Subaru Okiya Makes His Move
"Relax — we're clear." Conan glanced left and right, then fixed his gaze on one direction. "This way."
With that, he set off with Hattori in tow, talking as they walked. "Miss Raiden's signal is moving slowly — doesn't look like she's using any transport. She's probably on foot, so we can keep up with her."
"Then what are we waiting for? Let's move!" Hattori quickened his pace to catch up.
"So which is it up ahead this way," Conan asked, "the Takahashi estate or the Kondo estate?"
Heiji shook his head. "Can't say for sure. Both estates lie in this direction, but the Takahashi place is a little closer..."
Before he could finish, Conan stopped dead in his tracks, cutting him off.
"What is it? Did Miss Raiden stop moving?"
"She did." Conan lowered his head, carefully adjusting his glasses. "A sudden stop... I'm worried she's noticed the signal— Ah! The signal's gone!"
Hattori's face tightened. "Don't tell me we've been made?"
"Doesn't sound like it." Conan was listening hard for something. "There was a crackle of electrical static right before the signal cut out. That's not what it sounds like when someone finds a bug and destroys it — more like something jammed it."
After a moment, Conan heaved a dejected sigh. "Well... there goes the bug. Useless now."
Hattori raised a thumb at him. "Impressive. You even planted a bug, huh?"
"Is now really the time? We're about to lose her completely." Conan shot him an exasperated glance and pressed on. "Let's head for the spot where the signal last showed up first. There might be a clue."
They were barely halfway there when Conan's phone chimed — a text message had come in.
He didn't think much of it at first, but the moment he saw the sender — Subaru Okiya — it struck him that the man might have turned something up at the Kamisato estate, and he opened it at once.
At that single line, a smile broke across Conan's face.
Talk about perfect timing — like yawning and being handed a pillow. No more worrying about losing her now that they knew the destination; from here on out, everything would be simple.
Conan and Hattori Heiji promptly decided to take a shortcut straight to the Takahashi estate.
Meanwhile, Subaru Okiya — who had just slipped, with practiced ease, into Kamisato Ayato's study and found the results of the man's investigation laid out on the desk — set down the phone he'd used to send the message, then swiftly restored every last thing he had touched to exactly where it had been.
Then he climbed out the window, slipped past the patrolling servants, and set off toward the guest rooms where the Kamisato clan had put up their temporary houseguests.
As he neared the guest rooms, Okiya decided to save time by taking the lakeside path as a shortcut.
Rounding a bend, his narrowed eyes widened slightly.
There, on a lakeshore he had assumed was deserted, Klee — in her adorable little red dress — was crouched down, head bent, studying something with the utmost concentration.
Okiya hesitated over whether to approach — and then saw Klee, as if steeling herself with some great resolve, pull her backpack around in front of her and rummage through it for a long while before picking out a small red pouch holding a cute little animal plush.
Taking aim at a spot somewhere out in the water, she hurled it with all her might.
Plop. The plush dropped into the lake.
Okiya was still puzzling over why on earth Klee would throw a toy into the water when — BOOM — splash! — a tremendous spray erupted from the lake.
The next instant, a fish came sailing out and landed right in front of Klee, to her delighted cheer of "Wow, what a huge fish!"
Okiya: "..."
He stared blankly at Klee, his expression wiped clean — a rare, unmistakable change of face for him.
That had been an explosion just now, hadn't it?
The blast had been weak and the sound faint, but Okiya — no, Akai Shuichi — could confirm it from long experience undercover: that had been the report of a bomb.
That only made his expression more complicated still. Setting aside how a girl not yet ten had come to possess something so dangerous, he had seen it plainly enough — what Klee threw into the water was, unmistakably, a plush toy. How could it possibly have exploded?!
Baffled beyond all figuring, Okiya paused a beat, then walked over to Klee's side and asked in a gentle voice, "Klee, what were you doing just now?"
Klee blinked up at the man who had appeared out of nowhere, perfectly at ease, without a trace of the guilt of a child caught red-handed. "Klee was blast-fishing!"
B-blast fishing?
Okiya rather doubted his own ears.
Perhaps sensing that something was off about his mood, Klee did her best to comfort him. "Big Brother Subaru doesn't need to worry! Klee has lots of experience with this sort of thing — nobody's gonna get hurt!"
"So..." Okiya paid little mind to her reassurances and asked, instead, the question he'd been burning to have answered. "Was what you threw in just now a bomb?"
So Klee really was one of the Teyvat Syndicate's own — playing with bombs at her age?
"Nope."
To Okiya's surprise, Klee actually denied it.
"That's Jumpy Dumpty! He's a little dolly made to look just like Klee's best friend Dodoco, and he's Klee's friend too — he's the one who helped get the fish out of the water!"