Chapter 22
FUZZY DICE HAD finally been caught.
Amid the excitement over his own capture, the phantom thief smiled fearlessly from the cage of light in which he was imprisoned.
“That really was something. But you can’t hold me like this,” Fuzzy Dice declared, prompting nervous looks from the chief detective and his men.
What could he mean? Had he thought of a way to break out of the cage without using brute force? He was the legendary phantom thief, after all. The chief detective eyed Fuzzy Dice as if studying his every movement.
Fuzzy Dice, still smiling, held up his fingers and began to count. “Three…two…one…”
What was he planning? Everyone stood ready to react. By the time the count reached zero, they were hyperalert.
That was right when it happened: Lo and behold, the guild began to fill with white mist.
“What…? Is that…?!”
Seeing that mist, the onlookers first assumed that it was the sedative Fuzzy Dice was famous for using. Sure enough, adventurers started falling asleep left and right, as if to confirm that very hypothesis. The warrior-class adventurers went down first. Next, the mages began panicking before following suit and falling to the floor.
Upon closer inspection, the mist seemed to be floating in from behind the adventurers. In other words, it was coming from that direction.
“How in the world is he doing that?! He’s already inside!” Julius shouted, taken aback. The magical tools they were using not only shut a target in a cage of light, they also limited the range of that target’s skills and techniques. It should’ve been impossible to direct either at anything outside the cage.
Thus, Fuzzy Dice shouldn’t have been able to activate his sleeping gas from outside the cage of light while he was still imprisoned in it. That was why Julius was so startled and why the burly men flew into such a panic.
“Masks on!” The chief detective’s order rang out as the guild staff succumbed to the sedative one after another.
Hearing the composure in Wolf’s voice, Julius and the men collected themselves and pulled masks from the bags around their waists, then quickly put them on.
“Oh, wow! They do work, huh?”
The mask the chief detective had put on was the same Amphibious Breathe-Easy Mask that Mira picked up at Dinoire Trading the other day.
Now Mira needed to step up.
She had high resistance thanks to Martel’s specially grown fruit, but that didn’t mean she was immune, so she quickly put on that very mask—which she’d brought with her—just in case. As she did so, the situation in the guild continued to deteriorate.
At last, the only ones left standing were Mira, the chief detective, his men, and Fuzzy Dice.
“But how did you use…?” The chief detective groaned, his eyes fixed on the phantom thief. The masks seemed to be working, but how in the world had Fuzzy Dice carried out a technique from within the cage of light?
In the very next moment, the thief’s voice echoed from within the faint, hazy mist. “Why, that’s elementary… I was never in there to begin with.”
His answer didn’t come from within the cage of light but from somewhere farther away. In fact, it came from the same direction as the mist.
“It can’t be…”
Fuzzy Dice was still inside the cage of light. Yet when they all turned toward where they’d heard the voice, the phantom thief indeed stood there too. A shudder ran through the chief detective and his men as they wondered what exactly was going on.
The phantom thief’s hand immediately released something, and Wolf hurriedly adopted a defensive stance. Then a small cry went up from Julius and the men.
“Julius, what’s wrong?!”
Turning, the chief detective saw that their masks had been torn off by what appeared to be pieces of string.
That was a Demonic Art. I’m pretty sure the technique was Chain Spider’s Silk.
In no time, Fuzzy Dice had snatched all three of their masks. Surprised by the sudden display, Mira carefully got into a guarded position. She realized that, since she didn’t know the extent of Fuzzy Dice’s true powers, she could end up knocked out after having her mask removed as well.
“Ngh… Sorry, Chief Detective…”
After breathing the mist in for a moment, Julius and the men promptly fell asleep. The magical devices they’d held fell to the ground as well. The cage of light dissipated, and simultaneously, the Fuzzy Dice inside it simply vanished.
Seeing all this, the chief detective realized what’d happened. “I see… So we only managed to capture a phantom.”
The Fuzzy Dice inside the cage of light had been nothing more than an illusion. When he’d stood disguised among the other adventurers, they’d been dealing with the real thief, but he’d laid a trap the moment he’d revealed himself as Fuzzy Dice. As he unveiled his true identity, he’d switched places with an illusion and again mingled with the other adventurers. It was exactly the type of clever move one would expect of a phantom thief.
“Damn. That was brilliant.”
It looked as if the chief detective had finally run out of cards up his sleeve. He turned to face Fuzzy Dice with a brisk smile and gazed at the phantom thief standing among the sleeping adventurers.
“You were incredible yourself, Chief Detective,” Fuzzy Dice answered leisurely, although he appeared wary of Mira and thus kept his guard up. He added that Wolf had forced him to reveal himself.
“If I’d known all this would happen, I would’ve asked them to take it slower,” the chief detective said, staring within the curling white mist.
“If you’d done that, I would’ve been in quite the pickle,” Fuzzy Dice replied.
What were the two talking about? Mira tilted her head, but upon following the chief detective’s gaze, she realized what he meant. She saw the guild staff—the ones who’d successfully disenchanted the evidence Fuzzy Dice had brought in. Fuzzy Dice couldn’t have used an area-of-effect technique like the white mist while they were disenchanting the evidence.
But the fighting-skill and magic-aptitude tests had taken too much time, so they’d finished dispelling everything, and the phantom thief had been free to use his favorite knockout technique.
The only ones left awake were the wheelchair-bound chief detective and Mira.
“Hrmm… I guess the climactic phantom thief versus detective showdown is done?” Mira said, changing the topic.
She figured that was the case, given how things looked. In the continuously unfolding battle between Wolf and Fuzzy Dice, the thief had again come out on top.
“Yes, indeed. I’ve lost. Sorry for asking you to tag along,” the chief detective said regretfully, acknowledging his defeat. It had been a long battle of wits that he’d begun with plenty of cards up his sleeve. He looked over at Mira, and his eyes seemed full of anticipation at what she’d do next.
“No, not at all. I actually feel like I got to see a fantastic battle,” she answered. Then, switching gears, she turned to Fuzzy Dice and declared, “Well then, allow me to be your next opponent.”
“…Nice to meet you,” Fuzzy Dice said pointedly. “You must be that adventurer they call the Spirit Queen, right? I’ve heard your abilities are really something.”
As he spoke, Fuzzy Dice struck first, letting loose some spider silk from his hand. The movement was barely noticeable, and the silk moved blindingly fast. In the blink of an eye, it flashed toward Mira’s face. He was trying to pull Mira’s mask off.
At that moment, though, Mira rapidly summoned an evocation. “You sure are impatient. But I’ve already seen you use that trick.”
A tower shield appeared to block the spider-silk thread, then instantaneously disappeared. Mira had coolly shrugged off the attack without so much as moving a muscle. Unperturbed, she threw her head back, standing in the exact same spot, as if to goad the phantom thief.
“That was a holy knight’s… I see. It appears that you’re in a different league than everyone else here,” Fuzzy Dice said, obviously alarmed. He’d caught on to how powerful Mira was.
Hrmm… That was close!
Mutually cautious of each other, the two began slowly walking in a circle while sizing each other up, just like they were having a showdown in some Western. This continued for ten or twenty seconds before someone finally made a move.
Fuzzy Dice suddenly sent multiple spider-silk threads flying. This time, however, they didn’t just fly at Mira but also struck the guild walls, ceiling, and floor in quick succession.
“Ngh… So now you’re using Waterfall Spider’s Silk!”
Mira quickly reused the same partial summon, and a tower shield intercepted the thread aimed at her.
Looking at the silk stretched around her, she realized what Fuzzy Dice was doing. It was hard to see through the remaining wisps of white mist, but the spider silk appeared to be covered in bubbles. Among the silk-based Demonic Arts, these were infamously the stickiest and most elastic threads.
Just what’s he trying to do by creating a net in this enclosed space?
If Mira wasn’t careful, she’d end up covered in spider silk, becoming less and less mobile. She could no longer make any big movements—but that should’ve been true of Fuzzy Dice as well.
How did he plan to fight her? As Mira pondered that, a sudden breeze passed through the supposedly sealed guild. As it cleared the white mist from the room, Fuzzy Dice’s voice echoed.
“Well, my lady, there are still things I must attend to, and so I must be leaving.” There, right beside a half-open door, stood the phantom thief.
“Wh-what?!” Having just begun her showdown with Fuzzy Dice, Mira was itching for a fight.
But the thief, for his part, had focused on escaping the entire time. He’d kept his eyes on his distance from the exit, then acted once he was near it. Having betrayed Mira’s expectations and opted to make a quick escape, Fuzzy Dice gave a cool smile before making his gallant exit.
Once the Mages’ Guild was free of the white mist, Mira saw that the interior was plastered from top to bottom in spider silk.
“Damn… That sly devil,” she grumbled, calmly summoning a dark knight. It began zealously tearing the silk apart.
“Seeing all this proved that Fuzzy Dice is a demonologist. My hypothesis was correct after all,” the chief detective noted. Only a demonologist could possibly have performed such a feat. Wolf was happy to confirm that, although it was just as they’d expected.
“Still, to think that’d he be on that level…”
Fuzzy Dice had somehow strengthened the spider silk, making it so sticky and stretchy that even the dark knight had trouble slicing through it. Mira tried to solve the issue of the difficult-to-cut threads by equipping the dark knight with the holy sword Sanctia, but the silk was still sticky. Severing it made it slacken, and that slack silk soon wrapped around the dark knight until it couldn’t even move. Mira kept needing to dispel the knight after it cut a few threads, then summon it again. Considering that there seemed to be a hundred or so threads, that method wasn’t terribly efficient.
That said, focusing on efficiency didn’t work well either. Mira tried using partial evocations to cut the threads, but whenever a silk-wrapped summon disappeared, the slack silk became a bigger hindrance that obstructed her path even more.
The easiest way to clear the spider silk would be to just burn it away. Waterfall Spider’s Silk could easily be removed using flames. But of course, Mira couldn’t use fire in a roomful of sleeping people. She had no choice but to clear the threads the old-fashioned way, so it would be a little while until she could chase Fuzzy Dice.
Three minutes had passed since she began battling the spider silk. Using her mana to successively summon dark knights, Mira finally secured a path to the exit.
“Do you really intend on pursuing Fuzzy Dice now, Miss Mira?” the chief detective asked the girl, who didn’t appear to have thrown in the towel yet.
Although a mere three minutes had gone by, that was more than enough time for the phantom thief to make his way just about anywhere. Knowing full well that that was the case, the chief detective thought it’d be quite difficult to begin pursuing him. Up until now, they’d known where Fuzzy Dice would go. Now that Fuzzy Dice was free, the detective went on, catching him was no longer possible.
Then he added that, of course, that was just the received wisdom. “I can tell from your eyes that you’ve got some kind of plan.”
“Hrmm. That’s right. I prepared for just this occasion.”
“I should’ve expected as much, Miss Mira. What’s your plan?”
Mira answered, brimming with confidence, as the chief detective listened with profound interest on his face. He was keen to learn how she’d prepared for these circumstances, despite their original plans falling flat.
“Well, it’s simple. I’m having my talented comrades keep an eye on him,” Mira answered nonchalantly.
She’d always expected that Fuzzy Dice might escape. Actually, if they were really going to go at it, she’d prefer that they change locations. Having answered the chief detective’s query, Mira announced to the groggy adventurers that she’d let them clean up the remaining spider silk, then hurried out of the guild.
“I see…” Wolf said to himself. “A plan based on summoning. How interesting.”
Understanding her strategy at last, the chief detective began envisioning all the things summoning was capable of. As he did, he wheeled himself over to Julius, figuring he might as well wake his assistant up.
No Comments Yet
Post a new comment
Register or Login