allendalepharm Chapter 125 - 3.1
Chapter 125 - 3.1
Chapter 125: Chapter 3.1
May 1 Siesta
I was aware that I was dreaming.
"Seed, what are you trying to accomplish?"
After all, the one who said that was the past me, while the current me was gazing at this scene, floating in midair.
A year ago, I'd chased and chased a certain enemy until I'd reached a vast limestone cavern. The great evil lurked there, too deep for sunlight to reach. Multiple writhing tentacles sprouted from the white-haired young man's back.
"Something humanity could never understand," the enemy of the world said.
He'd already defeated me. I was no match for him, in wits or in strength. I might as well have been an infant as far as he was concerned, and I knelt before him, bleeding.
This is a dream, I remembered.
This was the memory of a defeat—of humiliation I'd lived through a year ago. "Someday, I swear I'll defeat you."
At the time, it was all I could do to make that declaration. For some reason, the enemy hadn't finished me off.
"Will you sacrifice your companions again?" Seed asked, even though I'd gone into this battle alone. Something similar to disappointment surfaced in his eyes. He transformed, shape-shifting through a series of young boys and girls, but still, he didn't attack.
"...What are you trying to say?"
The last shape Seed assumed belonged to a girl with black hair and red eyes. He didn't answer my question. I didn't recognize the girl. After he'd watched my reaction, he faded and vanished, like Chameleon.
"Companions? I don't have..."
I was missing memories of a certain time period.
If what the enemy was saying was true, had I stood by and watched my companions die, even if I no longer knew it?
At this point, those memories had vanished over the horizon. What had I done in the past? What had I lost?
I... I was—
" !"
The alarm echoed through the room, pulling me out of the dream. The source of this content nov(el)bi((n))
Even though it wasn't summer, my forehead and neck were covered in sweat, and my drenched pajamas clung to my skin. As I took several deep breaths, I sat up and reached for the phone by my pillow.
"...Somebody's calling?"
I'd thought it was my alarm, but the phone had been ringing. The name on the display was—Kimihiko Kimizuka.
Oh, right—we'd arranged to meet up this afternoon.
I checked the time. It was 2 PM. We'd planned to meet at one o'clock, but apparently, that had been a bit too early for me.
"Sorry to keep you waiting. Have you been here long?"
An hour later, I spotted a familiar silhouette at our designated meeting spot in front of the train station and called out to him.
"People who are five minutes late could say that, but you're two hours late.
Who the heck do you think you—"
Grumbling, Boy K.—Kimihiko Kimizuka—turned around. "... "
However, as soon as he saw me, he averted his eyes.
"The Fiend with Twenty Faces goes through disguises like nobody's business."
I wasn't the police officer or the antique shop manager today. I wore a new mask and costume.
"Since I'm not on duty, I went with a casual outfit. What do you think?" I lifted my skirt slightly. Granted, his initial reaction had already clued me in.
"It's a bit too short. Also, sweaters make, um, certain things...more obvious," the kid mumbled, still focused on some point across the station.
"I thought I'd show you that the Fiend with Twenty Faces can change her face, her voice, and her cup size at will."
"If I ran into you in another disguise on the street, I wouldn't recognize you." "Shall we set up a password, then?"
The boy finally turned to look at me.
"If you say, 'You sure are a beauty,' I'll say, 'Of course. I'm Ms. Gekka.'"
"I just realized your name is fake, too. What, you took it from the flower?" Boy K. smiled wryly. He knows a lot; that's good. "And? Do you have any ideas
about those paintings?"
He meant the Danny Bryant pictures he'd brought over the day before. According to the kid, Danny had bought them from a mysterious art dealer, and it was possible that they could help us discover Danny's whereabouts. Today, we were planning to follow that lead to a certain location.
"Yes. Well, to be accurate, I have an idea of someone who may have an idea." "...That's a pretty roundabout way of putting it. I just assumed we'd be going
to the places shown in the pictures."
The paintings he'd brought yesterday had shown certain pastoral landscapes. "You think Danny Bryant would be there? That's a little too simplistic." As a
matter of fact, I had an idea of where the landscapes were as well, but there was something else I wanted to check. "Let's go see the artist behind those paintings."
That had been our ultimate goal.
"The thing is, we aren't quite ready. Shall we wander around town until then?
I just moved here, you see," I said, beginning to walk away.
"So you want me to show you around? Unfortunately, there isn't much to this place. The town's not that interesting." With a small sigh, he came up beside me and began to walk me through this working-class neighborhood, a stone's throw away from the big city.
"I recommend that pain de mie shop. They'll be all sold out by now, though." The boy pointed at a bakery across the street. There was a big, eye-catching sign with the shop name on it: La Rollebarca. ...Instead of "barcarolle"?
"That's a great name, if I do say so myself." "Why are you talking up the name of the bakery?"
I wish he wouldn't just hand out that sort of information so easily.
"A while back, a robber forced his way into that place. Stuff happened, I resolved the incident, and they gave me the right to name their bakery," Boy K. explained.
"You said there's nothing to say about this town, and then you have a story like that? That's impressive." Also, I want the details on the stuff that happened.
"Oh, and that penny-candy store over there."
Rudely ignoring my comeback, the boy pointed out an old-time candy store. At the back of the shop, in a small, raised area floored with tatami mats, the elderly lady who ran it was drinking tea.
"That old hag..."
"You're suddenly being awfully rude."
"Even if you get a winning wrapper, she says her vision's all blurry and she can't read it, so she won't let you trade it in for your prize."
"Oh, she is rotten and a hag."
I felt sharp eyes zero in on us from within the shop, and the boy and I set off like a pair of racewalkers. This is a fun town.
"Oh, right. Gekka. Want to talk to your future self?"
"No, no, this is an everyday small talk conversation; don't start introducing a plot hook."
Nah, I wanted him to keep going. This was getting more and more entertaining. The kid's daily routine might have been more adventurous than mine.
"There's this rumor that if you use the phone booth under that pedestrian bridge, you can talk with yourself from five minutes in the future."
It seems Danny's story about coincidentally running into Krone and buying those pictures really had been a lie. Had the two of them been business acquaintances all along? Then why had he kept quiet about it? He hadn't even told the kid...
"If he wanted the pictures that badly, why not just go get them himself? Why was he so roundabout?" The idea seemed to mystify the boy.
"I couldn't say. I only knew him through our business deals, and he never let others know what he was really thinking." Krone gazed at the one blank space on the white wall. "I think he must have had some lofty goal. ...That said—and you may be angry with me for saying this—his eyes seemed to be focused on something in the distance, and it frightened me a little."
Danny Bryant had always had several faces.
A former Federation Government spy, and a traitor to the group. A private detective, and an enigmatic wandering handyman.
A surrogate dad for Boy K., whom he'd taken from the children's home. Which one was real, and what had he been trying to accomplish? If I met him,
would I have figured it out?
"Still, who would have thought he had someone like you?" Krone turned back, gazing at Boy K. Then she gave a sudden smile. "Now, what's next? Have you
finished your business here? It's true that I sold illegal counterfeits, so if you plan to turn me in, I'll have no choice but to comply." Jokingly, Krone held out her hands as if she were waiting to be cuffed.
"No, that isn't my job. More importantly, there was one last thing I wanted to know." I asked her my most pressing question. "Where can we find the person who painted those counterfeits?"
After leaving the gallery, Boy K. and I headed straight for the train station.
We were bound for the Hokuriku region. Apparently, that was where the artist lived. Krone had given us their address, and now we were a little closer to our goal.
Why had Danny Bryant cared so much about an artist who copied paintings? Why had he entrusted those pictures to Boy K. and disappeared? In search of the answers to those questions, Boy K. and I boarded the last bullet train of the day and headed for the Hokuriku region.
When we reached our destination, it was near midnight, and we decided to spend the night at a business hotel that was directly connected to the station. Postponing our visit to the artist until the next morning, we checked in right away and took our luggage to our room.
"Mm, a freshly washed pillow and coverlet. Paradise." I flopped face down onto the fluffy mattress. Just getting to sleep on a soft bed was a luxury. Once I begin fighting the world's enemies in earnest, I doubted I'd get to indulge in these luxuries, and so I made up my mind to savor this everyday happiness while I could.
"Come on, you, too. Aren't you going to bounce on the bed?" "What am I, a kid?"
"Yes. You are."
The boy pouted back at me. It was pretty cute.
He sat down on the other bed. "I'm used to spending the night away from home, and it's not the first time I've been to this area. There's really nothing to be so excited about," he said bluntly.
"Huh. When were you here before? On a school trip? Did you manage to enjoy it, even though you ended up by yourself?"
"I was here a year ago, it wasn't a school trip, and don't make random guesses and start feeling sorry for me over them."
"Lucky you. This time you got to come here with a gorgeous older woman." "Except your personality sucks, so I basically break even."
"Ah, so even with a flawed personality, I'm so beautiful that it balances out." "Quit with the optimism gymnastics. Your face is pretty much special effects
makeup anyway, right?" The boy looked at me closely.
What a shame I can't show him my real face. Should I let him see it at one point and call it one of my disguises, and watch how he reacts?
"And hey, how come we're sharing a room?" It seemed a bit late to complain about that, but he averted his eyes.
"Because we have to; they only had one vacancy. Oh, is this due to that odd predisposition of yours, too? What if you're actually the one who caused this sleepover?"
"I didn't cause it, I just got dragged into it. By you." This time, the boy looked me in the eye as he spoke.
"Well, should we play cards all night?" "No. I'm going to sleep."
"In mysteries, that means you're the next to die. It's all right, though: The detective will protect you."
"You're going to act as a detective now? You're one strange 'fiend.'" The boy looked exasperated, but he was definitely smiling.
The first time I saw him, he'd appeared to have given up on everything. Back then, somehow, his profile had struck me as beautiful. When I saw him smile, though, I liked it even more. ...For no particular reason.
"It was cold out there; I'd like to soak in the bath and warm up. Want to come in with me?"
"...No. There's no reason to do that." "What about saving water?"
"We don't need to worry about saving water at a hotel." "When you turned me down a second ago, you hesitated a bit."
"If you're gonna pretend to let it go, don't bring it up later!" The boy sighed, shoulders slumping.
But then...
"Can we be serious for a minute?" He lifted his head, gazing at me. Apparently, playtime was over for the moment. I motioned for him to go on. "Gekka—who are you?" Boy K. was moving toward the truth of the Fiend
with Twenty Faces. "That guy, Danny... He never told me anything. Not what he was thinking, or what job he was working on, or who he really was."
"So you're asking me instead?"
"I know it's kinda weird," the boy admitted. "But... Somehow, you two seem
sort of similar to me."
I hadn't been expecting that.
I'd never met Danny Bryant. I knew he'd been employed by the Federation Government before, that he was a handyman and Boy K.'s father figure, and a treacherous spy—but these titles were all I knew about him. What about Danny had reminded Boy K. of me?
"Then what is it that you want to know about me?"
I couldn't reveal that I was the Ace Detective without violating Federation Government rules. Even so, if I didn't tell him anything important, I might lose his trust. That was why I decided to give him a tiny peek behind the curtain.
Boy K. immediately started asking question after question. "Why are you looking for information on Danny? Is it because you want to, or are you following orders from somebody else?"
I see. So that had been on his mind. Since we'd been after the same things until now, he hadn't pushed for details about it. If we were going to stay together for a while, though, he'd probably decided we needed to be on the same page.
"At first, you said Danny was suspected of a theft. That's a fairly petty crime, though; you're going to great lengths just to catch a thief."
The boy's sharp eyes focused on me.
I'd known I wouldn't be able to put him off forever. Considering what I'd been doing lately, it was no wonder he'd become suspicious and doubtful. In a move to regain his trust, I began to tell him about my job, sticking to things that wouldn't get me in trouble.
"I have only one answer to both of your questions: I'm investigating Danny Bryant because I was ordered to."
"So you don't have any personal business with him?" I shook my head.
To be honest, I was curious about the whole situation. The fact that Ice Doll seemed almost too concerned about Danny was strange, and the way Boy K. was trying to hide something about him tugged at me as well. However, those concerns were secondary; my orders were to come first.
"Who ordered you?"
"I can't tell you that. Even if I did, I doubt you'd be able to understand right now. It's an adults-only sort of thing," I said, and the boy rolled his eyes. And then...
"In that case, as far as Danny and I are concerned, are they an enemy? Or are they on our side?"
Oh. That, huh? I thought. Boy K. must have wanted to know about this the most.
He must be extra sensitive to crises that threatened Danny Bryant. Either that, or he'd picked up on the presence of an enemy and was trying to figure out who they were. The only thing I could say now, and do for him, was...
"I promise you one thing." The boy turned back to face me. "As long as I'm standing between you and them, I won't let them be outright hostile toward you. I'll work to guarantee that both sides benefit as much as possible."
"...So you're a negotiator?"
"My job title doesn't matter." One thing was certain, though. "As long as you assist me, I'll reward you. If you ask me for help, I'll always respond. And then for the first time, we'll be equals." I held out my hand. The boy gave it a long, steady look. Then, as if he'd made up his mind, he grasped it and squeezed back.
"I get the feeling there's too much emphasis on protecting me, though." "Well, I'm older, so there is a bit of that."
We'd just reached a formal agreement.
"All right, I'm going to go take that bath. What about you, kid?" "Morning's going to come early, so I'm hitting the sack."
Wow, he's not cute at all.