The Wanderer and Kir's Standing
Under the complicated, unreadable gazes of everyone watching, Kyogoku Makoto explained the reason for his sudden return.
As it turned out, he hadn't been able to understand the email Sonoko had sent him. Terrified of missing whatever time she had specified, he had made a snap decision: come home immediately, camp out on this mountain, and simply wait there until the winter Sonoko mentioned finally arrived.
The method was clumsy, admittedly—but the result was a good one.
Thanks to Kyogoku Makoto's dramatic appearance, at the very least, Sonoko no longer had to exhaust herself clearing away every last handkerchief in the vicinity.
With the handkerchief-hunting business concluded, the group made ready to head back down the mountain. Before they left, however, Conan found his thoughts drifting back to the suspect's bizarre behavior. He didn't for a moment believe that ghosts actually existed in the real world—but he strongly suspected that someone was putting on an act, playing the supernatural for their own ends.
Uneasy, he went back to the spot the man had been staring at and searched it thoroughly, only to come away disappointed: there was nothing to be found. In the end, he still had no idea what the suspect could possibly have seen that frightened him so badly.
Organization Headquarters.
The Wanderer had been with the organization for some time now. It wasn't a particularly long stint, yet every member who had ever worked alongside him came away with a vivid impression of the man.
As a result, even though he had yet to receive a codename, his presence already overshadowed that of several members who had one.
For Chianti, at least, the Wanderer had become one of the people she least wanted to see in the organization—second only to Vermouth.
And that ranking existed only because the Wanderer disdained speaking to idiots, which meant their interactions were few. Otherwise, he might well have surpassed even Vermouth in her personal hall of infamy.
As for Vermouth herself, she didn't much care for the Wanderer either—especially after he stepped on a woman's landmine the very first time they met.
But perhaps hearing his story from Cointreau had stirred a sliver of sympathy in her, and the man was undeniably useful to the organization. All things considered, Vermouth bore him no great malice.
Of course, it helped that she'd spent these past days busy hunting for traces of Kir, leaving her little time to interact with the Wanderer in the first place.
Fortunately, the effort paid off: Vermouth tracked down a little boy who had witnessed the whole incident.
Through him, she learned that Kir had been taken to a hospital by the FBI.
When news arrived that Kir had vanished—wounded and unconscious, carried off by the FBI—Gin reasoned it out thus: Kir had once before been captured by the undercover agent Ethan Hondo and interrogated under truth serum, yet she had never leaked a shred of intelligence. In the end she had even bitten clean through the man's wrist, seized his gun, and killed him. That was iron willpower. The odds of her defecting were slim. Ergo, they would rescue her.
Once the Boss was briefed on the situation, he approved the operation and placed Gin in charge of it.
Gin seized the opportunity to slot the Wanderer into the mission as well—it would double nicely as the man's codename assessment.
The moment Chianti learned that the Wanderer was about to receive a codename and stand on equal footing with her, her distaste for him curdled into something uglier.
Even ranked below her, he hadn't deigned to acknowledge her. Give him a codename, and he'd only grow more insufferable.
But there was nothing she could do to stop it, which only made her angrier still.
It fell to Korn—who had spent that stretch of time enduring Chianti's dynamite-keg moods—to hear her out and offer a bit of consolation: Relax. Even after he gets his codename, the way he treats you won't change much. It's obvious he doesn't consider himself beneath you as it is.
Korn's consolation, admittedly, was effective. After hearing it, Chianti's temper became markedly less explosive—but in a certain sense, she grew even angrier.
And so, once she learned that the Wanderer's codename assessment was the mission to rescue Kir, and that she and Korn would both be taking part, Chianti quietly began nursing a scheme she had no intention of sharing with anyone.
She would sabotage the Wanderer mid-operation—trip him up where no one could see. Best case, his mission would go sideways and he'd fail to earn his codename.
She knew perfectly well the codename would come to him sooner or later. But every day of delay was a day gained.
As for Kir—saved was best; not saved, well, nothing to be done about that. She'd simply been unlucky. Chianti could shrug it off easily enough. It wasn't as if Kir were some saint, and the two of them had never shared anything resembling friendship.
If not for the Wanderer getting under her skin, Chianti would unquestionably have thrown her full effort into a rescue like this, same-organization loyalty and all. But circumstances, alas, were special now.
In a certain sense, the Wanderer ranked far higher in Chianti's heart than Kir ever had.
What Chianti didn't know, however, was that the Wanderer had very nearly refused his own codename assessment outright.
When Gin, grinding his patience down to the nub, demanded a reason, the Wanderer gave him exactly four words: Not rescuing trash.
In the end it was only when Cointreau asked the Wanderer about it personally that anyone learned why he'd branded Kir garbage. His words, verbatim:
She didn't even notice she was bugged. She's been captured twice, and now she's lying in a hospital bed. If that isn't trash, what is? Recovering trash like that—you're planning to hand the organization a fresh heap of trouble, aren't you...
Faced with a man who wouldn't so much as pretend to defer to him, a helpless Cointreau had no choice but to call in outside support. Ultimately it was his own younger sister who reached out to Nahida, asking her to personally talk the Wanderer around—and only then did he agree to take the mission.
Gin, naturally, understood none of these tangled maneuvers. All he knew was that the Wanderer was arrogant, ignored his commands, and plainly didn't consider himself a member of the organization at all.
But since the man at least obeyed Cointreau, Gin swallowed his displeasure and let it be.
Meanwhile, Edogawa Conan had begun to notice that something about Hondo Eisuke's behavior was off, and suspicion started to take root.
He told Hattori Heiji about it and asked him to look into Hondo Eisuke—as well as the woman who bore him a striking resemblance: Mizunashi Rena.
With Hattori's help, Conan got his hands on a photograph of Eisuke's father, then began tracing the leads one by one. To his astonishment, the trail revealed that the man had held a position in the CIA of the United States—and that he had worked as an undercover agent. The organization he had infiltrated was the very Black Organization that had shrunk Conan himself into a child.
At the same time, Conan had carefully, artlessly probed Hattori about whether he'd ever heard of a Vision—even casually showing him a drawing Conan had made of one. But Hattori showed no particular reaction whatsoever. Clearly, he'd never heard of such a thing.
Indeed, after looking at Conan's sketch, Hattori had actually asked him where one could buy an accessory like that—it looked pretty nice, he said, and he was thinking of getting one for Kazuha.
Though he'd half expected it, learning that even Hattori Heiji—son of the Osaka Prefectural Police's own superintendent—had never heard of these things left Conan feeling somewhat deflated.
But he set the disappointment aside quickly enough. The priority now was what he had recently uncovered: the organization already knew that Mizunashi Rena had been delivered to a hospital by the FBI. They hadn't yet pinned down which hospital—but Conan had a feeling it was only a matter of time before they made their move.
All Conan could do now was hope that the members of that mysterious other organization would keep their hands out of the Black Organization's rescue operation. Otherwise, things were about to get a great deal more complicated.