Editing Apocalypse Witch:Volume2 Chapter3 (section)

===Part 11===

Karuta had needed help for this one, so he had discussed it with the others before getting started.

He had spoken with Amaashi Marika and Omotesandou Kyouka.

“Alice Majority?”

Marika sighed.

That was the last of that trio of girls. The blonde ponytail one.

“Yes.” Karuta nodded. “There’s no point in investigating Casualty B, Moriyama Sanae. Any one of our 1000 people could have pulled that one off. I’d be the top suspect since I was out patrolling throughout the night and Aine’s testimony won’t help me since she agrees with anything I say. But this still gives us the answer when combined with Casualty A, Toudou Riho.”

“Continue.”

The President smiled in apparent enjoyment.

He could not say if that smile was from the heart or not, though.

“Riho’s throat was slit from head on. A slipper-sized pill bug of a Threat was found on the floor, but that doesn’t add up. How did that thing slit her throat? There was more than a meter from the floor to her throat, so are we supposed to believe it hopped straight up like some kind of spring-loaded contraption? It’s nonsense.”

“Sacri-sama, couldn’t it have fallen from the duct in the ceiling?”

“There were no wounds on her arms. However it happened, anyone would try to protect their face from an attack they could see. Even rookies and people without any combat training whatsoever would do that.”

“Then did it sneak up behind her?”

“You already know the answer to that, don’t you? That pill bug only had its jaws. It had no arms. To circle around from behind and slit her throat, it would have to have used its many legs to crawl along her back or shoulder. There’s no way Riho wouldn’t notice that. So,” he said while pretending he was holding and pushing forward an electric shaver or something. “''Someone must have held that pill bug and pressed it against Riho’s throat.'' That’s the only possible answer. There never was any other answer. And the lack of wounds to her hands means it was someone she trusted. She never imagined for a second she was going to be attacked.”

“Hm,” said Kyouka. “But what proof is there that person was Alice Majority? She was the one who came to us. If she did that, wouldn’t she have wanted to delay discovery of the body? And we could easily have asked the kids seated near the bathroom who had been in there.”

“She used the window,” replied Karuta. Normal people would never even consider that, but they were different. “That was ''only'' the 6th floor. Any Crystal Magician can fly, so it wouldn’t have been difficult for her to climb out through the hallway window, circle around the entire hotel, and arrive at the window to the girl’s bathroom. I’m the only exception there, what with Aine and all.”

“But if they chose a course that doesn’t show up on the cameras, couldn’t anyone have done that? It didn’t have to be Sanae-san or Alice-san.”

“Of course.” He shrugged. “But it couldn’t have been anyone else and I know you already know why. Riho was caught by surprise in an attack from dead ahead. Someone has to trust you an awful lot for you to slit their throat from dead ahead without giving them any time to try to stop you with their hands.”

“I see.”

“That was the girl’s bathroom, she would have immediately put her guard up around a boy or one of the adult teachers who are practically all-powerful in her school life. I was hesitant to go in there even when I knew it was an emergency. And Riho would have been suspicious of pretty much anyone – even another girl – if they climbed in through the 6th-floor window. There’s only one or two people she would let her guard down around in that situation.”

Utagai Karuta had seen it before. Back on the Grimnoah ship, he had seen Alice take a shortcut to the shower room window. That meant climbing in through windows was a habitual thing for that trio. It would not inspire any surprise. Yet if Karuta, Aine, Marika, or Kyouka had done it, it would have led to a flurry of screams. None of the other students – or teachers for that matter – could have done it.

It was not about the actual actions taken.

Only the other members of that trio had been close enough to Riho.

At the time, that logic had left them with two options, but then Alice had killed Sanae. Most likely, she had used a similar tactic: grabbing those small Threats in her hand and shoving them into the girl’s gut.

That death had left just one option.

The sole survivor was their answer. Marika sighed in a disinterested way.

“I had deduced that either Sanae or Alice must have killed Toudou Riho, so I put them through a little test. ''I have to admit, I didn’t expect to find they were both guilty.''”

A little test.

Needless to say, she was referring to having those two investigate the damage to the other domes the day before.

“Oh, had you already checked over all the domes yourself?”

“Yes, and then I had them check over them again. There were plenty of oddities to report, but those girls both said they found nothing. A nice way to dodge the issue, really. If I had pointed out the oddities later on, they could always claim they had simply not noticed. A nice way, but still plenty suspicious.”

Marika had mentioned a teacher joining that inspection at the last second – Kiyosawa Hadome. She had suspected he had gone along to keep an eye on the other two and make sure they did not say anything foolish, but it turned out he had no ulterior motive at all.

He had honestly reported what he saw and even tried to help the other girls with their report.

If Marika had not held out a hand to stop him, he would likely have mentioned what they had “overlooked”. That would have allowed the girls to realize how unnatural their report sounded, giving them a chance to course correct.

“So what exactly did they fail to report?”

“There were Threat-like footprints and claw marks visible around the surviving domes and there was a lot of fruit hidden in the snow. The former is unnatural because it means the Threat was picking and choosing who and what to attack despite supposedly being indiscriminate. The latter was evidence of a secret supply base. They had plenty of food for themselves prepared in advance in case we made a mistake and ended up stuck in the blizzard without food. Fruit stays good when frozen and they could cook it with magic fire to eat it.”

The discoveries themselves had been less important than questioning why those girls would hide it.

They had not wanted the others to know the Threat could be controlled or that a supply base had been prepared in advance.

The day before, Marika had said there was no way of narrowing it down at that point and the answer would become clear after a few more casualties.

“We had two possibilities and one died, so that settles it.”

They could have tried to separate Sanae and Alice, but they had not known how those two were controlling the Threat. If they captured those two and had a large army called in on them, they would have been wiped out.

Marika’s solution was to defeat both of them, but if they both had a controller, then one could summon the Threat while the other was being killed.

Thus, she had been waiting for an opportunity to kill them both at the same time.

Yet that opportunity had never arrived.

“You can’t solve every problem with a sniper shot, Marika-san.” Kyouka laughed. Had she gone to Marika’s igloo last night to drive that point home? Although that did lead them to overlook the late-night murder.

“Marika, when did you first start to suspect them?” asked Karuta.

“The instant we found Toudou Riho’s corpse. I mean, their grief was way too by the book. If your closest friend dies, ''it would tear your heart to pieces.'' I would have expected them to grab the corpse and fly off with it never to return, or to start calling everyone a spy and bombing the hell out of them with their Crystal Magic.”

That opinion seemed heavily influenced by Marika’s unique values.

She was also implying that was how she would react if Karuta or Aine died.

She had mostly jumped to a conclusion and gotten lucky, but she had still reached the right answer far sooner than Karuta. He was astonished by this, but anyway.

“Do you agree with Karuta on how she did it?” asked Omotesandou Kyouka.

“I do.”

“It would be technically possible, but it seems unnecessarily complicated. Flying around the outer wall to reach the bathroom window is a lot of effort. Why did Alice Majority want to contact Toudou Riho in secret so badly? And how did the Threat become a part of all this?”

Those questions were side issues.

If they wanted to find out why she had killed her friends, they only had to bring her down and take their time getting it out of her in a dark room somewhere. So there was a bigger issue here.

“Even if the Threat here is only a decoy, we have to take out whatever method she is using to control them. And I would really prefer not to consider the possibility that the method can be spread to others.”