Chapter 23

On the second floor, knights were scurrying about, peeling back wallpaper to check for tampering, searching candlesticks for hidden objects, and scouring our rooms for any potential clues.

It seemed, however, that they had found nothing.

By the time I made it upstairs a moment later, Geralt was talking to one of the knights, leaning on his cane with both hands.

Near the stairs, the air smelled faintly of sulfur. It was likely from the explosion; the scent still lingered.

“As of now, they say nothing suspicious has been found. Some cosmetics were found in the women’s rooms, but that’s about it,” Geralt informed me as he approached, having finished his conversation.

“Nothing at all?”

“Nothing. No anomalies. No secret passages or hidden gimmicks. Well, of course, nothing besides that.”

Geralt pointed his cane toward a hole large enough for a person to easily pass through.

The wallpaper near the hole was scorched and peeling, and the floor was stained a deep, pitch black.

“The charred remains of the wallpaper were likely trampled by everyone’s feet, resulting in this mess,” Geralt muttered, eyeing the floor.

“In that case, everyone who was here during the explosion must have the soles of their shoes blackened,” I said, voicing the thought as it came to me.

“I’d imagine so, but everyone’s shoes are likely black. Aside from Princess Victie, every single person was present. It’s hardly a hint.”

Red-faced, I found myself speechless at Geralt’s perfectly logical advice.

We spent the next ten minutes or so examining the area around the hole, but found nothing suspicious.

“Is it really impossible to blow a hole in this stone wall without using explosives?”

“Not strictly impossible. If someone wanted to chip away at it with magic or perhaps something like a chisel, they could probably open a hole this size if they worked for a full day and night without sleep.”

In other words, it wasn’t a practical theory.

I accepted the fact that there was nothing more for me to investigate here.

“Where to next? Each of our rooms?” Geralt suggested.

“If we do that, we’ll likely run out of time just from that alone.”

Unless we knew exactly what we were looking for, searching every single room would take far more than two hours. It was best to leave that to the sheer manpower of the knights.

“A calm judgment. You’ll make a fine detective.”

“It’s a blessing that we can rely on such manpower since the royalty is involved,” I muttered, letting my true feelings slip.

In a normal case, a detective would have to handle almost everything alone. In my thesis, I argued that this system needed to change.

“True. It is a privileged environment. But in another sense, it’s a difficult one.”

I looked at Geralt inquisitively as he made that cryptic remark.

“Because the chances of finding evidence that contradicts the deduction—the story—one has worked so hard to build increase significantly. The more evidence there is, the more restrictions you face when freely constructing a narrative.”

Geralt twirled his cane, his face a mask of total emptiness.

“Well then, that means there is only one place left to investigate.”

I nodded as Geralt flashed a smile, signaling a change in tone. I did so reluctantly.

Actually, even though I knew I had to go there, my heart felt incredibly heavy.

“To the chapel, then,” Geralt declared cheerfully.

I returned to the first floor and stepped out of the entrance hall, only to be startled by the biting cold of the outside air.

The sun had already set, and darkness had swallowed the surroundings. The lights carried by the knights searching the area moved like flickering fireflies.

Given the weather today and the current season, the temperature dropped significantly once the sun went down. Naturally, the freezing air still caught me off guard.

“We’re lucky it’s this time of year,” Geralt said, looking up at the moon while his breath came out in white puffs. Tonight was a crescent moon.

“Huh?”

“The corpse won’t rot as quickly.”

He said it as if it were nothing and began walking.

I followed after him.

Geralt greeted the knights surrounding the chapel and received two lanterns.

“Now then, I’ll leave the investigation to you, Van.”

Geralt handed one of the lanterns to me and had the knights clear a path.

I swallowed hard.

I was hit by a flashback of what I had seen in that chaos—the room smeared with blood, the headless girl.

The lantern in my hand rattled as I trembled.

“Let’s go.”

I gritted my teeth, made my declaration, and took a step forward. Once I did, my feet seemed to move on their own. I wove between the knights, my body pushing forward with momentum.

However, the moment I saw the entrance to the chapel—the metallic doors that had been blasted open and wouldn’t quite close, and the darkness peeking through the gap—a void so absolute it felt as if it could swallow everything—my body came to a dead stop.

I didn’t want to go in. It was an instinctive, primal refusal.

I shouldn’t go beyond those doors.

“L-let’s start by examining the doors.”

I tried to keep my voice from trembling and failed miserably. I was just delaying the inevitable terror.

“Hmm, fair enough.”

Whether Geralt sensed my state of mind or not, he agreed readily.

First, I pulled the door open. It felt heavy. As it swung wide, the darkness spilled out, and the sheer weight of the atmosphere nearly overwhelmed me.

“A thick door indeed. Made of mithril, is it? It would be impossible to breach this by ordinary means.”

Geralt, who had only been deducing based on hearsay until now, was seeing the real thing for the first time. I realized this somewhat belatedly. With an air of great interest, he examined the door from front to back.

“But with all the damage from being forced open, it’s impossible to tell if it was tampered with beforehand.”

The area around the latch, including the keyhole, was warped from the impact and had partially melted and resolidified from the heat. It was the same on both the inside and the outside. In this state, there was no way to tell anything.

“True. By the way, you.”

Geralt called over a knight who seemed to be the leader of the nearby group and spoke to him briefly.

“I see. Thank you.”

He turned back to me.

“Aside from the door, it seems no special secret passages or gimmicks were found in the chapel either.”

I hadn’t expected any, but hearing it confirmed still felt like a dead end.

“So, the only way into the interior is through this door after all.”

“That seems to be the case. Well then, shall we?”

Geralt moved lightly into the darkness beyond the door, his cane swinging rhythmically.

“Ah—”

After a moment of hesitation, I shouted, “Right!” to bolster my spirits and ran after him.

If I chickened out here, becoming a detective or changing the face of criminal investigation in this world would remain nothing more than a pipe dream.

I can do this.

I told myself that as I moved forward.

However, that meager resolve was shattered into a thousand pieces once I had progressed a certain distance.

“Ugh…”

A groan escaped my lips.

The stench of blood was overwhelming. And it wasn’t just that—there was a scent I couldn’t describe, something that seemed to cling to my skin and stir my very entrails. Perhaps this was the smell of death.

“This is quite something.”

Geralt, who had glided down the short corridor, reached the room and frowned ever so slightly.

“Ugh… ah…”

Enduring the smell, I managed to reach Geralt’s side. Then, our lanterns illuminated the room.

“Uuugh…”

This time, I couldn’t help it; I gagged. I fought it back, refusing to let myself vomit out of pure stubbornness. My eyes began to water.

“I’d heard the descriptions, but seeing it is quite spectacular.”

Geralt used a callous, insensitive word, but the scene was indeed “spectacular” in a horrifying sense.

In the center of the room lay the headless girl, her white cloth stained red, looking as if she were merely asleep. Blood was splattered everywhere, radiating from her body. A blood-slicked sword also lay nearby.

“I see. There is indeed blood on the ceiling.”

Geralt raised his lantern, confirming the thick smears of blood clinging to the ceiling in the dim light. From the ceiling, blood had dripped down the walls, mingling with the initial splatters until the entire room seemed painted in red. Because of the cold, some of the blood had already begun to freeze.

That fact sent a fresh shiver down my spine.

I felt like I couldn’t breathe. In reality, the room was small—barely four meters square and enclosed by stone walls—and I was trying to breathe as little as possible to avoid the smell, so the air was certainly thin.

But it was more than that. My body, my heart, was rejecting the act of breathing. It felt as if by inhaling the air of this alien space, I would become a denizen of it.

“A fairly clean cut.”

To my horror, Geralt knelt by the girl’s corpse and began observing the cross-section of her neck. I didn’t have the confidence to do the same with any semblance of composure, so I just stood there in silence.

“What about the clothing? Does the fabric look missing to you as well?”

At Geralt’s question, I gritted my teeth and looked again at the headless girl.

Indeed, the majority of the white cloth that should have been draped around her was gone. There were slashes and scorch marks, but even without those, the volume was completely different. The fabric that had been wrapped in multiple layers to hide the lines of her body was now barely enough to keep her skin covered, leaving the contours of her frame clearly visible.

It was the body of a thin girl who still retained a sense of childhood. It looked like the body of a completely different person from the one I had seen during the ceremony. That thought made me feel unsupportably ill. The body seemed to scream that a helpless, innocent girl had been murdered.

The coarse tekito-cloth was soaked through, dyed a dark crimson.

Everything was so sad, and so terrifying.

So this was what it meant for a person to be killed.

The next thing I knew, I was outside the chapel, with Geralt holding me by the collar.

“Wait, I…?”

Coming to my senses, I realized what had happened immediately. I had blacked out. I was appalled by my own pathetic showing.

“You did well for your first time,” Geralt muttered as he dragged me along.

“I’m sorry,” I apologized in a raspy voice, feeling utterly defeated.

“There’s likely nothing left to investigate. There was nothing more there than what Miss Arle reported.”

With that, we headed back to the ceremonial hall. By the time we stood before the doors of the Grand Hall, I had recovered enough to walk on my own.

Some reformer of criminal investigation I am.

A self-mocking smile almost touched my lips, but Geralt spoke up.

“As a detective, you must always remain detached. No matter what you might be feeling inside.”

After giving me that piece of advice, he opened the door and strode into the Grand Hall.

Looking at his straight, steady back, I felt like I finally understood a little bit about Geralt. The eccentric outfit, the unflappable attitude in the face of anything, the callous and provocative way of speaking—perhaps all of it was a performance, a persona Geralt maintained to remain an aloof, detached figure capable of bringing an incident to its end.