After it was confirmed that the Magic Item Seymour had purchased was indeed made by the alchemist causing disturbances around Gilm—just as Rei had predicted—Rei's group parted ways with Seymour and headed to a diner a short distance away.
It was evening, so the diner had a fair number of customers, but it wasn't full yet, and they managed to secure seats.
...Set was outside, eating the dishes Rei had ordered for it.
"You sure get a lot of attention, you guys."
Asimov made the remark while washing down some dried meat with ale. Rei glanced at Vihera, and Vihera glanced at Rei.
Each was clearly trying to say it was the other's fault they drew so much attention.
In truth, they weren't wrong. Rei was famous in Gilm for any number of reasons, and Vihera naturally attracted attention with her beauty and choice of attire.
Rei without Set wouldn't normally stand out much, but right now his hood was down, exposing the face that could only be described as feminine, making him unavoidably conspicuous.
Though not as much as those two, Byune's features were likewise well-defined—her looks more than deserving of the term "beautiful girl."
If anything, the least conspicuous among them was the alchemist, Asimov. His features weren't particularly refined, and he carried a somewhat rough, uncouth air, but compared to the other three, he had far fewer elements that drew the eye.
At any rate, realizing the conversation wouldn't progress at this rate, Rei let the topic of attention slide and addressed Asimov directly.
"Never mind the attention—just tell me the details. The Magic Item Seymour was using is definitely something that alchemist made, right?"
"That's right. You could say it's virtually certain."
"Isn't there a possibility that someone's just making it look that way?" Vihera asked, reaching for a dish of simply roasted, salted beans.
Asimov scoffed before answering.
"Hmph. There are probably fools out there who'd be taken in by that kind of fakery, but there's no way it would fool me. I may not look it, but I'm a skilled alchemist."
Asimov called himself skilled, but Rei knew his actual abilities were quite high, so he didn't interject and simply watched the exchange between him and Vihera.
"Well, since Rei isn't raising any objections, I'll take your word for it for now. So those items are definitely the work of the same person?"
Given they were in a crowded diner, Vihera deliberately avoided the key word in her question. Asimov nodded.
"Like I said earlier, it's almost certain. The habits someone has when crafting Magic Items—you can't hide those."
"If Asimov's saying this much, we can trust it. Which means the biggest question is who brought them to that shop to sell..."
"Even if you tried to get information out of that shop owner, I'd say it's impossible. He looked stubborn to begin with. And considering his connections as a merchant, I don't think he'd tell us anything."
"Probably not. ...In that case, the only option is to catch the seller directly when they show up."
"There's no guarantee they'll come to sell at that same shop again, is there?"
"Mm."
Byune agreed with Vihera while working through a skewer.
Rei had to agree as well. Even if the alchemist behind this incident was selling Magic Items for some reason, there was no need to keep using the same shop.
"But it's also a fact that we have no other leads. So we have no choice but to go where we at least have some clue, right?"
"That's true, but... no, you're right. What Rei says makes sense. So, are we going now?"
"Yeah. ...Asimov, sorry, but stick with us a little longer."
"Hah!?"
The words that came out of Rei's mouth were apparently the last thing Asimov expected. He slammed his cup of ale onto the table and made it clear this was no joke.
"I still have plenty of things I need to do. Your spear, for one, and I have other experiments to run."
"...Sorry, but since an alchemist is involved in this matter, I really need an alchemist's cooperation. And the most capable alchemist I know is you, Asimov."
Hit squarely by that killer line, delivered with full confidence, Asimov's eyes widened for a moment.
Asimov hadn't known Rei for all that long, but even so, he didn't think Rei would lie just to keep him around. In other words, what Rei had just said was his genuine, unvarnished opinion.
That wasn't wrong. ...Of course, it was also a fact that Asimov was about the only alchemist Rei knew in Gilm.
Naturally, Rei's recognition of Asimov as a capable alchemist was beyond doubt. Pamidor had confidently introduced him—acknowledging that while his personality had some issues, his skills were the real deal—so there was no way he wasn't skilled.
"W-well, if you're going that far, I suppose I could tag along."
"Sorry about this."
"Hmph. I just don't want to back down after you've said all that. Besides, you've given me rare materials—that hammer, Set's fur and feathers."
Getting a tsundere routine from a guy... Rei thought to himself, but kept it to himself and stood up.
...Incidentally, the food on the table had been almost entirely devoured by Rei and Byune during the conversation, with barely anything left. Even the garnish vegetables had been completely wiped from the plates. The sauce from the cooking had been cleanly mopped up with bread. If the diner's cook saw those plates, they might have been moved by the sheer magnificence of their appetite.
Despite having eaten a light meal before heading to Asimov's house earlier, it was an appetite that gave no indication of it whatsoever.
"I barely got to eat anything, you know. And I only had one cup of ale," Asimov said in a dissatisfied tone.
Rei smiled and replied, "We're about to go on a stakeout, so isn't that actually a good thing? If the stakeout failed because of alcohol on your breath, that'd be no laughing matter."
"Tch. Fine. Whatever."
Rei's words must have struck him as reasonable. Asimov downed what little ale remained in his cup and stood from the table.
Rei's group had taken cover in a spot where they could see the Magic Item shop they'd visited a short while earlier.
Since the shop sat in a back alley, they fortunately had no shortage of hiding places. Set, however, was waiting some distance away—its size made hiding without being spotted by anyone from the shop impossible.
"Still..."
Perhaps bored by the lack of movement at the shop in their line of sight, Rei suddenly muttered something.
Vihera seemed to be feeling similarly bored; she turned toward Rei without any particular caution.
...With a stunning beauty like Vihera standing right next to Rei, wearing nothing but her usual thin garments—so close that mere centimeters separated them—it was a fact he couldn't help but be conscious of her.
Rei had opened his mouth partly out of a desire to somehow break the awkward atmosphere between him and Vihera.
Though the only one who felt any awkwardness was Rei.
Byune was still young, and given her upbringing, had almost no interest in matters of the opposite sex. Asimov was an utter eccentric who preferred Magic Items over women. And Vihera—she was nothing but pleased that Rei was conscious of her.
"What? What is it?"
"No, it's just... on our way here, didn't the town seem unusually noisy? I know it always gets rowdy around evening, but it felt even more so than usual..."
Rei had muttered that half out of embarrassment, but it was also the truth. With so many adventurers in Gilm, the town naturally got loud in the evenings—adventurers returning from completed quests got fired up, and tavern parties added to the commotion. But the noise they'd felt while passing through the streets on the way from the diner to here had seemed greater than usual.
"Probably some idiot caused trouble again. Maybe something happened with that Magic Item business you were talking about, Rei," Asimov offered.
"...It didn't feel like that kind of noise to me, though."
Rei had sensed something almost joyful in it. But the moment he tried to put that into words, his movement stopped.
A beat later, Vihera's movement stopped, then Byune's, then Asimov's... and then the door of the Magic Item shop opened.
The person who emerged showed no particular wariness toward their surroundings and started walking down the street.
"How long has it been since we got here?" Rei muttered.
"I don't think that much time has passed yet, though?" Vihera answered.
Rei nodded at her words, but he wasn't quite convinced. He hadn't taken out the clock stored in his Misty Ring to check the time precisely, but even so, more than thirty minutes had definitely passed.
In other words, the person in Rei's line of sight had been inside the shop for that entire duration.
(Thirty minutes. That's not all that long, and from the look of it, they seem to be an adventurer. If they were negotiating to sell or buy Magic Items they'd obtained, that amount of time wouldn't be unusual. It wouldn't be unusual, but...)
Even so, to Rei's eyes, there was something about that person that set off his senses. He couldn't clearly articulate what it was, but following the instinct within him, Rei burst from his hiding spot.
Since the person who had just exited the shop happened to be walking in the direction of Rei's group, they ended up facing Rei head-on.
"Oh my, what is it? Do you have business with me?"
The person who asked that—standing right in front of Rei—showed a faint look of surprise upon seeing Rei's appearance, but in the next instant, an amused smile crossed their lips as they posed the question.
"I'd like you to tell me a few things."
"Hmm... from your voice, you're a man? Are you trying to hit on me, by any chance? Sorry, but I'm not into short guys. My apologies."
Rei had been mistaken for someone hitting on them. He was further flustered by the surprise that the person he'd assumed was a man was actually a woman, but he pressed on.
"No, that's not what I meant. I actually have something I want to ask you."
"Oh, are you lost? But I'm not very familiar with this area either."
"...It looked like you just came out of that shop back there, though?"
"Hm? Ah, I had some business there. As you can probably tell, I'm an adventurer. I come around here sometimes to sell Magic Items. But I only ever visit that one shop, so I don't really know much about the surrounding area."
The woman shrugged lightly, and for some reason, Rei's suspicion only grew. There was nothing particularly suspicious in her words, and nothing suspicious in how she spoke, either.
(What is it? What's setting me off? Something...)
While Rei was inwardly puzzling over this, the woman apparently decided the exchange was over. She gave Rei a light wave and turned to leave...
"Grrrrr!"
That cry echoed through the surroundings.
A voice impossible to mistake, belonging to the existence Rei could call his other half.
Set appeared with a growl and positioned itself in front of the woman, blocking her path as if to declare she would go no further.
"...Excuse me, could you do something about this? Did I do something wrong?"
"Grrru."
Paying no heed to the woman's words, Rei's gaze was fixed on Set.
The instant Rei saw Set turn its face toward the woman, the dissonance within him took shape.
It was something Rei himself hadn't consciously recognized. And yet, it was something that necessarily existed in any living creature.
Namely—
(Body odor!?)
To be precise, it wasn't the woman's body odor itself, but the stench of decay and iron rust that had seeped into her body. Even Set had cried out at the sheer foulness of it, so it wasn't something that would fade easily.
No—a human nose probably wouldn't have been able to detect it at all. But Rei, possessing sharper senses than a normal human, had subconsciously picked up the lingering stench of decay on the woman's body, and his instincts had relayed it to him as a vague sense of unease.
And above all, it was impossible to fool the nose of Set, whose senses were even sharper than Rei's and who possessed the Sense of Smell Enhancement skill.
"I see. So you're one of the people involved in this matter. In that case, let me hear—"
The moment Rei started to speak, the woman broke into a run without a word. Not toward Rei and Set, but in the opposite direction.
Naturally, Rei and Set weren't about to let her go. They gave chase, but...
"She's fast!?"
The gap was closing little by little, but the woman—Adria—was running at a speed where even Set and Rei couldn't immediately catch up.
Rei possessed high physical abilities, but even so, this was not a speed at which he and Set should have been unable to close the distance. The reason she could produce such speed was, naturally, not Adria's own power, but the Magic Items that Zboz had created.
Even so, the gap was gradually narrowing thanks to Rei and Set's speed. If they kept running, they should have caught up eventually.
...If they were still in the back alleys, that is.
But the direction Adria was running led to the main street. Once she disappeared into the crowd, catching her would become difficult.
Just as that urgency flared within Rei, Adria burst onto the main street and—
"Kyaa!"
—let out a cry as she tumbled to the ground.
What happened!? As that thought crossed Rei's mind, a voice reached his ears.
"Hmm. It has been quite some time since I last met Rei directly, and yet it seems you are caught in yet another commotion."
The one who spoke was a woman with golden hair that looked as if sunlight itself had been given form, a beautiful face that captivated all who beheld it, and a majestic, dignified presence.
Rei knew without even needing to think who this person was—someone who could fittingly be called a War Maiden.
Watching her touch her golden drill curls, Rei spoke the name of the figure standing before him.
"Elena..."