At Felix’s request, all the students gathered once more in the hall of the building.

“And so, dear students. You’re doing great - you’re getting through our academy’s tests quickly. But fighting skills and intelligence alone aren’t enough to make a good detective,” said Chief William.

“Quickly? Seriously?” someone said in the crowd.

“So now comes our students’ most beloved test - solving a murder. You need to concentrate all your will and intellect into a single fist. And make the one correct decision, on which you’ll build your way to the truth.”

“How do we do that?” David asked.

“How to do it? First, we must remember that nothing in life is final. There is nothing certain and precise. Everything is relative. You can’t even trust your own eyes and other senses. Second, you must remember that the truth is always buried deep. Even so, the obvious things should never be overlooked. Everything in life is easy, and at the same time everything is very hard.”

“What is he talking about? Just empty words,” someone from the crowd said.

“It’ll seem frivolous to you right now, or maybe it won’t make sense,” Felix continued, as if answering a student’s question, “but you’ll grasp the meaning of these words only at the scene of the crime.”

“Now this is interesting,” Aram said.

“Murder, hmm…” Reia mused.

“Riddles, riddles,” Ksyu said. The idea was clearly to her liking.

“We’ll divide you into several groups, and you’ll investigate one murder together,” Felix added.

“I wonder, is this a real murder?” Reia asked.

“Of course the murder isn’t real,” Felix said, as if answering Reia’s question.

Everyone standing near Reia turned toward her. She was standing quite far from where Chief William and Felix were. This was the third time their question had been answered directly.

“Can they hear everything we say?” David asked, with surprise and fear.

“Or maybe it’s just a coincidence,” Aram said. “Relax.”

“He’s certainly got everyone on edge,” Ksyu said, and giggled.

“Instead of a corpse, we’ll have something like a hallucination, or rather, a hologram. I think it’ll be more pleasant than touching a dead body,” Felix said. “Of course, during real investigations, you’ll come across real corpses, and the process of searching for evidence, identifying the body, understanding the cause of a person’s death - none of it will be very pleasant or easy. Of course, it would be more correct to use a real corpse, but for the first time, a hologram will do.”

“I wouldn’t mind examining a real corpse,” David said.

“You’ve probably never seen a single corpse in your life, and yet you want to touch one?” Aram said angrily.

“I…” David began.

A great many incomprehensible images and memories were spinning in his head. All his thoughts were tangled.

He remembered the river. It was crystal clear, so clear you could see the bottom. The girls lay motionless by the shore. Then the river began to turn redder and redder. The pale blue eyes of a very beautiful girl with long blond hair looked at him. The ends of her hair were already stained with blood, and her body hung from a tree. It swayed slowly in the wind, and because of that it seemed alive. But suddenly the trees began to resemble huge red mouths of fire. The forest wanted to devour the girls lying by the shore, to hide its master’s murder. There was something mystical, something incomprehensible, in this terrible nightmare. And something utterly creepy. It was so unbearable that for a moment David forgot about the terrible face, as if frozen in the branches of the tree. Only when he saw the wild green eyes staring at him did David come back to his senses.

“There’s nothing wrong with wanting to find out the truth and learning to do it as fast as possible,” David finally said.

“And if you happened to find out what kind of torment a person went through, would you still answer the same way? If, touching the corpse, you felt all the pain, all the suffering that person experienced, how would you answer then?”

David thought for a second.

“It doesn’t matter. I’d answer the same.”

“You’d answer that way only because you’ll never have to experience it all. That’s all.”

“You mean I’m a weakling, right? Is that what you’re hinting at?” David shouted.

“Boys!” Reia shouted.

“Yes! That’s exactly what I want to say!” Aram said. “You all only know how to wag your tongues.”

“I feel all of people’s pain. I see it. I don’t need to touch people’s corpses for that. I don’t need to invade their heads to know what they went through as they died. When you talk to a dead person’s acquaintances, through their stories, their memories, their photographs, you carry all those emotions through yourself, and your heart breaks. Isn’t that enough?!”

“Yes! Exactly! It’s not enough!” Aram shouted.

“Why, you..! Selfish creature!”

Voices began to appear in Aram’s head again.

“Die. Die, bastard. Fool, selfish scum!”

Aram bent down to the floor, clutching his head. Reia dropped to her knees and tried to help him up, but he fell again.

“David, that’s enough,” Ksyu said, her face serious.

David’s rage began to subside. His eyes still looked at Aram with hatred.

“If you do that again, I’ll wrap you in hundreds of chains and squeeze them so hard your body will simply burst in front of everyone.”

“Ha? Let’s try it, then!” David said, and was about to activate his superpower when he received a scalding slap in the face.

“I said, enough,” Ksyu said. Her gaze had turned even scarier.

David hadn’t expected that. He looked at Ksyu with such a sad, pitiful expression that it made her uncomfortable.

“Maybe I overdid it,” she thought.

“You’re both wrong,” Reia said. “That’s the first thing. And second, because of you two, we missed everything.”

“Thanks. Get ready for the test,” Felix said just then, and left with Chief William.

“So what do we do now?” Reia asked.

The boys said nothing and only stared at the floor.

“Nothing, we’ll figure it out on the spot,” Ksyu answered. “This is a group assignment. It’s unlikely we’ll all end up in the same group together. So someone is bound to know what to do.”

The announcement of the groups again sounded in the students’ heads:

“Aram, Zen, David, Ksyu, Kano, Alex, and Reia - you go to the first room on the third floor.”

“I’m laughing, I’m just laughing, I can’t help it anymore,” Ksyu said, and burst into helpless laughter.

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