“Erifell was investigating the identity of the witch. And that was why Cormeca, who’d caught on to what was happening, cursed Erifell. Right?” I said.
Leen nodded, her expression seeming to ask why I was checking this stuff so late in the whole affair. “Well, yes, I suppose so?”
If Erifell had stayed unconscious due to the curse, then no one would have ever found the evidence and consequently the Carbuncles would never have been called. It was this sneaky behavior that had caused me to conclude that the only way of solving this was to just skip the whole trial and deal with Cormeca on my own (albeit, it had resulted in Leen bullying me into backing down).
However, things had changed because Leen and I had gotten involved. Thanks to her and the slime’s care, Erifell had regained consciousness, even if still weak, and the Carbuncles made it to Esma, which was partially due to the fact that they were on their way here from Lilliette to begin with. In other words, things had moved a lot quicker than they would have without us.
The witch’s plan to subdue Erifell with a curse had fallen apart, and all we had to do was let the trial sort her out. The main reason that Leen and I had stepped aside was because it didn’t matter who indicted Cormeca, so it would be fine for Erifell to deal with it herself.
But was this really the case?
It was clear as day that Cormeca was the witch and she had used a pragmatic approach to dispatch Erifell. However, there was one aspect of this whole affair that lacked any pragmatism.
“Leen, if someone suspected you of being a witch, would you go out of your way to curse them?” I said.
“Huh?”
“And right in front of the two people who’d dealt with the situation in Leston? Cormeca should be aware that it’s utterly obvious she’s the crook here. So why the hell would she decide, in this situation, to curse Erifell and implicitly inform everyone that a witch was involved in what happened in Leston?”
A witch trial was designed so that once one was already underway, it wouldn’t end until one of the two parties were sentenced to death. The result of this was that the Carbuncles would not easily accept a trial request if the evidence was shoddy or if there was room for doubt.
The reason Cormeca’s trial had been organized so speedily was because the existence of a witch was proven by Erifell’s inverta. By cursing Erifell, no matter what happened, it was inevitable that Cormeca would be suspected eventually and would risk being indicted. That wasn’t logical!
“Well, because she thought that things would sort themselves out if she could silence Erifell?” Leen said.
“No. Cormeca knew about Derg. She would’ve realized that he considered indicting her out of revenge if Erifell passed away.”
Cormeca had referred to Erifell’s “little knight.” She knew who he was affiliated with and what his relationship with her was.
My mind returned to the evidence. I’d thought that it would’ve been lost forever if Erifell died, but she had placed it in the care of a colleague at the guild. Erifell was the careful type. She had probably taken precautions to ensure her position was explained in the event that she passed away. If it were me, I would’ve made sure they got into Derg’s hands even if that were at the funeral. It was clear to anyone that Derg had feelings for Erifell. If the object of his affection was killed due to a curse, there was no way he would take it lying down. It was very possible that he’d do what I’d try to and skip the whole trial to deal with the witch himself.
The short of it was that Cormeca’s actions weren’t distancing her from risk. In the best case this would buy her a little time, but the cost of it was the creation of indisputable evidence: the inverta.
“It’s just not possible,” I said. “Cormeca’s an adventurer. There’s no way she’s not basing her actions on logic and pragmatism!”
Cormeca was an alchemist, a painter, a witch, and also an adventurer. This might be a lot of titles to have, but I saw her reddish agate Sphere. You wouldn’t get a color that well defined after just a year or two. She had fought, honed her skills, underwent trials and tribulations of her own, and experienced all sorts of things as an adventurer.
“No matter how cornered, how self-destructive she may seem, Cormeca will always choose the most logical path. She would never have survived this long as an adventurer otherwise,” I said.
There was a consensus that an adventurer was a perfectly logical being. Those who chased after temporary fame, or risked everything out of greed, would sooner or later end up dead somewhere. If you lived in this world, survived in this world, then you would learn how to fight, think, and behave. Your actions would be efficient, wasteless, and adhere to reason. Ever since the guild was founded, we adventurers have stood upon the bodies of those who came before us and pooled together our knowledge, hoping to avoid that fate. This was the beast that we called logic.
“What’s with that face?” I said to Leen, who was silently staring at me.
“I was just thinking that you should maybe look in the mirror, Hakura...”
“The hell’s that supposed to mean?” There weren’t many adventurers who were as logical as me. “Anyway, Cormeca’s behavior isn’t normal considering she’s both a witch and an adventurer.”
This was the thing that had been bugging me for some time. I was well aware that the world wasn’t a simple place where everything fit together perfectly like a puzzle, but my gut was telling me something was wrong.
“Well, I don’t know what you want me to do with this information...” Leen said. “Hey, Blue? Why don’t you say something?”
“Hmm...” At Leen’s suggestion, the slime opened its mouth(?). “Let us consider the situation from a different viewpoint then, lad.”
“Meaning?”
“What reasons would make Miss Cormeca’s actions logical?”
“Well...”
If we were working under the assumption that Cormeca was definitely a witch, then after she had killed Allen, whom she secretly held feelings for, she had laid waste to Leston. Then Erifell, having lost her home, had gathered evidence to run a witch trial and get revenge against Cormeca. However, with Erifell having thoroughly investigated her recent activity, Cormeca realized that she was the prime suspect and thus decided to silence Erifell. However, the result was that she had created irrefutable evidence that a witch was involved, and she was subsequently indicted.
If all of this wasn’t because she had been clumsy and pulled the noose around her own neck, then...
“I’ve got it backward...?” I muttered.
In a witch trial, either the accuser or the accused would be killed—no exceptions. This had been Erifell’s goal. Because she knew Cormeca was a witch, as long as she could get a witch trial to occur, then she would win. This had been our assumption as well. We had thought that Cormeca would be operating under the same conditions, trying her best to prevent a trial from occurring.
However, what if Cormeca had the same goal as Erifell? What if her short-tempered, irregular, and antagonistic behavior had all been calculated? What if she had purposefully left evidence, a trail, clues, for Erifell to find? What if Cormeca also wanted a witch trial? It didn’t matter how suspicious you were, what your motive was, how much evidence was stacked against you; in a witch trial, the presence of a stigma was everything. All that groundwork was for the purpose of holding a trial—it was worth nothing during the actual event.
If Cormeca could successfully hide her stigma, then she would be cleared of all suspicion. She could sell her Sphere and retire from the adventuring life with a bag of cash. She could start a new life, continuing to paint in peace while providing alchemical help to people. After all, no one would dare indict a woman who had already been proven innocent in a witch trial.
The question was where Cormeca was hiding her stigma. If she simply tried to paint over it, it would be discovered. Whether she dug it out or burned it off, it would simply move to somewhere else on her body. But I’d thought about this problem just a little while ago. Many witches in the past had probably tried to hide their stigmas. The Carbuncles had expert know-how on how to identify a stigma. There was no easy way to keep it hidden.
So how had Cormeca done it? Where could she have hidden it?
Another twinge of pain in my right hand stopped my train of thought. I looked at my Sphere. It was obsidian, black as night. It had no decoration and was so unpretty that it probably wouldn’t earn me very much if I sold it in the future.
“Leen, a stigma needs to be in a visible place on someone’s skin, right?” I said.
“Y-Yes. It does. It has to,” Leen replied.
“What counts?”
“Uh?”
“Where on the skin counts?”
Leen looked at me with puzzlement. She then closed her eyes and groaned as she processed what I had to say.
“Oh!” Leen had realized too. “But that’s never been... No, maybe... H-Hakura!”
“Yeah, we stumbled upon this by chance...”
If my prediction was correct, Cormeca would be able to get out of the witch trial alive. There was a way for her to have a visible stigma, but escape punishment. We couldn’t know how the trial would go in reality, so...
“Let’s go, Leen! We gotta get to the church!”
“A-Are we running?!”
“Of course we are!”
“But I just ate!”
Leen did have a point, but luckily for me, my lethargy and exhaustion were completely gone.