Chapter 5: The Third Potential Holy Maiden

“Yes. Emily didn’t die, so the point at which Dr. Mordred’s personality branched into two was delayed. I thought I’d managed to prevent it, but from what you two have told me, the Killer has already emerged…”

Grace let out a grave sigh. Her gaze behind her glasses was laden with regret.

Frowning, Gilbert said, “Wait just a minute. In that case, why does the Killer attack a potential Holy Maiden in the game? I can understand his personality splitting as a consequence of him being unable to accept his sister’s death, but what would that have to do with targeting Holy Maidens?”

“That’s because of the Obstruction-possessed person who kills his sister,” Grace answered.

Cecilia thought back to when she’d visited Emily’s hospital room just recently. Mordred had indeed said that a person under the control of an Obstruction had attacked her.

“Since a possessed individual murders his sister, he grows to resent the Holy Maiden, who hadn’t protected her,” said Grace.

“But that’s…,” Gilbert murmured.

“Yes. It’s displaced aggression and a leap of logic, of course,” she replied. “If the Holy Maiden’s duty is to exorcise Obstructions, then failing to remove one is her fault. That being said, she can’t be held responsible for a possessed individual harming another person. But the Killer obviously couldn’t make that distinction. With his beloved sister dead, he was no longer able to process his grief. Thus, forming a grudge against someone was the only way he could hold on to himself. That was how his loathing of Holy Maidens developed… The real Holy Maiden, however, was out of his reach because she lives in her temple.”

Grace pressed a hand to her heart. “That’s why he turns to killing her potential successors. And he makes the character I am now, Grace Martinez, his first target.”

“But… It’s the Obstruction that was at fault…,” protested Cecilia.

“If he knew the identity of the possessed person, he would have gone after them. But…”

“They haven’t been found yet,” Cecilia finished.

Emily’s assailant was still at large. In light of that, it felt almost inevitable that Mordred would come to resent the Holy Maidens.

Grace looked down. For the first time that day, she frowned. “It’s not that they haven’t been found. They don’t actually exist.”

“What?!”

“The truth is—”

But just as she began to explain, the door to the research lab burst open. All three turned to the entrance to find an older man in a lab coat standing there.

“You’re still here, Grace?” he asked.

“Ah, yes. I still had a few things to get to in my research,” she replied.

“It’s good that you’re passionate, but you should head home already. You want to make sure you rest properly, don’t you?”

“Yes. Thank you for thinking of me. I’ll return there soon.”

“Good,” he said, leaving the room. He seemed to be making his rounds of the other labs, locking up and checking to see who was still there.

The clock indicated that it was indeed quite late at night. Grace got out of her chair. “I think that’s enough for today. We can keep talking about this another time.”

That brought the information exchange party to a close. Although the “exchange” part was in name only; Cecilia and Gilbert had gotten the information they needed, but they hadn’t given any to Grace.

Brother and sister walked home side by side. Since they’d just been discussing the Killer, the dark road back was a little scary. It still felt spooky even though they were on school grounds.

To distract herself from her fear, Cecilia remarked, “I never expected Dr. Mordred to be the Killer.”

“Yeah. But now that we know, it also explains why those wild dogs tried to attack Lean.”

“It does?” she asked, puzzled.

“He probably knew the whereabouts of the dogs’ territory, right? He’s the one who came to us asking permission to look into them in the first place. It wouldn’t be surprising for him to have realized that the dogs would pass by that cave.”

“You’re right…”

The more she thought about it, the more it made sense. Dr. Mordred was outwardly mild-mannered and gentle, but lurking just underneath was a manifestation of his pent-up resentment, the Killer. In fact, maybe his alter was the only reason he could still smile on the surface even though his sister had almost been done in. He’d ended up creating another self who could feel that anger for him.

“That aside, I wonder what the last thing Grace said meant,” mused Gilbert.

“What thing?”

“That the person who attacked Emily doesn’t actually exist…”

Cecilia replayed in her mind what she’d said.

“If he knew the identity of the possessed person, he would have gone after them. But…”

“It’s not that they haven’t been found. They don’t actually exist.”

What did that imply? The more she dwelled on it, the less sense it made.

“Well, I guess we’ll just have to ask her about it directly,” Gilbert reasoned.

“I guess we will.”

Still plagued by unease and uncertainty, they made their way back to the dorms.

Cecilia found herself outside the hospital after class the next day. Naturally, she was there to visit Emily. Lean had other things to do that day, so Cecilia had come alone.

I’m a little scared of Dr. Mordred now, but his sister didn’t do anything wrong!

Flowers for the room in hand, she entered through the hospital doors. Although the facility was part of the academy campus, it was still a public institution. As such, it also had a back entrance for regular visitors, which was located outside the fence surrounding the school grounds. By the same token, a guard was stationed at the door leading to campus, so not just anyone could exit the building that way.

Let’s see, Emily’s room should be…

Despite how big the hospital was, Cecilia did know the way to Emily’s room by now. She headed for the staircase leading to the upper floors.

Just then, a man wearing a brown hunting cap pulled low over his eyes crossed in front of her.

Wait, isn’t that—?

It was Bernard. He wasn’t wearing glasses, and his hairstyle and hair color were both different, but it was unmistakably him.

An ordinary person might not have noticed him at first glance. But Cecilia knew that he dons that disguise when he assaults women and children in the dating sim.

Why is he wearing it here…?

A sense of unease prickling at her, Cecilia followed Bernard. While he normally played the part of a meek young man, in truth, he was a serial criminal with a penchant for violence. And for whatever reason, he wore a disguise when committing his misdeeds. That would obviously put her on the defensive.

He’s headed for…

Bernard climbed the stairs and made for the wing where Emily’s room was. Then he actually went inside it.

But why?! Do they know each other?!

Cecilia crept up to the cracked door and observed him from there so he wouldn’t notice her. Bernard stood over Emily’s bed, fumbling in his jacket pocket for something, which he eventually produced.

It was a folding knife. He lifted it up high.

“Stop right there!” Cecilia shouted, bursting into the room and tackling him from behind.

It startled him. “What the—?”

Both parties crumpled to the floor. The knife slipped from Bernard’s hand and went sliding across the floor.

He reached toward the corner of the room where the knife had landed, but Cecilia grabbed on to his sleeve to stop him.

“Let me go!” he cried.

“Absolutely not!” she yelled back.

He kicked at her shoulder in an attempt to get her to release him, but she managed to hold on. Then she wrapped her hands around his waist to prevent him from escaping, which made him thrash even more.

“You little—”

Bernard reached for the bedside table, grabbed an object that was there, and brought it down over Cecilia.

“Oh no.”

A porcelain flower vase hurtled toward her face.

When she came to, she was in bed. The ceiling didn’t look like the one in her dorm room, and the window was open. It all seemed slightly familiar; suddenly, she realized that she was in a room in Emily’s hospital. Pain lanced through her head as she tried to sit up.

“Ngh!”

“Cecilia, are you okay?!” asked Gilbert, who was right by her side. He supported her back to help her into an upright position.

“Gil?”

“We found you unconscious in Emily’s room. Do you remember that?”

That jogged her memory. She snapped her head up. “How’s Emily?!”

“She’s fine,” confirmed someone else. It was Grace, shutting the door behind her. It appeared as though she’d just come back from checking in on her.

Cecilia breathed a sigh of relief.

“Honestly, I wasn’t expecting to find you passed out in Emily’s room when I went to go visit,” said Grace, who had apparently rescued Cecilia. The room they were in happened to be empty, so they’d asked the hospital for permission to borrow it.

“We’ve had a doctor examine you, and you have a mild concussion. The doctor told us that once you wake up, you’re free to go,” Grace explained.

Cecilia touched her head gingerly and found a slightly swollen bump there, but no broken skin. Maybe it was all thanks to her wig that she’d gotten off lightly.

“Do you remember how you ended up on the floor? Don’t tell me you smashed that vase onto your own head,” Gilbert said dryly.

“Oh, so actually—”

“Did Bernard assault you?” asked Grace, and Cecilia gave a start. Her insight was so keen, it was as if Grace had seen the event with her own eyes. Cecilia could only stare dumbstruck at Grace in response, who sighed. “I thought so.”

“What do you mean?” asked Gilbert sharply.

She brought a stool over to Cecilia’s bedside and sat down. “There’s something I didn’t mention yesterday.”

“Which is?” he inquired.

“Bernard is the one who attacked Emily.”

Both siblings inhaled sharply at the revelation.

“So an Obstruction is possessing him?” asked Gilbert.

“It didn’t look that way, though,” Cecilia mused, recalling the struggle from earlier. While he’d definitely had a dark aura about him, it hadn’t seemed like he was possessed.

“Bernard actually spread the story of someone under the control of an Obstruction attacking Emily. He lied to deflect suspicion away from himself. Since rumors of the Holy Maiden growing weaker had started flying around that time, he decided to take advantage of them.”

So when Grace had told them the night before that the culprit didn’t exist, she’d meant that an Obstruction-possessed culprit didn’t exist—not that there wasn’t one at all.

As both Gilbert and Cecilia struggled to wrap their heads around everything, Grace turned to address them head-on. “Cecilia, did you play through Jade’s route?”

“Oh—yeah!”

“Bernard Broussais is the final boss of his route. Catching Bernard is a major part of it. But because that branch of the story only depicts him as a serial assaulter, it doesn’t show what happened with his very first victim.”

“Wait, then—”

“Yes. The first person he attacked was Emily.”

Jade’s route does a deep dive into the youngest Coulson brother. It reveals that Ticky twists Bernard’s already twisted personality even further through compounding his stress on a daily basis. Consequently, Bernard seeks out women and children to beat in order to vent his frustration.

Grace went on. “Originally, Emily dies, and Bernard’s violent streak only grows. But since she survived this time, his violent tendencies should be lying dormant; he shouldn’t go on the assault spree he does in the game…theoretically, anyway.”

That had held true until recently, when he’d attacked Emily. His savage nature was rearing its head again.

When Cecilia first met Bernard earlier, she’d blithely thought, Has his personality changed?

She could never have anticipated the truth that lay hidden in her observation.

“The way I see it, we have two avenues of eliminating the Killer inside Dr. Mordred,” Grace announced, holding up two fingers.

“What are they?”

“The first is to rouse Emily somehow, since she’s the reason why the Killer manifested,” she answered, folding down a finger. “The second is to catch Bernard, her assailant.”

Grace folded down her other finger. Cecilia leaned forward. “Then why don’t we just hand him over to the gendarmerie?”

“We can’t do that,” she replied, dropping her gaze. “He’s the son of a marquis. Unless we have ironclad proof, the gendarmerie won’t do a thing. I actually went to them once, but they shooed me away. In fact, they outright implied I was the one who did it…”

While this country did have a functioning judiciary, the catch was that it was clearly biased toward the nobility. This largely came down to the fact that most of the people who held positions in the justice system were aristocrats. Furthermore, no one carried as much influence over the judiciary as the highest-ranking nobles. The king’s word was absolute, which is why Oscar often executes Cecilia without a trial in the game.

“Even if you exposed your own social standing, Cecilia, there’s a high chance that Ticky would come barging in as a duke’s son himself. And if that happens, Bernard will get off with a slap on the wrist, even if we do manage to get him arrested.”

“And if that happens, we won’t completely eradicate the Killer?”

“No, we won’t. Instead, I think there’s a real possibility that once Bernard got out of jail, the Killer would assassinate him.”

That very well might happen. At the moment, the Killer was taking his rage out on the Holy Maiden candidates. But if the true target of his ire appeared, he was certain to train it on him.

“But we don’t know if we can wake Emily up. By contrast, we do know we can catch Bernard,” Gilbert pointed out.

“Even so, we don’t have any proof…”

Cecilia’s gaze dropped to the floor, just like Grace’s. Gilbert was right—since they knew his identity, it would be much easier to capture Bernard than to wake Emily from her coma. But that came with its own can of worms. Both options were equally difficult. Not to mention that Bernard had just failed to kill Emily. Though perhaps he would try again at another juncture, he would probably exercise more caution and lay low for a while before taking another crack at it.

In other words, capturing Bernard meant going back to square one with Emily and investigating everything all over again.

Can we really manage that?

In the end, the three of them left the hospital without coming up with a strategy.