Mystery Murder (Part 1)
After that day, strange things kept happening to Shirou. His sense of time was distorted, ten minutes felt like an hour and vice versa. Everything then had a timer-like line of digits next to it. Shirou didn't know what it meant at the time, so he didn't bother investigating it. He hadn't told Touko about this either, and tried to hide it as well by avoiding eye contact with her. But because his sense of time was distorted, sometimes Shirou worked faster than normal, sometimes he just stood there like a statue. Touko noticed this and found it peculiar, but she kept silent and decided to observe him more.
January 1996, a week after Shirou had awakened his Eyes.
It was evening. The sky was turning dark. Shirou was walking home from school.
Night.
"What the?!" He was shocked. It was suddenly dark. The sky turned night time out of nowhere. The street light had already been lit up.
He looked around him with warranty, then continued to walk back home.
Then he encountered her again.
That time he could clearly saw her face.
It was the same as the girl he bumped into.
The same girl he met a few weeks ago.
It was her.
Still wearing the red jacket and yellow kimono, she stood in front of a disfigured corpse. He almost puked when he saw it.
Blood.
Blood.
Blood.
The victim had his limbs cut off, in which the arms were sewn to the legs. He looked at the timer next to him.
00:00:00:00
She turned to look at him.
"Hoh... You are the boy I met last week. We met again."
"You…Were you the one that kill him!?" Shirou asked.
"Who knows? Maybe I did, maybe I didn't." She answered half-heartedly.
"ANSWER ME!" He yelled, his voice echoed through the night.
"If you wanted to know, you have to catch me first!" She said as she ran away.
He chased after her.
But unlike last time, this time, it was different.
Everything around him started to slow down for a short amount of time.
He was slowly catching up to her.
Noticing this, she turned around and took out her knife, throwing it at him. He stopped to dodge it.
The knife lodged itself into the wall.
"Hey, what the hell!" He shouted.
He turned back but she was nowhere to be found.
"Tch! I lost her." He grumbled.
He looked back at knife, pulling it out from the wall.
"At least I got something to bring back home."
"Hmm?"
He noticed that there was a piece of paper attached to the knife.
He opened it up and read it.
"I will kill you next time if we ever meet again."
"Haiz… What have I gotten myself into this time?"
He looked back at the knife, noticing that there were not a single drop of blood on the knife.
"If she did kill him, there would be bloodstain on the knife… Maybe she didn't do it…? No, it's still too soon to assume anything."
He decided to call the police to check on the body, and then went home.
Back at Garan no Dou
"I'm home."
"Welcome back. You went home quite late today. Did something happened?" Touko was reading her documents as usual.
"Yeah. I met up with the one who supposedly was the "murderer". Well, she acted like she did the murder, but…"
"But?" She put down her documents, looking at Shirou.
"Nothing. I'm going down to the worksh- Urgh!" Shirou was talking then suddenly he fell to his knee, his right hand holding his chest.
"Shirou?!" Touko stood up and went to Shirou's side.
He tasted iron in his mouth.
He coughed out blood, his body felt pain all over.
Then he collasped onto the floor.
"SHIROU!"
Shirou opened his eyes.
He was floating in midair
"Ouch…My head…Wait…"
He looked around him.
It was the same void that was filled with giant clocks.
"I'm back here again."
That time, the gravity in the void was different, and the void wasn't just filled with giant clocks anymore, but various different objects.
He recognized them.
They were all the items Shirou had analysed (or Traced as he liked to call it).
But there was one item that stood out to him the most.
A knife. But not any knife.
It was her knife, the knife he had brought home.
He tried to move around.
"Woah, it feels like I'm in space."
Then he tried to move to the knife's position, his hand reaching out to it.
As soon as he touched it, the knife glowed a bright light, blinding him, forcing him to close his eyes.
He reopened his eyes.
His eyes saw that he was in a japanese-styled house, lying on a bed.
Then he stood up and went to what supposedly be a bathroom.
He saw himself in the mirror.
It wasn't him anymore.
It was her.
He was looking through her perspective.
Shirou didn't know how, but he was pretty embarassed then.
She was wearing only underwear and a white shirt.
And the worst of all, he couldn't even close his eyes, because it was her eyes.
That was one of the images that burned deep inside his mind.
Luckily (or unluckily) for him, she got dressed quite quickly. She put on her yellow kimono, then went downstair to the door, wearing her red jacket in the process.
"Suzurigi-san, I'm going out for a bit." She said.
"Master Shiki, please remember to return soon." A voice of a man was heard from inside the house.
"Hai~"
She got out of the house and started walking downtown to the main street.
She turned at a corner.
Shirou immediately recognized that place.
"?!"
The road he usually walked through when he came back from school.
She walked a little bit then stopped.
"This smell…!"
The stench of blood reached her nose.
She turned to look.
The same death body he saw when he last encountered her.
She thenheard a noise.
Turning to look, he saw himself.
"Hoh... You are the boy I met last week. We met again." She said.
The entire scene appeared exactly like when he met her, and he noticed that she had never once pulled out her knife until when Shirou chased her.
And he saw that when he chased after her, there was a point his speed actually doubling up, he remembered that the world around him slowed down half the speed at that moment. He thought it might had to do something with his Eyes.
When she threw her knife at Shirou, his perspective suddenly changed from her to the knife.
That time he could actually look around.
He looked up at himself and saw… Touko's face on his body?
