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."

 May 5 Siesta

Two days had passed since then. Bruno Belmondo, the Information Broker, had told me about the fight with a certain vigilante group who claimed to be on the side of justice. I'd apprehended Baht the mercenary; then Boy K. and I had managed to defeat the con artist, Krone. Right now, I was still at Sun House.

In the end, the home had escaped complete destruction, and the children were all safe. Jekyll, the head of the facility, had been found unconscious in the nearby woods. He had no injuries to speak of, but he was still sleeping in one of the facility's beds. Had he been attacked by the vigilante group's remaining members? I hoped he'd recover soon.

In any case, this string of incidents had been resolved. The threat to us had disappeared for now, and the children of Sun House would probably never be targeted again.

I still had one job left to do, though. In the grassy field near Sun House, after I'd made sure there was no one around, I took a call from a certain individual.

"Good work, Siesta. I expect you're quite tired."

The caller was Ice Doll, the Federation Government official who'd asked me to look into Danny Bryant. Since I'd resolved the incident, I'd emailed her a report of what I'd found. That seemed to be why she'd called.

"If you understand that I'm tired, I wish you wouldn't call me."

I had hoped to finish the job over email. Talking to people is work. It's even worse if the other person outranks you.

"Yes, I did feel bad about that. However, it appears you've failed to record an item, and I wanted to confirm that." Ice Doll's tone was perfectly serious, despite her apparently playing dumb.

"Failed to record something? You wanted to know what had happened to Danny Bryant. I sent a detailed account of that." If she was going to play dumb, then I would, too.

"You did. You said that Danny Bryant had, unfortunately, met his demise a year ago. You also gave details regarding the background of the incident, along

with plausible theories. I appreciated your work ethic very much. However…" Ice Doll had finally reached the reason she'd gone to the trouble of calling. "You haven't said what Danny left in the safe at the children's home."

Oh, I was right, I thought.

That said, in my report, I'd told her that the safe's contents had been a USB drive, and that it had accidentally been incinerated during my fight with Krone. It was all Boy K.'s fault for throwing it into the fire. I wasn't to blame, not at all. "I'm sorry. I had no idea your people considered the data on that flash drive so

important," I responded.

Ice Doll fell silent.

One would almost think she'd known Danny Bryant was dead already—and what she'd really wanted was the data he'd left behind. "But of course that's not true, is it?" I asked.

"As a spy who worked directly for the Federation Government, Danny Bryant knew far too much. We were concerned that the classified information he'd taken might have been leaked, that's all," Ice Doll responded, parrying my question with sound logic.

"Then you're saying it would be terribly inconvenient if whatever was on that flash drive became public?"

"…You're very insistent, aren't you, Ace Detective?" Ice Doll's tone grew as cold as her name. "Do you suspect us of something?"

"No. Only…"

I hesitated over whether to finish that sentence. Then I decided I needed to.

"I thought Danny Bryant might have been investigating the Akashic records, which are in the Mizoev Federation's possession. Was I overthinking it?"

Had Ice Doll mistakenly believed that the results of his investigation were on that flash drive? At the very least, the secret couldn't possibly be anything as tame as a list of children with special abilities. Krone had been lying to Boy K.

On the other hand, the Akashic records were the secrets of the world itself and must be kept from getting out at any cost. I asked Ice Doll, point-blank, whether that was why the government had gotten agitated and had sent a Tuner on this investigation.

"Ice Doll does not have the authority to answer questions about the Akashic

records."

I almost wondered if the voice was synthesized.

However, it was definitely Ice Doll's. She'd just positioned herself as a third party and refused to answer, in a tone that was ice cold and inorganic.

She'd neither affirmed nor denied it. She wouldn't even listen to the question itself. Ice Doll was telling me she didn't have the right to.

In that case, who had taken that right from her? No doubt she wouldn't tell me that, either.

"Then what about this?"

As long as it wasn't about the Akashic records themselves, it should be all right. On that thought, I asked Ice Doll one more thing I badly wanted to know.

"Is there a reason you didn't mention that Danny Bryant was the previous Ace Detective?"

No one had told me. It was only a hunch. Even so, I had several reasons to believe that was the case.

First, Ice Doll had sent Fuubi and me out to search for Danny, even though it had nothing to do with our actual missions. The only conceivable excuse was that Danny had come to possess taboo information, something on the level of the Akashic records. However, I didn't think that would have been possible for a rank-and-file spy. If he'd been able to access the Akashic records, he'd probably been a Tuner.

If I assumed Danny Bryant had been the Ace Detective, several things made sense. For example, the fact that Bruno had been in Japan, certainly not by coincidence, and had taken my request. Could the real reason have been that the former Ace Detective had given him a message to pass on? And the final key that had opened Danny's safe: The Inventor had presented it to me as something that was handed down from one Ace Detective to the next. That was supporting evidence as well.

On top of that, it had been roughly a year since I was appointed Ace Detective. Who had held the post before that? Would it be so odd to think that a certain private detective who'd died a year ago had been my predecessor?

"It's likely that what you have in mind is true." Ice Doll's tone had returned to normal, and she implicitly acknowledged Danny Bryant's identity.

Then she explained why she hadn't told me that he was the former Ace

Detective.

"I merely thought knowing the Ace Detective before you had fallen in the line of duty would have been distressing."

Ah, yes. That struck me as a clever excuse.

"I see. Thank you for your consideration," I said, although I wasn't actually grateful. I was good at saying things I didn't mean. "There's no need to worry, though. I won't die."

I could just as well have said I wasn't afraid to die, but I thought that might make me sound like a child whose only virtue was recklessness. So I just promised not to.

And, in order to achieve that objective, I— "I'm about to acquire a companion."

I hardly needed to say who it was. Of course, I had no idea whether he'd let himself be yanked around at my convenience. At the very least, not now… No, not right away.

He needed time, too. I'd wait. If the time never came, then that was all right. This was my story, an adventure I'd begun. I would have preferred not to get him involved.

There was one thing I knew for sure, though: A certain deceased detective had intentionally planned for Boy K. and me to cross paths.

Danny had known that if he happened to die while holding the secret of the Akashic records, the Federation Government would never let it slide. The government was bound to dispatch a Tuner to retrieve the secrets he'd left behind—and he'd deduced they were most likely to send the next Ace Detective. He'd assumed the new Ace Detective would make contact with Kimihiko Kimizuka, the person in Japan he'd spent the most time looking after.

In that case, what had Danny been trying to accomplish by bringing us together? If I assumed he'd understood the truth of that dubious talent of Boy K.'s, then I had my answer. In short, it was the kid's special predisposition, what he called his "knack for getting dragged into things": the Singularity. Danny had seen that for what it was before anyone else did, and had protected Boy K. by keeping him close. Then he'd passed that mission on to me, his successor.

Danny couldn't see the future like the Oracle. He didn't know everything, like the Information Broker. I was sure he hadn't been as strong as the Vampire in a fight. Still, the Ace Detective had the brains to foresee his own death—and to read all the potential paths the world could follow from that point.

And now, I had inherited that old detective's mission. Through a vast power I

shouldn't dismiss with a simple word like coincidence, guided by that great detective, my fate had intersected with Boy K.'s. Therefore…

"Someday, my companion and I will reach that place." The detective was already dead.

But his last wish would never die.

I would take on that responsibility and carry it with me.

"A companion, hm?" When Ice Doll heard my declaration, she gave a little laugh.

True, when I thought it through, this might actually seem pretty childish. Still.

"Did you know? In stories about saving the world, the protagonist is always a kid."