After leaving the dilapidated warehouse and cautiously making their way back onto the street, Cid pulled along Kanade, who was still shaken after killing someone with her own hands, and followed behind Christina. He glanced around before speaking.
"Christina-san, if you haven't figured anything out yet, then I think you could at least tell us where we're going next."
Hearing Cid's voice, Christina frowned.
To be honest, although they had originally planned to follow Eliza and use her to locate her father, Marquis Despoht, that warehouse had turned out exactly as Cid predicted. There had been nothing inside except piles of civilian supplies.
It almost looked as though the Thirteen Nightblades really had decided to show some kindness for once and distribute valuable supplies free of charge to the residents trapped inside the blockaded royal capital.
But how could that possibly be true?
How could the Thirteen Nightblades ever be that kindhearted?
There had to be some conspiracy behind it!
Besides that, they had met a righteous ally from the Therianthrope Kingdom, someone who might even be willing to join forces with them, and they had learned quite a lot from her.
Although the other woman appeared cold and unapproachable, Christina believed she was simply cold on the outside and warm on the inside. She had become furious after hearing Alexia insult someone, and she had rescued them when they were in danger.
No matter how Christina looked at it, someone like that couldn't be a bad person.
At the very least, she was far more to Christina's liking than Alexia, who had already stepped on her nerves several times.
Still, tens of millions, perhaps even over a hundred million people, had disappeared.
And behind the Thirteen Nightblades, the organization that secretly controlled the Kingdom of Midgar, lurked an even greater darkness...
"Hey, Christina-san, are you spacing out again? Hurry up and do something about Kanade. I feel like she's about to have a breakdown."
Jolted out of her thoughts yet again, Christina looked toward Kanade, who was being dragged along by Cid with a vacant expression, and gave her a speechless look.
Christina never would have imagined that simply delivering the finishing blow to Eliza would leave Kanade like this.
She could understand the shock of killing someone for the first time, but wasn't this reaction a little excessive?
It wasn't as though they had tortured Eliza or mutilated her corpse.
Kanade's mental fortitude...
Wasn't it a bit too weak?
Christina sighed helplessly, then quickly accepted it.
Whatever. She should have realized long ago just how useless Kanade could be.
At least Kanade hadn't switched sides halfway through the fight.
That much was acceptable.
By now, Christina had more or less resigned herself to the kind of people she kept running into.
She no longer expected them to be useful.
She no longer demanded absolute loyalty.
As long as they weren't bad people and didn't do something absurd like betraying her in the middle of a battle, she could tolerate them.
Even someone like Alexia, so long as she hadn't actually acted on her thoughts yet, was still someone Christina was willing to spend time trying to guide back onto the right path.
"I'll lead the way. I'll take you somewhere Kanade can rest for a while. While we're there, I'll also introduce you to an ally I met through Alexia yesterday."
After taking a quick look and confirming that Kanade was merely dazed because she was terrified of being arrested and executed tomorrow for murdering the daughter of a marquis, Christina couldn't be bothered comforting her.
She turned around, said those words, and led the way.
"Then we'd better hurry. It's already gotten pretty late. If we drag this out much longer, we might miss dinner. And if possible, I'd rather not let this go past midnight. I'm firmly against staying up late."
Cid pointed toward the already dark sky, deliberately explaining himself so this wouldn't interfere with his plans for later that night.
"Got it."
Christina answered casually and picked up the pace.
Before long, she had brought the two of them to the entrance of a restaurant.
"Let me introduce you to a friend I met yesterday. She's an ally who'll be fighting the Thirteen Nightblades alongside us, and she's also the author of the best-selling work in the entire country, perhaps even the whole world. Na..."
Christina spoke with almost ceremonial enthusiasm, a smile on her face as she excitedly pushed open the door.
Then she abruptly stopped the moment she saw the person inside.
"Alexia? Why are you the only one here? Where's Mr. Natsume?"
Faced with Christina's barrage of questions, Alexia lazily twirled a strand of hair around her finger while her bored gaze swept across Christina and the two people behind her.
When her eyes landed on Cid, a few ripples disturbed that otherwise stagnant gaze.
But she said nothing.
"She said something came up at the last minute, so she left first."
"Huh? In that case, I'll just head..."
The moment Christina heard that the person she had intended to introduce wasn't there, she immediately prepared to leave and go home.
If Alexia was the only one here, what was there to introduce?
They already knew each other perfectly well.
"What's that supposed to mean? You hear I'm the only one here and immediately decide to leave? And after I went out of my way to find quite a bit of information for you."
Christina's foot paused just as she was about to step away.
She glanced at Cid a few times, turned back toward Alexia, and sighed before finally taking her seat.
"If you still consider yourself the person who invited me here in the first place, Alexia, then I'm willing to talk to you."
"I have no idea what you're talking about. If anything, I'm the one who wants to ask why you brought him here."
Alexia couldn't understand why Christina's attitude toward her had changed so drastically in just one day.
But after glancing toward Cid, who was sitting in the back beside Kanade with a vacant expression, Alexia instinctively remembered what had happened yesterday.
She suddenly understood.
Or perhaps she simply didn't have the energy to think about it.
Whatever.
She would just assume Christina had run into something irritating too.
"I'll take that as you wanting to change. Do you want me to have Cid leave?"
Christina sighed and asked Alexia in return.
If Alexia was about to reveal especially important information, perhaps it would actually be safer for Cid and Kanade if they didn't hear it.
"Do whatever you want. I can't be bothered caring about them."
Alexia answered petulantly, let out a heavy breath, and pulled out a document folder.
"My sister has been watching me very closely lately, and there aren't many people around me I can trust. I haven't been able to investigate much. But there are some ordinary things that no one pays much attention to, and I found something strange in the data."
"But judging by your expression... did you find something too? Why don't you go first?"
Christina nodded.
She had no intention of hiding anything important.
She omitted the part where they had followed and killed Eliza, but told Alexia about meeting Zeta, focusing on what Zeta had revealed to her.
"The Therianthrope who hit me in the street that day saved you when you were attacked by those mysterious people? Christina, are you sure you didn't mistake her for someone else?"
"I'm sure."
Seeing Christina nod, Alexia's expression immediately darkened.
After all, Zeta's punch that day had landed very solidly on her.
"Let me ask you something first. She isn't from Shadow Garden or the Cult of Diablos, is she?"
"In my opinion, no. Not only because she said she came from the Therianthrope Kingdom, but more importantly, she wasn't wearing a mask."
Alexia was left momentarily speechless.
In truth, she had already believed Christina the moment she said the mysterious Therianthrope denied being part of Shadow Garden.
Alexia had dealt with members of Shadow Garden before.
Those women had absolutely no interest in hiding which side they belonged to.
But that was exactly why this shocked her.
A Therianthrope several times stronger than her sister, Princess Iris, had appeared inside the royal capital, yet Alexia hadn't received the slightest information about her.
Along with her shock came yet another wave of disgust toward the corruption festering throughout the Kingdom of Midgar.
"If that's the case, then the information you got from her might corroborate what I found. These are the recent figures for people crossing the Kingdom's borders and the volume of goods being transported through them."
Alexia spread the documents across the table and pointed toward the figures from two months ago, those from the most recent month, and the economic data for the same period.
"This much?"
Christina stepped forward and carefully compared the numbers before blurting out the question.
Compared to the flow of goods entering through the Kingdom's borders two months earlier, inbound traffic over the past two months had practically reached full capacity.
Yet both the amount leaving the Kingdom and the state of the Kingdom's economy remained roughly where they had been two months ago.
"Exactly. So where did all those goods, or people, that seemingly vanished into thin air end up? Are they still somewhere inside the Kingdom, or were they moved elsewhere? Is there some hidden route out of the Kingdom that I don't know about?"
Alexia pointed toward several locations listed on the documents.
The shipments recorded there had effectively disappeared after reaching those places.
No one had seriously considered the possibility that the missing people were being killed.
After all, transporting them all the way to the Kingdom of Midgar just to kill them would be pointless extra work.
And the aftermath of killing that many people would be impossible to conceal.
Those places look...
Kind of familiar.
Cid sat in the back beside Kanade, doing his best to look like an ordinary extra while glancing toward the documents.
He could only see a small part of them, but he vaguely remembered having visited those locations before.
If he remembered correctly...
He had passed through those areas while clearing out some bandits and mountain brigands.
It was probably just a coincidence...
Right?
"Hey, Cid, don't you think something feels a little strange?"
While Cid was thinking, Kanade nudged his arm and whispered.
"What feels strange?"
"The atmosphere. Didn't you see how Christina-sama and Alexia looked like they were about to start fighting earlier? Did they have some kind of falling-out?"
"Oh, that. It's nothing serious. To put it simply, it's that time of the month, so they're both in bad moods."
Cid glanced toward the two women, who had been glaring daggers at each other not long ago but were now sitting together analyzing the situation, and shrugged.
He didn't think much of it.
Still...
Something did feel strange.
"I figured it out."
"Whoa, Cid, what did you figure out?"
Hearing Cid suddenly speak, Kanade instinctively asked.
"I figured out what was wrong with that Magical Power transmission pattern we saw earlier."
"What was wrong with it?"
"Given the scale of that Magic Circle, forget the royal capital. Even if you combined every piece of magical equipment in the entire Kingdom of Midgar, there still wouldn't be enough energy to fully power even one of those circuits."
"That does sound like a problem. So, Cid, where do you think they're getting that much energy?"
Huh?
Cid answered instinctively, then realized the voice hadn't come from Kanade.
He turned around.
At some point, Christina and Alexia had both started staring directly at him.
Cid fell silent for a moment, then looked toward Kanade.
She had somehow reverted to the same vacant, traumatized state she had been in earlier.
If Cid hadn't just seen her acting completely normal, he might actually have believed it.
You're faking it now, aren't you?
"There's a gigantic Magic Circle underneath the royal capital covering the entire city? How do I not know about something like that? You're not joking, are you?"
Alexia frowned, clearly skeptical of what Christina had just told her.
No matter how weak the royal family's control over the Kingdom of Midgar had become, surely they couldn't be so incompetent that someone could cover the entire royal capital with a Magic Circle without them noticing...
Right?
After several seconds of silence, Alexia pulled another document from the folder.
She studied it briefly, then raised her head.
Her expression now carried a mixture of resignation and complete despair.
"Ah... Construction and building-maintenance spending in the royal capital has multiplied several times over during the past month, but there isn't a single major facility visibly under construction anywhere in the city!"
Alexia shouted the words furiously and smacked herself on the head several times.
Once again, she found herself despairing over her father's hands-off attitude and the sheer proportion of traitors infesting the Kingdom.
Even she could detect something wrong merely by examining construction and financial records.
Yet throughout all the time since she and her sister had returned, not a single person had mentioned it.
In fact, if Alexia hadn't personally investigated and someone hadn't tipped her off, she still wouldn't know about it.
"The Cult of Diablos went through all this trouble to build something like that. There's absolutely a conspiracy behind it! Damn them. Tomorrow, I'm getting people to tear that Magic Circle apart!"
Just throwing this out there...
Couldn't someone simply be embezzling the money?
People have been drawing salaries for nonexistent work since ancient times.
From Cid's perspective, Christina and Alexia had committed one of the greatest mistakes possible in deduction.
They had decided on the answer first, then started searching for evidence to support it.
The whole story about enormous numbers of people mysteriously disappearing had originally been something Zeta improvised based on recent events.
Still...
Watching the two of them enthusiastically piece everything together, Cid thought it wasn't half bad.
"Bang! Bang! Bang!"
A pounding sound came from outside the door.
Or rather...
Was that really knocking?
The sudden noise drew everyone's attention.
Christina instinctively looked toward Alexia.
"Did you order food?"
"No. I already ate at the palace."
Alexia shook her head and walked toward the door, having no idea who was outside.
Rather than sit around speculating, it would be faster to simply open the door and ask.
Besides, keeping someone waiting too long would be rude.
"Bang! Bang! Bang!"
"Coming."
The pounding continued without pause.
Alexia called out, trying to get whoever was outside to stop, but they kept striking the door as though they hadn't heard her at all.
Something...
Feels wrong.
"Wait!"
Cid suddenly moved and rushed toward the door, shouting at Alexia.
"Crack!"
Just as Alexia reached the door and was about to open it, she heard Cid's voice and turned her head.
At that exact moment, the sound of metal tearing apart rang out.
"Boom!"
The door exploded inward.
Flying debris instantly obscured Alexia's vision as a massive figure lunged through the doorway.
An arm powerful enough to rip apart an alloy door with its bare hands reached straight for Alexia's head.
If it caught her, there was little doubt her skull would be crushed like soft tofu.
"Get out of the way!"
Cid grabbed Alexia and pulled her down with him, sending them both crashing toward the floor while narrowly avoiding the terrifying strike.
"Boom!"
"Roooooar!"
The massive figure smashed into the ground, blasting out a large crater.
But even after missing its first attack, it showed no intention of stopping.
With a terrifying roar, the figure immediately charged toward Christina.
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