Ch.72007 Investigation Record – The Truth I Had Been Searching For

The detective who had gone to smoke with the Mother of the Knolls came out much later, emanating only the faintest cigar smell—too light for someone who’d supposedly been smoking all that time.

From the beginning, taking only the detective inside suggested she intended to have a private conversation. I didn’t find it rude. However, the Mother’s expression seemed somewhat haggard when she emerged with the detective.

The detective couldn’t have done anything inappropriate. He wasn’t the type to threaten the Mother in a mafia den. As he walked out, he gestured for me to get up.

“Let’s go. I’ve finished talking with your father, and the Mother has firmly agreed to give up on you, so the job is finally done. Still, until we leave the restaurant, I remain your bodyguard.”

Now when the corners of his mouth turned up in a smile, there was no resistance. I could resume the investigation that had been interrupted by Giuseppina. I could find out what had happened.

The skill the detective had demonstrated at the editor’s house certainly matched the description of an “angel of the trenches.” Thinking there might be some hope, I looked up at him.

His expression had relaxed somewhat. Now he looked like a neat man ready to enjoy a leisurely evening, which improved my mood and made me smile broadly as I spoke.

“Are you going to rest now, Michael? As for me, I really need to get back to work. The best way to eliminate anxiety is to do what I love, right?”

Hearing this, the detective’s expression soured. He seemed to know what I planned to do once this protection duty ended, and his disapproval was plainly visible, but he said nothing.

I could feel I’d made a mistake by letting my guard down. Still… instead of apologizing or making excuses, I just waited for the restaurant door to approach. I couldn’t speak from embarrassment.

We walked down the quiet, velvet-carpeted corridor empty of people. One step, then two steps… by the third step, the detective’s patience ran out.

“Are you going straight to the hall once we leave? Brooklyn should be there by now instead of the Professor. You’ll go in, lay out everything you’ve discovered, and then ask what happened. Isn’t that right?”

He didn’t stop walking as he spoke. I continued walking too and nodded briefly. It was what I had intended to do before being interrupted by Giuseppina. And it was what I had sworn to do.

But was that oath important enough to make someone wear such an expression? My resolve wavered. I couldn’t tell if I should steel myself or not.

The detective, who had kept his mouth shut until a Knoll employee opened the restaurant door, spoke as we stepped into the New York evening street filled with pedestrians.

“Give me three dollars and I’ll tell you everything. Better I answer than you go torment my other comrades at the hall. We couldn’t keep it secret forever anyway. Too many people saw us. Countless eyewitness accounts exist, and the damn hero worship never stops. Politicians invoke our names whenever they need patriotism.”

The detective’s voice carried more hatred than usual. I seemed to understand what he was talking about, and his attitude suggested I would surely regret hearing it, but… I decided to face my anxiety and nodded.

“But why three dollars?”

“Because today I’ll need to buy three one-dollar boxes of sleeping pills and empty them all into my mouth if I want any chance of sleeping. And if I wanted to silence you later rather than now, I’d have to spend money instead of receiving it.”

That seemed to be the weight of a secret that could pierce the heart with Hexenbane. I kept my mouth shut for a moment, then looked up to meet his eyes. I wanted to convey my sincerity.

“So, if it’s something I shouldn’t reveal, I swear—”

“No need. You’ll keep quiet without any oath. Let’s find somewhere private.”

Paulina offered to drive us home and put the detective and me in the car. The detective, who until now had sat in the front seat like an employee on guard, this time leaned back in the rear seat.

There was no conversation on the way home. He didn’t say we could think of solutions together, or that it surely wouldn’t be as bad as I imagined. It seemed like it would be insulting to him.

The detective seemed to think he couldn’t stop my curiosity anyway. Curiosity had more vitality than the slime filling New York’s sewers.

We returned to the apartment with suffocatingly heavy air surrounding us. The detective, looking like someone whose nerve had been touched during dental work, took some papers from his bag, attached them to the wall, and then tore them off.

Outside noise couldn’t enter, and inside sounds couldn’t leak out. It was a 20th-century magic scroll made of paper whitened with lime powder instead of hard-to-fold parchment.

Only then did the detective approach me as if reassured and sat on the sofa before me. Finally meeting my gaze, he spoke.

“You already know too much. Only people who already know could make that expression when seeing our photos. Who told you?”

Though I felt chills running down my spine, I faced him directly as I’d learned from watching the detective. I wanted to show I was taking the matter seriously.

“So, a warlock-soldier who was a Great War veteran…”

“The editor’s son introduced you. A reporter as clueless as you wouldn’t have found the veterans’ association on your own. And you already knew the editor’s son was a veteran. Your word choice was thin. Instead of saying you heard he was a veteran, you stated it definitively. You’ve met him. If a warlock connected with you, that’s the only place.”

For the first time, I felt that the Argonne Invincibles’ attack that the warlock named Samuel had worried about might be real. This detective was certainly capable of tracking them down.

At his chin gesture indicating I should continue, I barely opened my mouth. I didn’t feel assured that his hands wouldn’t reach for my throat after I spoke.

“He told me. That they used a connection ritual… and sacrificed people for the ritual. The sacrifice had to be either freshly dead or alive, and the person receiving the ritual had to consent… He said you all authorized it. Is it true? I want to know what’s real and what’s fake…”

“You guessed well. It’s all true. None of it is fake. I won’t make excuses. Did you hope I’d deny it? You just wanted to put this in an article with a footnote citing ‘testimony from an Argonne Invincible.’ Be honest. Just because you have a shovel doesn’t mean you should dig all the way to the grave, but who keeps their word these days? Tell me. Why do you want to know?”

He began speaking with an expression like he could chew and swallow language itself. He wasn’t telling me because he felt any affinity for me. He was speaking as if to say, if you’re so curious, hear it all.

What followed was mockery. His voice carried hostility with razor-sharp clarity. My saying I would go straight back to work seemed to have shredded all the trust we’d built during our half-day together.

I had no answer. I wasn’t shameless enough to say “I’m just curious,” nor corrupt enough to make excuses.

No, perhaps I had become a bit shameless. What came to mind was the detective’s advice to act normally. Taking a deep breath, I spoke with as much honesty as he had confirmed his story contained.

“At first, I was curious. About why Mr. Chris Wiggins… stole the Hexenbane. Once I had some outline, I felt I shouldn’t know. It seemed like something terrible. But I remembered how Chris smiled with his eyes when I shouted that I would listen, like he was grateful. If just listening could help, I wanted to help…”

The detective looked at me with dry eyes. He repeated what he had said before.

“I think I asked before if we looked like people who needed help.”

Facing that dryness made me feel sad somehow, but I didn’t look at him with pitying eyes. I decided to pull out a word that had long been buried in the dictionary.

“I don’t know. I don’t know if you need help or if I should keep my distance. But keeping such things bottled up inside must be painful. I… I might think this way because I’m someone with only flower gardens in my head, but… I don’t think you, or any of you, are people who would sacrifice others just to win a fight.”

I didn’t appeal to his humanity. I didn’t appeal to his reputation. I admitted what I didn’t know, expressed what I felt, and stated my beliefs as they were.

Was there any use in saying nothing was right? The detective pulled a cigarette pack with a red circle from his pocket, put one in his mouth, and lit it by gathering mana at his fingertips.

That action seemed like consent, so I placed three dollars on the table as promised. The cigarette smell was terrible, but I would listen even if I had to hold my nose. With that somewhat enlightened mindset, I looked at him.

“I was eighteen. Enlisted at seventeen and barely polished into something resembling a soldier after a year. The first battle wasn’t as bad as I expected. Shiny people like colonels and brigadier generals commanded directly near us, and we captured trenches more easily than expected. I thought the second battle would be the same.”

From the detective’s words, I couldn’t see the landscape he remembered. Memories might be visible, but words are not.

Human communication is full of flaws. No matter how clear and vivid his memories might be, no matter how well he spoke, the listener could barely grasp a third of his true feelings.

“But it wasn’t. At first, I thought it would be the same. We were breaking through trench lines, and our battalion commander laughed saying we would grasp the Germans’ hearts. It didn’t take long to realize we had advanced too deep. You figure it out when magic bullets and shells rain down from front and back.”

The detective let out a hollow laugh. He nudged me as if telling me to laugh too, but I absolutely couldn’t laugh.

“Later we found out we were the only ones who had reached that far. The French commander apparently tried to stop our commander, saying spreading out like that would only get us all killed. Well, what could we do? We received no orders to wait or retreat, and somehow we achieved a partial success only to end up dropped right in the middle of the dwarves.”

I thought I could see flames in the detective’s eyes. Not enthusiasm or passion, but simply anger, hatred, and fire. The flames of the battlefield that had completely transformed his life.

“We could hold out against the bombardment and charges for days. With each enemy charge, dozens of us died, until only about a company’s worth remained. We tried to send a messenger, but he ran barely four steps before being sniped and falling backward. He fell so close that we could reach out and recover his body. We had only two choices left: break through the encirclement or die.”

They didn’t die. Never had the statement that someone didn’t die sounded so horrific.

Even when I heard news about a violent criminal who failed to die properly during execution, it didn’t feel this terrible. Back then, I even felt pity.

But now, I couldn’t even feel pity.

“The officers had already died by evening, so there was no one to make decisions, when the warlock looked at the trench full of bloody water and said there was a way. If we used a connection ritual with all this blood, magic bullets wouldn’t even tickle us, and we could escape. The sacrifice for a connection ritual had to be recently dead, which was too easy to find. Everything around us was like that.”

I felt like vomiting. I could almost imagine what expressions they wore in that situation, and what choices they made.

“We wanted to live. We just loved our damn lives. We didn’t want our names in military song lyrics like ‘They died bravely like true Americans, like true Johnnies.’ The Professor spoke first. ‘Let’s do it.’ I’m not blaming the Professor. I was the very next one to speak. ‘What do we need to do?'”

I could somewhat understand why the Professor led them. He was taking responsibility. A responsibility with no known end date.

“The chaplain had been dead for a long time, so Brooklyn held up a cross he had barely managed to keep and prayed for us. It wasn’t really a prayer. He just made excuses for us: ‘This is the only way. The God-President will understand. We just loved life.’ Since there weren’t many of us, the baptism didn’t take long.”

When I tried to imagine the expressions of the Argonne Invincibles, covered in their comrades’ blood and feeling power emanating from their hearts as they screamed, I couldn’t hold back the nausea anymore and ran to the bathroom.

He waited quietly until I came out after wiping my mouth. As if his story wasn’t finished, he pointed to the space in front of him, and I stood before him. My legs were trembling.

“Magic bullets really didn’t even tickle. Shrapnel from bombardments didn’t properly embed in our skin. That was the first time I saw infantry who didn’t die even when grazed by machine guns. The dwarves screamed. No, we probably screamed louder. That’s how we broke through the encirclement ourselves and reached the allied trenches. Everyone who saw our condition didn’t ask anything, and we didn’t say anything.”

I felt like acid was rising in my throat again. I wanted to cover my ears as I remembered that propaganda song I had sung. Listening wasn’t help—it was torture.

“But I never expected the news to spread so quickly. A few days later, reinforcements arrived singing a new song. ‘The Argonne Invincibles broke through the encirclement and came to the homeland’s embrace. They came to the embrace. Now they’ll take a short nap and run to Berlin to grab the Kaiser by the collar. They’ll run there. If you don’t keep pace with them, you’ll fall behind. You’ll fall behind.'”

The detective sang a verse of that song, even including the rhythm. Regret washed over me. Perhaps I really should have given up on hearing the sword thief’s story. Now my whole body was trembling, not just my legs.

After finishing, the detective rose from the sofa. He collected the three dollars from the table and walked straight out the door. This was the truth I had so desperately wanted to find.