THE NEXT MORNING, ITE WOKE UP to the sound of her alarm clock. After hitting snooze, she looked over and saw that it was exactly 6:09 in the morning, just as she did every other day. Even if she was a bit groggier than usual, having stayed up the previous night much later than usual, she was sure she could get a cup of coffee to liven herself up.
When Ite stepped outside to head to the mess hall, she was confused by the sight of Zenpan and the rest of the troops gathered outside. Usually, troops weren’t meant to rally until 7 in the morning. Even though she was still in her pajamas, she approached the troops.
“Hey, Zero!” Ite called out before heading toward her general. “What’s going on? Is everything alright?”
“We were attacked last night,” Zenpan bluntly stated. “Two troops were found dead, one of which was dead at the bar, presumably killed by ricin, and the other having been stabbed in the neck and abdomen by a thin blade.”
“Hold on a second,” the archer added. “The second person wouldn’t happen to have been posted outside of Yukan’s room, was he?”
“He was, actually,” the general continued. “And as for the person whose room he was guarding, he’s gone missing.”
“What?! What about Kadaina?”
“We’re looking for him right now so we can actually try to get a better investigation going.”
“Sir!” a soldier called out not too far away. “We found Kadaina!”
“Ah, well speak of the devil,” Zenpan remarked as he hurried to the soldier.
“Turns out he was passed out by the horse pen,” the soldier continued.
“He went back?! I spent thirty minutes walking him back to bed only for him to end up back with the horses?”
“Either way, he’s hungover bad.”
“Of course he is! He chugged a Bertand!”
“CAN YOU STOP YELLING?!” Kadaina shouted before groaning in agony. “I have a headache.”
“What do you want then?” Zenpan asked.
“Write this down,” the mage began. “I need a lowball glass, a whole egg, salt, pepper, soy sauce, and a bit of hot sauce.”
“Yes, sir!” a soldier announced before heading off toward the mess hall. Kadaina winced at the yelling. A few seconds of silence followed as Zenpan and Ite looked down on Kadaina as he lay down on the straw floor of the horse pen.
“Would you mind helping me up? I’d prefer to not keep laying down in horse manure.”
Ite and Zenpan grabbed onto Kadaina’s arms and pulled him off of the ground. Kadaina seared as he stood up.
“Yep… now it’s even worse,” Kadaina remarked.
“Why did you think it was a good idea to chug a whole Bertrand?” the general continued. “You’ve never even drank before.”
“Did you not pay attention until I threw up?” his co-commander wheezed. “Peer pressure’s a powerful beast. I’m pretty sure I was a victim of what you might call ‘hazing’.”
“Hazing? Don’t be stupid, Kadaina! You had every right to turn down a Bertrand!”
“Not when everybody thought I was going to chug it!”
“Can you two just shut up?!” Ite yelled. “Stop bickering, dammit! Holy shit! Two of our troops were killed on our own base, another was probably kidnapped by the enemy, and here you two are complaining about your hangover!”
Just then, the soldier returned with the ingredients Kadaina requested.
“Yeah, yeah,” Kadaina scoffed. “Just lemme make this really quick and then we can get down to business.”
Kadaina cracked open the egg and tossed the egg yolk between the two halves of the egg shell to get rid of the whites. He then eased the egg yolk into the glass before adding a pinch of salt, a dash of pepper, and a dash each of soy sauce and hot sauce. Once this concoction was finished, Kadaina plugged his nose and took it in a single gulp.
“What the hell was that, Kadaina?” Ite asked.
“A prairie oyster,” Kadaina replied. “It’s a home remedy for hangovers. I learned to make it from Oba after she would have to make them for a few friends of hers that partied a little too hard the night before.”
Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
“I never thought I’d see a seventeen-year-old make a prairie oyster,” Zero remarked.
“While we’re waiting for that to set in,” the mage began once again, “we should head over to Yukan’s room. Perhaps we can come to some sort of conclusion about this after we get a good idea of the crime scene. We’ll focus on the man that died at the bar later.”
“No need for that, Kadaina,” Zenpan added. “We’ve already confirmed that he was poisoned. A quick blood test showed that he was drugged with cyanide and an incredibly powerful amount of sedatives.”
“If that’s the case, then there’s no way that these deaths aren’t potentially connected,” Kadaina continued, starting on his way toward Yukan’s room.
“It was that bitch, Brunnhilde!” Ite shouted out, suddenly. “I know it was her!”
“Wait, Brunnhilde?” the de facto investigator turned back to Ite. “You know who it could’ve been?”
“Yeah!” the archer continued. “She was blonde, had blue eyes-”
“Oh, her!” Kadaina interjected. “That’s where I know the name from! She was the one who gave me that Bertrand.”
“My God,” Zero added. “Ite’s right. Yukan and I found out that there was somebody at the party last night who pretended to be a nurse with that name! I think we found our culprit.”
“That’s great and all,” Kadaina continued, “but we still need to find out what happened to Yukan. If there’s any chance he’s still alive, then we need to make certain of it.”
With that, the three of them went over to Yukan’s room in the barracks. In front of the door was a guard who lay in a bloody pool. A thin stab wound went through his rib cage and across his throat.
“So I presume this is casualty number two?” the mage asked.
“Yep,” the general replied. “Some people reported shouts at roughly three in the morning. By the time anybody could reach this spot, he was already dead and the door was wide open with no sign of Yukan other than a few ruffled bed sheets.”
“The Omega Blade is still in there, right?”
“Why wouldn’t it be? Who else could possibly carry it than Yukan?”
“Then that means he didn’t even have a chance to fight back,” Kadaina walked into the barracks as he said this. “These bloody footprints are the only stains of that kind on the floor. This means that neither Yukan nor Brunnhilde were injured to the point of bleeding.”
“But what about the dresser?” Zenpan replied as he pointed to a dresser by the bed. The wood was splintered at one of the drawers, just about at the level of Yukan’s bed. There were several drops of blood as well inside of the drawer, but somehow none left the drawer.
“Well, I have a theory about that,” Kadaina continued. “That’s evidence of a struggle. I think the timeline is perfectly clear to me now. Brunnhilde enters the camp sometime during the victory celebration and tries to put me out of commission, at least for the night. She gets me drunk, goes over to the man at the bar, and poisons his drink. As for why she didn’t poison my drink, it would’ve been too easy for me to notice. I saw the bartender mix the entire cocktail and I would’ve seen her slip something in. Regardless, once the soldier at the bar is knocked out to be finished off later by the cyanide, she… Sorry, I don’t know if there was anything that happened after a while. I was kinda puking my guts out.”
“She began talking to us,” Ite answered. “Me and Yukan, I mean. She began talking to us, trying to claim that Yukan was injured and trying to take him with her to check up on him. I went out with her and confronted her. During this, she attacked me and said something about claiming a bounty.”
“Then Yukan ran out of the bar,” Zenpan continued.
“Yukan broke up the fight between me and Mirikiteki,” the archer carried on. “Mirikiteki ran away because neither of us were buying her facade.”
“Then, later that night,” Kadain picked up, “she goes back to finish the job. She gets rid of the guard posted at Yukan’s door, slitting his throat to keep him from shouting and stabbing him through the chest to kill him faster. She sneaks into Yukan’s room. Finally, she tries to incapacitate him in some way and keep him from being able to fight back. So, she slams his arm into the drawer and breaks it. Upon closer inspection, there’s likely some form of bone tissue residue in there. Either way, Yukan is down an arm and can’t use the Omega Blade, hence why it’s still in here. Yukan hollers from the pain and tries to fight back, but Mirikiteki is able to finish the job in time to not get caught. Perhaps she had used a sedative to keep him from calling out for help any further. Either way, Yukan is out of the camp before anybody has a chance to figure out what happened to him. That means he’s probably still alive as well. His body wouldn’t likely be missing if the mission was just to kill Yukan. After all, if she wanted to kill him, she had the perfect opportunity to kill him while he was sleeping. Not to mention she wouldn’t need the entire body.”
“I should’ve killed her when I had a chance!” Ite cried out suddenly. “Now Yukan is missing and probably going to die! I should have stayed up all night in that room with him! She caught him in his sleep! He didn’t even have a chance to fight back!”
“Hold on a second, Ite,” Kadaina interjected. “There’s a mark on your neck. It looks like a needle injection. She drugged you, just like she’d tried to with Zenpan.”
“Tried to?” Ite asked.
“I must’ve scared her away somehow in my sleep,” Zenpan scoffed. “Either way, there was a needle on the floor when I was woken up by the screams.”
“She knew that you’d get involved somehow,” Kadaina continued. “She might’ve gone into your room just to make sure you weren’t in there with Yukan. Even if you were, she could’ve tried to kill you regardless. You’re lucky she decided to take mercy on you. There was nothing that could be done. We were outsmarted. We were caught while our guard was down and now we have to act fast since our ace fighter is MIA.”
“We’re not going after him?!” Ite exclaimed. “You want him to just rot as a potential prisoner of war?”
“We can’t save him if our army gets wiped out first,” the mage responded. “The plan we have right now for the next battle is to lay siege on Fort Yaoseyun. Perhaps with the resources we find there, we can rescue Yukan from Arcfield. We’ll worry about a rescue plan later. Come on, Zenpan. We need to buff this out and tell General Mahando that the plan needs to happen today.”
The two generals left the room and abandoned Ite in her missing lover’s room. Her rage began to hit another peak and she punched one of the walls. She had put a rather large hole into the spot where her knuckles hit the drywall and pink insulation began to seep out of the hole like blood from an open wound.