Arc 32: Kraken (1)

Aten and I arrived outside the broadcasting room.

“... Do you think Serf is still here?”

“I don’t know if he’s here, but he must be watching us.”

He had tried to kill me using every student who had received a business card. He clearly wanted me dead badly enough that he wouldn’t simply have run away.

“Then the broadcasting room itself could be a trap.”

“Right. He must know I have no choice but to come here.”

Aten raised a hand and closed her eyes.

“... I don’t sense any mana. There doesn’t seem to be a magical trap.”

“Good.”

I nodded and slowly opened the door. Nothing happened. After carefully surveying the room, I stepped inside and found several students lying on the floor.

“Aten.”

“Yes.”

Aten approached them to check their condition. Meanwhile, I examined the broadcasting equipment and soon found what Serf had intended.

[Come to the auditorium.]

One short line. He had designated a place to meet me. Meanwhile, having checked the fallen students, Aten spoke.

“... They’ve lost a lot of blood. They’re all right for now, but they’ll be in danger if we leave them.”

“In other words, he intends to tie you down here.”

Aten nodded.

“Will you be all right? The auditorium really does sound like a trap.”

“We can’t leave the students like this forever.”

I took out my phone.

“Are you making a call?”

“Yeah. To my brother.”

Philly’s driver had suddenly behaved bizarrely, ramming the car into a guardrail. That had almost certainly been because of a business card. Since he had done it after answering a call, he must have heard Serf Daniel’s voice over the phone. Now that the bizarre behavior caused by those cards had spread throughout Constel, I had to inform Atzier.

I wanted to tell Philly, but if Atzier was beside her, who knew what he would say to me this time.

The phone rang briefly before Atzier answered.

“... Frondier.”

“Ah, Brother. It’s me. Constel is a shitshow right now. Most of the students are behaving the same way Her Majesty’s driver did the other day.”

I did my best to explain, but for some reason, there was no particular response from the other end. Then Atzier spoke.

“Frondier, I have something to tell you as well.”

“What is it?”

“Hmm, yes. To borrow your expression...”

His tone was somewhat awkward.

“It’s a shitshow here too.”

“... What?”

“No, let me amend that. It isn’t chaos here. But something strange has certainly happened.”

“What happened?”

“Most of the Imperial Palace’s knights are standing motionless.”

“Motionless?”

“Yes. Their eyes are distant, and their faces look like corpses’. Much like Her Majesty’s driver, as you described him. They’re all just standing there with those faces.”

Then this was definitely Serf’s doing. He had distributed business cards to the knights too. But something was odd. Atzier apparently shared my thoughts.

“But I don’t understand the culprit’s objective. If he can give orders powerful enough to make someone drive into a guardrail, there is nothing he couldn’t do with this many knights at his disposal. I don’t understand why he’s leaving them standing here.”

I frowned, thinking the same thing. Serf should have been able to give them a much wider range of orders.

“...!”

I lifted my head. I understood. Thinking about it, it was simple.

“... So that’s it.”

“Frondier?”

“Right. There’s no way he’s alive.”

I had been mistaken in thinking this was a joint operation between Gregory and Serf. That was impossible. My initial thought—what I believed—had been right.

“Ah, thank you. I’ll hang up for now.”

“If you can resolve it from there, hurry. We’re in a state of emergency with our operations paralyzed.”

“Yes.”

I ended the call. I had been mistaken. Yes, to borrow Atzier’s expression—the enemy was in a state of extreme emergency.

* * *

My footsteps echoed loudly through the empty auditorium. I walked slowly, step by step, yet each footfall resounded throughout the hall.

“... Hey.”

A man sat in a chair in the middle of the auditorium. He carried no weapons. He was completely defenseless. I approached him slowly, and he raised a hand in greeting.

“Hello, Frondier.”

He acted as if he knew me, but I had never seen his face before. Of course I hadn’t. This was my first time seeing Gregory’s face.

“... You’re hurt.”

“Yeah.”

Up close, Gregory was in terrible shape. His entire body was covered in wounds, and his side was particularly bad. It wasn’t bleeding, but that was probably...

“It’s turning necrotic. I got hurt while running from place to place, but I couldn’t go to a hospital. Surgery’s my only option now.”

“... Why didn’t you at least try a pharmacy, or even a quack?”

“Hah. You really don’t know Indus.”

That single remark explained everything. Indus had eyes and ears in most places outside the law. He couldn’t have done that while on the run.

“So it wasn’t Serf after all.”

“No. You knew that. He died at the cabin. An arrow hit him. Right in the center of his forehead, like a perfect illustration. If he could survive that, I wouldn’t have kept hanging around him.”

Gregory had done everything, from distributing the business cards to ordering my death over the broadcast.

“You managed to get hold of Serf’s voice.”

“Just one sentence. ‘Kill Frondier.’ He’d shouted it a dozen-odd times in the place where he died. I analyzed the residual mana with a recorder and recorded it.”

Serf had died, but the business cards remained. They still held his power. They were useless without him, but that one recording of his voice had survived.

Gregory looked up at me. Resignation and surrender were plain in his eyes.

“Frondier. Arrest me.”

“...”

“I can’t escape Indus. Even borrowing the eyes and ears of every animal wasn’t enough. The net keeps closing in. At this point, I’m better off getting caught by the police.”

“You caused all this to get caught?”

“That’s right. Based on all the information I’d gathered, you were the perfect person to cause a major uproar.”

I had connections to many Named Characters within Constel. Of course, I had worked to make that happen. But in Gregory’s eyes, had those connections made me worth exploiting instead?

“What did you do to the Imperial Palace?”

“Not much. First, I dug up dirt on knights with something to hide and blackmailed them into committing petty crimes. Under Indus’s name, of course.”

“... You turned Indus’s attention toward the Imperial Palace.”

Gregory nodded. The uproar in Constel seemed enormous from my perspective, but people outside probably didn’t even know what was happening yet. By contrast, the incident at the Imperial Palace must have caused quite a stir by now. There had already been incidents involving new and low-ranking knights, and today the entire order was standing motionless.

“The order was the same. ‘Kill Frondier,’ of course. But the knights don’t know who Frondier is. So they have no choice but to stand still.”

That was why I had become certain Serf was dead. I had realized it wasn’t that he hadn’t given any other orders—he couldn’t give any order except to kill me.

“You went awfully far just to get arrested. You could have simply turned yourself in.”

“If I’d turned myself in without doing this, I’d have served a year at most. I was only an informant in the cabin incident. Most of what I did before that was the same. I’m a ‘snoop,’ after all. Once I was released, Indus would just come after me again.”

“... You caused trouble to get a longer sentence? Because staying alive matters more, even if it means spending years in prison?”

“Of course. I want to live like you wouldn’t believe. And I can’t trust anyone else. Even if I’m arrested, Indus might pull me out along the way. I needed someone famous in his own right, with an extremely powerful family behind him.”

And I had been the perfect fit.

Gregory looked relieved, as if he had said everything he needed to. He held out both hands.

“Come on. Arrest me.”

“... For starters, I don’t have handcuffs or rope.”

“Then at least restrain me with your bare hands. The performance matters with this sort of thing.”

He said it so brazenly. I sighed and reached toward him. At that moment—

“Found you.”

A voice rang out, neither quite male nor female, oozing a persistent unpleasantness.

SHRRRK!

Something black shot out from behind Gregory and wrapped around his neck.

“Gah!”

With it coiled around his neck, Gregory was dragged helplessly backward.

CRASH!

His chair toppled. He thrashed his legs frantically, but slid across the floor without resistance.

‘A whip?’

No, it wasn’t anything that simple. As that sticky, squishy thing, tinged with the faintest purple light, snatched Gregory away, it brought to mind a mollusk’s tentacle.

The tentacle extended from a person. Where had they come in? Or had they been here from the start? Even right before my eyes, the figure felt unreal. That was how alien they were. Everything else looked like an ordinary human, but their right arm had turned into a tentacle and was holding Gregory.

... There was no guarantee only that right arm could transform. That entire body pretending to be human might be some kind of mollusk-like thing.

“Ghk... Gah...”

Gregory flailed his hands, trying to pry the tentacle off his neck. But he couldn’t grasp it. His hands passed through as though through water.

That tentacle ignored any physical force applied against it, yet could exert its own force unilaterally.

“Hello, esteemed Frondier de Roach.”

Like the voice, the figure’s face and body gave no clue to their gender.

“I am ‘someone with no connection to Indus,’ you know.”

The strange manner of speech and voice, the grotesque appearance—everything grated on my nerves. Someone with no connection to Indus? Hah.

“Let Gregory go, Indus.”

“Pardon? Why? He was your enemy until just now. You can’t suddenly pretend you’re friends. And...”

The figure extended their left arm. The instant I thought their index finger had lifted, a tentacle hissed past my temple. As I’d suspected, the right arm wasn’t the only part that could transform.

“I’m not Indus. Didn’t I just tell you?”

“Fine, then what are you? Which number ‘someone with no connection to Indus’ are you?”

The figure smiled at my question. The way their face moved, eyes and mouth bending into crescents, was not a human smile.

“You don’t need to know my number, but let’s see...”

Their eyes rolled as if the thought had only just occurred to them.

“Yes. Call me ‘Kraken.’”

It was a truly fitting name to introduce themself by.