Chapter 56
“M-Mr. Kael, I think some belongings of scary people may have gotten mixed in with my things….”
“Scary people?”
“Y-yes….”
Nia’s hands were neatly folded on her knees, but her fingertips kept trembling. Her ears drooped low, and her yellow tail barely moved beside the chair leg.
The look of someone who was genuinely frightened.
“I don’t know exactly what organization they belong to. I didn’t hear a name, either. But… they seemed a little different from the gangs you commonly see in Grayeblock.”
“What made you think that?”
Nia bit her lip as though choosing her words.
“It was something about their… atmosphere, I guess… It felt different….”
Kael narrowed his eyes.
Nia continued.
“The Black Ring people swore, broke things, and intimidated everyone around them, but those people were different. They seemed to be trying to move quietly, without attracting attention.”
Kael fell into thought for a moment.
Most of the Black Ring remnants in Grayeblock had been dealt with. They had not disappeared completely, but at least they no longer had enough strength to openly rampage around Last Round.
Then were these newcomers from somewhere else?
Kael asked,
“How did you know the item belonged to them?”
Nia could not answer immediately.
She rubbed the rim of the cup with her fingertips.
“At first, I didn’t.”
Nia said quietly,
“I really just thought… someone had put it in by mistake. It turned up when I was sorting the boxes of ingredients delivered to the bar and my shopping bag. I hadn’t ordered it, and neither had Ms. Mira.”
“So you tried to throw it away.”
“Yes.”
Nia nodded.
“I thought I shouldn’t keep it for no reason. It was a strange thing, so I was going to throw it away nearby. But….”
Her voice lowered slightly.
“I saw them when I went outside to dispose of it near the building.”
Nia continued,
“There were people in the alley, and they were searching through piles of garbage. They were checking the ground too, even the gaps around the pipes in the walls.”
“They were looking for what you went to throw away?”
“I think so.”
Nia swallowed hard.
“One of them was looking at a wrist terminal and said, ‘The location trace puts it somewhere around here.’”
Location tracking. Then it could not be an ordinary item.
“I hid as soon as I heard that. I didn’t even know the item could be tracked. I was just carrying it….”
Nia’s hand tightened around the cup.
“…A-and then someone else said something.”
She took a moment to catch her breath before continuing.
Her voice was trembling.
“He said that if there were any witnesses, we should kill them.”
Kael looked at Nia.
Nia had her head bowed. The fingertips gripping the cup had gone white.
“So that’s why you came to me.”
“Yes.”
Nia gave a small nod.
“If I told Ms. Mira… I thought she might go out there herself. And if I told the Security Bureau, they’d probably suspect Last Round first. If I said I had a strange item, they’d start by asking why it was in my bag….”
Kael thought it was more or less the right judgment.
He held out his hand.
“Show me.”
Nia hesitated for a moment before taking a small cloth-wrapped object from inside her clothes.
When Nia carefully unwrapped it, a small bottle emerged.
A perfume bottle.
A very small amount of blue particles floated inside the bottle.
Kael picked up the bottle and examined its side.
The label attached to the side was almost completely worn away.
The color had faded, and the letters had been scraped off, but a few remained.
He could see a name written near the center.
Etherlyn.
The instant Kael read the word, he recalled a memory from not too long ago.
An advertisement on a wall that he had seen when he first fell into Magitera.
[Mana depletion, stop enduring it any longer.]
[Legal Awakening Aid, Etherlyn.]
Kael had nearly let the phrase pass at the time, but it had remained in his memory.
He remembered sneering that it was poison, not medicine.
Kael rolled the bottle between his fingertips and asked Nia,
“Wasn’t this sold on the market?”
“…I-I don’t know much about it.”
Nia answered cautiously.
“I heard it used to be sold. Apparently, it was popular among the upper classes…. People said it was effective against mana depletion and good for recovering from fatigue, too.”
“They advertised it as legal.”
“That’s what I heard. But not anymore.”
Nia could not take her eyes off the bottle.
“I heard there was a major accident about a year ago. The company went bankrupt because of it…. Its name was changed, and other companies divided up its assets. After that, Etherlyn could no longer be legally purchased.”
Kael looked down at the bottle.
Saying it could no longer be legally purchased did not mean it had disappeared.
It meant there were no official stores where it could be bought, and that it was traded without leaving a record in the distribution system.
Kael examined the blue residue inside the bottle.
“How did this end up mixed in with your things?”
“I really don’t know. I picked up the ingredients at the market this morning, and when I came back and sorted everything, I found it in the inner pocket of my shopping bag. I don’t know whether someone put it there deliberately or it fell out of a box….”
“Was there any opportunity for someone to touch your bag?”
Nia lowered her eyes as though trying to remember.
Even while frightened, she was struggling to retrace her memories.
That was good.
“There was one person I bumped into in the market alley. I was carrying a lot, so I moved aside… and that person brushed against my shoulder. It could have happened then. Or it could have been when the person moving the ingredient boxes set one down beside my bag.”
“What did they look like?”
“I didn’t get a good look at the person I bumped into. They were wearing their hat pulled down low. I remember the person moving the boxes, though. They weren’t an employee of one of the suppliers who usually comes.”
“Any other features?”
Nia closed her eyes and tried to recall.
“They were tall. The tip of their left ear was missing, and there was a black tattoo on the back of their hand. I’m not sure what shape it was, though….”
Kael set the bottle down when he heard that.
It was still vague, but the shape of the situation was beginning to emerge.
“If they were looking for this bottle, there are two possibilities.”
Nia stopped breathing.
“One is that it got into your bag by mistake. The other is that someone put it there deliberately.”
“Deliberately?”
“Yes. You may have been used as a courier.”
Nia’s face turned pale.
“I didn’t do anything like that.”
“I know.”
Nia sighed at those words.
Kael continued,
“Sometimes a courier who doesn’t know what they’re carrying is more useful. Even if they’re caught, they have nothing to say.”
Nia stared at the bottle, then clasped her hands tightly on her knees.
“Then what should I do?”
Kael slowly wrapped the bottle in the cloth again.
“Just act as you normally do. And I’ll keep this.”
“Yes, thank you….”
***
Three blocks from Grayeblock Block.
In the basement of an old abandoned freezer warehouse was a storage facility that did not appear on any official map.
It had once been used to store processed meat products, but not anymore.
Deeper inside the storage facility, a man stood before a glass storage case secured by three locks.
Bram Coil.
The manager of Blue Ash’s eastern district.
He held inventory papers in one hand and a short pistol in the other.
Small bottles were lined up inside the storage case.
Bram looked back and forth between the papers and the inside of the case before slowly asking,
“One bottle is missing.”
At those words, the air inside the storage facility froze.
The subordinate standing before him could barely breathe.
A thin man. The tip of his left ear was missing, and a black tattoo shaped like a door marked the back of his hand.
He barely moved his lips.
“I-it’s… Mr. Bram, there must have been a mistake during transport….”
Bram turned his head at those words.
“A mistake?”
“Y-yes, I mean, this route briefly overlapped with another route, and I did check, but… there were so many boxes, and the location signal didn’t cut out nearby, so if we sent a retrieval team, we could easily….”
Bang.
He could not finish speaking.
As the gunshot rang out, the subordinate’s body bent backward and collapsed.
Bram stared down at the fallen subordinate without saying anything for a while.
Then he suddenly began swearing and venting his fury.
“Fuck.”
Bang.
“Do you have any idea how much a single bottle costs?”
Bang.
“You fucking bastard?!”
Bang. Bang.
Gunfire continued over the corpse, which could no longer answer.
Bram’s face twisted little by little.
“One bottle.”
Bang.
“Exactly one bottle.”
Bang.
“Which do you think is worth more, that one bottle or your life? Obviously Etherlyn. And you lost it?”
Bang.
Only after the pistol ran out of ammunition did Bram stop venting his anger.
No one inside the storage facility dared to move.
Bram looked down at the empty pistol before throwing it to a subordinate beside him.
“Load a fresh magazine.”
The subordinate hurriedly caught the pistol.
“Y-yes, sir.”
Bram turned back toward the storage case without paying any attention to the blood spreading across the floor.
His gaze was fixed on a single empty space.
The place where one small bottle should have been.
“The location signal.”
At his words, another subordinate quickly checked his terminal.
“The last response was near 17th Street in eastern Grayeblock. Uh… it’s believed to be around the building with a bar called Last Round.”
Bram turned his head.
“Last Round?”
“Yes….”
Bram was silent for a moment.
“That’s the neighborhood where that bastard Toph died, right?”
“That’s right.”
Bram clicked his tongue.
“What rotten luck. Send the retrieval team. Keep it quiet. Deal with anyone who saw the item, and if anyone has it, cut off their wrist first. And under no circumstances let the bottle break.”
“Yes.”
Bram walked toward the door across the bloodstained floor.
Just before leaving, he said without turning around,
“Clean that up.”
With a heavy clang, the iron door closed.
With another heavy sound, silence descended over the storage facility once more.
After a while, the two surviving subordinates cautiously began to move.
One of them looked at the corpse lying on the floor.
“Fuck….”
The younger one was the first to speak.
His face was still pale.
“What the hell is that thing for him to go that far? It’s only one missing bottle.”
The older subordinate beside him glared at him.
“You don’t know what it is?”
“I saw it was Etherlyn. Some old medicine, right? An awakening aid or something.”
“Old medicine?”
The older subordinate let out a dry laugh.
“It was damn expensive even when it first came out. Lowlifes like us only ever saw the advertisements; hardly anyone got to hold one. They said it was made exclusively for the upper classes to enjoy, or something like that.”
The younger subordinate grimaced as he looked toward the corpse.
“So he went on that rampage just because he lost one expensive medicine?”
“Because it isn’t just one expensive medicine.”
The older subordinate lowered his voice.
“There were plenty of strange rumors about it even before the accident. That it relieved mana depletion, increased ACU adaptation rates, helped recover from fatigue…. That’s what the advertisements claimed.”
“Advertisements are always bullshit.”
“But apparently they weren’t entirely bullshit.”
The younger subordinate frowned.
“What do you mean?”
The older subordinate looked at the blue bottles inside the storage case.
“I heard a rumor that someone used something resembling magic with it, without even having an ACU.”