Chapter 431

Narke’s expression hardened.

— “Using holy water to play tricks on a Catholic…”

— “It’s blasphemous.”

— “It’s too much. For some believers, that’s practically a totem.”

— “…A totem…?”

I thought of all the things Catholicism rejected and felt momentarily overwhelmed, so I decided not to pursue that line of thought. Narke, looking troubled for an entirely different reason, let out the words in a low, subdued voice, disappointment showing on his face at something I couldn’t quite understand.

— “Holy water is special, but it’s not a special thing. Do you understand what I mean?”

— “No.”

— “To them, it’s no different from a locket with the face of someone they love inside. Something they carry close to their heart every day because it gives them a sense of peace. People find comfort through the Church. Water blessed by priests, short prayers, countless rituals performed in the name of the Church… But you know, when you think about it, is all of that really the will of God?”

I said nothing.

From everything I had seen of Narke so far, I felt he would give me an answer not too different from my own. Even though he was a cardinal of the See of Saint Peter—a key figure in the Papal See, the center of the Catholic Church throughout the world. His values were his own, separate from those of the Papal See. The two did not necessarily align.

Narke spoke with a look of reproach, as though lamenting someone who had strayed down the wrong path.

— “It’s the will of people. But even so, believers find comfort in rituals and promises that have been established over many years. To me, holy water is simply salt water officially sanctioned by the Church. If it happens to contain divine power, then it could genuinely serve as medicine, but fundamentally, I don’t believe there’s any trace of God in it. Believers, however, don’t see it that way.”

“…….”

— “Holy water is the product of a promise that has lasted for generations. They took advantage of that faith.”

Deep sorrow was etched across his face. Narke had always wanted the essence of things rather than the Church itself. If his teachers heard me say that, they would probably insist that the two were inseparable, that they were one and the same. But at least for Narke, that wasn’t the case. Even without trying to speculate about his past, I could vaguely understand why he had stopped viewing the Church in such a positive light.

And yet, at the same time, Narke had said that even if he didn’t think highly of the Church itself, people could undoubtedly find peace through it. I couldn’t help but feel a sense of kinship with the way he thought.

Thinking that, I slowly went over the items in each section of the storage room, committing them all to memory. I wouldn’t forget a single one. The remaining bottles of holy water—the ones brought from other churches—were probably on the second and third floors of the residence.

Now, then.

<100 barrels of Atropos from Italy to Austria-Hungary>. The first three parts were solved.

The Austrian prime minister had returned from his visit to Italy carrying a bottle of holy water containing Atropos. It was unlikely that he had brought it back from Bosnia. The problem was the 100 barrels.

‘…A hundred barrels? Are they insane…?’

The amount was staggering. A single bottle of holy water probably held no more than 200ml at most—though of course that depended on what it was stored in—but where on earth were they getting a hundred barrels from? Still, there was hope now. I turned toward Narke and whispered.

― “Now we just need to find out where he got the holy water.”

― “Right, Lukas. But…”

Narke glanced at his watch, then grabbed my hand and dragged me out of the storage room.

― “We need to clean this up first! Hurry!”

“Huh?!”

― “We just barged in, after all~ Haha!”

Narke pushed the flustered me forward and struck up a conversation with the investigator waiting outside the storage room.

“We have finished checking everything. Thank you.”

So this is the price we pay for convenience. I thought that as I ignored Narke’s unusually polite, almost un-Narke-like manner of speaking, as well as the height and face he had somehow changed without me noticing. The investigator smiled and shook his head.

“Don’t mention it. You must have come a long way.”

‘So that’s the cover story. We came from far away.’

Narke subtly ushered me down the corridor while the investigator who had been guarding the storage room headed in the opposite direction.

― “Let’s go.”

“…?!”

Whoosh—

Narke grabbed my arm and flew down the stairs, casting a soundproofing spell at the same time. His height was shrinking little by little. The fingers gripping my arm grew rougher. The edges of his robe sleeves became worn, and a waist cord appeared around him. The hair that had taken on a brownish tint when he transformed into ‘someone else’ grew lighter and shorter. By the time we reached the lower floor and came back up the stairs on the opposite side, Narke had become a completely different person.

‘…Just how many faces does this guy have?’

Judging by how effortlessly he could pull one out on the spot, this definitely wasn’t something he’d only done once or twice. The investigator from the storage room was walking toward us in the distance. Narke, now transformed into yet another person, cast a concealment spell over me and pushed me against the wall. With a bundle of documents tucked under his arm, he walked quickly ahead. Then he cheerfully greeted the investigator.

“Hello.”

“Ah, hello.”

‘One person, playing multiple roles…’

That way, even if someone happened to rummage through the investigator’s memories, there would be no way to tell who had used divine power. Convenience always came with an inconvenient cleanup afterward… Now it was time to return the badge. I glanced at the badge hanging from my robe and asked, “Where did you even get this?”

“Outside.”

We left the building, greeting the police officer standing guard at the entrance as we went. This storage facility was in Vienna as well, which made it another place where one wrong move could easily get us into trouble.

‘He said we had two minutes left earlier… We must have gone over already.’

He had probably meant two minutes excluding the time it took to move around, but I couldn’t help feeling a chill run down my spine. I hurried after Narke.

Narke turned into a narrow alley near the ghetto. The beggars who usually sprawled along the streets seemed to have all been picked up by the police. There were tin cans and wooden boards scattered around the alley, but not a single person.

We squeezed through one crooked, winding alley after another until we finally stopped in front of a shop with a small sign hanging above it. A single orange mana lamp cast an eerie light over the place.

“…A bar?”

“Yeah.”

“…So this is where you took it from.”

Even without going inside, I could tell what had happened at a glance. These idiots got off shift and decided to get drunk? And then they let their badges get stolen?

I shook my head and reached for the badge. Or rather, I tried to. Narke’s hand came down firmly over mine.

— “Lukas. Not yet.”

“What?”

Narke smiled gently and explained in a quiet voice.

— “We didn’t come here to return it. We came to see whether we can get away with keeping it.”

“What?”

Before I could even finish processing that, Narke threw open the tavern door and walked inside. By then, he had already taken on the appearance of an ordinary middle-aged Old Human. I quickly followed him into the dark tavern as he walked at a brisk pace, and soon I spotted several people in Investigation Bureau uniforms, thoroughly drunk.

Of course there had to be a few idiots like this among the tens of thousands of personnel mobilized for the investigation, but seeing them with my own eyes was still pathetic. They had probably chosen this out-of-the-way place because going to a bar in the middle of the city would almost certainly mean running into their seniors, juniors, or colleagues.

‘…There were two badges, but there are five people here.’

So he only took two of the five. Right. If there had only been two of them and both badges disappeared, that would have looked more suspicious.

Narke pretended to go to the restroom, cast a concealment spell, and came back out, casually lingering around their table. How did I know? I had no idea. I could see him clearly even while he was invisible. But… it soon became impossible not to understand what he was doing.

BANG—

The arm of one of the investigators, who had been resting his chin on his hand with his eyes closed, slipped, and his fist struck a beer mug.

“…?!”

“…! Hey, wait!”

As the beer spilled, the investigators’ faces flushed red and they hurriedly got to their feet. In the meantime, another glass tipped over. That was how drunk people moved, I supposed, but that one was Narke’s doing. He had pulled on the first investigator’s clothes, making his arm slip. There was no doubt about it.

The investigators took off their beer-stained robes and jackets and hung them over their chairs before calling the server. In the meantime, I saw a gleaming badge and a robe brooch fall to the floor. They must have fallen when they hurriedly pulled off their robes with a bit too much force.

The smooth, rounded badge rolled across the floor and came to a stop beneath the table diagonally behind them.

Still invisible, Narke slipped his hand into someone else’s pocket, quickly skimmed through the notebook inside, and dropped it onto the floor. A cap that someone had left hanging over a chair also fell to the floor.

Only then did Narke slip back into the now-vacant restroom, come back out disguised as an Old Human, and calmly leave the tavern.

“…….”

― “Good~ Now, whatever goes missing, they’ll probably blame it on the commotion that just happened.”

― “Thorough.”

― “You always have to be thorough. I feel bad for the owner, but… it shouldn’t cause too much trouble. And I think we’re better off keeping the badge.”

― “Agreed.”

Hadn’t the lack of one been causing us a bit of trouble until now? With this, we could go anywhere. At least until the Austrian government changed the badge system and issued new passes—not badges.

“All right, now.”

I said as we left the alley again.

― “It’s time to find the holy water. One hundred barrels of Atropos have already been brought into the country. The German Intelligence Bureau should be able to find out which churches the Prime Minister visited. We’ll leave that to them…”

Now we needed to find out where the German embassy was. I pulled the map up in my mind and continued.

— “Let’s find the Atropos that was brought into this country.”

— “We should. A hundred barrels… That’s a lot to take in. Could the cipher have been decoded incorrectly?”

— “Then I suppose we’ll have to go hold the German cryptographers accountable.”

I should keep the possibility in mind, but I shouldn’t get too hung up on it. We had to consider that the cipher might have been decoded incorrectly, but that was fundamentally far outside our area of responsibility. There was a reason things were divided up, after all. The people sitting at desks and pushing pens around were supposed to put their heads together and work out the operation plans, while field operatives like us were supposed to run around on-site and use our judgment when things went wrong. Hopefully, their poor reasoning wouldn’t end up forcing us to do their work for them.

We stopped by the German embassy and wrote down the decoded message before handing it to the ambassador. He placed it in the warp mailbox along with a stack of other documents, then gave us a look that told us it had been sent successfully.

This German ambassador was our biggest ally in Vienna, Austria. Naturally, though unfortunately, there was only so much he could do outside of diplomatic affairs. For now, he was little more than a makeshift post office for us. So, just as we had been doing all along, we had no choice but to move ourselves and find the trail leading to the Atropos.

And…

We finally received the communication artifact that we hadn’t been allowed to bring into the country when we entered. I concealed it and hooked it over my ear. From now on, every piece of information we uncovered would be passed on to the ambassador here at the embassy.

As we left the embassy, I spoke to Narke through divine power.

— “All right. There’s something we need to think about now, Narke.”

— “I’m looking forward to it~”

— “…Don’t look forward to it…. You and I need to put our heads together.”

— “Haha.”

Narke literally sent his laughter into my head, then looked at me with clear eyes. I suppose that meant he was telling me to go ahead.

— “We narrowed down the common ground between Hypotheses 2-1 and 2-3 and came to the conclusion that ‘the Atropos was an object the prime minister possessed that didn’t look like poison at all.’ And we found the holy water.”

— “Right.”

— “I never even told you what Hypothesis 2-1 was…”

— “Hahahaha! Cut me some slack~”

— “Anyway, finding the holy water isn’t the end of it. To examine the case more closely, we need to figure out which of 2-1 and 2-3 is actually true.”

2-1 was mental manipulation magic.

2-3 was the prime minister himself applying the substance for some specific purpose, such as a ritual or rite—in other words, a traditional method of brainwashing.

Which one had the culprit used?

— “Narke. To answer the question of why the culprit chose the mana lamp, we came up with this. The ‘object in the prime minister’s possession that looked nothing like poison’ was the murder weapon. To turn that non-poisonous substance into actual Atropos, it needed a medium. And that medium was the mana emitted by the mana lamp. In other words, ‘holy water’ only became Atropos after coming into contact with mana. And here…”

— “Here’s the problem.”

Narke cut me off. There was a mischievous smile on his face. I really wasn’t in the mood to laugh right now—in fact, this was hardly something the entire population of Europe should be laughing about—but I couldn’t help letting out a small laugh at his teasing expression. I cleared my throat and seriously said what Narke had already predicted.

— “Right. There is a problem. The culprit could have simply made the prime minister drink the holy water. A mage’s entire body is filled with mana, isn’t it? If he drank the ‘holy water,’ it could have been transformed into Atropos inside his body. So why didn’t they do that? If they could kill him cleanly that way, why go through all this trouble and take the roundabout route of using the mana from a desk lamp? Of course, no one would willingly drink holy water. But choosing what kind of water he drank was something the culprit could have arranged from the start. Isn’t that a ridiculously minor problem?”

— “Hahahaha. I think we’ve already reached the same conclusion in our heads~”

— “Looks like it.”

I smiled and looked ahead again.

Now it was time to go over the four problems we’d identified earlier.

P1. In cases 2-1 and 2-3: Where did the Atropos come from?

P2. In cases 2-1 and 2-3: If contact with it was enough to cause poisoning the moment it was applied to his finger, why did the Atropos have to be applied to the mana lamp?

P3. In cases 2-1 and 2-3: No dangerous chemicals were found in or around the prime minister’s residence. So how did this happen?

P4. In case 2-1: Who cast the mental manipulation magic?

P1 and P3 had been solved at the same time, so I crossed them out. The holy water had been the Atropos all along.

What we needed to figure out now were P2 and P4, and Narke and I had just found the answer to them.

P2: Why did the Atropos have to be applied to the mana lamp?

We had already formed a hypothesis about that: mana was necessary to convert holy water into Atropos.

However, there was nothing special about the mana produced by mana lamps. It was merely “artificial mana,” with the characteristics of human mana removed from it, and it wasn’t particularly powerful since its only real effect was producing light. I had already considered this back during the Pentathlon. So the real question behind P2 was this: if drinking it would have killed the Prime Minister even faster because of the mana already in his body, why did the culprit make him smear the holy water onto the lamp instead of simply making him drink it?

We could make one simple assumption: “holy water” changes depending on what kind of mana comes into contact with it.

The moment the holy water got onto his hand, it should have been obvious that the poison would seep into his body. And yet the culprit didn’t stop there. They made the Prime Minister smear the holy water onto the lamp as well. Since artificial-lamp mana was involved in this case, we could therefore conclude that the mana that caused the holy water to manifest as Atropos was not “human mana,” but “artificial mana.”

There was one more thing we had to keep in mind. Other than the Prime Minister, there had not yet been any suspicious mass deaths. Even though one hundred barrels, roughly sixteen tons, of Atropos had already been brought into Austria.

It was becoming clear.

Holy water + artificial mana = Atropos. In other words, unless holy water came into contact with artificial mana, it was harmless whether someone drank it or poured it over themselves.

That left P4.

Why had the Prime Minister gone through the abnormal act of carefully coating the lamp with holy water? What kind of lunatic would smear holy water all over the glass of a desk lamp? Was it 2-1, or 2-3?

At this point, we had to ask ourselves another question: if holy water could be transformed into a deadly poison, couldn’t it also be transformed into other magic potions? On top of that, Pleroma had already developed mind control drugs in an attempt to reproduce the effects of mind control magic.

From there, we could form a new hypothesis to solve P4.

When holy water comes into contact with human mana, it transforms into a mind control drug rather than Atropos.

The Prime Minister had taken out the holy water he had received during his most recent trip and used it sometime after 9:45 AM. The moment he did, he had fallen under Pleroma’s mind control magic. That explained why the Prime Minister had gone to such bizarre lengths to carefully coat the lamp with holy water.

Every problem had been solved. Once the thread was pulled loose, the entire case became startlingly clear.

There was no need for us to discuss how the case would proceed any further. Just like me, Narke must have judged Hypothesis 2-1 to be far more likely. And regardless of that, he already knew exactly where I intended to go next in order to track down the Atropos.

Where should we go to find the Atropos?

First, there was the Italian cathedral the Prime Minister had visited. It was possible that they had a hundred barrels of Atropos there. But according to the cipher, roughly sixteen tons of Atropos had already made their way into Austria. The Prime Minister had only carried a single bottle of holy water with him. At most, it could have held 200ml.

Of course, it was easy to assume that the cathedral itself might possess a much larger supply of Atropos. We had already sent that information to Germany, so that was their problem to deal with. We needed to find the sixteen tons of Atropos that had been brought into Austria.

But then…

‘They said nothing unusual had been found on the train from Italy to Austria.’

That made perfect sense. Atropos wasn’t poisonous in its normal state, so there was no reason for it to be caught during a routine inspection of a freight train. If that was the case, what were we supposed to do?

Tap—

The heels of my boots echoed through the corridor with every step.

I was alone inside the dimly lit Ministry of Commerce and National Economy building. It was the middle of the night, so there was no one in the building. The departments involved in the investigation were working through the night, but the Ministry of Commerce and National Economy had nothing to do with the case, and apparently it wasn’t a particularly busy time for them either. Every employee was safely at home.

That was good news.

The only problem was that the entire building was pitch-black and deathly silent—like something straight out of a ghost story. There weren’t even any glowing emergency lights. But for a living person, that barely counted as a problem. I cast a soundproofing spell and listened to the sound of my own footsteps as I checked the doors of the storage rooms.

‘Hmm.’

Records room… Where would the records archive be? Even a room with a similar name would do. After rummaging around in the darkness for about ten minutes, I finally found something that sounded close enough. I stopped in front of the document archive and tried the doorknob.

Click.

It stopped about a third of the way.

‘…Now the problem is getting inside.’

Naturally, I didn’t have a key. Fortunately—or unfortunately—the room itself hadn’t been protected by a barrier, as people commonly did. The building had a barrier around it, but individual rooms didn’t. As long as I had the key, I could get inside.

What did I do when I came across Corbiniano’s locked door? I reached into my robe pocket and pulled out Austria’s coordinate book. After calculating the scale and the number of coordinate squares, I shifted the detailed coordinates by a couple of squares and snapped my fingers.

Clunk—!

“…!”

A window letting in the moonlight came into view. I leaned against a trolley inside the archives room and pushed myself up again. Success. I turned my head, gathered a ball of light at the tip of my wand, and scanned the bookshelves. The densely packed handwritten records were overwhelming.

‘Import and export ledgers.’

Where would they be? I slowly made my way along the shelves until I stopped at a section with the relevant label on the spines.

The years gradually increased, starting from November 1896. I ran my finger along the book spines before moving my gaze to 1898, this year’s records. Then I pulled out a purple leather-bound file and carefully opened it. There were far more entries than I expected, all written in tiny handwriting alongside countless numbers—the fact that not a single one of these records had been typed on a computer was almost enough to make me dizzy.

“…….”

April 1, 1898. April 2. April 3….

My eyes quickly scanned downward. Yesterday’s imports hadn’t been copied into the records yet. It didn’t matter. I went through every list a couple of times and committed them to memory. Then, after casting the soundproofing spell again, I tapped the artifact beside my ear. The ambassador’s voice came through almost immediately.

— [Received.]

“April 5. Sixteen tons of bottled mineral water, Acqua Panna, from Tuscany, Italy, to Alpenquelle Hans Gruber in Trieste, Austria¹.”

— […….]

I heard the hurried scratching of a pen.

I closed my eyes and slowly steadied my breathing. Everything that had happened so far flashed through my mind. Four in the morning. Less than twenty-four hours since I’d arrived here.

After a long while, the ambassador’s voice came through.

— [Good work.]

“…….”

Our mission was over. In principle.

Of course, there was no way anything dangerous would have been found on the train from Italy to Austria. Just like the Atropos had been holy water.

Then what was the roughly sixteen tons of Atropos left over after excluding the 200ml? Was it holy water too? Approaching the problem that way would never get us an answer. I had to find an ordinary, harmless liquid imported from Italy, whether it was perfume, detergent, or a beverage.

Now I had. The other ‘Atropos’ wasn’t holy water. It was drinking water. Pleroma had used a high-end Italian bottled-water brand to bring Atropos into Austria. A brand that could be found in practically any restaurant frequented by aristocratic New Humans. It was obvious what would happen to the New Humans of this country the moment they came into contact with that water.

Now there was one thing we had to do, even if it went against every principle we were supposed to follow.

We had to go to the most dangerous place the Acqua Panna imported into Austria could possibly end up: the Imperial Palace of Österreich-Este.

Translator Note

1. Trieste was part of the Austrian Littoral within the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1898. It became part of Italy only after the dissolution of Austria-Hungary following World War I.

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