At the end of the street, shadows were few and far between. Blood dripping onto the ground was quickly washed away by the rain. White steam rose from the torn wound in the downpour, and in an instant, it was healed and whole again.

’Blood... I want to drink clean blood... No, I have to control myself. This is a trial of the Blood Faction... The Law Enforcers found me after all. They know the Time Death Judgment was never carried out.’

’I need to hurry. I have to hurry. If I can’t shake the blame from both the Inner Side and the Outer Side, this life on the run will never end... I have to get rid of it all. I must!’

Baron stored the tattered windbreaker, used for Blocking, inside his Gentiana Pattern Ring, then changed into a clean set of casual clothes in a roadside phone booth.

As dawn broke, and after confirming the Battle Nuns were not in pursuit, he finally stepped out of the phone booth and hailed a few taxis passing by.

He glanced over the taxis and chose the second one from the rear.

"Westin Street."

...

Xenon headlights cut through the curtain of rain as the taxi stopped on a long street in Westin.

"Three pounds," the driver said.

After handing over the banknotes, Baron told the driver to pull over and wait for him.

"I’m a busy man," the driver grumbled. "This is going to cost me a few fares."

’Busy? Busy my ass. Of all the taxis on the street, you were the only one parked by the curb, smoking and reading the paper. If anything, I’m the one giving you business.’

Grumbling aside, Baron didn’t waste words. He counted out another twenty pounds, indicating that this was about as much as a London taxi driver makes in a day.

The driver smiled and reached for the money, but Baron held it back, offering a five-pound deposit and promising to pay the remaining fifteen pounds when he returned to the car.

The driver hesitated for a moment, then agreed.

He got out of the car. The rain was coming down hard, reducing visibility, but Baron still remembered the layout of the nearby houses. There were few pedestrians around. Following his memory, he made his way to the outside of Lady Eleanor’s villa.

It was exactly as it had been a few days ago: red brick, pointed arches, and dark roof tiles. Ivy grew wild on the gable wall, the rain shattering against its leaves like shattered emeralds.

Baron noticed all the windows of the house were covered with thick curtains, from the upper sills to the living room, without exception.

From the outside, it looked like a large, sealed box.

’Did she turn her own house into a coffin to seal away her heart, just as her family now lay in theirs?’

Baron had just finished this sentimental thought when he remembered that he hadn’t seen the bodies of Lady Eleanor’s family in the cemetery last night. That probably negated his earlier musing.

’Then again,’ he thought, ’investigating that very discrepancy was why I’m here.’

Baron didn’t rush in. Instead, he lingered nearby, pretending to be a pedestrian seeking shelter from the rain as he quietly activated the Chain of the Imitator.

He was scanning the area for any potential observers or pursuers. And, as always, he was identifying the best escape routes and hiding spots in case he was discovered.

It couldn’t be helped. After all he’d been through, his fighting was still more instinct than skill, leaving him with no real technique to speak of. That’s why he was always toyed with by the Battle Nuns from the Bureau of Judgement, who bested him with pure technical skill.

But his talent for escaping, on the other hand, was now perfectly maxed out.

After surveying the area and confirming there were no anomalies, Baron finally felt safe enough to leap onto a windowsill of Eleanor’s house. He slit his palm, letting the blood fill the crevices of the window lock before solidifying it into a key.

With a twist and a CLICK, the window unlocked. He carefully slipped inside.

...

He had come here before to collect a debt—and had also been arrested here—so while Baron wouldn’t say he knew the second floor like the back of his hand, he at least knew the general layout.

Following his memory, he went to the bedroom Carmen had taken him to last time. He pressed his ear to the door, listening for any movement. Hearing nothing, he slowly opened the door and stepped inside.

The bedroom’s layout was unchanged from his last visit, despite the deaths in the family.

Baron recalled that some Europeans, out of sentimentality, had a custom of preserving a deceased family member’s room exactly as it was.

He went to the bed, above which hung a family photo of four. He gave the picture an apologetic nod and was about to start searching when his keen hearing picked up the sound of footsteps ascending the stairs.

Without a moment’s hesitation, he dove under the bed.

The door swung open, and Baron saw a pair of cartoon slippers.

’Lady Eleanor must be at least forty-five or forty-six, right? Does she really have such a girlish heart?’

The thought had barely formed in Baron’s mind when he heard the bed sag with a THUMP, followed by a girl’s sigh.

"I really don’t understand why Mother insists on keeping all the curtains drawn, and why she forbids Grandma, Grandpa, and me from opening them. At this rate, we’ll never see the sun again, will we?"

Baron, who had been waiting for a chance to slip away from under the bed, froze. He was so stunned that he didn’t even realize his Blood Eye and Golden Eye had emerged.

For a moment, even the Glimpse of the Mysterious Crystal failed to conceal the Cross that symbolized Judgement.

The Cross quickly faded from his eyes. Baron lay still, breathing quietly and listening to the girl on the bed voice her frustrations.

Finally, the girl said, for reasons unknown to him, "If only Dad were here."

She pushed open the door and left the room.

From the crack beneath the bed, Baron tilted his head just enough to see the girl’s face in the instant before the door clicked shut.

Silver hair and pale gray eyes. Other than her hair and eye color, she looked identical to the Carmen he’d first met in this very villa.

’But now that I think about it,’ he realized, ’it’s probably not that the girl looks like Carmen, but that the Witch imitated the girl’s appearance.’

Yet, according to what Baron had seen that day and what had been reported in the news, the girl and her grandparents should have already been killed by "him."

’Why is she here, alive and well?’

A possibility he had previously dismissed now resurfaced.

Thinking back to the dead family of three at the time of his arrest, Baron now realized that the whole scene had been rife with inconsistencies.

Normal blood takes 2.5 to 5 minutes to fully coagulate at room temperature (25°C) after leaving the body. Yet the girl and her family Baron had seen that day had been covered in fresh, wet blood. Logically, their time of death couldn’t have been more than ten minutes before he arrived.

Then there was the placement of the bodies. The three corpses were arranged side-by-side on the bed. The Witch had said they were like that when she arrived, which suggested the killer had been in the middle of some arrangement but had been forced to stop because of Carmen’s arrival.

When he connected that to the empty coffins, the Blood Biter who specifically targeted families of three, the blood-related rituals, the missing spirits...

The chain of suspicion in Baron’s mind began to link together.

’Now that I think about it, maybe Lady Eleanor drew the curtains precisely because "they" are still alive. She’s preventing outsiders from glimpsing the mysterious happiness within this home.’

Once the sound of footsteps descending the stairs had faded, Baron crawled out from under the bed. He then noticed a photo frame on the nightstand that hadn’t been there before.

Baron picked up the frame. It was a family portrait of five.

The corner of his eye twitched. And with that, everything became clear.

All the pieces of his suspicion fell into place.

Without another moment’s hesitation, Baron took one last look at the photo and climbed out the window.

...

Back in the taxi, Baron paid the driver the remaining fifteen pounds as promised.

When the driver asked for his destination, Baron casually gave him a location.

...

The taxi stopped on a deserted road, not far from a police station.

The driver stammered that the twenty pounds didn’t include the fare.

Baron said coolly, "Yes, it did."

The driver chuckled, not bothering to argue. No matter how you looked at it, he had still come out ahead.

"Fine, fine, customer. Consider this trip on the house."

"We’re at your destination, so please get out. The rain’s light for now. If it gets any heavier, you might not be able to leave even if you want to."

Baron nodded but didn’t get out. Instead, he idly flipped through a newspaper and said casually:

"That twenty pounds didn’t just cover this trip. It also settled the fare I dodged last time."

In the rearview mirror, the stunned driver watched the passenger fold his newspaper. The man’s eyes were ice-cold, his Golden Eye and Cross Scar flaring like embers.

The Dragon Knight pressed a gun to the back of the driver’s head from over the seat. "Am I right, Blood Biter... or should I say, Master Bagins’s apprentice, Mr. Lankao?"