Chapter 4 : Chapter 4
Chapter 04: Since the Investigation Part Isn’t My Favorite, Let’s Just Skip It
—A color palette...
The girl who had come up to Chang Rong was tiny, bundled in a thick coat, with enormous braided twin-tails hanging down on either side of her head, each streaked with rainbow colors.
Even the eyes in her little face were mixed with strange, multicolored hues.
“Shiro said Noah’s paintings would affect everyone. Noah really does seem to have hurt An’an... Were you affected by Noah too? Is Noah... a bad girl who only troubles everyone and makes them suffer?”
The color-palette girl spoke in a dejected tone. Her rainbow-colored eyes were already shimmering with tears, as though little rainbow candies might start falling out of them at any second.
“...???”
So many question marks were piling up in Chang Rong’s head that they were on the verge of bursting out.
—“Shiro” meant that suspect girl with the long black hair who looked like a walking doom-shroom, right? This little kid in front of me is calling herself “Noah,” so who the hell is “An’an”? I do not think that name even came up in the earlier conversation...
Chang Rong began playing a frantic game of connect-the-faces-and-names inside his head, trying to use it to decipher what Rainbow Noah was even talking about.
“Noah... Noah...”
“Wah, wah, I’m fine, I’m fine! A girl who cares enough to ask after someone can’t possibly be a bad girl. That makes you a good girl!”
Seeing that the balloon in front of him was on the verge of bursting, Chang Rong panicked. If she really did start bawling her eyes out right then and there, he would go from unnoticeable background extra to the center of the spotlight in an instant, stealing everyone’s attention.
To prevent that horrifying outcome, he hurriedly assured her he was fine, while also patting her on the head and smoothing her hair down.
Shit, I forgot to turn off auto-loot!
A few spoken words of reassurance should have been enough, but for some reason his stupid hand had gone straight to Noah’s head on its own. The motion had been so smooth and natural that it was almost as if he did this sort of thing all the time.
Adults exchanged business contacts when they met for the first time. Ninjas shook hands.
Creeps patted girls on the head.
He was already a bizarre intruder among a roomful of girls, and now he had gone and committed direct-contact harassment on top of that.
Chang Rong could practically see himself standing on the gallows already, with a crowd below chanting, “Hang him! Jostar!”
That was it. End of the line.
“Noah is a good girl...?” she echoed, then broke into an absurdly adorable smile. “Ehehe...”
But the Bad End Chang Rong had braced himself for did not trigger.
The color-palette balloon whose hair he had petted neither screamed nor resisted. She simply froze for a moment, then turned that unbelievably cute smile on him.
—Hm? Could it be that I am actually a master of youth romance after all?
Noah’s reaction, far from what he had expected, filled Chang Rong with confidence. Perhaps he really could lead everyone out of this land of madness and despair alive—and while he was at it, perhaps he could even enjoy with a few girls the sour-sweet romance that only a galgame protagonist was entitled to.
While Chang Rong was swelling up with self-importance like a balloon himself, the disturbance on the other side of the room seemed to settle down for the moment. The owl called the Warden flew to the display screen and cleared its throat twice.
“Ahem... In any case, the situation is more or less what I just explained. If I keep talking, it will affect what little time I have left before I can leave work, so you may consult the handbook yourselves for the rest. Although Lady Meruru is gone, the 【Witch Trial】 will continue as scheduled. Now then, according to the earlier preliminary vote—”
The Warden, like some office drone desperate to clock out and flee, lazily slapped the screen with one claw.
Beep-beep-boop~!
The display, which had previously been dark, lit up again with a ridiculous sound effect. On the screen appeared the headshot of the girl called “Shiro,” framed like some MVP glamour photo.
“Nikaidou Shiro, if you would kindly cooperate. You received the highest number of votes as the prime suspect in this case, so we will be confining you until the trial begins. This is also to prevent the real culprit from interfering with the investigation or committing another crime while mingling among the group. I trust you understand.”
“What kind of joke is this...! I’m not—ugh!”
Before the girl whose full name was Nikaidou Shiro could really resist, the monstrous guard that had been standing at the door suddenly flashed to her side. Its great scythe, which looked more than capable of taking off a head in one swing, came to rest against her neck. That left the girl with nothing more to say.
“The trial will begin in a few hours, so please do your best until then...”
“Hold it! There’s been some weird extra person hanging around from the very start, you know? Aren’t you supposed to be the administrator? Are you really just going to ignore a screwup this huge?”
Just as the owl was about to flap its wings and call it a day, the girl with the cat-ear headphones suddenly pointed at Chang Rong and attacked.
“Eh!?”
Chang Rong, who until just moments ago had been quietly enjoying the show while pretending to be part of the furniture, was abruptly dragged into the light.
“Oh my? Oh dear, oh dear, this truly is... a completely unexpected situation.”
The Warden flew over to Chang Rong and looked him up and down with those eyes arranged one above the other in a full one-hundred-and-eighty-degree line, then let out a peculiar sigh.
“Ordinarily, a problem of this magnitude would require emergency response procedures. But Lady Meruru has already been murdered, and I would also prefer to get off work early—so how about you all handle it yourselves?”
“That is far too perfunctory, desuwa!?”
The Lolita-dressed girl whom Yingyu Emma had earlier called “Hanna” shouted her complaint.
“Are you kidding me? If some creepy bastard just showed up out of nowhere, then get off your ass and figure out where he came from, damn it!” yelled a white-haired, red-eyed girl in a tattered black hooded cloak and black mask, in a tone straight out of a delinquent gang.
“My, my. It seems this prison truly contains far more interesting happenings than I expected~” said the mature-looking girl in the purple kimono—the one who had helped Shiro up earlier—with an amused smile.
“Oho! Captain America-kun, you’re awake~~” The blue-haired girl, whom he vaguely remembered, cheerfully waved at him. For some reason she was holding a magnifying glass, and the energy of her bright, sunshiny grin felt wildly out of place.
“U-um...” Yingyu Emma seemed as though she wanted to say something, but her soft pink-haired voice was almost instantly drowned out by the arguing.
“That thing is a guy, so obviously he isn’t a witch, right? If he isn’t a witch, then that means he’s the second mastermind! Help, I’m going to get caught by the mastermind! He’s going to do this and that to me!”
As if the scene were not chaotic enough already, the cat-ear-headphone girl, Zedu Keke, pointed at Chang Rong and shouted in a display of laughably bad acting.
—That damned keycap...!!
Chang Rong glared viciously at Zedu Keke, wishing he could personally introduce her face to his beloved Grasp of the Undying.
Granted, he really was suspicious as hell. But there was no reason for her to keep piling fuel onto the fire like this. What the hell was wrong with that damned kitty?
“A second mastermind, hm? Yes, that is indeed quite possible—”
Clack!
A crisp sound of a bolt cycling cut through the room. Even amid the noise of the reception room, it was impossible to miss.
The black-haired girl with twin-tails and black goggles, who until then had likewise stayed in the background with almost no presence at all, suddenly made her move. She raised both hands and brought up an object that looked absurdly out of place in the setting around them: a rifle.
Chang Rong was not a military geek. He could not identify the model or the caliber. But he knew well enough that it was not some improvised scrap-metal firearm cobbled together by hand.
It was a genuine weapon—the sort of magical tool that, with the twitch of a finger, could instantly broaden a person’s mind, open a hole in their head, or make them sing out magnificently.
And at this very moment, the muzzle of that miraculous little tool was aimed straight at Chang Rong.
—Why the hell does someone in a locked-room blizzard death game start with a rifle?! Does this bullshit game have no sense of balance whatsoever? They could at least have eased us in with a pistol round. No, scratch that—even a pistol would still be wildly overpowered!
And come to think of it, this girl felt a little... ugh...!
A fresh spike of pain stabbed through Chang Rong’s skull. At this point, he no longer knew whether it came from the fear of having a gun pointed at him, the aftereffects of oxygen deprivation, or simply the ache of having had his forehead frozen solid.
As the situation lurched even further off course, the scene had already deviated completely from the original sequence of “lock up the suspect and disperse to search for clues.”
“E-everyone! Please listen to me!”
Just before things passed the point of no return, Yingyu Emma stepped forward.
She ran to stand in front of Chang Rong, spread her arms as if to shield him, and called out to the others with everything she had.
Her action worked. Every girl turned to look at her. None of them had expected this awkward, timid-looking girl to have the courage to step in front of a gun.
Emma glanced over the girls, whose fragile unity was now on the verge of total collapse, and took a deep breath to steel herself.
“Even if Meruru was the mastermind... that may only be the Warden’s side of the story, or there may be some other hidden truth to it. A-anyway, shouldn’t what matters most right now be finding the person who killed Meruru?”
“So I’m telling you, that guy is the killer, and this one is mastermind number two—”
“Everyone! Emma is right. What we should be doing now is not suspecting and doubting one another, and certainly not showing hostility toward each other. Heibu Naiyexiang, the Warden said it just now as well: the trial will not stop just because the mastermind is dead. If you shoot that boy here, then in the next Witch Trial you yourself will be eliminated immediately, because you will have killed someone in full view of everyone present, leaving no room for any defense. Is that really what you want?”
Zedu Keke was cut off by another voice.
The speaker was a short-haired blonde girl dressed in something resembling royal formalwear, with even a sword hanging at her waist. At first glance, one might almost have mistaken her for a princely knight.
As she spoke, this “prince” walked over to Yingyu Emma’s side, then flicked back her hair in an absurdly dashing pose.
—W-what is with this person’s overwhelming need to perform?
Chang Rong was left staring stupidly at the Prince’s string of overblown stage-play gestures.
Still, thanks to Her Highness the Prince, the girl with the rifle—Heibu Naiyexiang—finally showed a wavering, conflicted expression.
The tide seemed to be shifting. Even the color-palette balloon whose head he had petted earlier had drifted over to Chang Rong’s side at some point.
“Noah believes too. Mm. Believes in Suspenders.”
“My name is Chang Rong.”
That inexplicable misnaming startled him into correcting her at once.
For a moment, the reception room settled into a three-way standoff.
Yingyu Emma, the “Prince,” and Noah stood protectively in front of Chang Rong. They had chosen, for the time being, to trust this boy who had barged in from nowhere.
Zedu Keke, Heibu Naiyexiang, and the purple-butterfly woman, on the other hand, still regarded Chang Rong—the uninvited guest—with hostility, or at the very least suspicion.
The rest were split between indecision, total confusion, fence-sitting, and the blue-haired girl who for some reason looked thrilled out of her mind, as if she were thinking, “What’s this, what’s this? Are we about to start a firefight? Count me in!”
At the height of the tension, the one with the real power to decide things at last spoke again:
“Well now... if this continues, it will delay even the Witch Trial. Fortunately, I have come up with an excellent solution. I am sure everyone will be satisfied.”
The owl flapped its wings and looked straight at Chang Rong.
“Really, Warden? I’m not the mastermind—you should know that better than anyone!”
At least for the moment, the Warden did not appear to be his enemy. Chang Rong hurried to appeal to it, hoping it would clear him of this absurd accusation of being the mastermind.
Begging for help from the sidekick of the final boss was humiliating and decidedly un-protagonist-like, but no matter what, he could not let himself get killed in such a muddle-headed way.
If he died right at the start of the prologue, anyone seeing it would think he was trying to speedrun the opening on purpose. Hehe. I absolutely have to survive...
“Do not worry.”
The Warden answered with utter certainty, and at last Chang Rong breathed a sigh of relief.
Five minutes later—
“......”
“......”
In the basement level’s Punishment Room, where no signal of any kind could be detected, Chang Rong and Nikaidou Shiro—the suspect in the current case—sat staring at each other in speechless silence.
【In any case, I’ll just lock you up together until the trial begins. Once the Witch Trial is over and I’m off the clock, you can do whatever you like. It has nothing to do with me either way.】
Such was the Warden’s earth-shaking wisdom.