It was an indescribable sensation — as if some unspeakable horror had only just left this place. The lingering madness in the air, the mangled remains of something once living, clawed at every nerve of those who entered.
Pres froze where he stood. A moment later his stomach lurched violently. He bent over, retching in agony, his face twisted as though invisible hands were clutching his entrails, trying to crawl out from within him.
Lloyd helped him outside, then strode back in alone, his expression grave.
Everything in the room was drowned in a vivid, suffocating red, as though a storm of blood had swept through. The furniture lay in ruin, overturned and scattered, every surface smeared and soaked. It was impossible to imagine that so much blood could have come from a single victim — and this was not the pattern of arterial spray from any ordinary wound.
Lloyd stepped through the blood. The once-white bedsheets were completely crimson now. A twisted corpse lay in a shallow pool beneath the bed. The body had been torn open from throat to abdomen. Ribs had been snapped apart. The internal organs were gone. The brutality was absolute.
The victim's features were barely recognizable. Her eye sockets had collapsed inward, the eyes within shattered into a pulp of blood. Her mouth hung wide open, as if she had been screaming in agony until the very last moment of her life.
"Can you tell anything?"
Pres approached from behind, face pale. For a veteran detective, his earlier reaction felt embarrassingly unprofessional.
"A thorough torture killing," Lloyd said quietly. "Not for money. Only for suffering."
He scanned the room again, taking in the overwhelming red.
"The killer used the blood deliberately. Look at the sheets."
He pointed to the woman's hands. They were clenched tightly in the fabric. Lloyd tried to pry her fingers open, only to find her nails had dug deep into her own flesh. It was difficult to imagine the pain she had endured.
"She was tortured to death — not killed first and staged afterward. She suffered, clinging to the sheets, begging, crying, until she died."
Even Lloyd felt a flicker of nausea. He could not begin to understand what thoughts had filled the killer's mind during such acts.
Silence pressed in. The ticking of the clock grew unnaturally loud — then slower… slower… until it stopped.
With it, the very notion of time seemed to halt.
Then the light vanished.
Endless darkness swallowed the world, leaving only Lloyd and the blood-soaked room.
"How tragic."
A woman stood before the corpse, gently stroking the trembling flesh. A soft laugh slipped from her lips.
"Well, Lloyd — you really do look like a proper detective now. Even changed your name to Holmes."
Lloyd's face hardened. A deep, unfamiliar dread spread through him. He tried to stir his secret blood — but there was only silence.
"It seems my connection to the dark has deepened," he muttered. "I can see spirits now without even taking the herbs."
For the first time in a long while, he regretted not bringing his nail-sword. He had never imagined he would meet this woman again like this.
"No," she corrected softly. "More precisely, my restraints have cracked. The gaps are wide enough now that, with just a little effort, I can crawl out and breathe fresh air."
She smiled and walked in a slow circle around him, stepping through the blood. Her stained fingers brushed lightly across his cheek.
"There's no need to fear me, Lloyd. At heart, aren't we in a rather delicate symbiosis? I need you to remain anchored to existence… and you need me to escape the connection to the Stillness Sanctum. We're on the same side, really."
Lloyd stared stiffly at her, hatred and something far more complicated burning in his eyes.
"You're not her. You're just something wearing her skin."
"Is that so?" she said with a tilt of her head. "Then is it possible I've always been her… and everything before was simply my disguise?"
She laughed before he could answer, then sat at the edge of the bed, studying the mutilated corpse.
"You can't figure it out. Neither can I. If everything had a correct answer, he wouldn't be the one who died, would he?
"The one who should have died was you, Lloyd. So what if you took his name? That was his dream, not yours. If this is your form of repentance… it's painfully cheap."
Lloyd said nothing. This was the darkest corner of his heart — a secret he could never speak aloud.
The woman seemed to sense his weakness and laughed softly.
"You've always been like this, Lloyd. I truly don't understand why he chose to let you live. He would have been far more valuable."
She spoke almost to herself, eyes drifting with distant thoughts.
"Holmes… he told me that was the name he received during the Divine Benediction ritual. Your order's ceremony is mysterious — so mysterious that merely passing through an empty dream grants you the power to resist corruption.
"He said it was the name of a detective he heard in that dream. The man even had an assistant named Watson. He used to tell me that when he retired, he'd open a detective agency…"
A flicker of sorrow crossed her face — an emotion so out of place it felt like pity glimpsed in the eyes of a murderer.
"What do you want?" Lloyd asked through clenched teeth.
His feelings toward her were so tangled that even he sometimes felt lost, unsure whether anything he had done was truly right. It all traced back to that sinful night — the Night of Holy Descent that burned away glory and truth alike.
Lloyd had once believed he could forget.
But that, clearly, had only been escape.
Those memories had never left him.
They had only followed, step for step, in silence.
"Nothing much. I simply wish to make a deal with you."
At last, the woman revealed her purpose. An ominous power seeped into every corner of the space, as if the air itself had begun to rot.
"I told you—I don't bargain with devils."
Lloyd refused at once. She always tried to lure him, again and again. Fortunately, he was no longer the man he used to be. He could now stand before temptation and remain clear-minded.
"Why not? I have never deceived you. I lay every truth bare before your eyes."
"And it's those little truths, one after another, that damn us beyond redemption. Isn't it?"
Lloyd's voice rang out sharply.
Silence followed. Ancient, suffocating silence. It lingered as though time itself had frozen—yet it also felt as if it had passed in a single breath. The woman's expression faded into blankness, and she spoke lightly.
"Then how about we each take a step back? No deal. Just… mutual assistance."
"You think I'd trust you again?"
"Then let me trade a piece of information for your trust."
A sly smile curved her lips. In that instant, a chill swept across Lloyd's entire body. He stared at her. Another temptation. This time, it seemed to cost nothing at all.
But he knew better.
She never made a losing bargain. A terrible price always waited in the shadows.
"Archpriest Lawrence is not dead. He obtained the so-called Holy Coffin."
She spoke plainly. She knew Lloyd too well. Even knowing the danger behind it, he would still rush forward without hesitation.
The news struck him like a hammer. Blood vessels burst red in his eyes. He stared at her in disbelief, breathing hard for a long while, as if trying to force his rage back down. Only after a long silence did he finally speak, deep wariness in his gaze.
"Is this how you made the Pope fall?"
"He was just a greedy little man. Much easier to handle than you."
She shook her head dismissively.
"Everyone desires something different. But the hardest to satisfy are idealists like you. You don't crave objects or events. You greedily want to change a world… to make a single will endure forever."
She rose, placing a hand on Lloyd's shoulder, whispering by his ear.
"And once… wasn't it me you longed for?"
Her voice dripped with allure and desire. A hazy warmth spread, turning the world dreamlike and unreal—
—only to be severed coldly by the edge of a sword.
Lloyd's eyes were ice.
"Not anymore."
She laughed. "Is that another one of your changes? Then I suppose my little gift of trust was worthwhile. Archpriest Lawrence was one of the culprits. He should answer for the deaths of the demon hunters. And he took the Holy Coffin. You won't stop your hunt… will you?"
Seeing that the timid fool who once stole glances at her had grown, the woman's expression wavered between mockery and something almost like pleasure.
"So… shall we call this the beginning of our cooperation, partner?"
She extended her hand.
Lloyd stared at that pale palm for a long time. At last, he nodded helplessly. It was the truth—but he also knew it would lead to the wrong ending. That was the horror of devils.
They never lied to you.
Yet you never received a good result.
As she had said, Lloyd should have died long ago. His survival had been an accident. He had always been living on borrowed time.
He didn't mind returning a life that had never truly belonged to him.
Some people had to pay for their sins.
No matter who they were.
No matter what it cost him.
Once more, the devil had won. She smiled and said:
"John Watson."
"…What do you mean?"
"That's what he said. In the dream of the Divine Grace Baptism, that great detective had a partner. His name was John Watson."
"But that's a man's name."
"Do I look like a human to you? I have many titles—devil, witch, demon, and more. My true name is one you dare not speak. So does it really matter whose name this is?"
As she spoke, she began to change. Her form, her face—shifting from a child to an old man. Familiar visages flickered across that blank canvas of a face—Selyu, Eve, Pres—until at last it settled back into the appearance she had worn at the beginning. She smiled at Lloyd.
He said nothing.
He simply reached out and gripped her hand tightly.
…
"What was the killer's motive?"
Pres stared out the window, doing his best not to look at what lay inside the room. He wanted to think about the case, but his mind was completely captured by the grotesque horror before him. It was impossible to focus.
"Revenge. Nothing but revenge. Venting his anger on that woman's body."
The sudden voice made Pres turn toward Lloyd. The great detective's face was deathly pale. He was gasping, cold sweat running down his skin, like a drowning man who had just been dragged back to shore. He looked as if he might collapse at any second.
"Y-you… how did you deduce that?"
Pres hadn't expected Lloyd to react so strongly to the scene either. It seemed that no matter how legendary the urban tales made him out to be, he was still human.
"It's simple. It's written on the wall."
Lloyd pointed toward the wall above the bed. Following his finger, Pres finally noticed the words carved in blood. The nightmare scene had stunned everyone so badly that they had all avoided looking too closely—missing such an obvious clue.
"Revenge…"
Lloyd murmured the blood-written word, feeling an unsettling sense of fate.
"Well then. Let's get to work."
His pale face forced out the faintest hint of a smile, Lloyd doing his best to make himself look… cheerful.