Ur City Police Station.
“Well? Those three still won’t give up the names of their ninety accomplices?” Aisha asked her subordinate sternly.
“They insist there are only three of them.”
“Looks like these guys are the real deal—a proper gang. Tight-lipped, aren’t they.” Aisha couldn’t help a flicker of respect for the trio who refused to sell out their comrades.
Ever since the men had been hauled in the day before, her people had tried every method to interrogate the three of them, and they’d held firm that their side numbered only three.
If Mir hadn’t used magic to reconstruct, from memory, the intelligence he’d overheard at the time, she might well have been taken in.
“Keep at the questioning until they cough up the rest of their crew. These men are far too dangerous to be left running loose!” For all the sliver of admiration Raji had earned, Aisha would never allow a criminal gang like this to walk free.
“Yes, Captain!”
Once she’d seen her subordinate out, Aisha fished a black stone out of her desk drawer and turned it over in her hands.
It had been found on that gang leader; it didn’t look like anything valuable, and she couldn’t sense any magical reaction off of it, so she’d tossed it into the drawer without a thought.
The gang leader had only said the thing was a specialty of his hometown.
She studied it for a while without making heads or tails of it, and made to put the stone back.
That, at least, was what her brain intended—but her body didn’t carry out the order.
Instead it slipped the stone into her own pocket, and Aisha noticed nothing amiss about the motion at all.
In Carlo’s dorm room over in the apartment building, Mir and the other two lay sprawled listlessly across the sofa, playing cards.
“When on earth is Vills coming back?”
“How many times is that you’ve asked now?” Carlo frowned at the cards in his hand.
“Is one of us cheating?
Why did I just draw five threes?”
“Bet it’s Mir again.
He’s the only one who loves pulling this kind of thing,” Sak said, pointing straight at the prime suspect.
“You can eat shit, but you can’t just talk shit. Why does the cheater always have to be me?” Mir dug at his ear with the deadest fish-eyes imaginable.
Do I really leave that bad an impression on these guys?
“How about we all take our shirts off and see who’s hiding cards?”
Carlo shot the proposer, Mir, a startled look.
Could it really not be this guy after all? Read this novel at g.com for the best experience.
“Take our shirts off for what? You just chucked the cards you were hiding at the door while nobody was looking—I saw the whole thing. It made a huge racket; Carlo, are those beast ears of yours just for decoration?” Sak pointed at the several cards embedded in the door.
Under Mir’s terrifying freakish strength, the playing cards had actually sunk about a centimeter into that sturdy metal door of some unidentified material.
The cards looked wrecked, yet it still left you wondering whether they’d been made a little too tough.
“Argh! Why do you always have it out for my door, you jerk?!” Carlo shot to his feet, worked up.
“Now don’t get the wrong idea—it’s not just you I’ve got it in for. I hold a prejudice against every door in the world.” Mir kindly pointed out Carlo’s mistake.
Hearing this, Carlo felt he really ought to warn this unrepentant menace:
“I’m warning you—lay a finger on my door again and I really won’t go easy on you!”
“Are you asking me to lay a finger on your figurines?”
At the threat, Carlo’s body went rigid.
“Oh, and—back when you and I first met, three years ago…”
“Stop! Stop! Stop!” Carlo cut Mir off with three rapid-fire stops.
“Didn’t we agree never to bring that up again?!”
His agitated reaction successfully piqued Sak’s curiosity.
“What happened three years ago?”
Sak had only arrived at the academy two years back, so he knew nothing of whatever had passed between these two three years ago.
“Don’t ask!” Carlo glared at Sak with bloodshot eyes.
That over-the-top reaction only whetted Sak’s interest further: “Why the whole ‘my embarrassing past just got dragged out in public by a lousy friend’ routine?”
Hearing that, Carlo looked at Sak as if he’d seen a ghost—though strictly speaking, Sak was in fact a ghost.
“He just swaggered in like some Long Aotian protagonist when he first got to the academy—what’s the big deal?” Mir said, keen as ever to fan the flames.
“Aaargh!!! You bastard! I’ll strangle you!!!”
Carlo lunged and grappled with Mir, and was promptly, flawlessly pinned.
“Long Aotian? What does that mean?” Sak confessed his ignorance of the pair’s specialized vocabulary.
At his question, the two broke off their scuffle, exchanged a glance, and answered—one relieved, one disappointed—”You don’t need to know.”
Sak: ???
“Forget it, you two losers have fun. I’m off to help the girl tidy up her room.” Mir shot the pair a disdainful look, stood, walked to the door, and then…
Thud!
“Open the door properly!!” Carlo felt that letting this guy hang out in his dorm was the single greatest mistake of his life.
“Don’t you know how to knock?”
“You sure you want me to knock?” Mir’s expression turned progressively more absurd.
Xia Ye fell silent.
“I came to help you tidy up. You just bought a whole load of stuff, didn’t you?”
Xia Ye didn’t answer that.
Instead, face darkening, she called out a certain someone’s irresponsibility: “Finding the shops cost me a ton of time.”
“Why’s that?” The boy Mir seemed not to register any fault.
“Never mind, it’s nothing.” The girl wisely declined to argue the point with him.
“If you’re going to help, don’t just stand there—help me put things away.”
“You got it!”
Mir picked up one of the more private things Xia Ye had just bought and moved to tuck it into the wardrobe.
Mortified and indignant, the girl gave him a punch, then cradled her own reddened little hand and rubbed it.
“What are you doing?” Mir asked, honestly baffled, still holding the private item in his hands.
Xia Ye had never met anyone who could handle another person’s private belongings and still play so innocent.
“What are you doing, you pervert?!”
“Helping you tidy up—what else?” Mir knitted his brows.
Was this girl a little high-strung?
“Tidy up? Who said you could touch my private things?!” Xia Ye’s ice-beauty image was starting to crack.
Mir genuinely could not grasp why the girl was angry.
Back when he used to help Erin sort out her laundry, she’d never reacted anywhere near this strongly—did this girl’s belongings have some kind of secret on them?
Still failing to register the boundary he’d crossed, Mir turned the thing over with open curiosity—and that was the final straw.
A wisp of dark aura began to leak off of Xia Ye of its own accord.
“You…” The girl’s pitch-black mana spread across her whole body.
“Hm? What’s wrong?” And yet Mir, blind as a bat, still hadn’t registered the gravity of the situation.
“Go die!!!”
A mana-laden punch slammed into Mir’s chest.
It didn’t do much real damage, but the sheer force sent Mir rocketing straight out the door—heading, of all directions, toward the ordinary students’ girls’ dormitory.