Two weeks had passed since the death of Fuankilo Legacy.
The few visitors who came to see her empty coffin, which was enshrined in the temple of the holy land Metasim, had dwindled to almost none. Even the death of a high-ranking officer had already been filed away as just one more corpse among many. Part of it was that she’d been a noncombatant, someone who had left behind no flashy exploits for people to remember.
Yet when it came to fundraising, base management, and torture, she had been head and shoulders above the rest. Very few understood just how large the void left by Fuankilo’s absence truly was.
One believer who knew better than anyone how exceptional she had been simply couldn’t let her go.
“Fuankilo-sama… I’ve come again today.”
In the underground sanctuary beneath the temple, where the empty coffin lay, a gray-haired heretic knelt before the box. Her stiletto heels dug into the stone floor as the hem of her tight skirt brushed the ground—an outfit carefully modeled after Fuankilo’s own.
Her name was Karatena Wallmix, a woman who called herself Fuankilo’s number one disciple and a candidate for the next generation of executives.
Karatena had never accepted Fuankilo’s so-called accidental death. If anything, she had gone so far as to suspect that Oakley Mercury, the man Fuankilo had been keeping an eye on while she was alive, had been involved somehow.
She had no proof. It was little more than an obsession bordering on delusion. Ironically, this wild suspicion came far closer to the truth than she knew.
Karatena let memories of Fuankilo rise to the surface.
The days they spent torturing Orthodoxy believers side by side, competing over whose victims yielded more and better information. Their youth spent honing and refining their techniques together, sharing whispered conversations in the basement between screams.
When she looked back on that life, on those routines that would never return, she bit down on the ache in her chest and felt a vast, desolate loneliness swallow her whole.
Fuankilo really did look after people.
Her colleagues called Fuankilo prickly, abrasive, unfriendly. The whispers around her were all sharp edges and bad reviews. But from Karatena’s point of view, Fuankilo had been a reliable superior and something very close to an older sister.
To Karatena, Fuankilo was a fundamentally cautious person. She simply could not picture that woman of all people “accidentally” stumbling and falling into a smelting furnace.
A high-ranking officer who was all but immortal, dying because she just so happened to fall into a smelting furnace? It made no sense.
Besides, there had been that time she’d casually revealed the bomb implanted in her own body, laughing as she called it her “emergency escape device.”
No… Someone killed her. Someone has to have killed her.
The uneasy thought in Karatena’s mind slowly hardened into conviction.
A lock of hair slid loose and tickled her cheek, jerking her back to reality. Somehow, she’d spent hours in front of the coffin, lost in thought.
“This won’t do.” Smiling faintly, the woman rose to her feet. After coming to the temple every day for about a week, her thoughts had finally settled.
She had to uncover the truth behind Fuankilo Legacy’s death. That was her calling. And more than that, the prime suspect, Oakley, needed to be dragged into the light and punished.
Lately, Oakley Mercury seemed to be on very friendly terms with Joanne Sagamix. If she asked Joanne to cooperate with the investigation, she was sure they could rip that mask right off his face. She didn’t yet know how he’d managed to kill Fuankilo, but she would make him pay for it.
“I swear I’ll see your grudge avenged… and lay Oakley’s head right here at your feet.”
With a sharp whirl of gray hair, Karatena turned her back on the temple and walked away.