Children of the Rune – Winterer - Chapter 573

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This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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Episode 25.
The Princess and the Detective (25)
Espin didn’t bother responding further. She simply turned her head and walked past Maximian, descending the stairs. It was such a clean withdrawal that Maximian couldn’t help but tilt his head in confusion. Of course, Espin’s mind was already calculating that a student living in the Nenyaple Academy Dormitory System couldn’t simply vanish without a trace. She’d pressed him hard enough; now was the time to display composure. But when she’d gone about three paces, Maximian realized something crucial and called out.
“Hey, what was your name again?”
Espin turned back, her brow furrowing. Could she really trust such an idiot?
“Ispin Charles.”
Maximian’s mind possessed a convenient function that discarded names with no monetary potential, but Espin had no way of knowing that.
Mulberry Pike’s pistol certainly hadn’t been destroyed.
The gun was small enough to fit in the palm of a hand. It looked more like a toy for the nobility than an actual firearm—one might have expected jewels embedded in it, but there were none. It didn’t even function. According to an expert I knew, it hadn’t been designed to fire bullets in the first place, and most of its internal mechanisms had vanished. Yet despite being such a worthless relic, this was already the third person who’d come after it.
I didn’t know why they wanted this pistol so badly. But from experience, when many people pursue an object, there’s usually a reason. I couldn’t simply hand over something like that. Right, prospective freshman?
As Maximian walked toward Nenyaple, my mind began racing. When I was irritated about having my drink stolen, I wouldn’t think about what might happen five minutes later. But once I decided to deduce something, everything changed. As hypotheses formed in my mind, events from half a year ago began clicking into place like magnetic fragments.
The “Mulberry Pike’s Pistol” incident had begun like this. In hindsight, her credentials seemed false, but regardless, a woman calling herself Mulberry Pike, an antiques dealer, had come to find me. She said she’d entrusted an antique pistol to a craftsman for repairs, but he’d disappeared with the gun.
The reason Mulberry had specifically sought me out was that the missing craftsman, Boild, was from Nenyaple. With help from Professor Ostley, who had supposedly taught Boild, I easily tracked him down. When I found him, Boild seemed somewhat mentally unhinged, but he snapped back to his senses the moment I took the pistol from him. He couldn’t even remember why he’d disappeared with it. Of course, whether Boild remembered or not, my job was simply to hand the pistol back to Mulberry and be done with it.
But then Professor Ostley intervened, suggesting the pistol might be connected to whatever had made Boild act strangely. He took possession of it, claiming he needed to understand the investigation process. He even sent an intermediary to Mulberry, the owner, to request her cooperation.
Then Mulberry ran away.
Until that point, I had no idea the pistol would become such a coveted item. Mulberry had apparently decided it was better to abandon it and flee than to be caught by the professor and subjected to mental torture. But a few days later, when I visited Professor Ostley, he had no intention of returning the pistol to me. Even though Mulberry’s property should rightfully have become mine after she skipped out without paying my fee.
“That object requires further investigation.”
The last time I’d visited was roughly two months ago. The professor still said the investigation wasn’t complete, and I had no great attachment to the thing, so I’d forgotten about it since then. As I climbed the hill path leading to the school, I indulged in a bit more deduction. It went something like this.
Until now, the pistol’s approximate value had been roughly equivalent to the bundle of luggage Mulberry had abandoned when she fled—worth about one hundred Elso. Even estimating that bundle at one hundred Elso was the result of halving the value of the promissory notes inside, which were of uncertain collectibility. In reality, it was probably just junk worth ten Elso at most.
Yet the pistol’s value had just skyrocketed to a year’s tuition at Nenyaple. This absurd phenomenon revealed a simple truth: if an object possessed such remarkable power, it likely had several times the value I’d imagined. Wouldn’t you agree?
To find evidence supporting such an exciting deduction, I needed to discover what the pistol actually did. So upon arriving at school, instead of heading straight to the dormitory, I made my way to the Blacksmith’s Shop tucked in the corner of the campus. Professor Evangeline Ostley, who specialized in ancient artifacts, ran her research lab behind the shop.
When I reached the lab—which looked like a converted warehouse—I found this sign on the door.
If there’s no answer, kick it in.
I wrinkled my nose and muttered.
“No wonder the door looks like this.”
The door was barely holding together, patched up with metal scraps like a bandaged wound. I almost kicked it immediately, but felt sorry for the door, so I tapped it gently with the back of my hand instead.
“Yes?”
An unexpectedly quick response came from inside. I pushed the door open and found no professor—only a research assistant sitting alone at a workbench, peering through a loupe-style magnifying glass at something broken. He wore a glove only on his left hand, a peculiar design that wrapped up to his forearm. His hair, grown out somewhat and tied back, was a pale blue color.
Research assistants in professors’ labs were usually graduate students. This student was an exception. Still in his second year, he’d been working full-time in Professor Ostley’s lab for five hours a day since last year, even substituting for course credits. As a result, he barely interacted with his classmates, but I knew him well. He was my dormitory roommate.
“Hey, Rosencrantz.”
Langier Rosencrantz looked up and pushed the loupe back, speaking.
“Oh, Maximian. What brings you here?”
“Can you even see me wearing that thing?”
Langier removed the loupe and set it down, brushing back his disheveled hair.
“I see better with it.”
Then he closed his eyes and pressed both hands against them for a moment. I picked up the loupe and looked through it backward, muttering.
“Wearing something like that makes your eyes spin and gets tiring. Though you always look exhausted anyway.”
Langier’s eyes were an uncommon crimson. Many people called them beautiful, going on about rubies and such, but to me they just looked like a rabbit’s. Langier removed his hands from his eyes and smiled faintly.
“Yeah, it’s convenient when I want to pretend I’m tired and take a break.”
“Pretend? You’re actually tired, so you’re tired. Is it sane to crawl into the lab even on a day like this when school’s gone mad just because exams ended? What’s your professor making you do?”
Professor Ostley was the sort who would’ve wanted to take the lead in revelry on a day like this, but that fellow certainly wouldn’t have reciprocated. As expected, Langier shook his head.
“No. But days like this are when I find this place most comfortable.”
“What, has your misanthropy flared up again? In any case, get some proper sleep and quit that damnable Olive extract, and you’ll be reborn anew.”
Langier then fixed Maximian with a steady gaze, propped his chin on his hand, and replied.
“When you quit drinking, I’ll give it a try.”
“Excuses, excuses. And don’t you think that Olive extract is more destructive than alcohol? From where I’m standing, it’s a stomach pulverizer.”
“True enough, but there are times when it’s better than having one’s brain pulverized.”
Maximian pointed at Langier’s experimental bench and contorted his eyebrows strangely.
“No wonder, staring at that monstrosity every day. Just catching a glimpse of it makes you feel like your brain’s being crushed.”
Atop the bench lay roughly twenty fragments of mechanical parts—the sort that looked as though they’d been torn from some water wheel—scattered in pieces. Were ancient relics these days really like this? Langier raised his eyebrows as if to say “What’s the problem with that?” while Maximian shook his head and got down to business.
“I came to ask you something. That revolver you took from that fellow Mulberry Pike last time—remember? What happened with it? Did you finish investigating?”
“Ah, that revolver.”
Langier pushed back his chair and stood. Behind him stretched a labyrinth of dozens of five-tiered bookshelves forming a corridor so dizzying to behold that one’s head might spin. Each shelf bore baskets and boxes of what looked like junk one would want to discard, along with books arranged in rows.
Langier walked into the maze without hesitation, stopped at a specific point without looking around, and withdrew a teal-colored box. But instead of opening it, he pulled a memo from the pocket affixed to its back, read it, returned the box to its place, and came back empty-handed.
“What? Why are you coming back empty-handed?”
“It says here the investigation isn’t finished yet.”
Maximian made a mental note of that shelf’s location. But there were still matters to be settled separately.
“Hey, how long ago did you take that thing? And you’re still investigating? Is there some massive problem with it?”
“I don’t know if it’s massive, but…”
Langier sat back down and fiddled with his magnifying glass, thinking for a moment. There was clearly something the Professor had told him.
“There’s something inside it, but I haven’t found a way to extract it yet.”
“Can’t you just unscrew it and pry it open?”
“No. It contains a hazardous substance. Remember how the craftsman seemed a bit off when we recovered the revolver? That might be the influence of this material.”
Maximian blinked several times. This was unexpected. But fundamentally, nothing changed. The fact remained that this was a problem Maximian couldn’t solve.
“So you’re saying I can’t get it back right away? Isn’t this too much? Think about it. How can it be right to borrow someone else’s property and keep it this long?”
“It wouldn’t be, but when it involves hazardous materials, that’s different. You could be put in danger too.”
Of course that was true. But Maximian had obtained the opportunity to exchange that toy revolver for a year’s worth of Nenyaple tuition. Once he got the money, what did he care what happened to that presumptuous freshman afterward? All Boild the craftsman had done in his addled state was steal the revolver, and Espin claimed it was originally hers anyway. How could there be a problem with her stealing her own property, right?
…or so he tried to convince himself, but ultimately something gnawed at Maximian from somewhere deep in his heart. He wasn’t so dull as to sleep soundly after extracting an object the Nenyaple Professor deemed dangerous and selling it to just anyone for profit. And besides, he had no basis for believing the claim that the revolver belonged to Espin.

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This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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