Tantei wa Mou, Shindeiru - Volume 9 - Chapter 2.01

  The world’s strongest alliance

Our dinner party ended, and the group split up. Marie got into a taxi, while Natsunagi and I decided to walk to the nearest train station. However…

“Saikawa, why are you coming with us?”

“There you go, trying to shut me out. Are you planning to get frisky with Nagisa on the dark streets?”

Saikawa inserted herself between me and Natsunagi as we walked to the station.

“Don’t turn into a pain-in-the-butt junior out of nowhere. Forget that—why not call your car? It’s a bad idea for idols to take the train.”

“Oh! There’s a park! Let’s play for a bit.” Saikawa hastily ran over. She wasn’t even listening to me.

“I guess she’s not as discouraged as I thought.”

“Yeah. I do think she could afford to be a little more vulnerable in front of other people, though.”

Exchanging looks, Natsunagi and I followed Saikawa into the park.

“It’s been forever since I last went on a swing.”

Saikawa cheerfully pumped her legs, building momentum. I took the swing next to her and lightly kicked off the ground. The smell of the dirt and rusted iron would’ve made anybody feel like a kid again.

“Want me to give you a push?” Natsunagi planted her palms on my back and pushed softly.

Who’d have thought we’d end up playing in a park after graduating from high school?

“I apologize for earlier,” Saikawa said after a little while, still swinging gently. “We met up to discuss Marie’s request, but I ended up just talking about myself.”

“Was that it? Don’t worry about something like that.” I pumped hard, kicking my legs out, feeling the night wind rush past my face. “We told her we’d continue our investigation, and as far as I’m concerned, you’re a client, too, Saikawa.”

Ever since she’d asked Natsunagi and me for help last year.

“That means you can bring your problems to the detective and her assistant anytime. As for the fee, how about…yeah, that priceless smile of yours is enough.”

“Kimizuka…” Saikawa gazed at me, her pupils trembling.

…Or maybe I was the one who was shaking unsteadily.

Saikawa had been swinging pretty high for a while now…

“Kimizuka, are you all right? You look like you might fly off!”

“Natsunagi, you’re pushing too hard!”

The swing I was on seemed liable to go all the way over the top of the swing set. I waited for gravity to stop me, then felt a little sick. Choking back my nausea, I lifted my head. Natsunagi was already having a nice chat with Saikawa.

“…Not fair,” I groaned, and just then, my smartphone alerted me to an incoming call. The name on the screen said Fuubi Kase. It felt as if we talked on the phone once a week or so. I picked up.

“Answer my calls on the first ring.”

“What are you, my controlling girlfriend? …So? What do you need?”

“We’re dealing with a weird incident. I’m sharing the intel with you, just in case.” On the other end of the line, Ms. Fuubi gave an exhausted sigh. “We’ve been finding unidentified bodies all over the place lately. Though that part’s pretty normal.”

“It’s seriously messed up we live in a world where it’s normal to find unidentified bodies all over the place.”

“The victims are all dried up. They’re basically mummified.”

She’d caught me off guard, but then the pieces started falling into place. Oh, there it is. This must have been what Mia’s prophesy earlier was about. She’d said I was about to get involved with undead mummies.

“The corpses are all damaged pretty badly, and someone’s clearly drained all their blood.”

“Well, that’s terrifying. I wonder what sort of monster is behind it.”

“I’m sending you a photo of one of the specimens.”

“No need, I’m good.”

“What’s up?” Ms. Fuubi asked, sounding mystified.

“There’s one near me right now.”

I hung up for now. In the distance, a shadow had moved.

It was shaped like a person, but the figure clearly didn’t belong to a normal human.

“Kimizuka, that’s…” Natsunagi was staring at it; she’d obviously noticed it, too. The thing was about ten meters away. A skinny mummy with long, disheveled white hair stood there, wriggling and writhing uncannily.

“I could really do without any more horror movie tropes, thanks.”

The Magical Girl wasn’t with me anymore, and I wasn’t carrying a weapon. I held an arm out in front of Natsunagi, keeping a wary eye on the creature.

“But it’s human.” A blue light flared in the darkness. It was Saikawa’s left eye; she’d removed her eye patch.

That blue eye of hers could see an enemy’s true form. Seed had reclaimed the seed it had held, so her eye couldn’t see as much as before, but it still had the primordial seed’s power.

“Oh, apparently it died, then came back to life as a mummy.”

The mummy slowly approached, its body undulating. It stretched a thin hand out toward us. Was it preparing to attack, or asking for help? I couldn’t tell.

“Ha! A hollow marionette,” rumbled a low voice.

The next instant, something slashed the mummy’s upper body in two, and it disintegrated into ash.

“You again, Scarlet?”

The mummy had been purged by the king of the vampires. Scarlet had done his work in under a second, and the next thing I knew, he was sitting at the top of the slide, one knee raised.

“Oh, Mr. Vampire.” Blinking rapidly, Saikawa went over to Scarlet.

The two of them hadn’t met in more than six months. They weren’t particularly close, or at least I hadn’t thought they were…

“It’s been a long time, girl. Nothing has changed, I trust.”

“I’ve gotten cuter!”

“Then indeed, nothing has changed.” Scarlet nodded soberly a few times. The world was vast, but this had to be the only place you could see banter between an idol and a vampire.

“Scarlet, what was that thing?”

“An undead mummy—or so I would like to tell you. However, if you ask me, it is merely a shoddy failure.” Waxing poetic about his superiority as usual, Scarlet noiselessly flew down to us. “It is the work of the enemy vampires I mentioned before. Their ability to reanimate corpses is weaker than mine. After they’ve killed a human, the best they can do must be to turn them into cheap imitations.”

“So there are a lot of these enemy vampires across the world?” Were there other enemies besides the old vampire I’d run into in Scandinavia? There had to be, or mummies like the one we’d just seen wouldn’t exist. In which case… “What do they want?”

“Deduce that much on your own, if you claim to be a detective’s assistant,” Scarlet said with a mocking smile.

“…At the very least, you confronted that old vampire because he was eating human flesh and blood in an attempt to prolong his life. Does that mean all enemy vampires are trying to use humans as food? Is that the ‘vampire rebellion’?”

If so, their motives were somewhat similar to Seed’s. Their survival instincts were forcing them to try and drastically upset the current order of the food chain.

“Is that why you agreed to hunt your own kind?” asked Natsunagi. “To defeat the vampires who are trying to harm humans?”

Scarlet narrowed his eyes, which seemed to wordlessly confirm her assumption. “An enemy is closing in on this country as well. I sowed the land with my blood earlier, but they seem undaunted, and are still bent on wreaking havoc here.”

Was he talking about what he’d done on that helicopter ride two weeks back? Apparently, Scarlet’s threat hadn’t worked on our current opponent. Did that mean they were particularly dangerous?

“How much do you know about this enemy vampire?” Natsunagi took a step forward. She was asking about the identity of the vampire who was planning this assault on Japan.

“—Elizabeth.” Scarlet looked up at the moon as he said her name. “If I am the king of the vampires, then she should be called their queen.”

“An old friend of yours?” The way Scarlet spoke made it seem likely.

“She once had a heart for justice. She was noble and powerful, and took pride in the fact that she was a vampire. However, as the end of her life drew near, she changed. She began attacking one human after another, eating more than she required. Before long, the means and the end had changed places, and she’d started to kill for pleasure.”

“…So she’s killing every human she can get her hands on, and turning their corpses into mummies.” Natsunagi’s expression stiffened, and she hugged herself tightly.

“She hates humans. She eats their flesh and blood to extend her life, then turns their corpses into her minions and toys with them. The Necromancer Elizabeth. She is the enemy I most need to kill.”

“You’re not going to tell us that this Elizabeth is the one who torched the village near Reloaded’s hometown, too, are you?” Had the old vampire only been eating her leftovers?

“The possibility can’t be ruled out.”

At that point, I understood why Scarlet was revealing so much. He was telling us that stopping Elizabeth was his mission, and he didn’t want us interfering.

“But as the Ace Detective, stopping her is my job, isn’t it?” Natsunagi broke in. Naturally, her expression wasn’t exactly bursting with confidence. Even so, she’d gotten this job from the Federation Government, through Mia, and she didn’t intend to abandon it that easily.

“This was not what we discussed, human.” Scarlet glared at me. He was reproaching me for having failed to talk Natsunagi around. That was what the whole helicopter ride had been about.

“The situation’s changed a bit, see. We took a request the other day that seems to involve vampires; that thing with that old vampire was part of it. So we may end up tangling with them whether we want to or not.”

Of course, the fact that the two incidents overlapped might just have been coincidence. However, could we really write it off as chance, or blame it on my knack for getting dragged into stuff? Was there some other entirely different reason behind it? It seemed too early to say one way or the other.

“You humans are a troublesome lot.”

My cold stare-down with Scarlet stretched on for a while, until finally the idol singer broke the silence. “I just had a brilliant idea. Let’s form an alliance!”

Saikawa had been standing at the top of the slide, and now she slid down it energetically, nailing her landing like a gymnast.

“An alliance? Between the Ace Detective and the Vampire?”

“Yeah! We’re fighting the same enemy, right? Why shouldn’t we team up? That was what the three of us did,” Saikawa said with a smile.

“Come to think of it, that was how that happened, huh?” Natsunagi and I had gotten to know Saikawa in a similar way. SPES had been targeting Saikawa’s left eye, and Natsunagi and I had also had business with them, so we’d teamed up. Since then, that alliance had transformed, leaving us as comrades with an unbreakable bond.

“You’d be okay with that, too, wouldn’t you, Mr. Scarlet?” Saikawa ran up to him on light feet. “Right? Right?” She peeked up at the vampire with her blue eye.

“It always ends like this when this girl gets involved.” Scarlet cracked his neck. Unusually for the vampire king, he wore a look of resignation. Thinking back, when Scarlet had appeared with Bat and the undead Chameleon and offered to resurrect Saikawa’s parents, her innocence had seemed to leave him dumbfounded.

“—Well, if I consider this to be another piece of guidance from the Singularity, then perhaps…” Scarlet glanced at me, then started toward Natsunagi.

In other words…

“Just don’t hold me back, human.”

“O-of course I won’t!”

Their sharp glares clashed, but almost immediately, both their expressions softened.

And just like that, the Ace Detective and the Vampire formed a temporary alliance.