Yusaku Kudo's Investigation
Only after all the chaos and commotion had settled did Conan learn that the lady was, in fact, his own mother in disguise.
And Hades' partner really had passed away.
Conan tilted his head up at his mother with the dead-eyed stare of a fish on a market slab, and asked, voice flat with displeasure, "So. You came all this way just to scare me?"
Yukiko Kudo covered her mouth, waving her hand airily as she giggled. "Of course not."
"Your father and I..." She glanced up at Yusaku Kudo, who was walking over to join them. "Well, we've been keeping an eye on this case all along."
"As a matter of fact, it was I who cracked the cipher in Hades' previous case..." Yusaku came to stand at Yukiko's side, slipping an arm around her shoulder as he briefly explained why the two of them had turned up here.
"Frankly, I expected a man as cunning as Hades to put up a far harder fight. I never imagined..." His gaze drifted toward the two figures at the center of the nearby crowd — Lyney and Lynette. "They were a great deal of help this time, weren't they?"
"They were." Following his father's line of sight, Conan looked at Lynette with an expression that was hard to describe. Are all the members of the Teyvat Syndicate really this skilled?
From what he'd heard, part of the reason the police had caught Hades so smoothly was that the man had lost too much blood and was running on empty. According to the reports, Hades himself claimed he'd been stabbed by Lynette's longsword — but with no evidence to back it up, Scotland Yard had dismissed it as the ravings of a criminal.
Yet Conan's instincts told him the man hadn't been lying at all.
Which left the question: how on earth had Lynette managed to conceal such an obviously sharp blade on her body?
"They're with Miss Ningguang's crowd, aren't they?" Yusaku paused for a beat, then asked, his voice soft and sly, "Yes...?"
"Yeah... ah, no, wait, that is... they're, um... friends..."
Standing beside his father, Conan's guard had slipped far more than he realized. Caught completely off guard by Yusaku's question, the answer tumbled right out of him.
The moment it did, he knew he'd made a mistake — but it was far too late to take it back. Faced with his father's knowing look, Conan understood there was no point pretending anymore, and he confessed honestly. "Fine. Yes, they're with them. But how did you know, Dad? I never told you about that."
Even at the end, curiosity got the better of him — he simply had to know how Yusaku had figured it out. Back when Conan had first suspected the connection, it had taken seeing matching accessories again and again, followed by a lucky stroke of information, before he could even link them together.
"Ah..." Yusaku let out a sigh. "The Professor told me."
"What!" Conan bristled with indignation. Honestly, Professor. "I specifically told him not to..."
"You told the Professor not to tell us, hmm?" Yukiko cut in before he could finish, then gave a deliberate, aggrieved rough-up of little Shinichi's hair. "If your dear father hadn't noticed something was off and asked the Professor himself, just how long were you planning to keep us in the dark?!"
"That's right — lean on the adults once in a while. We're far better positioned to dig up information than you are, you know."
"I'm sorry..." Conan ducked his head, embarrassed under Yusaku's gaze, and fidgeted awkwardly as he tried to explain. "Ahem. It's just — you two had never even heard the name of that strange organization, so I thought..."
"I wanted to try handling it on my own first. And honestly, most of the Teyvat Syndicate people I've come across aren't that dangerous. On the surface I'm just an elementary schooler — as long as I don't give anything away, I'm basically safe. That's why I didn't rush to tell you..."
"Oh, right — so did you turn up anything else interesting afterward, Dad?"
Seeing straight through Shinichi's attempt to change the subject, Yusaku merely arched an eyebrow and let it slide, steering the conversation where the boy wanted it. "Unfortunately, no."
He went on to explain. "The background information the Professor gave me on those people was all quite thorough — no traces of fabrication whatsoever. And on the surface, there's nothing unusual linking them. The way they know each other, the way they interact... it all looks perfectly natural..."
"As for that young lady who happens to know every one of them — I looked into her as well. She really has traveled to a great many places." At that point, Yusaku couldn't help a small sigh of admiration. "She's poured an extraordinary amount of effort into finding her brother, that much is certain."
Listening to his father, Conan lowered his head and turned it over slowly in his mind.
The findings on the Teyvat members didn't surprise him — he'd expected as much. When he'd asked Heiji for help back then, the investigation had turned up almost nothing useful either. Still, actually confirming there was nothing to find left a sting of disappointment he couldn't quite shake.
But the results on Xia Yu — those genuinely caught him off guard.
So Xia Yu knew all those people simply because she'd been to so many places? It really was nothing more than pure coincidence?