"Oh, how did you finish it?"
The Mask rarely had so much to say, and Fu Qian played along with a little prompting.
"Who could've guessed that something I said offhand back then would actually come true?"
The Mask looked Fu Qian up and down, making no effort to hide his amazement.
"Coincidences are always misleading. Looking back, all five of us racking our brains back then was completely the wrong approach."
"We didn't find the source of color. Death Watcher did."
"And this form you're in now—you benefited from it, too, didn't you? Otherwise, it's hard to imagine you'd have survived this long."
"Who do you think you're looking down on?"
Fu Qian took issue with that.
"My achievements today are entirely the result of my own hard work, all right?"
There was no doubt that was true, but the listeners clearly weren't convinced.
"Heh... heh..."
The Mask let out a series of cold laughs as he listened.
"You really are an arrogant, conceited person. You even considered all five of us dead weight and would rather act alone."
"Even now, I can't seem to argue with that."
"Let me think. You left decisively even under those circumstances, so there's no way you'd have some ridiculous notion of turning back to save your other teammates... Which means you came back for another reason."
"This thing... is actually the abyss?"
The Mask looked down at the "well" beside him and reached a conclusion.
"Then where's the source of color? You couldn't possibly have left it behind."
As befitted the person who called the shots on the team, he showed remarkably sharp reasoning and had pieced together most of what had happened.
But smart people were often misled by their own judgments. As he looked Fu Qian up and down, his