Miss Hebe Is Charging Through the Lostbelts! [49]

Precis did not know that the manager she was talking about was not an “apprentice,” but a “Daylight” who stood at the pinnacle of postwar Ascendants in the present world.

Nor was she someone newly advanced to Daylight like Andoain. She was a former Knight of the Round Table who bore multiple Marks and stood at the very summit of Daylight.

Unlike her former colleagues, Mordred had not appeared beneath the banner in response to Arthur’s summons.

Because Mordred’s spiritual body had been preserved intact by the sage, she had actually been summoned separately by Morgan, outside the sequence of the Knights of the Round Table.

After that, she had always traveled with Morgan.

The Illusion on her had also been cast by Morgan. After all, this was still central London. Revealing her identity would be troublesome no matter what.

After hesitating again and again, Mordred finally took out her phone and dialed Morgan’s number.

The call connected quickly, and a woman’s cool voice came from the other end.

“Hello? It’s me.” Mordred lowered her voice. “Mother, my lady, where are you right now?”

“This is the modern age. Don’t tack on my lady.” Morgan first corrected Mordred’s form of address. “I’m currently investigating Brancrug.”

Mordred knew of this place called Brancrug. It was a refuge for apprentices and recluses, the only autonomous territory in all Albion that could remain exempt from King Arthur’s authority.

Its ruler was not any individual, but a library called Hush House.

“All right, Mother.” Mordred accepted the correction readily. “Do you have time to perform a divination now?”

The voice on the other end fell silent for a moment. “Water Mirror divination won’t work. Ever since I helped Arthur look into clues about Merlin last time, I haven’t been able to use it.”

Morgan recalled the last time she had used the Water Mirror to help Arthur divine the matter. As a result, Arthur had gone mad and sent out every Knight of the Round Table under her command, launching rituals along a dozen borders at the same time.

Large-scale actions like that happened every so often.

As long as Merlin was not mentioned, Arthur remained that wise, mighty, eternal king. But if a situation involved Merlin, Arthur would act regardless of the cost.

Morgan sighed. She was the same.

“There’s no need to use Water Mirror divination, Mother,” Mordred said softly. “Ordinary divination will do.”

“What do you want to divine?” Morgan did not particularly care what Mordred wished to calculate. After all, for one of the few Dusk-ranked people in the present world, status was status. The divination medium used made no difference.

“I want to divine a person,” Mordred said. “That person lives at Alfie Square on Church Street. I don’t know her name. Her appearance… is exactly the same as Merlin’s.”

From the other end of the call came the sound of something heavy falling to the floor, as if something had been smashed.

“You’re saying that person looks exactly… like… Merlin?”

A terrifying, dreadful aura came through the phone. For an instant, a pitch-black illusion even surfaced before Mordred’s eyes.

“Yes. I confirmed it,” Mordred answered firmly. “So I hope you can perform a divination and determine whether she has anything to do with Merlin.”

A hoarse laugh, faintly tinged with madness, came from the other end of the call.

“Mordred, you really have grown up. You did very well… Stay in contact at all times. I’ll begin the divination now.”

…

Cornwall, Brancrug Village.

In a pitch-black oak forest, the pale moon drifted among the shadows of the trees. In the clearing at the very center of the forest, a witch with silver hair and black clothing held a long spear shaped like a tower’s spire, tracing the symbols of the Twelve Consuls into the soil.

The symbols of the Twelve Consuls joined head to tail, forming a ring.

Next came the symbols of the Consuls representing the Seven Principles.

Mr. Day, Holy Grail, Skyflint, Scar-Father, Fisher King, Messiah, Duke of Sighs.

Among them, the symbol of Mr. Day, who represented the Principle of Lantern, was the largest.

It was a totem made purely of lines, resembling both the rising sun climbing over the horizon and a half-open eye.

Unable to use the Water Mirror divination she was best at, Morgan could not easily perform divination on an entity of the same status. But how could divination be such an inconvenient art?

Apprentices who had just begun learning divination would use large-scale rituals to borrow a higher status, warding off the dangers of divination and obtaining more information.

After that, as they mastered rituals and raised their own status, heroes who specialized in divination could obtain the answers they sought with only a few stones. When matters involved their own safety, they could even resort to an even less reasonable “sudden premonition,” directly seeing fragments of the future before their eyes.

Aside from matters concerning Merlin, if Morgan wanted to divine something, flicking her fingers a few times would have been enough.

Yet at this moment, she did not hesitate to spend important materials and directly set up a ritual to borrow status in her own workshop territory.

She was going to borrow the status of the Consul who presided over prophecy, foresight, and dawn, and brute-force all information related to Hebe!

The enormous spear pierced the soil before her. An unnerving laugh echoed through the forest as Morgan abruptly clasped her hands before her chest.

The mist in the oak forest began to thicken and churn, as though something wanted to use it to take shape.

Immediately afterward, the temperature rose slightly. That cloud of mist gradually began to glow, swelling and contracting like a living creature. A moment later, a pair of coal-black, beadlike eyes opened within the mist.

“Nongnong! Nongnong!”

This was an inhabitant of the Wasteland, an inconspicuous creation under Mr. Day—a shifting mist.

This Wasteland creature known as a shifting mist liked chasing light and heat. It would instinctively follow certain elements and come toward them.

But the moment this shifting mist saw Morgan, it let out a scream so miserable it seemed inhuman. It wanted to flee, but Morgan merely reached out and caught it in her palm.

“Not bad quality. You’ll do as the foundation for the ritual.”

The Enchantress calmly announced the shifting mist’s fate, and her palm slowly tightened.

Immediately afterward, part of the Enchantress’s consciousness left her body and forcibly stabbed into the shifting mist.

Through its link to the Wasteland, the Enchantress, with the high status she had borrowed, forced a lock from Brancrug onto Alfie Square.

Vast cobalt-blue starlight shone out from the Enchantress’s eyes, dyeing the shifting mist’s entire body a bizarre deep blue.

BANG!

The shifting mist did not even have time to scream before it burst apart cleanly and scattered.

Morgan calmly shook out her hand.

She destroyed the remnants of the ritual on the ground, walked out of the oak forest, and dialed a number.

…

Mordred picked up her phone.

She heard a cool voice come from the other end.

“No result.”

Mordred frowned. Mother’s divination had actually failed?

“What are you thinking?” Morgan said calmly. “No result is also a result.”

She had searched through every resident of Alfie Square, calculating their personal information and their past and future within a three-month span down to the last detail.

Under such circumstances, Alfie Square was like a fully colored-in map to Morgan. Yet when she attempted to divine Hebe, she saw only a vast, boundless expanse of cobalt-blue starlight.

It was practically a wall without a single blind spot.

The shifting mist’s form had been cleanly shattered by the counterattack from that “starlight” firewall.

On the map in Morgan’s mind, only Hebe’s section remained pitch-black. Yet even though she had obtained no information, she could still use reverse deduction to lock onto Hebe.

After that…

“Stay in the restaurant. Don’t run around,” Morgan ordered coldly. “I’m returning from Brancrug immediately.”

The Enchantress hung up. She went straight to the center of Brancrug Village, intending to sell off the land she had purchased immediately.

This was a law established by Hush House, a rule every resident who settled in Brancrug had to obey.

Mordred had only just wanted to say that Hebe might be moving when Morgan cut the call.

When she called again, the phone gave only a busy tone.

This is a fan translation of 赫柏小姐正在杀出异闻带！ by 青散人 Rights to the original work belong to the creator. Please support them by exploring their original work or sharing it with others if you can. Thank you for reading and supporting my efforts to bring this story to a wider audience!