The God of Thunder
The building, once steeped in history and radiant splendor, was now being battered to the brink of collapse by a force of overwhelming power.
When the lightning struck the Takahashi mansion, the roar it unleashed shook heaven and earth. Walls and roof were torn to shreds and hurled in every direction, and in an instant the entire estate was split in two, a massive gash opening through its heart. The once-sturdy structure had been rendered pitifully fragile, utterly unable to withstand such might.
Before this sudden catastrophe, the people inside the Takahashi mansion were gripped by sheer terror. They scattered in flight, searching desperately for anywhere safe to shelter. Some collapsed where they stood, paralyzed with fear; others bolted blindly in every direction. The whole scene dissolved into chaos, saturated with dread and despair.
The head of the Takahashi family, standing closest to the strike, might as well have been pinned in place by an invisible hand — his entire body went rigid. Eyes wide, face twisted in horror, he stared straight at the lightning that had descended like an act of God. Everywhere he looked, there was nothing but that blinding, incandescent purple light.
In that moment, his mind went blank. The violet radiance became the only thing in his vision, staining the entire world a terrible hue. Then a violent surge of pain tore through him, and his brain shut down in an instant. What followed was an eternity of darkness closing over him, and at last, all fell silent.
Chaos reigned at the scene, and apart from the butler at the family head's side, no one noticed that the master of the Takahashi house was already dead.
Everything had happened far too suddenly, too bizarrely — which is why not a single soul realized that after Raiden Ei's Musou no Hitotachi fell, no second bolt of lightning ever came down at all.
Nearly everyone was too busy fleeing for their lives to think of anything but escaping the point of impact.
And so, when Hattori Heiji and Edogawa Conan entered the Takahashi mansion, they met with no resistance whatsoever.
Staring at the split earth and the collapsed buildings before them, the two of them simply could not believe that all of this was the work of a single slash.
They had, after all, just watched Raiden Ei bring her blade down — but seeing the aftermath with their own eyes still made the whole thing feel like a dream.
At that moment, they heard someone shouting a short distance ahead: "The master — somebody come quickly!"
Knowing it most likely meant something had happened to the head of the Takahashi family, Hattori and Conan pushed down their disbelief at the scene before them and ran toward the voice.
The moment they arrived, they saw a man in a butler's livery kneeling beside a figure charred pitch-black from head to toe, weeping unrestrainedly, his face contorted with terror.
Hattori ran closer. Though he held little hope, he still pressed his fingers to the man's neck to check for a pulse.
Before long, he withdrew his hand and said with a sigh, "Sigh... he's gone."
With the master's death confirmed, the butler fell into an even greater panic.
Without the family head, what was to become of the Takahashi house now?
Hattori backed away a few steps to put some distance between himself and the butler, then leaned in close to Conan and murmured, "Hey, Kudo. Would you say this counts as him being struck dead by Miss Raiden's lightning-slash?"
"There's no way!" Conan frowned deeply, his expression caught somewhere between frustration and bewilderment, as though he were confronting a problem beyond all comprehension. "No ordinary person can just conjure a lightning bolt!"
He had seen Raiden Ei's Musou no Hitotachi with his own eyes mere minutes ago, and yet he still could not accept that a single human being could produce what he'd just witnessed.
"Miss Raiden may well be the killer, but... that whole spectacle? I'm inclined to think it was some kind of illusion cooked up with high-tech equipment." Conan's face was conflicted, his voice wavering — even as he said it, he didn't quite believe his own words.
He would sooner believe this was the product of technology than accept that supernatural forces existed in the world. After all, Miss Ningguang's Jade Chamber Corporation had acquired the Schindler Group's research — they ought to be capable of pulling off an effect like that... probably.
Because the alternative was that Miss Raiden had genuinely split the Takahashi mansion in two all by herself, and a thing like that could only be possible for a god, right...
But come to think of it — the Teyvat Syndicate's beads were literally called Visions, and Klee and the others plainly worshipped some wind god called Barbatos.
And now that he mentioned it, one of the designs of those glass beads was purple, like lightning itself. Could it be they worshipped some kind of thunder god too?
Conan's mouth twitched. That Miss Raiden Ei — surely she wasn't connected to this thunder god business. No way. No, no...
No. Absolutely not.
Conan reassured himself: there are no gods in this world. Don't scare yourself. Everything, without exception, has to have a rational, scientific explanation.
He shook his head vigorously, trying to shake the outlandish speculation right out of his skull.
Just then, the police officers Hattori had called finally arrived.
Having been a step slower than Hattori and Conan, they reached the vicinity only after everything was already over. Forget the lightning that had blocked the roads — they hadn't even seen the single slash Raiden Ei had delivered, arriving instead to nothing but a scene of devastation that looked like the aftermath of an earthquake.