To the murder scene

“Let’s examine the murder scene too.”

Hina took the lead and headed to Chainsaw Man’s bedroom.

It was somewhat pathetic to hesitate and follow behind a high school girl, but… it was a room where someone died.

I was a bit reluctant to just walk right in. It would be one thing if it were a stranger, but thinking that the robust Chainsaw Man had died in that room made me hesitate.

For a moment, I felt like I could smell blood. As I stood there frowning, Hina opened the door and beckoned to me.

“What are you doing? Hurry up and come here. We don’t have time.”

The inside of the room I reluctantly entered was cleaner than I expected.

I thought there would be signs of a struggle, or at least some bloodstains, but what was this?

It was so clean that it was hard to believe someone had died here. If I had seen it without knowing, I never would have imagined it was a murder scene.

There were no signs of anything being broken, and even the blanket, aside from being slightly crumpled, was better organized than the bed in my own room.

…Is this something I should be reflecting on?

Anyway, it seemed Chainsaw Man had been assassinated without putting up much resistance.

“Was he attacked while sleeping?”

Since the security camera footage showed him going in to sleep, it would be reasonable to think so.

It was bitter to think that Chainsaw Man - an A-rank Ronin with universally acknowledged peak skills, who was even said to have become one of the city’s legends through his death - was killed in his sleep without even getting to properly swing his cherished weapon, Ferdinand.

It also made me scared all over again. If Sey hadn’t helped me, if my luck had been just a little worse, I could have ended up like that too.

The state of my old house, shattered to pieces by unidentified intruders, was still vivid in my mind.

If I died, unlike Chainsaw Man, I wouldn’t have a funeral acknowledged by everyone at the Memorial Ground, nor would I be buried in the world I used to live in; I would just be forgotten as an “apprentice bartender who met an unfortunate death”.

It was a terrible ending just to imagine. As I shuddered, Hina shook her head next to me.

“deny”

“Huh?”

“He didn’t die while sleeping. I thought so at first too, but now I can say for sure that he didn’t.”

What did that mean?

As I blinked my eyes blankly, Hina kindly explained.

“Look at the bed here. It’s a pretty expensive product, so it uses a shape-memory foam mattress. It’s originally meant to automatically record your sleep pattern… but, according to the logs, during the time he was murdered, Mister Miguel wasn’t lying down; he was sitting on the bed.”

It was true. When Hina manipulated the display connected to the bed, the mattress changed shape on its own, as if time were rewinding.

It was a recreation of that specific timeframe. I could see the indented marks left on the edge of the matrix where someone had sat.

And that wasn’t all.

There weren’t just one mark left behind, but two.

Right before Chainsaw Man was murdered, two people had been sitting together on his bed.

One of them was Chainsaw Man himself. Then who was the other?

All the circumstances were connected into one.

I sighed and stated the logical conclusion.

“It’s a criminal acquaintance.”

It had to be.

The reason Felix had been on guard but then opened the door in relief after realizing their identity. The reason Chainsaw Man had been murdered with his guard down, unable to put up a proper fight even though he was awake.

It was because it was someone they knew, someone they trusted. Naturally, it would be a person who had built a long-standing friendship with both of them.

“It’s someone from the Club. One hundred percent. There are no other possibilities.”

She had another reason to be so certain.

“In the first place, the fellow executives were the only ones who had the location of this room shared with them. It was kept strictly hidden from anyone else. Besides -”

“I’m a member of the Group/Gathering too, so why didn’t they tell me?”

“- Mister, you’re a newcomer who just joined. Why would they trust you enough to tell you the location of the stealth? Don’t interrupt me while I’m talking and just be quiet.”

“…”

I picked a fight for no reason, got nothing out of it, and just ended up getting scolded.

Just a moment ago she was clinging to me, arguing that I was undeniably a member of our Group/Gathering, but now she was saying I couldn’t be trusted because I was a newcomer who had just joined.

Which tune was I supposed to dance to? Now that she had already finished persuading me, I was being treated like a total afterthought.

“As for deleting the surveillance camera video, it’s impossible to access it in the first place unless you’re authenticated by the security system. And it’s not like they bypassed the permissions either, you know? It means the culprit had the approval code from the start.”

“And that would have been given to the rest of the Group/Gathering people, excluding me.”

“You know it well. Now do you see why I suspect those people?”

Those people.

She was definitely talking about Angela and Nigel.

Both of them had been incredibly suspicious people from the very beginning.

One was a dark and gloomy man exuding a dangerous aura, and the other was an unidentified woman who was beautiful and busty, but in reality carried around a bunch of high-risk lethal weapons.

If it were me, I might have told others, but I absolutely wouldn’t have given the location of the Stealth to those two. Why did Chainsaw Man trust the Group/Gathering people so firmly…?

“Could there be any other possibilities?”

When I asked just in case, Hina replied in an abrasive tone, perhaps thinking I was challenging her deduction.

“What other possibilities? There’s no possibility of it being an outsider.”

“No, I mean someone other than those two.”

“If it’s someone else, there’s only Paulo. Seriously? Do you think there’s even a speck of a chance that Paulo Oppa did it?”

That was true. The guilt-ridden state Paulo had shown today, the way he had shouted Chainsaw Man’s achievements at the funeral as if coughing up blood…

If that was acting, then Paulo, this bastard, should forget about being an assassin or whatever and just switch careers to being an actor right now. I could see the potential for him to become the greatest cinema superstar sponsored by the upper levels nobles.

It definitely wasn’t Paulo.

Hina obviously didn’t make sense either.

In that case, the only ones really left were those two… but maybe?

Something came to mind, so I asked carefully.

“Come to think of it, how did… Felix die?”

Because all attention was focused on Chainsaw Man’s death, I had heard almost nothing about Felix, who had died alongside him.

Hina sighed and spoke.

“It seems Felix Oppa noticed halfway through and fought the culprit. But he wasn’t someone who knew how to fight in the first place… Haa. They said they barely found him dumped in the building’s waste passageway, chopped up into pieces so badly that it was hard to even recognize his form.”

Ugh… He just received less attention, but he met a much more gruesome death than Chainsaw Man. I heard Chainsaw Man was found in a peaceful stance…

Beggar

“Did the culprit have some personal grudge against Felix?”

“He wasn’t the type of person for that. Something must have happened during the fight. Perhaps he made himself a nuisance to the culprit.”

Hina spoke with a frown, as if recalling Felix’s death made her uncomfortable. It was an attitude that showed she didn’t want to talk about this topic anymore.

However, the fact that he was in a state where it was hard to recognize his form bothered me somewhat.

“That corpse… are you sure it was Felix?”

At my words, Hina glared at me fiercely.

“…The Deep But no. Do you think I haven’t considered that possibility too? It’s a situation where I literally have to suspect everyone around me that I knew, or rather, thought I knew.”

Felix Oppa wasn’t a Ronin but a regular civilian, so the city police even finished the forensics. The result was a 99 percent Bio Code match. They said it’s definitely Felix Oppa’s corpse.”

“I see… Sorry.”

When I apologized awkwardly, Hina also shook her head with an uncomfortable look.

“…It’s undeniable that you’d naturally be suspicious. I’m sorry for getting mad too.”

An awkward silence flowed for a moment. Feeling like I should be the first to say something, I opened my mouth.

“So, in the end, there are only two candidates left.”

Angela and Nigel. Come to think of it, neither of them could be seen at the funeral.

Of course, there were so many people that it could just be that I couldn’t find them, but…

“It’s true that neither of them came to the funeral. There must be a reason. For instance, both of them might be the culprits.”

Her eyes filled with deep-seated resentment. Even without asking, I could tell she was saying, “If both of them are the culprits, I’ll kill them both.'

“If they’re the culprits, they definitely would have run away; are you confident you can catch them? I’m not in a position where I can take a long break from work.”

I wasn’t a detective, and I couldn’t just arbitrarily abandon my work under the pretext of chasing a murder case culprit, could I?

Loyalty to Dragon president, Tony, and Sey was one thing, but I couldn’t do it because of Isiho chairman either.

I had to report regularly, and since I wasn’t the police, I couldn’t exactly write down that I was going around doing a murder case investigation.

“Don’t worry. There are more than enough ways to find them. Catching them is the problem. That’s why I sought you out, Mister.”

Right, if the elite high school girl said so, I should believe her. When I nodded, Hina asked this time.

“So, who should we go after first?”

…Hmm.

“What did you say Chainsaw Man’s exact cause of death was again?”

“Neurotoxin, a nerve toxin. It was injected into the back of his neck, and he went quietly and cleanly in one shot. That’s why Paulo said he thought Chainsaw Man was sleeping in when he found him.”

Neurotoxin, huh.

I felt like I roughly knew who we should go after first.