The case was getting closer to being solved, but then the Old Man added another detail. "There were 14 women and one man killed here, however, I saw fifteen women here. I couldn't see the end of that, however, it's quite possible she survived or at least she didn't die here."
Zelaine looked at him, her mind racing. 'If she survived, then why hasn't she reported it? Or maybe she was silenced.'
Mr. Carl began checking his digital files. Originally, the salon had been gifted to him by his uncle a few months ago, and he only had the sale agreement paper's photo with him now. He needed to verify the identity of the previous owner.
"Where is it? I forgot where I saved it," he muttered, scrolling through the files on his phone for about two minutes. "Found it."
From over his shoulder, Zelaine peeked at the screen too. The name of the previous owner was Eug Ezhaloch, and the photo accompanying the name was that of a bald man.
"That is the man I saw," the Old Man confirmed.
Suddenly, things got complicated because of the name Ezhaloch.
"I think we should turn into paranormal activists instead," Zelaine said with a sigh, the weight of the investigation starting to feel more like a ghost story than a standard job.
Mr. Carl turned pale as the realization hit him. "I never checked the documents. What is the meaning of this? Did Ezhaloch cover this up? It can't be... they are honorable and loyal."
The Old Man stepped in to console him, his voice low and serious. "You should stay out of this. Ezhaloch is a reputable family; they would not want their family name to be tarnished."
Zelaine watched Eug's face on the phone screen with interest. While the others were distracted, she quickly pulled out her own device and texted someone. The message was sent to Cale artem, she had gotten his phone number now.
'Like always, this is going to be hectic,' she thought.
Suddenly, a vision flickered in her mind. The Old Man's head snapped up; he sensed the unmistakable ripple of someone using Yaicraft in the room.
In Zelaine's vision, a woman with black hair appeared directly in front of her. She looked to be in immense pain, her expression worn down as if she had been tortured for a very long time.
Surprisingly, Zelaine felt a sharp pang of sympathy for her, a feeling she couldn't quite explain.
"Did Eug Ezhaloch kill you here?" Zelaine asked.
To the Old Man and Mr. Carl, the room was empty; Zelaine appeared to be talking to thin air.
The girl then vanished, and everything in the basement returned to normal.
Sometimes later.
"Cost fifty five Sen, chicken flavoured. No."
"Let's see this one, spicy, curry flavoured. Cost seventy two Sen. What the hell is curry flavoured?"
Zelaine walked around stuffing fifteen bottles of beer and other stuff into her cart. She even checked some canned foods but went against herself and decided not to buy them.
"Twenty cup noodles."
"Good, it should suffice for tonight."
Zelaine then went to the counter and processed the payment using the Old Man's card.
They were now returning to their office, which served as their refuge. Mr. Carl had made a fuss earlier, but he ultimately decided to leave the matter altogether once he realized that the Ezhaloch family—one of the pillars of Ellejort—was involved.
He gave them the agreed payment and left, wanting no part of a scandal involving such a reputable name.
Zelaine had expected the Old Man to just give up and leave as well, but to her surprise, she saw him performing more divinations to find out the truth. It could have been for personal reasons, though frankly, she didn't care about his motives.
Her own mind was occupied. She had completed the coding for her new skill, and enactment was the only step left to obtain it. She felt a sudden, sharp urge to return home abruptly, but she held it inside.
After several more divinations, the Old Man gave up for the moment and suggested Zelaine walk the way back home. Zelaine promptly refused, but the Old Man successfully bribed her with the promise of more food.
So now, here she was, carrying a large box filled with a hoard of supplies, walking toward the Old Man with a satisfied face. The Old Man just watched her with a frown as she loaded the haul bought on his credit.
'Is my balance safe?' he wondered gloomily.
Then both walked on the lonely street. The moonlight shone very brightly and stars seemed to twinkle and glitter above. This kind of sight was not new for them.
Rather, even for Zelaine, being a Yai user who has lived for one hundred and twenty-six years, the sight was relatively very old, visible almost every night. Still, Zelaine was a shut-in most of the time, focusing almost all her time coding and hanging around Cale and Atiya; she did not have much time to admire the moonlight, nor wanted to anyway.
Still, when they reached a point under a large bridge, a figure approached them in a creepy walk.
The figure had a blood-red body except for the face of a man, and blood was dripping from his head. But on a closer look, one would easily notice the long, beautiful blonde hair of the figure was actually a wig. Zelaine's footsteps stopped. Even the Old Man was a little surprised and said:
"What kind of creature is this? It's making me curious."
"Please pull my hair out," the figure said in a truly creepy way.
Zelaine, however, had something different in mind. She grabbed the figure by its hair and instantly dumped it inside a nearby dumpster.
"Phew. It was scary. I am scared of ghosts," Zelaine thought, faking a sigh and waving the dust off her hands as if she had just performed a mundane chore.
"Ghosts should be the ones scared!" the Old Man thought, watching her nonchalantly toss a supernatural entity into the trash.
Both of them nonchalantly continued their journey back, the encounter at the dumpster already a fading thought.
After reaching the office, the Old Man went straight to sleep, likely exhausted by the divinations and the drainage of his bank account.
Zelaine did so too, but she had other intentions in mind. In the quiet of her room, she summoned her cube-shaped Yai circuit. As the familiar structure materialized, a hot liquid began to flow over every part of her body, the searing heat a byproduct of the intense data processing.
Then, in an instant, a vision of instructions flooded her mind—the final parameters of the enactment.
After a long breath, she smiled.
The task was an easy one; she could complete the final requirements in just a few days. She was only a few days away from finally gaining the Precognition skill.
****
"Offer me humans, at least one each year, and for the following year your village shall be freed of the curse."
They had almost discarded it as another failed ritual, the same dead end dressed in different words, until something happened that had never once occurred in their entire history of dark offerings.
Fredo trembled, his eyes tracking what was unfolding in the air above the altar, unable to look away and unable to fully process what he was seeing.
The shredded remains of the sacrifice they had just made were lifting, pieces of entrails and flesh and bone rising from the snow and gathering overhead, assembling themselves slowly and deliberately into a shape, piece by piece, the snow swirling around it as it took form.
He steadied himself and spoke to the voice.
"Will it truly work."
A beat of silence in which no one breathed.
"Will we really be free."
Every villager standing in that snow was scared, openly intimidated, staring at the forming statue above them and waiting for the answer.
The demonness smiled.
"Of course, and when the right sacrifice finally comes, your curse will be lifted entirely."
That was what happened back then.
Now it was time to commence the ritual of sacrificing Atiya, and Fredo was getting ready.
"It is time, human."
"Ara, from esteemed guest to human and soon to be sacrifice, quite the demotion." Atiya rattled the chains slightly with what limited movement he had. "But as you can see I cannot exactly move. Shabash."
Fredo looked at him for a moment.
"You were desperately trying to escape not long ago, yet your demeanor here is completely different, it is as though you have some kind of backup."
"If you are that curious you will find your answer soon enough."
Fredo opened the cell, gathered the end of the chain, and lifted Atiya without ceremony, carrying him out into the passage with the chains still fully wrapped around him.
The other villagers moved alongside them on both sides, watching the surroundings, quiet and alert.
"Oh my, oh my," Atiya said, as they moved through the corridor. "I have never even attempted a princess carry with my fucking girlfriend and here you are doing it so boldly, it is so goddamn embarrassing."
Fredo said nothing and kept walking.
In his understanding of Atiya, built from observation over the days since his arrival, he had taken him for a stoic and calculating person. This version of him did not fit that picture and Fredo could not determine whether it was genuine or engineered, which was its own kind of problem.
The nonsense continued all the way to the altar. Fredo arrived with his cargo still talking, the full assembly of villagers gathered and waiting, the statue of the demonness presiding over everything from above. And there, chained to the pole on the altar directly before the statue, was Leishna.
Atiya noticed her immediately and said nothing about it.
"Were you always this talkative," Fredo asked, setting him down.
"I just wanted to know if living the way she does is any fun," Atiya said, "and honestly, it really is."
Fredo glanced at Leishna and understood exactly who he meant.
Fredo could not afford to take risks at this stage, so he handled it personally, tying Atiya bare backed against the altar himself.
"Ah, please be gentle."
Atiya made a face that was equal parts mockery and theatrical suffering. Fredo ignored it and worked methodically, securing his wrists and legs with chains he had infused with his own yai specifically to prevent any activation of yaicraft. When he was done Atiya was fully bound against the stone, unable to do anything about any of it.
Leishna watched from her pole with visible delight.
"Partner! Could it be that you have finally reached nirvana? You are so calm in the face of death, exactly as I expected!"
She flailed against her chains as much as she could manage, which was not much, and grinned at him across the altar.
"Hahaha, right now I need not nirvana but a Super Saiyan transformation to get out of this on my own! Ha ha ha!"
Atiya called back with matching energy.
Fredo ignored both of them. The same could not be said for the rest of the villagers.
"Do they think this is funny?"
"We have watched countless of their kind have their guts opened and none of them ever acted like this."
"They are completely insane, that is all."
Fredo began drawing symbols around the statue and across the altar stone, dense and deliberate, each one placed with the precision of a thousand years of practice. The moment the last symbol was completed the surroundings shifted, a change that was felt before it was seen, the space itself contracting around them into something older and heavier than the mountain air it had been a moment before.
Villagers in robes rose into the snowy air around the altar, dozens of them, ascending without effort, and their voices joined together into a single sustained chant that rolled across the mountain.
"Ithryx..."
"Zantek..."
"Syoness..."
Atiya lay against the cold stone and looked up at all of it and felt the fear arrive properly for the first time, specific and immediate, settling into his chest alongside the cold of the altar beneath his back.
These could genuinely be his final moments.
He ran through what they might do to him, his mind supplying options he would have preferred not to think about. Guts opened. Chopped, the way he had chopped Screja. Strangled, the way he had strangled Kellen. The fear of it was real.
But underneath the fear something else was running, quieter and more considered. He was not particularly afraid of the demonness herself, and he had a reason for that, a thread he had been pulling since the cave, since the memory crystal, since the face he had seen in the dark below the lava river.
He turned his head toward Leishna and called out over the deafening chant.
"Are you not going to answer your worshippers, Leishna chan?"
Leishna tilted her head from her pole, her expression shifting into something that was almost but not quite innocent.
"Hmm. Whatever could you mean by that?"
"There were clues scattered all the way back, but I saw the real face of the demonness in the cave earlier." Atiya held her gaze across the altar. "Don't lie to me. You are the demonness, aren't you, Leishna chan."