Drip, drip... drip...
The sound of water in the bathroom gradually softened until it ceased.
A moment later, Hayashi Yoshiki emerged, wearing a bathrobe. He wiped his wet hair with a towel while unlocking his flip phone.
"Tomorrow night at seven, come to the bar."
It was still a text message from an anonymous number.
Hayashi Yoshiki had no particular reaction after reading it. He simply deleted the message and went to the window sill in his bedroom.
—Gin arranging another meeting was something he could have foreseen, but this time, Gin hadn't managed to get any leverage on him. He wondered if Gin still had something in mind.
But for now, none of that mattered.
In Hayashi Yoshiki's view, the Organization was quite easy to navigate.
As long as he could complete the tasks assigned by the Organization, and not harm... or rather, not be discovered harming the Organization's interests, many other things would be fine.
For example, Gin, who could arbitrarily deal with Organization members, could tolerate the mysterious behavior of intelligence agents like Vermouth and Bourbon, and tolerate Pinga's direct provocations, simply because these individuals had outstanding operational abilities and he hadn't caught them with any leverage.
However, if Gin were to take notice of him and frequently send him on dirty jobs from now on, that situation wouldn't be so pleasant.
"So next, it's best to quickly raise my social status..."
Like Pisco in the Organization, because his public social status was quite high, even though he was occasionally assigned tasks by the Organization, his "attendance" frequency was quite low.
Therefore, Hayashi Yoshiki felt that being just a mystery novelist wasn't enough.
"If I were to be active as a famous detective..."
Hayashi Yoshiki lowered his gaze to the window outside.
The Organization didn't lack a useful executioner, but a detective who could participate in various cases and openly investigate all sorts of information would undoubtedly be more useful to the Organization.
Furthermore, becoming a detective was an idea Hayashi Yoshiki had from the beginning.
The Death Note was very useful, true, but if he only used criminals found through the Organization's intranet as consumables, over time, something might be noticed.
But as a detective, no matter how many cases and criminals he dealt with, no one would find it conspicuous, and he could also come into contact with some very useful talents.
For example, the assassin "Scorpion" who appeared in the movies and liked to shoot targets in the right eye, Kevin Yoshino, a skilled sniper and former US Marine Corps sergeant, and professional assassin Maya Tachibana, who was adept at strangling targets with wire in the series...
Although Hayashi Yoshiki, with the Death Note in hand, probably didn't need to rely on these "talents" to do anything for him.
However, these people's identities and personal abilities were very useful.
After all, even with the Death Note, if he wrote to make target A, who had no shooting experience, take a sniper rifle and headshot target B from six hundred yards away, the result would only be an infeasible cause of death, leading both to die of heart attacks directly... But controlling a sniper to do it would be a different matter.
And because they were criminals or professional assassins, killing any number of people inexplicably wouldn't arouse suspicion.
"..."
Hayashi Yoshiki, suddenly thinking of some interesting characters, put down his towel. His not-quite-dry hair hung down as he sat in front of the computer.
He opened the computer, typed "Lupin III" into the search engine, and pressed enter... Under the sluggish internet speed, the blank webpage took several seconds to display the search results.
Lupin III, internationally wanted phantom thief, descendant of the great thief Arsène Lupin, has committed multiple crimes worldwide since his appearance, and is currently wanted by over thirty countries—
He actually found it...
The glaring light of the monitor reflected on Hayashi Yoshiki's face.
Looking at the wanted photo in the search results, which looked a bit like a monkey, he quickly read the relevant information.
Lupin III was the protagonist of a popular work from the 1970s. Although it was from a long time ago, it later had two movie crossovers with Detective Conan... Since his information could now be found online, it suggested that the two worlds' settings had merged.
There were quite a few formidable characters in Lupin III...
He let his thoughts diverge from this.
Before transmigrating, Hayashi Yoshiki was not a professional assassin or a spy. He had never touched a gun. Although he had learned a bit of combat, compared to the human-shaped tyrannosaurs of this world, it was really just rudimentary skill.
Therefore, if he ever found himself in a critical situation, he seemed to be helpless—in a dire moment, the speed of writing names in the Death Note obviously couldn't be faster than a gun.
Many thoughts crossed Hayashi Yoshiki's mind.
Supernatural abilities exist in the Conan world; the most direct example is the magic of the witch Akako Koizumi...
However, learning magic was still somewhat unrealistic.
But what interested Hayashi Yoshiki more was another character from Magic Kaito, also featuring Akako Koizumi: the world-renowned illusionist—Gunther von Goldberg II.
Outwardly, he was a world-famous illusionist, but secretly, he was an assassin codenamed "Spider" hired by a mysterious organization. In the story, he attempted to kill Kaito Kid several times. His illusionary performances were almost equivalent to magic, and they seemed to be achieved through technological means.
With these thoughts in mind, Hayashi Yoshiki simultaneously searched for related information about him online—because he was a famous illusionist, there was plenty of information and photos of him on the internet.
Hayashi Yoshiki took out the Death Note, copied the person's name onto a blank page, and wrote the cause of death.
"Gunther von Goldberg II"
"At 00:14:31 AM, Tokyo time, March 19th, made an international call to 0081-xxx-xxx-xxx. After the call connected, began to follow all instructions from the other end of the line."
"On April 12th, Tokyo time, encountered robbers outdoors and was shot to death."
In the original work, Hakuba Saguru once said that "Gunther von Goldberg II" was actually an alias, and even his nationality information was entirely fabricated. Therefore, Hayashi Yoshiki wrote it down simply as a test.
He waited until 00:15 AM, and his phone showed no activity.
It was indeed an alias...
Hayashi Yoshiki didn't feel disappointed.
He merely regretted that he couldn't yet use the Shinigami Eyes; otherwise, he could have directly learned the person's name from the photo.
He had to think of another way—