"Thank you, Miss and Master, for your enthusiastic assistance and help regarding my psychological test. Please take your time with it. Once you are finished, I will come over to collect it. I also need to check on my friend. Farewell, Miss and Master."
Click~
Ron closed the door to the hospital room and returned to an empty room at the end of the corridor. It was none other than the director's office that he had previously entered.
Adjacent to it was a laboratory and a lecture room for students, containing a white board meant for teaching.
Ron locked the door, then pulled out his notebook along with the firearm components.
He grabbed a board and began writing on it. Although he had already finished mapping out his thoughts, it was best to visually display them for a final summation.
'First, contemplate the surface level.'
The firearm, although matching in color and design regarding its components, was practically non-functional and incompatible.
It was unclear how it had ended up in car five. Perhaps the pre-amnesiac Ron had placed it there?
However, it had to be understood that the original components were still with Ron.
Clack~
From his athletic duffel bag, Ron pulled out a paper bag containing dozens of different components. He looked at the defective firearm and compared the pieces with one another.
Indeed, they were a perfect match.
This eliminated the possibilities of Ron abandoning his gear, being mind-controlled, or scenarios involving item consumption.
Thus, the remaining options were: magic or illusions.
But first, according to the game rules recounted earlier, within ten seconds, one had to kill a person if magic was utilized.
If magic was used merely to store and create this item, it would be irrational, because that would force them to execute a physical kill or face death. Yet simultaneously, another question would arise: why go to the trouble of hiding it, and how did they know about the gun? The easily comprehensible answer lay in two parts: either they knew Ron and were tracking him, or they had learned about it through another source.
Secondly: If they were capable of using magic and executing the corresponding kills, that attributed to two distinct traits: cold-bloodedness and proficiency.
Those two traits could belong to individuals with unstable antisocial psychology, low EQ, or twisted serial killers. They could also belong to desensitized individuals or soldiers.
The current era was a period of war among the city-states, meaning soldiers were not concentrated in Jinlus or Pegasus—which were relatively peaceful—but rather in combat zones or regions near active warfare. Consequently, if they were soldiers, they were either deserters or possessed a rank high enough to not be tightly bound during these days.
Yet a paradox arose. High-ranking figures typically did not travel by train, because they possessed sufficient resources to travel via private means utilizing magic, unless they suffered from a specific predicament. But if they had such a problem, the probability of achieving a high rank was exceptionally low.
As for lower-ranking soldiers, they were not adept at killing. At the very least, they could beat a person to a pulp before using magic and crush them to death within ten seconds—that was... feasible.
Meaning if that were the case, from the two lines of reasoning above, we obtain:
High, stable psychological fortitude.
Knowledge of Ron, or at least the gun.
Belonging to two groups: low-ranking military personnel or deserters, and murderers.
The reason Ron excluded groups like butchers or executioners was that they were not particularly strong. Butchers engaged in work that wasn't very clean and were usually quite weak; if they were strong, most would choose jobs with less scent of blood, barring exceptional cases involving psychology or family.
As for executioners... they were death row convicts who executed other death row convicts under the lord's command. Their status was higher than prisoners of war but lower than commoners—they couldn't even afford a ticket.
Ron rifled through the list of individuals who had purchased tickets—the one he had obtained from Janeus—and realized that among the people in car five, none belonged to the military.
'Deserters? Murderers?'
Ron hypothesized, but fortunately, there was nothing more. Occupations were not printed on the list for him to deduce.
Consequently, this turned into another dead end. He did not know their faces, nor did he know their identities. There were only names and ID codes, which he could not look up within the magical archives.
But then, he remembered the IDs. Meaning, to travel by train, they could not use real IDs, making them fake. But if they were fake, they should have chosen another, safer method of transportation, such as a horse carriage. Although expensive, it was undeniably safer.
Ron immediately erased this path of deduction, discarding the matter of whether they knew Ron or the gun entirely.