“Look, we should…”
Kalian, feeling urgent, put on the most friendly smile he could muster.
“Why don’t we exchange names first?”
“…Pardon?”
“I’m Kalian Artes. What might your name be, sir?”
“…”
The man’s face had now turned deathly pale. Unable to do anything about the arm Kalian had grabbed, he just trembled, looking exactly like a mouse before a cat.
No, why is he so scared? What did I do…
Ah, well… Of course he’d be wary.
Right now, people matching the man’s appearance were being stopped and searched throughout the streets. So what must the man be feeling right now?
“I apologize, sir. I don’t have any bad intentions toward you. I just…”
How should I persuade him? To lower this wariness, I need to approach as friendly as possible.
“I just want to… talk with you.”
“…”
However, futile to Kalian’s efforts, the man only grew more frightened with each word he added.
“I-I want to become your good friend, sir!”
The green eyes looking up at Kalian trembled left and right. The hands clutching the bundle of luggage tensed.
…Is this not it? Should I be even more friendly?
First, let’s put the man at ease. In an alley with so many people passing through like this, he’d be anxious no matter what was said.
“Sir, shall we go somewhere quiet and safe first? We can go there and have a more in-depth conversation…, argh!”
In an instant, Kalian’s vision flashed white. A pain as if his precious center—which had never once been struck in his entire life—was being torn off assaulted him.
Unable to even breathe, Kalian collapsed right there. Naturally, he lost his grip on the man’s arm. Bailey, hearing Kalian’s scream, came running from somewhere.
“Lord Kalian!”
He quickly helped up Kalian, who was prostrate on the ground.
“Bailey, catch that person quickly!”
“What? Who?”
“Over there, that person…”
Still unable to straighten his back, lying face-down on the ground, Kalian barely managed to point at the man. The man was hurriedly throwing off his cloak and rapidly distancing himself from them.
“There, that… person taking off his cloak!”
“What? Where?”
But before the naturally slow-acting Bailey could find the man, the man had already hidden himself among the crowd. Even from Kalian’s view, as he endured the pain with eyes wide open and followed that retreating figure to the end, the man ultimately vanished.
“Y-you idiot…! Ah, agh!”
Kalian started to rage at Bailey but collapsed again. His hand, trembling with pain, clawed at the dirt ground. It hurt so much that tears and snot streamed down his face. He frantically fumbled to check whether his precious, delicate center was still intact.
“Fortunately it didn’t burst…”
“What? What do you mean? Lord Kalian, what on earth happened?”
His superior, who was always so fastidious about cleanliness, was rolling around on the dirt ground spouting nonsense, so Bailey could only be bewildered.
“Could that person be the vampire?”
This was truly the best Bailey could deduce. After all, stuck in this backwater, all they’d been doing was tracking the whereabouts of a vampire based solely on some lunatic’s testimony.
Of course, his superior did occasionally mutter about “heaven-sent talent” and “an unprecedented genius mage” and so on as if reminiscing about a wistful first love… but that wasn’t something Bailey cared about.
In any case, Bailey, who hadn’t grasped the situation at all, belatedly asked the question he should have asked from the start.
“Are you all right? Are you hurt somewhere?”
“Aaaah! You idiot Bailey! You’re fired! I’m going to fire you!”
Kalian, who had been lying face-down on the ground groaning, suddenly jerked his upper body up and grabbed Bailey’s collar, shaking him vigorously.
“Sheesh… Why is he acting like this again…”
As he swayed back and forth with the shaking, Bailey let out a deep sigh.
***
“So, you’re saying that person is the thief…, no, the genius mage you’ve been looking for, Lord Kalian?”
“Yes.”
Kalian, sitting on his horse, replied curtly. He still felt a tingling illusion in his groin. Perhaps it wasn’t an illusion. He was fortunate his balls hadn’t burst.
“But why on earth?”
The more he thought about it, the more absurd and outrageous it was. Even if someone was a fugitive, when a person approached that kindly, wasn’t it common courtesy to at least hear them out?
He looked so gentle and kind, yet as a fellow man, how could he do something so atrocious…
“Bailey, do I look like a criminal?”
“What? Oh, what are you saying… Of course not.”
Bailey said this without even looking at Kalian’s face, carelessly tugging the reins. His superior wasn’t the beauty of the century, but with the halo of being the youngest chief mage added, his face was decent enough to look at. Of course, without that halo, well, not particularly…
“You’ve always been handsome…”
“But what did I do to make him so scared?”
“Because he’s a thief… Even I would have run away quickly if a suspicious person was excessively kind in that kind of situation.”
His superior didn’t know how to deal with people well. He was someone who’d spent his whole life sitting at a desk doing research, so it couldn’t be helped.
“Still, now that we’ve met face to face, next time I see him I’ll have to treat him even better.”
“Don’t treat him even better… Just capture him right away!”
Bailey advised his superior, who was saying such naive things.
“He didn’t just run away—he kicked you in the balls and ran. It’s obvious what’ll happen. Do you think that squirrel-like fellow will just sit still if we meet again next time?”
Looking up at him with a worried face and sighing, Bailey continued speaking.
“Really, if you catch that guy, just hand him over to the village security. Why would you take a thief who steals other people’s things to the royal palace? No matter how high-level a mage he is, with that kind of character, he’ll just cause trouble at the palace before long.”
Kalian thought of the man. He had the kind of face that looked like he’d never told a lie in his life. Far from stealing, he looked like someone who, if asked for money, would shake out not only the money he had but his entire fortune to give it away.
Until he kicked him in the balls and ran away like a squirrel…, he definitely had.
“No… He still seemed like a good person. He must have had no choice because of his destitute circumstances.”
Bailey shook his head at his thoroughly rose-tinted superior. How could anyone know a person’s character just from looking at their face? Kalian attached elaborate backstories to the first impression of a complete stranger.
“Like, maybe he has sick parents at home but no money for treatment… Or he could be an orphan. No, looking at him, he didn’t seem like someone of low birth. Maybe he has some secret about his birth… Actually, could he be a high-ranking mage of very noble status…”
“Lord Kalian.”
You’re practically writing a novel… What kind of backstory would a petty thief have? Bailey stopped walking and looked up at him.
“Think about it. If that person was truly in destitute circumstances, from whom on earth did he learn such high-level magic? Conversely, if he was a high-ranking mage of noble status, would he have been doing petty theft in a market like this in the first place?”
Kalian, having listened carefully to his words, stroked his chin with a thoughtful expression.
“Then some other backstory…”
“Ugh! I can’t take it.”
Backstory or whatever, that guy is just a petty thief. It seemed his superior had started obsessing over something strange while avoiding the stress of writing his thesis.
“Petty thief, mage, whatever—snap out of it. Now you’re in a situation where you need to change your thesis topic. Didn’t we come all this way only to end up going back empty-handed with nothing to show for it!”
The original purpose of coming here had already fizzled out.
When they tracked down and visited the physician that the man who claimed his younger sibling had given birth to a vampire had brought at the time, he was apparently currently missing.
‘Don’t even mention that bastard! Whether he died somewhere or whatever, I’m relieved!’
That physician may have been something to his patients, but he apparently wasn’t a good husband to his wife. According to his wife, the physician left home one day saying strange things and never returned.
‘He came back from examining a patient, and that evening he was somehow out of it. He didn’t even drink the alcohol he was so crazy about.’
The physician went to the man’s house to examine his younger sibling and witnessed a bizarre sight. Though he didn’t explain in detail, that’s what his wife sensed.
‘Ollie, I saw something really strange… That’s what he said. So I asked what he saw, but he absolutely wouldn’t answer. And that night he suddenly said he had to go somewhere and put on his coat.’
In the middle of the night, he hurriedly left the house. Leaving strange words with his wife.
‘What was it… He said he had to take that child to the forest. He kept repeating that.’
‘Who is “that child”?’
‘I don’t know either. What nonsense that man was spouting.’
After that, the physician never returned.
This was the last clue Kalian and Bailey had been able to investigate. With the whereabouts of the physician, the only witness to the incident, unclear, further progress had become impossible.
“Go back where?”
An appalled response came from Kalian. Bailey jumped up and said,
“There are no more clues to find, so what are you planning to do here?”
