"You're good at this."
A dark office. Moor and Harold worked by the light of one dim lamp, sorting out the formulas they would need.
Moor had looked over the documents Harold had prepared in advance, and found himself impressed.
"I had a good teacher."
"'Had'?"
The odd past tense caught Moor's ear.
"I wasn't always the only usable sorcerer in this company."
From Harold's words and the bitter look that came with them, Moor understood.
His teacher, his comrades — all of them had died in the course of this case.
That was likely a large part of why he clung to it the way he did.
A city where people were dying at this rate — and yet the senior officials, the mayor among them, were scrambling to bury the situation for the sake of their own positions. Which had made it all but impossible to request outside help openly. It was also, of course, the very reason Ran and Moor had been able to come here and work alongside the Imperial Army.
"Looks like the preparations are done. Let's head out."
Harold gathered a few documents and left the room.
***
"You've met him, so you'll know already."
Harold was busy inscribing formulas across the ground. Moor stood watch beside him, cigarette between his lips.
They had committed a great many of the city's imperial troops, and brought in outside help besides — professional adventurers and paladins — and still the case remained unsolved.
So on the day the killer had announced, every last person the company could field was deployed around this hospital.
"The sorcery he leans on most is that riddle of a 'smoke' — no one knows the principle behind it."
His formulas finished, Harold straightened up.
"He'll crush or fling away most anything with it. And use it as a smokescreen on top of that."
Moor nodded, agreeing without a word.
"But the truly troublesome one is the vanishing."
"Right. That's the biggest problem."
At the first announced killing, a fast response had let them field the absolute maximum of available personnel. And they had succeeded in ringing the suspect in with a ward.
They had been confident not so much as a rat could slip out.
"And he vanished anyway."
Harold's face turned bitter as he said it.
"He rampages to his heart's content, and at the end he always — always — turns to smoke and disappears right in front of us."
The frustration of it drove his fist into the wall as he spoke.
"To catch him, cracking the secret of that formula matters more than anything."
Moor and Harold walked a wide, unhurried circuit around the hospital.
Along the way, they checked the state of the formulas the imperial troops had inscribed.
"By the way — every formula you asked for is finished. A lot of them I've never seen before. What are they all for?"
"Well... insurance, mostly."
Moor waved the question off vaguely.
"With this... if we catch the Sage even now, will we be able to look them in the eye again, I wonder?"
"Of course. Without question..."
Their slow circuit of the hospital eventually brought the two of them to where Ran and a portion of the troops waited.
Ran was sitting flat on the ground, bored out of his mind.
"...He's late. Could've picked a time, at least... My food's going to finish digesting at this rate."
Ran's grumbling left Harold speechless. Every person here was laying their life on the line — and Ran talked like a friend was running late for lunch.
"How's your condition?"
"Huh?"
The question came out of nowhere, and Ran — hungry — answered prickly.
"How exactly do you plan to fight him? He got the better of you badly enough a few days ago."
Unbothered, Harold pressed his question.
Ran didn't answer it. Instead, he sprang abruptly to his feet.
"Hey? What is it, all of a sudden?"
"This smell! He's here! It's the Sage! The Sage has shown up!"
At Ran's shout, every imperial soldier waiting nearby went taut.
"There! Ready!"
One soldier raised his rifle and sighted on the hospital roof.
At the end of that muzzle stood a figure, dressed exactly as before.
"Not yet! Ran!"
"What?"
Ran was already lunging — and this time Moor stopped him successfully.
"You promised. You charged off on your own last time and lost him, so this time you listen to me."
"Tch. Fine."
BOOM—! KA-BOOM—!
In that instant the hospital building exploded. Debris and smoke swept over the imperial soldiers around it.
"Wow... straight to the rampage."
"Everyone, close ranks!"
While Moor covered his mouth and nose with an arm, marveling, Harold moved fast to get his men in order.
Fwooosh.
"What was that sound?"
The eerie noise had Moor scanning the area — but the smoke made anything hard to confirm.
"Careful! That's a favorite trick of his!"
Harold had barely finished when a massive chunk of debris came flying. It crushed the imperial soldier standing beside Ran flat.
"Tch — what's even happening? I can't see a thing!"
The fog was thick enough to blind them.
In visibility like this, the side with allies in the field could hardly move at all, while the enemy could fire off whatever he liked.
"Now I understand how they've been losing all this time."
Before Moor could finish the thought, an eerily loud string of explosions came rolling in from the distance.
Small fragments came flying in time with the blasts. Most of the imperial soldiers took them; Ran was slipping them on pure instinct.
"Ran! Fall back!"
Moor called him in urgently — and formed a defensive ward in the same breath.
Explosion upon explosion. Their force blew part of the smoke away.
And at the center of it stood the old woman, blasting imperial soldiers apart by the score.
Her eyes were locked, precisely, on Ran.
"That bastard!"
Ran started to charge — and the old woman turned to white smoke once more and was gone.
When the noise briefly fell away into silence, Moor used a sorcery at once to clear the view.
"Phew... is everyone all right?"
Moor looked around, checking on the imperial troops.
A considerable number had sheltered inside the wards laid down beforehand.
"Focus purely on staying alive and we can manage this somehow."
Harold and some of his soldiers came walking up to Moor from behind as he spoke.
"...Damn it all."
"Glad you look intact."
"Tch, this is infuriating! Just let me kill him already!"
"If he's got a way to escape, fighting him is meaningless. Catching him comes after we've cornered him."
Ran grumbled, thoroughly out of patience. Moor let him have his sulk and explained anyway.
"We've done it your way up to here, Moor. I assume you've got something for what comes next?"
Harold couldn't make sense of a plan in which Moor appeared to have done essentially nothing.
But given what the two of them had shown him, he decided to trust it — this once.
"No problem there. I've already found him."
"What? Found him? How, exactly?"
Before answering, Moor set a cigarette between his lips.
"One of my sorceries. This crow."
Moor stretched out his left hand into empty air, and a crow came flying from nowhere to settle lightly on it.
"These are my familiars. Scattered all over this city as we speak."
Moor tucked the cigarette between the fingers of his right hand and covered his right eye with the palm.
"And I can share sight with them. So once he's tagged, wherever he goes, I don't lose him."
Moor finished, took his hand from his eye, and put the cigarette back between his lips.
"Well then, shall we? Time to meet a Sage."
***
On the city's outskirts stood a mansion long past shabby — half-collapsing.
Inside, the place was a wreck, ransacked as if burglars had been through it.
Imperial soldiers combed it in careful teams.
BANG.
Midway through a sweep of the corridor, an attack of raw mana came out of nowhere and slammed into them.
The soldiers who took it head-on went down without a sound.
"There you are!"
Ran, walking a little behind them, read the flow of the mana and broke into a run.
"Aaagh!"
He dove into the room across the corridor — and was instantly flung back out by telekinetic force.
"What the hell was that!"
"What do you think? Ran, how many times do I have to say it? I told you not to go running off alone."
Moor propped up Ran where he was rolling across the floor.
"No, that's not it! That guy isn't the Sage!"
"Hm?"
At Ran's words, Moor raised his head and looked toward the room he had been thrown from. Out of it walked a boy with the face they had seen at the lake. On his left hand was a ring.
"Ah... as I thought."
"What do you mean, as you thought?"
Moor's parting word set Ran off.
"Ah! I wasn't keeping it from you, Ran. It only started seeming off to me partway through."
Startled by the reaction, Moor hurried to explain himself.
"Hey, Moor! You're telling me that child is the killer?"
Harold had been sweeping another wing with the rest of the men, and came running at the noise.
"Yes. That's the one who's killed close to a hundred people these past few weeks."
Moor pointed at the boy with the hand holding his cigarette.
"That's impossible, how could...!"
While the soldiers reeled at the fact that what they'd been fighting all this time was a mere child, their enemy was drawing his mana up.
"Right, you've all confirmed it — so everyone back away, please~"
Moor threw up a defensive ward, shielding himself and the others from the boy's attack.
And asked everyone to put distance between themselves and Ran.
"Ran, we're clear! Do as you like. Only..."
"I know! Don't break the ring!"
Ran finished Moor's sentence for him and shot at the boy like something loosed from a string.
"You, who've done nothing but lose to me? Go on and try!"
Unmoved by the charge, the boy poured sorcery into him.
Against Ran, with his silver energy flowing, none of it did a thing.
And in the end, Ran's fist landed square in the boy's face.
"Why won't it... urgh."
Sensing something wrong inside his own body, the boy tried to turn to white vapor — and found it wouldn't come.
"Why? Why does he keep attacking... and he isn't running, either."
"No. He can't run."
Moor set a cigarette between his lips and lit it.
"First: he escaped every ward you trapped him in because he had a set of coordinates. Those coordinates are this mansion. Which means an escape by that method is off the table."
Moor kept a continuous read on the boundary of the silver energy while guiding the other soldiers to safer ground.
"Second: he has not paid the price for the power he took from the remains. Which means he can't use sorcery at all anymore."
Moor watched the boy, smiling easily.
"No! What are you talking about, I paid it! All those imperial soldiers at the hospital... so why?"
Rolling on the floor under Ran's beating, the boy screamed it at Moor.
"No, you failed to pay it. The ones you killed were doubles — sorcery-made, at my request, by the Imperial Army. Cobbled together in a hurry, so a close look would have given them away, but in fog that thick, checking isn't easy. In the end you were beaten by your own sorcery."
Moor answered with a smile. Hearing it, the boy realized his mistake — even as he started coughing up blood, over and over.
"A true Sage would never have missed that point. But a child took on far more power than he could carry."
Moor drew a long pull on his cigarette and breathed it out as he spoke.
Contempt and pity were mixed together in his face.
"I couldn't! I couldn't help it either! I wanted someone to stop me. That's why I wrote down the dates and the places!"
The boy had managed to prop his upper body up, and no more; he spoke through tears.
"Bullshit! What do you mean, you couldn't help it? I saw the bodies you left behind. You enjoyed the killing — plainly."
Ran flew into a rage at the words.
"So — what's to be done with him now?"
The boy had reached a state in which he could do nothing at all but keep his eyes open.
Ran, all interest in him gone, let the silver energy go, which allowed the others to approach.
"It's regrettable, but leaving him like this will bring him to a condition where death would honestly be kinder. If killing a child sits badly with you..."
"No. This one has to be ours."
And with that, Harold drew the staff from his coat. And leveled it at the head of the boy lying prone on the floor.