Quazy's elusive trick was simple on the surface, but its mastery lay in the flawless execution, the kind only someone who understood the laws of Sani could achieve. And yet this stranger, a mere mortal, a detective of terrifying acuity, dismantled the secret Quazy sacrificed his life to guard and treated it as if it were nothing but a shallow, forgettable gimmick.
Quazy collapsed to his knees, tears pouring unchecked. "Who… who are you?" he rasped, the horror buried beneath the steadying influence of Sani while the rest escaped him raw; a trembling thread of sound that only Klaire caught. "Please don't…"
"What?" Edon persisted. "Be more clear."
"Why don't I do everyone's job while I'm at it?" Kudo snapped, swatting Edon's hands aside."It's an inconsequential case."
Whether he'd forgotten the past or refused to care was anyone's guess.
"I gave you a hint. Figure it out. Learn something. Grow. I'm not babysitting you through every investigation." He said, frowning once to drive the point home, before turning and walking off.
Klaire slumped to the floor as the precinct slowly returned to its usual bustle. "I'm sorry… I'm so, so sorry," she sobbed, clutching Quazy in a desperate embrace, unwilling to leave his side, hoping she could shield him. "How did he know?" she whispered, hoping Quazy himself revealed the trick to him at some point.
Quazy shrugged, just as lost as she was. "Might've been the spell," he guessed.
Klaire misinterpreted the word and sniffed the air, testing it for any familiar scents that lingered.
"Exactly!" Quazy snapped upright, scrambling to mask his earlier slip. "I—uh—use paint removers. To erase any leftover paint. Even one tiny smudge can expose my trick! And then I use odor removers… You know, to hide the smell of the paint remover I used to hide the paint."
"That's bonkers!" Klaire said once she caught up to Quazy's train of thought.
"Completely impossible," Quazy agreed. "Or so someone with less deductive skills might think."
He curled into a ball, rocking back and forth for a while before he built the courage to speak again. "Look at the bright side. At least he doesn't know about my past. I'm not ready to face those truths…" His voice trailed off at the end as he shut himself off.
Without knowing it, Kudo became the hope Klaire had lost along the way; she had spent years scouring the supernatural only to return empty-handed each time. But now, now there was someone who could pull meaning out of nothing at all.
She pressed her clenched fist to the cold bars of her cell, the metal biting into her knuckles as she whispered her vow. "I will find the truth."
From that day forward, Klaire chose to stay in the cell, watching, learning, and absorbing every nuance of Kudo's craft while quietly collecting clues about the supernatural disturbance at Triple-S.
She began by taking notes on Kudo, only to realize after a week that she'd collected nothing but rubbish.
The officials dragged their feet before calling the supernatural event a "mystery," and the school's sponsors scrambled to shut it down with fabricated reports. Meanwhile, the rival political parties pushed the case onto Kudo, following the same tired pattern she'd seen orbit his every investigation.
If Kudo solved the mystery, they'd claim his success as their triumph, and if he failed, they'd weaponize that failure as proof of their foresight. Either way, victory and the next election were already theirs.
Not that Klaire or Kudo gave a rat's ass about politics.
One chased the supernatural, while the other hunted for the one truth; Everything else, the drama, the public's flimsy attention span, and the election schemes, did little to motivate their next step.
"Didn't know we were so similar," Klaire remarked, and Quazy responded by tightening into an even smaller knot of limbs and regret.
Kudo was the opposite of showy. He prized efficiency, not flair. His former secretary claimed he used to put on a show during his early years, but fame eventually allowed him the luxury of solving the most challenging cases with nothing more than a sentence. Sometimes even a single word.
"Paint!" Klaire's eyes widened.
A single word that could dismantle a mystery, solve a crime, peel back a hidden truth, and lay bare the core of a man, if said in the proper context and under the right circumstances.
"He's almost like Metelda!"
"Yeah, well… it still takes forever to collect the proof," Maria chimed in.
"But that first suggestion—nailed with just one word… that's what makes everyone else panic and hand him the evidence he needs," Klaire said, exposing one of Kudo's signature techniques as though it were obvious.
"Wow!" Maria applauded. "You're as sharp as the chief claimed."
Klaire scratched her head, feigning embarrassment.
You people really lack world experience, she thought silently, turning her attention back to studying Kudo.
Kudo carried height without intimidation, his eyes doing most of the work. A hawk-like intensity, followed by a quiet, relentless assessment that cut through excuses and intentions alike. His short, dark hair hovered between "uncared for" and "purposefully careless," the perfect midpoint for a man who never wasted effort on appearances. And his deep-set, piercing eyes flicked between people and their hidden agendas, processing information like a machine tuned to truth alone.
Kudo's wardrobe mirrored the life he'd built inside the precinct; simple, functional, unchanging. His shirts fit well but carried a hint of age, sleeves permanently rolled to his elbows as though he were always mid-investigation. A long, weathered trench coat rested on his shoulders, less a fashion choice and more a second skin. Dark, forgettable slacks and shoes softened by countless miles completed the ensemble. A notepad and pen were his only tools; the real work happened in his mind.
If not for the Chief quietly arming him with an old revolver and a badge, Kudo would've passed for an investigator of strange truths rather than a cop bound to a precinct.
Kudo's one indulgence in personal flair was a wristwatch with a cracked face, forever stuck at the moment it shattered. Whether it held meaning was a mystery in and of itself. His former secretary, a fountain of half-truths and rumors, knew nothing about it, except that he never took it off.
His posture balanced ease and discipline: loose but never sloppy, straight but never stiff. Every step he took was deliberate, efficient. Somehow reminding her of Metelda. His voice, calm and measured, carried the kind of quiet authority that made people listen before they even realized they were doing so.
At a glance, he looks like someone you could lose in a crowd, a man built to blend in. But once you meet his eyes, you feel an uncomfortable certainty that he's noticed everything about you.
"Just propose already," Quazy muttered, gagging for emphasis.
Klaire ignored him just as he'd ignored her for the past week and focused on mimicking Kudo's technique. She hoped Imitation would lead to understanding, believing with all her heart in "Imitation before mastery—mastery before personal signature."
She couldn't copy Kudo's gift; that was a divine cheat bestowed upon him by the almighty himself. So she focused on his craft instead. His approach looked deceptively simple on paper: search for the one prevailing truth.
But where did one begin searching for such a truth?
Because that, too, was a privilege granted by their unfair, capricious god.
"Ignore the norm," she echoed the Kudo's mantra. "What you see, what another insists they saw, even what you assume should be there… discard it all. And whatever remains, no matter how improbable, has to be the one true truth."
Klaire applied the absurd method to several unsuspecting souls. Tiny details, the ones ordinary people brushed past, had always stood out to her. Everyone from the streets learned to read the world this way, because the ramifications of not paying attention were death.
An actual thief can pick out an undercover cop's stare even in a sea of faces. This isn't any grandiose technique; it's one's survival instinct pushed to its peak, sharpened far beyond the abilities of your run-of-the-mill street thief who faced jail time at most.
Raised in the blackened underbelly of Yorkenstine, Klaire had no choice but to cultivate instincts that kept her breathing. Some men tried to cop a feel; others were just desperate or dumb enough for her to exploit, without ever trading away her integrity. Over time, she learned how to turn the city's scum into dependable assets: conduits for information, gossip peddlers, hidden talents, or tools whose skills she could weaponize.
Take Quazy, for instance. Klaire envied his ability to disappear on a whim; to melt into the world as if he'd never been there. But just like Kudo's gifts, that talent belonged only to him. So she chose another path, sharpening her gaze and teaching herself to uncover the unknown hidden within the known by reverse-engineering Quazy's crazy gift.
———<>||<>——— End of Chapter Fifty-Four. ———<>||<>———