Steampunk: Sixth Era Epic

Although the hall downstairs remains lively, most of the hotel tenants upstairs have already returned to their rooms to rest at this time, so as soon as they came upstairs, the surroundings suddenly became quiet.

Emilia lives on the third floor, and when Shard and Luviya entered the corridor, they saw that her room door was open. Shard gestured to Luviya to wait at the door, while he cautiously sidled into the room, then saw Emilia struggling with her weight and gravity potential, trying to close the bulging suitcase.

Her suitcase wasn’t so bulging when she arrived, and she hasn’t had time to buy much during her stay in Tobesk. It’s just that she’s not good at packing, so the suitcase ended up looking like this.

Seeing Shard come in, she blushed and immediately stood up, trying to cover the suitcase behind her:

"Shard, why did you come up?"

"Luviya and I were worried about your safety here alone."

While speaking, he turned around and called Luviya in too. Although Emilia hadn’t encountered any problems at the moment, Shard and Luviya still trusted their intuition, both of them felt something seemed amiss around here, tonight was indeed too smooth.

Shard even thought of what Iluna had once said:

"Iluna’s team came when you three checked in, to capture someone selling illegal magic potions, but that person disappeared in the inn. This matter remains a mystery, I suspect there’s more to it."

"We can’t just leave; we must confirm what exactly is going on here, otherwise we’ll bring danger into the detective’s home..."

Luviya said, and Shard’s palm glimmered with silver moonlight. Subsequently, he made a round inside the room, tapping the walls, floor, furniture, and even under the bed.

"There’s no problem with this room."

He finally said, Luviya pointed outside:

"Then it must be the corridor."

The three of them went to the corridor, Luviya and Emilia stood at the door, with the former shielding the latter. Shard continued to tap on the corridor walls with his hand and asked:

"Emilia, during the week you’ve lived here, have you encountered anything unusual?"

The elf girl immediately shook her head:

"Nothing unusual, the food here is quite good, and there are servants cleaning the room regularly. Although it’s sometimes noisy at night, I don’t sleep that early either. The neighbors on either side of my room are very friendly, and the innkeeper Mrs. Sangmi takes good care of me. Tobesk is a warm and hospitable city, although the prices are higher than I expected."

"Diviner~"

The girl with purple eyes drew cards again, looked at the face of the card, and frowned as she asked:

"What Emilia just said, there is something wrong. The food, servants, nighttime noise, neighbors, Mrs. Sangmi, prices, which of these six keywords is out of place?"

The dice were casually tossed, clattering~

"Food, neighbors, prices."

Another toss of the dice:

"Neighbors and prices."

"The prices in Tobesk City are indeed an issue, but that’s currently just a social problem. What’s left are the neighbors... Emilia, you just mentioned, neighbors on either side?"

Shard frowned, turned, and looked at her, and Luviya’s pupils slightly enlarged, likewise looking at the elf girl she was shielding behind her:

"Emilia, repeat your description of the neighbors."

The elf girl spoke timidly, not knowing what was happening with them, only aware the problem seemed serious:

"The neighbors on either side of my room are very friendly...this sentence...is there something wrong with it?"

"Of course, there’s an issue, you do have a neighbor on the left, but isn’t it the corridor end on the right?"

Luviya spoke, Emilia blinked bewilderedly and looked past Luviya’s body at where Shard was currently raising his hand, seeing the door that appeared there:

"Is it the end of the hallway? But the Goodman Family, aren’t they living in..."

Luviya’s fingertip touched her forehead, and a purple glimmer appeared at her fingertip. Emilia’s expression immediately froze. After just a few dozen seconds, the frozen expression turned to shock, and then to panic:

"Wait, I remember the day we checked in, I specifically chose the room at the very end to prevent anyone from disturbing us next door. This is, this is..."

"Detective, she understands."

"Making friends with seventeen-year-old girls, didn’t expect the things encountered to be just like hers."

Shard looked at the wall where the door had just suddenly seemed squeezed out from within the space, sighed helplessly, put on a fierce expression, and raised his hand to slap it forcefully:

"Mr. Goodman, Mrs. Goodman, come out!"

His voice was full of genuine anger; it wasn’t faked. Although Shard had previously heard from Miss Galina that such a relic would remain in the same city for long enough before leaving, he truly didn’t anticipate this thing daring to appear around his acquaintances.

The pounding on the door panel was quite forceful, but because this was the end of the hallway, and Luviya had already used the Silence Charm, there was no need to worry about disturbing others.

Pound pound pound~

Once Shard finished knocking, an almost identical rhythm of pounding unexpectedly came from inside the door. Shard immediately took a step back, withdrew the longsword from his back and looked at the door. As the silver light on the blade grew increasingly bright, the door suddenly sprang open with a pop~.

The room inside was completely dark, with only a small area near the door illuminated by the gas lights from the hallway. Mr. Goodman, seemingly in his forties, Mrs. Goodman, plump and wearing an apron, a boy Shard hadn’t seen before wearing glasses and a uniform of some unknown school, a girl in a white dress with a bright red ribbon tie at her chest, and the pet dog seen last time, all stood neatly in that small illuminated area as if posing for a photo.

Mr. and Mrs. Goodman stood at the back, extending their left and right arms to hold the two children. All four "people" slightly lowered their heads, their expressions gloomy as they looked outside, the malice from that instant could be felt even by Emilia protected in the distance behind Luviya.

She tightly held Luviya’s hand, thinking of meeting this thing multiple times and even being neighbors for a week consecutively, she only felt she wanted to quickly go to Shard Family’s familiar bedroom, wrapped in a blanket holding a teacup, and not leave for the whole week.

Having seen too many bizarre things this year, Shard wasn’t panicked, just cautiously watching them. He didn’t rashly enter the room, but stared at the ghostly family whose faces were pale.

Suddenly, the gas lights in the hallway flickered twice, and after a pop~ sound, the gas lights went out from the far end towards the hallway’s end, engulfing the three people in the dark.

Emilia held her breath, fearing when the light suddenly shone again, she would find herself not holding the hand of the purple-eyed diviner, but instead something eerie. Fortunately, this time she overthought it, the silver glimmer gently appeared in the darkness, and the elf couldn’t even tell whether that was the light from Shard once again spreading to the sword in his hand, or the light from the sword spreading to him.

"Silvermoon!"

The hands gripping the sword charged forward diagonally, the dazzling moonlight arc blade, likely along with the forest run under the moonlit night earlier, would forever remain in the young elf’s heart.

The sword pierced through the darkness into the room that shouldn’t exist, with a pop~ like a bubble burst, all four people and the dog standing at the door disappeared, yet the room with the open door remained, so neither Shard nor Luviya felt relieved:

"Let’s leave here first, this thing is different from last time. Last time it had just arrived, this time we don’t know how many souls it has absorbed."

Shard stepped back two steps, placing his hands on Luviya and Angelina’s shoulders, and then all three suddenly appeared in the night sky outside the inn, feather-lightly landing on the street. Spatial movement carrying two others, for Shard at the seventh ring, was just barely doable, and he was now very glad Dorothy didn’t accompany them tonight.

The "Friendly Neighbor" is a legitimate Sage-Level Relic, even if it hasn’t fully arrived yet, it’s not something to easily deal with. Moving from the inn to the street was partly out of concern for involving the Three Cats Inn, but more for Shard worrying if he couldn’t truly solve the issue, being on the street would help the Church quickly detect the abnormality here.

Yet that relic wouldn’t give him such a chance, almost as the three hit the ground, a surge of darkness spewed from every window of the Three Cats Inn. The street’s gas lights flickered twice and then went out one after another, like the hallway lights earlier.

The moonlight and starry sky’s glimmer disappeared at some unknown moment, although Shard and the light on the blade barely illuminated the ground, the surrounding unyielding darkness still terrified Emilia.

Despite her bravely daring to escape from school multiple times before, not only did the Randall Valley not have problems then, but she also had a Unicorn with fighting power akin to a Dragon by her side. This was her first "solo" face-to-face encounter with an out-of-control Sage-Level Relic, something she hadn’t studied at the Academy.

"Detective, be careful, this space of darkness differs from reality, that thing indeed possesses Spatial Ability."

Luviya’s eyes appeared to glow with purple light in the dark, but at this moment, no one had the time to notice this. Shard gripped his sword, looking around, the sense of danger growing stronger in his heart:

"Take care of yourselves, if we really can’t handle it, I’ll turn into a Dragon again and fly you away with me. The ’Friendly Neighbor,’ while eerie and powerful, still has the limitation of a finite range."

Though he said this, if he indeed transformed into a Dragon in Tobesk City, unless the Church was dumb, they would easily link the Dragon here to the Moonlight Dragon of Moon Bay, something neither Shard nor Luviya wanted to see.