Afternoon Lasagna (1)
There was no need for conversation.
Not the sort of thing to be discussed while standing on a train platform, after all.
The woman in the nun's habit led the way, and I followed behind her.
It was around sunset by the time we arrived, an hour's walk later, at a small cathedral perched along a hillside road. We passed a nursery where the faint voices of children drifted out at intervals, and stepped into the main hall.
The woman slipped her hand behind the crucifix hanging on the wall and felt around until she found something. With a small click, the stone altar slid aside on its own.
It was an opening just wide enough for a single person to pass through.
I climbed down a ladder through the hole, and before long the altar slid back into place, sealing the entrance behind us. The woman adjusted a lantern-style magic device mounted on the wall.
The space it revealed in its faint glow was teeming with life. Cages upon cages filled every corner, packed so densely they swallowed the walls, and the smell of beasts wafted out from all sides.
"Would you care for an introduction? Mine, I mean."
"If you'd like."
Don't we already know everything about each other anyway?
It seemed pointless to exchange pleasantries, but there was no reason to refuse either, so I honored her wish.
"Zakina. Professor in the Department of Magical Biology at Eretz Academy, and I also look after the children here."
"I'm Alpinia. A prospective part-timer at a shop called Afternoon Lasagna."
"Pfft."
Was there something funny about what I said?
I shot my gaze over to Zakina's face, but she showed no particular intention of explaining why she'd laughed.
"So how should I address you?"
"Whatever's comfortable for you."
"Magic Security Bureau direct subordinate agency, the Inspection—"
"Just call me by my name."
"Alpinia, ma'am."
"Drop the honorific."
Zakina gave a sly little smile for a moment, then opened the gate of the largest and deepest of the cages.
"I looked around a bit after hearing about the situation. On a personal level."
She vanished briefly into the darkness beyond the cage and returned with a white rat the size of a forearm cradled in her arms.
"This one's been dosed for several days. With, you know. Upper."
"You acquired it yourself?"
"It's a synthetic narcotic based on mana recovery potions. I was curious about its effects. As it happens, the Bureau had already shared the key ingredients and the formula with me."
"You made it?"
"I received authorization in advance. For the purpose of apprehending narcotics offenders."
Well, that settles that, I suppose.
If a permit had been granted, it meant the decision had already been made that a certain amount of flexibility was acceptable for resolving this case.
I scattered the 'failed experiment' I'd been circling at my fingertips into the empty air.
—Pow.
A small tremor and a muffled blast followed.
Squeak—?
Ooo— oooo—
Arf!
"Th-that is. That kind doesn't just… disappear."
"I know. It's fine."
Stalker fan, was it?
Naturally, I didn't take Underling No. 1's words at face value. She'd probably just exaggerated having heard about my constitution while taking the Bureau's entrance exam and grown curious from that.
Among mages, my magic immunity trait apparently made for a fascinating research subject. In fact, there had been plenty of lunatics within the Bureau itself who'd clung to me begging, please, just let me dissect your body once.
It was a fairly common occurrence for a Bureau researcher to dig too obsessively into my abilities and, without even realizing it, forfeit their eligibility to join the Inspection Unit. I guessed Zakina belonged to much the same breed.
Still, it's convenient not having to explain everything at length.
Trying to explain to other people the mechanism behind something like 'it's not actually proper magic, so it can't be canceled' — a principle even I couldn't fully grasp — and actually convince them of it was a considerable ordeal.
Next time I go on a courtesy visit, I should bring a fruit basket or something.
She'd been saying creepy things about being a stalker fan and whatnot, so I'd been thoroughly on my guard, but she turned out not to be such a bad pick after all.
Gradually, the cries of the beasts died down, and Zakina gently lowered the rat in her arms to the floor.
The rat was frozen like a statue. It lay motionless in place, only blinking its eyes from time to time.
"It's alive."
"Alive is all it is. That's the whole of it. It can't even close its eyes properly, and its organs are so swollen it can only take nourishment through administered drugs."
Zakina reached her hand over the rat's head. A faint light began to seep out from inside her habit, pressed flat against her abdomen.
Ah. That's magic of the kind you inscribe on your own body.
I took two steps back, putting distance between us.
Crunch.
"Thank you for the consideration. This particular working is, shall we say, rather problematic if it gets interrupted midway."
A set of 'teeth' sprang from Zakina's hand and began devouring the sprawled rat, chewing it up from the head down.
"Upon administration, there's a temporary elevation of the senses. Mana becomes easier to perceive than usual."
"Doping, in other words."
"Close enough. In truth, it's nothing more than overheating the nerves, but—"
"Keep it short."
"Continued use destroys the mana circuits, and the process comes with excruciating pain."
Once the teeth had swallowed the rat whole and been chewing it over for a while, they spat out — ptoo — a pink lump of flesh about the size of a finger.
"And needless to say, the addictiveness."
Zakina lifted the saliva-coated pink meatball between two fingers. Then she placed the lump into a plastic pouch marked UPPER.
A temporary boost in capability, and fierce addictiveness.
It wasn't hard to guess the target demographic.
Academy students.
They'd probably advertise it as sharpening your focus or boosting your exam scores. Or they could force it on juniors through seniors, or get them hooked through intimidation. By the time the drug reached the students' hands and they blossomed into second- and third-tier distributors, hunting down the heads of the narcotics ring would become far harder.
This wouldn't end at the level of a few more addicts when it finally blew open. Given its potency, it was a lethally dangerous poison.
So that's why Cedric's hysteria index was higher than usual.
The one saving grace was that the group trying to manufacture and distribute this 'Upper' had been rounded up early.
"They're hardly going to give up now, though."
The people seeking to circulate narcotics through the Magic City were still alive and well. Sooner or later, the moment they learned their 'supply line' had been cut, they'd start looking for a new one.
Finding and arresting every single narcotics production facility was a practical impossibility. How exactly were we supposed to catch all the lunatics who burrowed hundreds of meters underground or set up shop in the middle of the open sea?
"First things first, then — we need to track down the distribution organization."
At my words, Zakina nodded.
"I have reliable children. We assign each of them a zone, predict the back alleys where the original deals would likely have taken place, and—"
"No."
I cut her off.
Summed up, she was proposing we comb through every suspicious location one by one.
And how many years would that take?
The odds of finding anything were vanishingly slim, and the method did nothing but give the enemy ample chance to sense us coming.
Granted, if we were an investigative unit bound by public scrutiny, we'd have no choice but to take such a soft-handed approach. But here, the Inspection Unit had a surer, more efficient method of our own.
I stretched out a finger and pointed at the plastic pouch in Zakina's hand. The narcotic by the name of 'Upper'.
"That stuff. Let's sell it ourselves."
She stared back at me with the eyes of someone beholding a complete lunatic, but—
"Hohoho, so this is the view that the merciless, serial demolition maniac gazes upon."
"Not at all, no."
Wrong on both the serial and the demolition counts. Nowhere in the plan was there a single word about explosions or destruction. So why? Everyone, please stop slandering me.
"Miss, are you the Demolition Maniac?"
"Like, do you smash anything and everything?"
"I don't."
I gently pushed away the nursery children clinging to me and let out a short sigh. In any case, I'd succeeded in convincing Zakina.
The operation name was, what, something like Fanning the Flames of a House Already Burning?
It was an operation only possible because Zakina had secured 'authorization for possession and use of narcotics' in advance.
First.
Under the stated objective of 'apprehending narcotics offenders', we would sell the drug faster than the real narcotics dealers could.
Just enough for rumors to circulate. Everyone who bought the drug in the process would be placed under thorough surveillance, and arrested once everything was finished.
Zakina would handle the surveillance through a spell called Fermalia — apparently something along the lines of sharing vision with animals. It fell within her own field of expertise, and she'd said she could manage it alone.
She said she could handle it, so she'll sort it out somehow.
In any case, once we threw ourselves into selling the drug, word would eventually reach the narcotics dealers' ears that a 'competitor' had appeared.
And then they'd think: Wait, some other outfit has suddenly popped up selling the very drug we were supposed to be moving? And the supplier who was supposed to sell to us has gone silent?
Suspicion. A supplier gone to ground, and 'Upper' being brazenly sold on the streets. Rather than concluding that their supplier had been arrested by the Magic Security Bureau, the dealers would arrive at one word: betrayal.
From there — whether to punish the traitor, or to seize back the 'Upper' that was rightfully their merchandise—
They would come to us first.
"You're welcome to make use of them, you know. These are children who've received quite proper 'education'."
"No, thank you."
Isn't the heartless, merciless one actually you, Zakina?
She proposed using the nursery children as her sales apparatus so matter-of-factly that I shut it down without hesitation.
Bringing children into this was a line that simply could not be crossed, no matter what.
And it wasn't just about the dealers. Anyone who came looking to buy narcotics in the first place was, as a rule, a wretched specimen of a human being.
Blackmail, extortion, abduction — possibly even murder. Who knew what those people would do to children?
Besides, there was no need to borrow the children's hands. As it happened, there was a location perfectly suited for selling narcotics.
"Sold only to a select few of our VIP customers — a shop of exactly this scale is just right."
The rumor that narcotics were being sold there would attach itself, sure. But the building was one the Magic Security Bureau had prepared for identity cover in the first place. Business was not its true purpose — if anything, it would be no exaggeration to call the shop something prepared precisely for moments like this.
If the shop's image goes down the gutter, we just close it. End of story.
The aftermath was, well… the office staff would clean it up nicely on their own, surely. My job ended at catching the dealers on-site; everything after that belonged entirely to Cedric.
"We'll sell at Afternoon Lasagna, and I'll handle the meetups personally."
I was going to become a master narcotics peddler.
Nurturing that grand ambition, I fell asleep surrounded by nursery children.
The next day, I headed to Afternoon Lasagna.
Uh. Hmm.
"Wow! Miss, that look really suits you!"
"Welcome home, Master… nyang."
This one had not been in my predictions.