Episode 11 — Declaration of War
“How did you come here, Miss Holmes?”
Forcing down my fluster, I threw out the question. Holmes, who had been glancing about, walked forward and opened her mouth.
“I’m set to enroll in this academy.”
“…You, you mean?”
“Since the mysteries I need to solve won’t emerge anywhere else, it makes sense that I come.”
Holmes’s gray eyes fixed on me. There was something about them that felt as if they pierced straight through everything. I held her gaze without looking away—until she suddenly turned her eyes to Professor Moriarty.
“You must like sugar quite a bit?”
With a slight smile, she asked her question.
“You clean the room so often and so thoroughly it borders on compulsion, yet there’s a lot of sugar powder scattered around.”
At that, Moriarty spoke, wearing an intrigued expression.
“Not everyone whose hobby is cleaning their room is a compulsive case, student.”
“That’s true. But it’s a bit too perfect to be called a hobby.”
Running a fingertip over the sofa where, a few days ago, the dean had collapsed with a hole in his head, Holmes tilted her head and murmured,
“You kept it so spotless that even if someone had died here, no evidence would turn up. I almost let myself be mistaken.”
Then she flicked a smile with her eyes at me and Professor Moriarty.
“I can understand it. Mild paranoid tendencies and delusions are among the early symptoms of mana addiction.”
“And also a chronic affliction of detectives. Aren’t you being a bit too aggressive over a light joke?”
Propping her chin on her hand and leaning forward, Moriarty began to whisper to her in a low voice.
“Judging by your nails and the skin around your eyes, you seem to enjoy experiments using mana stones. Mana stones are a power source remarkable enough to shake human history, but continued exposure induces symptoms of mana addiction.”
“You don’t need to go out of your way to warn me. It’s something my roommate keeps telling me.”
“To be frank, you already look halfway gone. If you keep experimenting without minding your health, even those brilliant eyes of yours will start to reel.”
From a shirt pocket—who knew when she’d hidden it—Moriarty produced a sugar cube and, with a gentle smile, held it out to Holmes.
“If you’ve nothing to do in your leisure, why not eat sugar as I do?”
“For the advancement of deduction, I must decline.”
“Not quite as amusing as my assistant, but you’re rather entertaining.”
Neatly refused, she popped the cube into her own mouth as though she’d been waiting, chewing as she spoke.
“Any thought of becoming a graduate student, like Mr. Adler?”
“I have no intention of participating in a slavery system legally practiced in the nineteenth century.”
“Ah-ha. Hahaha…”
Professor Moriarty burst into laughter, then, all at once, lowered her voice and asked me a question.
“Is that girl the ‘Holmes’ you mentioned back then?”
“Uh, well. About that…”
Come to think of it, on the very first day I woke up in this world—when I unintentionally spoiled Moriarty’s life—I’d mentioned “Sherlock Holmes.”
As her “archnemesis,” at that.
“You quenched my thirst, and now you’ve brought me a sweet drink as well.”
“……….”
“I’m getting to where I can’t live without you.”
If she weren’t the final boss, and not my supervising professor, it would’ve been a rather gratifying line.
Besides, that faint smile that’s her default—that poker face of hers has never so much as wavered, so I can’t tell whether she means it or not.
‘But more to the point, what do I do about this.’
Leaving that aside, this situation—though I’m not showing it—is quite dangerous.
In the original game, Holmes wouldn’t set foot in this academy until a year later, and now she’d shown up here.
“So, will you be a first-year freshman starting now?”
“I haven’t actually enrolled yet. Things got a little tangled, so I’m technically an outsider at the moment, but from next term I’ll be a student here.”
On top of that, even Professor Moriarty—who should have left the academy by now—was here. An unprecedented situation had unfolded, impossible to predict even a step ahead.
“But I don’t sense any mana from you. If you can’t use mana, how did you get admitted to this academy?”
“A letter of recommendation from the Queen of the Kingdom of Bohemia, plus discreet pressure from the person who is the British government itself, is sufficient.”
“Are you admitting to illicit admission right to my face?”
“An ‘illicit admit’ who set a new all-time high on the entrance exam—surely that’s not quite right.”
Watching the two geniuses smiling as they fenced with razor edges even in this very moment had cold sweat breaking out on me.
For now, before this got any bigger, I had to bring the situation to heel.
“Miss Holmes, regrettably, recruitment just ended.”
I chose my moment and cut in, and both sets of eyes fixed on me.
“So…”
“That’s strange. Red mana is exceedingly rare; there shouldn’t be anyone in London who can manifest it.”
In that instant, Holmes stepped right up to me and opened her right hand.
“Except me.”
Crimson mana, like living flame, began to rise from her palm.
‘What.’
Don’t tell me Holmes is a vampire? Did the lunatics in the story department slip in backstory behind my back?
No—more to the point, she isn’t supposed to be a mana user.
“Miss Holmes. You mustn’t impersonate a mana user by hiding mana-stone powder between your fingers.”
While I was mired in doubt, Professor Moriarty’s voice let me piece together the truth at last.
Holmes, who in the original loved chemistry experiments and even published papers, is, in this game, a master of mana-stone research.
Most likely this “red mana” she’d just displayed was merely the color, artificially implemented using a mana stone.
Which, frankly, is impressive enough on its own. Publish what she’s doing right now as a paper and the academy might flip.
“That’s odd. The notice clearly said anyone who could wield ‘red mana’ would do. Nowhere did it say mana stones were forbidden, or that you’d only take one person.”
“Every word is correct, Miss Holmes.”
Even so, I couldn’t very well let Holmes into the Criminal Consultation Society, so I began to rebut her, slowly.
“But if you need an expensive mana stone every time you cast, even I’d find that a bit burdensome.”
“I can cover the cost.”
“But my conscience would still feel burdened. And as for headcount, that’s the prerogative of the club president—me.”
Hearing that, Holmes began to stare holes straight through me.
“Is there a problem?”
“…………”
I asked it back, but Holmes only kept her mouth shut and calmly took me in, top to bottom.
‘Come to think of it, this is the first time I’ve seen her this close.’
When we first met, she’d been disguised as a nun, and at the hospital I hadn’t had the leisure to look closely.
But facing her at this distance, I can see why she’s the protagonist.
‘…She’s pretty.’
Setting aside that she looks a touch worn from mana addiction due to excessive mana-stone experiments, she had the kind of looks anyone would concede as that of a beautiful girl.
Glossy black bob. A cool smile at the corner of her lips. Gray eyes shining quietly.
And draped over her uniform, that trademark black detective’s coat.
As a diehard fan of the original Sherlock Holmes series, I found it hard to tear my eyes away.
“……?”
I’d been staring at her in a daze for a while when I realized her gaze had dropped downward.
“…Miss Holmes?”
Wondering what she was looking at, I tried to ask—only for her to wordlessly take my left hand and lift it.
“This wound…”
“Ah, you mean this?”
So that was it: she was looking at the burn scar I’d gotten saving her in the last incident.
“My mana circuit burned out. The rest recovered, but this part was beyond fixing.”
“………..”
Still holding my hand, she examined it this way and that, then asked in a low voice,
“Does that mean you’ll never be able to use magic with this hand?”
“As the price for saving London’s genius girl, it’s cheap.”
“……”
At that, she quietly lowered her eyes and was about to say something—
“Miss Holmes. I’d like you to head back now.”
—when Moriarty’s voice, chin still propped on her hand, came right then.
“I have urgent matters to discuss with my assistant, Mr. Adler.”
“Do you. Then I should be going as well.”
Holmes at last let go of my hand, withdrew her gaze from me, and turned to leave.
“…By the way, Mr. Adler.”
Heading for the door, she suddenly tossed me a question.
“What exactly is your relationship with that genius professor beside you?”
“That’s…”
“Are you perhaps together against your own will? If so…”
“Miss Holmes. You ought to break the habit of blindly getting jealous just because the person you like isn’t your assistant.”
When Moriarty said that to Holmes with a smile in her voice, Holmes tilted her head and asked back,
“You’re saying I like Mr. Adler?”
“Otherwise you wouldn’t, on your way out, have secretly attached a micro mana receiver to the office doorknob.”
Moriarty snapped her fingers; with a brittle sound, the knob wreathed itself in smoke and crumbled.
“…I’ll concede that much, but I can’t agree about Mr. Adler. I’m merely curious.”
“I’m sorry, but Mr. Adler, of his own free will, chose to become ‘my property.’”
“Well now, a person’s free will can be clouded in a state of diminished capacity.”
“We even drew up a contract recently. Legally and magically, he is mine.”
“May I examine the contract? I have the distinct feeling there are dozens of clauses that would be problematic in law.”
Holmes and Moriarty’s gazes crossed once more.
“I didn’t expect someone as wise as you to be this irrational.”
“There is no such thing as an absolute in this world. And I am, in fact, a very emotional person.”
“No—absolutes do exist. And the absolute will be me.”
Watching a war of words whose spark I couldn’t begin to guess at, Moriarty sent her eyes to me and asked,
“Isn’t that so, Mr. Adler.”
“……Yes.”
In that split second I weighed countless thoughts and finally nodded; Moriarty knit her brows slightly and looked at me.
“……….”
And so did Miss Holmes over there.
‘What the fuck.’
I don’t know what this is, but the sinking silence felt so stifling I was going to choke to death.
.
.
.
.
.
“Oh, right.”
Who knows how much time had passed.
“Mr. Adler, you’d better be careful.”
In the hush, Holmes quietly opened the office door to step out, then turned to add,
“Miss Lestrade, who’d been dispatched to assist at Scotland Yard, will be returning to the academy soon.”
At her words, the headache I already had throbbed all the more.
[Quest Log]
- Don’t Move: Receive a confession from Inspector Lestrade.
“If she sees you, she’ll probably beat you to death on the spot.”
Because no matter how I tried, I couldn’t picture the academy’s strongest in raw combat blushing and telling me she liked me.