“What the—?”

  “Unfortunately, it appears we’ve been rained out,” I told her, pointing out the obvious.

  “Oh nooo...!”

  “Aw, try not to get too discouraged yet,” I said in an effort to console her. “Remember, Ca’Marcanda means ‘house of endless negotiations,’ right?”

  Miyoshi puffed out her cheeks in a pouty manner.

  “You’ve got a pretty good grasp of Piedmontese, Kei.”

  “I just looked it up,” I said, putting my cell phone down on the table and picking up the bottle of Vistamare. Reaching into my pocket, I made a show of pulling out my Laguiole sommelier corkscrew knife, then removed the cork and poured the wine into her glass. As the lemony yellow liquid went in, an aroma of white flowers and citrus wafted up.

  “Smells a lot like a Vermentino, doesn’t it?” Miyoshi commented.

  I poured three more glasses, handed one glass each to Saito and Mitsurugi, then picked up my own.

  “We might have been rained out this evening, but I’d like to make a toast. To our summer vacation, and to the beautiful ocean view that’s hiding out there somewhere.”

  “Cheers!” we all said in unison.

  With the wine Miyoshi had swiped, and the various cheeses and charcuteries Saito managed to procure from somewhere, we proceeded to have ourselves a nice little banquet.

  ***

  “So...a nice little banquet, huh...”

  Some time had passed, and I found myself regretting my life choices. A drunk Saito was haphazardly chopping up charcuterie on the cutting board while shouting “affettato misto!” in a sing-song voice, to which Miyoshi responded “have it with Lambrusco!” in the same manner, then dashed off to the cellar. It was like some kind of wild witches’ sabbath.

  “That’s the poorest excuse for affettato misto I’ve ever seen!” I scolded.

  “Huuuh?” Saito said in a drawn-out voice. “Doesn’t it just mean ‘sliced cured meats’?”

  “No! Well...yeah, sorta.”

  “I’m confused...”

  “Listen! ‘Affettato’ means ‘thinly sliced’! It’s a meal consisting of cured meats sliced extremely thin!”

  “You’re sooo picky, Coach!”

  “It’s not being picky! Who the hell’s gonna take a bite out of a three-centimeter-thick slice of salami?!”

  “I will! Rawr!”

  As Saito stabbed the meat with her fork and pulled it up to her mouth for a big bite, I calmly fired back at her.

  “You know, that thing’s probably got a whole mess of calories in it.”

  The moment I cast that terrifying spell, a silence took hold of the room. The tiny fork Saito had been holding fell out of her hand, hitting the table with a surprisingly loud clank.

  “D-Don’t worry!” Miyoshi said hurriedly, having returned from the cellar. “Lambruscos actually promote weight loss!”

  I glared at her utterly nonsensical factoid.

  “No, they absolutely do not.” In fact, they probably have a decent amount of sugar—a lot of them are semisweet.

  “Really?” Miyoshi replied. “I know one time I got a terrible stomachache after drinking some and ended up losing weight.”

  “That’s only because you also ate too much!”

  “Ooooh! So that means if I overeat, I can lose weight!” Saito exclaimed, her absurd conclusion resonating with renewed vigor.

  “What is wrong with you?!” That’s it. I give up.

  Mitsurugi, who had taken up the part of an uninvolved spectator, was practically dying of laughter, doubled over with her hand on her stomach.

  How are we supposed to explain this train wreck to the hotel staff when they come back in the morning...?

  ***

  After a wild night of partying, the last person standing was always the one who got the short end of the stick.

  I carried Saito and Miyoshi back to their respective rooms, worrying a bit about how defenseless they seemed.

  “Man, these two. They’re lucky I’m not a wolf in sheep’s clothing.”

  “That’s just how much they trust you,” stated Mitsurugi, who had been accompanying me. “Though you know, you’re stronger than I thought you’d be, Yoshimura,” she added in a tone of admiration, having seen me carry each of the others like princesses and place them down in their beds. Of course, I’d had my STR set to 100 at the time, so it had been a rather light workout, all things considered.

  She looked up in thought.

  “Maybe I should have you carry me too...”

  “What? Are you also drunk?”

  “I mean, maybe a tiny bit.”

  “In that case, you should probably go to bed. I’ll walk you to your room.”

  “Oh, okay,” she responded, a hint of disappointment in her voice, then promptly opened the door right next to Saito’s. “I had fun tonight,” she murmured, then paused for a while, until a devilish grin formed on her face. “Wanna stop in for a bit?”

  Summoning every ounce of reason I had left, I pulled my face tight, stammered something about seeing her in the morning, and retreated while I still could. Apparently she had been more drunk than she let on.

  Once I had made my way back to the lobby, I plopped down on the couch and let out a heavy sigh. Pouring myself the last remaining bit of Costa Russi, I surveyed the disaster scene around me.

  “They’re gonna be so angry at us tomorrow...” We hadn’t spilled the alcohol or anything, but the table was packed with enough wine glasses of various shapes and sizes to make it seem like a small army had been drinking. Miyoshi, in her infinite wisdom, had kept bringing out different glasses to match each wine type and vintage. “Sheesh. Yeah, I know they told us to use whatever we want, but that girl needs to learn some restraint.”

  Lambrusco in a ballerina champagne tulip? Moron. What if the stem broke? Any white wine glass with a somewhat narrow mouth would’ve been fine. Yeah, more like this one—

  I took a closer look at the glass Miyoshi had been using. It was a Riedel Sommeliers that was meant for Zinfandel. Another loud sigh escaped my throat. Those must’ve been the only kinds of glasses they had available.

  Outside, the rain started to pick up, and the streams of water running down the windows started turning into rivers. As I mulled over how I would get the throng of wine glasses back to the kitchen, I finished off the remaining wine, and before I knew what hit me, I was on my way to dreamland.

  ***

  “Mmh?”

  When I came to, I wasn’t quite sure what had woken me up at first. As soon as I heard the sound echo down from the second floor again, though, I sprang to my feet. That sounded like Mitsurugi screaming!

  Immediately setting my stats to max, I sprinted up to her room as fast as I could.

  “Mitsurugi?! Are you okay?! I’m coming in!” Something seemed to be exerting pressure on the door from the inside. Using my stat-imbued strength, I forced the door open. The window facing the front of the hotel was wide open, and the wind and rain were pouring in, causing the curtains to flap wildly like the cape of some madman.

  I dashed over to the window and looked down...but there was nothing there. Using an arm to stave off the piercing wind as it picked up in intensity, I leaned out and looked in both directions, then spotted what looked like someone in a red dress at the far end of the courtyard.

  “Mitsurugi!”

  Leaping out the window, I hit the ground and took off after the figure. I have the highest stats of anyone on the planet—there’s no reason I shouldn’t be able to catch up.

  I could only pray I was right about that.

  ***

  “What’s this...?”

  I hadn’t managed to catch up to the figure I had seen, despite running fast enough to cover a hundred meters in a single second. The downpour was torrential, which had limited my visibility, but the path I had taken into the forest was narrow and had no branching paths, so I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why I never caught up.

  I had ended up at an ancient-looking shrine, standing all by itself in the middle of the forest.

  “Maybe it’s the shrine the butler mentioned?”

  The area was pretty much pitch-black, but I just so happened to have the Night Vision skill. Despite how muddy the ground was, though, I didn’t see any obvious footprints. Just in case, I took a quick look around the perimeter of the building, but found nothing out of the ordinary—apart from the lonely shrine itself, which seemed to be built in the taisha-zukuri style.

  The main halls of Shinto shrines were usually built in one of two architectural styles: shinmei-zukuri or taisha-zukuri, with the former usually being used in places where amatsukami, the gods of heaven, were enshrined, and the latter where kunitsukami, the gods of earth, were enshrined. The deity enshrined in this particular shrine was supposedly one of the kotoamatsukami, the gods of creation, which were closely related to the amatsukami, meaning it typically would’ve been in the shinmei-zukuri style.

  “It’s like the textbook definition of a shrine...”

  I approached the entrance to the main hall and tried to gently open the door, but it was locked from the outside with a sturdy-looking traditional boat-shaped shrine padlock. There’s no way anybody could’ve hidden inside here.

  “Dammit,” I spat out. Having lost sight of the suspicious shadow I’d been so certain I’d be able to easily catch up to, there was nothing to do but head back to the hotel. I paid careful attention to the muddy ground and nearby underbrush as I made my way along the path, but found nothing but my own footprints from when I had first run through. The downpour was getting somehow even worse than before, so even if someone had left traces behind, they would’ve been completely washed away soon enough.

  When I got back, Miyoshi was waiting for me in the lobby. “What on earth just happened, Kei?!” she asked anxiously, handing me a large towel.

  Accepting her offering, I ran the towel briskly over my head a few times to dry off.

  “No idea,” I grumbled brusquely.

  Miyoshi’s brow furrowed.

  “I saw what happened to Mitsurugi’s room, so I searched around the hotel for her just in case, then contacted the relevant parties.”

  “All right.”

  “Kei, you should take a shower and change, then we can—”

  “No, I’ve got to go back out there and find her.”

  “Calm down and think for a minute. There are only three of us, we have no lay of the land, it’s nighttime, and the weather is awful. Wandering around out there is only going to get us nowhere fast,” she said. She quickly added that she hadn’t picked up anything with her Danger Sense or Life Detection skills either.

  When she told me that, I realized for the first time that my own Life Detection skill hadn’t reacted to anything out there either. If Mitsurugi had been alive and in the area, there definitely should’ve been some kind of reaction...

  “Look, we can at least send the Arthurs out there,” Miyoshi offered.

  “Y-Yeah... That’d be the most surefire way, huh...”

  “We’ve got to wait for people to contact us back anyway, so please, change into some dry clothes. Unless you want to catch your first cold?”

  Both of us were blessed with the Super Recovery skill, so it was highly unlikely we’d ever catch colds...but her comment made it feel like she managed to catch me in an “idiots don’t catch colds” joke, and I couldn’t help but chuckle ever so slightly. People still being able to laugh even at the absolute worst of times is kind of an amazing thing.

  ***

  Once I had taken a shower and changed clothes, I went back down to the lobby and sat on another couch, facing Miyoshi as we chatted.

  “But Mitsurugi’s room is on the second floor! You dashed up there within maybe ten, fifteen seconds of hearing that loud sound. Nobody could’ve possibly kidnapped her in that short a time. What would they have done, draped her over a shoulder and jumped out the window?”

  “It isn’t exactly impossible.”

  “The only person it’s possible for is you, Kei.”

  “So the kidnapper is someone with abilities like mine, then?”

  Miyoshi groaned in exasperation.

  “Keeeiii...”

  My mind was all over the place, I was on edge, and I couldn’t stop bouncing my knee.

  “Look, the problem is there’s no motive,” she continued.

  “Motive?”

  “If someone ran off with Mitsurugi, they had to have done it this way for a reason, right?”

  “A reason, huh...” If someone had just wanted to kidnap her, it would’ve been way easier to do it while she was walking around at night. Also, if they had been after Mitsurugi specifically, they would’ve just gone after her in Tokyo. Nobody in their right mind would’ve trailed her all the way out here.

  “Is there any chance this could be some group that’s trying to force us under their thumb?” I suggested.

  “There aren’t many people who knew we were coming to this specific place. Besides, if that were the case, it would’ve been easier for them to make a move when the two of us weren’t together,” Miyoshi pointed out. “I don’t think we’re the cause of this...”

  “You think it’s something about this place itself, then?”

  “That would be the natural assumption, yes. Think about it: employees who never stay here at night...a building that’s practically dripping with history...”

  “And then there’s whatever was wearing that red dress,” I added.

  “Red dress?”

  “Yeah. Earlier this afternoon when we were at the beach, I thought I saw a woman in a red dress at the top of the cliff.”

  “And?”

  “I’m pretty sure I saw the exact same outfit when I looked out the window in Mitsurugi’s room just earlier.”

  “Out in the pouring rain?”

  Rain, huh... She was right. Anyone wearing a dress out in the rain like that would’ve gotten absolutely soaked, and the fabric would’ve bunched up and clung to their body. However, I distinctly remembered it as a dress, not some unidentifiable red object. Maybe it was because I had seen it earlier in the day...

  “Now that you mention it, that is pretty strange,” I admitted.

  “Anyway, we can ask the staff for more info about that tomorrow. For now, how about we look up more info about the property and the building here in the archives?” Miyoshi suggested.

  “Not like I’m gonna get any sleep while we’re waiting on the Arthurs anyway. May as well try to make myself useful.” I figured she had called the police as well, so it was always possible they might show up at some point too.

  “Let’s do what we can, then!”

  “Where’s Saito, by the way?” I asked.

  “Apparently after she finished cleaning up here, she went to the kitchen to make us some midnight snacks.”

  Taking a closer look, I saw that the mountain of wine glasses had indeed disappeared. Her BFF vanished into thin air, yet she’s still completely on top of things. Talk about working well under pressure.

  “Wait a sec. Isn’t it a terrible idea for us to split up in a situation like this?” I automatically started to rise from my seat.

  “We’ve got Life Detection—we can keep track of her using that. Right now we’re the only three people in the building,” Miyoshi reminded me. “Though the skill won’t do much good for anything inanimate, of course,” she added with a shrug.

  Soon after that, Saito came safely back out of the kitchen, pushing a cart stacked with little sandwiches and a pot of coffee, and the three of us started thumbing through the dozen or so books we had taken out of the archives and stacked on the table.

  “But what would Haru’s abduction in the present day have to do with all these old documents?” Saito wondered aloud, confused.

  That sure is the question of the day.

  “I really don’t know. But if this really doesn’t have anything to do with Miyoshi and me, then I can’t help but think it potentially has something to do with the history of this land.”

  “Could it have been a random crime?”

  “You don’t ‘randomly’ kidnap someone out of the second-story window of a hotel that isn’t even officially open yet.”

  “Hmm...”

  At that point, all we were really doing was trying to get some peace of mind. Our only course of action was to wait for others to contact us—whether it ended up being the Arthurs, the police, or the perpetrator.

  People said investigators for kidnapping cases should always get eight hours of sleep, but we were civilians, and sleeping was the last thing on our minds. I did want to make sure that at least Saito could get a nap in, though, since she didn’t have Super Recovery like we did.

  “At least one of us has to be awake in case someone contacts us, so let’s sleep in shifts. Why don’t you go first, Saito?”

  “Me? I’m kind of worried about going back upstairs...” She glanced upward uneasily.

  “I would be too,” I agreed. “You can just lie down on the long couch in the back, there.” I reached under the chair behind me and pulled out a cotton blanket, which I handed to her.

  “All right. Wake me up as soon as you hear anything, okay.”

  “You got it. Thanks for the midnight snacks.”

  Giving a little wave in response, Saito made her way over to the couch, which was in a slightly darker part of the room. The rain continued to beat loudly against the building, showing no signs of letting up, and we still heard the occasional distant rumble of thunder.

  “Hmm, so these are the priest’s personal notes?” The book I held up was rather thick, and it was apparently one of seven volumes. On a cursory glance, the contents seemed less like a diary and more like a collection of thoughts that had suddenly sprung to mind and been scribbled down. The earlier entries were all dated, but the further along I skimmed, the fewer dates were marked down.

  “It doesn’t look quite as old as I thought it would,” I said, scrutinizing one of the pages.