『Well, leaving that aside, let’s try to find any residual thoughts.』(Vandalieu)

Death-attribute magic allowed Vandalieu to read a person’s residual thoughts from a part of their dead body. But he could only read such thoughts from corpses, and even if he could read them they often made no sense, he hadn’t had many opportunities to use this ability up until now.

Vandalieu pressed his forehead against Zandia’s cold palm and closed his eyes.

He saw a man thrusting a distinctly sharp spear. Behind him was another man collapsed onto the ground, covered in blood and still clutching the handle of a broken sword.

Zandia collapsed. She was stabbed repeatedly by the spear, as if judgement was being brought down upon her. In the corner of her eyes, she saw another brown-skinned woman who had already been defeated before her. And just before her vision turned dark, she saw a man descending underground.

The man with the spear was Mikhail, while the defeated man covered in blood was Borkus. The other woman was likely to be Jeena.

However, if these residual thoughts were correct, Zandia and Jeena had died here in the audience chamber after Borkus was killed. They hadn’t descended into the underground passage beyond the ice as Borkus thought they did.

But then why were their bodies not here? Even if one assumed that their bodies weren’t trapped in the ice other than this one wrist and thus weren’t preserved, at least their bones should have remained. And Borkus had been revived as a Titan Zombie long before his body turned into just a skeleton. There was no way that he wouldn’t have noticed Zandia and Jeena’s bodies if they had been present.

Had someone taken them away? Had they been disposed of in a way that didn’t even leave the bones? But then why had this wrist and, more importantly, Borkus’s body been left alone?

… Contemplating on his own would yield Vandalieu no answers.

「I saw in the residual memories that the two of them died before Mikhail went underground.」(Vandalieu)