms he would understand.

“The Prime Minister was poisoned. There’s no doubt about it.”

That was the problem. If no one had poisoned the Prime Minister’s food, tea, water, or wine, then how on earth had he been poisoned until his body rotted away and disappeared? Narke asked me with a serious, humorless expression.

“Then how?”

“The desk lamp.”

“…….”

“The Prime Minister arrived in the early morning, turned on the lamp, and started working. While he was doing so, he was poisoned by a toxin that rapidly spread under heat.”

“…The desk lamp. That’s surprising. What made you think of that?”

“When you ask me that, I always have to wonder where I should even begin…”

“From the beginning.”

“The beginning, huh. You could just use Insight, you know.”

I said that, then felt a little sorry when I saw Narke’s bloodshot red eyes, the tiny blood vessels burst across them, and opened my mouth.

“…Right. The moment I entered the room, I noticed an ugly vase. Talk about terrible taste. And there was a sachet in the wardrobe, which wasn’t my taste either.”

“Hahaha. That’s an unusual way to investigate.”

“There was nothing particularly strange about the window or the desk. I was standing in front of the desk and looked up, and the light from the second quadrant of the chandelier seemed a little dim. I figured it probably hadn’t been maintained very well.”

“And then?”

“I took apart the fountain pen while checking for mana. There was nothing wrong with it. So I checked the desk lamp next. The lever was turned toward the on position, but it wasn’t giving off any light.”

Narke stared at me without saying a word. I met his golden eyes and continued.

“I thought the mana lamp cartridge had run out, so I took the cover apart first. But the cartridge was still sufficiently charged, and the mana inside it was no different from that of an ordinary mana lamp cartridge. Even its color was exactly the same as when it had left the manufacturer.”

“So, at least from what you could sense, it was just an ordinary cartridge.”

“Yeah. There’s no way the culprit would have touched the cartridge in the first place, because the lamp itself was broken.”

“…….”

Even though I had jumped straight from A to Z, Narke immediately understood what I meant, his eyes turning sharp.

If I were to explain the parts I had left out, it would go like this.

If the culprit had put Atropos into the cartridge, the investigators, being mages themselves, would have sensed the mana leaking out over the lampshade. Even if they had made the drug so that its mana couldn’t be detected, the cartridge itself would have remained as obvious evidence at the scene. From the culprit’s perspective, that would only create an unnecessary risk.

P. Yes, don’t most criminals avoid leaving evidence at the scene in the first place? More importantly, remember that the Investigation Bureau hadn’t even paid any attention to the desk lamp. The culprit had every reason to think that, while it might be somewhat risky, replacing the cartridge was worth trying. The poor reasoning of the Austrian Investigation Bureau only supported that assumption.

S. This deduction assumes that the Prime Minister’s killer is on the same level as us. We have to consider the possibility that I’m overestimating him, but we already know that the culprit was capable of infiltrating the Prime Minister’s residence. If he had tampered with the cartridge, then it would be reasonable to assume that he also tampered with it after the incident. In other words, he replaced it.

If that were the truth, then I might have returned after seeing the cartridge the culprit had swapped in and confidently told Narke, “There was no poison in the cartridge.” After all, there had been a full thirty minutes between the Prime Minister’s death and the secretary entering the office.

There was a flaw in that reasoning. If the culprit had the ability and the time to replace the cartridge, there would be no reason for him to leave the broken stand behind at the scene.

We had to keep in mind that the desk lamp had not originally been a piece of junk. It had become one during the incident. Even if someone used an oddly shaped cinnabar ceramic as a decorative piece, if the desk lamp he was actually using suddenly stopped giving off light, it would be perfectly natural for him to have someone take it away and get it repaired.

We remembered the positions of the windows, the table, and the chair, as well as the size of the room. Even with the indoor lighting, the office was large enough that the chandelier alone was not sufficient. It would make little difference in ordinary circumstances, but trying to read paper documents while sitting at the desk would cause a completely different level of eye strain. The office chair was positioned with its back to the window. Even at noon, when plenty of sunlight came in, his body would block the light from the documents, making a desk lamp essential. And the incident had taken place in the dim early hours of the morning. The desk lamp had been turned on ever since the Prime Minister arrived at work. It had broken today, while being used in the incident.

From this, we could conclude that the culprit who had brought Atropos into the Prime Minister’s residence had been unable to return to the scene after the incident. And if we went back to the more fundamental question, the answer was simple: the culprit had not put Atropos into the cartridge.

It didn’t take me long to think of this. I was just about to move on to the next point when, in those few seconds, Narke grabbed his forehead and closed his eyes.

“…All right, Lukas. I get it. The cartridge wasn’t tampered with. So what’s next?”

“…I’ll explain it out loud. You really didn’t need to use it just now, did you?”

“Haha, true. But it feels like there’s a lot more going on in your head.”

Narke buried his head in the pillow and continued.

“I want to know what you’re thinking~ So, go on. Keep explaining.”

“The cartridge itself was completely normal, but the glass conduit that carried mana from the cartridge to the luminous artifact was damaged. Depending on the angle, it looked slightly blackened, as if mana residue had built up inside or the glass had melted.”

“The glass passage was damaged…?”

“That’s what it looked like. But since the protective glass wasn’t damaged at all, the glass conduit probably hadn’t melted either. It must have been clogged with mana residue. But here’s the problem.”

“Why would mana residue have built up in the conduit between the cartridge and the luminous artifact?”

Those weren’t my words. At Narke’s words, I snapped my fingers.

“Exactly. You can tell just by hearing it, but it’s not something that could have been clogged by someone taking it apart piece by piece. Why would mana residue have built up inside the glass conduit in the first place? The mana in the cartridge is designed not to clump together. And just as you read with Insight, there’s no way the culprit would have tampered with the mana lamp cartridge.”

I rested my chin on my hand and continued, almost muttering to myself.

“That leaves only one possibility. The culprit applied the poison to the glass surface of the desk lamp.”

“…….”

“The poison’s mana spread toward the Prime Minister while also spreading into the mana lamp itself. That foreign mana blocked the path through which the compressed mana inside the cartridge was released. There was one more thing that bothered me earlier. Why was the light from the second quadrant of the chandelier slightly dimmer than the others?”

I knew the layout when viewed from the side: entrance door―chandelier―desk―chair―window. Now imagine looking up at the ceiling while sitting in the chair. The second quadrant was on the left, and more specifically, on the desk side rather than the entrance side. For a right-handed person, the desk lamp would have to be on the left side of the desk, and that was exactly where it had been.

The poison smeared across the lamp’s protective glass had affected not only the lamp and the Prime Minister, but the room as well, albeit only slightly. The chandelier light closest to it had been obstructed more than the others, much like the cartridge’s glass conduit had been clogged.

“That was a clever choice. Anyone working at a desk would naturally have a lamp there… To put the poison somewhere people wouldn’t think twice about.”

At those words, I briefly had a thought like a 21st century person before immediately pushing the thought aside and covered it with another line of reasoning. Leaning back against the headboard, I said, “It’s certainly a new method compared to poisoning someone’s tea or wine. He must have been desperate not to get caught.”

Good.

This was easier than the training I had gone through at the Headquarters. That had been troublesome not because it was particularly complicated, but because I had to move around in person. I had to make my way through the city to deal with that, whereas this was something I could solve within a single room. The problem was that it didn’t really end with the room.

Now I had to find out who had smeared Atropos onto the Prime Minister’s desk lamp, where that person had hidden the ‘100 barrels of Atropos,’ and how they had managed to infiltrate the Prime Minister’s residence in the first place.

After all, as you know, everyone who had entered the Prime Minister’s residence had been interrogated. And yet, none of them had turned up anything suspicious.

There was still a faint trace of something having been applied to the lampshade, and the Investigation Bureau would soon collect the fingerprints and compare them with those of government-registered officials and various other people. The culprit might have worn gloves the entire time, or perhaps his fingerprints were not registered at all. Unless someone was the sort to put on his glasses by gripping the lenses with his fingers, people generally had no reason to reach inside a lampshade and pull at the bulb to adjust the angle of a desk lamp. That meant that if they collected the fingerprints left on the protective glass, the only ones they were likely to find would be the culprit’s. So there was an extremely high chance that he had been wearing gloves when he applied Atropos to the glass. Even if they used every method available, they might not identify the person who killed the Prime Minister right away, but…

The moment I had them investigate the desk lamp, the die was cast. Now that I had thrown out the bait, the other side could no longer avoid the battle of wits. Even if we knew nothing about the fingerprints, every choice the culprit made would become a clue for us.

The culprit probably thought he was “looking down at the Austrian investigators on the plain from the forest on the high ground.” But that wasn’t the case. He was in the forest on the high ground, yes. But we were sitting in the forest before him, watching both the forest beyond it and the plain below.

If all else failed, I might have to spend my precious points to turn back time to midnight, force my way into an Austria where the Prime Minister was still alive, and observe the culprit myself with a telescope from outside the Prime Minister’s residence. But there was a ninety-nine percent chance the Headquarters would put a stop to that plan.

With that thought in mind, I asked Narke, “I’m sorry to ask you to use your ability in a situation like this, but… if you look at that desk lamp, do you think you could tell who applied the poison to it? It’s not too late yet. How about going there yourself?”

“Hmm. You already had the investigators examine the desk lamp before you left.”

“I know. Since we’re on the subject, what do you think about that?”

Narke gave a small laugh and shook his head.

“That method is the best. It’s much better than us simply stealing the desk lamp. Besides…”

Narke spoke with a slightly troubled expression.

“It wouldn’t be impossible, but even if I went there myself, the results would be very uncertain. If I looked into someone’s eyes, maybe I could figure it out, but I don’t have an ability like Heike’s.”

“Not impossible, but difficult right now,” huh. So if Narke’s Insight ability were to reach a higher level, he could theoretically read the memories of objects as well. But that wasn’t possible for him yet? Either way, looking into the eyes of the people there would only tell us the same thing we learned when we first arrived in Vienna and looked into the eyes of the police—that is, the details of the investigation, nothing more.

Come to think of it, I’ve always felt this way, but Heike’s ability really was one Pleroma would be eager to get their hands on. If they raised him properly and trained him to specialize in his ability, the benefits they could gain from it would be enormous. Just like his uncle, Heinrich Einsiedel, did.

“…….”

When my thoughts reached that point, I closed my eyes and let out a long breath.

After that, Narke quickly fell asleep. From what I had heard, Markus was due to return to work at three in the morning. I closed my eyes as I watched the hands of the clock inch toward nine in the evening.

I don’t know how much time had passed.

When I opened my eyes at the sound of rustling, I saw Narke hurriedly putting on his outer clothes in the darkness. I groped around for the lamp on the bedside table, finally managed to turn it on, and asked, “…Narke?”

“Lukas. Get ready. We have to go out.”

The moment I heard the seriousness in his voice, I quickly got up, put on my outer clothes, and followed him outside. It was two in the morning. Narke cast an illusion spell, transformed into Johanna, and followed behind me. When we took the elevator down to the lobby, I came face-to-face with someone I hadn’t expected to see.

Kathrin Wächter, Markus’s “junior” whom I had met earlier, was walking into the hotel with several of his colleagues. His face had gone pale, and the muscles around his mouth and forehead were tense. Unlike earlier, his strides were long and his hurried, unsteady gait made him look as though he was desperately searching for someone.

“…….”

He must have checked the condition of the glass conduit inside the mana lamp and reached the same conclusion I had. That someone had coated the lamp with poison. He must have come here now to report the fingerprint analysis results to his senior, and Narke had come out at this hour to find out who the ‘Prime Minister’s killer’ was from Wächter.

Supporting Narke by the arm, I walked toward the main entrance without looking anywhere but straight ahead, wearing the face of an ordinary citizen who knew nothing. Wächter’s pale face drew closer with every step. Soon, he hurried past me. Just as I turned my head to see whether Narke had looked into Wächter’s eyes, Narke’s mouth opened and closed several times in disbelief. Then a short sentence struck directly into my mind.

— “It’s the Prime Minister. Only the Prime Minister’s fingerprints were found.”