For the time being, Rei and the others returned to searching the mansion, turning over in their minds where the corpses before them had been created—and what possible reason there could have been to produce such bodies in the first place.
Though not as sprawling as an estate in the Noble District, the mansion was still far larger than an ordinary home, owing to its proximity to that area.
Because of that, searching the interior was a considerable undertaking. But the most troublesome part was the fact that someone inside the mansion was still hunting Rei and the Guards.
That was exactly why, while Rei could move alone, the other Guards had to operate in groups of two or three, making it impossible to conduct the search smoothly.
"Well, there's still a chance something else is hiding in that study, so it makes sense for the Guards to go through it."
As far as Rei had been able to tell, the study where the wall switch had been found appeared to contain nothing else of note.
Still, if the Guards were giving it a proper search, it was only natural to hope that something else might turn up.
With that settled, Rei left the study in the Guards' hands and continued searching the mansion for anywhere else that might yield clues.
"Hey, Rei. What's up?"
As he passed by one of the rooms, a voice called out to him.
He turned toward the source and found three Guards standing there.
Rei could tell immediately that they had been searching the room.
"I was hoping to find some leads. I've been looking around, but I just can't seem to turn up anything."
"Well, whoever's pulling the strings behind this incident is definitely cautious. They wouldn't leave evidence lying around so easily."
"I know that. Still, the lack of clues is glaring. ...I did find what looks like some documents in the study, though."
"You should've said so sooner. Let me see them."
At Rei's words, the Guard who had been searching the room didn't quite widen his eyes in shock, but he still made his strong interest plain as he spoke.
Rei hesitated briefly, but since there were no other leads to speak of, he pulled the documents from his Misty Ring and handed them over.
In truth, he should have gone over the documents together with the other Guards when they left the pile of corpses behind. But the honest fact was that the abnormal sight had driven the matter completely from his mind.
However, as the Guards read through the documents, what spread across their faces was bewilderment.
"What is this? ...It's completely incomprehensible."
"Yours too? Mine's the same. It reads like writing that isn't actually writing."
"A cipher."
The third Guard, who had been studying the documents, murmured the word.
His voice wasn't particularly loud, but it reached all three of their ears without fail.
Naturally, it reached Rei's as well.
"A cipher? ...That's a hassle. Think you can crack it?"
"Not right here, right now. We'll need to examine them more carefully."
"Yeah, well... they were hidden inside a secret shelf, so I'd bet there's some important information written in them, but..."
Rei peered at the documents alongside them, but what was actually written there was nothing more than meaningless strings of words arranged in sequences, or numbers jotted down at irregular intervals. Understanding the contents was simply impossible.
"Yeah, I can't make heads or tails of this either."
Rei had never been skilled at deciphering codes.
If it were something simple—not even really a cipher, like a message written on paper with a tanuki illustration and a whole mess of "ta" characters mixed in—he might have managed. But this wasn't something that could be cracked at the level of a child's game.
"Right? Yeah, it's definitely better to have you hold onto these, Rei. Once we're done searching this mansion, I'll pass them along to my superiors along with my report."
"...You sure? There might be Guards who..."
The Guard who had been listening understood immediately what Rei was worried about.
He was guessing that there was a strong possibility of a traitor in their ranks.
Given everything that had happened up to this point, reaching that conclusion was only natural, and the Guards here must have been half-convinced of it themselves.
"We'll make copies of the documents. That way, even if something happens to these originals, there's nothing to worry about. Right?"
"Assuming there's no trap built into the paper itself."
Even from what Rei knew, tricks like invisible ink made from mandarin orange peel came to mind immediately.
Documents found inside a hidden shelf, documents deliberately written in cipher, and an opponent more cautious than any they had faced before.
Taking all of that into account, it wouldn't be strange at all if some kind of trap had been laid on the paper itself.
"...I see. That's a possibility. But if that's the case, we're out of our depth. We can't exactly hand copies over to our superior."
"That's beyond my area, so I'll leave it to you. Anyway, that's all the documents. The rest is... these tools."
Rei stashed the returned documents in his Misty Ring and then produced what appeared to be several tools.
Just looking at them, though, no one could tell what they were used for.
Rei initially wondered if they might be Magic Items, but at least for now, channeling magic power into them produced no visible change.
"What... exactly are these tools for? The fact that they were in a hidden shelf means they're probably not just decorations or something meaningless, but..."
"Since we don't know how to use them, you'd better hold onto them, Rei. They'll probably come in handy for..."
The Guard's voice trailed off mid-sentence. Rei's ears had caught faint screams and what sounded like angry shouts coming from somewhere far away.
They were so faint that only someone with sharper-than-normal hearing like Rei could have picked them up.
The Guards in front of Rei showed no sign of having heard anything, still occupied with discussing the tools they held.
But even without hearing the voices themselves, they could tell immediately that something about Rei's demeanor had changed.
The Guards looked at him quizzically, but by that point, Rei was already in motion.
"I'll be right back."
Leaving only those words behind, he slipped out of the room and broke into a sprint toward the source of the voices.
The Guards, well aware that something had happened, immediately gave chase.
But even for trained Guards, the overwhelming gap in physical ability between them and Rei wasn't something that could simply be overcome.
Rei pulled further and further ahead as they raced down the hallway, leaving the Guards behind.
"Damn it! I knew it, but is there nothing we can do about this gap in ability!?"
One of the Guards shouted in frustration as he ran, acutely aware of the chasm between Rei's capabilities and his own.
Those shouts from behind were, of course, audible to Rei.
But right now, rushing to aid whoever was crying out ahead of him took priority over calling back a response.
Several minutes had passed since Rei had started running.
Gradually, the screams and shouts reaching his ears grew louder and more distinct.
They were unmistakably the sounds of combat—and there was a real possibility that it wasn't a fight at all, but a one-sided assault.
No, the fact that voices were still carrying meant they couldn't be enduring a purely one-sided beating. If that was the case, there was still time!
Rei's mind flashed back to the man he had seen pinned up beside a painting in the room with the hidden door—hands and feet pierced through with stakes, displayed like decoration.
If the goal was simply to silence someone, there was no need to go that far.
Which meant whoever had created—or rather, staged—that scene had done so to satisfy their own tastes.
They were a contradictory figure, going to such elaborate lengths to create a spectacle just to silence someone. Nevertheless, the slash wound across the man's throat made it immediately clear that they were highly skilled.
Of course, there was no guarantee that the person fighting ahead of Rei was the same one who had carried out that crucifixion.
"There."
Rei spotted the scene of the battle ahead.
What surprised him, if only slightly, was that the one fighting three Guards was a woman—no, someone young enough to be called a girl.
In this world, there were plenty of people whose outward appearance didn't correspond to their strength.
Rei himself was the textbook example of that.
Even so, the battle unfolding before his eyes featured a small girl who looked to be in her early teens wielding a longsword, holding her own and then some against three grown men. It was only natural to be taken aback.
No, to be precise, she wasn't merely holding her own. She was launching a one-sided offensive against the Guards, who were committed entirely to defense and barely managing to stave off fatal blows.
Was it because their opponent was a child that they couldn't bring themselves to strike back?
Rei couldn't help but consider that possibility, but from what he could see, the girl's combat technique was simply on a higher level than the Guards.
As if to prove it, the girl—wearing a smile that could only be described as drunk on slaughter—swung her longsword down toward a Guard's head...
"Like hell I'll let you!"
Rei activated the Eye of Nebula on his belt, conjuring a handful of arrowheads.
In one fluid motion, he hurled the magic-formed arrowheads.
They struck the longsword just as it was about to crash down onto the Guard's skull, deflecting its trajectory from his head to his left shoulder.
The blow still nearly cleaved his left shoulder in two, but it was unquestionably a lighter injury than taking the blade to the head and dying.
Seeing that her attack had missed—no, that it had been forcibly deflected—the girl's smile vanished. She glared at the one who had interfered, her irritation plain on her face. Then, in the very next instant, she bolted.
Whether the girl, confident in her own abilities, didn't think she could take Rei head-on, or whether she had simply been instructed to run if he showed up...
Rei didn't know the reason. But in the current situation, the enemy fleeing was a stroke of luck—it meant he could see to the Guards' treatment.
Or so Rei thought, until...
"We'll handle the treatment here! Go after her, Rei! She could be a lead—capture her alive if you can!"
With the Guard whose left shoulder had been slashed shouting those words, Rei couldn't afford to stop now.
He pulled a reasonably potent potion from his Misty Ring and tossed it to the unharmed Guard, then took off after the fleeing girl.
From behind, he could hear the Guards scrambling to administer treatment, but he deliberately tuned them out and focused on the pursuit.
"Don't come after me!"
The girl must have noticed Rei tailing her. She glanced over her shoulder and hurled her longsword straight at him.
But a halfhearted throw like that—especially with a longsword, which was no throwing dagger—had no chance of flying true.
The blade tumbled end over end, sailing wide of the mark even though Rei hadn't bothered to take evasive action.
It's true that running with a longsword in hand is awkward, but throwing it away means she won't have a weapon when I catch up.
There was a chance she had some kind of dagger as a backup weapon, but even so, she'd have been better off facing Rei with the longsword.
Well, if she's going to sabotage her own attacks, that makes things easier for me...!
Rei loosed another volley of arrowheads.
The problem, though, was that they were inside a mansion.
The hallways didn't run in straight lines; there were turns and corners all over the place.
Because of that, the arrowheads Rei threw buried themselves in the wall, failing to catch the girl as she rounded a corner.
"Not getting away that easily!"
Rei sprinted after her and rounded the corner—and at that same moment, he caught sight of a door some distance away swinging shut.
But even after closing the distance to that door, Rei didn't immediately throw it open.
That door closing right before his eyes was plainly suspicious.
So suspicious, in fact, that it wouldn't have surprised him if a trap had been rigged to trigger the moment the door opened.
That was why he came to a halt.
That said, standing mutely in front of the door wasn't going to help him capture the girl inside.
After a moment's deliberation, Rei reached out cautiously and gripped the door, ready to react to whatever might come the instant he pulled it open.
He had steeled himself for the possibility of an arrow or something similar flying at his face. But when the door swung open, the room beyond was completely empty.
There was no one in sight—not even the girl.