Mr. Gist, clutching a bottle of rum usually favored by dockworkers, climbed the stairs to the second-floor apartment. Approaching the door, he encountered a pungent, metallic odor, which he mistakenly attributed to the brothers possibly indulging in some kind of underprocessed seafood meal. He knocked on the door, but no one answered, which was odd given the tenants' usual homebound habits. Trying the handle, the door creaked open.
Peering inside, Mr. Gist was met with a sight that shocked him to his core. The central hall was smeared with dark, dried pools of blood, and disjointed limbs were scattered across the floor. A decapitated head sat on the coffee table, staring toward the door with open eyes and mouth, as if recounting a horrific event. Mr. Gist recognized the head as the youngest and tallest of the brothers. His knees buckled, and he stumbled backward, landing at the entrance.
Elyon arrived early at the precinct, curious about whether Miss Loran had divulged any details about the bank heist. He spotted Garrick, who had spent the night there, and greeted him.
"Good morning, Mr. Garrick. Did Miss Loran confess any details of the bank robbery last night?"
"Confess? She didn't say a word. She denied everything when her lawyer arrived, claiming a solid alibi from her time at the church school yesterday. Even the bishop from the Church of the Craftsman in Kaelang district personally vouched for her, posting a £50 bail. She was released last night," Garrick rubbed his eyes, checked the time – eight in the morning – and laid back down for more sleep.
"There's been a murder! They're all dead!" a man shouted while bursting into the port division precinct. Garrick, who had just tried to get some rest, stood up furiously.
"This better be a real murder case, or someone really is going to end up dead here."
The man was Mr. Gist, and Garrick, clearly not pleased, took down his report. Elyon went upstairs to inform Captain Kappa. Clerks like him weren't equipped to handle homicide cases.
Kappa led Elyon and the reporting Mr. Gist back to the crime scene, and Elyon noted that it was directly across from the bank that was robbed on Monday.
"It's on the second floor. I can't bring myself to go up there again," Mr. Gist pointed upstairs.
The door was ajar. Inside, the blood had turned black with dried splatters. The place was littered with human remains. Elyon recognized one of the heads on the coffee table as the youngest Wolff brother. David's torso was on the couch – or rather, what remained of it. Despite having encountered dead bodies in the bank robbery case, nothing had prepared Elyon for such a gruesome scene, and he felt a wave of nausea.
"Look at the weapons left on the coffee table, how could the killers have managed to take down armed bank robbers?"
Captain Kappa seemed immune to the gore, thoroughly investigating the scene.
On the coffee table lay a revolver and two sawed-off shotguns, along with scattered bullets.
"Wait, if these are two of the three who escaped North Street, where's the second Wolff brother?" Elyon blurted out.
"You might find something in the bathroom," Captain Kappa suggested, still examining the windows and items in the room.
Elyon pushed open the bathroom door to find a corpse floating in the bathtub, pale and bloated, evidently drowned. The mystery deepened as to how an adult could drown in a tub – there were no signs of struggle, and the surrounding floor was dry, suggesting the second Wolff brother might have willingly met his end there.
On the wall near the tub were dark red symbols resembling a sigil of some malevolent deity, with an inverted triangle containing a cross. Beside it, a line of crude writing sprawled across. Although the script was distorted, Elyon recognized it. While not adept at writing himself, his schooling in the gastronomic empire on Earth equipped him to translate traditional Chinese into simplified.
Yes, the line before Elyon was in traditional Chinese characters, forming an ancient verse.
"The world is full of suffering; the masses are in turmoil; only through killing can we appease our god."
Dizzied by the familiar characters and their unsettling message, Elyon patted his head, assuring himself he was still on the planet Gaia. Why was there traditional Chinese here? Could he not be the only one from Earth?
"What did you find?" Kappa's voice came from behind. He peered in, then asked, "You understand those scriptures thought to be readable only by gods or demons?"
Gods? Anyone with an education from the gastronomic empire could guess. Elyon refrained from commenting, instead pointing to the inverted triangle sigil.
"What's this symbol?"
Kappa looked at the mark and then pulled Elyon out of the second-floor room, lighting a cigarette on the steps as he began to explain.
"This case has come to an end, and the Special Bureau will take over."
"Special Bureau?" Elyon asked, confused.
"They usually go by 'Special Actions Division' and dress in our same black uniforms. Formally they're police, dealing with various cases, but when it involves powers beyond the common man, that's when they get involved."
"This case involves transcendent powers?" Elyon deduced from the captain's hints.
"That triangle sigil in the bathroom is a symbol of an evil deity. I can't disclose more; the bank heist case is essentially closed. The trio inside will be reported in tomorrow's papers as having been killed resisting arrest. I'll write that you, Cook, and I each took one down. It should boost our year-end evaluations."
"Is that really true?"
"The truth doesn't matter anymore; it's beyond your capacity to deal with."
Elyon didn't demand an immediate resolution, as seen in morning dramas or crime shows. The eerie deaths of the three criminals inside were warning enough.
Years later, when people sought to trace Elyon's exploits, they often began with this seemingly mundane bank robbery case, speculating how he got entangled in a series of events that swept him up like a dry leaf caught in the currents of time.