Unnatural Forces
After the scene had mostly calmed down and the crowd's nerves were soothed, a police officer walked over to Hattori and asked for his account of events.
Hattori laid out the whole story honestly — how they'd come to be there, start to finish. Naturally, he skimmed over where exactly they'd gotten their lead that the Takahashi family had sabotaged the Kamisato estate's competition venue, and instead focused on painting a vivid picture of everything they'd witnessed the moment they arrived at the Takahashi residence.
Even with Conan chiming in to back him up, the officer couldn't help the skepticism creeping across his face as he listened to tales of lightning barring their path and a single sword stroke splitting the Takahashi mansion in two.
If he hadn't already known Heiji Hattori and known the boy didn't joke around, he'd have assumed they were deliberately spinning tall tales to mess with the police.
But even knowing Hattori was almost certainly telling the truth, the officer couldn't stop himself from absently touching the phone in his pocket. He felt a sudden urge to call his psychologist — to have the man take a look at Hattori and Conan and determine whether the two kids, startled by some sudden earthquake, had simply let their imaginations overtake reality.
As for the Takahashi butler standing nearby, with his half-sobbing, half-hysterical expression, the officer privately suspected the poor man's mind had simply cracked under the shock of disaster striking so close to home. He'd already given up on questioning him.
He wasn't entirely buying Hattori's story, but when Hattori mentioned seeing someone from the Kamisato household at the scene, the officer dutifully contacted the relevant people and checked on Miss Raiden's whereabouts over the past stretch of time.
Before long, his colleague came back with the results.
Hanging up, the officer turned to look at Hattori, his gaze an extraordinarily complicated thing — three parts suspicion, three parts concern, three parts resignation, and one part outright disbelief.
"We've already checked. Miss Raiden is currently at the Kamisato estate, with Miss Mouri and the others. They can all vouch for her."
Which meant that Hattori and Conan could not possibly have seen Miss Raiden at the Takahashi residence. The two estates were far apart — there was simply no way she could have made it back to the Kamisato estate in so short a time.
As for Hattori's claim that a single sword stroke had split the Takahashi mansion open...
"We've just received word from the earthquake bureau. A minor tremor occurred in the vicinity of the Takahashi home — that fissure was most likely caused by the quake. Thankfully, casualties were light.
"As for the head of the Takahashi family, it appears he was tragically struck by lightning from the abnormal thunderstorm the earthquake produced. That's what killed him, presumably."
Heiji Hattori and Edogawa Conan stood there dumbstruck, listening to the officer read out the findings.
"No way! How could it be an earthquake?!" Hattori refused to believe it. He stepped forward and took the officer's phone, pulling up the report that had just been sent over.
Conan crowded in beside him, unwilling to give up either, and the two of them pored over the earthquake bureau's survey together.
There were technical terms they didn't fully understand, but it was unmistakably an official report from the bureau — and the results really did show a minor tremor at this exact location.
"Could Miss Raiden have used some kind of method... some device to trigger the earthquake?" Conan murmured to himself.
He replayed the image of Miss Raiden swinging her blade down, and his mind spun off in wild directions. Maybe there was something off about that sword — some hidden mechanism that could summon lightning, and with it, an earthquake?
And another thing — how had Miss Raiden gotten back to the Kamisato estate so fast? He was certain that what he'd seen really was her. It couldn't be that both he and Hattori had imagined the same thing, could it?
The culprit had already been struck dead by lightning, but according to the materials Hattori had sent over, others had been involved in the scheme as well.
In fact, once Kamisato Ayato learned of the incident at the Takahashi residence, he had contacted the police himself and handed over additional evidence of the Takahashi family's crimes that he'd uncovered recently.
As a result, the officers leaving the estate today carted off the better part of the Takahashi household.
When Hattori and Conan heard about this, it only cemented their conviction that the Kamisato family had been behind the day's events. But they had no proof — and with nothing more than the testimony of the two of them, plus the Takahashi butler, three statements weren't enough to explain anything.
No matter how unwilling they were to let it go, there was nothing more they could do. All they could manage was to head back to the Kamisato estate and see if they could figure out how Miss Raiden had returned there so quickly.
Unfortunately, even after racking their brains the entire way back, neither of them could turn up a single clue.
Back at the Kamisato estate, Conan wasted no time finding Mr. Amuro — no, Subaru Okiya — hoping to trade information with him.
From Subaru Okiya, Conan learned that Klee had been using Dodoco to blast fish out of the water; in return, Okiya learned what Conan had witnessed at the Takahashi residence.
Subaru Okiya stroked his chin, thoughtful. "So Klee's Dodoco might be like Miss Raiden's sword — carrying some kind of unnatural power?"
Compared to Conan, Subaru Okiya had far more life experience as one of the FBI's ace agents. Over the years he'd inevitably run into a thing or two that science couldn't explain, so he found it much easier to accept an ability that looked like magic.
Hearing that Klee wasn't the only one with such powers — and recalling the deep impression Tartaglia's peculiar weapon had made on him the first time they'd met — he was already starting to wonder whether everyone in the Teyvat Syndicate possessed some strange ability of this kind.