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Chapter 747: Return of the Death God

Translator: imperfectluck Editor: Kurisu

“There’s only one truth! The murderer is... you, Death God Roland! You’re the living harbinger of misfortune! You bring death and misfortune to everyone around you! You’re the legendary Death God elementary school student detective who brings death to families all across Japan! Just admit it, you’re the one who murdered Akama!”

“...Harloys, if I really did have such an ability, then you’d probably be the first to die. I don’t mind if you joke with me, but you really should hold back. If others believe what you say, causing new strange rumors to spread about me tomorrow, then I’m going to make you eat nothing but cat food for an entire month.”

The place we were currently at wasn’t very suitable for jokes, as we were currently in the VIP guest section of the Bardi royal palace. Royal guards with tense expressions were entering and exiting a certain room on the 3rd floor, where the elderly archmage Akama’s corpse was lying on the redwood floor.

Prophecy archmage Akama’s eyes had been closed by someone already, but his expression was quite calm.

There was no sign of a struggle at all. Akama had only one fatal injury located right on the chest.

“The assassin killed him instantly with one strike to the heart. The assassin must be a veteran.”

I pulled off the white cloth covering Akama’s corpse. When I saw the large hole in his chest and how there was very little blood around despite it, and that the attack had been quite clean and quick, I knew that this had to be done by a professional assassin.

Normally, it would be quite reasonable that a veteran assassin ambushing an unprepared archmage would succeed in killing the latter, no matter how powerful the archmage was.

However, something was rather unusual in this situation.

Although it was common sense that prophets were unable to prophesize anything regarding themselves, prophecy magic was a type of investigation magic, which would be the natural counter to all assassins. Akama was a veteran archmage who had long reached Level 4 already. It would be inconceivable for him not to have 10 or 20 investigation spells cast on himself.

Detect Invisibility, Sense Hostility, Heat Detection, True Luck, Noise Alarm (a spell which would loudly alert all others in the area that the user was being attacked), and Ward of Protection (a shield spell that would automatically activate when the user was in danger). These were all standard investigation magic spells. It would be incredibly difficult to successfully ambush any prophecy magic archmage. It would be impossible to ambush a prophecy magic archmage even for me.

If I truly wanted to kill a prophecy magic archmage, I would far prefer to use a direct attack as that would be much easier.

Just how amazing of a grandmaster would one have to be at concealing their own presence in order to successfully assassinate Akama, who obviously hadn’t been on his guard at all, when Akama was the most famous prophecy magic archmage in the world?

I touched Akama’s corpse which was becoming cold, gathering dark magic upon him.

I didn’t have the deductive reasoning abilities like Death God Conan did, but I did some Death God-like abilities of my own. Eich was a magical world where having the dead talk wasn’t that difficult, after all.

Yet, my attempt to summon Akama’s soul met with obstruction.

“Holy water to put his soul to rest after death? This is truly an experienced assassin.”

Akama’s face was still slightly wet, likely from holy water. Either an idiot priest had already come to cleanse the soul, or the assassin had intentionally poured holy water on the corpse.

I asked the royal guards and found that no priest had come here.

This meant two things. One was that the assassin was tremendously experienced because the fact that holy water could obstruct soul summoning was a secret that even the majority of undead mages didn’t know. The second thing made me contemplate even more...

“The assassin knew that someone would soon attempt to summon Akama’s soul, meaning that the assassin knew that an undead mage would come to check the corpse.”

Drawing out a living or dead person’s soul actually had many limitations. A corpse that had died too long ago would lose its connection to its own soul. While it would be possible to reanimate such a corpse as a skeleton or zombie, summoning its soul would no longer be possible.

Under normal circumstances, souls would soon return to the Cycle of Reincarnation. After just one or two hours, even an undead magic grandmaster’s soul summoning spell would likely fail. Additionally, soul summoning was a spell that could only be attempted once per corpse. Failing once would mean that it was completely impossible to try again afterwards.

Soul summoning was about trying to withdraw memories from the dead individual’s soul fragments. Failing at soul summoning would cause the soul fragments to completely shatter, which was why it was impossible to try more than once.

That was why more than 90% of the time, undead mages would actually use soul summoning magic against the living. Usually, it was to interrogate someone living for the information they knew. This was highly effective and would require a very low cost. The only side effect was that after using soul summoning magic on someone living, that person would die afterwards.

Bardi was the home location of the Southern Sect. Although undead mages weren’t directly outlawed here, Bardi wasn’t exactly friendly towards undead mages due to the high number of dragons and Holy Light job class members here. Undead mages were quite few in Bardi.

Yet, the assassin had been certain that an undead mage would soon arrive here, which was why the assassin had prepared for this with holy water.

The assassin knew of my arrival.

In a way, this clue might actually be more valuable than having the dead Akama speak. Information learned from soul summoning would be fragmented and scattered. It was possible to learn something, but it would be equally likely to learn nothing from soul summoning.

“A traitor?”

“It’s possible. Confirmation is still required.”

I waved my hand as I rose up.

Rather than suspecting a mysterious top-level assassin from somewhere unknown, I more suspected the other mages who had come to Bardi together with archmage Akama—the culprit had been able to easily get close to Akama while being viewed by him as a trustworthy individual, on top of knowing that I had arrived and that I would use undead magic on Akama’s body.

Someone among these mages might not want me to get close to the truth of what I was looking for.

It seemed that Halent had gone out of Bardi for the time being. He hadn’t returned yet even though the Mage Country’s envoy had been assassinated. I recorded my observations and analysis and tossed the information to the royal guards so that they could send it to both Halent and the lead archmage from the Truth Symposium who had led this team of mages that Akama had been a part of.

As for finding out who the traitor might be? I didn’t intend on personally getting involved. Reality was quite different from detective stories where it was quite easy to find the murderer. In this world and generation, finding a murderer would be highly difficult.

The traitor wouldn’t exactly write the word “murderer” on their face. Without any obvious clues, accusing people would only provoke distrust and even more chaos.

Of course, you could accuse someone with evidence, but they could also accuse you of planting false evidence to frame them. Mages were highly experienced at faking evidence, reaching the point where even they would be unable to tell real from fake. The end result was that nobody would be able to prove anything, which meant that only power and authority could determine what the “truth” really was. The person who won might not always be the one on the side of truth.

The Truth Symposium had never been an ironclad alliance of mages to begin with. Many of the archmages had broken taboos or even touched upon the Chaos Abyss. It was only natural that some members of the Truth Symposium were secretly allied with the Chaos Faction. They would be rewarded with taboo knowledge and the Chaos Abyss’s power as well as “truth”.

Undead Emperor Aso had previously successfully infiltrated the Truth Symposium. Archmages from other species and factions could naturally do the same. I had long since expected that there would be those among the Truth Symposium who weren’t allied to my cause. Now, an enemy had acted in order to cut off my investigation. This might not actually be a bad thing for me. Someone powerful enough to kill Akama would never be cannon fodder or someone that didn’t know anything. It was likely that I could unearth much from this.

But, this was something quite troublesome that would easily drag me into a quagmire. I didn’t intend on getting too deeply involved.

Although this seemed like I had lost the trail of clues, prophecy magic was a major magic category, and the Mage Country wasn’t far from here. I could simply go find another prophecy archmage.

This incident had also indirectly confirmed yet another guess of mine.

“I’m constantly being surveilled. Not only that, I’ve trodden across my enemy’s sensitive territory, forcing them to take action.”

It was well within expectations that I was under surveillance. However, the fact that my enemy had been forced to act actually let me heave a sigh of relief. I was more afraid that my enemies would completely ignore me as that would mean they didn’t think that I was a threat at all.

It was almost certain now that the Chaos Girls were connected to Karwenz’s goal of destroying the dimensional barrier. In that case, I probably needed to start focusing on gathering information on the Chaos Girls.

The easiest method would be to talk to a Chaos Girl who had already awakened to her true nature.

“What a headache. Elisa is refusing to communicate.”

Harloys was always the type to instantly retort to anything I said, yet even she remained silent when I said this.

Over the past few days, I had been hesitating on whether I should go find Elisa or not. However, I already had many things to deal with, on top of the fact that nobody knew where Elisa was right now.

“...Where am I supposed to go to find her? It would probably take at least several months to locate her.”

In fact, since nobody knew where she currently was, that already explained a lot.

It was likely that Elisa currently wasn’t in the mortal plane, nor would she possibly go to the Chaos Abyss, so when considering her condition, the Fire Elemental Plane was the most likely place that she was in right now. However, the Fire Elemental Plane was enormous as well as dangerous. If Elisa wanted to hide from me, it would be no easy task to find her.

“Forget it. I should probably watch over Leona really closely.”

Leona was a Chaos Girl. My System had already confirmed this. Perhaps I would only need to keep Leona by my side in order to sooner or later learn even more about the Chaos Girls.

With so many things for me to deal with, I no longer had free time to cultivate my power level. This naturally meant I would have to delay crafting my next magic sword. If I wanted to cultivate, it would be much more effective to find some isolated mountain or forest than stay in the Bardi capital.

However, I couldn’t think like that right now. It was likely that I would need to soon fight against two Undead Emperors. Halent was probably busy because of this major matter.

I had very little I could make use of here in Bardi. Entering the war at this time meant that I could only serve as Bardi’s fighter. I would take the blame if I lost, and I wouldn’t gain anything if I won. I might even get disliked by both sides. This wasn’t what I wanted at all. However, I had no excuse to refuse to help Bardi.

“Roland.”

Suddenly, a voice spoke my name right in my ear, but this voice didn’t belong to my System or the chatty silly cat. This heavy and solid voice instantly reassured me.

“Boss Ayer? You’re awake?”