Check Mate

Inspector Todouji and the four detectives under him, Haruta, Natsuta, Akita, and Fuyuta, had all dealt with Phantom Thief Jeanne before.

The girl who called herself the Kamikaze Phantom Thief always pulled off all sorts of inexplicable feats, as though she had magic.

But until now, that magic had only involved her own tricks. It had never made them inexplicably vanish from a corridor and reappear in a garden.

"That really is the presence of a Clow Card!"

Sakura, Huo Lin, and Tomoyo stood in a deserted corridor on the second floor. Although the police had sealed off the outside tightly, their cordon only covered ground level.

Both Sakura and Huo Lin could fly. They had come down from the roof.

As for Tomoyo, Sakura was not yet skilled enough to carry someone using the Fly card, so Huo Lin had carried her inside. Tomoyo was delighted with this, since that vantage point was perfect for filming Sakura.

Whenever Sakura had used the Fly card before, Tomoyo had struggled to track her with the camera from the ground. From too far away, the footage became blurry.

Now she could film everything so clearly from a first-person perspective. For Tomoyo, nothing could have been more wonderful.

As for being carried by Huo Lin, they were both girls, so it did not really matter. She only worried that she might be a little heavy.

"Yes, that's a Clow Card." Huo Lin had seen Clow Cards before and recognized the distinctive fluctuations of their magic. "But why would that phantom thief want a Clow Card too?"

"Whatever her reason, a thief has to be a bad person," Tomoyo declared. "We can't let a Clow Card fall into the hands of someone bad. Go, Magical Girl team!"

"Magical Girl team?" Sakura and Huo Lin were both baffled.

"That's right! Magical Girls versus a phantom thief! I've already worked out how to edit the footage! But with so many police officers here, will that phantom thief really come?"

"Of course. She's already here." As Huo Lin spoke, she looked toward the rooftop of a building across the way.

The phantom thief could not fly, but her physical abilities were clearly astonishing. A drop of six or seven stories meant nothing to her.

At that moment, Kurumi Kusakabe stood on the opposite rooftop, holding a Golden Cross set with a purple jewel. Fin had given it to her. The little creature called herself an Apprentice Angel and was a palm-sized fairy with a pair of white wings on her back.

This cross allowed Kurumi to draw on the power of her past incarnation, Jeanne d'Arc.

Kurumi leaped from the rooftop, clutching the Golden Cross to her chest.

"Jeanne d'Arc, please grant me strength. Turn bravado into earnestness, invincibility into beauty, and vitality into courage!"

"Ah, she transformed!" Having watched the entire scene, the three of them clearly saw the girl's school uniform turn into an elaborate outfit-the very same appearance of the Kamikaze Phantom Thief shown on the news!

"That Jeanne girl is a Magical Girl too?"

"She seems a little different." To Huo Lin's senses, what the other girl possessed was not magic in the usual sense.

It felt somewhat different from the power she sensed in herself, Sakura, or Clow Reed.

By then, the Kamikaze Phantom Thief had landed in the courtyard garden without even trying to conceal herself.

"There she is! It's Phantom Thief Jeanne!"

Any police officer who was not blind could see her.

Huo Lin was a little disappointed. She had thought she might get to see a magic show like Kaitou Kid's.

So this Kamikaze Phantom Thief was more of a robber than a thief. There was no finesse to it at all.

That was asking rather too much of her. Kusakabe was not Kaito Kuroba, with his wealth of family knowledge. She had never studied stage magic.

An angel had suddenly appeared, told her she was Jeanne's reincarnation, and asked her to go around sealing demons, lest a great calamity befall the human world.

She had been thrust into the role herself.

But she possessed a power greater than stage magic-a power bestowed by a real deity.

Even with their overwhelming numerical advantage, none of these police officers could stand against Jeanne for even a single exchange. They were easily knocked down.

Jeanne did not hurt them. She merely darted and leaped about, making the whole thing look more like a farce to anyone watching, while the officers stumbled and toppled every which way.

"Sorry about that." Jeanne apologized to the officers she had toyed with. She had already reached the corridor where her target was.

Miyako was not here today. She was Jeanne's classmate and Inspector Todouji's daughter, and she was particularly enthusiastic about catching "Phantom Thief Jeanne." She also kept coming up with strange ideas that had left Jeanne scrambling several times in the past.

Miyako's absence today made the operation much smoother. There was simply no one who could stop her.

Jeanne approached the painting.

The frame bore the title "Smile," but the image had nothing whatsoever to do with that name. It depicted a strange-looking woman.

There really was something wrong with this painting.

Demons liked to inhabit works of art to obtain energy from human hearts.

As for the calling cards sent before every theft, Kusakabe actually had nothing to do with those. The little angel named Fin sent them all.

This time was no different. Fin had said she had found a painting with a strange power, most likely another demon at work, and needed Jeanne to seal it.

Fin's information was usually reliable.

"In the name of God," Jeanne said, producing the Sealing Needle, "evil born from darkness, be sealed here!"

"Check Mate!"

The Sealing Needle shot toward the painting. But unlike what she had expected, it did not turn into a chess piece to mark a completed sealing. It remained a needle and fell to the floor.

"Ah... what's going on, Fin?!"

"Sorry, it looks like I made a mistake. This isn't a demon."

Just then, the strange woman in the painting suddenly moved. As though the image had come alive, she pressed her index finger to her lips in a shushing gesture.

Jeanne felt dazed for an instant. When she came to her senses, she discovered that she was in the garden outside the corridor.

This was the first time she had encountered anything like this.

Was this... another trap Miyako had designed? But she did not think Miyako could do something like this.

It defied science, though she herself was not exactly scientific either.

Oh no, the police officers are coming again.

"Fin, what do you mean, it's not a demon? Are we calling this off?"

"Yes. That painting isn't inhabited by a demon. It's something else, so we'll have to cancel."

"What? How could this happen?!"

She felt as though Fin had tricked her.

Jeanne did not actually want to steal paintings. If this had nothing to do with demons, there was no need to deal with it. Although this would leave her with a "failed theft" on her record, that sort of thing did not matter at all. She did not truly want to be a phantom thief.

But just then, searchlights suddenly lit up in the garden, making the entire space as bright as day.

Dazzled by the lights, Jeanne could not open her eyes for a moment.

"You're surrounded, Jeanne!"

Oh no, that's Miyako's voice.

She had been here all along!

"The art museum is so big that we can't predict exactly where you'll come in, and it's impossible to guard against every possibility. But the location of your target is fixed. As long as you come here, we can block every route you could take to leave."

That was Miyako's strategy.

It did not matter if they could not stop her from coming to steal. They only had to catch her when she tried to escape. They could even catch her with the stolen goods.

That was why she had set up all her measures in ambush here in the garden, a place Jeanne had to pass through.

"Ha ha! We've spread an inescapable net here. You can't get away, so surrender!" Miyako Todouji felt triumphant. After the thief had succeeded and escaped several times, her father was almost becoming the laughingstock of the Metropolitan Police Department. This was the father she had been proud of since childhood.

She did not care whether her father earned promotions or raises, but she absolutely would not let others look down on him.

This time, she had finally caught her target.