Chapter 357: Haunted House |
The white Audi slowly pulled up to the curb, stopping right in front of Kiryu Wakaba, who stood by the street wearing a small black leather backpack.
The window of the front passenger seat rolled down, and Hoshino Gen gestured to her from the driver's seat.
Kiryu Wakaba pulled the car door open, slipped the backpack off her shoulders to hug it to her chest, and cheerfully slid into the vehicle. "Good afternoon, senior!"
"Yeah," Hoshino Gen replied with a perfunctory nod. As he turned the car around, he asked, "Tell me about the supernatural incidents currently available in Tokyo."
Hearing this, Kiryu Wakaba could not help but playfully stick out her tongue. "You are as impatient as ever, senior."
Even so, she obediently pulled a document bag from the small black backpack in her arms. "Compared to other places, Tokyo definitely has a lot fewer pending incidents. After all, the Special Affairs Group's headquarters is located here, so any supernatural incident that occurs in this area always gets priority treatment."
"Because of that, any supernatural event that actually manages to become a backlogged case in Tokyo tends to be quite troublesome." Kiryu Wakaba could not help but smile as she spoke. "But if you are the one stepping in, senior, then there won't be any problems at all!"
Before she could say any more, Hoshino Gen cut her off. "No, this time I need an incident that isn't too difficult, and I won't be the one handling it."
"Huh?" Kiryu Wakaba blinked in surprise. "Not you, senior? Then..."
"I see," Kiryu Wakaba mused thoughtfully, before gently puffing out her cheeks. "Personal hands-on guidance from her senior, plus a thoughtfully selected incident to help her build actual combat experience. And if I am not mistaken, to prevent any accidents, you'll definitely accompany Senior Sasaki the entire time during her first direct encounter with the supernatural, right?"
"..."
When Hoshino Gen remained silent, Kiryu Wakaba knew her guess was dead on. She muttered, a hint of jealousy in her voice, "Must be nice. When I faced a vengeful ghost for the first time, I almost died..."
Hoshino Gen still said nothing.
Not wanting the atmosphere to turn completely awkward, Kiryu Wakaba sighed and said, "Since Senior Sasaki is the one handling it, the available choices should be pretty slim. May I ask what tier Senior Sasaki's supernatural abilities are at?"
"C-tier," Hoshino Gen replied.
"She's already C-tier after only being exposed to the supernatural for a little over a month. Having a proper legacy really makes a difference, huh." Kiryu Wakaba pouted, making no attempt to hide her sour feelings toward Sasaki Ayane.
Of course, even as she complained, her hands did not stop flipping through the documents.
Before long, she spoke up. "For a C-tier, we usually assign Level One or Level Two incidents. Currently, there is only one pending Level Two incident local to Tokyo in the Special Affairs Group's database."
"Let's hear it."
"All right. The supernatural codename for this Level Two incident is the 4-chome Haunted House."
"The address is an abandoned villa in the suburbs of Minato Ward, at Yoshimachi Yonchome. According to the files, the villa originally belonged to a family of four named Higashida. It consisted of the husband and wife, along with a pair of siblings aged nine and four."
"Mr. Higashida was originally a senior executive working at the Amamiya Trading Company, while Mrs. Higashida was a housewife. Their children attended kindergarten and primary school in Minato Ward. To outsiders, they appeared to be a very happy and respectable family."
"But in reality, Mrs. Higashida had been using her husband's money to keep a handsome young secret idol on the side. The four-year-old younger brother was actually the biological child Mrs. Higashida had with that secret idol."
"Although Mr. Higashida was usually busy with work and overlooked many things that didn't quite add up, four years after the child was born, he finally noticed that something was wrong."
"Mr. Higashida secretly took his younger son to get a paternity test, and the results were self-evident."
"After returning home, Mr. Higashida got into a massive argument with his wife. Consumed by rage, he lost control and beat the younger son, who wasn't his own flesh and blood, to death with a club."
"Then Mrs. Higashida and Mr. Higashida got into a physical struggle. In the end, Mr. Higashida murdered his wife as well."
"When he finally snapped out of it, Mr. Higashida seemingly wanted to take his daughter and flee, but the little girl, having witnessed her father murder her brother and mother, flatly refused to go with him."
"Perhaps he was afraid that bringing such a daughter along would expose his crimes, or perhaps he simply couldn't bring himself to kill his biological daughter. Ultimately, Mr. Higashida chose to cut off all means of contacting the outside world, locked his daughter inside the villa, and fled on his own."
"However, the little girl still died, from an infection caused by the rotting corpses."
"The secret idol kept by Mrs. Higashida, unable to get in touch with her and driven by who knows what kind of thoughts, showed up at the house one weekday morning."
"Even though the front door was locked, the secret idol merely knocked, and the door opened on its own."
"As a result, after that secret idol walked inside, he never came back out."
"Several police officers who went to investigate the scene later on also went missing."
"However, because the affected area of this incident was extremely small, basically, as long as no one stepped into the villa, nothing would happen, and since there was a surge in supernatural incidents across the country at the time leaving the group severely understaffed, the case was temporarily shelved."
"Later on, an available member did go over to try and clear out this supernatural incident, but after arriving, he found nothing out of the ordinary. It was as if the vengeful ghost there had already left or simply vanished."
"Following that, specialized personnel entered to conduct a thorough survey, and their findings were more or less the same."
"But just as this incident was about to be crossed off the backlog, the member who had visited the haunted house and the personnel who surveyed the scene all went missing one after another. It wasn't until the morning before yesterday that someone finally found their mutilated corpses inside that very haunted house."
Having finished detailing the files and intelligence, Kiryu Wakaba turned to look at Hoshino Gen's profile, speaking with some uncertainty. "Although this incident was tentatively classified as a Level Two supernatural event, since no one has actually witnessed the true form of the vengeful ghost inside the haunted house, it might be even more dangerous than we think. Are you really going to let Senior Sasaki handle a supernatural incident of this difficulty?"
"Though to be fair, out of all the remaining pending cases in Tokyo, this is already the lowest difficulty one on paper."