C156: Reflecting on the battle
Sitting alone in the crimson theatre, Izzy rapped her index finger against the velvet of the armrest in a rhythmic cadence.
"Mmm."
She closed her eyes briefly, allowing the silence of her mindscape to settle around her
“They failed.”
That result took her by surprise.
She had not anticipated that Victor could escape from the combined assault from the Inspectors. What made the failure more galling was that the engagement had been four against one.
Izzy examined her own fingers, turning her hand over before slowly shaking her head.
“I have also failed.”
Izzy had attempted to execute what she had thought of earlier: launching a coin using Psychokinesis.
The setup had been simple in theory. commanding the bird puppet to fly while carrying two shillings in its small beak. The instant Victor came close, Isa would release the coins at him.
But, as expected, it did not turn out the way she imagined.
Firstly, the engagement occurred high in the open sky, where the coins would naturally be subjected to air resistance and gravity. These forces required her to manually guide and propel the coins using Psychokinesis.
In essence, Isa had held to the coin throughout the entire attack. That was the reason Isa could alter the coin's direction mid-flight.
This limitation meant the bird had to remain within a fifteen-meter radius of Victor.
And as for launching the coin at bullet velocity, the experiment was a complete failure.
Isa could launch the coin, certainly. But its speed was comparable only to that of a grown adult throwing the coin with all their might.
To achieve true bullet speed was, at present, technically impossible. At least, not at her current level of Psychokinesis.
‘But at least I know I can injure him.’
Izzy tapped her finger against the armrest.
Immediately, the theatre flared red. The velvet curtains of the stage parted with a majestic sweep, and slowly, the entire fighting sequence of the church engagement began to replay upon the boards.
While Arnold was staying at the pub, Izzy had watched the entire battle unfold through the shared Field Vision of her bird puppet stationed on a nearby rooftop.
She had witnessed everything, with the exception of the final moments when Victor had emerged from the secret underground chamber, brandishing some unknown artifact.
Her intuition had screamed at her that the object was extremely dangerous, so she had retreated and prepared for the ambush.
She rewound the recording and began from the beginning, analyzing the entire encounter carefully.
To be honest, the opening exchange of the fight was extremely bizarre. It had caught her off guard.
["Are you a vampire?"]
["I indeed am."]
'What in the world is this nonsense?'
It read like something straight out of a low-budget theatrical drama, the kind of cheap production where villains confessed their sins the moment the hero posed the question.
Who in their right mind would reveal their true identity upon being asked so directly? Was she trapped inside some poorly constructed simulation?
Izzy massaged her aching temple.
She noticed a critical detail hidden within the exchange.
The moment Gregory posed the question, he had closed his eyes.
'You are concealing something, Captain.'
Gregory. Izzy deduced that the man possessed some manner of compelling ability, forcing his opponent to speak the truth.
'But how did Victor himself not perceive the compulsion?'
It was bizarre. Izzy noted this question on the black monument for future study.
Throughout the whole fight, Izzy had managed to confirm each of their abilities.
Their abilities aligned with the records preserved in the black monument.
The only abilities she needed to be cautious around were Gregory's truth-compelling ability and Victor's resurrection technique that allowed him to escape death.
'Based on my count, he could employ that five times.'
Izzy could not determine with certainty whether Victor's weakened state afterward was due to the silver or the cumulative exhaustion of battling four Inspectors simultaneously. But she noted that he had not triggered that strange ability when struck by her coin.
Yet, something did not quite add up.
'That one time when Troy succeeded in decapitating him. His body did not transform into blood but stayed as it was during the middle of the fight.'
Izzy narrowed her eyes, leaning forward in her velvet seat as she scrutinized the image on the stage.
'Another ability?'
And the most important part: Victor had not died.
It was as though he had been revived.
‘This is going to be complicated.’
She felt a wave of headache wash over her.
Izzy had managed to follow the scenario established by her two previous iterations up to this point. This was the first genuine deviation from her carefully constructed plan.
‘Then I can only depend on Danz to kill him.’
But Victor had fled away. Her bird puppet had also been killed. How was she supposed to locate him now?
‘One villain got away. It’s straight out of a drama movie…’ Izzy grimaced. She understood very well how critical it could be when an enemy managed to escape.
‘Now that I think about it, I heard him say something.’
When Izzy had still maintained control of the dead bird puppet, she had caught fragments of his low muttering.
["So you have awakened."]
He had spoken those words while directing his gaze toward the Baroness's estate.
And he had also spoken when gripping the dead puppet bird in his hand.
["Deaf."]
[“How coincidental. You have appeared.”]
'What does he mean by that?'
She was also certain that he had looked in her direction. Toward the direction of the hidden mansion nestled within the dark forest.
Then, immediately afterward, her connection to the bird had been abruptly cut off. Likely because Victor had destroyed the bird’s corpse.
Did Victor manage to comprehend the entire situation? Did he realize that the one controlling the bird from behind was her, just by examining her bird puppet?
Izzy was certain that her Path was “the Deaf.”
'This is dangerous...' Izzy mused. She had never anticipated encountering an ability capable of tracing her puppet back to her.
Given that Victor had withstood the combined assault of four trained Inspectors, she was confident he was a Silver Sky Stagefarer.
A stage higher than Danz, her strongest ally at the moment.
Izzy frowned, her finger returning to tap against her chin. Her leg began to vibrate restlessly. For some reason she could not explain, her tapping would not stop.
She felt uneasy about something, a cold itch scratching at the back of her mind.
Izzy frowned harder, her brow creasing. She could not identify precisely what was wrong, but her intuition insisted that something crucial was missing from the picture.
*Sigh.*
Izzy signed lightly. Since she had no way of knowing what was wrong, she couldn’t deducing it.
'Hmm. Have I forgotten something important?' Izzy closed her eyes, concentrating.
"Ah," she muttered, the memory surfacing at last.
"Isa," Izzy called out, projecting her voice toward their mindscape where her young mind stayed.
"Yes, Izzy?"
"What about the bird I instructed you to follow Lumber?"
For some inexplicable reason, Izzy could no longer access the perspective of the other bird, the second puppet she had tasked with shadowing Lumber’s movements.
The bird that she had specifically told Isa to follow Lumber with.
"...Ah!" Isa gasped. "Isa forgot!"
Izzy narrowed her eyes.
"You as well?"
"I, yes! The bird! Isa lost track of the bird after it approached the forest, and then," she stammered, her voice rising in pitch. "Isa forgot! She received the new task from Izzy, and—"
Izzy sat in silence for a long moment, processing the implications.
At that time, she had indeed asked Isa to assist her with the Psychokinesis to ambush Victor.
‘Somehow, we both forget about our other bird puppet?’
Both of them had forgotten about the other bird, the puppet that had trailed Lumber and the young boy Otis.
'Cognitive influence...'
The forest was dangerous, that much was certain. It exhibited too many incomprehensible phenomena that even Izzy, with all her accumulated knowledge, could not understand.
At least, she could now confirm one crucial fact: Lumber was Otis’s kidnapper.
“Why would he do that?”
For now, she would remember this detail. If it didn’t affect her survival, she would ignore it.
"Is, Isa’s sorry. She did not know—"
"It’s alright," Izzy sighed, massaging the bridge of her nose with thumb and forefinger. She could not exactly blame the young mind for the lapse. It had been her own oversight as well.
'I must tread far more carefully from this point forward.'
She had grown arrogant, complacent in her assumption that the Inspectors could dispose of Victor on her behalf, without any need for her direct intervention.
During that battle, she should at least have joined in and dealt ưith the vampire while he was occupied too.
‘Still have to depend on myself…’
Izzy grimaced at the bitter truth of it.
Since Izzy could not do anything at this point, she wrote her entire deduction onto the black monument and returned to the real world.