Chapter 19
HAVING FINISHED THE JOB they’d been hired to complete, Nina and her sisters—looking very much relieved—plopped down in the corner of the balcony.
Mira didn’t have anything to do until Fuzzy Dice’s next move, so she began chatting with the trio, keeping an eye on the Lock-On M Type-2’s display. Registering Fuzzy Dice’s mana with the magical tool was as far as the chief detective’s plan went, so Mira was free to pursue the thief however she wished.
For the moment, the marker was fixed in the Mages’ Guild. Once it began to move, that would mean that Fuzzy Dice had finished his business in the guild and was escaping.
In Mira’s mind, the operation up until that point had just been her setting the stage. For Mira, the real operation was about to begin. She needed to chase down her target, capture him, and question him. Then she could realize her ultimate goal: finding the orphanage.
Fuzzy Dice’s ability to dash across rooftops was superhuman, and Mira planned to give chase using his position on the Lock-On M Type-2. Furthermore, she wanted to do so without him catching on, so she couldn’t ride something like Pegasus.
“What?! Are you going to chase him on foot?!”
The sisters were flabbergasted to hear Mira’s plans. Looking skeptically toward her legs—which were thin, soft, and very much a young girl’s—they asked whether doing that could be pretty difficult.
It didn’t matter that Mira was an A-rank adventurer hailed as the Spirit Queen; without using her fabled evocations, there wasn’t much chance that she could pursue Fuzzy Dice. Mira was sure that was what Nina and her sisters were thinking. Yet in addition to her summoning abilities, Mira had also developed several Immortal Arts techniques over the years.
“I guess I haven’t mentioned it yet, but I’m actually somewhat skilled in using Immortal Arts,” Mira boasted, jauntily activating True Sight. The moment she did, her aura became clearer and more pronounced, and her eye color changed.
“Isn’t that one of the hidden Immortal Arts…?”
“Her eyes look just like our teacher’s friend’s…”
“Adventurers with nicknames really are on another level, huh?”
Nina and her sisters took a collective breath, their eyes burning with admiration. They realized Mira just might be able to keep up with Fuzzy Dice.
“But…you’ll need to jump and leap around quite a bit, won’t you? Um, can you do that?” Nina asked, her gaze falling toward Mira’s skirt.
Just like the chief detective the other day, she was undoubtedly worried that Mira might end up putting her underwear on full display.
“Oh, I already took care of that. I got a second layer to cover my panties,” Mira said, brimming with confidence.
There was no need to worry about her outfit—she’d bought innerwear just for this occasion. For some reason, however, Nina and her sisters kept glancing back and forth between Mira’s self-satisfied grin and her skirt. Then they gave each other puzzled looks.
“What do you guys think?”
“Um, I think there might be some mistake.”
“Yeah, I think so too…”
Perplexingly, the three moved away from Mira and began whispering to each other. They wore troubled expressions, as if there was something they didn’t quite know how to say, and they shot glances at Mira occasionally.
Mira tilted her head, befuddled by the sisters’ actions. Had she said something that could’ve bothered them this much?
She was still sitting there, a blank look of confusion on her face, when the sisters whirled around as if they’d finally reached an agreement. They glanced once more from her face to her skirt as Nina spoke on the trio’s behalf.
“Um…from what we can tell, those are just normal panties. Do they really sell innerwear like that?” Nina demanded, looking honestly perplexed. It was clear from Mina’s and Nana’s eyes that they were dubious too.
Mira had sat cross-legged without really considering that she was wearing a skirt. Since Nina and her sisters had been sitting opposite her, they could apparently see her panties. But a lot of people dropped their guard about that kind of stuff around members of the same sex, and since Nina and her sisters were fellow girls, she hadn’t really worried about it.
But in the middle of all this, Mira had implied that she’d taken measures so that it wouldn’t be a problem if anyone saw under her skirt. The moment she did, Nina and her sisters were suddenly taken aback. From the brief glimpses they’d gotten, they hadn’t seen anything other than actual panties.
And their eyes hadn’t deceived them.
“What’re you talking about? Look, they’re right…” Mira said.
She lifted her skirt, about to tell the girls how she’d bought innerwear specifically for this occasion, when—glimpsing only the panties she usually wore—she froze.
What had happened? She thought about it for a moment. The answer soon hit her: Despite acquiring several kinds of innerwear, she’d forgotten to put one of them on when she’d dressed that morning.
“Ugh…I completely forgot…”
It was easy to accidentally overlook something that one wasn’t used to doing yet. Having come up with that excuse, Mira hurriedly pulled out a pair of bike shorts and pulled them on. With those firmly in place, she was ready to jump at a moment’s notice.
A smile appeared on Mira’s face as she continued to monitor the Lock-On M Type-2 eagerly while occasionally jumping into the underwear discussion that had started between the sisters.
The topic was managing one’s undergarments from an adventurer’s perspective. The girls discussed how many pairs to bring into a dungeon, how often to switch them, and most importantly, how one washed the garments. On that topic in particular, their concerns seemed never-ending.
Mira, on the other hand, didn’t really have to worry about any of that. Since she could use evocations, she could wash or change her underwear whenever she wanted. The more she talked about that, the brighter Nina’s and her sisters’ eyes got. They bowed down on the ground, thanking Mira once again for agreeing to teach their sister summoning.
“Um…what exactly is going on here?”
Having made his way to the third-floor balcony right at that moment, Julius stiffened like a board as he took in the sight of the sisters prostrated before Mira.
“What? Don’t you worry about it. I just agreed to teach their sister the basics of summoning,” Mira said, briefly explaining the situation.
Given how it looked, however, Julius couldn’t quite wrap his head around the sight. He only managed to reply vaguely, “Huh…?”
Meanwhile, Mira wondered why he’d come all the way to the balcony. “Well, at any rate, you must be here for a reason, right? What’s up?” she asked. “All that’s left is for me to pursue Fuzzy Dice.” She checked to make sure the thief hadn’t yet moved.
The chief detective hadn’t planned what to do from here on. It was Mira’s choice now. Or could Wolf have thought up some plan and sent Julius to tell her about it?
As she considered that, Julius replied, “Yes, about that… The chief detective suddenly asked that I come get you. I’m not sure about the details either.”
He appeared to be telling the truth, and a bemused look appeared on his face as he spoke. Apparently, right after he’d rushed from the mansion to the Mages’ Guild, Wolf had asked him to get Mira. Julius hadn’t even had a chance to check out the situation at the guild.
“Hunh… I don’t get it. But if that’s what he asked, I don’t have much choice.”
Once Mira registered Fuzzy Dice’s mana, her mission was supposed to be complete. Knowing the chief detective, though, he’d have a good reason for wanting her to rejoin him. In light of that, she immediately stood, then nimbly leapt from the balcony.
She used Air Step to race across the street in midair before quickly descending in front of the entrance to the Mages’ Guild. Finally, before entering, she turned and waved at the balcony on which she’d just been standing.
“She’s so light on her feet…”
“She really is incredible, huh?”
“Our sister will be too, with Mira as her teacher.”
Mira had leapt off the balcony as if it were completely normal and run through the air as easily as if she’d been strolling through a park. If she could use the Immortal Arts at that high a level, just what was she capable of with summoning?
Hope and anticipation glittered in the sisters’ eyes as they stood, hands clasped, with looks of respect, admiration, and even a bit of reverence.
Julius, who was still with the sisters, thought back to seeing the three bowing before Mira and took a small step away from them.
Inside the guild, the staff and around thirty adventurers were all trying to deal with the phantom thief’s evidence. Seated firmly in the center of them all was the chief detective.
The enchantments on the evidence were seemingly proving particularly difficult to dispel, and the staff were focused solely on that task. In stark contrast to the employees, who were working feverishly, Wolf and the adventurers who happened to be present looked placid.
“So why’d you ask me to come here?” Mira asked the chief detective.
He slowly looked toward her and answered, “Oh, sorry for that. I’d planned to give you free reign from this point forward, but what can I say? I’m a detective, and old habits die hard.” Wolf spun his wheelchair around, then laughed bitterly that he just couldn’t stand to do nothing when Fuzzy Dice was right in front of him. “Even if I can’t physically go toe-to-toe with him, I’d still like to try something I thought up. I apologize for changing our plan.”
Now that they’d registered Fuzzy Dice’s mana, the chief detective’s plan had concluded, so this should’ve been Mira’s operation. But although Wolf apologized for barging in, Mira replied that she didn’t mind one bit.
“This was originally your sting. You should finish it as you see fit.” She didn’t mind indulging the chief detective and readily agreed to do so. If anything, she looked forward to seeing what sleuthing he had planned.
“Thank you, Miss Mira.” Wolf smiled cheerfully. Then, as his gaze made its way to her hand, his eyes lit up. “So how’d everything work out?”
“Hrmm… It all went without a hitch,” she replied, checking the Lock-On M Type-2’s display. She could still see a mark corresponding to her target’s presence.
“I expected nothing less of you, Miss Mira. I’m glad I left it in your hands.” The chief detective nodded approvingly.
Then Wolf quickly explained what had gone on up until then, as well as the current situation. After leaving Mira and the sisters, he’d headed to the Mages’ Guild to await Fuzzy Dice. Shortly after, he’d heard the crowds outside go wild as the phantom thief made his grand entrance.
Just like before, Fuzzy Dice had set his evidence—on which he’d placed active anti-theft enchantments—onto the guild’s counter. The moment he did, the chief detective gave a signal, and all the guild’s exits and entrances but the main one were locked down.
Wolf had also used a magical tool he’d secretly prepared to place a barrier around the guild. If anyone left, that tool would emit a sound that notified everyone immediately. Julius himself had passed through that barrier on his way to get Mira, and it had responded, so they knew it worked.
“I’ve already considered that Fuzzy Dice might very well have tried to leave at exactly the same time as Julius,” the chief detective added, addressing Mira’s thoughts before she even had a chance to mention them.
But the barrier was designed to tally each individual person who exited through it, and the count was still at one. Looking at the chief detective, Mira noticed an unfamiliar box by his wheelchair displaying a 1. It seemed that box was the magical tool producing the barrier.
As Wolf explained all this, Julius made his way back into the guild as well. Based on the fact that he’d come back in, he wasn’t likely to be Fuzzy Dice in disguise.
“That brings us to now. Someone in this room is Fuzzy Dice, but incognito,” the chief detective said with a sharp glint in his eye. He cast a glance at the adventurers.
They comprised men and women, as well as warriors and mages. Of course, more mages than warriors were present, considering which guild this was. But that was irrelevant, since Fuzzy Dice could disguise himself as whoever and whatever he wanted.
Furthermore, the chief detective said, if he were disguising himself as anyone, an adventurer was always a safe bet. Adventurers were always coming and going, so it wasn’t terribly suspicious if no one recognized them.
“Forget about us. What about them?” one adventurer shot back, pointing at the Mages’ Guild employees. If Fuzzy Dice had disguised himself as someone in the building, the adventurer insisted, they ought to suspect the staff as well.
“That’s a good point. But wouldn’t it be rather difficult for him to disguise himself as one of them?”
Speaking with the suspects was another one of Wolf’s responsibilities as chief detective, and Mira thoroughly enjoyed the whole scene as she listened in.
Having stated that Fuzzy Dice would struggle to disguise himself as a staff member, the detective elaborated: The guild staff saw each other regularly. If Fuzzy Dice randomly disguised himself as one of them, they’d notice the stranger immediately, which would blow his cover. Thus far, that hadn’t taken place.
Ultimately, the chief detective asserted, although it would be possible for Fuzzy Dice to replace a particular employee, he certainly hadn’t. In his previous heists, the thief hadn’t disguised himself as somebody, but rather as nobody special.
Did Fuzzy Dice have difficulty impersonating someone specific, or did he prefer not to? Wolf finally added that anyone the phantom thief disguised himself as might be unjustly implicated in a crime that they hadn’t committed. Thus, he concluded that Fuzzy Dice had no choice but to disguise himself as a random stranger.
“I see. That means it’s got to be one of us, huh?” said the man, seemingly convinced.
The man who’d spoken up looked his fellow adventurers up and down, adding that about half of the group weren’t familiar faces in Haxthausen. He was an adventurer based out of the city, and he pointed out six other adventurers whose paths he claimed to have crossed many times over the years.
If two adventurers recognized each other, the chances that one of the pair was Fuzzy Dice were low. Since that made sense to the adventurers, they began checking to see whether any comrades they recognized were present. As they did, they reported their findings to the chief detective and moved to the other side of the room.
After the adventurers had concluded their independent checks for familiar faces, there were a little over a dozen left whom nobody recognized. If the chief detective’s hypothesis was valid, one of them had to be Fuzzy Dice in disguise.
“Thanks for the help,” Wolf told the adventurers who’d recognized each other, then gazed at the remaining adventurers and looked them up and down.
How exactly would the chief detective see through Fuzzy Dice’s disguise? Seemingly excited to learn as much, the man from before volunteered his assistance again, as if dying to help.
“So what’s next?”
“Next, we ought to take a closer look at whoever Mira identifies,” the chief detective said.
“Ah. Sure thing.” Nodding, the man looked toward Mira as if to ask who it’d be.
“All right, then,” said Mira. “Let’s see…”
How would she uncover which of the adventurers was Fuzzy Dice in disguise? Despite being put so abruptly on the spot, Mira was unperturbed. After all, the key to seeing through the phantom thief’s disguise was in her hands.
While the chief detective was speaking, she’d finally realized why he summoned her, and she began checking the Lock-On M Type-2. Their plan had been to register Fuzzy Dice’s mana to pursue the thief, but this device could also identify him within a larger group of people. The magical tool made the impossible possible.
Fuzzy Dice had won every single battle, yet he was about to suffer his first defeat. The moment Mira pointed someone out would forever be recorded as a pivotal moment in the legend of the phantom thief.
Having masterfully succeeded in tagging Fuzzy Dice and registering his mana, Mira pointed dramatically at the display screen and announced, “The person behind these crimes is…you!”
Mira’s tone of voice, bearing, and intensity suggested that she’d stepped right out of the pages of a famous detective novel. The line she’d used, as well, was exactly one a detective would say when confronting a criminal with cold, hard facts, having used their skills of deduction to chase said criminal down and expose their crimes to the light of justice.
Mira seemed to relish the line; it was more or less at the top of the list of things she wanted to try saying.
Then the helpful adventurer spoke up: “Um…there’s no one there.”
“Huh…?” Mira’s voice betrayed her befuddlement. She hurriedly turned her gaze to where she’d pointed—straight into the empty space created when about half of the adventurers had moved to the other side of the room.
Mira had gotten a bit ahead of herself and neglected to check where the Lock-On M Type-2’s cursor was now pointing. She’d prioritized coming up with a perfect pose over monitoring the device, so she hadn’t realized it was indicating an empty space.
Who could blame her? She’d verified beforehand that the device worked, using Julius; then she’d successfully registered Fuzzy Dice’s mana. There was no way she could have expected the Lock-On M Type-2 to suddenly give the wrong reading when it counted most.
“What’s…going on?”
Had the Lock-On locked up? Suspecting that, Mira began moving around, checking the display. Wherever she moved, it kept pointing to the exact same spot. The person whose mana she’d registered was certainly standing right there.
Unlike the utterly perplexed Mira, the chief detective stared at that exact spot and calmly asked the adventurer helping them, “Something must be there. Check that spot out, would you?”
“Sure,” the man replied, looking as doubtful as Mira. Nevertheless, he moved where the Lock-On M Type-2 indicated.
The device could only give them directions to a target’s location, so the man followed Mira’s directions to “just keep going straight.” He made his way roughly halfway across the guild floor before finally reaching a wall with several notices posted on it.
“Hm? What’s this doing here?” the man muttered, suddenly stopping to pick something up. “Hey, did someone drop this?”
He turned around, holding something aloft in his hand. It was a leather cloak, but it didn’t seem to be just any cloak.
“I didn’t, but I’ll take it.”
“No, that’s definitely mine.”
“It’s probably mine if there’s no name on it.”
They seemed to be half joking, yet all the adventurers began claiming that the cloak was theirs. Although it just seemed ordinary at first glance, it must’ve been quite valuable.
“Well, what’s so different about that cloak compared to an ordinary leather one?” Mira asked the chief detective. All the adventurers could apparently tell, but Mira didn’t notice anything special about the article.
“What, you don’t know?” The chief detective looked a bit surprised. After a moment, he continued, “Well, considering your particular talents, I guess you wouldn’t need one.”
Deciding that that was the likeliest explanation, the chief detective began explaining the garment to her. It was known as an anti-fiend camouflage cloak, he said.
Whether a fiend spawned in an area was partly determined by that area’s concentration of mana, as well as a few other factors—more often than not, the fiend’s strength and particular type. When a fiend spawned, its level was always higher than that of the area’s monsters. But the specific conditions that led to fiends spawning weren’t yet clear, so adventurers still stumbled across high-level fiends while hunting monsters.
Fiends could also keenly sense living organisms’ mana. To escape one, a person had to run not just out of the fiend’s eyeshot but outside its mana-detection range. Of course, if a person suddenly ran into a fiend, escaping it was a tall order, given that fiends were generally high-level. That was where the anti-fiend camouflage cloak came in.
“Two magical tools are sewn into this cloak. The first simply circulates nearby mana, and the second conceals the wearer’s mana inside the garment.”
The cloak was basically a super useful tool that enveloped its wearer in their surroundings’ mana, just as if they were wearing camouflage, allowing them to blend in perfectly and evade a fiend’s mana-detection sense.
“I see… I had no idea this world had stuff like that.”
Mira had known that fiends could sense mana. While still in the game, when she’d come across a fiend she had no way of defeating, she often dealt with it using whatever mana-concealing items she had on hand while running away.
But times had changed, and now there were items that could trick even fiends’ senses. Mira was mightily impressed as she looked at the cloak, which was a testament to ingenuity.
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