Chapter 100: The Truth Surfaces

Estella's expression when she came out of her uncle's townhouse was not the kind that invited small talk.

The Waldrich family carriage was waiting at the corner. The driver took one look at her face from twenty meters away and swallowed whatever greeting he'd been preparing. He pulled the door open in silence.

Estella got in without a word.

The carriage stopped at the main gate of the Royal Knight Order's headquarters. Estella pushed the door open before the wheels had fully stopped, and before her foot hit the ground she was already giving her name to the officer on duty.

The knight opened his mouth — probably to explain that the Commander was occupied — and then he looked into her eyes and thought better of it. He stepped aside.

The door to the Commander's office slammed into the wall hard enough to rattle the frame.

There had been, in the half-second before it opened, what sounded like a suppressed sigh.

The Commander was behind his desk. Several stacks of documents covered the surface; one had started leaning, the top pages sliding to the edge. He'd apparently braced for this, because the door hadn't startled him. He just looked up.

Heavy bags under his eyes. Hair that had been raked in multiple directions by anxious hands. He managed a smile anyway.

"Miss Waldrich. Please, sit. Can I offer you tea?"

"No." Estella planted herself in front of the desk without any intention of sitting down. "Where is Kargas?"

The smile held for one second, then stiffened.

The Commander leaned back in his chair. A pause.

"Knight Kargas is currently listed as missing. During our investigation we found evidence of prolonged contact with an unidentified organization. After the incident involving Miss Seraphina, he stopped appearing entirely. We're still —"

Estella's palm cracked down on the stack of documents. Papers scattered over the edge. The Commander didn't move to catch them.

"He's dead."

The Commander's pupils contracted. He sat up straight, hands folding together on the desk surface, and when he spoke again the courteous tone was gone entirely.

He put it together quickly. She'd gone to rescue Seraphina, run into Kargas, handled it herself, and now she wanted answers.

"You're certain?"

"Do I look like I'm joking?"

Cold sweat started to break out on the Commander's forehead.

"How deep does it go?" Estella's gaze didn't let him go. "Has the Order actually conducted a full internal review? How many others like him are still in there?"

"We've been working on it. The Kargas inquiry has started producing names — " He pulled open a drawer and started reaching inside.

"Started."

She leaned forward slightly, and the pressure across the desk became almost physical.

"Seraphina wasn't kidnapped by one man acting alone. The Curse Cult had enough penetration inside this Order to make that operation possible. That isn't a personnel failure. Your entire vetting system has failed. You know that better than I do."

The Commander was silent for several seconds.

He held her gaze without flinching, and he didn't waste breath on excuses.

Outside, from somewhere across the training yard, came the distant rhythmic count of a drilling formation.

Then he stood, came around the desk, and stopped in front of her. He inclined his head.

"I will conduct a full purge. Top to bottom. I give you my word — and I give it to House Waldrich."

Estella looked at him for a moment.

She remembered the night Seraphina disappeared. This same man standing at the front line, armor grey with dust and smeared with blood, voice already gone from shouting orders, still directing his people — holding the perimeter to keep that thing away from the residential blocks until his mana ran dry.

She let some of the edge out of her voice.

"I want Kargas's full file. Everything."

The Commander's brow creased. "Files pertaining to internal Order personnel management fall under national security protocols — by regulation, the Adventurers' Guild cannot —"

"I'm not requesting it as an adventurer." Her tone dropped one register and the room got smaller. "I'm requesting it as House Waldrich. The person who was kidnapped is my cousin."

The Commander ran out of objections and took her to the archive himself.

---

The file was thick. It came in a document sleeve with the Order's wax seal on the drawstring.

Estella tucked it under her arm and walked out. She was two steps past the door when the Commander's voice came from behind her.

"Miss Waldrich. There's something you may want to know."

She stopped. Turned her head.

He stood beside his desk, choosing words carefully before he released them.

"The organization connected to Kargas... there have been a number of reports recently. Coming through different channels. Their operational range appears to be considerably wider than our earlier estimates — they've been sighted across multiple towns. There are also accounts suggesting they're actively searching for something specific. No one has been able to determine what." A pause. "Be careful."

Estella nodded once and walked out.

---

The day after she got the file, she started tracking down witnesses from the academy attack.

The building was rubble. Students and faculty had already scattered back to their families across the kingdom. Just tracking down where they'd all gone took a full day of messages and inquiries.

By the time she'd pried the critical details out of two separate students, it was past midnight on the third day.

She sat at her table with Kargas's file spread on the left, the academy attack timeline mapped across the center, and a map covered in red circles, with notes connecting the various pieces.

Kargas had been assigned to a patrol route passing directly beside the academy on the day of the attack.

And Seraphina had been on leave that same day.

Estella stared at that for a long time.

Seraphina didn't take leave because she was unwell. Estella knew her cousin. The timing was deliberate — she'd been collating something. Pulling threads together somewhere she couldn't be observed. Or someone tipped her off. Someone who knew the attack was coming but needed her out of the crossfire.

The witness accounts filled in the rest.

A student still recovering in the hospital ward mentioned, almost as an afterthought, that the Headmaster had been completely absent for the duration of the attack. Never appeared. Never gave orders.

A younger girl who'd been in the main courtyard when the attackers arrived said something more direct: the black-robed figures moved through the grounds like they already knew the layout. No hesitation at corridors, no wrong turns. Like they'd had a map. Like someone had given it to them.

Estella pinned everything to the wall in order. Left: Kargas's assignment records. Center: the minute-by-minute attack timeline. Right: Seraphina's schedule in the days before and after the kidnapping. Far right: Princess Angelica's injury report — she'd been caught in the attack as well, both her Gold-rank escort knights killed.

Every thread pulled tight around the same name.

Oswald Rutherford.

He hadn't died protecting his students. He'd known. He'd been part of it.

The Knight Order's official report listed his cause of death as a penetrating wound through the chest, and put his status as killed during the attack. That was the public version.

But every student and faculty member she'd interviewed had mentioned the same thing, unprompted.

The Holy Sword Witch.

She had come down into the great hall during the fighting and told them they could push back. That was the last thing Oswald had been seen near.

Estella drew another circle around Witch. The space around it was already dense with lines — solid, dashed, pointing toward different incidents, different locations. Then her pen moved to the second label. Magical Girl Brigade. Three of them. Consistently alongside her.

Present at the academy attack. Present the day the slash divided the sky.

The Witch. The three girls. Cult officers. Both scenes. If the Witch had thrown that strike across the sky, she had almost certainly been the one to put a blade through Oswald's chest as well — buried him and everything he knew under the academy wreckage.

So whose side was she actually on?

A second-in-command cleaning up a liability? Or a separate faction entirely, running a parallel agenda against the Cult?

Either way, someone capable of an attack like that without visible effort had to be Radiance or even higher. Which meant there was no one in the kingdom who could face her head-on.

Estella dropped her pen on the table and stood up to go to the window. Outside, the city was carrying on with its evening in complete ignorance of the blade hanging overhead. She almost envied them.

A knock at the door. She crossed the room and opened it.

Radlin was leaning against the doorframe with the expression of someone who had been looking forward to this conversation.

"Got two of them. Both registered adventurers. Caught them at a meet with other members — timed the ambush just right." She raised an eyebrow. "When do you want them?"

"Now."

They'd set up in a disused warehouse on the edge of the district. The sub-level storage room was cold, damp, and far enough from the street that no one would hear shouting.

Two people, zip-tied to chairs. The older one was somewhere past thirty, hair in genuine chaos, the kind that suggested it had always looked roughly like that. The younger one was lean and angular with eyes that couldn't decide where to land. Both of them had been roughed up enough to show, but their overall condition was more regrettable bar fight than captured cultist. When Estella walked in they turned those eyes on her — clear, frightened, not particularly bright — with tears and running noses already well established.

She stood in front of them.

"Start talking. Who are you working for, what do they want, and how deep does it go?"

The one with the bird's nest hair raised his swollen eyelid halfwa. "It's — it's just called the Cult, I don't even know the full name, I swear! I'm just a runner, they tell me to do something I do it, I don't ask questions —"

The lean one was straining forward against the ties, words pouring out. "They gave us these pills, right, special medicine, it boosts your stats — we didn't really have to do much, just complete tasks for the higher-ups sometimes, it was basically like a guild except no membership fee —"

"Exactly like a guild! Better than a guild, actually, guilds take commission —"

"— and there were almost no rules —"

"Task bonuses too, and if your attendance was good enough they gave you extra —"

"Enough." Estella cut through it. "Give me names. Your direct superiors. Meeting locations, contact methods, recognition signals."

Both of them looked at each other.

Then they started howling. The older one about elderly parents. The younger one about a twenty-year mortgage.

"I don't know anything, I swear to the gods —"

"I repent! I'm not a heretic! I will never join a weird cult again, I know it was wrong, I genuinely know —"

The storage room amplified both of them equally.

Estella listened. Her frown deepened by increments.

They were too stupid to be performing. These two had probably been scooped up, handed performance-enhancing drugs, and told to do occasional odd jobs — and had genuinely spent the entire time believing they'd found a guild with unusually good benefits. Their gear was Iron standard. Neither of them had even basic detection-ward enchantments on their persons.

The Cult had invested nothing in these two. That was the point. Expendable bodies baited with easy power, deployed for tasks that didn't require real assets.

She turned and walked out. Radlin caught the iron door on the way through and swung it mostly closed behind her. The howling continued at reduced volume.

"Release them, or keep holding?"

"Release them. But put someone reliable on both for at least a month. Report anything that moves."

Radlin tapped two fingers to her temple in acknowledgment.

---

Back at her own base, Estella laid everything out one final time.

She stepped back and looked at the board.

The timeline. The assignments. The witness reports.

Every thread tied itself around one name.

The Witch.

She had descended into the great hall when the attack was at its worst. The slash that split daylight from darkness had been hers. Oswald Rutherford was almost certainly her work. So was Kargas.

Two high-ranking Cult operatives in the capital — one gone rogue, one losing control — and someone had come personally to close both accounts.

This wasn't some righteous enforcer. This was internal enforcement. She came from inside the Cult. Core leadership, at minimum a senior lieutenant — or possibly the person running the entire operation.

A Radiance threat. Embedded somewhere in this country. Operating freely.

And the kingdom had no idea she existed.

Estella's jaw set.

That couldn't continue.