Diluc Comes to Take Him Home
That being the case, Amuro Tooru reasoned, if the man in the suitcase had died at the hands of Kenzuka Kei, then the man at the detective agency very likely hadn't taken his own life either.
But right now, the urgent priority was finding Conan.
Then Mouri Ran remembered that Professor Agasa kept a spare pair of tracking glasses. She wasted no time calling him and telling him about Conan's abduction, which was how Haibara learned of it as well — and Okiya Subaru, who had been keeping a close eye on Professor Agasa's place all along.
Okiya smoothly talked both the professor and Haibara into joining the search for Conan's whereabouts.
Hardly a moment after being hung up on, Sera Masumi called back again, learned the whole story from beginning to end, and decided to link up with Ran and the others first.
While all of them were working in their own ways to rescue Conan, back at the bar, Venti and Gin had already moved on to the topic of the accessory that every member of the Teyvat Syndicate carried.
"Oh, you mean this Vision thing?" Venti burped, dug out the green ornament — which looked entirely unremarkable — and tossed it carelessly onto the table. "This isn't important. It's just an ordinary glass bead, that's all."
His tongue tripped over itself as he spoke, clearly the result of downing four or five glasses of strong liquor of varying proof in a row. By now, a thin haze had settled over Venti's eyes, and he looked so thoroughly drunk that even his wits seemed to be swimming.
Seeing the Vision sitting there on the table where Venti had carelessly dropped it, Kiir reached out curiously, wanting to inspect it for herself.
She inched her hand toward the Vision slowly, all the while watching Venti's expression.
Right up until she picked the thing up, Venti's attention never left the drink in front of him — he didn't spare Kiir so much as a glance.
Once she'd finished examining it, Kiir nodded and signaled to Gin with her eyes: it was exactly as Venti had said, just an ordinary glass bead. It felt as though a little pressure would shatter it — easy enough to counterfeit.
"Then why do they call it a Vision? Is it the Teyvat Syndicate's emblem?" Gin pressed after a moment's thought.
"An emblem? No, no." Venti shook his head, slurring his words and rambling from one thing to the next. "It's the gaze of the gods, you know. It has special power."
The gaze of the gods? Gin felt a flicker of contempt.
To think the Teyvat Syndicate actually believed in that sort of nonsense!
And besides — "Weren't you just saying it was an ordinary glass bead with nothing special about it?" Gin now suspected Venti was drunk and contradicting himself all over the place.
"Huh? Did I say that?" Venti pressed a hand to his forehead, his face scrunching up as he struggled to remember, then nodded in self-affirmation. "Well, I wasn't wrong. It is just an ordinary glass bead."
Now Gin was certain the boy was drunk. His murky gaze lingered on the blurred figure of Venti, and an itch rose in him to do something about it — but remembering the trap Rum had stumbled into at Dawn Winery, he abandoned the dangerous idea.
He gave Vodka his orders in a cold voice. "Contact Kaeya. Tell him to come collect his division head."
Kiir, sitting quietly to one side, had sensed the atmosphere freeze over as well. Reading the look in Gin's eyes, she worried he meant to do harm to the intoxicated, unaccompanied Venti.
Whatever else could be said, she was currently under the Teyvat Syndicate's control — she couldn't very well just watch coldly from the sidelines. But as she was weighing what to do, she heard Gin's order to Vodka and quietly let out a breath of relief. Apparently she wouldn't need to intervene after all.
Still — how could this boy, the head of the Mondstadt division no less, have so little situational awareness? Who got blackout drunk right in front of members of another organization? Or was he putting on an act?
"Aniki, Kaeya says he's not in Japan right now, but he's already contacted someone to come pick him up."
"Mm." Gin gave a low acknowledgment, then deftly fished a cigarette out of his breast pocket and lit it.
As the small flame flickered, the cigarette caught instantly, and wisps of pale blue smoke curled upward. The smoke spread little by little until it formed a thin veil, shrouding Gin's cold, hard features — making it impossible to read what expression, if any, lay beneath.
Before long, a red-haired man appeared at the entrance of the bar. He swept the room with a glance, then headed straight toward Gin.
"Aniki — that's Kaeya's adoptive brother, Diluc," Vodka murmured, leaning in close to Gin's ear.
At those words, Gin turned to look at Diluc, and his gaze paused for an instant on the Vision at the man's waist.
So Diluc was one of the Teyvat Syndicate's Mondstadt people too.
The Teyvat Syndicate truly was hiding dragons among tigers — it even had foreign nobility in its ranks.
And another thing... was the relationship between Kaeya and Diluc really as bad as their intelligence division had dug up?
Diluc walked over and came to a stop at Venti's side. He gave Gin and the others a slight nod, then looked down at the drunken bard, his voice low. "Venti. I give you funding so you can sing, not so you can come out and drink yourself into this state. And drunk in front of outsiders, no less. You didn't say anything you shouldn't have, did you?"
But Diluc soon gave up on worrying about it. "Forget it. You're just a wandering minstrel anyway — you don't handle affairs, so you couldn't spill any secrets worth the name."