Chapter 43

I woke as morning arrived.

To be clear, there was no sunrise to greet us; it was simply the case that my body naturally stirred, and a check of my watch confirmed the time.

By then, several others had already woken and were rustling inside their sleeping bags.

“Time to get up, then,” Hunt muttered, as if convincing himself. The moment he stepped out of his sleeping bag, the rest of us—myself included—followed suit. Since Hunt was the employer’s proxy, we couldn’t very well stay huddled in bed while he was up and moving.

When we stepped out of the tent, the women were apparently already awake. They were gathered around a campfire Eni had started, boiling water.

We joined them around the flames.

“This will wake you up,” Shirona said, handing the men wooden mugs filled with coffee made from that water.

The coffee in this world has a grainy texture and is strangely watery, yet it’s so bitter it nearly brings tears to your eyes. On the plus side, it’s the perfect wake-up call. We accepted it gratefully.

The women had clearly already had theirs, judging by how energetic they were.

“See, you just don’t get it! Dreams are better left as dreams. If you solve every mystery, where’s the fun? The fairy tales I read as a kid should stay fairy tales. You’re better off not digging for the truth.”

“Hah?! You’re a disgrace to adventurers everywhere! Listen: an adventurer is someone who tries to uncover everything in this world. If there’s an uncharted labyrinth, you dive in, conquer it, and bring the truth to light. That is what it means to be an adventurer!”

I watched Eni and Mora heatedly debating the philosophy of adventuring while I let the bitter liquid snap my brain into focus.

Kijiitsu, with his usual glass-marble eyes, was staring at his coffee as if it were a scientific anomaly.

While the others drank in silence, Jin suddenly turned to me.

“So, Van. Now that you’ve become a noble, how is it? Has anything actually changed?”

“I got a letter from my family saying my younger sister is getting a bit full of herself. That’s about it.”

“Hmph. In truth, a noble title alone gets you nowhere. Without power, it’s nothing but a burden.” Hunt nodded, closing his eyes to savor the coffee as if he had his own thoughts on the matter.

“Hey.”

Henya, who had been stealing glances at Watch while sipping his drink, finally spoke up.

“Someone go wake Brad.”

“Ah, quite right.” Hunt clapped his hands. He seemed to have forgotten entirely.

I figured a junior member should handle it and looked toward Eni, but she was now deep in a discussion with Mora about the “philosophy of romance.” No hope there.

Left with no choice, I stood up and approached the iron coffin in the corner.

“It’s morning. We’ve got coffee, so come on out.”

I called out, but there was no response.

Resorting to the next step, I rapped on the lid with the hilt of my sword.

“Wake up! Rise and shi—ne!”

Still, nothing.

Strange.

Thinking it might be empty, I tried to lift the lid, but it wouldn’t budge. It was locked from the inside.

“What’s the holdup?” Jin asked, approaching when he saw me struggling.

“He won’t wake up. He’s definitely in there, though.”

“Huh?”

Jin tilted his head, let out a grunt of exertion, and hoisted the iron coffin upright.

“Whoa… yeah, there’s definitely weight in here. HEY!”

He shook the box vigorously. Still, no reaction.

By then, everyone except Kijiitsu—who remained by the fire—had gathered around us.

“He won’t wake?”

“Hup!” Without answering Hunt’s question, Jin dropped the box back to the ground. It hit the floor with a heavy thud, but there was still no sound from within.

“This is bizarre, even for him,” Watch muttered.

“Does someone have… right, Eni. You’re good with magic.”

“Eh?”

“Try roasting it a little. The heat should transfer to the interior,” Watch suggested—a rather terrifying proposal.

“True. Shall we give it a try?” Eni said, starting to roll up her sleeves. She was just as bad.

“Stop it,” Shirona, the Medic, interjected firmly.

“Are we certain he’s inside?” Mora asked for confirmation.

“Yeah, no doubt. The weight, and the sensation of something shifting inside when I shook it,” Jin declared.

“Locked from the inside, though… that’s troublesome.” Hunt narrowed his eyes. In contrast, Jin let out a massive yawn.

“Eni, you’ve got spare gunpowder, right?”

“W-well, yes.”

“We’re prying this thing open by force.”

“That’s impossible. We don’t even know where the locking mechanism is located.”

She was right. From the outside, there was no way to tell exactly where the box was secured.

“Right here, probably.”

Jin pointed to a section of the gap between the lid and the box at the head of the coffin.

“How can you tell?”

Watch asked with a face so expressionless it was impossible to tell if he actually cared to know.

“I tried to pry the lid open earlier when I was shaking it; I could feel it then. This isn’t the first time I’ve had to open a locked box. Call it an educated guess.”

Seeing a smug Jin brought back memories of when he forced open the cathedral doors during our previous case.

“Alright then, let’s give it a shot.”

Eni busily prepared her gunpowder. Her eyes were sparkling. She really does seem to enjoy blowing things up.

“It’s here.”

Henya drifted toward the iron box, and in a flash, he drew his sword with an iai strike.¹

To my eyes, it looked like he had simply drawn his blade, but a high-pitched metallic ting echoed in the air.

“Hmm.”

After staring intently at the edge of his blade for a moment, Henya moved to the other side.

“It seems there’s one more latch. Based on the vibration, it’s on the opposite side… here.”

He swung his sword once more.

This time, there was a heavy, grinding sound.

While everyone else stood there agape, Henya calmly sheathed his sword. Only Watch remained unblinking, staring at Henya’s swordplay like a researcher confirming the results of an experiment.

“It’s open.”

At Henya’s casual prompting, Jin tentatively grabbed the lid and pulled. It lifted.

The box was opened.

There lay Brad. He looked as if he were merely sleeping, yet his skin was drained of all color, making it clear he would never wake again.

“No way… how can this be happening?”

Mora was the first to react. She turned bloodshot eyes toward Hunt.

“What is the meaning of this?”

“I’d like to know that myself, but…”

Hunt covered his mouth, but the hand he used was trembling. His eyes glared back at Mora.

“Is he… dead?”

No one answered Eni’s dazed question.

Henya, having loosened his blade in its scabbard, narrowed his eyes as if asleep while observing Watch. Watch, paying him no mind, stared fixedly at Brad’s corpse.

Kijiitsu had eventually drifted over to my side. With his usual inscrutable eyes, he looked at Brad and whispered, “Poison?”

Shirona looked up sharply. “Poison… yes, that’s it. This was a poisoning.”

“Poison? I see… there are no visible wounds, so it must be,” Jin agreed.

“Could it have been a gas?” I chimed in. “A toxic gas could have seeped into the box.”

“That won’t work,” Jin countered. “Who would have spread it? If someone had slipped out in the middle of the night, one of us would have noticed. We were all together in our respective tents.”

I had no comeback for that. He was right. Attempting to poison Brad after he was already inside the coffin seemed nearly impossible. In that case…

“The… meal?” Shirona suggested hesitantly, her expression showing she wasn’t even convinced by her own words.

“A slow-acting poison administered during dinner? Is that even possible?” Jin groaned.

“Brad chose his own bowl and served himself,” the usually taciturn Watch spoke up. “We all shared the same food from the pot, and Van even ate directly from it.”

“So it wasn’t the meal. He must have been poisoned at some other time,” Jin concluded.

Shirona still looked doubtful. “When would that have happened? I was incredibly careful because of the Poison Lizards; I was checking everyone and providing treatment constantly.”

“Maybe the poison was administered during that treatment.”

Kijiitsu’s voice was a low murmur, but the impact of his words stopped everyone in their tracks. He looked at the stunned Shirona with eyes devoid of emotion. “Or perhaps it really was the meal.”

“K-Kijiitsu…”

I finally understood what he was implying. “You mean…”

“It might not have mattered who it was. It didn’t have to be Brad.”

Kijiitsu fell silent after proposing the theory of indiscriminate murder.

No, even if it were indiscriminate, the culprit would risk being poisoned themselves. That makes no sense. Wait—if the culprit had an antidote, it would be entirely possible. But still…

My mind was spinning in circles.

“Van, Kijiitsu—you’re the detectives. I need you to investigate. Shirona, please examine the body.”

It was Hunt who finally took charge, his face pale but his voice carrying the authority of the Treasure family. He then clutched his head. “God… this is insane. This wasn’t supposed to happen. Something is wrong.”

No one could find the words to comfort the groaning Hunt.

According to Shirona’s assessment, Brad had definitely been poisoned. Since she knew she would be the first one suspected in a poisoning case, I felt her diagnosis was quite reliable.

While the specific type of toxin wasn’t identified, everyone agreed it must have been slow-acting. It seemed certain that the poison had been administered before Brad ever entered that iron box.

But as for how, everyone was stumped. Including me.

How do you poison a man as pathologically cautious as Brad? I couldn’t see any way to tamper with the food during that dinner.

Or was it truly random?

“Maybe a ‘Shadow’ slipped into the box and injected the poison,” Jin suggested with a dry, humorless chuckle. No one laughed.

“Let’s think calmly,” Hunt said, trying to stabilize the group. “The culprit isn’t necessarily among us. Someone else might have entered the dungeon and reached this camp.”

But that theory was a stretch.

“By themselves?” Eni argued immediately. “That would be suicide. Descending into this dungeon alone without a Return Stone… it’s too dangerous.”

“And if it were a group,” Jin added, “one of us would have noticed even if we were asleep. Hell, Brad at least would have noticed. He was a paranoid bastard.”

Hunt fell silent as Jin spoke.

“I can guarantee it,” Henya interjected. “No one entered this camp while we slept.”

“How can you be sure?” Shirona asked skeptically.

“Exactly as I said. If someone enters my vicinity, I notice—even in my sleep. Without fail.”

Henya spoke with absolute confidence. I remembered him sleeping while clutching his sword; his claim might not be an exaggeration.

“Hey.”

Mora looked straight at Hunt. “So, what about the conquest?”

The question hit us like a physical blow. That was the real issue. What were we going to do now? All eyes turned to Hunt.

Hunt closed his eyes for a long moment, lost in thought.

“We proceed. It isn’t uncommon for sacrifices to be made during a dungeon conquest. The manner of Brad’s death is disturbing, but we cannot abandon the mission because of one death. I cannot report a failure to my father.”

Though his face was etched with bitterness, Hunt had made his decision.

“That said, if you two can solve the mystery of Brad’s death while we move, all the better.”

He turned his gaze toward Kijiitsu and me, but we both remained silent.

We hadn’t found a single clue to solve the mystery.