Editing Toaru Majutsu no Index:AgneseSS Chapter6 (section)

===Part 6===

The guild leader known as Tu had gone around Europe stealing from museums.

But the thefts had stopped for a period.

During that period, a bloodline investigator named Brax Mizhine had gone missing.

Had Tu been involved in that? They had hoped to find some information by sneaking into his mansion that doubled as an office.

And this was the result.

The arms had been severed at the shoulders, elbows, and wrists and the legs at the thighs, knees, and ankles and then it had all been sealed in plastic wrap. The torso did not remain as a single part. Instead, each of the organs had been separated into plastic storage containers. The head had been chopped up as well. The parts of the face like the eyes, nose, ears, lips, and tongue had been neatly separated, but so had the scalp, the skin of the face, and the skull. The brain had been sliced into eight pieces with each one stored separately.

Even if they had been stored in the fridge, it was odd for them to remain unchanged. There was no clouding in the eyeballs, so it was like seeing one of those disturbing videos where a chemical-filled burger or convenience store bento was filmed for a long period of time without any bugs getting near it.

Lucia returned the small container holding both eyeballs to the fridge.

“I only the portrait hanging on the mansion’s wall to go off of, but this is probably him. Assuming that painting and any photos weren’t faked too, this is Brax Mizhine.”

“You mean…?”

“Yes, Sister Agnese. This was not a natural death and it does not look like the result of failing some kind of spontaneous ceremony. This was a gruesome murder. We should assume it was a sort of execution.”

“A-are you saying Tu did it?”

Angelene’s voice was trembling.

There were countless reasons for people to kill each other, but they could look back at Tu’s actions for this one.

Tu had attacked museums around Europe and stolen valuable items. They had stopped the thefts for a period, but then they had started up again.

Blood Investigator Brax Mizhine had gone missing during that gap.

They now knew he had been killed and dismembered.

Leaving the body behind may have been meant as a message to someone. And his family and the mansion’s workers may have stopped showing up because they had seen it and went into hiding.

“Tu was satisfied he had achieved his goal, so he stopped stealing. Or he thought he had. But after murdering Brax, he started stealing again.”

“We had already predicted he found out he didn’t have what he wanted, right?”

“Yes, whatever he had stolen was a fake and had no effect. Brax was a bloodline investigator, so he was an expert at looking through old records. Could he have screwed up an appraisal?”

That did not seem like enough of a reason to kill.

It was Tu who had stolen the fake from the museum, not Brax.

(If I’m right about this, then Tu may have killed him to silence him. But in that case, they wouldn’t have killed him in such a complicated fashion. They would have done it secretly in the ocean or mountains or made it look like an accident or illness.)

Why would he have been executed for getting it wrong?

Brax Mizhine was hiding something in the kitchen. After some more searching, Lucia found a sealed envelope of paper documents attached inside the small elevator shaft for kitchen carts.

It was a secret list of purchases.

The list included stone and wood from an old home, old wine bottles, parchment, ink, paint, and adhesives like beeswax and animal glue. The age of the items appeared to be important. They were categorized by era and region.

“What is that about?”

“He was probably gathering counterfeiting materials. To fake the will of an English noble from the year 1000, you need paper and ink from the year 1000. Paper and ink from France or China in the year 1000 won’t do. Nor will paper and ink from England in the year 1500,” explained Lucia while flicking at the bundle of documents. “A bloodline investigator reveals secret histories and bloodlines that ordinary people can’t research, but the people who hired him would want their beliefs to be confirmed. He was basically changing his answer to give the client what they wanted. The truth was irrelevant because the client would have no way of finding out it wasn’t true, so he would figure out what they wanted to hear and – true or not – give them that answer. Because when he put a beaming smile on his client’s face, it would come with a hefty tip.”

That was not limited to investigators like him. Quack doctors did the same. Honestly confronting a patient who was faking their illness would only lead to an argument, so they would give them some medicine and tell them to see how that worked. If that medicine was actually a harmless vitamin pill, they could be peaceably rid of an irritating patient who was trying to pass off their laziness as a health condition. And thanks to the convenient placebo effect, that meaningless vitamin pill might even trick them into improving.

“He must have appraised whatever Tu had stolen and given it the stamp of authenticity, which Tu must have been delighted to hear.” Lucia sighed as she approached the conclusion. “But that appraisal was a complete lie told to earn some money, so Tu only learned it was a fake when they began their big ceremony where failure was not an option. But it did fail and that harmed Tu in some way, so they came back to angrily confront Brax. And, well, we’ve seen how that turned out.”

“Is that why there was a gap in the seven thefts?”

“Brax must have seen it as no more than his usual lip service, but that lie was worthy of death to Tu who was risking their life on this.”

In some cases, information could pull a deadly trigger.

For example, if a doctor had told a patient what disease they had a little sooner, they could have prevented the unwanted spread of that information from locking them out of buying a certain company’s stock.

Tu had lost everything and been forced to go underground due to the usual pleasantries that the eloquent man had seen as no more than business as usual.

And if Tu had ''returned'' to this mansion to execute the man for it, they may have also retrieved and destroyed any hints leading back to them.

Yet they had not found the documents Lucia currently held. It seemed unlikely they would have intentionally left them behind. They had failed to clean up thoroughly enough, which was unsurprising in a mansion so full of traps.

She skimmed through the documents.

The purchase list for counterfeiting materials was divided out by era. Going from top to bottom would not lead her to the most recent job. She narrowed her eyes and then grabbed a magnifying glass lying nearby. She approached the window and gathered the moonlight with the lens.

“St. Catherine is a symbol of knowledge. She outtalk any and all scholars. Her wisdom shall show the way.”

It was like a laser pointer highlighting the important text on a whiteboard.

The spell ensured that the viewer was not led astray by the vast amount of information and that the answer they wanted was revealed to them. The effect of the spell differed based on the amount of knowledge the spell user had.

She had the answer.

“This appears to have been his last job.”

“Yes?”

“The Sickle of Saturn. Run a search of Roman mythology as quickly as you can! If we can’t track this down, we never will find Tu!!”