Aetheral Space

Chapter 144:6.2: The Great Detective Knows

Unforgivable, Atoy Muzazi thought. Utterly unforgivable.

Governor Regan put a hand to his mouth as he viewed the grisly scene. Even Marie’s nose wrinkled at the scent of dried blood and excrement. This was more than a murder -- it was a desecration.

"Pretty interesting, huh?" said a lively voice from the doorway.

Muzazi turned away from the body to look. There, leaning against the doorframe, was a young man with silver hair and bright blue eyes. For a moment, Muzazi’s hand almost went to his sheath, thinking Dragan Hadrien had suddenly appeared before him -- but no, no, this was a different person.

His hair was longer, for one, bound in a ponytail -- with pale blue highlights at the end -- and the structure of his face was entirely different. A small blue fez balanced itself atop his head, and a similarly blue-and-white fur coat was wrapped tight around his small and slight body. His eyes scanned Muzazi intently, a carefree smile on his face.

"Hey, hey," he said curiously after a moment. "What’s with the hostility? That’s pretty interesting, too. You thought about going for your sword when you saw my eyes, so did you have a bad experience with a Cogitant in the past? Oh, you tensed up your back when I said that, so did they stab you in the back or something? No, no, I guess they shot you, then?" He grinned a cheshire grin. "I’m right, right?"

Muzazi cleared his throat awkwardly, trying his best to recover from the verbal barrage.

"That’s… correct," he admitted. "I apologize -- you caught me off guard. I assume you’re…?"

The young man stepped into the room, hands clasped behind his back as his eyes flicked around, observing everything. "Special Officer Winston E. Grace, yes -- the E stands for Ezekiel, in case you were wondering. I specialise in cases like these."

Regan nodded in confirmation. "We’ve been host to Officer Grace for two days now. Sadly, we haven’t made much progress so far, but now that you two have arrived…"

"Huh?" Winston loudly interrupted, furrowing his brow in bewilderment. "What do you mean we haven’t made much progress? No, no, I’ve solved it already."

The cabin was silent for a second as all present simply stared at Grace. The sheer power radiated from the combined disapproval of Muzazi, Marie and Regan would have been sufficient to wither a tree -- but the cheerful detective didn’t seem to be affected at all. He simply cocked his head, as if confused by the negative reception he was getting.

"What’s up?" he asked.

"Um, sir," Regan said, taking a hesitant step forward. "When you say you’ve solved it -- are you saying you know who the culprit is?"

"Yeah, of course," Grace replied casually. "What else would I mean?"

"W-Who is it, then?" Regan’s eyes were wide with anticipation.

"Well, if you’re asking me who actually physically did it, I haven’t figured that part out yet -- but I’ve figured out the motive and the people behind it."

Marie stepped forward, addressing the new arrival for the first time. "And those are?"

Winston Grace looked up at Marie -- he truly was small, barely exceeding five feet -- and quickly scanned her up and down. A strange twinkle entered his eyes, and died down just as quickly.

"Well," he said, stretching the word out as he took another step forward -- bending over as he looked around the crime scene. "I’d say this whole thing is something of an audition. It’s happened before, after all."

"An audition for what?" Muzazi asked flatly. He’d known this person for less than three minutes, and he already found them exhausting.

Winston glanced at him over his shoulder. "Darkstar," he said simply.

Darkstar. The word resounded through the small room like the toll of a bell. Muzazi’s body stiffened in response to it, Marie’s even more so. Off in the corner of the dimly lit room, Regan swallowed his saliva. The shadows seemed to press in on them.

"Darkstar…" Regan said hesitantly. "Sorry, what is -- what is Darkstar?"

Winston’s mouth spread into an innocent, almost childlike grin. White teeth gleamed in the faint light. "You don’t know?"

Regan shook his head -- and Grace’s attention switched to Muzazi again, eyes drilling into him.

"How about you?" he asked. "Do you know?"

In this dark place, faced with that mercilessly inquisitive gaze, Muzazi felt almost as if he were being interrogated. It was a terribly irrational thought, but he couldn’t help but feel that something awful would happen if he didn’t share what he knew.

"Partially," Muzazi admitted, shifting on the spot. "I know they’re an organisation opposed to the Supremacy, but that’s the extent of my knowledge."

He knew that, once, there had been a Special Officer -- one of the best -- who’d betrayed the Supremacy to join up with this Darkstar organization. Nobody had known why he’d turned, and he’d killed every single person that the Supremacy had sent after him. He’d once been known as Samson Rhodes, but most called him the Abyssal Knight these days -- and it was said he was a thing no longer human.

"And you?" Grace finished by asking Marie.

"Pretty much the same," she shrugged.

Grace’s eyes narrowed in response, but he didn’t question her any further.

"Since none of you seem to know what the whole thing’s about," he said, pulling up a discarded chair and sitting himself down backwards in it. "I’ll graciously explain it to you!"

He leaned forward, balancing his chin atop his fists as he addressed the room.

"Darkstar…" he said, with more than a trace of theatricality. "Half-cult, half-terrorist group. They were a big issue back in the Henri era, but they died down shortly after that -- they’ve mostly been dormant since, save for isolated incidents."

He jabbed a finger towards the halo of blood sketched out on the floor.

"That’s their symbol. Basically, they believe that the course of human progress went along the wrong route a long time ago -- before the Gene Tyrants, even -- and society needs to be reset to that point so we can take the proper path the next time around. In essence, they want the light of civilization to go out -- hence, a dark star."

Muzazi’s hand tightened around Luminescence. "Madness," he muttered.

"Yeah," Grace flapped his arms. "It is pretty crazy. Interesting, though, right? Crazy people are usually fun to try and figure out."

Marie crossed her arms, leaning against the wall. "You said audition, though. How’s that?"

"Well, as I understand it," Grace stared down at the body, tilting his head to view it from various different angles. "Darkstar’s a pretty exclusive club. No room for dead weight when it comes to changing the world, you know? You’ve gotta prove you’ll be useful. I’d say disabling a vital supply chain for the Supremacy would do just that."

"If it is this Darkstar group," Regan spoke up nervously. "Couldn’t this just be part of their normal activities? It doesn’t necessarily have to be an audition, does it?"

Muzazi nodded in agreement, but Grace’s confidence was unbreakable. He shook his head as if embarrassed they’d even ask something so foolish.

"No, it’s definitely an audition. Darkstar themselves wouldn’t need to show off like this. They don’t have anything to prove. The people who did this wanna convince themselves they’re big and bad and scary -- and they wanna convince Darkstar of that, as well. Well, let’s head off."

Without another word, Winston Grace hopped off the chair and headed for the exit, almost skipping as he went. It truly seemed that, here among the blood and guts and shadows, he was in his element.

"Wait," Marie called after him. "What do you mean let’s head off? Where are we going?"

Grace turned on his heel, pointing at the corpse with a confused frown. "This guy had a girlfriend. Obviously we need to interview her about the last time she saw him."

She glared. "You’ve been here for two days already, and you haven’t even done that?"

He blinked. "Of course not. I’m, like, super weak, so I need you two to protect me in case something goes wrong. Right?"

Muzazi sighed to himself as he followed the two of them out of the crime scene. He wasn’t sure what he’d expected from this mission, but it certainly hadn’t been this. The cold welcomed him as he traded one darkness for another.

Ironically, Marie supposed, she was probably the most human member of this dynamic trio. Unfortunately, that meant she was also the best equipped to take care of this unpleasant task.

Philippe Guler’s girlfriend, Lara Vinfried, dabbed her eyes with a handkerchief as she was interviewed. Marie herself was the one doing the actual questioning, while Muzazi took notes behind her and Grace wandered around the apartment like a pest.

In terms of general layout, the residence didn’t look much different from the crime scene they’d started at -- save for the lack of corpse, of course. It was a small place, almost claustrophobic, not big enough to keep secrets in, certainly. Marie honestly couldn’t imagine what would drive someone to try and build a life on this depressing planet: lack of options, maybe? Certainly nothing good.

She leaned forward, placing a reassuring hand on Lara’s shoulder as the woman silently wept.

"I know this is tough," Marie said with sympathy she didn’t really feel. "But if we’re going to catch the person who did this, we need you to be tough. Philippe was a security engineer, right? Did he talk about his work at all?"

Lara shook her head. "No, no, not at all," she sniffed. "He was quiet -- he never talked about his work at all. I just don’t… don’t know why they would have done this to him."

For a split second, Marie’s sympathetic smile twisted into a smirk -- and reverted just as quickly. They? So you already know it was an organization.

"I’m so, so sorry," Marie went on soothingly. "Do you remember the last time you saw him at all?"

"A couple of days ago," Lara managed, body wracked by silent sobs. "He came by and stayed the night -- but he left early the next morning. He -- he said he had to get some work done."

True.

"And do you know if he had any enemies, anyone who’d want to hurt him?"

"I don’t know anything about that…"

Lie.

As a Gene Tyrant, Marie had observational skills that far exceeded any bog-standard Cogitant. She barely had to squint to see the obvious signals of deceit on this woman’s face. Hardly took a detective to spot them with how bad Lara was at lying, either.

Bang.

Marie glanced over her shoulder, annoyance already overpowering the faux-sympathy on her face. Somehow, that idiot Grace had managed to walk straight into a wall, nearly cracking his head open with the speed at which he’d approached it.

As Marie watched, he groped at the wall, cocked his head as if he’d only just recognised it’s existence -- then turned and offered her a cheery thumbs-up.

"You’ll have to forgive him," Marie said, a plastic smile struggling to stay fixed on her face. "My colleagues can be a little… eccentric."

It took nearly two hours of withstanding Lara Vinfried’s incessant weeping, but they finally managed to make it out of the apartment intact -- with the information they needed. Marie spoke up smugly the second the apartment door closed behind them.

"Basically," she said, twirling a lock of hair with her finger. "This woman knows who the killer is, and I’m betting they threatened her to keep her quiet. Since the victim was a security engineer, he probably had something the killer wanted -- a way to access the security systems, most likely. It’s easy to figure these things out if you pay a little bit of attention."

Muzazi nodded, an appropriately awed expression on his face. "Well done, Officer Hazzard!" he said. "I have to admit -- I didn’t notice any of that."

Behind him, however, Grace was simply playing on his script -- finger tapping away against the screen. Marie frowned: it seemed that playing around on their little devices was the best the humans of this era were capable of.

"You have any insights for us, great detective?" she called out.

He glanced up from his script -- from this angle, Marie could see he was actually looking at an overhead map of the settlement: a collection of cubes vaguely forming the town, ringed by various circular buildings.

"Hm?" he mumbled. "Oh, uh, that’s great. By the way, there’s three killers and they’re hiding out at the generator installations outside town."

You could have heard a pin drop.

Marie’s eyes narrowed into a glare. "Oh, fuck off. There’s no way you figured that out just from listening to her."

Grace scratched his head sheepishly. "Yeah, uh, about that," he laughed. "I actually wasn’t listening to her at all, haha!"

Two hours. "I’ll seriously beat the shit out of you."

"Wait, wait, hold on!" Grace waved conciliatory hands in front of his face. "I admit I wasn’t listening -- but that was because I was doing my own investigation, right? It was very important!"

"Everyone has their own methods, Officer Hazzard," Muzazi nodded. She had half a mind to hit him too.

Grace held up an arm, aquamarine Aether running across its surface.

"My Aether ability is called Dupin’s Alchemy," he explained. "By disabling one of my senses, I can boost the strength of another. I made myself deaf and blind back there for a little bit so I could get a good whiff of the place."

Well, that explained him walking into the walls. Marie couldn’t help but feel a little sorry for him -- it must be awful to have to go to such lengths just to get a passable sense of smell.

Grace held up a finger as he went on. "I counted seven recent scents, three of which were tinged with blood and fuel. I’d estimate those bloody scents were from around two days ago, which lines up with the murder -- and the only places in town that use massive amounts of fuel are the transport ships that come in and the generator installations. No one transport ship has been around for the entire duration of this murder case -- hence, they’re hiding out at the generator installations."

With all the facts laid out, Grace clapped his hands together, as if trying to brush away invisible dust -- and then turned the map on the script in their direction. "There are twelve installations encircling Landfall-01," he said. "We’ll check out four each. Sound good?"

That, at least, seemed to finally be a straw too far for Atoy Muzazi. He stepped forward, raising a hand.

"Hold a moment, Officer Grace," he said sternly, looking down at him. "Your deduction is splendid, but it’d be better for us to investigate each of the installations as a unit. We don’t know what the enemy is capable of, after all."

Grace pouted childishly. "No, no, no," he insisted. "They’ll have split up to make themselves harder to track -- if all three of us show up at one installation, they’ll just run for it, but if just one of us shows up they’ll think they have a chance against us. Then we can just bring them in!"

Marie raised an eyebrow. "What happened to I’m, like, super weak?"

"Don’t worry about it," Grace waved a dismissive hand. "I’m always willing to put myself in danger if it helps solve the case, so it’s no problem! Anyway, come on, come on! Please?"

Marie and Muzazi exchanged a look. When had this turned into a babysitting assignment?

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"What do you think?" Muzazi asked.

Personally, Muzazi thought it was cold.

Even with his Aether bolstering his body, the chill bit at him like a swarm of ravenous insects as he marched towards Installation 3, snow crunching under his feet. His bike floated in park a few meters behind, waiting for his prompt return. At this point, he didn’t expect much to come from this endeavour -- the first two installations had been empty, occupied only by automatics, and his first impression of this place seemed no different.

The generator installations which drew heat from the earth below differed aesthetically from the rest of Landfall-01 in only one aspect: they were cylindrical rather than cuboid, like massive chimneys stretching up towards the sky. In any other landscape, they would have seemed unique -- perhaps even artistic -- but in this cold darkness, they were just shadowy monoliths off in the distance.

Perhaps Marie and Winston Grace were having better luck -- or perhaps Grace had been mistaken in his deduction from the start. Either way, Muzazi still had his duty to fulfill: he’d

Marie hesitated. Oh, she thought. Is that all? She began walking again.

"I can see you’re understanding the implications," Beanie grinned. "Now that we have a contract, why don’t you and I talk about a few matters? How many comrades you have, how much you know about us, that sort of thing? Oh, that look on your face. I know it’s humiliating to be the first to fall, but -- hey." Panic began to infiltrate his tone. "Hey, what are you doing? Weren’t you listening to what I just said? S-Stay back! I mean it, stay the fuck ba--"

Marie finally reached him, utterly demolishing his head with a single punch. A second later, her own head exploded.

It was a little annoying to scoop up her bone and brain matter to reabsorb it, but that was all. She was fully regenerated not even two minutes, and could only look down at the corpse of her enemy without pity.

"Man," she said. "You really aren’t lucky. You would have won easily against literally anybody else."

"Every time you hit me..." Winston panted for breath as he stood up after the latest attack. "Your next attack is even stronger. So does your ability just power you up every time you land a hit? No, no, it feels like it’s more interesting than that… these squares on the floor, what are they about…?"

Grinch landed back at his starting position, clinging to the railing there with his feet.

Such fun, such fun. There was no better sensation in the world than watching an idiot try in vain to escape certain death. Grinch had sharpened his body and mind to their limits through countless battles, but even he was unable to suppress that little bit of glee when he saw someone like this boy fall into utter despair.

It was no biggie, anyway. That hunger was what made him strong. Perhaps he’d tighten the vice just a little more, for kicks.

"Idiot," he giggled incessantly. "Your little brains working on overdrive, huh? You’re working so hard trying to figure out what my power is, huh? Even I feel a little sorry for you, so…"

"Hey."

Grinch froze. All of a sudden, with that one word, it felt as if invisible hands were tightening around his throat. The words he’d been about to speak died on his tongue. All he could do was stare at his opponent, covered in darkness, slouched over on the other end of the warehouse.

"I’m... sure I’m mistaken," Winston Grace said. "But you weren’t about to tell me what your power is, right? To be honest, there’s nothing you could do that would piss me off more. I’m the kind of guy who likes to figure things out for himself. My Aether Core is curiosity, after all, so it’s something that I accept as part of myself completely -- and since solving mysteries is the only thing that brings me pleasure, nothing’s worse than when someone tries to spoil it for me. I’m sure you wouldn’t do something that stupid, but I’ll warn you anyway. If you try to just tell me the answer…"

The young man looked up -- and in the darkness of the warehouse, all that was visible of him was one glaring blue eye, pupil dilated to its utmost.

"... I’ll seriously kill you."

This brat was looking down on him. Anger flaring inside his brain, Grinch launched himself at him, hand ready to rip his head off from his shoulders. It was his fourth time around, so he should be plenty strong enough!

Winston Grace just barely stepped out of the way of the blow. "I figured it out, anyway," he said lightly, the menace in his voice completely gone. "It’s checkers, right? Your power’s based on checkers? I’m right, right?"

Grinch’s heart skipped a beat as his ability was figured out, and as he backflipped back to the starting position he couldn’t help but feel the tide of the fight had turned irreversibly against him.

Winston went on. "If I’m right -- and I’m pretty sure I am -- you’ve turned this room into a checkerboard, hence the square pattern, and yourself into a pawn, right? When you reach the other end of the board, you get a power boost, right? Just like how a pawn becomes a king in the game, right?"

Sweat dripped down Grinch’s forehead. The brat was right on every count.

Winston put his hands on his hips and sighed as he stared Grinch down. "It’s a neat power, I guess, but you’ve kinda messed up with it. Aether abilities with strict conditions generally have more potent effects -- just like how, when you take a piss, a thinner stream will travel further, right? But you’ve kinda half-assed it. If you made it so that I could get the ’king’ power boost too by making it to your side of the checkerboard, you’d probably have gotten a better power boost on your end, too. But you’ve picked just enough rules to limit yourself without getting enough power to make it worth it."

A vein bulged on Grinch’s forehead, and he bared his teeth in a growl of frustration. He wouldn’t just sit here and allow this little shit to talk down to him! He’d barely avoided the fourth strike. The fifth one, powered up even more, would spell the end for him.

Grinch kicked off the ground, launching himself towards Winston.

"I’ve figured out your weakness, too," the boy said casually, taking a punchpoint revolver out of his coat and pointing it up towards the ceiling.

No!

Grinch planted his feet against the ground, to halt his attack, but it was too late -- all that accomplished was sending him skidding across to Winston Grace.

"The checkerboard appeared after you sealed the room," Winston smiled. "Hence, it can only exist within a sealed space. Hence…"

Aquamarine Aether crackled up his arm, into the revolver, into the bullet -- and fired. The projectile slammed into the roof, opening up a tiny hole. It was enough: the chalk checkerboard on the floor immediately dissipated into pale green Aether, just as Grinch’s skidding stopped right in front of Winston Grace.

In a blur of movement, Winston lunged forward -- and firmly pressed the barrel of the gun against Grinch’s stomach.

"I’m right, right?" he grinned wildly, eyes wide.

He pulled the trigger once, twice, thrice, from point-blank range, each pull blasting a bullet into Grinch’s body. The Scurrant fell to his knees.

"Something else to keep in mind with conditional power-up types like you," Winston said, taking a step back. "Is that when the system providing those power-ups goes away, your Aether actually goes down for about two seconds before resetting back to its normal state. That’s pretty interesting, right?"

Grinch looked down at his bleeding stomach, already feeling the cold spread through his body. This was bad, this looked bad, but he knew that if he got some Panacea in his belly he could come back from this. If he played his cards right, he could come back from this.

There were cards he could still play

"K-Katashi Oliphant-Hidaka …" he mumbled, swaying on the spot. "T-That’s our boss. He put us up to it…"

The moment those words passed his lips, all the life in Winston Grace seemed to drain away.

His hands dropped to his side, flopping against his hips. His smile collapsed into a slack, passionless frown. The previous intensity of his gaze faded away until his eyes were dull and dead as a corpse. Even his hair seemed to fall limp around his head. His lip trembled, just slightly. It was as if Grinch had just shot his dog in front of him.

"Seriously, dude?" Winston sighed -- and then he lifted the gun up once again and blew Grinch’s brains out.