From the second day, the atmosphere in the castle began to become tense.

After breakfast in the dining room, everyone entered the state of magician standard - mysticism. Everyone kept themselves alone as much as possible, did not communicate with the outside world, and even had their meals brought to their rooms by the servants of the castle.

The morning meal was the last meal for all to attend, a prelude to the battle for Grevin's legacy, and a signal and farewell between the magicians.

If there are any exceptions, there are probably only Shinji and Grey, two young people who didn't plan to solve the mystery in the first place. However, because everyone else remained mystic, the two were also isolated.

Teenagers and girls don't care about this. Looking at the way Grey wears a hood all day and her face is not showing, you know that she is not good at contact with people, and the more people there are, the more uncomfortable she becomes. Shinji knew that there were ghosts in it, so he hurried to teach Grey a lesson, not asking her to do anything, at least not to hold herself back in the battle.

Soon, the incident happened.

Someone died.

In the middle of the night, before dawn, in the very middle of the hall, the location of the stairwell.

There is a huge statue of an angel with an angel holding a sword and a scale. Among the many angels, it is the symbol of Michael - the balance condemns the sins of the dead, and the sword repels Satan.

But this time, Michael's sword pierces not Satan, but a woman.

Kimono from the Far East is hung on the statue of an angel, which is even more mysterious. Even if the blood of the Angel Sword is stained, it will not be able to detract from this beauty. Even if the blood had turned black as it began to clot, the fact that the pierced woman was so touching would not change.

Ryori Kano!!

All the magicians who were invited recognized the identity of the deceased.

“…… Hmm!"

Grey involuntarily covered her mouth. As a grave keeper, it is not that she has never seen a corpse, but the corpse in front of her is a little different.

Her eyes, those beautiful black pearls, had been brutally gouged out.

"I'm going to put her down. Heine gently held out his hand to the statue.

No one has any objections. Magicians are used to death and know how to deal with such things, except for Rosalind, who is still a child.

Heine's hand stretched out a wire as thin as a hair, instantly cutting off the statue's sword. The young man gently took Ryori's corpse. Not caring that the suit was soiled, he carefully placed the body on the floor, hesitated for a moment, and lifted the kimono that wrapped the corpse.

"It's rude. ”

There was still no one to speak, and while Heine was performing the autopsy, the magicians were also using their own ways to determine the cause of the woman's death.

The eyes were violently gouged out with a large sharp object resembling claws, and a large part of the back was also peeled off, presumably by the deceased's magic mark - normally, as long as the magic mark remains, the magician will not die easily, and even if he is mortally wounded, he can survive for a while.

There is a letter in the sleeve of the kimono, and the letter contains the same style of invitation as the other invitees, the only difference is the name of the invitee and the corresponding "angel name".

Someone involuntarily read out the last words he heard yesterday.

—Ask the name of the angel. ”

"Whoever cannot answer the question must be stripped of by the angels. ”

Angel name.

Peeling.

I thought that this sentence itself was also a mystery, but I didn't expect it to be such a simple and crude literal meaning.

The pattern of stripping was also deduced later by the magicians, and was related to the "angel name" of each person.

The angel name of "Stripping City" follows the Kabbalah system, one of the foundations of magic, and the "angel name" of Ryori Kano is Hachasiah, the angel who uses the Aries Palace as the ruling house.

The house of Aries is the first house of the zodiac, and it is the head that protects the part of the body, and Hachasiah protects the eyeballs.

In the first house of Aries, Hachasiah peels off the eyeballs.

An invitation is not only an invitation, but also a death notice of how you will die.

So what's next, the Golden Bull, or is it another Aries? After all, there are seventy-two angels in the Kabbalah system, and where are the stripping parts?

Silent.

An eerie atmosphere filled the air. There is no fear, no sorrow, just distrust of the surroundings and the same joy.

Gray, who has a super-psychic nature, captures these emotions, but she doesn't understand them, and when she returns to her room, she asks the doubts in her heart.

"It's actually quite understandable. ”

Shinji replied as he made some kind of preparation.

"Ryori Kano is the only one who knows the secret method of Ashuburn and does not need to get it among the people gathered in Stripping City, and is also a symbol of the rules. ”

"Her death says two things. First, there are indeed very precious treasures here, otherwise no one would have dared to risk being hunted down by the Law and Political Science Division to kill Ryori Kano. Second, as soon as Ryori Kano dies, the rules that can be guaranteed to be implemented with the deterrent power of the Law and Political Science Division will be gone, and the next thing is the reality of the magic world that I told you the day before yesterday - the law of the jungle. ”

Grey recalls the sounds she had heard not long ago, and the emotions that came out of them.

Conceited.

Enmity.

Curious.

Greedy.

All kinds of emotions are intertwined, like a gathering of demons who laugh out loud on a stormy night.

At this moment, Gray finally understood that this was not a simple puzzle treasure hunt at all, but something deeper. The mystery is no longer something waiting to be solved, but some kind of decoy, an ominous shadow.

"Instructor, what should we do?"

"Everyone is on the move, and we can't afford to be idle. Take this, bring the topographic map I made, and keep an eye on one of my people. ”

"Who. ”

"Heine Istali. ”

"Mr. Heine?"

There was obvious hesitation on Grey's face, and it was clear that he had a very good opinion of Heine.

"The instructor thinks he's the murderer of Miss Kano? because he was the first to find the body. ”

"No, on the contrary, I think he could be the next victim. ”

"Hey, hey!!"

"A schoolboy who never grew up told us that the first person to find a body is often not the murderer — ahem, sorry, forget you're not Webb's dead house, don't read comics. To be honest, on the night I found the body, I laid an 'eye' telling me that Heine had left the room early and had not returned until the body was found. If he is the murderer, there is no need to risk suspicion and be the first to find the body. If he wasn't, then there was a good chance that he had discovered something, and it was only reasonable that he had been killed by the real murderer - how could Miss Rosalind be eight years old, and how could she bear the blow of losing her brother. ”

"Ho, I can't see that you still have this kind of fetish. ”

The voice of the Adesha landscape rang out.