"S-step aside!"
"...Ack!"
The young nun who rushed in to stop the vagrants threatening me collapsed with a scream after being struck by the knife they had brandished as a threat.
"L-Lord Adler!"
"Are you alright?"
And at precisely that moment, people who appeared to be servants from my house came running from afar. The vagrants immediately fled with their tails between their legs.
In the end, only I and the young nun, now covered in blood, remained at the scene.
Had an outsider witnessed this incident, they would have praised the young nun's great courage.
'As expected, it was Holmes.'
But while pretending to check the nun's condition, I knelt down and reached that very conclusion.
I had carefully dipped my finger in the blood she was shedding and tasted it, discovering that it was merely red paint.
Even with a changed gender, Holmes was still Holmes. Had I not known of this development, I would have been completely deceived by the astounding acting.
"Please forgive our incompetence, Lord Adler."
"W-we... we were wrong. We should have come out further to greet you..."
"W-we have no excuse."
While I was worrying over how to navigate this desperate situation, the housekeeper and maids who had belatedly arrived began kneeling down one by one.
"W-we're sorry..."
"Please forgive us..."
As I quietly looked them over, the maids turned pale, squeezed their eyes shut, and began trembling violently.
"It is my fault for failing to lead everyone properly. I shall bear the punishment on their behalf, so please, forgive the other children, Lord Adler."
The housekeeper, kneeling as she spoke, had dark bruises and wounds covering her neck.
'...I'm going crazy.'
I felt I roughly understood why the gazes of those who looked at me at the detective academy had all been so cold.
The Isaac Adler from before I possessed him had apparently been quite a piece of human trash.
"...How does this nun look?"
"Sh-she seems badly injured."
"She looks dead."
To change the subject, I fixed my gaze on Holmes and posed the question. The maids glanced at my expression for a moment before clamoring over one another.
"She is not yet dead. However, she will likely not last until she can be moved to a hospital."
".........."
Seeing the housekeeper say so after checking her pulse, it seemed Holmes also knew how to put herself in a comatose state.
"Sh-she was a brave nun. If not for her, Lord Adler would have been in danger..."
"We cannot simply leave her lying on the street. Might we bring her to our mansion?"
As I quietly looked down at her, the voices of the maid and housekeeper reached my ears.
'That is precisely Holmes's aim.'
Holmes had orchestrated this in order to enter the mansion and get her hands on the photograph of the Queen of Bohemia that I possessed.
The vagrants from earlier were likely actors hired by Holmes as well.
If I brought her into the house, a false fire commotion would likely break out in a few minutes with Watson's help.
Holmes, lying in the room as if dead, would take that opportunity to burn into her eyes where I went.
"Help her up and escort her to my room."
I had to take advantage of that very point.
After all, "A Scandal in Bohemia" is the episode where Holmes is defeated.
If I simply followed Irene Adler's actions from that story, the photograph would remain safe.
"Sh-shall we wash her first...?"
"We shall escort her immediately."
The housekeeper clamped her hand over the muttering maid's mouth, hoisted Holmes up, and began heading toward the house.
'Just stick to the original, stick to the original.'
It was still a game under active development, so I didn't know the details, but this world was one based on the Sherlock Holmes series.
Having read the four novels and fifty-six short stories countless times, I could certainly survive here.
Of course, survival aside, having to complete quests that would make me burst into hollow laughter just by looking at them was quite a daunting matter.
For now, let me focus on the incident unfolding before my eyes.
"Where are you going, Lord Adler."
"Ah."
As I walked, making such a resolution, I stopped at the housekeeper's call and my eyes went wide.
"Welcome, Lord Isaac Adler."
""Welcome.""
Dozens of servants had come out to greet me in front of the mansion.
And not a single man was among them.
'He really was something else.'
I was beginning to grow deeply curious as to just what Isaac Adler had been doing in London.
.
.
.
.
.
Holmes, carried by the housekeeper, and Adler entered the massive mansion.
'...Good, just as Holmes planned.'
Dr. Watson, hiding in the back alley watching that sight, suddenly recalled the conversation she had shared with Holmes just moments before.
"The photograph is likely inside the mansion. Adler may carry it on his person during weekdays when he is not at the mansion, but since it is the weekend, he must be keeping it somewhere in the house."
"But I heard the Queen, fearing the photograph, had the house searched numerous times before."
"Hmph, if it were something that lecherous queen could resolve on her own, I would never have taken on this task."
"Then how on earth do you plan to find it?"
"Simple. I shall make the opponent reveal the hiding place himself."
Having said that, Holmes changed into a form-fitting nun's habit and continued.
"When faced with a crisis, he will go to retrieve what is most valuable to him. Men are creatures who act on such instinct."
"Hmm."
"Of course, Adler—called the greatest trash in London—would undoubtedly rush to where the photograph is in a frenzy."
"Yes, I suppose so."
Watson did not agree with everything Holmes said, but she wholly agreed that Adler would exhibit such behavior.
"When I enter the mansion, I shall open a window and send a signal when the time is right. You must then throw the smoke bomb through the window."
"And then?"
"Shout 'Fire!' at the top of your lungs. That is your mission for today."
Watson recalled the plan she had made with Holmes, took a deep breath, and looked ahead.
'Those people...'
A housekeeper estimated to be around her age. Maids who mostly looked to be around Holmes's age.
Their necks and arms, bowed in greeting as Adler entered the house, were all marked with bruises and wounds.
'Are they being abused?'
As a doctor, she could tell immediately.
That those marks were not made overnight.
'What a trash of a human...'
Watson's eyes began to burn with a sense of justice.
A kind-hearted lady, she had been feeling guilty until just moments ago about dragging innocent people into the incident, but upon reflection, such worry seemed unnecessary.
If they succeeded in taking the photograph through this operation, the Queen would personally purge that trash.
Then surely, freedom would come to those pitiful children as well.
- Clack...!
Watson, pacing around the mansion with such thoughts, raised her head as a window opened.
- Slide...
Having confirmed Holmes's signal, she steeled her heart and pulled out a smoke bomb from inside her coat.
'Please succeed this time as well, Holmes.'
And she powerfully hurled the smoke bomb into the room.
"...Hup."
Then, having taken a deep breath and cupped her hands like a trumpet to shout loudly,
- KUWA-KWA-KWA-KWA-KWA-KWANG!!!
a massive explosion erupted before her eyes, and she was swept away by the blast, flying backward.
"Urk..."
Thanks to that, Watson rolled across the ground for quite some time before violently slamming into a wall.
- Fwoooosh...
Into her vision came Adler's mansion engulfed in a massive inferno.
"F-fire... why is it real..."
Murmuring with dim eyes, she finally lost consciousness from the impact of hitting the wall.
.
.
.
.
.
"Nngh..."
Holmes, lying in Adler's room, grabbed her throbbing head and rose.
"Blast."
Then into her sight came the room's interior engulfed in flames, and her own head now bleeding for real.
Could Watson have thrown a Molotov cocktail instead of a smoke bomb into the room?
While looking around the room with such thoughts, Holmes spotted the smoke bomb rolling on the floor, emitting smoke.
Judging by that, it seemed the smoke bomb Watson threw was not the cause of the problem.
'The fire's origin is not here, but near the parlor.'
Moving her gaze about to find the cause of this situation, Holmes discovered thick smoke seeping through the door crack.
'The parlor windows were all closed. Then it must be an internal factor, not external.'
There were two possible situations.
Either Isaac Adler had caught on to her scheme and struck first, or someone targeting him—whose reputation was already the worst—had committed an act of terror.
'...This is troublesome.'
Whichever it was, it was an unfavorable development for Holmes.
She had taken paralytic medicine for the perfect act, leaving her body in a state where it could not move well.
That body had been swept up in the blast that struck the mansion, rendering it completely out of sorts.
It seemed impossible to get up from bed immediately.
"...Tch."
Holmes's expression turned cold.
If this explosion was intended by Adler, he would have already retrieved the photograph and fled.
Even if Adler had not intended it, if he died or the photograph was not in this room, the result would be the same.
In other words, it was an exceedingly bleak situation where the only outcome to expect was Adler getting caught up in this incident and dying.
'...A mana user wouldn't die from something like this.'
But to make matters worse, Adler was a mana user, of which only an extreme few existed in the world.
The reason he could act so insolently was that Adler was one of the few mages in England treated much like nobility.
Rumor had it his skill was abysmal, but even so, it seemed unlikely a mana user would die from something like this.
'I must change plans before it's too late.'
Thus, Holmes quietly clicked her tongue at the completely tangled situation and began turning over ideas in her head.
- Thud, thud...
".......?"
She tilted her head at the sound of footsteps beyond the door.
"Kuhak, kuhak..."
At that very moment, coughing sounds right in front of the door.
- Creeeak...
Holmes quickly closed her eyes and peeked through narrowed lids. There in her sight was Adler, opening the door and staggering into the room.
"Ungh..."
Having suffered severe burns all over his body, he was drenched in blood, perhaps from being caught dead-on in the explosion's impact.
'So it was here, the photograph.'
But watching Adler crawl into the room despite his battered state, Holmes became certain of the photograph's presence.
She had been smiling quietly to herself, but soon held her breath for a moment.
Because Adler, with a deathly pale face as he looked around, had fixed his gaze on the bed where Holmes lay and was approaching urgently.
"...Found it."
Even the narrowed eyes she had kept open to avoid revealing she was awake closed again, and to Holmes's ears came Adler's voice, relieved.
'Had he hidden it under the bed?'
Holmes, who had already searched the bed once when no one was around, harbored that question inwardly, debating whether to open her eyes at that very moment.
- Rustle...
Suddenly, Adler's arm wrapped gently around her waist.
"....? .......??"
At that moment, Holmes's thought process briefly halted, having been embraced in a man's arms for the first time in her life.
"That was a close call for real."
Holding her, Adler murmured in a sincerely relieved voice as he headed outside.
"...Hup."
Then, after setting Holmes down in the mansion garden, Isaac Adler led his staggering body back into the mansion.
""........... ""
The mansion's servants, whom he had rescued and brought out to the garden, watched Adler's retreating figure with eyes of disbelief.
'When faced with a crisis, he will go to retrieve what is most valuable to him.'
In Holmes's mind, as she took in that entire scene, the words she had spoken to Watson while shrugging her shoulders suddenly came to mind.
'Men are creatures who act on such instinct.'
The gaze of the arrogant genius girl, who had never once changed that thought since birth, was quietly wavering.