Chapter 118 - Wizard May Cry (4)
11 min read ·
From experience, Shin Do-ryong knew she was bound to be worrying about something strange, so he called to Shin Se-hee in a calm voice.
“Paternal Aunt.”
But Shin Se-hee had her bent index finger pressed to her lips and was too lost in thought to hear him.
“Hmmm....”
If, really, just if....
‘If that boy Yo-han really is Do-ryong’s son, then who is his mother?’
One might assume it was one of the women Shin Do-ryong had briefly dated in the past.
After all, to outsiders, the young Shin Do-ryong had been the delinquent young master of a prestigious family, a piece of trash who went around with a different woman every day.
He really was trash, too.
Surprisingly, though, he had never gone as far as having physical relationships with the women he met that way.
They had literally been casual relationships where they met for a little while, hung out, and broke up.
Shin Do-ryong himself had been the one to keep his distance.
‘...Maybe he wanted the clan to see him as a delinquent.’
Shin Do-ryong called to Shin Se-hee again.
“Hey.”
Once again, she was too absorbed in thought to hear him.
Shin Se-hee’s eyes narrowed halfway, her long lashes lowering.
“..........”
There had been girls who didn’t know the Shin Clan was an exorcist family and simply took a liking to Do-ryong because he was fairly good-looking....
But most of the people who had gathered around Do-ryong in the first place had been interested in his position as the future Clan Head.
It really would have been better not to date women like that at all.
Still, whenever Shin Se-hee sternly scolded him (or, more accurately, threw a fit), Shin Do-ryong would act indifferent while quietly putting an end to those casual relationships.
On top of that, after he got the “women” who could be called serious lovers, he stopped seeing multiple women like he used to.
The fact that they were lovers in the first place was a problem... but anyway.
As far as Shin Se-hee knew, there were three women who could truly be called Shin Do-ryong’s lovers.
...His current wife, that fox of a woman, Lee Seo-yun.
Yeon-hwa, Si-on’s late mother.
And.
And eventually, Shin Do-ryong walked right up to the deeply preoccupied Shin Se-hee and called her name in a low voice.
“Shin Se-hee.”
“...Eek!?”
Shin Se-hee instinctively jumped with an adorable shriek, stepped backward, and nearly tangled her feet.
Shin Do-ryong reached out and caught her by wrapping an arm around her waist.
“Careful.”
“Th-thank you... But I’m your Paternal Aunt!”
Shin Do-ryong glanced toward the Director’s office door, then tightened the arm around Shin Se-hee’s waist and pulled her into his embrace.
“Ah!”
The distance between them vanished in an instant.
Looking down at Shin Se-hee, Shin Do-ryong whispered playfully.
“You like it better when I call you Se-hee.”
“.........!”
Shin Se-hee’s eyes widened and trembled as she looked up at Shin Do-ryong. Her face went red in an instant.
“Sh-shut up! Let go of me!?”
Shin Se-hee struggled, pounding Shin Do-ryong’s chest with her arms, but he did not let go.
“Acting like some cute little girl at your age... Don’t get me horny while I’m working.”
Shin Do-ryong naturally pulled Shin Se-hee close, bent down, and kissed her.
“...Ah.”
Shin Se-hee instinctively accepted his lips and gently closed her eyes. She lifted her heels and stood on tiptoe.
For a few brief seconds, their tongues softly entwined before their lips parted.
Reluctant to let the lingering sensation go, Shin Se-hee opened her eyes and looked up at Shin Do-ryong.
“..........”
A clear strand stretched between their lips, lengthened, and finally snapped.
Shin Do-ryong looked down at Shin Se-hee and spoke in a low, gentle voice.
“I know it’s hard for someone with your personality to talk about what’s bothering you, but once you’ve sorted it out even a little, tell me. I’m worried.”
“...All right.”
...As for the three lovers Shin Se-hee had been thinking about earlier, the first had been Shin Se-hee herself.
Held in Shin Do-ryong’s arms.
‘I definitely raised him with plenty of love and attention....’
Her face flushed, Shin Se-hee gently bit her lip and looked up at Shin Do-ryong, the man she loved, with yearning eyes.
Shin Do-ryong’s grandfather, Shin Do-hwang, had taken multiple concubines.
So even though Shin Do-ryong’s father and Shin Se-hee had different mothers.
Even though she was a Paternal Aunt only a little older than Shin Do-ryong, and their blood relation was comparatively distant.
‘...How did he grow up into such a shameless fucking piece of shit who commits incest while betraying his master and defiling his ancestors?’
Still, she loved him. There was nothing she could do about that.
“..........”
Shin Se-hee’s slender hand clutched Shin Do-ryong’s clothes tightly.
Perhaps she was the one who had used their distant blood relation as an excuse and ended up giving him affection not merely as family, but as a woman.
***
Maybe Si-on butting in had gotten the question of what to do with me put on hold for the time being.
Si-on and I arrived at the scene of the Invisible Murder Case without any interference.
“Yo-han, we’re here.”
Tap-.
We got out of the car together and approached the middle of the screened-off intersection.
As a matter of procedure, Si-on showed the agent guarding the scene her ID identifying her as a Team Leader in the Special Operations Division, and we went behind the screen.
Judging by how the Special Operations Division agent didn’t look particularly surprised to see me, maybe the order that I was supposed to be detained had only been passed down through certain direct chains among the Division’s upper ranks.
Come to think of it, officially within the Special Operations Division, I wasn’t a criminal wizard who owned the grimoire <De Vermis Mysteriis>.
I was the owner of <The Lesser Key of Solomon> and a Civilian Collaborator assigned to Si-on.
Anyway, time to look over the scene.
Whether I should call it obvious or fortunate.
For the sake of my mental health, the victim’s corpse had already been removed.
All that remained were bloodstains on the asphalt and the white tape I’d seen in comics and movies, marking the place where the body had lain at bizarre angles.
By bizarre angles, I meant the body had been scattered in pieces, so the white tape marking it was scattered in pieces too.
Well, seeing the corpse firsthand might have been useful for gathering information.
But I was an exorcist and wizard, not a detective or investigator, so I probably wouldn’t know what I was looking at anyway.
This was better.
Besides, the Special Operations Division would have already handled the investigation and autopsy.
“What did the autopsy find?”
“Here.”
Si-on handed me the documents as she explained, and I skimmed through them.
The victim was an eighteen-year-old male high school student.
As I read the report, I sighed.
“Haah....”
I could see why the Special Operations Division higher-ups had tried to single me out as the culprit right away.
“There were animal claw marks and bite wounds all over the victim’s mutilated body. It’s estimated that an invisible monster roughly two to three meters tall seized him by the neck and killed him while cutting his body apart piece by piece.”
An invisible monster around three meters tall. Similar to Grizzly.
Anyway, I wasn’t a detective.
But now that I was at the scene, maybe I should give that thing a try?
I’d seen it in comics: look at the crime scene again from the killer’s point of view.
I drew in a breath and looked around the scene as I thought.
I was the killer. A wizard who had committed murder.
Assuming another wizard had done this rather than an Anomaly.
The murder weapon was a Familiar powerful enough to tear a human being apart with brute force.
...I actually had one like that too, but anyway, moving on.
It was morning, at an intersection full of pedestrians.
Why deliberately choose such a conspicuous time and place to commit murder?
A sudden impulse? Or maybe a Familiar obtained by chance had gone berserk?
No. If it had gone berserk, the killing wouldn’t have taken this long.
Killing a person was easy for a monster. All it had to do was bite through the neck.
But it hadn’t.
According to the report, it had taken its time torturing the victim for around five minutes before the police arrived, killing him slowly.
If the only objective had been to kill him, that was inefficient.
Then again, neither the time nor the location was efficient. The Special Operations Division was already on its trail, wasn’t it?
Right. The killer wasn’t the cautious, efficiency-minded type.
But there still had to be a purpose behind the murder.
‘Why?’
Why grab some random high school boy with an invisible Familiar, torture him, and then kill him?
Right. The reason for the torture.
For the sake of my mental health, I didn’t want to watch anything that gruesome, but if I had to watch it?
Why would I want to?
...Right. Because I wanted to watch the victim suffer.
“..........”
But if it were me, I wouldn’t stand in the middle of the street and watch.
Maybe for ten seconds. Five minutes was far too long.
That was way too conspicuous.
I wouldn’t do something like this in the first place....
Anyway, what mattered here was why the killer had tortured and murdered the victim. The motive.
I could be wrong, but probably.
Either it was some lunatic who simply wanted to watch another person get tortured, or it was revenge born from a personal grudge.
That was when Si-on spoke to me.
“Yo-han, what do you think? From a wizard’s perspective, do you notice anything?”
“I haven’t checked the magical side yet. I was thinking about the motive, though. What do you think?”
“I see. I could be wrong, but....”
Si-on seemed to have already formed an opinion of her own, because she spoke in a calm voice.
“I believe it was either personal revenge or a thrill killing without a specifically chosen victim.”
Same conclusion as mine.
“Same as me.”
“It’s only my conjecture.”
Si-on’s and my gazes naturally swept the surroundings before settling on a second-floor café that would have offered a clear view of the crime scene at the time.
Si-on lowered her gaze back to me and spoke.
“We’ve already obtained CCTV footage from the surrounding shops as part of the investigation. I’ll let you know if anyone suspicious appears.”
It looked like the Special Operations Division had already done everything it could.
Then it was time for me to do my job as a wizard.
If this had been an ordinary murder, maybe not, but this was blatantly a supernatural case, so I tried detecting mana.
“..........”
It was more an act of instinct than a technique. I searched for lingering traces of supernatural energy.
And my eyes immediately narrowed.
...Whoever did this had left plenty behind.
I could sense mana lingering in the air, carrying a bestial, sulfurous stench distinct from the smell of blood at the scene.
And <The Lesser Key of Solomon> inside my coat reacted to that mana.
Flutter-flutter~!
Well, I’d already had a pretty good guess when I smelled sulfur.
I took out the grimoire and held it in my hand.
Frrrsh-!
<The Lesser Key of Solomon> opened on its own and revealed a certain page.
[Glasya-Labolas, twenty-fifth among Solomon’s 72 demons.]
Commonly known as the President of Slaughter.
He appears in the form of a winged dog or wolf, or as a middle-aged man with the appearance of a scholar, and kills whomever his Contractor wishes dead.
He does not stop there, however, and continually encourages his Contractor to commit further murders. Aside from killing, he will also teach his Contractor various fields of learning if desired, and possesses the power of invisibility.
‘The power of invisibility.’
I didn’t know who the Contractor was, but at least it looked like I’d figured out what the murder weapon was.
One of Solomon’s 72 demons. A bigger fish than I’d expected had shown up.
If its true body had been summoned, I should have felt its presence during the summoning... so was it a Split Spirit?
<The Lesser Key of Solomon> fluttered.
Flutter-!
Well, with this thing here, I felt like I could manage somehow, but I still couldn’t afford to let my guard down.
At least I’d learned that this wasn’t simply the work of an Anomaly.
It was a murder committed by a wizard who had made a pact with a demon.
After all, with demons, it was all business.
A high-ranking demon wouldn’t commit such a conspicuous murder without a contract.
***
A hamburger chain restaurant.
A small hooded girl who looked about middle-school age munched on a hamburger while reading articles on her phone.
The Spontaneous Massacre Incident everyone had been yammering about however they pleased since morning.
More precisely, it had been a murder committed by an invisible demon.
Something invisible placed a hand on the girl’s shoulder and gently caressed her.
[Surely you don’t intend to stop here? Tormenting and killing a piece of trash like that hardly comes close to paying the price of your valuable soul.]
A faint scent of sulfur spread through the air alongside the rough, mocking voice.
“...Of course not. I’ve still got a long way to go.”
The girl crumpled the hamburger wrapper, rose from her seat, and left the restaurant.
[Khehehehe....]
The invisible demon, Glasya-Labolas, laughed as he followed behind her.
Then the hooded girl turned back toward Glasya-Labolas and spoke.
“Undo the invisibility and transformation.”
[.........Haah.]
In a deserted alley, the invisibility and transformation fell away, revealing the form of the old Maltese possessed by the demon.
The girl knew the being in front of her wasn’t really the dog she had raised, but she still closed her eyes and hugged Poppy.
“..........”
Holding Poppy in her arms, she carefully rubbed her face against the dog’s fur.
Then she opened her eyes again and walked away with a cold look in them.