I brought up another window.
Admin: Photographic Evidence.
The photos floated in the air:
Compost Room
Contents of Large Box
Dissection Tools
Purgatorial List…
Their grotesqueness assaulted the eyes of all who could see.
“The high priest has been making compost of his followers’ dead bodies in the basement of the church headquarters.”
“This case…is extremely serious!” said Prosecutor Ileana. “That such a terrible thing could go unnoticed right next to the royal palace… It’s immoral!”
“Immoral, you say?” the high priest replied. “Watch your mouth.”
“No prosecutor needs to watch their mouth in the face of crime,” I said.
“Mr. Akuto! Yes, this is a chargeable offense! Now that I think about it, the fact that Cumba’s body was brought to the church headquarters immediately after the incident means that they were trying to cover up his cause of death! There’s also cause to believe that he attempted to cover up the fact that those who inconveniently died within the church were dissected and made into compost!”
“The treatment of God’s Panacea does not fail. It was God’s will. Those men and women were called by God and fulfilled their destinies. And so God’s children return to the earth.”
The high priest’s smile did not falter.
“This is how it has been, since time immemorial, and how it shall be. We feast upon the fruit of the earth and return to the earth. Upon which flowers will bloom, and olives will ripen. This is the truth as it is written in the scriptures.”
The three church members in the crowd each responded in a whisper: “The high priest’s words are right and just.”
The bizarre sight made me feel like they were in a different world, where this kingdom’s law and common sense meant nothing.
“Now I understand why my father was right to separate the church and state.”
The head of the kingdom clutched at her pink skirt with tears in her eyes.
I could see she felt that the high priest had deviated from what he should have been protecting.
“Court assistant, prosecutor, Princess Ecstasia. God will punish you for your ideologies which insult the scriptures without believing in them. Brainwashing? What an unpleasant suggestion. Besides—”
He took one look at Ileana and the princess before turning his face to the heavens.
“O Scales of Judgment! I cast doubt on this trial! This investigation was supposed to be about the responsibility for the building’s collapse. Yet now all of a sudden they are trying to expose the privacy of our church! It is unrelated!”
“From the start, you’ve been aiming to find fault with our trial and have us punished by the scales.”
“Don’t be so self-conscious. It is only proper that a person conducting a trial incorrectly would face God’s punishment.”
“We’re not doing anything wrong. This is your case,” I responded to Gilvert, then spoke to Shiro. “It’s time. Use those chemicals you brought.”
“Yes, Master!”
Shiro and the other maids split up and started spraying some kind of liquid around us.
The sun was beginning to set, and the rubble was casting long shadows on the ground.
“What is that strange magical tool you’re using?” the high priest asked.
The mud on the ground where the round pillar used to be started glowing a bluish white.
“It’s a luminol reaction,” I replied as I turned to face him. “It’s not magic. It’s forensic science.”
“Forensic…?”
“You’re not familiar? This is the stuff often used by crime lab investigators in detective anime. You know, like Detective Co*an. Too bad you never watched any anime with the princess.”
“…” Silence. The high priest was staring at the light, bewildered.
“Even if blood gets washed away by rain and you can’t see it anymore, it leaves behind traces that can still be detected. This chemical shows us where the traces are by making them glow like this. We can see there was a large amount of blood spilled here.”
“Even if that’s true, it has nothing to do with me.”
“Don’t move a muscle.”
Shiro continued spraying the chemical. She moved from where the round pillar had been…over to the high priest.
“Wh-what is this?!” Ileana gasped.
Everyone—the princess, the gallery—opened their eyes wide.
Between the collapsed building and where the high priest was standing, there was a trail of mud. And on that trail was a line of blue-white light between the large traces of blood and the high priest.
“High priest Gilvert Trinity,” I began. “You set up a very elaborate scheme. And it all started one year ago when you failed to completely heal Cumba, didn’t it?”
I walked toward the head of the church.
“With your healing spell, God’s Panacea, you accidentally activated a malignant tumor. But if you allowed it to be examined by a hospital outside the church and word got out, you thought that your population of church members that was already dropping would decline even further. So you muzzled the Nols brothers and decided to use them even further.”
I was only speculating about his goal. But at this stage, I needed to keep exposing more evidence to make him falter.
“Originally, you wanted to wipe out the royal family and the Japanese culture that didn’t fit with your own ideological beliefs. And you wanted to take the place of the judge that had been summoned. You thought you could accomplish this if you caused an incident that made the church and its followers into victims. That’s when you decided to borrow the power of the Black Scales’ forbidden magic.”
Everything I had seen and heard up until now was starting to line up nicely.
“You set your sights on the old church branch building, because there was a restricted building right next to it. All you had to do was make it fall toward the church. But first, because you are cautious after all, you wanted to see for yourself if the material transfiguration spell really worked. Those nine arcade machines around the round pillar were in the way anyway, and they were trash that no one would miss, or so you thought. But it turned out they were actually a key item in another case.”
Even if they had been largely forgotten by most, there was still someone who loved them.
“All that was left to figure out was the timing. You aimed to collapse the building at a time when the princess and the judge were at the nearby tavern. You changed the round pillar into mud, and in its place used one of your Holy Scourges to hold up the building. Like you said, ‘There is almost nothing that is physically impossible for the Holy Scourge.’ So it was easy.”
Using those capillaries, he probably could have even held the mud in place and camouflaged it so that it didn’t lose its shape.
“The high priest is highly proficient at controlling the mana within the body. He made sure that Cumba and Alba had enough mana to maintain the power of the Holy Scourge for a specific amount of time, wrapped it around them, then had them grasp it. He planned it so that the Scourge would break exactly when we arrived at the tavern—they were basically used as human timers.”
I heard the people in the gallery react.