A full moon hung in the night sky, its light mingling with the streetlamps to bathe the city below.
CRASH.
The north of the Kandera Domain.
A sound of rupture that had no place in the dark streets of Hayden, where all should have been quiet. WEEEOOO—!
Then the siren, wailing out across the district. And with it, ten soldiers of the imperial garrison burst through the darkness.
"Damn it — too late again?"
"No. Now!"
Two officers among them, one drawing a sword and the other a staff, led the sweep of the alley.
And just then, into the soldiers' sight came an old woman of uncanny appearance.
She seemed to be fleeing in haste — and when the moonlight caught her, it bared a face drenched in dark-red blood.
"Hands in the air!"
Nearly as one, the entire squad drew rifles and trained them on the old woman.
The smaller of the two officers thrust his staff forward. And when the old woman, ignoring their warning, made to flee again,
BANG—!
At the officer's signal, the soldiers opened fire.
Depth 3 mana rounds, discharged from rifles. There was no doubt that every one had struck her. Power enough to kill even a trained fighter outright.
Yet when the smoke thinned a moment later, the old woman stood there smiling at them, as if nothing had touched her at all.
"What in the—! Huh?"
Shock ran across the soldiers' faces.
The old woman vanished from their sight in an instant.
"Aaaargh!"
And the screams of the imperial soldiers rang out, one upon another.
She had reappeared behind them, hands whipping through the air.
Mana scattered with every stroke — and the scattered mana carved the imperial soldiers to pieces.
"Goddamn it! Enough!"
The small-framed officer, who had barely slipped aside from her attack, swung his staff down and up.
Sparks leaped from its tip — and in the same breath, lightning fell out of the sky.
'No feel of a hit.'
His sorcery split the old woman cleanly in two — and the split figure dissolved into white smoke and was gone.
What he had cut was no true body, but a double wrought of sorcery. Realizing it, the officer swept his eyes fast around the alley.
But all that met them were his fallen men.
"Hack, hack!"
The other officer, beside him only moments before, lay crumpled against the building opposite, coughing up blood.
"Are you all right?!"
The small officer — the last man standing against the old woman — ran to him and checked him over at once.
"Hack... we lost her again."
"Don't talk. You'll open the wound."
With that short answer, he drew a signal flare from his coat and fired it into the sky.
Minutes later, more imperial troops came running from elsewhere.
They moved with drilled precision, checking each fallen comrade in turn.
"Lieutenant Harold! Are you hurt, sir?"
One soldier ran up to the small officer.
"I'm fine. See to the others first."
"Forgive me, sir... but apart from you two lieutenants, they're all dead."
The soldier answered while checking the fallen officer's condition.
Harold forced himself past it and pressed on.
"Total dead?"
"Nineteen, tonight alone."
As the soldier finished, others came running. They too checked the fallen officer, then bore him away on a stretcher.
"The engagement caught us off guard this time — the sorcerers' ward went up too late as well."
The soldier who had arrived first stayed behind, speaking with Harold.
Harold drove his fist into the wall in sheer frustration. Then he turned his eyes to the wall of the neighboring building.
"If the ward had worked properly — could we have caught her?"
"No, sir..."
The soldier's answer was short.
"Right. Even a perfect encirclement would have ended the same way... She's slipped through a high-grade ward before... How many times does this make now?"
Harold spoke through clenched teeth.
"Sir, what I'm trying to say is—"
"I know. Even so — the premise stands: we raise wards that force her to spend even a little of her sorcery. It's the only way we'll ever crack the riddle of it... There's nothing for it but to grind forward."
Harold cut his subordinate off and carried on.
But the soldier felt no resentment; he understood his lieutenant's heart well enough.
"You know it yourself, sir — this stopped being a simple string of murders long ago. Persuade the Senior Captain. Hire a specialist guild, or request support from a battalion, a knight order..."
The soldier didn't finish. With the victims mounting by the night, the words had simply spilled out of him — but he knew Lieutenant Harold carried the same thought.
"We'll handle the cleanup and the tracking, sir. Go home and get some proper rest."
He changed the subject on the spot.
"You're forever telling me to rest."
Harold looked at his subordinate a moment, a bitter smile on his lips.
Then his gaze went straight back to the wall he had been glaring at.
"You've pushed yourself far too hard of late, sir. It's difficult to watch. And besides — you're the only sorcerer above Depth 4 in our whole company."
"I know. Don't worry so much."
Harold turned on his heel and started away.
On the wall at his back — the one he had been glaring at — three corpses hung plastered in a wild sprawl.
And beneath them, lettered in blood:
'In two days.'
The serial killer's closing mark. It declared the night's work finished — and with it, the Imperial Army's defeat.
***
"My, my. Too late after all."
Harold's walk home.
A man's voice drifted out on a plume of cigarette smoke.
The man stood leaning against the boundary fence that split footpath from roadway.
A newspaper hung from one hand.
"You think 'my, my' covers it? Idiot! We had both eyes wide open and still lost her right in front of us."
At the man's left, a silver-haired boy crouched on his heels, spitting the words out in irritation.
"Don't be too hard on me, Ran. By the look of things, there's nothing to worry about. The Sage will appear again — without fail."
Moor spoke around his cigarette, turning the newspaper's pages.
"'Grotesque serial mass murders by a lone sorcerer... victims through last week: some sixty, garrison troops among them...' Troubling. How many will tomorrow night add, I wonder?"
Mid-sentence, Moor's eyes met Harold's.
"Who are you two?"
Harold stopped in front of them.
And carefully, his hand drifted toward the staff at his hip.
"Prodding the sore spot just loud enough to be heard — deliberately. So you know who I am... You look suspicious from a mile off. What's your business here?"
Even as he spoke, Harold drew his mana up, ready to cast at a breath's notice.
Ran answered by snapping into an attack stance — and Moor's outstretched left arm barred him.
Ran read the intent and didn't lunge; but his guard never lowered an inch.
"Straight to the interrogation, I see. Not that I blame you — but rest easy. We are, most assuredly, not suspicious people."
Moor folded the newspaper in his right hand and smiled at Harold.
"First, though — would you mind taking your hand off that staff? Any further, and I don't think I'll be able to hold this one back."
Still smiling, Moor flicked his eyes toward Ran.
Harold's gaze followed the cue from Moor to Ran. Even at a glance, the boy read as dangerous.
"Ah! We have no intention of harming you, of course. Quite the opposite — we'd like to cooperate."
"...Cooperate?"
Harold realized, to his own surprise, that the word had genuinely eased something in him.
The talkative man looked strong in his own right — but instinct told him the silver-haired kid at his side was the truly dangerous one.
"We are paladins of the Church of Radiant Light — of the Counter-Demon Order, to be precise."
Moor pulled one last deep drag, breathed it out, and flicked the butt into the trash bin at his side.
"The serial killings gripping this city — if your suspect is a sorcerer of 'Sage' class, we will be of considerable use."
***
"It checks out. A letter of introduction did come down from above, apparently."
The heart of the city of Hayden. In an interrogation room of the Imperial Army office there, Ran and Moor sat side by side.
Harold spoke as he entered, a sheaf of documents in hand.
"So the request from above really was official."
"Well, naturally. We're paladins, you know."
Moor answered Harold with a sly grin.
"Now that there's a little trust between us, we'd love to hear about the case as soon as..."
"No. First — you two."
Harold tossed the documents onto the desk and sat down across from them.
"The higher-ups may have signed off, but I don't trust either of you an inch. In the field, I make the calls."
His glare at Moor left no room for argument.
Moor met it with a smile.
"But the only real sorcerer in this company is you, Lieutenant? And strictly speaking, a mage... but your opponent is a telekinetic, so even at equal level a head-on fight is a losing proposition, is it not?"
Moor held the smile on Harold — while his eyes kept darting to the pile of documents the man had thrown down.
"How do you know the killer is a telekinetic?"
"From the photographs in the newspapers, of course."
Moor answered as if it were nothing; inwardly, Harold reeled.
The truth was that for all the losses they had taken, they had never once secured solid information on their enemy. And the man in front of him was reciting the killer's profile off a few newspaper photographs.
Moor saw that his words had struck home. So he spread the newspaper open and walked Harold through it, step by step — the traces of mana visible in each photograph, and every reason behind his conclusions.
Harold listened with growing admiration. And then, close on its heels, a hollow sense of his own helplessness.
"And that's why nothing we've tried has worked?"
"Well... so it would appear."
Moor weighed dressing it up for a moment — then simply said what he thought.
"Frankly, that things ever came this far is strange in itself. A cold assessment? This platoon — no, this entire company — cannot fight a Sage."
"A Sage?"
Something shifted in Harold's eyes at the word. In that instant, Moor sensed he had touched something he shouldn't have.
But against Moor's expectations, it was Ran who reacted — slamming the desk as if he couldn't bear another second.
"Enough already — hand over everything you've got on the Sage! Do that, and I'll knock the bastard flat as many times as you want!"
Ran had surged to his feet, fuming. Moor laid a careful hand on his shoulder to rein him in.
"That's been the strange part since the moment we met. Why — why are you two so convinced this is a Sage's doing? And absurd as it sounds — if it really were a Sage, and a murdering fiend besides... wouldn't the sane thing be to run?"
To Harold, after all, Sages were the pinnacle of the magic path — beings who bent that power toward the world's advancement. The very premise of Ran and Moor's claim lay beyond his understanding.
Harold looked from one to the other, comprehending neither.
In their bearing, an unaccountable ease and a simmering fury stood side by side.