“I am currently at the scene where the bodies of a man and a woman were discovered.”
A daytime talk show was covering a certain incident in its news segment. A female reporter stood at the entrance of a dimly lit alley, where other members of the press could also be seen.
Near a station in a rural area of the Kanto region, the bodies of a man and a woman had been found.
“A young boy, found unconscious at the scene, was taken into protective custody—”
A severely injured elementary-schooler had been found collapsed nearby, and the case had been investigated both as a criminal incident and as a possible accident. The identities of the deceased were determined to be a male high school student and an unemployed woman, and it was also confirmed that neither one of them was related to the boy.
At first, suspicion fell on the male high school student, who had been a known delinquent in the area, but he was cleared of any wrongdoing. Footage from nearby security cameras and witness interviews brought to light the possibility that it had been the woman who’d first led the boy into the alley.
“Various speculations circulated, but thanks to testimony from the boy after he regained consciousness, the full picture of the incident has come into view.”
As expected, it was the woman who had injured the boy. She’d used her cunning to talk him into going to the back alley, where she’d subjected him to a violent assault, striking and kicking him repeatedly. The boy had even suffered a broken neck, and the fact that his life was saved was nothing short of a miracle.
A young man who’d happened to be nearby had tried to help the boy, only to be stabbed by the woman instead.
But why did the woman die as well? By that point, the boy had already lost consciousness and didn’t know what had happened next.
The police investigation revealed that the young man had fought back, even while suffering a stab wound to the abdomen, resulting in excessive self-defense. His fist showed damage consistent with having struck a hard object, and the shape of the injury had matched a depressed fracture found on the woman’s skull.
“A recent search of the woman’s home has yielded a large amount of evidence. The findings were shockingly disturbing—”
Some of the findings included books about torture and poison, an enormous number of photographs believed to have been secretly taken of local elementary schoolers, a map of the town with markings for choosing a crime scene, an eerie basement where various poisonous mushrooms were being cultivated...
And a diary in which she had written down her darkest, most unsettling urges.
The contents of that diary sent shock waves through society. Page after page was filled with the deep darkness the woman had carried within her, laying bare her desire to abuse children—a destructive impulse directed at the young. The endless grotesque fantasies were too horrific to even speak of.
What further astonished the public was that this woman had volunteered at day care centers and other such places.
Thus, the delinquent boy with the red pompadour became the town’s hero, while the woman came to be known as a devil.
“In this location, hidden from view by surrounding buildings, three individuals were—”
✦ ✦ ✦
“So, tell me. You people are looking for a duo with black hair, correct?”
“Huh? Yeah, that’s righ— Yes, ma’am.”
In the residential district of Erunst, in an abandoned house near the slums, Milène, the acting knight commander and magic knight, was interrogating several men.
She had come, personally, to capture the slum dwellers who’d been causing trouble in town—though this was partly because there were so few knights she could trust.
When she’d actually caught the men, they were indeed from the slums, but that wasn’t all. Every one of them gave off an aura that clearly wasn’t from ordinary citizens. They weren’t just poor folk—they were underworld types.
Several of them had real combat ability. Milène, on the other hand, was alone, but still in control of the situation. For someone who could defeat a high-tier magical beast solo, a few albeit capable thugs were nothing. All the men had already been knocked down by her magic and lost the will to resist. Despite her appearance as a harmless, bespectacled beauty, every single one of them was terrified of her.
“Black hair, you say...”
When she heard “black hair and dark eyes,” the first faces that came to mind were the black-haired boy who’d helped her superior regain his motivation and the beastfolk girls accompanying him. But these men were after two people with black hair, both of them older than the boy, so he and the two girls couldn’t have been the ones they were after.
“It’s a guy with hair like a rooster and a plain female sorcerer,” said one of the men.
“And why are you chasing these black-haired people?” asked Milène. “What reason do you have?”
“A kid got killed in the slums.”
“And you seek revenge?”
“Yeah...ma’am. That woman’s killed a few slum kids. And there’s no mistaking she’s tortured them! This ain’t just about pride. You can’t let someone like that roam free.”
The string of brutal crimes had been committed quietly in a corner of the slums, but there had been witnesses every time: runaways, drug dealers, poor folk with nowhere to go, and so on. The black-haired woman must have thought no one had seen her, but those hiding in abandoned houses had witnessed the atrocities.
“I see...” said Milène. “A black-haired duo. Yes, I recall hearing about something like that.”
Milène remembered a report she’d received the other day about a pair of mercenaries who’d forced their way into the dungeon. With all the recent chaos, plenty of mercenaries were acting reckless like that, but... She’d remembered that specific report since people with black hair were rare. At first, she’d thought it might be Ares, whom she’d met before, but apparently not.
“I wonder if those children are all right.”
The faces of the boy and girls who had entered the dungeon to dispel their curse crossed Milène’s mind—she owed a lot to them.
“I really hope nothing happens...”