Heavenly Demon Holmes: London’s Subjugation

Only one who carries chaos and inner demons within can give birth to a dancing star.

-Friedrich Nietzsche-

“What happened, Holmes? Surely this has something to do with the note you sent Sir Harcourt from Buckingham Palace…”

“He must have read it at once.”

“What on earth did you write?”

“……I wrote that he should beware the servant.”

-Gulp.

I heard Watson swallow hard.

I had meant to keep matters concerning Moriarty hidden from her, but now that she had come along, I had no choice but to share something. Of course, not now.

“You must have many questions. Once we finish what is urgent, we will go back and I shall tell you everything.”

At my words, Watson nodded heavily.

Seeing the grave air about Sir Harcourt’s subordinate riding with us, she seemed to have grasped the seriousness of the situation.

“Hyah!”

The driver’s shout and the horses’ pounding hooves spurred my ominous imaginings onward.

The carriage raced southeast past Mayfair and St. James’s.

Just as Westminster Palace, where Sir Harcourt’s office lay, came into view outside the window.

-CRASH!

With a thunderous boom, a third-floor window shattered, and a large human figure fell from it.

“Damn it……!”

There was no time to ask Watson’s leave.

-Woosh!!

I flung open the carriage door and leapt into the street, then unfolded lightness skill and closed the distance to the building in an instant.

The guards hesitated between stopping me and confirming the fallen man’s identity, but withdrew when they saw the minister’s subordinate hurrying after me.

“Are you all right….!!”

The one rolling on the ground was none other than the Home Secretary.

“Cough!!”

A mouthful of blood poured from Sir Harcourt’s lips as he lay collapsed.

Blood followed from his eyes, nose, and ears as well. He seemed to have suffered severe internal injuries.

“Minister! Hold on just a little longer!!”

Watson arrived a beat later and pressed the minister’s pressure points. The minister’s pulse began to steady.

Seeing Self Defense Essence still wrapped around his body, it did not seem his injuries came from the fall’s impact.

Then there was only one conclusion.

“Who did this to you?”

Sir Harcourt could not answer my question.

He fainted with his eyes still open.

After confirming Watson had begun emergency treatment with the medicines and long needles she always carried, I looked up at the Home Secretary’s office window, which was belching black smoke.

“……Hm.”

The greatest weapon and shield of Kingswood Kung-Fu was the diamond-like body forged through Bulk-Up & Cutting.

Sir Harcourt was a master surpassing Inspector Lestrade and Sir Henderson.

I could not help but wonder who could reduce the Home Secretary, whose physical durability far outstripped other supreme masters, to this state.

“A master of the Church of Asteroid……? If not—”

When Sir Henderson told me that Sir Harcourt’s servant Clark had gone mad while drawing a likeness, believed to be that of the Church of Asteroid’s leader, presumed to be James Moriarty, I realized at once that Clark was already dead, and a fake had taken his place.

Among the many sinister arts of the martial world, there existed techniques that placed psychological taboos to make one’s knowledge difficult to access—but there was no art that could turn a perfectly sound man into a ruined husk the instant he broke such a taboo.

The Church of Asteroid must have identified the infiltrated Clark and tried to dig up who had pursued the truth behind the telephone murder case.

Clark, loyal to the minister, would have leaked nothing. He would rather have taken his own life.

In the end, the Church of Asteroid would have had no choice but to send an agent.

And across the history of Murim, when planting an agent to spy upon an official master, the preferred choice was usually one with weak force.

‘At least, perhaps, it is fortunate the minister’s life is not in danger……’

It was then.

Just as I was about to spring up with Sargent Jump, a young man with a face I had never seen silently ‘walked out’ from the minister’s office window.

“……?!”

As I looked up at him, I couldn’t speak a single word.

It was a profoundly bizarre sight.

A man from whom I felt not the slightest presence—

was, quite literally, walking upon the sky.

As though neither the Home Secretary collapsed on the ground nor I held any interest for him, he simply stared ahead into empty air.

With everyone’s eyes on the fallen minister, I alone noticed his presence.

Soon the Kung-Fuists rushing into the minister’s office would meet him, but if he fled at once, it meant there was no one but me who could catch him.

And yet, why?

As I watched a man who radiated no notable presence at all, I couldn’t move even a single step.

Had my body frozen under pressure?

Like an animal forgetting how to flee for a moment when it hears a tiger’s low rumble.

No. That was not it.

What bound me in place was nothing other than instinct.

I knew it with my bones.

If I leapt with Sargent Jump now, or ran up the walls of Westminster Palace with the Absorption Technique and struck at the man standing in the air—

I would surely die.

“Damn it……”

When faced with something incomprehensible, humans typically show one of two reactions.

First, they attempt to grasp and comprehend it. Dragging it from mystery into the realm of reality. Second, they fear it.

Most people respond in the former way, and only shift to the latter when they fail.

What made me different from them was that I had never experienced the latter.

Let us take as an example the difference in responses when Timothy Young, the Phantom Fist, committed his murder case.

While Lestrade and Scotland Yard’s officers were terrified, I succeeded in deducing the truth of the incident.

But this time was different.

I didn’t understand in the slightest the phenomenon occurring before my eyes.

‘What in the world is that power……?’

Moriarty, who looked as harmless as though he had never learned Kung-Fu, stood suspended in midair without leaking even a grain of energy.

It was not as though the martial world lacked those who could perform such transcendent lightness skills.

The problem was the hole that had formed in the heart of the gray sky.

In the clouds hanging above the man’s head, a perfectly circular hole had opened—unnaturally perfect.

It was as though an invisible force pierced the clouds and poured down from the heavens into the crown of his head.

Meanwhile, what lay beyond the hole utterly denied common sense.

“Tell me, Watson. Am I seeing a hallucination?”

When I spoke, Watson lifted her head.

“What do you mean by—”

Watson rose and looked up at the sky, and then froze in place.

It seemed it was no illusion.

Beyond the clouds was a beautiful night sky, with stars glittering.

Yes. That, in itself, was perfectly natural.

So long as Big Ben’s hands were not pointing to half past three in the afternoon.

-Clatter.

The cane slipped from Watson’s hand and rolled along the ground.

The incomprehensible sight had knocked the sense out of her.

“Don’t panic. Lower your head, slowly. You have seen nothing.”

“……”

‘He doesn’t so much as spare us a glance.’

I was relieved.

Relieved that the strange being above our heads showed no interest in me at all.

And I was the sort of man who could not tolerate himself harboring such feeble sentiments.

-Shing!

I drew the blade of my Heavenly Demon Cane and cut my palm.

“Holmes—!”

“I found myself thinking too softly for a moment, and I required stimulus.”

When I took out my pipe and lit it, the dizzying pain and the smoke, mingled with the scent of elixirs, returned my reason to its proper place.

In this situation, the foremost priority was to observe the opponent.

-Whoooom!

When I unfolded the Indra Net, raised to a new level at the Royal Palace ball, moisture in the air gathered, forming several large magnifying lenses in a straight line.

‘……He resembles him.’

Through the Indra Net, the man’s face looked leisurely, as if he had come out for a stroll, and his features and silhouette were deeply familiar.

Pale skin that seemed nervously taut, and bright blond hair.

The habit of moving his head side to side like a serpent, now and then.

A tall frame and slender limbs.

He did not look yet thirty.

Without question, I knew him.

‘James Moriarty……’

It was a baleful hypothesis I had once entertained.

In a world where Kung-Fu existed, my nemesis might possess might beyond imagination.

A fear that had been no more than a vague premonition had now taken shape and bared its teeth at me.

‘I knew we would meet someday, but why now, of all times……’

I did not need to exchange words to know.

He was the man I had plunged with from a waterfall. I could not possibly mistake him.

He was James Moriarty, who, like Her Majesty Queen Victoria, had reached the Unrestrained Realm and undergone rejuvenation.

Just as my soul returned to the past, his body too had flowed against time and regained its prime.

Ever since I learned he had transmitted demonic arts to Timothy Young, I believed I had steeled myself.

But upon facing him in truth, I understood how fleeting human resolve could be.

‘With a gap in class this vast, I cannot even attempt a suicide attack.’

Even with my nemesis before my eyes, one I would gladly tear apart, what ruled my mind was only the thought of escaping the immediate peril.

It was not that I feared my life being consumed.

If I were convinced I could bring him down by throwing away my life, I would gladly consider it among my options.

However, the goal of this life was to bring down Moriarty without sacrificing anyone. Not myself, and not Watson.

Unlike me, who possessed all memories from before regression, Moriarty did not remember me.

That was obvious from the fact that, on the day I first opened my eyes in the London Murim, Moriarty did not come to kill me.

He did not know me, but I knew him.

In other words, this meeting was not only a crisis. It was an opportunity.

If I could merely gauge the gap in power between Moriarty and myself, it would be profit enough.

‘He is an uncatchable man, but it is certain he did not come here to kill someone.’

That Sir Harcourt survived against a Moriarty who could summon the night sky into London at midday meant he did not harbor killing intent.

Having faced him in a previous life, I had a fair grasp of his temperament.

He could have sent subordinates for this, yet he came himself—meaning he couldn’t resist curiosity.

But I couldn’t exploit that curiosity at once.

If it became known that I was the one who solved the Phantom Fist case, it was plain I would be killed.

Even as I thought so, Moriarty’s body was slowly rising into the sky.

I had no intention of dying for Moriarty here, yet I did not wish to end this encounter without gaining even a single clue.

Therefore, I would do this.

-Squeeze.

I took from my pocket Irene Adler’s new handkerchief—the one I carried for emergencies—and wrapped a shard of broken glass in it.

Then I hurled it with all my strength at Moriarty, floating in the air.

Without even extending a hand, Moriarty stopped the glass shard, charged with internal energy , with Poltergeist.

-Tssst!

Under the pressure of his powerful internal energy, the knot of the handkerchief came undone and separated from the shard.

The window fragment turned to dust in an instant, and the handkerchief unfolded neatly into a square.

Moriarty stared for a moment at the initials I.A. embroidered on the handkerchief, then at last looked down.

The crossing gaze of consulting detective and crime consultant.

It was the first time.

That I, the one who had judged countless criminals, tasted what it was like to stand at the defendant’s bar.

Still, I had succeeded in stirring his curiosity.

Now it was time to seek a way to survive.

In a notably courteous tone, I sent Moriarty a Direct Message.

<Mrs. Norton requests a meeting in the near future.>

<……Irene Adler?>

Given what we are to each other, is it not only proper to set terms for our next meeting?