The moment he peered through the hole in the wall and saw the man swinging a short blade at him from the other side, Rei reacted instantly—no hint of surprise freezing him in place.
Rather than retreating, he lunged forward.
The house before him was dilapidated, the kind of building that wouldn't surprise anyone if it collapsed under wind and rain given enough time.
Which was exactly why Rei smashed through the wall as he advanced.
Why push forward instead of fleeing? The answer was written on the face of the man who'd tried to swing the blade.
"Whoa!?"
The man clearly hadn't expected Rei to charge at him instead of running.
That momentary hesitation in the man's swing was all Rei needed.
"Take this!"
A fist shot out, capitalizing on the opening.
Thrown after dodging the short blade and stepping inside, the blow connected with the Man with a Dagger's torso—sent him flying.
Given the building's fragile state, the man Rei had punched smashed straight through the wall and kept going.
"Haa."
Relieved to have cleared the immediate danger, Rei stepped outside.
The man who had offered to guide him to the Black Dog hideout—the one who had so insistently urged him to look inside this building—should have been right there.
After a stunt like that, the man had clearly betrayed him.
Bracing himself, Rei turned his gaze toward the guide—only to find him collapsed on the ground, vomiting blood.
(What happened?)
For a split second, Rei wondered if Set had attacked him. But one look at Set's confused demeanor confirmed that wasn't the case.
That left only one logical conclusion: something else entirely had caused this condition.
Still, with the guide incapacitated, Rei's next priority was making sure the man with the short blade was truly down for the count.
He'd punched him away, but that didn't necessarily mean the man was out of action.
"Set, keep an eye on that man."
Rei called back to Set as he headed toward the spot where he'd sent the assassin flying, hearing Set's cry of acknowledgment behind him.
"He should be around here... ah, there he is."
Rei spotted the man, still flat on the ground with no sign of getting up.
What's going on? As Rei approached with that question burning in his mind, the answer revealed itself.
A short blade was buried in the man's head—driven in deep enough to destroy his brain.
For a moment, Rei wondered if the impact of being punched through the wall had somehow caused this. But looking closer, he could see that the man was gripping the blade himself, having driven it into his own temple.
There was no other way to interpret it: suicide.
"What... exactly happened here?"
The words escaped Rei's mouth in sheer disbelief.
The man who had guided him here, and the man inside the house who had targeted him—both were clearly members of the assassin group hunting him. That much was obvious.
But even so... would they really go this far just because the assassination failed?
If they wanted to kill themselves, they could have just swallowed poison or something.
Stabbing their own heads with a short blade was undeniably a horrific way to go.
Even as a suicide, why? Rei couldn't help but wonder.
Yet here it was, plain to see—the blade gripped in the man's own hand.
No one else had killed him. That much was clear.
Which meant the suicide was unmistakably self-inflicted.
Why would they do something like this? Rei didn't understand. But one thing was certain: the assassin was dead, and any intelligence he could have provided died with him.
"...Can't be helped, I suppose."
He'd rather not touch a corpse like this if he could avoid it.
But examining the body might reveal something—perhaps even an explanation for this bizarre method of death.
Making that call, he stored the corpse in his Misty Ring.
"Now then... this means I can't help being suspicious of the other one too. Wonder how that turned out."
Muttering to himself, Rei headed back to Set—only to find exactly what he'd feared, though perhaps should have expected.
Another corpse.
The body of the man who had offered to guide him to the Black Dog hideout.
The man had already been vomiting blood when Rei left him, so he'd had a bad feeling about this. But he'd decided that dealing with the man who had actually attacked him took priority...
"Ah... what the hell happened to him?"
He let out a sigh. But dwelling on it now was pointless.
All he could do was head to the Black Dog hideout.
Show Marina's letter of introduction. Get whatever information he could about this incident.
Whether that would actually work, he had no idea.
But thinking it through, getting intel from them seemed essential.
(Then again, the guy who was supposed to guide me to the Black Dog hideout is in this state. Were they controlling him with some kind of hypnosis? Or was he working with the enemy from the start? ...The real problem is that I can't just walk into the Black Dog hideout blindly anymore.)
The person who had offered to guide him had tried to spring a trap.
That meant if he asked anyone else for directions to the hideout, he could never fully rule out the possibility that they'd come at him too.
If the first volunteer guide had been a setup, this whole situation was troublesome. No—not just troublesome. Extremely troublesome.
"So how exactly am I supposed to get to the Black Dog hideout now? I can't just go crashing into every building that looks like it might belong to some organization."
Pulling a stunt like that would turn this whole affair into a massive mess.
No—it might not stop at a mess. It could easily spiral into a full-scale disturbance.
That was why he needed to think carefully about his next move.
"Hey, Set. What do you think we should do here?"
"Gruu?"
Set let out a troubled purr in response.
Rei wasn't the only one at a loss—Set was just as clueless.
So when Rei asked what they should do, Set had no immediate answer.
Not that Rei had expected one. He'd partly called out just to clear his head.
"Yeah, sorry. Got a lot on my mind thinking about what comes next. But you're right—for now, we need to find a new guide."
"Grurru!"
Set barked in agreement.
Rei figured it made sense. He couldn't trust someone who volunteered themselves, like the man lying there vomiting blood. But if Rei approached someone himself and asked for directions, maybe that would be different.
"Hm? ...Ah. Poison."
As Rei went to store the vomiting man's body in his Misty Ring, he noticed something. The man hadn't taken one of Set's strikes.
When he'd first seen the blood, he'd assumed Set had destroyed the man's internal organs or cracked his ribs badly enough to damage them.
But looking at the body now, the injuries didn't seem severe enough for that.
Sure, there was always the possibility that internal damage simply wasn't visible. But given what he'd just seen—the man stabbing his own temple—it made more sense to assume this one had also killed himself through some means, rather than Set having done it.
"This guy was at the Gigant Turtle dissection too..."
Rei murmured as he studied the corpse.
It was a face he'd seen several times during the dissection work in the winter.
The man had been among those who gathered when Rei arrived in the Slum District. Whether he'd done so willingly or had been under someone's control, he'd still tried to assassinate Rei.
Could Rei accept that? Of course not. And yet... this was the Slum District. Somehow, he found himself understanding that things like this were simply par for the course.
"Gruu..."
Set purred and nuzzled his face against Rei, as if to comfort him.
"Yeah. I'm not that worked up about it. What I need to do now is get to the Black Dog hideout. ...The problem is finding a guide."
Honestly, Rei really didn't want to approach someone only to discover they were an assassin.
But he also couldn't deny that he needed information from someone.
"Should've asked Marina before I left. Then again, even if she'd given me directions through the Slum District, no guarantee they'd still be accurate."
The Slum District was a place where buildings could collapse or new ones could be thrown together with scrap materials in a matter of days.
As a result, the streets themselves shifted constantly.
It was said that even among current residents of the Slum District, there wasn't a single person who knew every path.
Even if Marina had given him directions to the Black Dog hideout, they'd be useless if the roads had changed.
"Seriously, what to do... Standing around here isn't getting us anywhere. Let's move."
Storing the poison victim's corpse in his Misty Ring, Rei and Set left the area.
His first destination: somewhere with people.
...Though heading somewhere crowded naturally carried a higher risk of being targeted by assassins.
But to find the Black Dog, he had no choice but to talk to someone.
Putting distance between himself and the ambush site, he walked for several minutes before arriving at a relatively busy area.
That said, most of the people there weren't working—they were just standing around chatting with friends.
(Then again, I guess that's the Slum District for you.)
Even so, Slum District residents still had to eat to survive, and eating required money.
How exactly these people who loitered around chatting in broad daylight earned a living was, frankly, a mystery to Rei.
(Crimes, maybe? Seems par for the course down here.)
Robbery or pickpocketing wouldn't be particularly difficult for a Slum District resident.
Then again, targeting the wrong person in a place like this would get them killed.
This was Gilm, a frontier town.
With its abundance of skilled adventurers, anyone looking for a victim had to choose carefully.
...Though with the Expansion Construction drawing in people who normally wouldn't set foot in Gilm, maybe things were actually tilting in the residents' favor right now.
"Hey."
"Is that... Rei?"
"Yeah. He's got a Gryphon with him, no mistake."
"But what's he doing in the Slum District?"
"Who knows. If you're that curious, go ask him."
Several people exchanged low whispers as they spotted Rei.
...Naturally, with his sharp senses, he caught every word.
But they were only suspicious about his presence. None of them showed the murderous intent of an assassin.
Rei let it slide without a second thought.
(So—any ideas on who to ask about the Black Dog hideout?)
He was mulling it over on what passed for a main road in the Slum District when something caught his eye.
One of the buildings in his line of sight.
It was sturdier than the ruin where he'd been ambushed earlier. Inside stood a lone man.
Slightly older than the guide who'd betrayed him, by the look of it.
When the man met Rei's gaze, he made a beckoning gesture—a meaningful come here.
After what had just happened, this was suspicious. Extremely suspicious. But with no other leads, checking it out was the logical move.
"I think the saying goes, 'If you don't enter the tiger's den, you can't catch its cub'?"
Muttering, he approached the building.
...For some reason, as Rei and Set neared, the surrounding Slum District residents quietly averted their gazes.
Filing that away, Rei stopped at the entrance—ready to react to anything—and called out to the man inside the doorless building.
"You have business with me?"
"You're the one with business, aren't you? The Black Dog hideout... you want to know where it is, don't you?"
The man's reply hung in the stale air between them.