All the information they had led back to a single thing, and the more Trafalgar turned it over in his mind, the less he liked the shape it took. A café, nothing more. No name worth remembering, no details beyond the fact that it stood outside the city, paired with the vague story of a mysterious warrior woman who had vanished without explanation. The whole thing felt poorly constructed, like a tale meant to be just convincing enough to pull someone in.
The location bothered him the most. Outside Salca's walls, where the flow of people thinned and eyes stopped watching, any confrontation would unfold on someone else's terms. Add to that the idea of a lone fighter strong enough to draw crowds and then disappear, and the story began to feel less like a coincidence and more like something shaped on purpose. It could have been invented outright, or exaggerated over time, but either way the gaps were too clean, too convenient.
