Arc 2 - Chapter 14: Cross-Examination (2/2)

"Tell me, what happened that night?"

Floy started the interrogation with Yurine. Yurine thought they were going to take them into an interrogation room, but he took Yu out of the office and started questioning Yurine as if it was a casual conversation.

It was the third time he had been separated from Yu since they met. The first time was when Yu left him in a park and went to the team offices for some fraudulent business, and the second time was when Yu went to an uncanny place with Marino Swann.

She felt strange when he wasn't there because she was used to him. Without Yu, she was lonely, her heart pounding as her heart fluttered with stress.

"My mother, I and her apprentice entered an underground tunnel through the sewers. We were heading towards the Sigma Tower but a monster attacked us. We escaped from the monster and went into a cave, and my mother collapsed the ceiling to stop the monster. Of course, she didn't know that there was a road above that ceiling, and when the road collapsed, above the road..." She had never referred to Yu by name, and now she refrained from mentioning him by name. "He... He fell down."

"I don't understand, explain more clearly." Yurine's explanation raised more questions. "By that, do you mean Yu Valarfin?"

Yurine nodded her head in agreement.

"Who are your mother and her apprentice?"

"My mother's name is Rie, we were adventurers in Mora, then we came here and she took an apprentice."

"Who is her apprentice?"

Yu had told him not to mention the Wizarding Academy, but the only way to talk about it without mentioning Sharley's name was to mention the academy. The reason he didn't want to use her name was because he didn't like her.

"The nephew of the headmaster of the Wizarding Academy was his apprentice." After she said it, she regretted not taking Yu's word for it.

"Wizarding Academy?"

"My mother came here from Mora to the Wizarding Academy, and I came with her, and then the headmaster gave her his nephew as an apprentice."

"Why?"

"To gain status in the academy, you have to train apprentices."

"I'm not asking that, why did your mother come to the academy?"

"To be stronger."

Her mother had told her that someone was after her and that she wanted to defeat him. She didn't say it directly to Yurine, she overheard her talking to someone else, but she knew that she had come to the academy to defeat that person.

"Is there nothing else? Why did she want to be stronger?"

"None of your business." Yu would definitely be angry with Yurine if he heard that answer, but Yurine was not going to treat a stranger who tried to touch her mother's secrets with respect.

"Why would Headmaster Bishory give his nephew as an apprentice to a newcomer he didn't know? Did they know each other before?"

"They met through the Bishory family in Mora."

Yurine was also present in this part of the story. The Bishory family was a house under the Vermilia family, supporters of the Virgo Cathedral, and Duke Vermilia was instrumental in Rie meeting them.

"How did you know the Bishory family?"

"Well, it's mother's thing," Yurine thought. "That's none of your business either."

"Let's get to the point, then." Floy was clearly annoyed by Yurine's answers. Yurine was not afraid of his anger, he was clearly not a mage, and the mana in his body was not high enough to give him an edge in swordplay.

Yurine had the power to tear Floy apart in a few seconds if she lost her patience. If Floy had realized this, he would have been careful not to anger Yurine.

"Why were you going to Sigma Tower? Why the sewers?"

"My mother wanted to get something there and we had to go there secretly. I don't know what she wanted to buy or why we had to go undercover." She was honest in this part, she didn't know what her mother went there for.

"Try to remember, maybe you know something."

"I don't know," Yurine pressed.

"And you were attacked by a monster?"

"Yes."

"And your mother collapsed the ceiling of the cave."

"Yes."

"A powerful wizard, then."

"Of course," she said, puffing out her chest, proud of her mother.

"The collapsed road and the corpse of the hunting gorilla are in the records, but the ground to the road is quite high, how did Yu Valarfin survive that fall?"

"I don't know."

How Yu survived that fall was still a mystery. Perhaps it was a trick of fate that he survived that fall, just as it was fate that he was on the road at that moment.

"Then what happened?"

"My mom's apprentice was injured and he wanted to come with us because that idiot had nowhere to go and probably wanted to flirt with my mother."

"Why?"

"Because he had nowhere to go and probably wanted to flirt with my mother."

She answered by repeating what she said. She knew from Yu's story that he had nowhere else to go, so joining their group was more of a necessity than a choice.

"That idiot carried the apprentice and we drilled a hole under the Sigma Tower and went into the tower. We left the apprentice in the tunnel, and I never saw him after that, I don't know what happened. We were going upstairs to get what my mother wanted, and then we started smelling fire, and then we were intercepted by two assassins."

Floy might have thought she was telling a story of pure fiction. The pressure in Yurine's heart was growing, even though she knew what she was telling him was true.

"I don't know why the assassins were there. My mother killed one of them and then another one killed my mother."

She had been thinking all the way how to tell this part of the story and, unexpectedly, the words simply came out.

"It was because I knew I would see her again," she tried to comfort herself. She felt guilty for having expressed her mother's death so simply.

"That idiot and I were trapped inside the tower, it was on fire upstairs and downstairs and we had nowhere to go. When the remaining assassin came to kill us, he killed him and we escaped from the tower by jumping out the window. Then people saw us going to the inn, and that's the story."

At first it was questionable whether Yu was strong enough to kill someone. Yurine was also surprised that he could kill someone, and before she could get over that surprise, he had killed someone else.

Jumping out the window might not have been convincing to Floy either. Before he could ask another question, Yurine formed a gust of wind around her hand that took the shape of a tornado. Their hair briefly blew up with the papers on the table.

"I can do wind magic, I used my magic to slow the fall and we landed safely."

"You're a wizard, of course..." Seeing magic made the story more believable in Floy's eyes. Magic was not a subject that ordinary people were familiar with, and that obscurity made the stories more believable.

"Is there anything else?"

"No, that's all," Yurine told me almost everything she knew.

"Thank you for your cooperation."

After writing Yurine's full statement, Floy closed the notebook, putting a bracket between the pages.

"Yu Valarfin, what do you know about him?"

"We met less than a month ago, I don't know much."

"And yet you let him take you as his daughter?"

"No one is taking me, don't make things up. He's helping me achieve my goal. If, if..." she didn't want to talk about this part either. "If he hadn't taken me as his daughter, I wouldn't be able to go out like this and achieve my goal."

"Why is he helping you, what is your purpose?"

"That's none of your business either."

***

After Yurine came out, it was Yu's turn to be interrogated, so Yu walked in and sat down on the same chair where Yurine was sitting. It was warm because someone had sat before him.

"Where are you from?"

"İlonya." He lied easily. He chose İlonya because he knew a ship had come from İlonya the night the Sigma Tower burned.

"Where?"

"Seussu," he said. Meanwhile, he hoped Floy didn't turn out to be from İlonya.

He had heard of Seussu from a merchant who had stayed at Lucia's inn in the early days of the Second World. It was a town famous for its sausage.

"Why did you come here from there?"

"To start a new life."

"I know that İlonya is a good country too, maybe the best after Rolderhelm. Couldn't you make a life there?"

"I'm nineteen years old, at that age it was normal for me to dream of leaving home like any teenager."

There is hardly a young man who has not thought about leaving home and going away in his youth. It was not surprising that Yu Valarfin also thought about such things.

"You are very well dressed, and you are staying in a good inn. How did you get the money to buy all this?"

"After I escaped from Sigma Tower, I sold an item I brought from İlonya."

"Tell me how you met Yurine."

"The night I came here I was walking on the road to find a place to stay. The road collapsed and I fell into a cave. There I met Rie and Yurine."

"How did you survive that fall?"

"I guess the world doesn't want me to die yet."

He had died from Rie's spell after the fall, but he didn't know why he hadn't died when he fell. The only explanation was luck.

"And then?"

"Since I had just arrived in Rolderhelm, I had nowhere to go and no one I knew. So I decided to move in with Rie. Rie is Yurine's mother, by the way." Yu told Floy again, even though he knew who she was from Yurine. "Because I had nowhere to go, I didn't know anywhere."

"Is that the only reason?"

"I thought Rie was beautiful, and then there's this."

Every person who has watched anime has dreamed at least once of finding a beautiful waifu and embarking on a story with her in the categories of adventure and romance. Yu was one of them.

"What happened next?"

"Rie and I went through a secret passage and came to the bottom of where the Sigma Tower is located. Rie made a hole and we entered the tower's storage room. Meanwhile, we had Sharley, Rie's injured apprentice, who was unconscious, and I was carrying him because he was unconscious. I left him in the tunnel to come back and get him later."

"Do you know who Sharley is?"

He didn't want to involve the Wizarding Academy, but he would have to in order to answer this question.

"Sharley von Bishory was Salery von Bishory's nephew." Floy nodded for him to continue. "We were going up to the upper floors of the tower, I don't know why we were going, I don't know what happened there, I was just following Rie. When I started to smell something burning on the stairs, I told Rie, but they said they didn't smell anything. When I insisted, we were confronted by two assassins."

"Who were these assassins?"

"They were named Sorrow and Joy, wearing clown costumes."

"Sorrow and Joy?!" Yu nodded, confirming Floy. "And you killed one of them?"

"Sorrow."

"Do you know who they are?"

Yu shook his head from side to side and said he didn't know.

"How did you do that?"

"When Rie killed Joy, Sorrow killed Rie. I took Yurine and tried to escape but there was nowhere to run, Sorrow trapped us and tried to kill us. I hit him in the balls for my life, and when I did, I managed to get the scythe out of his hand and killed him without wasting any time. As I said, there was nowhere to escape, so we had to jump down from the tower. I don't know how many floors we were on, but we were high up, Yurine slowed our fall with her wind magic and we escaped."

The interrogation was less stressful than he thought it would be, he answered all the questions quickly.

"I know you can't use magic around them."

"We realized that, but when Joy died, whatever was preventing Yurine from using magic was removed and she was able to cast her spell."

It would be useful if Yu had their spell blocking feature. Of course, if it works against his will, it would be more of a hindrance than a support, as it would prevent Yurine from casting spells.

"Why did you adopt Yurine after that, why did you stay with her?"

"I couldn't leave a little girl alone."

"That can't be all."

"I have a disease, I don't want to say what my disease is." Actually, he could say he had two disease. One was the epilepsy that had been haunting him for a while, and he thought Yurine's healing magic was working. The other was the blessings he received from Rie. Yurine had said that if he didn't do a healing spell, the blessings would hurt him. "It's not curable, at least there is no cure that I know of. Yurine keeps me from suffering from these diseases and I help Yurine find out who sent those assassins there."

"Do you know why those assassins are there?"

"No," he said, hoping Yurine hadn't said anything about it.

"Have you found anything so far?"

"Uh, no. We went there to see if the people at the Wizarding Academy knew anything, but we came back empty-handed."

Floy stopped writing Yu's statement. "There's nothing else, is there?"

"There is something that is not relevant."

"What is it?"

The man with the bandage was scaring him and he had to talk about him. Maybe they could get help.

"Yesterday I heard that a man with his face covered in bandages came looking for Yurine, except for the guards. Yurine says she doesn't know anyone like that. Honestly, this makes me uneasy. Can't anything be done about it?"

Yu could not think of any measures that could be taken. There was no protection order for a matter where there were few arguments, and even if there had been, it would have made Yu's job harder because of his illegal actions.

But he talked about a case of hope.

"Where did he come from?"

"At the inn where we're staying. He came in the afternoon."

"We will investigate."

Floy said they could leave after jotting down Yu's last words on another piece of paper.