By the time Konehl-Ghervil emerged from her shower, toweling her hair dry, the evening sky had swallowed the last vestiges of daylight.
She found Esli, the female knight, diligently occupied in the living room.
Esli had retrieved soil from the apple orchard behind the house and was carefully potting the day’s floral acquisitions into dark brown terracotta containers, each pierced with drainage holes.
Seven such pots now adorned the table, lined the wall, and graced the windowsill.
Originally, there had been eight, but one had unfortunately shattered during transport.
Konehl-Ghervil observed in silence, refraining from interruption.
A faint pang of regret pricked at her; it was her money, after all, and Esli had spent it to the very last Denarii.
Had the funds been allocated to provisions, she would have found it acceptable. However, these blossoms, neither edible nor practical, held scant appeal for her.
Among them, only two varieties were familiar enough for her to name: a pot of Marguerite daisies and another of pansies.
Beneath the subdued lamplight, a striking rose-red bloom, quite uncommon, had been positioned by the knight on the already rather cramped windowsill.
Frowning, Konehl-Ghervil approached the knight, seeking closer confirmation.
Indeed, it was a pot of roses, blooming profusely, their stems armed with thorns.
“How rare,” she mused aloud. “Where did you acquire it?”
Due to the prevailing ban on Blood Roses, most florists refrained from cultivating even common rose varieties. The subtle distinctions between the two often invited unwelcome scrutiny and potential trouble.
One could never be certain if a seemingly innocuous rose garden harbored the forbidden Blood Rose.
A single additional word could dictate a chasm of difference in price.
“I didn’t purchase it,” Esli chirped, a wide, self-satisfied grin spreading across her face. “A kind old woman bestowed it upon me. Her children were away, and after I helped her carry two hefty sacks of peanuts up to her apartment, she offered me this as a token of gratitude.”
“Do you truly intend to transport all these potted flowers when we depart?” Konehl-Ghervil inquired, a note of gentle admonishment in her voice. “Surely, they will far exceed the stipulated luggage allowance for the train.”
Konehl-Ghervil’s words effectively dampened Esli’s enthusiasm.
“Oh, right!”
The knight’s buoyant smile faltered, her gaze now fixed on the young girl’s earnest expression.
Her intention was not to mar the pleasant atmosphere, but merely to impart a gentle caution against frivolous spending.
Upon re-entering her room, Konehl-Ghervil found no sign of Govet diligently examining flower petals on the table, as she might have expected. Instead, the plump furball lay sprawled on the bed, belly skyward, lost in a profound slumber.
‘Had it not just slept through the entire day? Was slumber its sole purpose?’
A slight twitch played at her lips as she padded silently to the bedside and settled down.
She gently scratched its belly, eliciting no response. A soft pinch to its plump cheek also yielded no reaction.
A prickle of unease led Konehl-Ghervil to lift it, gently shaking it and calling its name, yet the creature remained unresponsive.
By its steady, rhythmic breathing, it appeared to be in a perfectly normal sleep.
This peculiar depth of slumber was unprecedented; typically, Govet’s sleep was light enough that such disturbance would have roused it immediately.
‘Could it be…’
‘She harbored a suspicion that the petal was somehow involved.’
Placing the furball back on the bed, she began a frantic search: through her notebook bag, the metal box, every corner, and finally beneath the bed. The petal, however, remained elusive.
As she settled at the table to devise a solution, a profound silence gradually enveloped her. The sounds of the knight arranging flowers and her soft footsteps in the living room had eerily vanished.
It was as if she had unwittingly stumbled into a world devoid of sound.
The unsettling stillness was deeply unnerving, and an involuntary shiver traced its way up her spine.
Her room, a rear side bedroom, offered a partial view of the apple orchard through its window, revealing roughly a quarter of its expanse.
Tonight, the air was still; dry, skeletal branches remained motionless beneath the moonlight, while everything below their gnarled forms was plunged into impenetrable darkness, rendering details utterly indiscernible.
A subtle movement, however, caught her eye.
She narrowed her eyes, peering intently into the gloom.
Within the oppressive darkness that consumed half her field of vision, some seventy or eighty meters distant, a faint pinprick of light flickered.
It was like the sharp glint of light off a polished mirror.
An urgent, primal instinct seized her, compelling her to retreat from the table, away from the precarious window.
“Get down!”
A sharp shout pierced the unnatural quiet.
Her mind, jolted into acute awareness, reacted instantly. Her hands clamped onto the table’s edge, and she threw her body backward with desperate force.
“Bang.”
A dull, concussive gunshot ripped through the air, shattering the windowpane.
She tumbled backward, landing with a jarring thud, almost entirely on her back.
Glass shards exploded inward, and she instinctively threw her arms up to shield her face.
Her arms, surprisingly, registered no pain. As she hazily opened her eyes, a colossal axe, shimmering with an ethereal glow and seemingly forged from ice, filled her vision, completely obscuring both the shattered glass and the world beyond.
Before the shock could fully recede, she witnessed Esli, the massive ice axe gripped in one hand, launch herself through the shattered window, plunging headlong into the apple orchard.
Thereafter, only the resounding thud of wood being cleaved and the relentless crackle of gunfire echoed from the depths of the orchard.
The entire sequence of events had unfolded with breathtaking rapidity, consuming scarcely ten seconds.
A faint recollection surfaced: the voice in her ear had been Govet’s.
She twisted her head towards the bed, but the furball was nowhere to be seen.
Something squirmed on her back, struggling to dislodge itself. Only then did Konehl-Ghervil realize that the impact of her fall had been cushioned by a surprisingly plump and soft object beneath her.
“Are you hurt?”
Scrambling to her feet, hands braced against the floor, she scooped up the furball and frantically inspected it.
“Calm down,”
Govet’s voice, though calm, carried an unmistakable undertone of gravity.
“Examine yourself first. I am unharmed.”
Their gazes locked, and a profound silence once again settled between them.
‘Indeed, she had allowed herself to become somewhat discomposed.’
‘With the knight engaged outside, she was, at least for the moment, safe.’
Setting the furball gently aside, she rose and slowly turned, meticulously examining her body. Miraculously, there were no bullet wounds, no injuries, not even the slightest scrape. Yet, a persistent tremor of trepidation remained, coupled with a gnawing worry for Esli.
“Fret not over the unfortunate urchin,”
Govet hopped onto the windowsill, peering out into the night.
“Even if a common individual were to press a firearm directly to their temple, they could never truly fell a consecrated Plague Knight.”
“I wouldn’t be so certain,”
A third voice, rough and gravelly, suddenly materialized within the room.
A chilling touch of metal pressed firmly against the back of her skull.
“Who—” A sudden constriction seized her heart, and she began to turn.
“Bang!”
Without the faintest flicker of hesitation, the man squeezed the trigger.
At this range, there was no chance of evasion; Konehl-Ghervil believed she was dead.
The gunshot seemed to rupture her eardrums; she instinctively squeezed her eyes shut, her breathing almost halting.
Her back was drenched in liquid, and warmth seeped from her neck.
It was the sound of Esli’s frantic footsteps rushing back that urged her to force her eyes open.
The sight before her stunned her.
Govet’s scarlet eyes were fixed intently on her back.
Following its gaze, she looked behind her in disbelief, seeing only a pool of thick blood spreading to her feet, with a black trench coat and a smoking black pistol at its center.
Turning sharply back, she remembered the power of the bloodline, the psychic suggestion Govet had told her about.
It had manipulated him to turn the gun on himself at the last moment.
****
Two hours later, Valo-Ramsey led a team of professional investigators to secretly cordon off the area.
It took twenty minutes to walk from the bungalow to Valo-Ramsey’s residence.
Esli insisted on dragging Konehl-Ghervil along, for even with the dazzling record of having ‘solo killed’ an attacker without a scratch, she was unwilling to leave Konehl-Ghervil alone.
Thus, the bloodstains on her body took nearly an hour to clean up.
Over twenty people investigated for more than two hours, then used a dream reconstruction to recreate the scene, confirming there were only two attackers.
As usual, neither Konehl-Ghervil nor Govet appeared in the dream. Therefore, it remained unknown what power she had used to make the attacker shoot himself.
The main point wasn’t that; if a nun from Solis Abbey had died at the hands of a common person, that would have been a catastrophe.
Konehl-Ghervil witnessed this special investigative method: taking items closely related to the main people at the scene—Esli’s ice fragments and a drop of processed blood from the deceased man—mixing them with a special potion, and drinking it, one could recreate the crime scene in a dream.
Konehl-Ghervil found it disgusting and didn’t try it, instead listening to Valo-Ramsey and another agent describe what they saw in the dream.
The attackers were two middle-aged men in black trench coats; one ambushed in the apple orchard as a sniper, while the other hid in a dry irrigation ditch at the edge of the woods as a backup.
The attacker in the woods, at the moment Esli severed their hand, swallowed poison to commit suicide, dissolving into a pool of blood after death.
The outcome was similar to that of the attacker inside the room.
However, it couldn’t be concluded that their transformation was due to the poison; professional testing was still required.
As for how they found this secluded place.
Combining with the dream investigation.
It was finally discovered that the problem originated from the vibrant red rose Esli had brought back.