Realm Walker

The hard part of the courtroom round was never gathering clues, nor was it investigating. The clues, the evidence—all of it had been handed to both sides up front. The real challenge was seeing the truth of the thing in the shortest possible window.

One had ten minutes to argue their side of the case—that was all the time allotted by the dungeon. If one was weak in deduction, dull in the eye, or slow upstairs, they could never untangle the whole case within that time frame. And if one couldn't think it through, what exactly were they going to defend themselves with?

Therefore, when Yuanshi Tianzun knocked over Zhao Chenghuang's first piece of evidence without even raising his voice, the seven detectives felt something heavy settle onto their chests. This one was going to be a problem. And when he found a crack in the second piece in under a minute, "problem" no longer covered it. Their seven faces had gone tense.

He'd only had a minute or two from breaking out from the cell. Had he managed to read the whole case in that amount of time? Was his claim that the killer was hiding in the room the whole time just a wild guess that happened to land? Or the assured statement of a man who already knew he was right?

***

In the elders' row within the colosseum, Elder Hongying smiled to herself. "The chiefs designed this round as a test of brains and footwork, I'd say. In a dungeon, a quick head and a bit of adaptability are the two things that matter most, right after who hits harder."

She tipped her head toward Elder Sun. "Has that boy actually cracked the whole thing? He's no Scout."

Elder Sun grunted. "He's bluffing, most likely. Even a Scout needs more than a minute to think. Nobody's that quick."

***

Elder Sun had him dead to rights. Zhang Yuanqing was clearly bluffing. The window of time had been too thin. There was only a minute or so between his arrival at the scene of the crime and the appearance of the Detective Squad. It was nowhere near enough to lay the whole case out straight in his head.

The blood on the clothes, the busted glasses, those were the easy catches, the kind of low-hanging fruit that could be plucked by just making a couple of connections.

To prove that the killer had been standing right there, though, required that he understand the case end to end. Yet his whole reason for saying the killer had been present traced back to one thing and one thing only—he knew he didn't do it.

He hadn't actually solved anything. He hadn't cracked the case. He'd found the angle to tip the evidence over, but no clean line of logic to back it up with.

The seven detectives looked on as Yuanshi Tianzun continued to sit there mutely. As the seconds ticked by, their expressions changed from one of worry to something closer to triumph.

Zhao Chenghuang let out a quiet breath. It was a bluff, and he knew it. If Yuanshi Tianzun could prove the killer was at the scene, the evidence would collapse on itself. But how could he do it? There were three sets of prints in the room, and not one of them was a stranger's. The killer left nothing to discover.

But there was a killer. It had to be.

Across from him, Zhang Yuanqing's mind was in overdrive. Whoever slammed me in the back of the head was probably the killer. The fellow dropped me, wrestled Professor Li, did him in before running off, and hung it all on me. Except the phone video runs start to finish, and there's no third guy in it. Not only that, but Old Wang next door didn't notice a second visitor all afternoon.

Unless... He got in way ahead of time. Waits for me, moves the second I'm through the door, drops me first, kills the professor, frames me, and walks out clean, leaving me to take the blame. But putting him in that room means putting evidence on the table to make that case. It also meant laying out how he worked. Four minutes have gone by. I have six left. Don't rush. Don't rush it. The tighter it gets, the calmer I have to play it...

That was when Zhang Yuanqing heard World Ablaze pipe up, his eyes crinkled to slits, his voice full of lazy amusement.

"Scraping the barrel now, are we?" he said mockingly. "A killer in the room? If there's a killer in there, where are his prints? You've got the wrong thread, Yuanshi Tianzun. The clock's still ticking. Maybe you should try a different door."

His smile grew wider. "You could always look at Professor Li's wife, you know. Maybe she's your killer. Of course, then you've got to explain why you were already out cold and Li was already dead by the time she walked in. I'll offer you a theory. She slips home mid-lecture, kills him, then strolls back out. Class ends, she comes home, and 'Oh no, look what I've found.'"

That's an idiotic train of thought. The wife's a set piece, same as Old Wang. There was barely a line of info on either of them, and this round is a thinking contest with no legwork, no step to collect evidence—

Zhang Yuanqing was already firing the rebuttal off in his head when it landed. He'd walked right into it. The trash talk was the whole point. He wanted to break his rhythm, get under his skin, knock his thinking sideways.

Zhao Chenghuang read the play at once and pitched in, flat as a table, "The great Yuanshi Tianzun, out in the first round. That's a hard thing to live down."

They were trying to wind him up, feed his panic over the ticking clock. Payback, really, for the needling Yuanshi Tianzun had done to them earlier.

***

In the arena, Elder Hongying smiled as she watched the projection. "Old Sun, you called it. The boy was bluffing."

"The chiefs are a nasty bunch," Elder Sun said quietly. "They knew full well there's no Scout in the last eight, yet they designed this round anyway. It's the Female Marshal's doing, I'd bet. There isn't one Scout in the top eight. She had to have been spitting flames."

"It seems even the last man from the White Tiger Legion is going to wash out," Elder Hongying said.

Elder Sun gave her a small nod. "The marshal has dropped the rock on her own foot with this round."

Elder Hongying shook her head, laughing, and turned back to the "battle."

The rest of the audience in the gallery were all on the same page.

"Four minutes."

"Somebody get a Scout up here to explain!"

"That guy's sitting there going 'this one's too hard, I can't do it,' guaranteed."

By this time, everyone who was watching understood what was going on. This round wasn't about cracking the case. It was whether the accused could take what he had and rebuild the truth fast enough to find the way out.

Peeling away the outer covering of the murder-mystery case, and the scenario was clear. A Walker in a dungeon, with their life on the line. Could he break out of the trap in time, or would he fail?

Even Yuanshi Tianzun, a man who'd breezed through S-rank dungeons, looked stuck.

***

Inside, room 404. World Ablaze hadn't stopped running his mouth.

Zhang Yuanqing let the noise wash past him. He looked around again, the Eye of the Observer feeding him as much information as he could handle. His mind was spinning fast, going back through every detail one more time, when he stumbled upon a fresh thought.

The killer couldn't have known beforehand that I was coming. I'm his ghostwriter. Professor Li teaches and writes on the side, and has made a decent name as an author. Hiring someone else to write for you isn't a thing he would brag about. There's no way Professor Li told a soul about the meeting.

That single thought cleared up the fog that had built up.

That's it. I got stuck in my own rut. He wasn't framing me, and he wasn't lying in wait in the room either.

A grin spread across Zhang Yuanqing's face. "Foolish detectives. Let me show you exactly where our killer was tucked away."

World Ablaze cocked an eyebrow. "Where was he tucked away, then?"

Zhang Yuanqing stepped back two paces and leveled a finger at the single bed in the corner of the study. "Right here. Look."

The seven detectives crowded around it and looked. There was a patch of clean floor down the middle under the bed, where the dust and grime had been pushed out of the way, leaving an outline. The dirt beyond it was still thick and undisturbed. Not long ago, somebody had squeezed under there and wiped a patch of the floor clean with their own back.

"You're saying the killer was under the bed?" Yuan Ting said, stunned.

Sun Miaomiao knocked it down before Zhang Yuanqing could get a word out. "It couldn't be. If the killer was under the bed while Professor Li was in the same room, how could he not notice? And if he did notice, what does that say about the relationship between him and the supposed killer? You don't let a man who wants you dead camp under your bed."

Zhang Yuanqing shot the baby-faced girl a look. She was a sharp one. If he followed her version of events, he'd have to prove how the killer and Li knew each other, which he couldn't. That would walk the whole deduction straight into a wall, since there would be nothing for him to build on.

He had his own path in mind, though, and her words did not budge him off it.

"I never said the killer was under the bed," he said with a smile. "The one under the bed was Professor Li. And he didn't crawl under there himself. He was stuffed there."

Stuffed under the bed? The other contestants blinked.

"Then who did you, the suspect, meet with in this room?" Zhao Chenghuang asked evenly.

"The killer, obviously," Zhang Yuanqing replied.

He picked up his phone, and tapped the screen awake. "Watch this."

He opened the video clip and turned the screen to face them. To save time, he paused it when the person at the computer said, "I've lost interest in your manuscripts."

He watched as the detectives crinkled their faces, trying to work through it.

"The Professor Li our suspect met was the killer," he said. "That's why he drew the curtains in broad daylight and put on a mask. Since my glasses were smashed, everything is a blur, so I can't tell that the professor is a fake. That's how he slid it past me."

Sun Miaomiao's brows drew together in a frown. "That doesn't hold water. The killer couldn't have known ahead of time that your glasses were broken and your eyes were bad. How could he be sure you wouldn't see through his disguise? The face mask could just be an indication that he had a cold, while the curtains could have been drawn just because that's how he likes the room to be. You being blind as a bat doesn't mean the Professor Li you met was the killer. And the dust under the bed could've been scuffed off a dozen ways."

She narrowed her eyes at Zhang Yuanqing. "It's a bold guess, but that's all it is—a guess. You've got no evidence."

She wasn't going to bother herself with World Ablaze's game of trash talk. She could spend all day poking holes in the reasoning instead.