Chapter 88
"Suicide by poisoning, is that it?"
When Lewis muttered in a low voice, the chief warden sitting across from him nodded once, his face deathly pale.
After leaving the Star-Reading Witch's mansion, Lewis Miller returned home to find a single report waiting for him.
The man who had infiltrated Serendia Academy—the false Pittman—had killed himself with poison he had concealed on his person.
And so, despite having only just returned home in the middle of the night, Lewis flew to the detention center, put a little pressure on the gatekeeper who babbled that he should come back in the morning, and summoned the person in charge.
The middle-aged man serving as chief warden of the detention center had begun trembling pitifully the instant he heard that Lewis was one of the Seven Sages, and had answered his questions honestly.
"Where was the body discovered?"
"A little after noon today... It was found by a guard on patrol."
"You said it was suicide by poisoning. Did anyone see him drink the poison?"
"N-no, sir. The cell across from his happened to be empty..."
"Did any of the other prisoners notice anything unusual?"
"N-no, sir..."
"Hmm," Lewis said with a nod as he pictured the prison layout he had inspected before coming here.
The cells in this detention center were built side by side rather than facing one another, making it difficult for prisoners to check the condition of neighboring cells.
"When you imprisoned that man, didn't you check his belongings?"
The chief warden's face reddened, and he desperately protested, spittle flying from his mouth.
"No! No, sir! We checked him thoroughly! That man definitely didn't bring any poison in with him!"
"Yet he is dead."
"Th-that is... well..."
Lewis considered several possibilities.
There were two likely possibilities.
Either the man had somehow brought poison into the prison and killed himself, or someone had murdered him to silence him.
Thinking the latter possibility more likely, Lewis told the chief warden that he wanted to see the man's body.
The chief warden led Lewis underground, trembling all the while. Apparently, they used a room below ground to store corpses.
The body had merely been laid on the floor. It belonged to a man in his mid-twenties.
The face was almost identical to that of Eugene Pittman, a teacher at Minerva, and apparently it was not the result of makeup or any other disguise. That had already been confirmed when the man was captured.
He was wearing a shabby prison uniform. The state of the clothing caught Lewis's attention.
"Chief Warden, did you remove these clothes shortly after his death?"
"N-no, sir, not that I recall... I believe they're just as they were when he was found..."
Then something was wrong, Lewis thought, furrowing his brow.
The prison uniform had been put on far too carelessly. His underwear was on backward, and it had not even been pulled all the way up to his waist.
(As if someone had dressed him after death...)
Suddenly thinking of one possibility, Lewis examined the body thoroughly.
He had some knowledge of examining corpses, but honestly, with the level of medicine in this country, it was difficult to determine the exact time of death.
── Even so, he could tell the difference between someone who had died half a day ago and someone who had died several days ago.
"Chief Warden, how was the real Eugene Pittman killed?"
"According to this man's statement, while the Minerva party was traveling to Serendia Academy to participate in the chess tournament, he waited until Eugene Pittman was alone, drowned him with water magic, stripped him, and threw him into a river..."
"So the real Eugene Pittman's body still hasn't been found?"
When the chief warden nodded, Lewis became certain.
The real Pittman had supposedly been drowned—and that information came only from the culprit's statement.
(What if Pittman was actually killed another way? ...For example, by poison?)
Lewis looked down at the body before him with a bitter expression.
"There is no doubt that the cause of death was poisoning. But this body has not been dead for only half a day... This is the real Eugene Pittman."
"...Pardon?"
"They must have used ice magic to keep the body from decomposing."
Seeing that the chief warden was slow to catch on, Lewis turned his razor-sharp gaze on him and asked one question.
"Did any outsiders, such as delivery workers, enter or leave the facility today?"
"N-now that you mention it... A supplier came to deliver food for the prisoners..."
"That supplier was in league with them. Most likely, the accomplice carried the real Pittman's body into the cell, staged it to look as though the false Pittman had committed suicide, and got him out."
＊ ＊ ＊
Despite the late hour, a covered wagon traveled along a certain road. Sitting in the driver's seat was a young woman with short, neatly trimmed black hair. Wearing a hooded cloak, she had a cool, unadorned face and a pair of dignified brows.
A young man poked his head out from the wagon behind her.
He was an obviously mild-mannered, helpless-looking pretty boy—the Minerva teacher Eugene Pittman... or rather, the man who had stolen his face.
The woman kept her gaze fixed ahead as she spoke.
"Yuan, please stay inside for now. Someone may already have noticed that you've escaped."
"Don't be so stiff, Heidi. Then how about this?"
The man called Yuan laughed in a sweet, cloying voice like scorched honey and covered his face with both hands.
When he pressed his fingers into his skin, the face modeled after Eugene Pittman twisted and warped like clay.
It looked as though he were kneading clay pasted onto his skin. But a closer look revealed that this was not the case—the skin itself had changed into something like clay.
Though this nauseatingly grotesque sight was unfolding right beside her, Heidi did not so much as blanch. To her, it was nothing surprising.
"How do you like this?"
When Yuan swiftly lowered his hands, his face was an exact copy of Felix Arc Ridill, the Second Prince of the Kingdom of Ridill, aside from the color of his hair and eyes.
Heidi gave Yuan a sidelong look, studied his face, and then turned her gaze forward again.
"Yuan, please stop fooling around."
"Yes, yes. You're cute and all, Heidi, but you really don't know how to take a joke."
"...I'm sorry."
Heidi lowered her dignified brows slightly in dejection and bowed her head. She was so serious that she felt at fault over even the smallest things.
Yuan let out an exasperated little "Oh, come on" and hugged Heidi from behind.
"I'm not angry. Oh, I'm so lucky to have an ally as capable as you. The only reason I was able to escape like this is because of you, Heidi. Thank you."
With that, Yuan kissed the back of Heidi's head several times, each kiss making a soft smacking sound.
Yuan was a highly capable assassin who could infiltrate all sorts of places by freely manipulating his face, but he could do all of it only with Heidi's support.
First, they had poisoned the real Eugene Pittman and preserved his body with ice magic so it would not decompose.
Then, once Yuan had safely completed his mission at Serendia Academy, he was supposed to fake his suicide at an appropriate time and have the preserved body discovered. That had been the original plan.
But a boy named Barney had seen through his identity, and Yuan had been captured.
So they had changed the plan. Heidi infiltrated the detention center, and they swapped Yuan for Pittman's body.
"Whew, that was a lot of close calls... Ugh, I hate it. Stress is bad for my skin."
"Once we've rested at the safehouse, shall we return to the Empire?"
Still embracing Heidi from behind, Yuan shook his head.
"No, our work isn't finished yet. At Serendia Academy's festival... I'll infiltrate it one more time."
As he spoke, Yuan narrowed his eyes like a snake and licked his lips with the tip of his thin tongue.
"But there's something that's been bothering me a little about infiltrating it again."
"The 〈Invisible Magician〉 who defeated you?"
"Yes, that's right."
Yuan closed his eyes and recalled the moment he had been defeated.
After Barney Jones, a Minerva student, saw through Yuan's identity, another female student appeared as Yuan tried to silence Barney.
Since it would have been troublesome if she screamed, Yuan trapped her in a water-sphere barrier, but...
For some reason, the water-sphere barrier was destroyed.
For some reason, he was crushed by wind magic.
For some reason, lightning magic knocked him unconscious.
And yet, no one there had chanted a spell.
At the time, Yuan had assumed that a magician was hiding somewhere and attacking him with remote magic.
(...But what if that wasn't the case?)
The water-sphere barrier Yuan had created had felt as though it had been destroyed from the inside.
He could not imagine that the seemingly powerless girl had destroyed the barrier with her bare hands. If it had been destroyed from within, magical interference would have been the most plausible explanation.
(The inside of the water-sphere barrier was filled with water, so she shouldn't have been able to chant a spell... Had that girl been hiding some kind of magic tool? No, she never once made any movement suggesting that she was using a tool.)
Wearing Felix's face, Yuan narrowed his eyes and went over the circumstances again and again.
And the more he examined them, the more he arrived at one conclusion.
In other words—the girl, Monica Norton, was hiding something.
If Yuan was going to infiltrate Serendia Academy's festival, that girl would likely be his greatest obstacle.
At that premonition, Yuan shuddered with anticipation, then curled his lips into a crescent-shaped smile.
Throwing back his head, he laughed in a sweet voice, sounding delighted from the bottom of his heart.
"Heehee... Ahaha... Ahahahahaha!"
"You're having fun, Yuan."
"Yes, I am. It's fun. It makes my heart race. Because... you know, there's the scent of an especially thrilling secret."
Hugging Heidi from behind and burying his face in her black hair, Yuan gave a muffled chuckle.
Then, with the expression of a cat facing its prey, he grinned and licked his lips.
"Exposing secrets is my job. I'll expose all of them—the secrets of Felix Arc Ridill and the secrets of Monica Norton... Every last one."
"Yuan, there's something hard pressing against my waist."
"The look on someone's face when their secrets are exposed is so wonderful, isn't it? It's incredibly exciting. They twist their beautiful faces into a mess and cry and beg like a maiden stripped bare! 'Please don't tell anyone, don't expose me!'"
"Yuan, there's something hard pressing against my waist..."
"Once we reach the safehouse, will you indulge me?"
"Yes, Yuan. Whatever you wish."