The gaze he had when looking at me was anything but normal.
"I'm sorry, I don't know my way around this place just yet," I said, acting as calm as I could.
The man stood and extended his right hand in my direction. "Ah, don't worry about it. Welcome to Altrix. As you probably noticed already, I'm the Mayor. You can call me Al. I'm the one who made the request to have mercenaries help us figure out what's happening in my city."
I shook his hand. However, once more, I couldn't shake off the feeling that something was strange about this whole situation.
"It's nice to meet you, Al."
I glanced back toward Amelia and Ivy. Luckily, it seemed that nothing had happened to them while I was gone.
"I actually had some questions for you, if you didn't mind. It'd make things easier for the two of us. What do you say?"
Al grinned. "Of course. Follow me. We can go to my office and talk about things there."
Just as we were about to leave, the guards from earlier came out of the stairway.
"Oh, Mister Mayor, you don't have to worry about them. We were about to send them on their way."
"If they were allowed to take on this quest, it's because they are capable. The Mercenary Center isn't some cheap organization. Trust them."
With that, we finally arrived inside his office... Finally, I was about to get some answers.
"So, what do you want to know? I'm an open book."
"How long has it been since those strange deaths have been happening?"
"Around three months."
"Do you have any idea what's causing it?"
The Mayor shook his head. "Not really. The deaths seem random. However, what we've noticed is that most victims have decent backgrounds most of the time. They aren't orphans or homeless people. Whoever is doing this is clearly targeting decently strong people."
"Do you have a theory as to why that's the case?"
"Mhm, no clue. That's why you're here, isn't it?"
"I see. Well, I don't have any other questions. Thank you for your time. We'll try our best to deal with this problem as fast as possible."
With that, we exchanged greetings and left his office as we were quietly guided outside.
'To think that he'd lie at the end. They clearly have an idea about it. Otherwise, it wouldn't have taken them three months to ask for help from mercenaries.' I shook my head. 'They're clearly hiding something inside that basement.'
"So, what do we do now?" Amelia asked, nervous.
"We wait."
Soon enough, the sun went down, and it was finally time for me to go into action. I waited for both Amelia and Ivy to fall asleep before moving, since they would only worry about me. It was better for me to move alone.
I left our small hotel room and immediately headed for City Hall.
'Why would a City Hall be so heavily guarded at night?' I thought to myself, as I couldn't even count the number of guards on my fingers.
Luckily for me, infiltrating a building like this was as easy as breathing, especially at night, where only shadows could be found.
[Shadow Manipulation]
In the blink of an eye, I found myself past the metal gate. I looked through a window and used [Shadow Manipulation] again, and just like that, I was inside the City Hall lobby, just like earlier.
'It seems like they invested most of their staff in protecting the outside.'
Inside City Hall, it was mostly empty.
I found the same stairway as earlier and immediately headed for the basement. However, just as I was about to go downstairs,
I heard a few voices.
City Hall wasn't as empty as I first thought.
'There are two of them.'
I couldn't allow myself to be caught. The Mayor was definitely strange, and if he learned that I was snooping around the basement, then I had no idea what he might do. For all I knew, he might be the person responsible for this whole thing in the first place.
However, while that was currently my theory, there was one major flaw to it.
'If he's the culprit, why would he ask for help from the Mercenary Center?'
No matter how hard I thought about it, it didn't make any sense. Nevertheless, I pushed those thoughts to the back of my mind.
I needed to knock out those two guards as fast as possible. I didn't feel confident in doing so with the Dragonic Gauntlets, so I decided to use the Lix Training Dagger. I moved swiftly down the stairs, and the moment the two guards saw me, they were already lying on the ground.
'They're much weaker than I expected. They're, at most, D-Rank.'
I continued my way downstairs as I finally stood before the same door as earlier. Just like before, it was clearly locked, and the guards from earlier also didn't have any sets of keys that could potentially unlock this door.
I had basically no other choice but to forcefully open this door.
However, the moment I did this... an alarm was bound to resound all over the building. I'd have very little time to analyze everything inside that room. Still, I had no choice, and I was also confident in fighting my way out safely.
After a minute of thinking, I made my decision.
I took a deep breath and, with a strong kick, forcefully opened the door.
-BEEP!-BEEP!-BEEP!
Just as I had thought, an alarm immediately rang. It wasn't just across City Hall—it was far too loud for that. It echoed across the whole city. Every single person living in Altrix knew that there was an intruder inside City Hall.
I could already hear hundreds of footsteps heading for the basement of City Hall. They were all coming for me. However, I didn't even care about it because of what I was witnessing.
This wasn't a morgue at all.
The charred bodies were all carefully stored inside water tanks, with their vitals displayed on the left side.