Tantei wa Mou, Shindeiru - Volume 6 - Chapter 4.4

May 4 ???

Late at night, a lone woman was running through a dense forest.

“……! Hff… Hff…”

The blast wave had scorched her skin, and she was covered in cuts and bruises. Even so, thanks to a certain drug, she managed to keep moving.

The drug was a powerful substance created by one of her companions, a doctor code-named “Drachma.” Developed around a certain core, it greatly enhanced human physical abilities and improved their natural self-healing capacity. The drug was still in clinical trials, but she’d been taking it as part of her preparations for this mission, and it had paid off.

There was another reason the woman—Krone—couldn’t stop running.

She’d just barely managed to protect the flash drive from the explosion, and she was on a mission to deliver it to a certain individual.

“……! The contents haven’t been leaked yet.”

Panting as she ran, Krone gripped the flash drive tightly. While her spur-of-the-moment lie regarding its contents had been exposed for what it was, she’d heard the password required to view the information stored inside was difficult. Even the Fiend with Twenty Faces wouldn’t have had enough time to crack it.

“The secret has been kept. Now I just have to give this to…”

Nothing else mattered. Nothing even occurred to her. Krone just raced through the trees, making for the car her companions were waiting for her, in order to carry out the mission she’d been given.

“Where are you going in such a hurry?”

Out of nowhere, she heard a woman’s voice. There was no way anybody would be out in this forest at this hour. As she watched warily, a crimson figure emerged from the shadow of a great tree, bathed in moonlight. Krone didn’t recognize her.

“…! Who are you?” She didn’t feel any particular urge to kill this person, but she held her survival knife at the ready.

“I asked first. Where are you going with that burned lump of black?”

“…What are you talking about?”

Krone looked at the knife in her left hand. The blade wasn’t even chipped. If she slashed at the woman’s throat, it was sure to produce a gout of fresh blood—

“Not that one. Your right hand.”

Krone opened her clenched fist.

Something black and burned rested in her palm.

Before long, the wind eroded it into particles that sifted away and vanished.

“Wh…what?”

She’d thought she’d snatched the flash drive out of the flames, but it had already been destroyed.

“Poor thing. The drug’s side effects are making you hallucinate, hm?”

The red-haired woman was saying something, but Krone wasn’t able to process her words anymore. Why am I here? What was I fighting, what do I want, and—

“Krone. Who ordered you to kill Danny Bryant?”

Yes, someone had… A year ago, someone had asked her to kill Danny, and she’d accepted the job. Krone remembered that much, but she didn’t have enough brainpower left to recall the client’s identity.

“We should have been…the real thing.”

One regret dominated Krone’s mind: They would have become true heroes the day she completed this job.

“‘We,’ huh?” the redheaded woman muttered. Even in mid-confrontation, she lit a cigarette. “Your whole gang of evil vigilantes grew up in the underworld. Your individual situations had made each of you hate the world, and you banded together to try to change it.”

Those words reminded Krone of her past.

As a young child, she’d had nothing to eat. The only way she’d been able to keep herself alive was through theft and scams. Even so…at some point, she’d been struck by the beauty of a piece of street art that had appeared out of nowhere on a wall in town, drawn by some anonymous artist.

What had happened after that, and who had she met? Had she resented the world once again, and banded together with like-minded comrades to try and improve it? She couldn’t remember. What had happened to the others? Krone tipped her head back to stare up at the sky, although it accomplished nothing.

“Ruble, the man who murdered Danny Bryant’s daughter, was slashed to death by a certain man’s sickle five years ago. The one who carried out his sentence was the Enforcer,” said the red-haired woman.

From what she was told, this “Enforcer” executed criminals who couldn’t be brought to justice publicly. Krone laughed. There’s an organization like us out there.

“Baht the mercenary lost to the Fiend with Twenty Faces… Or rather, to the Ace Detective.”

So the Fiend was a member of this organization as well. Krone then realized that they weren’t just similar to her group. They were a perfect replacement, an improved version.

That’s it, she thought. I wanted to become someone like that—someone with genuine strength.

And yet…

She’d made so many mistakes she couldn’t even begin to identify where she’d gone wrong.

“Are Dollar and Real safe?” Krone blurted out the names of her remaining companions.

“If they trigger a global crisis, somebody will deal with them someday,” the woman said bluntly, exhaling a white puff of smoke.

“I see. And? Are you here to kill me?”

The drug seemed to be working: Krone felt as if her body had grown lighter. It might just have meant she was closer to death, but to her, that was a minor issue now.

“No, I can’t kill you. Not that I wouldn’t,” the woman responded.

She said that was the Assassin’s rule, and the difference between her and the Enforcer.

“I can’t kill criminals. I only kill innocents.”

There were cases when global peace could be maintained only by killing the innocent. The Assassin claimed that those jobs fell onto her.

“You’re a devil,” Krone said, and smiled faintly.

If Krone was a necessary evil, then this woman was an absolute evil. However, that difference in their resolutions was probably what made the other woman the real thing.

“That’s fine.” The Assassin stubbed out her cigarette in her portable ashtray. “So, since you’ve committed too many crimes to count, I can’t finish you off.”

That was when it happened.

Krone heard an odd sound behind her. Creeeeak, shwirr, shwirr. When she turned, she saw another shape rise out of the darkness.

“Aren’t you…?”

The occupant of the wheelchair was the elderly man who’d shown Krone around Sun House during her visit. What had his name been again?

“Which one do you know? I wasn’t aware he was here until today,” the Assassin said, as an aside, then went on. “Which of his faces did you meet? Jekyll, the kind old man who loves children? Or Hyde, who becomes a demon to protect them?”

Krone stared vacantly at the old man, as he slowly rose from his wheelchair. His eyes had rolled back into his head so that only their whites showed. He leveled a swordstick at her.

“Don’t worry,” the Assassin said.

“I doubt you’ll have time to feel any pain. You’re about to die at the hands of the former Master Swordsman, after all.”

The Assassin had come to see the end of the job she hadn’t finished a year ago. Now she turned her back, entrusting the final move to her former comrade.

Before she disappeared into the night, she asked Krone one last question. “I hear you were a scammer. How does it feel to be the one who got duped at the end?”

It was Krone’s final look back over her life.

“It feels fantastic.”