The resounding echo of the slap had long faded into the quiet hum of the wind rustling against the thin paper screens.
I rolled my jaw as the stinging heat continued to radiate across my left cheek in a hot, throbbing rhythm, but I kept my expression perfectly blank.
Mitsuki stood right in front of . Her chest heaved with slow, controlled breaths, and her knuckles remained stark white at her sides. She stared daggers into my face, searching for any sign of a lie.
She found nothing but cold, flat reality.
I let the heavy silence stretch out, giving her brain a few seconds to transition from pure, blinding rage back into tactical focus.
I watched the rigid tension in her shoulders twitch, and only when her breathing finally steadied did I raise my hand.
"Like I said, things can go four ways... One," I said, holding up my index finger. "Both the miners and the Iron Vanguard are active Entropy cultists."
I raised a second finger, keeping my tone perfectly level. "Two. Just the miners are cultists. And your husband’s party is just dumb muscle, acting as obvious, oblivious guards."
A third finger joined the others. "Three. Your people are the cultists, and they are using this entire mining operation as a front while making sure the innocent miners stay in line and don’t go snooping around."
"Or four. The Hollow Cinder Mine is completely innocent. The Vanguard is clean, so are the miners, and I just dragged a massive target right onto everyone’s backs."
I t her judging eyes, holding her glare without flinching. "Look, we don’t have the ti to figure out which one is the truth right now. We need a single, airtight plan that keeps us breathing in all four of those scenarios."
Mitsuki released a heavy, shuddering breath, pressing her fingertips hard against her temples, squeezing her eyes shut for a brief second.
She visibly fought down the adrenaline spiking her heart rate as she turned her back to , pacing a few deliberate steps across the floorboards.
The sheer, unadulterated fury radiating off her began to settle into a sharp, clinical focus.
"You are missing the bureaucratic picture," she muttered, keeping her back to . "There is a fifth possibility."
Mitsuki turned around and walked over to the small wooden desk resting against the far wall of the shrine.
She gripped the edge of the table hard, leaning her weight forward, and she stared down at the grain.
"Only the owner of this mine being a cultist... or rather the cultist," she said. Her voice flattened into a purely informative tone.
While I kept my mouth shut, letting her explain.
"His na is Sigarashi..." she continued, looking over her shoulder, and eting my gaze. "He runs a pharmaceutical company... has six outlets in Shinkotsu and fourteen across the entire Fugen. He is wealthy, yes. But he is strictly mid-tier, so to speak.... He lacks the capital to play against the major noble houses."
She pushed off the desk and turned to face fully. "When the Orichalcum ore was discovered here about a year ago, the Fugen issued a massive public tender for the mining rights. The major players should have swallowed it whole... It should have been a ruthless bidding war between the elites. But to everyone’s absolute surprise, Sigarashi won the bid."
A sudden, chilling clarity washed over as I took in the new information
The scattered, chaotic pieces of the puzzle locked together into a grounded, terrifyingly mundane picture.
[Of course. It’s a goddamn shell company!]
Looking at it now, it’s the most obvious play in the book. You avoid stuffing a legal mine with cultists wearing spooky robes, cause that’d risk imdiate exposure.
Instead, you make it purely a highly lucrative, perfectly legitimate asset.
You hire normal, completely innocent folks to do the heavy lifting. You set up a standard managent structure, and then you silently re-route the raw ore or the profits straight into the cult’s war chest.
It was the cleanest, lowest-risk operation possible. Just clean accounting and solid profit margins. It was a brilliant, highly effective form of organized cri.
I pushed my back off the wooden pillar, nodding slowly.
"That makes a terrifying amount of sense..." I said, genuinely respecting the hustle. "But I refuse to believe Entropy left a high-value Orichalcum mine entirely unmonitored."
I took a step toward Mitsuki, "If I ran that cult, I would never trust a bunch of normal workers and so hired guards. I would plant at least one handler on-site. Soone with access to the rosters, the shipnts, and the infrastructure. Soone to cook the books and sound the alarm if anyone got too nosy."
Mitsuki’s eyes widened as she caught onto my exact train of thought.
Our focus shifted, narrowing down from an army of hidden enemies to a single, highly probable suspect.
And we only needed to look at the guy managing the day-to-day operations.
"That sleazy manager," we both said in unison as we both looked at each other before bursting into soft chuckles.
The deduction felt like a solid, tangible win.
But the heavy reality of the approaching night imdiately crushed that brief laugh.
After all, knowing the enemy’s most plausible identity changed nothing about our imdiate survival.
"Okay..." I said, forcing my mind back to the present danger. "Whatever the case, we need to assu we are getting attacked tonight. We need to assu your ritual will be disrupted."
Mitsuki let out a tired, hollow chuckle as her shoulders slumped, and she finally lost the last bit of that rigid, angry energy holding her together, leaving her looking incredibly exhausted.
"Then my death is inevitable..." she stated. Her voice lacked any dramatic flair, delivering the words as though she were talking about the weather.
She turned around, gesturing toward the window depicting the sprawling basin outside the shrine. "The ritual takes place out in the open. Right in the middle of the basin. If the ritual gets disrupted, I will have no walls or doors to hide behind."
I stepped up beside her, staring out at the orange-dyed basin.
My eyes traced the periter, mapping the geography. I looked at the dense forest surrounding the mine, the mountain entrance to the north, the loading docks to the east, and the main living quarters.
And recalled the twisted rules these specific nightmares operated on.
"Outsiders need soone from the inside to open the door for them to enter a dwelling..." Mitsuki said, dropping her voice to a grim whisper. "... But out in the open, those rules do not apply to . They can just walk right up and rip apart."
She placed a hand flat against the window fra, her gaze shifting toward the large, rectangular building housing the workers. "And there is a secondary threat. An outsider’s domain ignores physical walls. If my ritual fails and they reach the living quarters, their hallucinogenic domain will easily bleed right into the living quarters. Our containnt procedures can handle that... But our first and foremost priority is the infrastructure..."
My stomach dropped. I realized exactly where this was going.
She pulled her hand back from the window fra. "That is why my ritual covers the entire Hollow Cinder Mine, not just the living quarters. I have to raise a massive barrier spanning the entire basin.
She looked at , her dark eyes filled with a heavy fatalism. "And to protect all that infrastructure evenly, the ritual demands that I sit at the exact geographic dead center of it all. At the main crossroads right by the path."
I stared at the dark dirt roads outside as the tactical reality of the situation settled into my brain.
The setup was an absolute nightmare.
Mitsuki was going to sit out in the open, acting as a giant, stationary anchor for a massive barrier.
If her barrier failed, the outsiders would close the distance and rip her apart right then and there.
Their domain would then engulf the living quarters, influencing everyone except Garek, who is still a possible cultist and would be sitting right beside , ready to knock out or kill the second that barrier fell.
I had to sohow tackle that and make sure Mitsuki is safe, because no way in hell I will have the death of a pregnant woman on my conscience... hell, anyone’s death for that matter.
And fight off whatever those cultists throw at .
All while handling a literal army of Tier 3 invisible tentacle Accursed sieging the living quarters.
[Well... fuck.]
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