Chapter 65: Overstaying His Welcome

Once Uriel finally opened his mouth, the two lead interrogators — both acutely aware they had screwed up and nursing guilty consciences — politely escorted him back to the interrogation room.

"Let's go over it one more time." The interrogator sitting across from him flipped through the transcript pages. The initial intensity of the questioning had completely evaporated; it felt more like ticking boxes on a bureaucratic form. "On the day Seraphina Waldrich went missing, you were with her?"

Uriel nodded.

"What did you do?"

"Went on a date."

"Specifics."

"Walked around, did some shopping, then went to the plaza to grab something to eat." Uriel answered earnestly, even managing to conjure a faint blush of adolescent shyness. "Ice cream. I bent down to tie my shoe, so I handed her my cone. When she handed it back, I noticed she'd taken a bite out of it. I guess that was basically sharing the same spoon."

The recorder froze. His quill stopped mid-stroke.

He looked down at the saccharine, romance-soaked sentence he had just committed to parchment. Then he looked back up at Uriel. His expression hovered somewhere between confusion and a profound, secondhand embarrassment. Beside him, the guard standing with his arms crossed coughed into his fist and suddenly found the ceiling fascinating.

The lead interrogator stared. "...That's it?"

"We also talked. About... pets, I guess?" Uriel thought for a moment. "She told me she liked fluffy things, but her family wouldn't let her keep a dog. I told her I had a dog at home that barks at everyone. Then we debated for twenty minutes about whether dogs or cats were better."

The recorder finished the last word, set his quill down, and slid the parchment across the table.

The interrogator picked it up, scanned it from top to bottom, and looked up. "That's it?"

Uriel met his gaze, his expression so sincerely earnest it was practically watertight. "Do you need more detail? Like what flavor the ice cream was, or what brand the milk tea was? I think it was vanilla. Or maybe sweet cream. Not sure if there was vanilla in it. Might've just been Seraphina's lip balm."

The interrogator placed the transcript — now thoroughly contaminated with adolescent romance — on the table and pushed it aside with two fingers, as though it were mildly radioactive.

He stared at Uriel for several long seconds. He opened his mouth. Closed it. Opened it again. Closed it again.

Uriel didn't flinch. He knew exactly what the reaction upstairs would be when this transcript made its way up the chain of command. All this fuss, for this? The Royal Knight Order had deployed their standard interrogation protocol, and the result was a high schooler's play-by-play of a weekend date.

"Fine." The interrogator stood up, the legs of his chair scraping a short, harsh squeal against the stone floor. "Wait here."

He pushed the door open and walked out.

Uriel heard the lock click once. Footsteps echoed down the corridor — the sharp tap of boot heels on stone, fading into the distance. He adjusted his posture and leaned back in his chair.

The transcript would go through the standard chain of command. In a place like the Knight Order, the hierarchy was rigid. Every step required a signature and a seal. The interrogator would hand it to the squad captain, the squad captain to the vice-commander, the vice-commander to the Commander's desk.

That would take a while.

---

Meanwhile. Knight Order Headquarters. Commander's Office.

The office was easily three times the size of the interrogation room. Portraits of past Commanders lined the walls, every single one wearing an expression of unimpeachable, rigid righteousness.

Behind a mahogany desk sat a man in his fifties, his shoulders as broad as a barn door. Spread out before him was the interrogation transcript. Beside it sat a cup of black tea, long gone cold.

On the sofa opposite him sat a woman.

No one had ever sat on the visitor's sofa in the Knight Commander's office with quite this level of absolute entitlement. Her legs were crossed, the toe of her boot tilted slightly upward. Her elbow rested on the armrest, fingertips propping up her cheek. Long hair cascaded from her shoulders, the tips brushing her waist, catching the office light and throwing off a cool, silver sheen.

Her expression was faint — poised somewhere between politeness and appraisal. It was impossible to tell whether she was smiling or simply calculating the net worth of the person sitting across from her.

Estella Waldrich.

The kingdom's strongest adventurer. Candidate for the title of Hero. Seraphina's cousin.

She wasn't wearing standard adventurer gear. Just casual clothes, no sword at her hip. But the Commander knew perfectly well that this woman didn't need a sword to dismantle half this building. Or half the Royal Capital. Even with the entire Knight Order mobilized against her.

"So," Estella spoke. Her voice didn't sound hurried in the slightest. "What did the interrogation turn up?"

The Commander slid the transcript across the desk.

Estella didn't reach for it. She simply tilted her head, her gaze sweeping over the parchment. Her eyes moved fast — ten lines at a glance — until they hit a certain sentence.

And stopped.

"Ice cream," she read aloud.

Her gaze moved down.

"Indirect kiss."

The fingers resting on the armrest tapped once. Lightly.

"Talked about family."

The leg she had crossed over stopped swinging.

The Commander noticed the detail. He'd spent thirty years running with adventurers. He'd seen every kind of scene there was — and a person suddenly freezing a subconscious habit was often more honest than any words they could speak. He discreetly pulled the transcript back and took a sip of his cold tea.

"That's all there is," the Commander said. "We interrogated him all day, and that's all we got. The kid is either genuinely innocent, or he's playing dumb."

He glanced at Estella deliberately.

"What do you think? Want us to put him through the wringer? Torture him a little?"

The question was perfectly calibrated. Discussing how to rough up a girl's boyfriend right in front of her cousin was, in itself, a probe. If you want to protect him, I'll let him go. If you nod, I'll play by the rules. The Commander was no fool. He had no intention of accidentally pissing off a terrifying woman.

Estella was silent for a moment.

Then she stood up.

"Just let him go."

The Commander raised an eyebrow.

"If he did it," Estella said, walking straight toward the office door without looking back, "he'll go back to his base or meet up with his accomplices once he's out. Just have someone tail him. If he didn't do it, keeping him locked up is pointless."

She pulled the door open.

"I'm going to find Sera."

The door clicked shut.

The Commander stared at the closed door for a long while. Then he picked up a small magical communicator from his desk.

"Release the kid. Uriel, was it? Let him go."

---

Detention Wing.

Uriel had been transferred here after the questioning ended.

The iron door finally swung open from the outside. The Knight Order member in charge of releasing him stifled a yawn and jerked his chin toward the hallway. "Come on out. Word from upstairs says you're free to go."

Uriel stood and rolled his stiff shoulders. He stepped out of the detention cell and walked down the corridor toward the exit.

It was a long hallway. Closed doors lined both sides, with a magelight lamp every few paces, casting alternating bands of bright and shadow across the stone floor.

As he rounded a corner, he saw her.

At the far end of the corridor, a woman was just walking out from the direction of the Knight Commander's office. She turned and disappeared into the passageway leading to the main hall. She wasn't walking fast. Her silhouette stretched long and lean against the light at the end of the corridor.

It lasted only an instant. Five seconds. Maybe less.

But Uriel's pupils contracted sharply.

He saw her level.

His observation ability had triggered passively — he hadn't consciously activated his Aether Analysis. He was far too familiar with this visual habit. For individuals whose level was high enough, the ambient overflow of their mana signature alone was enough to gauge their standing. And what he saw in that single glance made his throat tighten.

Bright gold.

Not just gold — its edges bleeding into halos of red-purple. That red-purple wasn't a soft gradient. It was like the cold flame spat out when superheated metal is quenched — scattered like sparks along the rim of the golden aura.

Converted to a numerical value: close to 70.

Uriel's mental processing speed spiked to its absolute limit in a fraction of a second. This woman has to be Estella.

Gold base, red-purple overflow — that visual signature corresponded to the threshold of Star-class. Around level 68, give or take. One step away from Star-class. Seraphina had said her cousin was the kingdom's number one adventurer, a Hero candidate, preparing to break into Star-class.

She had clearly underestimated her.

This wasn't "preparing to break through." This was standing on the threshold.

Uriel didn't break stride.

He rounded the next corner, pressed his back against the cold stone wall, and took one deep breath.

Things Seraphina had said scrolled across his mind like subtitles on a screen. "My cousin has no sense of personal boundaries with me." "The way she looks at me sometimes makes me uncomfortable." "I hate that type." — every sentence, every fragment, snapped together in his brain like puzzle pieces.

Estella is at least interested in Seraphina in a way that is definitely not normal cousin behavior.

Estella has a transgressive, possessive obsession with Seraphina.

Estella just read his transcript in the Knight Commander's office — shopping, ice cream, indirect kiss.

And yet here he was. Released.

Had she said "let him go"?

"No." Uriel's voice was barely a whisper, his lips hardly moving.

A standard four-option multiple choice question materialized in his head.

1. Rush over and hack him into mincemeat on the spot.
2. Abuse her authority and have the Knight Order torture him.
3. Not care at all. Magnanimously let him go.
4. Ambush him outside. Quietly stab him to death.

He stood where he was, staring down the corridor at the exit door. Sunlight spilled brightly across the tiles outside. A few Knight Order members chatted by the entrance. The exit was right there.

But Uriel turned around.

And walked back toward the detention wing.

---

The two Knight Order members inside were still tidying up. The iron door was still open. One of them looked up and blinked as Uriel strolled back in. "Uh... what's up? Forget something?"

"Yeah." Uriel nodded, his face a mask of perfect calm. He started looking around on the floor, peering into corners, patting things down.

Then he just... stood there. Showing no signs of leaving.

The two guards exchanged a glance.

"Find it? Then you can head out." One of them pointed toward the door.

"Oh, right." Uriel spoke as if something had just occurred to him. "I saw a tall lady with long hair in the corridor just now. Was that Lady Estella?"

"Yeah, she just met with the Commander."

Confirmed.

In Uriel's mind, the options on his mental test were crossed out one by one.

C — Impossible. A yandere-coded older sister who gives her cousin lesbian-PTSD, upon learning that said cousin shared an indirect kiss with a guy, reacts with "just let him go"? That wasn't magnanimity. That was abnormal.

And when something is abnormal, there's always a reason.

What about A and B? Charging into the corridor right outside the Knight Commander's office to hack him to pieces would be far too conspicuous. Torturing him risked leaks — bad PR for her, bad PR for the Knight Order.

So the correct answer was D.

Ambush him outside. Quietly kill him.

No witnesses. No physical evidence. No surveillance crystals.

A suspect who had just been released by the Knight Order, found dead in some back alley? It would just be written off as "met with an accident while attempting to flee." She wouldn't even need to do it herself. A hired blade, a plausible excuse, and she'd wash her hands clean.

Once the man was dead, the narrative belonged to whoever was left standing.

"So I can't leave."

Uriel said it so softly that the two guards thought they'd misheard.

"What?" One of them tilted his head.

Uriel didn't explain. He started rummaging through the detention room. He dug through the recorder's quill cup and pulled out a feather pen missing its cap. He picked up a random metal shard from the corner. He lifted the cold, half-empty water cup from the interrogation table, examined it, and set it back down.

"What are you doing?" The guard's expression shifted from confusion to wariness.

"Looking for my stuff. Think I left something behind." Uriel casually pocketed the metal shard, then dropped into the interrogation chair.

He settled in.

And didn't move.

The two guards stared at him.

"...You can go. Orders from upstairs say you're released."

"I know." Uriel leaned back, stretched his legs out, and arranged himself with the relaxed posture of a man sitting in his own living room.

"Then leave."

"My legs hurt."

The two guards stared.

Uriel's face was a portrait of serenity. "You interrogated me for too long. Made me sit in the same position for hours. Poor circulation. My legs are numb. Can't walk."

One of the guards opened his mouth to argue — but the interrogation had gone on for hours, and the chair was notoriously uncomfortable. He scratched the back of his head and walked out.

About ten minutes later, he returned with an Order healer. The medic squatted down, examined Uriel's legs, stood back up, and looked thoroughly baffled. "There's nothing wrong with them."

"Numbness," Uriel said. "It's intermittent."

The medic gave him a long look, then glanced at the two guards, and finally pulled out a bottle of the cheapest healing potion on hand. Uriel accepted it and drank it with great solemnity.

Then he stayed seated.

"Now what?"

"Hungry."

When that word left his mouth, even Uriel himself felt it was entirely justified. The Knight Order had interrogated him for the better part of a day and given him two cups of water. Not a single slice of bread. He was genuinely starving.

Another twenty minutes passed before a bowl of mashed potatoes and a few hard rolls were brought in. Uriel ate slowly. Each bite was chewed with meticulous care, as though he were savoring a feast prepared by a royal chef. He dunked the hard bread into the mashed potatoes, stirred it into a paste, and spooned it into his mouth one deliberate bite at a time.

When he finished, he wiped the corner of his mouth.

And stayed seated.

The light filtering through the window had turned deep orange. The foot traffic in the corridor, once bustling during the day shift, had thinned to a trickle. The bell for the changing of the guard had already rung. Night was falling.

By now, four or five Knight Order members had gathered in and around the detention room. They had nothing better to do — they'd just come to gawk at the guy who'd been told to leave and refused. One poked his head through the door, then ducked back out. Another took his place.

"Are you going to leave or not?"

"Can't."

"Didn't we just fix your legs?"

"Treated the symptom, not the root cause."

The guard's mouth twitched. He turned and walked into the corridor, where he conferred with his colleagues in hushed tones. They were whispering, but Uriel's hearing was far from ordinary.

"What's this guy's deal? Orders say let him go, and he won't go."

"Beats me. Just throw him out?"

"You want to throw him out, or should I?"

"Maybe... we report back upstairs and see what they say?"

Uriel leaned back in the chair and closed his eyes.

Outside, the darkness was settling in perfectly. A moonless night. High winds. Deep alleys. The kind of night made for murder.

Whoever wanted to go out there was welcome to it.

He wasn't going anywhere.