Mr. Red Herring is very perceptive.
The second floor corridor of the villa is at right angles to the stairway, and the second floor is centered on the stairway, which divides the corridor into two sections, left and right.
One section is covered by a wall, the staircase is completely invisible from a distance, you have to walk through the right-angled corner in order to see, accordingly, the person on the staircase can not see the corridor, a section of the staircase handrail in the turning wall is farther away, the person on the staircase can see a section of the corridor near, in the near corridor on the person can see the staircase entrance.
Ichijō Mirai pauses at the second-floor stairway to survey the latter, the half of the corridor that he can see.
It wasn't too long, it was a bit narrow, and the nearest doors had wooden signboards with code names [Escape King] and [The Silent Ventriloquist] on them, and the floors were carpeted and decorated with paintings, and even the doors had a glossy sheen that made them not very kickable at first glance.
So, while Ichijō Mirai was taking his customary professional measurements of his surroundings, he was also taking his professional measurements a step further.
He wondered where he could sneak in, accomplish the assassination without alerting the others, and walk away in style.
And the answer was: anywhere.
As long as you kill everyone, it's a perfect infiltration, and you can get away with it.
That's typical professionalism.
Gamer's disease.
Ichijō Mirai doesn't comment on this bad professionalism, but he does want to comment on 'Red Herring': he's so aware of it, and describes it so accurately.
And...
"You startled me too, 'Mr. Red Herring'," Ichijō Mirai's red eyes curved up like dangerous blood moons, but he had the gentle smiling expression of a man who was friendly with his guests at a party, "I heard your footsteps only two or three seconds before you turned the corner."
His eyes flicked over 'Red Herring's' fat belly that stretched like a water balloon, and then up again, landing on the other's fat chin that was one-half the width of a normal human's, a large nose, and a pair of eyes that took up a corner in the flesh.
There was a pause before Ichijō Mirai expressed his inner feelings in a good-natured voice: "You don't really look like a gentleman with a big heart."
He was being nice enough.
If he had been a little bit more of a player and not so nice, he would have been tearing his stomach out to see if this gentleman had a head hidden in his stomach as well.
"Ah-ha-ha, you, you're the detective that 'Magician's Apprentice' was talking about, aren't you? I've heard a lot about you, but I've never seen you before."
'Red Herring' rubbed the back of his head and laughed dryly, introducing himself gruffly, "Hello, my nick, ah you know my nickname in the chatrom, my name is Doito Katsuki."
"I'm sorry, I didn't realize there was someone at the top of the stairs, I was walking and thinking, and I almost ran into them..."
The implication was that because she was walking and thinking, she wasn't walking at a normal speed, and the noise she made was naturally much smaller.
"Really," Ichijō Mirai, still in a good temper, apologized again in a nice voice and explained why he was silent, "I'm sorry, I was stopping to take a break and look at the rooms, which had name tags on them..."
As he said that, he remembered Morofushi Hiromitsu, and thought no wonder that guy always had a gentle, good-natured demeanor, like a wolf lurking in the bushes... it was a good look to use as a prelude to a sudden attack.
"Oh, those signs, they seem to have been put up by the owner of the villa, or the 'Escape King' guy," Mr. Red Herring said with a look of understanding and a tone of indifference, "I heard that when the windows were being replaced, he helped to assign the rooms, with the men's rooms being on the second floor, and the women's rooms being on the third floor."
"But there are a lot of rooms, in fact, you can pick the empty room, and then hang the sign over."
"I looked, although you are not in the chat room, but also hung your sign, it is [Detective], just over here," He pointed to the direction from which he came, and touched the back of his head, "just now is the detective's aura? It's really scary, obviously you don't have a trace of killing aura, but the moment I saw you, I instinctively jumped out of the thrilling illusion of 'this guy is preparing to kill', it's really scary ah."
Mr. Red Herring showed an expression of fear.
When he made the expression, all the muscles in his face were working hard or relaxing without a trace of stiffness, and there were no traces of foundation on his nose, lips, teeth, chin, or forehead, and there were no traces of knives or anything else, so it was lifelike, and it was a real face.
The exposed neck is also thick and soft, there is soft flesh in the owner's heart palpitating and slightly shaking twice.
Only the arms, stomach and legs, which were covered by the clothes, were doubtful.
Ichijō Mirai judged it as such, and stepped aside to make way down the stairs, "Thank you, I'll check later."
His eyes glanced over Mr. Red Herring's stomach and smiled, "I'm sorry about that, it's a good thing you're good, we didn't run into each other."
"Have you practiced any self-defense, sir?"
"I'm too fat," Mr. Red Herring patted his stomach, the palm of his hand patted his stomach to softly sink down some, and then shook up the slight fluctuation, "Recently there are fitness to control the weight,"
"But the results aren't that great... I'll be off then, Mr. Detective."
He waved his hand and went downstairs with a big smile.
Ichijō Mirai, on the other hand, went to the room with the [Detective] sign, and pushed open the door.
The room was a spacious single room with a warm furry tone, not only was the floor covered with a furry carpet that was a different color than the hallway, but the bed, sofa, and curtains were furry as well, and some of the furniture was covered with furry protectors, and the wall opposite the end of the bed was decorated with a faux fireplace plush, making the whole room seem to be covered with a layer of warmth from the fireplace.
The curtains are easy to take off the hooks curtains, the top wearing a ring, hanging in the window above the rod.
The curtains on either side, except for the rings at the end of each, have a small notch where the rings can be removed from the rod with a firm tug.
On either side of the wall there are two white fixtures, one with a hanging bead chain, which, depending on the position, can be moved down the window rod below the edge of the window.
The curtains are a bit incongruous compared to the more elaborate decor of the villa, and Ichijō Mirai pauses in front of them, eyeing the notched rings above them for a few seconds, picking out a ring whose notch is not aligned with the pole, and tugging at the curtains below.
The rings tightened.
But the pole is still, solid.
Ichijō Mirai puts in maximum force.
The white rod remained motionless, steadily fixed above the curtains.
"It's so strong," Ichijō Mirai sighed as he let go and picked the curtains with his hands, "it looks like it's perfectly capable of carrying a person's weight even in an emergency, using the curtains as a rope to climb down."
And what's an 'emergency'...?
He lowered his eyes to look at the drawbridge not far from the villa through a thin layer of glass, and sighed again, "Like a fire."
"In a fire, it saves lives."
Whether it's the curtains or the brittle glass.
...It seems that this time the murderer was quite reasonable and did not have a strong desire to involve others.
Thinking so, Ichijō Mirai left his suitcase on the second floor and carried Suzuki and Sonoko's suitcases to the third floor.
The third floor was the same as the second, almost identical, except that the curtains had increased in width and length, so long that they hung straight to the ground, and so wide that they were folded over one another in tiers so wide that they could only be drawn to the center of the window, even when pulled as far as they would go.
This kind of curtain is very inconvenient, and will reduce the guests' daily use of the view.
However, if the curtains were removed and thrown out of the window, the width and length of the curtains would allow them to hang from the third floor to the first floor.
So Ichijō Mirai curled his red eyes and smiled again.
He had tarried too long upstairs, and by the time he came downstairs again, it was already dark.
The first floor was brightly lit, and a white mist was coming out of the kitchen.
Suzuki Sonoko was the first to notice.
Before Ichijō Mirai rounded the corner of the stairs, she suddenly looked sideways, saw Ichijō Mirai appear in the first-floor view for a moment, bent her eyes joyfully, and ran over to him with a steaming cup in her hand, "Mr. Mirai!"
"Ms. Kiyohiro is fast, dinner is almost ready, it's steak!" She held up the cup, "Would you like a hot drink?"
The cup was still steaming, and the white haze was making her soft cheeks a little hazy, and making those sparkling eyes appear and disappear.
"It's sugar water, it's not bitter!"
Ichijō Mirai stopped short of declining and took the cup, "Thank you."
"Wow," Suzuki Sonoko withdrew her hand in a bit of surprise, her eyes still shining as she gazed at Ichijō Mirai, "You really prefer sweet to bitter, Mr. Mirai."
It was an intuition.
When Ichijō Mirai left, Suzuki Sonoko noticed the cup of coffee that hadn't been touched much, and in the moment of noticing it, she intuitively thought, "Mr. Mirai is sometimes so bad that he buys a dozen cupcakes, dips his fingers in them, and smears them on the faces of small children, smiling and deliberately teasing them.
The cakes had to be coffee-flavored bitter cakes, lemon-flavored sour cakes, durian-flavored cakes, and so on and so forth, and what would happen to the other children after the cakes were smeared onto their faces one by one so that there would be four vertical, slanted bars of cake on their cheeks was something that Suzuki Sonoko didn't know.
She thinks her eyes might have watered up and she might have cried.
Not because she's amused, but because she's so sore, so ugly, so ugly, so ugly, so ugly in front of her crush.
And before he cries out, Ichijō Mirai, who is still saying 'Well, you don't like cake, so I'm disappointed', will turn around the only intact apple bunny cake from behind him, hold up the apple flap that serves as the bunny ears to her lips, and when she's stunned, he curls up his red eyes and smiles, and coaxes her to eat the deliciously sweet cake.
...It was an illusion.
It was an illusion, but a vivid, detailed illusion, as if it had really happened.
But in an instant, it flashed through Suzuki Sonoko's mind like a flash of light, causing her back to tremble and her nostrils to swell with acidity, as if she had actually seen Ichijō Mirai dropping his eyes, coaxing himself to eat the cake in a good-natured manner without much effort, not even getting angry at having his finger bitten in indignation, but instead, he was smiling.
It's very nice.
Good to see her a little embarrassed: ah ah ah people have not even agreed to it, how to start imagining a good relationship!
Thinking about it all do not want to point out the scale of how to think of that kind of mess ah!!!!!
Suzuki Sonoko was ashamed of her good memory and lack of imagination for remembering exactly how bad she was as a child.
She was ashamed to please Ichijō Mirai, almost wagging her tail into a propeller, "I put three icing sugar, not very sweet, just a little light sweetness."
Ichijō Mirai looked at her a few more times, took a seat at the table, and prepared herself before inquiring in the solemn tone of a player receiving an NPC quest, "May I ask what I need to do?"
"Huh?" Suzuki Sonoko followed and sat down, looking at Ichijō Mirai's hand, she subconsciously raised her eyes at the words, just glimpsing Ichijō Mirai's smiling mouth, she quickly lowered her eyes, "Ahem, no, no, no..."
She found a reason why she wasn't being unprofessional, "You just helped us with our luggage."
Did you?
But you've just given the Hero three ten-ring mail delivery quests, five egg-catching quests, and ten quests to kill other people's chickens, so you're thanking the Hero for his hard work, but you're also showing a rare sign of weakness.
Ichijō Mirai thought so, without stopping, directly open a new topic, "I just looked upstairs, the curtains are quite good, in a crisis can be used as a life line thrown out of the window,"
"The bathroom setup is also very interesting, the door is non-combustible material, very hard, visually one or two feet can not be kicked open, in some special circumstances can be successful temporary safe house."
"I've checked the rooms for you, and the windows in both of your rooms are thin enough to break easily with a blow from the elbow," he stops short with a brief reminder or two, "It seems that someone is very afraid of accidents."
Someone wants to have an accident.
And with a setup like that, it's probably going to happen soon enough, not before everyone's caught up.
Suzuki Sonoko blinked, wearing a green blouse that was supposed to be much brighter than her eyes, but it wasn't as bright as her eyes, and she listened, turning her dark green pupils thoughtfully, nodding her head unconsciously to show that she was listening, looking quiet and good-natured, but also full of life and vitality.
The laborer came out of the kitchen with the trays and brought everyone's dinner up one by one before saying the first words, "Dinner's ready."
Mouri Ran stopped pretending to watch TV and finally got out of her own way and let out a small sigh of relief as she walked quickly from the couch to the table, "It's steak, no wonder Ms. Tanaka went to fetch the red wine just now."
She straightened her skirt and sat down, and was about to pick up her knife and fork after everyone was seated, when she suddenly froze and turned her head to look in the direction of the drawbridge beyond the villa as if she had heard something.
At the same time, Ichijō Mirai also looked over.
He heard the sound of a car.
The sound of a car that had braked hard at the edge of the cliff, and suddenly the sound of the brakes pierced the sky.
Because it was so far away, and because it was blocked by the wind and snow, it was only a faint, indistinct sound to Ichijō Mirai's ears, and he felt a sense of doubt and illusion.
Mouri Ran stood up, her brows furrowing in confusion, "I think... I think I heard someone calling my voice?"
Suzuki Sonoko looked up blankly, "What?"
"This is the top of a mountain, and it's dark, how could anyone call you, beware of the phantom of the mountains," her eyes caught a glimpse of Ichijō Mirai standing up as well, and she was a bit surprised, "Hey, Mr. Mirai?"
She stood up with him, and immediately looked a bit more serious, "Is there really someone?"
In the deep forest, at night, there were actually human voices outside?
No, it can't really be some ghosts, can it?
"No," Ichijō Mirai shook his head and watched as Mouri Ran answered the door, "it's the sound of a car."
He followed.
The sky was dark and heavy with night pressing into the horizon, but in the midst of the night and the moon, a bright color spread across the sky.
It was the orange-red color of fire.
The flaming orange-red of the drawbridge.
In the midst of the twisting and jumping orange-red, there seemed to be a figure moving about.
Ichijō Mirai, who had to squint to see the drawbridge from the villa, stood still for a moment and confirmed, "There's someone on the drawbridge."
In the orange-red that was about to twist into a ball of fire, a black figure flickered through the black smoke and red light, and almost as soon as Ichijō Mirai locked on to him, he swooped down the last section of the drawbridge with all the difficulty of a moth and collapsed on the ground illuminated by the light of the flames, a small one.
Mouri Ran also swooped down.
Ichijō Mirai recognized it, "Conan."
Conan, who ran from the burning drawbridge as if he wanted to die.
And Mouri Korogō, who called and waved from the other side of the bridge, but could not be heard or answered.
They were gone, but they came back.
Why?
As he pondered this, Ichijō Mirai fell back, observing the stunned expressions of the others, and pondered the question: Conan...
...
...Really doesn't look like a child.