The Mysterious "Leader"

Watching Bernadette vanish before her eyes, Aria finally pointed at the corpses by the door. "Need any help?"

Odys took a drag from his pipe. "No."

Aria nodded and added, "I'll come back tomorrow to learn how to make bullets."

Odys gave a grunt in response to Aria's farewell.

Only after Aria left did he hear the dogs barking next door. Though there were no pedestrians outside, the air seemed to suddenly start flowing again, no longer making him feel as if he were trapped in a sealed space.

Bernadette must have sealed off the surrounding area earlier, so no one outside had heard the gunshots. At least that spared him a police interrogation.

After Odys finished his pipe, he closed the door, put on gloves, and arranged the two corpses in the yard.

By then, the Beyonder Characteristics had already separated from the bodies. They were Odys's spoils of war. After storing them in an exquisite wooden box, he used scissors to cut open their clothes, then sliced open the corpses' flesh with a dagger.

Odys went into the storeroom, put on a gas mask and deerskin gloves, took out a large bottle of yellow potion from beneath a cabinet, and poured it over the corpses.

The corpses immediately began to hiss and sizzle as their flesh, blood, bones, and tendons rapidly dissolved in the potion.

While they dissolved, Odys fetched a sack and a large dry sponge, then cleaned up the shop outside.

Of the four bullets that had missed their targets, three had struck the walls, scorching three patches black. He would have to repaint them tomorrow.

The remaining bullet had hit the display window, shattering a large section of glass that would need replacing tomorrow.

After cleaning up the other traces, the two corpses had become puddles of bloody liquid. Odys soaked it all up with the sponge, placed it in the sack lined with oil paper, and threw it into the garbage bin outside.

Finally, he rinsed the area with clean water. The two corpses had been dealt with.

After handling everything with practiced ease, Odys sat behind the counter and began smoking his pipe again. I had to advance as soon as possible!

Late at night, Tutwa Street, South Borough.

Fors Wall, dressed in a long skirt and with brown hair, sat worriedly on the sofa in the living room, occasionally glancing toward the door.

It was already deep into the night, yet Xio had not returned.

As a bounty hunter, Xio occasionally had to work at night, but when she left that morning, she had not said she would be coming back this late.

Just as midnight approached and Fors was preparing to go out and look for Xio, she heard footsteps outside. She immediately breathed a sigh of relief. She could tell that Xio had returned.

A few seconds later, Xio Derecha entered. Her features were delicate and her cheeks still held a trace of baby fat. Smiling, she said, "Sorry, Fors. Something urgent came up, and I didn't have time to send you a message."

Fors stood up. "It's fine as long as you didn't run into danger."

Then she asked, "Have you had dinner?"

The rumbling of Xio's stomach answered that question for her.

Fors had saved Xio some bread and lamb stew with potatoes, though the potatoes were certainly cold by now and needed reheating.

Xio placed the soup pot over the fireplace to warm it. "You can't imagine what happened to me today!

"This morning, I went to meet the person in the golden mask. He told me that the police were investigating me!"

Fors, who was making tea by the dining table, froze slightly. "Have you taken on some commission you shouldn't have lately?"

Once a bounty hunter caught the attention of the police, it basically meant the end of her career.

"That was what I thought at first." Xio looked at the fire in the fireplace. "But when I asked around through acquaintances, I couldn't find out anything at all.

"So I changed my approach. I started sorting through the commissions I'd received recently and contacted those clients again."

The lamb stew with potatoes began to bubble. As Xio spoke, she used a hook to pull the pot out and set it by the fireplace, then ladled the stew onto a plate.

At the dining table, Fors poured each of them a cup of tea.

The two sat facing each other. Xio scooped a large spoonful of potatoes into her mouth, held bread in her other hand, and spoke while eating. "That process took up a lot of time. Just when I was planning to continue the investigation tomorrow, I suddenly found a clue."

She took a bite of bread. "Do you remember that job about finding homeless people in the East District?"

"Of course I do," Fors said. "After all, very few people would spend spare money looking for homeless people in the East District."

Then she asked, "Was there something wrong with that commission?"

"More precisely, there was something wrong with Byron, the person who posted it." Xio chewed, her cheeks puffing in and out as she spoke. "I only exchanged a few words with him before I noticed something was off.

"You know, with Beyonder powers helping me, my instincts have always been accurate in that regard.

"Byron apparently hadn't expected that I knew I was being investigated... Then again, if I hadn't met that person in the golden mask some time ago, I wouldn't have known the police were investigating me.

"After the whole sequence of fleeing, chasing, and questioning, I learned that Byron had wanted to introduce me to an Occult Gathering. The police investigation into me was merely that organization's routine background check."

Fors was somewhat surprised. "An Occult Gathering that can mobilize the police for routine investigations?"

Xio nodded. "Yes, that gathering has ties to official Beyonders.

"According to Byron, the gathering's organizer has close ties to the Machinery Hivemind and is extremely well-informed.

"The gathering mainly trades intelligence, much of it highly classified."

Fors took a sip of tea and smiled. "Xio, isn't that exactly what you need?"

For a bounty hunter, being able to obtain high-level intelligence would be a tremendous help to her work.

But Xio said, "I'm still considering whether to join. The organizer is just too mysterious, and the gathering is even held at a fixed location. That makes me feel very unsafe."

Fors blinked. "Huh?"

Xio explained, "Byron said the organizer's codename is 'Leader.' Every participant knows that he emerges from the basement, then returns to it after the gathering ends.

"No one knows how he enters that building, and no one knows how he leaves.

"Since the participants are all intelligence agents, they naturally considered investigating the gathering's organizer. One of them staked out the place for an entire day and night after a gathering, yet never saw the Leader emerge.

"Someone skilled at making mechanisms also bribed two servants hired by the Leader and secretly entered the basement. They searched for a long time but found no hidden passage."

Fors froze slightly. It sounded like something from a ghost story.

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