To sacrifice oneself… or to kill another in order to save the many.
It was a question that rarely yielded a clean answer. Everywhere one looked, it festered with hypocritical dialectics, cloaked in the language of virtue.
Lloyd gazed silently at Merlin. He realized, perhaps a shade too late, that he had underestimated this enigmatic alchemist. What the man sought to probe was far heavier than the thoughts Lloyd had entertained.
"I am not saying you must sacrifice yourself, Mr. Holmes," Merlin replied evenly. "What I want is your decision. Whether you kill another, sacrifice yourself, or stand aside and bear no consequence at all—I do not care. I care about the choice. What will you do?"
He dismissed Lloyd's earlier words. This was no mere question; it was a tribunal of morality.
Replace a few of the terms, and Merlin's meaning became crystalline.
Would Lloyd decide for the entirety of humanity lying bound upon the rails?
Would he ignore the demon's train as it crushed them without mercy?
Would he sacrifice another to halt the encroaching corruption?
Or would he place himself upon the tracks and fight the fiend to his final breath?
For humanity. For the eternal severance of demons.
Could Lloyd sever himself from morality—perhaps even from himself?
He drew a slow breath. The conversation had become… interesting.
"I would push the unlucky man onto the tracks."
"You mean you would live—and let another die?"
The train screamed past in a shriek of steel and fury. Lloyd's hands thrust forward. The unfortunate soul fell. Blood blossomed in ruin.
He had done nothing wrong. His only sin was standing beside Lloyd. And so, he died.
His death saved the remainder of mankind. The demon train ground to a halt.
But was it truly so simple?
Why him? Why must he be the sacrifice? No one asked for his consent. He was simply… ended.
By every moral reckoning, Lloyd had killed him. He had chosen the man's fate.
Lloyd nodded, resolute.
Merlin, at the far end, seemed faintly perplexed. "Sacrificing another to preserve yourself—frankly, Mr. Holmes, such a choice hardly inspires trust. Yet I assume you have your reasons. Care to share them?"
"It's simple," Lloyd answered, his tone stripped of warmth. "Because I have greater value."
He spoke with absolute seriousness.
"If one life must be forfeited, then let value decide. I live. He dies."
"And why," Merlin asked softly, "do you believe your value exceeds his?"
"Because I can make the decision."
Lloyd's lips curled with faint disdain.
"You, Arthur, and the lofty figures lurking behind you—place yourselves within this dilemma, and you would be the ones pushing. The one cast onto the tracks could be Shrike. Or Lancelot."
"In the end, someone must decide. And someone must endure the agony and the guilt of that decision. Compared to dying pointlessly, I am better suited to choose."
"Decisive. Cold. Unfeeling. That is what a decision-maker must be. No sentiment. Human lives reduced to numbers. To maximize survival, to secure the greatest good with the smallest sacrifice."
"That is why I must live. Only someone like me can continue pushing innocent souls onto the rails, one after another, to preserve humanity's fragile continuance—and the demons' silence."
He seemed to recall something, and a harsh smile touched his mouth.
"Not some fervent leader throwing himself onto the tracks one after another. It sounds noble. It is utterly foolish."
Silence lingered.
In that dead stillness, Arthur began to clap—slowly. His gaze held something akin to admiration, though more than that… recognition.
Merlin's voice came again, like sharpened metal scraping against metal.
"A wicked answer. You sound like the villain of a tale. Yet in truth, this is reality—pure rationality, making absolute choices."
A rasping laugh followed, like crows murmuring over a corpse upon the rails.
"Many times, what is just does not yield good outcomes. And often, what is sinful yields the greatest justice."
"You speak like a sinister conspirator," Lloyd replied. "Your words carry a chilling echo."
"And yet," he continued evenly, "are you any different? The only difference between us is this: before the tracks, you stand surrounded by others—Shrike, Red Falcon, Galahad, Lancelot… all potential sacrifices."
Merlin's hollow gaze was a cage. In its darkness, Lloyd saw his own reflection, as though he too were trapped within that void.
"But you, Mr. Holmes, are different. When you stand before the rails, no one stands beside you. You have only yourself. And aside from stepping forward to face the train, you have no other path."
"That is the difference between us. As you said, we are the wicked arbiters of others' fates in the shadows. And you… you stand alone."
Lloyd stretched languidly. The severity in his expression softened; a faint smile rose to his lips.
"So all this trouble was merely to ask me that?"
"Curiosity," Merlin replied. "And to better judge the kind of man you are."
He stared directly at Lloyd. His eyes were so hollow it was impossible to tell whether he truly saw him at all. The uncertainty was deeply unsettling.
"Well?" Lloyd asked.
"Not bad."
After a long, unbroken stare, Merlin turned his head slightly.
"What do you think, Arthur? Though you dislike him, he is undeniably one of us."
Merlin was confident in his assessment. No matter how depraved or mad a person might be, something bound them all—and for this particular breed of men, that binding force was singular.
Demons.
Shared interests. Shared purpose. Trust followed naturally.
Arthur said nothing. He merely nodded once.
Merlin bent and lifted a box from beneath the table—solid iron, heavy in appearance. Yet in his frail, almost morbid frame, it rose with unsettling ease. The clasps snapped open.
From the narrow seam of the lid, a thin breath of cold mist spilled into the air.
"For the past half month, it hasn't only been the demons stirring," Merlin said at last. "A new kind of hallucinogen has begun to circulate through the Lower District. And among these new variants, there are… special batches. I think you'll understand once you try it."
As he spoke, Merlin drew a vial from the case. Tiny beads of condensation clung to its surface, trembling like cold sweat before he flicked it across the table.
Lloyd reached out and caught it. The glass bit into his palm with an unnatural chill. He couldn't fathom why such a thing required cold storage.
Hallucinogens were no strangers to him. In the Lower District they flowed like gutter water—relentless, unstoppable. The authorities had purged and cracked down time and again, yet never truly stemmed the tide. Rumor even claimed that within the aristocratic salons of Upper Old Dunling, the fashion had begun to take root.
He had once tasted the stuff by accident during his clash with Sabo. What followed had been a descent into hell—visions that warped the nerves, illusions that eroded judgment until a man could no longer trust his own mind.
Now, gazing at the half-translucent liquid within the vial, Lloyd sensed something amiss.
This was different.
A faint, inexplicable familiarity coiled within him. Before Merlin could elaborate, Lloyd uncorked the vial and inhaled a measured draught.
A subtle bitterness brushed his tongue.
Seconds later, his thoughts began to sink into a heavy fog. Heat surged through his limbs. Then—
The alarms screamed.
The Geiger index spiked. From the darkness came the grating rasp of metal against metal, as if iron scales scraped across one another in the unseen void. Before anything could emerge, Arthur raised a hand toward the shadows. The sound dwindled. The alarms died with it.
He watched Lloyd in silence.
Beneath the table, however, his fingers closed around the grip of a revolver.
Five minutes passed.
At last Lloyd lifted his head. Cold sweat traced the line of his brow. His eyes were glacial.
"I think I understand why you're so cautious."
Merlin allowed himself a faint smile. His hypothesis had not been wrong.
"We don't know how long it's been circulating," Arthur said gravely. "The hallucinogen is merely camouflage. You've seen the effect yourself. This thing is… something else."
The destruction of the underground palace. The ambush against the Plague Doctor. All of it had been tied to this. Someone was using Old Dunling as a proving ground—and the Cleansing Mechanism had no idea who stood behind it.
"It feels like secret blood," Lloyd said coldly. "I can sense it. More precisely, the hallucinogen is laced with a minute quantity of inferior secret blood."
A dreadful revelation.
"Someone is attempting to replicate the secret blood technique," he continued. "And clearly they've made progress. It lacks the purity refined by the Order, but to a certain degree… it can stabilize demonization."
Fragments of recent events aligned in his mind with brutal clarity. The secret blood that had transformed Sabo—perhaps it had originated here. The perpetrator behind the grisly massacre—likely another who could stabilize his own metamorphosis.
"This is why we sought you," Merlin said. "Our investigations converge. We identified the hallucinogen first—the batches tainted with secret blood. It circulates in minuscule amounts throughout Old Dunling. At first, we didn't understand what we were looking at. Your confirmation made it certain."
"So there is an unknown organization," Lloyd cut in, his gaze sharp as a blade, "that has successfully replicated secret blood. And it operates within Old Dunling."
Arthur avoided that look.
"We don't know," he admitted. "The situation is chaotic. You've seen it. Our Watcher system cannot track them. Only when they undergo demonization do we detect them—and by the time we arrive, they're gone. Almost every time."
"There have been exceptions," he added. "One demon we hunted had already lost stability. As you described, he could no longer revert to human form. But a mindless fiend leaves little behind in the way of clues."
Two streams of intelligence merged.
Behind the thinning mist, something grotesque began to take shape.
Lloyd fell silent.
When he finally spoke, it was not to answer Arthur, but in a murmur meant for himself.
"No one can replicate secret blood. No one can…"
It was a taboo born of the Revelation. Even the Gospel Church had required endless centuries to tame that savage beast. Others—bereft of such knowledge—had no hope.
No one could do this.
Unless—
His thoughts reeled back to the night of fire.
The Holy Descent Night.
Ed, who survived.
Inferior secret blood.
The newly appointed Pope.
The reformed Demon-Hunting Order.
The reawakening Stasis Sanctum.
A storm tore through his mind, scattering connections he could almost see yet could not bind together.
And then—
Everything stilled.
Lloyd stared ahead blankly.
At some point, another had taken a seat beside Arthur. Watson sat there, smiling faintly at him.
The answer rose like a blade in the dark.
I was not the only survivor.
Nor was Ed alone.
Many escaped the Place of Seven Hills. Many…
If only the Gospel Church possessed the secret blood technique, then was it so impossible that, amid the chaos of that burning night, someone else had seized it?
The Holy Descent Night itself had been the eruption of a vast conspiracy.
Could not a scholar carrying that forbidden knowledge have fled as well?
The source of secret blood in Old Dunling.
The mysterious figure behind Ed.
The missing Holy Coffin.
At the end of the Ende Town operation, every demon had been purged—yet the sacred coffin, unseen by any eye, had vanished.
A great net seemed to descend upon the entire city.
For the first time in years, Lloyd found breathing difficult.
"So," he said at last, though whether to Arthur or to Watson he did not know, "what exactly do you want from me?"
Arthur answered.
"We would like to retain you as a consultant to the Cleansing Mechanism. As you serve the Suarland Hall as an external detective."
Setting aside personal grievances, Lloyd was among the few true experts in demon hunting left in Old Dunling.
"These are the files related to the incidents. After you leave, Joey will assist you with the formalities."
"You're not going to ask whether I agree?" Lloyd interrupted.
This time Arthur did not flare with anger.
"Mr. Holmes," he said quietly, his eyes devoid of light, "you and we are of the same kind. Our only lifelong quarry is the demon."
Even if I did not ask, he seemed to say, you would hunt them to the ends of the earth.
Lloyd caught the file that slid across the round table. He opened to the first page and smiled faintly.
"This is the codename for the entire case?"
"Yes. The most active demon—the one you pursued before. If our deductions are correct, he is still alive."
"Brutal massacres. Bloody inscriptions. Those are his signatures."
"So you've named it—A Study in Blood?"
"Is there a problem?"
"No."
Lloyd's gaze lingered upon the file.
"I like the name."