After bursting out of the water, the dim light around him brightened again. Hattori Heiji felt the sea breeze brushing past him and looked at the familiar faces on shore. His wildly pounding heart calmed slightly.
He took another deep breath, dove back underwater, and looked again in the direction where he had just seen the mermaid. But this time, the area was empty. There was no one there.
"...I must have seen it wrong."
After a brief moment of confusion, Hattori Heiji nodded slightly and decisively concluded, "How could there possibly be someone underwater? And there definitely aren't any human-headed, fish-bodied monsters in this world. That's not scientific— it must have been the refraction of the light underwater, the shapes of all kinds of debris, and the swaying seaweed that made me hallucinate."
Casting aside those distracting thoughts, he looked that way twice more. Only then did he steady himself, hold Conan's wristwatch in his mouth as a searchlight, and continue looking for what he had come to find.
He dove along the steep seabed for a while, then his gaze froze—before him was a heavy ship anchor embedded in the seabed.
He was about to examine it more closely when a powerful current suddenly surged from his side and swiftly swept him away.
With a splash, Hattori Heiji broke through the surface.
After taking several heavy breaths, he came back to his senses and suspiciously looked down at the water. He did not know whether it was an illusion, but when the current had swept him along so violently that he could not open his eyes, he had distinctly felt as though something had mercilessly slapped him and sent him back to the surface.
"...Could it have been a large patch of seaweed swept away by the