The light had vanished, and pitch-black darkness crashed in without warning.
The light had vanished, and pitch-black darkness crashed in without warning.
In an instant, she slipped into utter darkness, unable to tell where she even was.
Ransel wrinkled her nose at the stench of filth and felt disgust from her damp feet as she continued forward.
She could have lit a Bolt, but she didn't.
She had no idea where this passage might lead anyway.
'It might connect to the sewers… or maybe somewhere else entirely.'
If this were just a sewer, the woman who had set the hospital on fire moments ago would be in the spotlight.
Being careless and lighting a fire here would be as absurd as facing off against some other gang.
She walked slowly ahead, ears tuned to the faint patter of her own footsteps and the distant rush of water somewhere ahead.
'Decatio and Feratic… there are no other forces joining the fray, they said.'
The war between the two gangs.
According to Darin, Feratic had a slight edge.
A rumor that their leader was Level 6.
She had never faced a Level 6 before, but a Level 6 was the point where the Wall was crossed, so the gap between her expectations and reality would be vast.
'Level 6…'
Level simply meant realm.
The higher the level, the deeper the realm, and strength grew exponentially as you climbed the ranks.
Level 4 and Level 5 were almost the same, but Level 5 and Level 6 were like heaven and earth.
Zailos Paromeden probably knew exactly what Decatio was and how strong their leader was.
Maybe he even suspected they were at a disadvantage.
But Zailos Paromeden was still starting the war.
'Is there something he believes in?'
Even knowing he was at a disadvantage, why start the war?
Because the payoff of losing would be greater, or because he had a sure path to victory, or information that would seal it.
One of the two.
The latter seemed likely—he might even ally with other forces to crush Feratic.
But the real problem was…
'What did he want?'
Ransel let her thoughts drift for a moment before she finished them.
Right now she had no way to know.
She hadn't even known Decatio existed in the first place.
Without proof or even a hunch, no matter how rational she was, she couldn't dig deeper.
Then footsteps began from the opposite side.
Growing closer, matching the sound of light flickering in the distance.
Without a word, Ransel drew her pistol and spread her mana wide.
A secondary technique she had mastered while researching the new spells she had acquired.
Using her now sharply attuned mana perception to scatter mana particles and scan the target through the reflected mana.
The spread-out mana swept across the entire sewer and read the structure of the tunnel and the stranger's identity.
'One person. Male. One pistol. Cybernetics on the left arm.'
With one scan, Ransel already knew the stranger's appearance.
Her skill wasn't high enough to read the fabric of his clothes or the mark on his sleeve, but she could still pick up the surface details.
She quickly moved to the nearest pillar nearby and hid behind it.
The flashlight's light danced dynamically with the stranger's movement, leaving bright spots wherever it passed that nearly made her eyes sting.
Ransel waited calmly until the stranger's figure was fully revealed.
The light swept past where she had been hiding and, a moment later, past the very pillar she was behind.
Ransel immediately slipped behind the man's back and stuck close.
Any parts her mana couldn't scan, she checked directly with her eyes and made her conclusions.
'Quickly, according to plan…'
Right in front of her, a man walked on, nose wrinkled against the stench.
He wore the kind of clothes usually favored by Feratic, a pistol in one hand and a flashlight in the other.
From his speech and attire, it was clear he belonged to Feratic.
Probably coming to scout ahead of the war with Decatio.
Ransel matched his steps exactly, so the two sets of footsteps overlapped and the man felt nothing unusual.
A faint smile tugged at the corner of Ransel's lips as she watched him seem almost amused.
'This shouldn't happen…'
The madness, the trait, the instinct—all of it writhed inside her.
Beneath the rational core that supported her, dark madness surged forward.
Even if she resisted, the best she could do was twitch her hands.
At the end of this meaningless and futile resistance, Ransel pressed the gun's muzzle against the back of the man's head with trembling fingers.
Noise still didn't come from anywhere; the man still hadn't noticed her presence.
Even if she could destroy and relocate corpses to erase evidence, there would always be parts she hadn't handled that no one else would know about.
Someone smarter than her would certainly figure out it was her work.
This world had divided knowledge into so many fields that her lack of scientific or magical methods for proving her identity was almost laughable.
Right now, when she truly felt the absence of knowledge, finding a sacrifice like this was surprisingly lucky.
Ransel wasn't sure she could finish the cleanup perfectly.
She only knew she could keep doubting and doubting until she produced something better, but she had never been able to create a perfect result from the start anyway.
So she used a proxy, threw the blame at a sacrifice, and accelerated the war.
In that case, her hidden actions would be buried together with the loser at the end of the so-called war.
'No… even if the words are long-winded, the essence isn't that.'
She just wanted to do it.
She wanted to do it, so she did.
No reason could justify this action, and no explanation could account for what Ransel was doing.
What mad scheme could she even pretend to be?
All she knew for certain was that this action would ignite the war.
And that was exactly the situation she wanted.
A joyful breath escaped from behind the man's back, making him jump in surprise and turn around.
Ransel pressed the gun muzzle firmly against his skull, stopping him from looking back.
"Wh-Who are you…!"
"I wonder who it might be?"
Ransel answered slowly and pulled a round from the pistol's magazine.
She altered the Bolt's shape, adjusted its power and output, and etched a pattern onto the casing.
The casing glowed red, then shifted to purple, then back to blue, leaving a bullet trace.
"Which… which gang are you from? Don't tell me those bastards are after me…!"
"Oh? Then I wonder."
Ransel drew Decatio's unique mark on the casing and examined it before sliding it into the chamber.
"Wh-What do you want?!"
Ransel had no intention of answering the man's question.
She took all his fear, confusion, and doubt and redirected them elsewhere.
Ransel drew the slide back to chamber a round and spoke in an emotionless voice.
"Starting now, you will raid the hospital where a Decatio doctor is stationed. Kill everyone inside and set it on fire."
"W-What nonsense is this…?"
Ransel listed what would happen from this moment on, predicting every future event based on the given situation.
The voice in her tone was flat, reading from a script rather than describing events that had already happened, making it sound cold and detached.
"During this, he escapes through a secret passage Decatio had prepared, but he is discovered by a Decatio member waiting there. After a fierce exchange, he takes one to the abdomen, two to the legs, and one to the neck, and dies."
That emotionless voice and that cold tone of narration planted fear in the man.
"Don't laugh. Don't you dare laugh…!"
Sweat beaded on the man's forehead and trickled down.
As the man began to tremble, Ransel calmly continued listing what would happen behind her, beyond prediction, beyond belief, beyond fanaticism.
"Afterward, your corpse and the atrocities will deepen the conflict between the two organizations and serve as a motive to ignite the war."
"GAAAAAH!!!"
The moment her words ended, the man screamed and leaped to his feet.
The C.A.A near his spine assisted his movements.
It was so extraordinary he would have been mistaken for a superhuman.
This was the power of the C.A.A to boost cognition and reaction speed.
Ransel's lips curled into a smirk as she pulled the trigger without hesitation.
"You really went to a lot of trouble to get that expensive implant. Pity."
As predicted, the man who had resisted in vain took four bullets—one to the neck, one to the abdomen, and two to the legs—and died instantly.
Ransel brutally tore the C.A.A out of the man's spine and tossed it into the sewer flowing beside her.
She pulled out her knife and ripped off the cybernetics on his left arm, then hurled it into the same sewer.
In the sewers of District 54, everything drained into the nearby sea.
The mechanical parts would sink to the bottom of the ocean and be impossible to find.
As if someone had snatched them away for use.
What was left behind was only the bullet from the Decatio filth gang and the corpse with bloodstains.
She left them exactly as they were to flaunt everything and quickly slipped away.
She had motive, a reason, and even the plausibility.
Now the only thing left was to enjoy the suppressant she had freely obtained.
Ransel hummed a little tune as she left the sewer.
A while later.
Ransel tested the suppressant's effect and heard the news that a war had broken out between Decatio and Feratic.