Phantom Thief? Detective! (3) <You Did It, Sis!>
Catherine let out a triumphant laugh once she was certain they had completely shaken off the caravan’s pursuit.
Audrey Heswald grinned as she applied a healing potion to her wounds.
“Yeah. This time we really landed a big one.”
“At this rate, we won’t have to worry about money for a few months, right?”
“Who said anything about just living expenses? We could even buy some new magic items.”
Audrey winced and lightly bit her tongue as a sharp sting shot through her injury. Catherine took off her hat and set down the stolen jewel box.
“This time let’s get an anti-fall item. If you keep getting hurt like this, what are we supposed to do, sis?”
“Hmm? Are you actually worried about your big sister? How touching.”
“That’s not it. I had to fly while carrying two jewel boxes and you. My shoulders feel like they’re about to pop out of their sockets. You’ve definitely gained weight lately, haven’t you?”
“Wow, listen to this girl!”
The two bickered like any ordinary sisters before their expressions suddenly turned serious.
“Are we really giving forty percent of this to Lucregens again? We’re moving our workshop after this anyway. Can’t we just keep it all?”
“Greed will ruin us. Those bottom-feeders aren’t exactly trustworthy, but we still need to show them enough loyalty that the ones who come to investigate us can at least claim they don’t know anything.”
Lucregens, its public order already frayed by the conflict between dark factions, was the perfect environment for the Heswald sisters—better known as “Gwen & Stacy”—to operate as phantom thieves. But once the family feud escalated into open warfare and finally ended, the enraged lord began deploying guards throughout the city. It was time for the twin thieves living their double lives to relocate their workshop.
Catherine sighed as she touched the jewel box.
“Even when we share what we worked so hard to steal, those beggars are never satisfied. I hate hearing them whine and badmouth us behind our backs.”
“You know we’re not doing it for their sake. If we abandon the underworld’s code of loyalty, fencing the goods becomes a nightmare. Besides, once some of the nobles’ wealth ends up in their pockets, they’ll keep their mouths shut even if they’re scared.”
There was a reason they deliberately targeted wealthy individuals with shady reputations. People with secrets of their own found it difficult to ask others for help or betray them. It was one of the hard truths the twins had learned through experience.
“Tch.”
Having finished the grumbling that had become part of their routine, Audrey and Catherine began appraising the value of the jewels. This place was their secret hideout where they stashed their treasures. Once they found a fence to dispose of the stolen goods, they planned to leave Lucregens and return to their “respectable identities.” Their double life would be on hiatus for a while.
But there was one thing they hadn’t anticipated.
A pursuer who would track them all the way to this very hideout.
“Excuse me, phantom thief ladies. Are you open for business right now?”
“──Hic?!”
Catherine, who had been examining the jewels through a monocle, quickly hid behind her sister at the voice coming from behind them. Audrey broke into a cold sweat as she glared at the wide-open entrance of the hideout.
The two visitors were a man and a woman who shared only one similarity: black hair. Armed with a spear and a dagger, the difference in their heights was as stark as the difference in their weapons. The woman, who appeared to be a half-dwarf, scanned the secret passages of the hideout with the casual interest of someone browsing a clothing store. The man, completely out of place, let out a yawn.
“I don’t feel tired even if I don’t sleep, but I still get sleepy.”
He stretched his mouth wide in another yawn, brushed his bangs aside, and looked around their hideout before letting out a short laugh.
“Why do all these petty thieves insist on hiding in caves like this?”
“We’re not petty thieves, we’re phantom thieves, okay?”
The self-proclaimed phantom thief glared at me with narrowed eyes, and I found myself at a loss for words.
“Isn’t that the same thing?”
“It’s completely different, you idiot. More importantly, how did you even follow us?”
“I asked a passing rabbit.”
“We followed the remaining traces.”
Even though Franc and I answered honestly, they still looked at us with suspicion. Damn it, that kind of hurts my pride a little. Do you have any idea how hard it is to track down a mammal that stays active in winter among all the hibernating animals? If it weren’t for that snow rabbit we happened to meet, we wouldn’t have caught up so quickly. It turned out that Tirsi wasn’t the only one suffering from winter debuffs.
─Glance.
The phantom thief sisters darted their eyes around. Even inside their hideout they were still wearing their masks, but I had already used Odin’s Eye to memorize their general appearances and stored the information in my brain. Even if they got away, finding them again wouldn’t be difficult.
I twirled my spear and spoke.
“There’s no one else. It’s just us.”
“…Really?”
Hey, I can hear your eyeballs rolling around.
“…Stacy! Run!”
“Okay, sis!”
─Whoosh!
The two women darted away like flying squirrels that had seen a mousetrap snap right in front of them. They must have been calculating their escape angles inside those heads of theirs. The twin phantom thieves exchanged quick hand signals and split up. I couldn’t help but feel a little impressed by their nimble escape.
‘Even in this situation, they’re not resorting to threats or attacks.’
In this world, the words “robber” and “murderer” were practically synonyms. A thief who refused to inflict physical harm on people probably wanted to be seen differently from your average petty crook. Whether it was because they lacked confidence in fighting or simply disliked violence, it was enough to earn them some goodwill from me.
Of course, that was assuming I overlooked the fact that they were criminals.
“I’ll take the left side.”
Franc said that and dashed off. I planted my feet firmly and activated my magic.
A burst of steam exploded beneath my feet, launching me forward.
I overtook the older sister phantom thief in an instant. Landing on the ceiling, I swung my spear. Unable to stop her momentum, she took a solid blow to the forehead from the blunt end of the shaft.
“Ouch!!”
She let out a short scream and collapsed backward, apparently knocked unconscious by the light concussion. I snatched her falling hat out of the air and put it on my own head. A bit small.
“S-sis! Damn it! Get out of the way, you big-breasted woman!”
“B-big-breasted…?”
The younger phantom thief who had been fleeing toward the other exit grew angry at Franc. In the blink of an eye, Franc had located the secret exit and blocked it. From what I could see, the thief’s feet were faster than Franc’s, but with her escape route cut off, there was nowhere left to run.
─Swish!
She tried to pull an item from her bag, but Franc’s thrown knife forced her to dodge. The phantom thief even smiled like a batter watching an incredibly slow pitch.
“GOGOGO!”
“Gah!!”
She never could have imagined that an earthen fist would burst out from the golem-core knife embedded in the cave wall. The phantom thief took a clean one-punch from the golem and found herself trapped inside a hand as large as her own body. I offered a silent prayer for the woman who had just let out a scream utterly devoid of any feminine grace.
Franc reached down to pick up the orb the thief had dropped, only to cough after catching a whiff of it.
“Ugh! It’s… it’s spicy… What is this?”
“That must be it. The capsaicin bomb they used while running away.”
“Huuu… I really hate this…”
It had been a while since I’d seen Franc dislike something this much, so I couldn’t help but chuckle. You know how sometimes you just want to play a silly prank on the person you love? It was childish, but seeing Franc—who usually indulged all my whining—react with such disgust was strangely adorable.
─Tight!
With that thought in mind, I took out a rope from the slate inside my bag and tied up the unconscious phantom thief.
“Arrest complete.”
“W-wait! Let’s negotiate! Negotiation!”
The moment I tied her older sister up like a dried fish, the younger sister phantom thief trapped in the golem’s fist began to squirm. The grip must have been too tight; her face had turned bright red.
“Weren’t you the one saying phantom thieves don’t negotiate?”
“Does pride matter when I look like this?!”
“Fair enough.”
I nodded in agreement with her honest answer and extended threads of mana toward the bound phantom thief. It was the Absorbing Star Great Technique that the black magician Krentus had left me as a legacy. Since my back was turned to the younger sister, she wouldn’t be able to see it. While it couldn’t suck mana out of someone like the real version, the swift footwork these girls used looked incredibly useful.
The true essence of the technique was engraved into my body!
I quietly analyzed the footwork and frowned.
‘…The variation between martial arts really is huge.’
Just as I had heard before, the martial arts of this world had to be modified to suit the individual’s aptitude and constitution. In other words, it also meant that techniques completely incompatible with one’s aptitude—like magic—were nearly impossible to learn.
‘It’s a footwork specialized entirely in creating distance while completely abandoning counterattacks.’
It was a technique that seemed to perfectly embody the twins’ belief of avoiding fights and only stealing objects. I would probably have a hard time learning it, and even if I did, I wouldn’t be able to use it properly. There was also the matter of aptitude. My macho ideology of either enduring insults and writing them down in my mental ledger or settling things on the spot was fundamentally at odds with this technique.
‘Maybe I’ll just learn the tricks and teach them to Franc.’
It would probably be useful for her when she needed to create distance before throwing her knives.
─Snap!
Since the framework of the technique wasn’t that complicated, I roughly read it and cut off the Absorbing Star Great Technique. It would be bad if I got too absorbed and picked up some weird habit. I had no desire to become a pathetic warrior who only spammed half-baked techniques like Krentus.
“Huh?! Huh?! It’s not a bad offer, right? Right?!”
Whether I was doing that or not, the younger sister phantom thief was desperately trying to appeal to Franc.
“──Ugh?!”
Franc smiled awkwardly, looking slightly troubled by the girl’s enthusiasm, but her expression suddenly changed.
─Whoosh!
“Kyaa?!”
The phantom thief was hurled from the golem’s grasp. Franc had already stepped back from the spot, and I—realizing a second too late—grabbed the woman I had tied up (Gwen or whatever her name was) and ran.
─Crack!
─Crunch!
BOOM!
“SyuoooooaaaaAAAA──!!”
A single water dragon burst through the ceiling where we had been standing. Someone had broken through the cave roof from above in an ambush. Watching the hideout and jewel box get buried under falling rock, the younger sister phantom thief made a face like she was about to cry.
“Y-you liars! You said it was just you guys!”
“It is just us. That’s probably your guest, not ours.”
“Huh? O-our?”
Franc’s words perfectly expressed what I was thinking. The moment I realized the opponent was a mage, I had activated Odin’s Eye, so I couldn’t say anything. When your language stat is garbage, only nonsense comes out.
The water dragon rose back into the sky. There, bathed in the light of dawn, stood an elf riding on the dragon’s back.
“Oh? What’s this, everyone’s still alive? I thought at least one of you would die and there’d be nothing I could do about it.”
The elf stood straight on the dragon’s back, looking down at us. He seemed shorter than a pure-blooded dwarf. His ears were shorter than Yerna’s or Hotulusil’s, suggesting he was a half-elf. He might still be young. But to ride atop a water mass shaped like an Eastern dragon, drop that water dragon on people’s heads, and show almost no change in expression… that meant this little brat was a bastard who was used to getting blood on his hands.
“Wow, I really am lucky.”
The brat cackled as he looked back and forth between the twins we had subdued.
“I came to work and ended up learning the phantom thieves’ identities. And they’ve already been captured. Looks like my reward is going to double?”
“…Who are you?”
Franc asked, lowering the hand that held her knife. Our Franc was kind enough to try to avoid starting a fight without reason, but the little brat displayed his species’ specialty and maintained an arrogant attitude.
“Why do you need to know? Don’t worry about who I am. Just hand over those twins and I’ll let you two go.”
“Don’t hand us over!”
The still-conscious younger sister seemed to have realized from his casual tone that he was far worse than us, and she began begging us for her life.
I looked at the elf, then removed the magic item earring from the older sister’s ear and crushed it.
─Crack!
They say married couples share the same mind. Franc saw what I did and immediately copied me. A glint appeared in the water-dragon-riding elf’s eyes.
“Oh? How did you know that was a tracking magic item?”
The younger sister phantom thief, who had been about to protest the destruction of such an expensive item, shut her mouth. Good. It was noisy, so I was glad she stayed quiet for a while.
“Hmm? Hmmmmm…?”
The blue-haired little elf stroked his chin as if thinking, then grinned.
“Fine. I’ll take you two along as well. I won’t get paid for it, but if I torture that yellow guy over there a bit, I have a feeling something interesting might come out──”
─Swish!
A knife flew out and interrupted him, shooting straight toward the half-elf brat. The blade reached him in the blink of an eye. The little elf’s face filled with shock, but he soon relaxed slightly upon seeing the light of the shield magic he had prepared in advance.
Crash─!!