In the Pariellete District, while Eric was still fighting.
Max was still stuck in the invisible green wall. He had no hope of getting out and couldn't even teleport or use telepathy. Since he couldn't do anything, he decided to chill and stop worrying about anything. He may have been scared and worried at first, but that was only the heat of the moment.
To be honest, he was quite disappointed that the trapper didn't reveal himself. He may not have had any chance of defeating someone higher-ranked than him, but it surely would have been fun. "Well, too bad," he thought as he walked toward a table and sat in the chair.
He placed his legs on the table and put his arms behind his head as he looked around.
Suddenly, he felt that someone was looking at him. He immediately put down his legs, sat straight, and looked in front of him, to the left, and to the right, but he didn't see anyone looking at him. The entire area where he was trapped had no people. The moment people passed the wall, they disappeared. It was obvious he had been placed in a different dimension. The only one who could have seen him must be the trapper, but the person didn't seem to show any interest in speaking.
Max looked at the opposite seat and stared at it for a while. He couldn't help but feel that someone was sitting on that chair. "Uh, hello?" he blurted out hesitantly. The chair in front of him did not even move the slightest. Max felt that the trapper must be laughing so hard right now.
Max lay back on his chair again and closed his eyes. "Officer, can you please sit straight?" Max heard a respected young man's voice from beside his chair. Max opened his eyes and looked to the left, and saw a waiter looking at him with confused eyes.
Max blinked twice with a shocked look and sat straight as he apologised to the waiter. "This is the shortest time I have ever been trapped," Max mumbled as he looked at the table and saw a light-green note lying on it. He picked up the note, and it said, "Meet me on Friday, same location, with Eric."
Max blinked at the note and shrugged his shoulders, stood up, put the note in his pocket, and walked off to the right.
...
Back in the alley, Eric stood silently with his back slightly bent as he stared at the headless body of the female assassin. Her body had a pool of blood beneath it now as her body lay motionless.
Eric raised his left arm and wiped the blood coming from his nose. He had been injured a lot in this fight. Normally, when two people with a difference in ranks fought, the higher-ranking one was much more powerful than the other, but in this case, Eric had not only been trapped but had lost the initiative with no environmental advantage, whereas his opponent had the initiative and could travel in the domain as freely as a fish in the ocean. If they had been the same rank, he might have died already.
From Eric's right arm, the golden liquid came out and seeped into his injuries, and in a few seconds, all of his injuries were healed like they were never there as he straightened his back.
Eric looked down behind him, and from his shadow a hand came out. That hand belonged to a strong person with veins easily visible. After the hand, an entire arm came and pressed against the ground, and a person came out with a black bubble floating near his left shoulder; it was none other than Max.
Max stood up and looked at Eric, and asked with a worried tone, "Are you fine?" Eric simply nodded and walked up to the dead, headless body of the girl.
"Do you know which faction she was from?" he asked as he gazed at the headless body of the girl ahead of him. He did not doubt that she was the assassin. Her bodysuit only confirmed it.
"I don't know. We do not have anyone from the Mind, Imagination, or Emotions Pathway, so we can neither channel her spirit nor examine her emotions from her domain of emotions or even explore her world of consciousness and subconsciousness." Eric stopped talking for a second as he bent down and examined her dead body to look for anything she may have carried on her. He was looking for her short sword specifically. He continued as he searched, "But we can deduce."
"Then I am going to be useless. You are the deductive expert," Max blurted out as he looked outside the alley to make sure no one came here or looked at what was happening inside. The black bubble floating near him entered his body and was absorbed.
Eric searched her entire body and was able to obtain three items. One was a simple, small mirror used by ladies for makeup, but for this particular girl, this mirror was definitely not used for makeup. However, the mirror was already in pieces thanks to Eric's surprise attack. "So this is how she planned to escape after leaving the domain—by entering the Mirror World. Good thing my surprise attack destroyed it; otherwise, I would not have been able to kill her," Eric thought to himself as he felt relief at going all out in his surprise attack.
The second thing was a black-and-gold badge with a symbol of multiple rectangles, triangles, pentagons, and all types of shapes placed in a cross-section in a sequence from each other in a vertical manner.
"Isn't this the symbol of the Dimension Pathway? Which is also the symbol used by the Organization?" Max, who had walked up to Eric and bent his back down a little with his hands on his knees, asked.
"It is, but the question is, why does she have it on her during a mission? Normally, no member will carry it on missions—in case they are caught, they would be identified," Eric replied. Then he fell silent for a few seconds before speaking again, "It seems that this girl was not as smart and careful as I initially thought, but for someone as low-ranked as her, carelessness and ego still exist, which ultimately led to her demise. But it could also be that the Organization wanted us to know about their presence and arrival in Paris. Let's go with the former for now."
The third thing that Eric obtained was the short sword that she had. It had a golden covering and a silver blade with a surface so shiny that it could be said to be like a mirror's surface. This was the weapon that the girl used to attack him. Good thing that he was hit with one that was fake, whose effects were way weaker than the real one, but he also felt that even if the real one had hit him, it wouldn't have caused much damage to him.
"Is this a relic?" Max asked as he gazed at the surface of the short sword and saw his reflection. "Yes," Eric replied. Eric took out the golden liquid from his left hand, and it seeped into the short sword. Soon, Eric's head was filled with knowledge about the short sword regarding its rank and negative effects.
Name: The Mirror knife
Rank: Rank 5 (Auri Nova)
Pathway: The Inversion Pathway
Effects and usage: Can turn any surface the sword hits into a mirror. There is no cooldown on its usage. It can still be used for 6 more months before its effects stop completely.
Negative effects: Every time it is used, it will make the user think oppositely for a few seconds.
Eric absorbed all the knowledge about the relic as he also saw a vision—a memory, more accurately—about the origin of the relic. In his memory, Eric saw a young blacksmith smashing a small piece of hot iron on an anvil, cooling it down, giving it its shape, and bits and pieces of all the steps of its making. After the short sword was completed, the blacksmith smiled, looking at the sword, and then turned his gaze to Eric, who was witnessing him making this relic, and passed it down to Eric.
Eric picked up the short sword and looked at it. He normally couldn't see his reflection, but here he could, and he saw his face. He was none other than the assassin girl he had just killed. He wasn't surprised looking at himself as her since he was in a memory—her memory.
The memory ended as cracks formed around Eric, and he was back in the real world, sitting in front of the headless girl with Max beside him. He put the short sword in his pocket as he stood up.
"So, did you use any bullets?" Max asked. "Three bullets," Eric replied. "So what excuse are you going to give for their usage?" Max asked. "None."
Eric replied as the golden liquid came out of his right foot and went into the body of the girl. It collected the bits and pieces of the bullets, took them out, and returned them to their original form. Eric picked all the bullets from the ground and reloaded his gun.
"And what about the body?" Max asked while chuckling. Eric stared at him for a few seconds before letting out the pink liquid with black particles from his right arm. It went into the body of the headless girl. Eric raised his right hand and squeezed his hand, and the body of the girl started to get crushed. It got crushed and crushed more and more with squelching sounds as Eric continued to clench his hand. When his hand finally clenched fully, the body of the girl was nothing more than a small meat cube. Eric picked up the meat cube, walked toward the end of the alley, and threw it in the dustbin.
"Too bad we do not have any resources to set up an altar; otherwise, we might have been able to obtain her Aura. But time has passed, and her Aura must have already returned to the layer of natural Auras," Eric regretfully said to Max.
Eric turned to Max and asked, "So what happened with you?"
Max opened his mouth and told Eric everything about how he was trapped in a different dimension and that the trapper was someone who belonged to the Dimension Pathway, how the trapper bore no ill will toward them—at least he thought so. He also told him that the trapper was definitely someone higher-ranked than they.
"He left a note for us," Max told Eric as he took out the light-green note from his pocket and handed it to Eric. Eric took a single look at the contents of the note and gave it back to Max.
"What day is today?" Max asked Eric. "Wednesday," Eric replied. "So, are we going to meet him or not?"
Eric looked at Max with a cold gaze and replied, "Do we have any choice? Ignoring everything, that trapper is a higher rank than us, and he knows about us. He can catch us even if we try to run, and we have no hope of defeating him. It will not be good to try to ignore him even if he wants to harm us, especially when he approached us first. It will be good if we are able to make him our backer. We are quite vulnerable here as it is, with no backer behind us to save us if we ever get into a dangerous situation."
"You are right. If he can trap me so easily, then trapping us and killing us is going to be very easy for him." Max agreed with Eric. Both of them fell silent for a few seconds as they stood quietly. After a few seconds, Max asked, "So, how many enemies are in Paris according to you?"
Eric, hearing Max's question, looked right and thought for a second before turning back to Max and replying, "As of now, if we take the trapper, the one who tainted Claude Perrin, the girl, then there would be three. But we have killed the girl, so two. But that girl definitely had a backer one rank higher than herself, so there are still three. But I am sure that there are more still hiding themselves and lying low until they get orders from their higher-ups."
Max nodded, and both Max and Eric started to walk down the footpath and continued their patrolling. In the evening, their shift ended, and they returned to the police station to give back their guns. Max and Eric turned at a crosswalk and saw some construction workers fixing a broken road. Eric at first didn't pay much attention to them, but then his intuition told him to ask them the reason the road was broken.
Eric walked up to the workers and asked them politely about how the road was broken. They told him that an accident had occurred the day before yesterday in which a woman went into labour while in the car, causing her husband to panic and get them into an accident. Both parents died, but the baby survived and was sent to the hospital and were saved.
Eric's eyes widened for a moment as he remembered a file regarding this incident, his body frozen for a second, and his mind churned rapidly.
After a few seconds, He was out of his daze and thanked them with a smile and kept walking with Max. After they passed the road, Eric turned to Max and said,
"Now, there are 4."