Episode 75
Translator: RaidenTL
Episode 75
Stroking his chin with a troubled expression at Elysia’s words, Evan replied.
“So… it really wasn’t a suicide.”
“The time of death was nine hours before the fall. That means Hertz was already dead around 3:30 AM yesterday.”
“Then…”
“He was killed, and then the body was thrown.”
Having stated her conclusion cleanly, Elysia took a bite of the sandwich in front of her. Then she muttered in self-reproach.
“The culprit must have been there. They probably used the chaos of the accident to hide in the crowd and slip away.”
“Did you see them?”
“No, I must have been panicking. Why, why did I do that? Why was I so scared of something like that…?”
Evan gently lifted Elysia’s head as she bit her lip, looking her straight in the eye.
“Are you sure you didn’t see them?”
“I didn’t sense anything.”
“What if it’s not that you didn’t see them, but that the culprit was never there in the first place?”
Her eyes widened in surprise as she stared blankly up at him. Evan continued calmly.
“You’re a perceptive person. If you, standing right next to the point of impact, didn’t see anyone suspicious, I think there’s a high probability the culprit wasn’t there at that time.”
“You… think so?”
She felt the intense emotions that had threatened to overwhelm her begin to subside. As the self-blame clouding her vision cleared, she could finally see the case with clarity.
That’s right. The culprit isn’t an idiot. Would they really have infiltrated the school in broad daylight, where only authorized people are gathered, just to drop a body? Elysia’s eyes widened as she murmured.
“…The clock.”
“The clock?”
“What if they set up a device in the clock tower the night before? The body fell after the clock struck twelve. There could be a connection…”
Seeing Elysia let out a small sigh of realization, he moistened his lips with his tea. Falling after twelve chimes… Evan looked up and said.
“At twelve o’clock, when it signals the lunch hour, the clock tower chimes a little differently than at other times. As the bell rings, a small door opens, and an owl-shaped statue pops out.”
“So if they broke into the school the night before and placed the body inside that door…”
“They could make the body fall at the stroke of noon.”
Elysia paused, mouth slightly agape, replaying his deduction in her mind. Her expression turned serious as she asked.
“Senior, are you a genius?”
“I just know the school facilities well.”
“Then the culprit must have entered the school the night before. Senior… you’re amazing. You’re being a huge help.”
He gave an awkward smile at Elysia’s sudden high praise, then asked as if something had just occurred to him.
“Ah, this is just a personal question, but how did you figure out the time of death?”
“I measured the body’s internal temperature yesterday, remember?”
“Ah, with that?”
“You can use that temperature to trace it back.”
By opening the system window for <Panic in the City> and selecting the ‘apply/utilize’ function, she could combine existing information to extract new data.
After neatly transcribing all the information she had hastily jotted down in her notebook, the very first thing she did was plug the body’s temperature into the formula for tracking the time of death.
Early yesterday morning, she had faced this result window, stifling a yawn as she muttered, “Just as I thought.”
`SYSTEM: Analysis complete.`
`The estimated time of death is May 26th, 3:06 AM.`
Evan nodded in understanding and fell silent, as if telling her to continue. After a moment of silence, she touched the damp ends of her hair with her fingers and asked.
“By the way… why would they do something so pointless?”
“Pointless? You mean throwing the body out in the open in a public place?”
“Yes, that.”
He lightly traced the rim of his half-empty teacup with a finger and answered.
“Perhaps they wanted to hide the fact that the cause of death was murder, so they deliberately caused a commotion. In fact, if you hadn’t convinced Blair, it would have been ruled a suicide, a funeral would have been held, and we would have lost the chance to examine the body, which is a form of evidence.”
“They were afraid of the murder being discovered, so they tried to hide it… In that case, what about this?”
Elysia opened a drawer and pulled out a fluttering piece of paper. Evan recognized it as the suicide note Hertz had left and furrowed his brow in complication. Taking the paper, he asked.
“Is there any chance it was forged?”
“I compared the handwriting with the letter Hertz left last time, using the system’s help. It’s a perfect match. It wasn’t forged by someone else; he wrote the note himself.”
The two fell silent, lost in confusion. Elysia rubbed her face wearily and let out a sigh. The real reason she hadn’t been able to sleep properly was that she had been stuck at this very point.
She had already proven the cause of death was murder, not suicide. But then what was this suicide note?
Deciding to set the problem aside for now, Elysia asked.
“Now it’s your turn to talk, Senior. I need your opinion. What do you think about the state of the body?”
He seemed to be lost in thought for a moment. After a soft “Hmm,” he replied.
“Hearing you say it was murder and not suicide makes some of the things that felt off start to make sense.”
“How so?”
“There were many injuries, like the skull trauma and the fractures in his lower body, including his leg bones, but the decisive cause of death was a broken neck bone.”
She recalled how he had calmly explained things as they examined the body together yesterday. She remembered the injuries being widespread because his entire body had been damaged by the fall.
Evan quickly shook himself free of the delusion that Elysia, who was waiting for his answer with sparkling eyes, looked just like a puppy waiting for its mealtime.
“The injuries don’t match up.”
“They don’t match up?”
“The skull fracture occurred here—”
Evan took out a piece of paper, drew an oval, and marked the fracture locations with an X before looking up at her.
“The right temple and the back of the head. And then, the neck bone fracture.”
“Are you saying these didn’t happen at the same time?”
“The fracture is more severe at the back of the head. It was practically crushed. That means the back of his head hit the ground first.”
Elysia quickly pulled the paper from under his hand and, enunciating clearly, wrote down his words verbatim.
“If the back of his head hit first, then the injury to his right temple doesn’t make sense.”
“Right. And the neck bone is strange, too. It looks like someone… broke it intentionally.”
His green eyes, lost in thought for a moment, reread the sentence Elysia had written. Evan rolled the sentence around in his mouth twice before speaking.
“That trauma to the skull, even if it wasn’t fatal, could have been enough to render him unconscious. Caden Hertz wasn’t a large man, but as a noble, he would have learned swordsmanship, so he wouldn’t have been easy to subdue.”
“So… they knocked him unconscious first, then murdered him?”
The man closed his eyes for a moment as if horrified, then opened them and replied.
“Probably. It’s my first time determining a cause of death from a corpse, so I was a bit lost, but everything clicked into place after hearing what you said.”
Good. The cause of death is clear. It was definitely a murder, and they had even pieced together the process. Elysia pointed to the X Evan had marked and asked.
“The temple, what do you think he was hit with?”
“It would have to be a blunt weapon… I suppose.”
“I mean, what kind?”
“That… I don’t know.”
Elysia’s face showed bewilderment, as if to ask, ‘Why wouldn’t you know that?’ before she let out a soft, “Ah.”
Evan had been providing answers so smoothly that she had unconsciously assumed he knew everything. She waved her hand dismissively.
“Ah, my mistake. Sorry. You’re just so capable, I automatically assumed you’d know.”
“…At the place you were before.”
“Hm?”
“Was there… someone there who helped you like this?”
“Well, there was, yes?”
Literally, there was. Whenever a case broke out, the first place she went was the morgue, where she would get an explanation from the NPC medical examiner.
The freedom in <Panic in the City> wasn’t that high, so it was naturally a system of just reading out a pre-written script. A single prompt would cause a stream of answers to flow out.
What was he hit with? A stone hammer. Aha, a stone hammer, the kind used for demolishing buildings and stuff, right? Yes, that’s correct. The conversations tended to go something like that.
Hmm, could you even call that a conversation? It was a one-sided transfer of information, a mere imitation of communication. Well, anyway.
“There was, but…”
“Was he good?”
“Hm? At what? Oh, at examining bodies? Of course, he was good.”
“…I’ll study.”
Seeing Evan nod with a resolute expression, Elysia faltered in surprise. Why would he? I mean, what’s so fun about digging through corpses? Did I push a wrong button somewhere?
The man rested his chin on one hand and gazed at her, his eyes curving into a smile. But the pupils hidden within that smiling gaze were burning with determination.
“No, really, you don’t have to go that far—you’re already helping me enough.”
“Enough, but not perfectly.”
“You don’t have to worry about it that much.”
“I want to worry about it.”
The man, who had been resting his chin on his hand, placed his arm on the desk and leaned forward, and the fresh scent of grass washed over her. Elysia didn’t even think to pull back, simply staring at Evan’s face, now right in front of her own.
When was it that this man had shed the anxiety and hesitation that had always seemed to weigh him down?
Ah, it was probably from that night. The night he had confessed his entire past to her. From that point on, Evan had approached her without fear. Yes, just like now.
Elysia clasped her hands on the desk, fiddling with her thumbnails as she spoke.
“Uh, but, it’s not really your field, is it?”
“I’ll make it my field from now on.”
“Why?”
He looked into her silver-grey eyes, which were wide with curiosity, and answered as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.
“Because I hate to lose.”
Elysia was a little dumbfounded by the man vowing not to lose to a mere scrap of data that could do nothing but read a given script. She stared at him with a blank face for a moment, then let out a hollow chuckle.
“What’s that? That’s such a lazy reason. Who likes to lose?”
Unlike Elysia, who reacted as if she’d heard a joke, he was serious. For now, Evan just smiled. It wasn’t a smile hiding some ulterior motive, nor was it a condescending sneer. It was just an honest smile, as if he had stated the obvious.
Before coming to Minerva, he had been relentlessly educated on only one thing: how not to lose. The competitive drive to seize victory as a matter of course had naturally become a kind of obsession lodged in his mind.
And on the day fate forced him to his knees and snatched away countless lives before his eyes, he had been stripped of that mindset and had fled. He ran from the battlefield and hid himself in the quiet.
He thought he would never set foot in a place where victory and defeat were decided. Because failure was a certainty.
He had only realized that the competitive spirit he had forgotten still remained within him while spending time with Elysia.
This wasn’t to say he wanted to return to the battlefield and rack up victories. If he had to return to a battlefield where people were dying, he wanted to go as a doctor.
He had realized he could never again hold the lives of many in his hands and move them around like chess pieces.
Besides, that wasn’t what he wanted to win.
“I want you to need me.”
Elysia, who had been writing down the future direction of the investigation on a piece of paper, flinched at his sudden voice and looked up. He captured her startled image in his green eyes, which had darkened with sincerity.
“I want you to take me for granted, to drag me somewhere even if I say I’m busy.”
I know that you, who are always on guard as if you could be attacked at any time from anywhere, are defenseless only in front of me. I know that you, who dislikes the interference of others, easily reach out your hand to me.
One might think that getting this far was enough, but he wanted just one more thing.
“I want to be your perfect assistant, so much so that you feel my absence when I’m not there.”
“…Eh?”
“And I’d like it if you tried to exploit me even more because of it.”
Hearing his last words, Elysia gasped, “Heek!” Her eyes, looking at him as if he were crazy, seemed to mumble.
“What kind of perverted thing to say—”
“I just… would like that.”
His wide smile showed perfect sincerity. At a loss for words, she stared blankly up at Evan. He gently poked her cheek with the tip of his index finger and said.
“Your face is red.”
“Be quiet. It’s about time, so let’s get ready to go.”
As she was about to usher him out of the room to get ready, Elysia let out a short, “Ah,” as if remembering something, and reached into her inventory.
This one? Or that one? After looking over the weapons she had, Elysia picked out a pistol and handed it to him. As the man accepted it with a confused expression, she said.
“Blair said he’d have a few soldiers accompany us, but we should have at least one safety precaution of our own, don’t you think?”
Elysia had thought Evan’s bewildered expression was a ‘Do we really need to take something like this?’ kind of reaction, but she soon realized it was closer to unfamiliarity and tilted her head.
He examined it with a troubled look and asked.
“Is this… a gun?”
“It’s a gun.”
“I’ve never seen anything like this before. I’ve never seen one with such a short muzzle.”
Elysia belatedly remembered that unlike <You’ll Fall in Love>, which was closer to 19th-century Europe, <Panic in the City> was set in 20th-century America.
Then automatic pistols probably haven’t been invented yet.
At that moment, a chill ran down her spine. It was because of a fragment of memory that had suddenly surfaced.
“So, what have you prepared for what comes next?”
She remembered a pair of red eyes glinting in the darkness, the image of a man standing with a smile of anticipation.
Not only had she been holding a pistol in front of that man the whole time, but she had even threatened him with it when she ambushed him for tailing her. But why…
‘Why didn’t he ever ask what it was…?’
It was as if he were someone who already knew the identity of a weapon not of this world, without needing to ask.