Chapter 98: Professor, your experiment has failed

"Michel Hévin appears to be laboring under a misunderstanding, so I'd like to go ahead and correct it."

Rishe's unexpected words made Michel's eyes go wide once more.

Ah, I see. Even if Rishe somehow knows what gunpowder is, she doesn't know that I can detonate it with a timed device.

He wasn't even completely sure she knew that much. She probably figured that if they just arrested Michel now, they could forestall the tragedy at the eighteenth hour. While Michel was thinking such thoughts, Rishe turned to him.

"My alchemy teacher once told me that experiments always have unpredictable variables, and if you don't have a handle on those unpredictable variables, it's easy to mess them up."

Michel gasped. That was exactly what he'd been thinking.

Rishe's clear green eyes never wavered. "You may be a genius alchemist, but as long as you're missing information on the pawns in your experiments, you'll never get the results you want."

Suddenly, she held a golden pocket watch in her right hand. "Professor, your experiment has failed."

Rishe announced. "There was no way for you to account for the unpredictable variable; me. Thankfully, everyone involved finished their work very quickly."

"What are you saying?"

A bell rang in the distance, functioning as both an announcement from the church and the clang of the would-be clock tower. It was now the eighteenth hour. The sun was setting over the capital city, dyeing the sky a deep blue.

Michel looked westward at the view of the city visible from the garden. He located what he thought was one of the districts with his barrels. Just then…

"Lightning?!"

There was a streak of vertical light. It couldn't have been lightning; the skies were clear. This light, however, rose from the ground up and raced into the sky.

"No… That's—"

"Your creations are not just poisons. You can only imagine them bringing people harm, but if you change the way you use them, they are worth so much more."

In the next instant, beads of light burst into the skies above the capital with a great boom ! It was his gunpowder.

Michel knew that from a glance, but this was not what he had been expecting. In fact, he never could have predicted what he was seeing.

The light looked like an enormous flower.

The chemical he'd created—the one meant to blow human bodies to bits—had made a flower bloom in the night sky.

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That's one up safely.

Rishe let out a relieved breath as she looked out at the city from the palace garden. Apart from one of Rishe's guards, who'd run off somewhere, everyone was gazing skyward. Even Theodore, her accomplice, was looking up with round eyes—the eyes that resembled his brother's.

After losing track of Michel, Theodore's network had searched all through the capital. As it turned out, they were searching for the gunpowder, not Michel himself.

"The main target of this reconnaissance is not Michel."

She'd explained when she asked Theodore for help. She'd relayed things to him a few days ago, laying out several pieces of paper across a table in a meeting room.

"Michel probably intends to place items in three specific areas across the city. I want your people to evacuate everyone in the surrounding district if they find something with this specific shape. Do you have anyone skilled at disarming traps?"

"Of course. Half the people who work for me."

"Have those people follow what I've outlined here." Rishe handed Theodore a diagram of the device she thought Michel would be using.

"Just like traps, these devices are dangerous if you don't follow these exact steps. But unlike traps, they're not made to be difficult to disarm—just do everything as I've written and the degree of danger involved will plummet."

"These diagrams will make this much simpler than what those guys are used to. I'll tell them to be extremely cautious just in case."

"Thank you. Next, I have a list of candidate sites where you'll likely find your targets. Even if you lose Michel, this list will narrow your search considerably."

Rishe's explanation to Theodore had gone on for some time. If they tailed Michel every day, they'd get a sense of the locations he was scoping out.

Thanks to their information network, they even had a picture of where he'd been going before they began tailing him. Michel tended to stand out—he was androgynous and beautiful, and he wasn't the type to resort to a disguise.

Additionally, Rishe had the advantage of knowing Michel's plans for his experiments from her life as an alchemist.

In his plan to test the chemical in an urban area, he prepared three devices. He wanted to use districts with small buildings and a lot of air flow.

People from the slums, who traveled all across the city to earn money, would be familiar with places like that. Limiting the candidates to places on Michel's daily routes made it easier to find what they were looking for. Michel would make sure his chosen locations were optimized for eliminating as many unpredictable variables as possible for his remote experimentation.

The perfect climate, humidity, weather, and location. He even told me he'd set the three devices over a kilometer apart from each other to account for different wind conditions. I keep going over it again and again, and I remember it all.

He would set the explosions for just before sunset, when there would be enough light to observe the results but fewer people out on the streets. In Galkhein this time of year, that would be the eighteenth hour in the evening. Just after she'd finished her earlier conversation with Michel, Theodore received word they'd made it in time.

Rishe closed the pocket watch in her hand and heaved a little sigh.

Michel stood and took a shaky step forward. "What was that…?"

The knights pointed their swords at him, then lowered them just as quickly. The event he'd described, at the time he'd described it, only left them confused.