A Many-Sided Brawl
The suspects on the other side didn't hesitate for long — apparently, having witnessed the supernatural, they simply recovered their composure and got back to business.
The man closed his eyes, gave a small nod, and the crowd behind him closed in, all of them moving to attack at once.
Conan sat quietly in Noelle's arms, holding his breath, watching Albedo and Kaeya with wide, tense eyes.
He saw a man swing a blade at Kaeya, who slipped aside with effortless ease and sent the attacker flying with a single kick — a man who would not be getting up again.
Then, before his foot even touched the ground, Kaeya pivoted into a side kick, and two more went sprawling.
Albedo's situation was, if anything, more dangerous than Kaeya's — the only two men in the group carrying pistols had both fixed their sights on him.
But Albedo dodged one of them, seized the man's gun hand and snapped it, took the pistol from his grip, aimed it at the other gunman's hand, and fired.
As the wounded man's grip loosened and the second gun clattered from his fingers, Albedo caught it and tossed it to Kaeya.
Kaeya caught the pistol behind his back without even looking, as if he had eyes in the back of his head, and fired off several shots in quick succession, taking the fight out of a good number of their opponents — until the gun ran dry.
Then he hurled the empty pistol with all his strength, and it cracked against another man's skull.
On the other side of the clearing, Albedo was making short work of them in much the same fashion.
Within a matter of minutes, the two of them had dispatched the majority of their enemies.
In fairness, a few men had noticed that the group over here consisted of nothing but women and a child, and had come deliberately hunting for the easy prey — but Noelle dodged every single one of them, and not one of them so much as grazed the hem of her dress.
By the end of it, Conan had completely lost the ability to be nervous.
He even had spare attention, while Noelle was busy dodging, to study Albedo and Kaeya's movements.
And what he found confirmed it: the two were extremely close. Their coordination was seamless, and even the way they dodged and struck — the styles themselves — bore a distinct resemblance to one another.
As for the ringleader, watching his men drop one by one, he swallowed hard and made the instant, decisive call to turn and run.
Conan caught the movement and was about to warn Noelle —
But before he could get a word out, the man's head snapped back from a stone Albedo had flung, and he crumpled to the ground, out cold.
Conan couldn't shake the feeling that he'd seen this scene somewhere before.
Xiayu-nee must be every bit as close to Albedo as she seemed, too.
Once their leader went down, the resistance from his underlings weakened all the more, and before long, every last one of them had been dealt with by Albedo and Kaeya.
By the time the tardy police finally arrived on the scene, all they found was a heap of bodies lying on the ground — and standing in the middle of them, Albedo and Kaeya, their clothes only slightly rumpled, without a single bead of sweat between them.
At the sight of the officers, the two of them straightened their clothing, and every trace of the fight vanished from view.
The officer leading the unit that responded to Mouri Ran's call was someone Conan and the others knew well — Officer Yamanaka Misao. It was thanks to him, after all, that Conan had deduced the Organization's boss was likely in Tottori Prefecture: the keypad melody Yamanaka played when calling his grandmother there matched the tone pattern Vermouth used to text "that person."
The moment he arrived and took in the scene, he marched straight up to Kaeya and moved to slap the handcuffs on him.
Only after Conan and Mouri Ran, hurrying up behind, both explained did Yamanaka half-heartedly accept that Kaeya really had nothing to do with the case.
Kaeya ignored the laughter of Lisa, who — far from helping when he'd nearly been carted off by the police — had done nothing but tease him, and rolled his eyes at the muddle-headed officer.
He genuinely couldn't wrap his head around it. They let people like this become police officers? And it looked like he held a fairly decent rank, too.
Then, with Conan's account, Albedo's testimony as an eyewitness, and the recording he'd made on his phone of the yakuza suspect blurting out his confession in a moment of sheer panic, it was easy enough to establish that the man had killed more than one person.
There were far too many suspects to transport, so Yamanaka had no choice but to call for backup.
Sonoko and the others waited a while longer, until the newly arrived officers finally carted off everyone involved along with the evidence. Before leaving, Yamanaka reminded them to come in and complete their statements later, then shot Kaeya one more look — confirming once again that the man truly wasn't some gang crony — and departed, still visibly uneasy.
With the emergency behind them and all the uninvolved parties gone, night had fully fallen. The surroundings were pitch dark, and they could only make out the silhouettes of those around them by the faint moonlight overhead.
The reason they'd stayed on the mountain so late instead of heading down with the police was simple: Sonoko, quite obviously, refused to give up. She intended to press on with her unfinished objective.
Ran and Conan, naturally, stayed behind with her.
The others, unwilling to leave two girls and a child alone on a mountain this late, stayed as well.
Before long, Sonoko had loaded Lisa's potion into a spray bottle and carefully spritzed it toward a handkerchief tied to one of the trees.
Then, to Sonoko's delight and Conan's open disbelief, the misted handkerchief slowly dissolved into a wisp of fog and vanished altogether — while the branch it had been tied to remained without so much as a scratch.
How could a handkerchief simply cease to exist? Where was the law of conservation of matter when you needed it?!
Conan stared at Lisa with complicated feelings. He was becoming more and more convinced that the people with Visions were all deeply mysterious. Lisa — who outwardly was nothing more than a librarian — could brew potions like this. Even Noelle, who looked so soft and delicate, could walk unscathed out of an ambush by half a dozen men while carrying a small child. None of these people were ordinary.
Meanwhile, buoyed by the potion's effects, Sonoko was in high spirits and immediately set about targeting every handkerchief tied in the area.
But her strength gave out sooner than expected.
True, with the potion she no longer had to climb the trees herself to untie them — but spraying bit by bit like this, after clearing the handkerchiefs on only two trees, Sonoko's arm was already starting to ache.
Lisa noticed the strained look on Sonoko's face and furrowed her brow slightly, moving to help.
Then, abruptly, she turned her head toward the shadows of the trees at Sonoko's side.
Albedo and Kaeya looked that way at the same instant.
Seeing their sudden, simultaneous reaction, Sonoko sensed that something was up and edged uneasily closer to Lisa.
"Lisa, what's wrong? Is there something over there?"
"There's someone walking toward us," Lisa replied.
Though she couldn't make out the person's face clearly, nothing about their bearing suggested anything suspicious, so Lisa stayed relaxed and dropped her guard.
"Shin-nii?! What are you doing here?!"
As footsteps sounded, Sonoko too heard someone crunching through the fallen leaves toward them — until at last the figure stepped out of the shadows, and the moonlight spilled across his face.
Sonoko looked over nervously — and saw a face that had no business being anywhere but abroad.