The Witch and the Conspirator

Before the scorching corpse could cool and its Beyonder characteristic emerge, Shermane put on her gloves and adjusted the charred body's pose, giving it a certain religious significance, just like the other prominent gang members she had killed.

Then she began using her black flame to clean up the blood nearby, burning every place the two of them had passed through to obliterate all mystical traces. Of course, she did not forget to set upright the crates Le Ruisi had knocked over during his escape or pick up the goods scattered on the ground.

Tomorrow, this scene would appear in the major newspapers as the fourth serial murder committed in the East Borough in nearly a month. Keeping it clean and tidy would only emphasize its eeriness.

The three similar murders before this, along with their ritual-like crime scenes, had prompted the Tussock Newspaper and the Backlund Morning News to publish alarmist discussions of the serial killings that had occurred in this city last year. Rumors even claimed that the person arrested by the police back then had merely been an unlucky scapegoat, and that the true murderer had reappeared to begin a new round of slaughter.

This met Shermane's needs for acting as a Witch and aligned with the acting rule she had formulated: eerie behavior, misunderstood motives, and negative effects on the victims and society.

Of course, she had added another condition of her own: no harming the innocent. Thus, everyone who died at her hands was a gang member from the East Borough guilty of heinous crimes.

Moreover, to prevent anyone from tracing the murders back to her, Shermane had deliberately targeted gangs with no connection whatsoever to the Black Claw Gang under her control. Combined with a Witch's anti-divination and anti-tracking techniques, this had already left