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Farewell, Fiend – Part 07

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Translator: Kell

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Kazuya gasped. Avril and Cecile exchanged curious looks.

“Does that mean…”

Victorique glanced at Kazuya, who was dripping wet.

Kazuya saw in her face liberty, freedom for a moment from the long weariness, boredom, and despair that always enveloped her. He had seen this look several times in the past.

She wore the same expression when she finished picking up the fragments of chaos, playing with them, and reconstructing them. Victorique was not bored now. She had played with the mystery and solved it.

Kazuya swallowed. “You figured it out, didn’t you? You solved the mystery of the Leviathan, the man who, more than twenty years ago, built an alchemy workshop in the clock tower to manufacture gold and get close to the king and queen, and how he disappeared after being shot with poisoned arrows by the Royal Knights. The mysterious murders that started happening around the same time. The victims died in the workshop, locked from the inside. None of them were students or staff of the school, but travelers and trespassers. And…”

Avril nodded and continued. “The ghost of Leviathan wandering the clock tower. Doors open and things move on their own even when no one’s there. Also there’s a shadow passing outside the second-floor window.”

“About that…”

Ms. Cecile intervened before they could start arguing. “Now, now. What about the mystery behind Leviathan’s mask? The biggest mystery, though, is the murder.”

The three shared glances and turned to Victorique.

Her cherry lips parted, and she yawned, looking bored.

“Kujou, newt, you’re with me,” she said in her husky voice. “Cecile, you go and find that dumb detective with the drill for a head. Let’s go.”

“Go where? The clock tower?”

“Yes. To check something. Kujou.”

“Yeah.”

“Very well. Come with me.”

Victorique started walking toward the clock tower.

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“I believe there are two reasons why there are so many ghost stories about the clock towers,” Victorique began. “First, a mysterious alchemist did, in fact, live in the building at one point.”

The group—Victorique, Kazuya, Avril, Ms. Cecile, and Inspector Blois and his men, a total of seven people—opened the door and made their way down the dark corridor. They could only see each other’s silhouettes. The dust in the air stung their eyes.

Victorique’s husky voice reverberated oddly everywhere.

“And the second is the sensation that you’re feeling right now.”

“What are you talking about?” Kazuya asked.

“Don’t you feel dizzy, like someone is putting pressure on you?”

They all looked at each other.

She was right. From the moment they entered the clock tower and started walking down the corridor, they felt dizzy, and their sense of balance went haywire.

“I asked for an accurate survey of the clock tower. This diagram is the result. My guess was right. Take a look.”

Victorique stopped and, relying on the faint light from the window, unfolded the blueprint. They all peered into the odd sketch. A long, narrow cylindrical tower with a chamber of clockworks in the center. The tower drawn using blue lines looked completely normal, but the black one looked bizarre, distorted hideously.

It was tilted, warped as if a giant hand had crushed it, and looked like it could collapse at any moment.

“Wh-What’s going on here?” Kazuya murmured.

“The blue lines represent the original plan. And the black lines show the actual construction. Do you get it now? This is the cause of the strange sensation. The clock tower is warped. The sketch shows why you feel dizzy as soon as you start walking down the corridor. As you can see, the floor of this corridor is not parallel to the ground, but tilted ever so slightly. It looks straight to the naked eye, but it meanders little by little. The corridor becomes narrower as you go further inside, making it appear longer than it actually is. In other words, what we perceive through our vision and what our body feels are not the same. That’s what makes you feel queasy.”

Kazuya and the others looked at each other.

Victorique folded the sketch and resumed walking. She turned a corner and started up the stairs.

“And these stairs. When Cecile and I came here, she stumbled around this area.”

Ms. Cecile scratched her head in embarrassment.

Kazuya recalled the time Avril tripped at the same spot and tumbled down the stairs, screaming.

“The stairs are also deliberately crooked. Common sense dictates that each step of the stairs should have the same height. But not here. The height of each step is slightly different. It is why you trip as you go up and fall. This can also explain the silhouette crossing outside the window on the second floor. This second floor is lower than how we perceive it. We might be going up the stairs, but the corridor we passed before actually descends a little, so this floor is lower than expected. It was that huge carpenter who passed by the window. Not a ghost, nor a giant.”

Victorique made it on top of the stairs and stopped in front of the clockwork room.

The door was open.

“It’s the same reason the door opens even when no one is there. When someone enters the tower and starts walking down the first-floor corridor, this door opens, most likely because of the skewed layout. As for random things moving by themselves, the slanted flooring’s the culprit.”

Victorique had Ms. Cecile remove her glasses and placed them on a chair.

As everyone watched, the glasses moved slowly and fell to the floor.

A forbidding silence fell over the clockwork room. Giant mechanisms whirred in the dim workshop.

The huge pendulum, slowly swinging above, produced an eerie breeze.

“But why build the tower like this?” Avril murmured.

“Elementary. Check the sketch again.”

Victorique unfolded the blueprint and pointed to a spot.

At a small square area.

A room not found inside the blue lines. On the warped, black-outlined sketch, there was a small square space next to the clockwork room.

“The tower was built slanted to accommodate a hidden room. They adjusted the heights and the angles a little to create a space not found on the original plan.”

“For what?”

“To hide Protestants, most likely.”

Victorique turned around and stared at the area where the secret room was supposed to be.

On the other side of the large ebony table was a colorful stained-glass window in the colorless gray of the workshop. It depicted bright flowers in full bloom—yellow, purple, and a single red one.

“Temples and houses built in the Middle Ages often had hidden rooms, secret passages disguised as fixed windows, and various other mechanisms. This academy has been called the secret armory of the Sauville royal family since the Middle Ages. All sorts of things were concealed, stored, and developed here. Weapons of the future, people who should not be alive, secret assets. I suspect there are other hidden rooms on campus besides this one.”

Inspector Grevil de Blois, who had been silent for some time now, clicked his tongue. He shot his sister a scornful glare, cold sweat beading on his forehead.

Victorique cast Inspector Blois a cursory glance. The inspector looked away first.

“I think, back in the Middle Ages, this clock tower was used to hide things. But these days, only a few people know about that. Now let us talk about the gold, the same gold mentioned in the song. We turn back the clock about fifty years to the end of 1873, when the Africans died.”

Victorique suddenly kicked Kazuya, who was standing next to her, in the leg.

Kazuya jumped. “Ouch!”

“Sing, Kujou,” she ordered.

“No way… Wait, sing what?”

Victorique’s shoulders shook. “The African song, what else?”

“No. Why is it always me? Ow! Fine…”

Kazuya endured the shame and straightened his posture. Putting his hands on his hips, he started singing softly.

Africans say,

March, march I say!

Till the hens sing!

Till the stars fall from the torn roof!

Du da du da doo…

Even in dreams

March, march I say!

Du da du da doo…

From afar, the Africans came.

They walked, and walked, all the way.

Walk, walk I say!

Du da du da doo…

Africans came from across the sea.

They rowed their boats, rowed their boats, all the way.

Row, row I say!

Pretty sisters, mother, and father!

Flesh and blood is cheap, bread is expensive, but keep on rowing!

Du da du da doo…

Gold and black skin

Row, row I say!

Du da du da doo…

The Africans leapt over the scorching land,

screamed, and disappeared.

When he finished singing, Kazuya shut his mouth, feeling embarrassed. Everyone regarded him silently in surprise.

“I’ve been thinking,” Victorique said. “You’re oddly good at singing.”

“How is it odd? Anyway, I’m not doing this ever again! Boys shouldn’t be dancing and singing in public—”

“Hush. That’s enough from you. Shut your mouth and look unspeakably sad.”

Kazuya closed his mouth and did as he was told.

“The lyrics contain several fragments of chaos,” Victorique continued. “The African song, which had been sung in the village for about fifty years, mentions gold. Where did they come from, and for why did they ‘walk’ and ‘row’ to this village? What does gold and black skin refer to? And finally they ‘screamed’ and ‘disappeared.’ But what does it mean?”

Kazuya and the others exchanged glances.

“No idea…”

“We know that they died and were buried in the village cemetery at the end of 1873. Which brings me to my next point, an important event in history.” Victorique grinned. “This event holds the truth to the Leviathan’s terrifying mystery. He did not create gold using alchemy. Recall your history.” She paused. Her ruthless green eyes gleamed, as if staring into the void. “1873 was the year the gold rush started in the African continent.”

The group let out a collective gasp and glanced at each other.

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