And so. "Click."
Narukami Koharu slid her long blade back into its sheath.
"There. The Constable should be satisfied now."
"Though it's rather unfortunate."
"But our captain Dix is out on a mission in the Dungeon today, so he isn't at headquarters right now."
"Still, since our Ikelos Familia has handed over the wrongdoers, that ought to count as an answer for the Constable."
This maneuver — they meant to carry the gecko's tail-shedding through to the very end.
Shakti tightened her grip on the shaft of her halberd.
The scapegoats set up to take the fall had been bound and dragged out to close the case, and now they'd been slaughtered in plain sight.
The captain himself had even slipped away clean on some pretext.
She knew for certain that behind this threshold lay filth that couldn't stand the light of day.
Under the constraints of the Guild's regulations and the rules of due legal process.
As long as they didn't openly draw weapons in resistance.
She, as Military Police captain, had no grounds to smash that gate down by force.
After all.
Rules only ever bind those willing to abide by them.
For the maggots who used the Guild's articles as a shield, no one understood better how to eke out survival in the cracks of the law.
But this was only a temporary reprieve.
At the thought, Shakti swept her gaze over the several headless corpses lying in pools of blood, no longer twitching.
"In that case, tell your captain when he returns."
Shakti looked coldly at Gran and spoke.
"If the Ikelos Familia's name dares carry even the faintest whiff of another violation out there—"
"No matter where you hide."
"The next time someone comes knocking, it won't just be this handful of us."
Gran didn't bother with so much as a reply, simply turning to grab the heavy iron door.
"Bang." The gate slammed shut.
And with it, the tangled alleys of Daedalus Street gradually fell away behind them.
Tsukuyo seemed weighed down, lost in some thought of her own.
Shakti unfurled the parchment list in her hand.
More than half the inked names were crossed out.
She turned to Narukami Koharu beside her.
"Every Familia we could move against today has been dealt with."
"The rest have foul reputations, but I lack solid evidence to act directly, so they'll have to wait."
Koharu only shrugged, unbothered, her hands toying all the while with her black blade, Bloodcry.
Her thumb wiped away the last trace of blood lingering in the seam of the guard.
A smile sat at the corner of her mouth.
After all, she'd taken dozens of heads today.
Her clothes, from collar to hem, were long since soaked through with blood.
Yet she showed none of the Sanity crash that follows excessive slaughter.
If anything, she looked deeply content.
Like a traveler who'd wandered too long across a vast desert and had at last found an oasis of her own.
In this world where life could be measured in killing, she'd finally found the place where she belonged.
What's more.
She'd executed so many people today.
When she went back tonight and had her god update her Grace, the figures were sure to be staggering.
And so the group left Daedalus Street and set off down the road back toward the upscale residential district.
As the setting sun dyed Orario's streets a deep orange-red.
Along the way, vendors pushing wooden carts and adventurers shouldering weapons caught sight of Narukami Koharu drenched head to toe in blood, walking in the midst of a fully armed Military Police column.
One after another they drew back against the walls, muttering under their breath.
Behind the second-floor windows of a few taverns, eyes likewise sized up this small figure with short golden hair.
In just a single afternoon.
Everything that had happened today had sprouted wings and spread to every corner of the city.
The very first day the new Constable officially took office.
The core members of the Apollo Familia had all been thrown into the cells, their headquarters sealed.
Seven or eight small and mid-sized Familias, long steeped in wrongdoing and colluding with the black market, had been torn out by the roots.
Dozens of heads had literally tumbled into the foul gutters of Daedalus Street.
The bloody purge had indeed bought the first cornerstone of a new order.
Namely, that the new Constable truly could kill in defiance of the law.
Hushed conversations swirled through the alleys.
Amid these whispered exchanges, some had even learned through their channels that she and Tsukuyo were sisters.
Koharu turned her head and bared a grin toward the direction the voice had come from.
A mouthful of stark white shark teeth flashed in the air.
It frightened the loose-lipped adventurer so badly that he dropped flat onto his backside, then scrambled and stumbled into the nearby alley to hide.
"Hahaha, boring."
Koharu snorted in scorn at the sight and turned to keep walking.
And so, before long, the group finally arrived at the gate of Haimer's mansion in the upscale district.
By now the sky had darkened, and the Magic Stone lamps along the street were flickering on one after another.
Lili walked at the very front, trotting up to the gate and pushing open the courtyard's black wrought-iron door.
Shakti stopped by the gatepost and didn't step into the courtyard with them.
She glanced through the oak door Lili had opened, and seeing no sign of that familiar figure toward the hall—
"Since Lord Haimer isn't in right now."
"I shouldn't intrude any further."
Shakti shifted her halberd to her left hand and gave Tsukuyo and Koharu a slight nod.
"The Ganesha Familia will handle the cleanup."
"Rest up, everyone. I'll take my leave."
But then, no sooner had Shakti finished speaking—
"In such a hurry to go, Miss Shakti?"
A gentle voice drifted over.
They all turned to look; Haimer was just coming up from the other direction.
In his hand he carried a small bag of snacks wrapped in kraft paper.
He seemed to have just returned from shopping.
Haimer handed the snacks to Lili, patted her head, then looked at Shakti in greeting.
"Lord Haimer, you've just come back from outside?"
Shakti gave a slight bow.
Haimer nodded.
"I took a trip over to the Guild to apologize to Eina."
"After all, today's affair made quite a stir."
"With the Apollo Familia's conversion workload suddenly ballooning, Miss Eina's been working overtime brutally lately."
Haimer smiled and added a word.
"So I've arranged to treat Miss Eina to a meal tomorrow, if she's free, by way of making it up to her."
At the name "Eina," Koharu tilted her head.
"Eina?"
Koharu looked at Tsukuyo, her voice full of curiosity.
"How come I've never heard that name before?"
Tsukuyo softly picked up the thread.
"Miss Eina is our Familia's dedicated advisor at the Guild, elder sister."
"Being a Guild advisor, Miss Eina knows a great deal, and she looks after us very attentively."
"A Guild advisor?"
"Knows a lot, and attentive?"
Hearing this.
The corner of Koharu's mouth curled up, and she flashed her trademark shark-toothed grin, looking eager to try her luck.
"Since she takes such good care of my little sister, I'd like to meet her someday too."
"You can meet her."
"Once your stats sublimate to Lv. 2."
"Then I'll naturally take you to the Guild to see her and have your record updated."
With that, Haimer reached out and ruffled Koharu's short golden hair.
Koharu blinked, but instead of pulling away she pushed her neck up into it and asked with some curiosity, "Is this one of the ways a god shows affection?"
"You could take it that way."
And so, once Haimer had finished, Shakti gave a brief report on the matter of the list from earlier.
She placed special emphasis on the Ikelos Familia handing over five scapegoat corpses.
Haimer listened without any surprise, only nodding.
"Well done, Miss Shakti."
"Since they know today to cut out their own tongues and hide, let them sit in the sewers for now."
"No rush. The remaining rats are more fun caught slowly."
Seeing that Haimer clearly had a plan in mind, Shakti finally set down the burden she'd carried all day.
"Since Lord Haimer has a plan, I'll return to headquarters and report in."
With that, Shakti bowed, then turned and led the Military Police column off down the street.
After Miss Shakti had left, the courtyard gate fell quiet.
Tsukuyo stood to one side, her lips parting a few times then closing again, as though she wanted to speak but held back.
Haimer glanced at her, and putting it together with what had come before, understood at once what Tsukuyo was wrestling with.
After all, back then, the reason Tsukuyo and the others had learned of the Xenos.
was thanks to her hearing — catching from afar the Ikelos Familia's discussion of "poaching sentient monsters."
"Tsukuyo."
Haimer spoke plainly, his tone casual.
"If there's something on your mind, say it."
Tsukuyo nodded slightly and reported to Haimer in a low voice.
"Kami-sama."
Tsukuyo seemed to have heard wind flowing beneath the ground of that place called Daedalus Street.
As Tsukuyo raised the doubt she'd sensed at Daedalus Street.
Haimer found himself a little surprised.
After all, he hadn't expected Tsukuyo to notice the artificial labyrinth deep beneath Daedalus Street — Knossos.
Its entrance lay precisely in a hidden spot within Orario's Daedalus Street.
Haimer had assumed at first that through such thick earth even Tsukuyo would struggle to detect it — yet he'd never imagined how badly he had underestimated her.
"I think... the wind you heard, Tsukuyo... must be the passage the Ikelos Familia uses to smuggle the Xenos."
The oak door closed, sealing the night air of the street entirely outside.
Orario's nights held more clamor than calm.
Several blocks on.
Shakti led the Military Police at a steady pace along the cobbled road back to the Ganesha Familia's headquarters.
From far off, the lights beneath the enormous elephant-god statue were already visible.
A short, wheat-skinned Amazon girl who'd been leaning against a stone pillar sprang up the moment she spotted Shakti and trotted over to meet her.
"Lord Shakti!"
A faint scatter of brown freckles across the bridge of her nose, the girl arrived out of breath.
Seeing her excitement, Shakti raised an eyebrow and tossed her halberd to a Military Police member beside her.
"It's late — what are you doing standing out here by the gate?"
"Bringing you the good news firsthand, of course!"
"The interrogators just sent word!"
"Lord Haimer's name works like a charm!"
The Amazon girl gestured wildly, hands and feet flying, like a newcomer who'd just heard the deeds of a great hero.
"You should've seen it."
"Those few Familia gods we hauled back today from the sewer strongholds in Daedalus Street."
"Every other time these gods came in, their noses turned up at the ceiling — hours of interrogation and not a single word out of them."
"But today, the moment they hit the cells."
"The instant the interrogators warned them in the name of Constable Haimer."
"Those gods—"
"every one of them turned meek in a flash!"
"Before, you'd ask three questions and get silence; now they cough up whatever you bring up — where the rotten ledgers are buried, where their runaway underlings are hiding and making contact, all spilled clean to the bottom!"
"Before, they wouldn't make a peep no matter what you asked; now, ask anything and they answer!"
With that, the girl scratched her head and, a little sheepish, lowered her voice further.
She glanced left and right, confirming that no one but them was paying attention.
"I know it's not very respectful to Lord Haimer to say this."
"But..."
"Lord Shakti, it really does take a villain to break a villain!"
The words were blunt to the extreme.
And they voiced what these errand-running MPs all felt.
Shakti shook her head and cut her off.
She flicked a finger lightly against the little girl's forehead in correction.
"Keep it down, and mind your words."
Shakti's tone was stern.
"Judging by the purges Lord Haimer is carrying out and his protection of the honest, decent lower-tier adventurers alone."
"To us, he's certainly no evil god."
At that, even Shakti couldn't keep a flicker of fantasy from stirring.
If only Haimer had descended to the Lower World a little sooner.
Even just a few years earlier.
Then...
The barb lodged in the hearts of countless veteran adventurers.
All the blood so many comrades had shed back then, those tragedies.
The catastrophe of the Astraea Familia.
All of it might have happened a little less.
At the thought.
A gust of wind blew, and Shakti went still, her mood sinking.
After a few seconds of silence she gave her head a small shake, forcing these impractical notions firmly down.
Then she clapped a hand on the Amazon girl's shoulder, startling her.
"All right."
"Since they're willing to talk now, that's a good thing. Come on, take me to the interrogation room."
"Let's see whether they can still give us leads, and follow the thread to whatever big fish are buried deep and slipped this net."
"Yes!"
The Amazon girl seemed to hold Shakti in real awe.
At the order she snapped straight, answered crisply, and hurried to the front to lead the way.
Meanwhile, in stark contrast, was the Southeast District.
Deep in the Pleasure Quarter, at the very top floor of the Ishtar Familia's base — the Temple of the Divine Courtesan.
Ishtar, dusky-skinned and purple-haired, sat barefoot before the great bronze mirror of her vanity, wrapped in an extravagantly gaudy nightgown.
On the carpet at the center of the room behind her knelt a covert scout, who had just finished reporting, word for word, everything that had happened across the black markets a little over half an hour ago.
— Such as the Apollo Familia's headquarters being utterly wiped out.
— Hyacinthus having a hand and a foot severed and being carried off by the Military Police.
— Seven or eight small and mid-sized Familias that habitually made eyes with Evilus in private and long concealed their black-market dealings, all scoured clean within a mere seven hours.
Having heard all this.
Ishtar appeared to still be grooming before the vanity mirror, but in truth her fingers had clamped down hard on the tabletop.
Her bright-red painted nails raked three grooves straight into the hardwood surface.
A sharp crack — several hairpins were crushed to powder along with it.
Ishtar had crushed them by sheer force.
In the mirror, Ishtar's face was drawn taut as stagnant water.
The veins on her forehead bulged a finger thick.
Ruthless! Truly ruthless!
Only the first day, and Apollo had already been toppled outright.
Ishtar honestly didn't know whether to count herself lucky that, in all these years, the most fatal handles against her still hadn't truly fallen into the hands of the Guild and Ganesha.
But regardless.
Making eyes with Evilus, expanding her fortune for years through illegal trade — Ishtar had done no less of it herself.
It was she who had deliberately sent people last night to spread to Hyacinthus the news that Apollo had once been humiliated by Haimer.
That was what drove Hyacinthus to raise such a ruckus this morning, making Apollo the first chosen to be Haimer's example — the chicken killed to cow the monkeys.
But Ishtar hadn't expected Apollo to die so fast.
Apollo was dead. The next in line might well be her.
"Damn it!"
"That useless thing!"
"Aisha."
At the thought, Ishtar stopped grinding her teeth and turned her head.
toward Aisha — tall, bronze-skinned, arms crossed, standing in the shadowed corner of the room.
Hearing her goddess call her name.
Aisha stepped half a pace forward, out of the wall lamp's shadow.
"Lord Ishtar."
"Go."
Ishtar rose, trailing the hem of that lavish, ribboned nightgown now torn open in several places, and crushed the shattered jade hairpin fragments on the floor beneath her bare feet.
Even as the shards stabbed painfully into her heel, she didn't so much as blink.
She wiped hard with her fingertip at the lipstick smeared by her earlier loss of composure, dragging a glaring red streak across her face.
"Go summon those few outside reinforcements who arrived last night."
"I have new arrangements."
Because she knew full well that Orario's balance had now been utterly shattered by Haimer as Constable.
No matter what.
Kali had already sent her Familia over ahead of time.
Even if it was unclear whether Telskyura — the warrior nation on Kali's side that had long enforced a closed-country policy — already knew of Haimer's descent to the Lower World.
As long as the plan to imprison Sanjouno Haruhime's soul with the Killing Stone in exchange for a large-scale surge in power succeeded, taking effect one step ahead...
then once she defeated the Freya Familia, she'd still have a chance to turn the tide against the wind!
That's right! She would win!
As long as the beauty goddess's charm worked on Haimer...
____
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