Chapter 36

Three days after I killed Saburo Yamazaki, the company I worked for, Yoshida Screw Co., Ltd., went bankrupt.

Its management had been deteriorating from the start, but the disappearance of two employees sparked rumors online, slapping Yoshida Screw Co., Ltd. with the label of a black company and causing all of its clients to cut ties.

With the company crushed, the swarms of reporters that had been flocking around all vanished at once.

While that made it easier to go outside without worrying about public attention, I found myself in a situation where I had lost both my best friend and my job at almost the exact same time.

I had some savings for immediate living expenses, but I still needed to find a new job.

That being said, I didn’t hold any special qualifications.

In the countryside where I lived, workplaces hiring full-time employees were overwhelmingly scarce, leaving mostly just convenience store part-time jobs.

However, since I wasn’t very sociable, my honest preference was to avoid customer service jobs like operating a register that required interacting with an unspecified number of people.

“What should I do…”

I tossed and turned on my bed while tapping away on my smartphone.

Online bulletin boards were lined with shady phrases like [Easy job paying 5,000 yen an hour!], [Must-see for anyone who wants big money right now!], and [Not a scam, I’ve got a moneymaking scheme for you! Click first!].

“So sketchy. Is anyone actually dumb enough to believe this…”

Exasperated, I set my smartphone down on the bed, stood up, and stretched out broadly.

Glancing at the date on the calendar in my field of view, I muttered,

“Four days left…”

I reaffirmed that I had to kill someone else within four days.

That was when it suddenly hit me.

I might not have had any qualifications, but I possessed the ability to use spells.

The spells I had learned numbered six in total: recovery, detoxification, villain perception, stealth walking, clairvoyance, and mind reading.

If my recovery spell had any effect on other people, I might have had the option of taking the plunge and becoming an underground doctor, but unfortunately, recovery spells only worked on oneself.

Detoxification and villain perception probably wouldn’t bring in any money either.

However, regarding stealth walking, clairvoyance, and mind reading, using them felt like it could let me mimic a certain profession.

That profession was—a detective.

I didn’t know the specifics of what detectives did, but from what I saw on TV, tailing targets and conducting personal background checks seemed to be the main line of work.

If that was the case, couldn’t I make a living by making use of my spells?

It was a sudden flash of inspiration, but I picked up my smartphone again and looked up the detective profession.

As it turned out, no official public qualifications were required to operate a detective agency.

There was no way someone living in an apartment like me could open a physical detective office, but if I solicited clients on a smartphone bulletin board like the one I had just seen, maybe I could pull it off.

Moreover, working as a detective seemed likely to bring me across bad people in many instances.

“…Should I give it to try?”

Yielding to the momentum of the moment, I immediately started typing text into my smartphone to post on the online bulletin board.

The wording went like this:

[I’ll consult on any request you have! Prices are half the market rate! Onitsuka Detective Agency]

Finally, I appended my own smartphone email address and tapped the send button.

Yet the moment the text I had written went live online, I snapped back to my senses.

Depending on how desperate I was for work, putting my own smartphone email address on such a shady bulletin board was out of my mind.

Besides, there was no way anyone would actually reach out to something like this—

Bzzz… Bzzz…

Right then, my smartphone in vibration mode received an email.

Thinking “No way…”, I opened the newly arrived email in shock.

There, a lengthy request for work addressed to the Onitsuka Detective Agency was spelled out.