Chapter 5
A FEW HOURS after departing from Roslein, Mira walked through southern Sentopoli just as the lunch rush was filling the city’s restaurants. Unlike the center city and business district, this area was relatively quiet, with many drab factories and storage buildings lining the streets.
Ah, here it is.
Deep in the manufacturing district, Mira found a single one-story wooden building amid the giant constructions around it: the Sentopoli office of the Isuzu Alliance. Though somewhat annoyed by the placement of it, Mira knocked on the door.
After a short wait, the door opened, and a plain-looking woman peeked out. “Yes? Do you need something?” She wore an employee’s uniform and black-rimmed glasses. As soon as she spotted Mira, she smiled gently and asked, “Umm… Are you lost, my dear?”
The imposing storehouses and factories stood in stark contrast to the more amiable-looking exterior of the office. As such, lost children occasionally wandered to it for help. Another waif had wound up on her doorstep.
“I’m not lost! I have business with the branch manager.” Mira glared at the woman.
The woman squatted down to meet her at eye-level and said, now more serious than before, “I’m the branch manager. What do you need?” Her eyes were calm, but they had the sharp gleam of someone sizing up a threat.
“I…see. Good, that makes this easier. Light to the forest, peace to the spirits.” Mira spoke the code phrase.
The woman stood up again, looked around, and quietly answered, “…All right. Come in.”
Mira followed her into the branch office.
“My name is Matti. How about you, Miss…?” The woman turned around and shot a wary glance outside before locking the door behind her. She wasn’t taking any chances.
“I’m Mira.” Blunt as usual, Mira took a casual glance around the office. “You know, this place is rather plain for a branch office.”
It looked like any other family residence. The living space beyond the front door had a small dining table and a kitchen. Four doors lined the walls of the room, with two of them leading to a restroom and bath.
The more she looked at it, the less it looked like a professional office of a large organization. It was basically a residence; if not for the sign outside, nobody would think this was a place of business.
“I’m the only person here. So, well…I’ve made some quality-of-life improvements.”
Are all Isuzu offices like this? Mira wondered.
They weren’t. According to Matti, there weren’t many spirits around Sentopoli, so Isuzu didn’t have to devote labor to protecting spirits’ natural environments here. A single person could maintain the office, allowing her to use it as a living space as well.
When Mira asked what she did here if she didn’t have any spirits to protect, Matti answered that she was here to determine whether an environment safe for spirits could be created in the surrounding wastes. Matti was a botanist, and it was her lifelong dream to develop a lush forest from the grassless wastes. The Isuzu Alliance had taken a liking to her passion, and she ended up being made an office manager. Some might find her dream foolish, but if she could make it a reality, it would lead to a much larger habitat for spirits—this was Isuzu’s dream as well.
Of course, that wasn’t why the office existed here; it was a base for communication and information exchange among the boots on the ground. But, as it was on the edge of the continent, members rarely visited.
“That code phrase was a request to use our communicator, right?” Matti chuckled and added that she occasionally forgot the phrases due to how rarely she heard them. “Follow me.”
She opened a door at the back of the room. It may have looked like a normal home, but this was still an Isuzu office, after all—behind the door was a hidden staircase leading underground.
Mira followed Matti down and through an iron door at the end of the stairs. Behind it was a communicator-like device.
“I’ll be upstairs if you need anything.” Matti closed the door and left.
***
The hidden room prepared for Isuzu information exchange was very gray—walls, table, couch, and all. The communicator alone was black.
It looks like the old telephones I’ve seen in museums… Come to think of it, how do you even use this thing? Mira stood at the back of the room and mumbled to herself. The machine itself was almost the same as the one Solomon had set up in her wagon, but she now realized that she’d only received calls and had never actually made one.
“Hrmm…” After yet another grumble, she tried picking up what appeared to be the receiver. It was normal for most landline phones to be picked up before dialing. Mira glared at the buttons on it and groused to herself, “Good grief. I don’t need a full instruction manual, but you could at least label the buttons. How inconsiderate. Kids these days only care about form, not function.”
At this point, Mira even began complaining about her old world. She’d internalized her Danblf persona to the extent that even her personality was a bit geriatric.
Just then…
“C’mon… Gramps, for real? I’m on the line. Pfft! Look, when you lift up the receiver, it automatically connects… Pffft, ha ha ha!” Kagura’s voice came from the other side, unable to contain her laughter.
“Wh-what?!”
“Give me a break. You sound senile!”
Mira was stunned by the realization that Kagura had heard all of her grumblings. On the other end of the line, Kagura couldn’t stop laughing. Whenever she seemed to calm down, she’d sputter and start giggling again.
Mira pouted and slammed the receiver down, hanging up on Kagura. The communicator began to ring. Mira picked up the receiver and heard Kagura’s voice again, much more composed this time.
“Sorry, Gramps. You’re just too much.”
“You could’ve said something as soon as you picked up. Good grief…” Mira mumbled again, still pouting. She wasn’t truly angry; this was more like banter among friends.
Likewise, Kagura’s tone was playful as usual. “I said sorry, okay? So, heh heh… What do you need so badly that you’re willing to fumble with technology you don’t know how to use?”
“Hrmm. I was hoping to request this urgent delivery service of yours,” Mira replied and gave a quick account of events, including how Écarlate Carillon had helped them.
***
“Ahh, okay. Good stuff, Gramps! It’ll take five or six hours to send someone there, so I’ll get on it right away.”
“Good. I’ll be waiting.” With those final words, Mira hung up. It seemed the urgent delivery system worked by having Kagura receive the requests and send personnel herself.
Waiting around here all day sounds boring. I might as well report to Aaron, Cyril, and the others while I’m here. Mira returned upstairs, told Matti she’d be back in five or six hours, and left the branch office.
***
When she reached the business district, Mira was confused—none of her friends were at the Epicurean Excess. Now that she thought about it, it was a little past noon now, so everyone was probably out gathering information.
Well, it’s no rush. In fact, why don’t I join in on the effort?
Mira quickly gave up on her initial plans and ran off into the city to play detective, thinking that she might run into someone along the way. However, she knew that this was a serious mission, so she managed to stop herself from being too playful as she sleuthed around.
A few blocks later, Mira “infiltrated” a magical tool shop and eavesdropped on a few customer conversations. One in particular happened to catch her interest.
Two large men spoke to each other in hushed tones. Mira hid nearby and listened in.
“It’s almost the day of the auction. Did you set aside some funds?”
“Yeah, I managed to scrape something together. Can’t wait.”
Oho, an auction? Where products gather, people gather. Perhaps a gathering of information as well. Mira knew this was a bit of a reach, but she decided to look into it nevertheless.
“Excuse me, sirs. Might I ask you something?” Mira questioned the two big men about the auction they’d just been discussing. They looked guilty for a moment, then claimed that they didn’t know what she was talking about and rushed to get away from her.
What’s their deal? I doubt they were too nervous to speak on account of my intimidating adorableness. Hrmm, perhaps it’s some clandestine affair? Given their reaction, it might have been some kind of black-market auction. Mira smirked to herself in the corner of the magical tool shop.
A black-market auction! Now doesn’t that sound thrilling!
It sounded as suspicious as could be to Mira, so she summoned Wasranvel and had him use optical camouflage. Then she more or less randomly picked out people she thought looked fishy and listened in to their conversations.
After an hour of sleuthing—including some illegal entry in the name of the investigation—Mira discovered a few things. First, the auction would be held a week from now. Almost all of the people going there were adventurers.
The auction’s main business was selling items from dungeons or adventures that straddled a legal gray area—these things were better to sell away from prying eyes. But in many cases, there had been outright illegal items among those auctioned off: cursed magical tools, materials from holy beasts, forbidden tomes, illegal poisons, and so on.
The auction had run dozens of times, serving customers numbering in the thousands. But due to its superb management, it hadn’t been exposed even once. Furthermore, nobody knew the host’s true identity.
This is as fishy as it gets. Seems I’ve no choice but to get to the bottom of this.
Now that she knew the adventurers were up to something, Mira cast a wider net to probe even deeper.
***
It took Mira less than an hour to discover the venue where the black-market auction would be held. She used her optical camouflage to walk in through the front door, saving the last tiny remainder of total concealment for when she truly needed it. Optical camouflage alone was quite enough to get the job done—nobody suspected a thing.
Mira stopped in front of the prefab houses on the edge of town. There were ten of them, each able to house perhaps four people. They seemed to be temporary housing for the people who worked at the nearby warehouses, but according to what Mira had heard, the westernmost building concealed a large underground room that housed the auction.
She looked around and found a few people who looked a little too clean and tidy for warehouse work. Were they involved in managing the event? Armed with this hypothesis, Mira followed a well-built, important-looking man into the building at the west end.
It was a very plain, one-room space on the inside, but when the man pushed on a wall decoration, a hidden staircase appeared in the floor. As soon as he descended, it closed again.
Hrmm. Why do I feel like I’ve seen a lot of hidden doors and staircases recently? If she opened the door again right away, the man might notice. Instead, Mira waited until she could no longer feel his presence through Biometric Scan. Then, she checked twice and went down the hidden staircase.
At the bottom was an underground room—perhaps more precisely an underground facility due to the sheer size.
My word… This is the light of a spirit! The stone passage was as bright as the sunlit street outside. Mira looked up and felt spirits’ power emanating from the fixture above. It was the same as the light from the War-Torn Burial Ground. Seeing this, Mira smirked triumphantly.
Bingo, I say.
There were a few people within the facility, and they occasionally passed by Mira. She shifted from detective mode to phantom thief mode, sneaking furtively about as she cased the premises.
One room contained the auction items. There were many truly devious items, some of them easily understood and some of them incomprehensible to Mira. She eavesdropped on conversations to try to glean more detailed information, all the while using Inspect to see exactly who these people were. This was easy, as she could face them head-on without them so much as noticing her.
As she carefully proceeded down a corridor, she spotted a familiar man and froze up. Hrmm? That’s…
The young man passed by without realizing she was there.
Isaac Meyer, right? I remember him… Indeed, he was the very sorcerer who had passed by while Mira and Scorpion had rescued Angelique and Anne from the Melville Commerce compound.
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