Chapter Forty-Six: The Mysterious Hour in Blackhorn Alley—The Faceless One

The magician Harold had been preparing for this day for a long time.

Ever since he heard the rumors about the recent serial killer, he sensed something was amiss.

This serial killer wielded disturbingly strange magic, and his crimes seemed utterly random.

He never spoke. His mind-reading abilities and soul-invading techniques were terrifying beyond belief!

He could read anyone’s thoughts and project his own voice directly into others’ minds.

Those who encountered the Faceless One either vanished without a trace or went mad.

To this day, no one could pinpoint the Faceless One’s magic—some claimed he used his victims’ own spells!

Others said it might not even be magic at all.

Some insisted he simply struck people with his wand.

Others argued that the Faceless One used nothing but everyday charms.

The most outrageous rumors declared that the Faceless One didn’t even exist! He was nothing but a phantom born of the collective imagination of wizards!

The tales grew more exaggerated, and events ever more bizarre.

Yet the ‘amateur scholars’—wild wizards who didn’t even understand basic charms—were getting increasingly excited.

Most of them hailed from Muggle nobility, some were court wizards, but they all shared one trait: they’d never been to school, had a deep disdain for knowledge, yet called themselves ‘theorist’ wizards.

In the Muggle world, they were people of great renown, but in the wizarding world, no one bothered with them, treating them as Muggles. Every now and then, someone would cast Forgetfulness Charms on them to send them back to the Muggle world.

Nevertheless, these wild wizards always managed to sneak back into the wizarding world in one way or another, though they could never even tell who was a wizard.

They only knew a place called Blackhorn Alley, which supposedly had wizards. To blend in, they dressed up as they imagined wizards would, and upon meeting anyone in the streets or alleyways, would immediately launch into grandiose discussions.

They understood nothing of magic. Every statement began with “I suppose,” and ended with some string of incomprehensible “world-ending forbidden curses” of their own invention—spells they themselves could not even fathom.

They all hoped to catch the infamous Faceless One, to make a name for themselves and prove their brilliance and theories. To this end, they brought along copious amounts of their latest concocted exorcism powders.

The wild wizards swarmed in, but the true sharks of Blackhorn Alley grew more and more uneasy.

They suspected the Faceless One was sent by the Ministry of Magic—he couldn't be acting alone, but must be a group of agents in disguise! All this chaos was just a ruse to draw them out, and there must be informants from the Ministry among them.

The notorious dark wizards stopped frequenting their usual haunts, donning disguises and moving about in safe zones among the common wizard folk. The more cautious among them set up magic arrays around their most secret hideouts, hoping to conceal them further.

Yet, every single one of them was caught.

It was uncanny.

After their capture, a pattern emerged.

Those wizards without warrants on their heads were often toyed with by the Faceless One, then released.

Those with warrants vanished entirely.

This seemed to confirm the dark wizards’ suspicions—it truly was a joint operation between the Ministry and Hexagon Prison.

The leaders of every faction in Blackhorn Alley banded together to resist.

But the agents’ movements were bizarre beyond belief, appearing and disappearing without a trace—as if they didn’t exist at all.

Except for the wild wizards who claimed daily to have seen the Faceless One, no one could ever find him.

Some even said the Faceless One never used Floo Powder or Apparition, yet still came and went without a trace.

It was even stranger than the bizarre events rumored in the taverns these days.

The alliance launched a manhunt for the Faceless One, until one day, the leaders themselves suddenly vanished, and the hunt quietly faded away.

A wave of panic swept through Blackhorn Alley—they’d been outmaneuvered.

Clearly, these agents were determined to cut out the cancer festering in Blackhorn Alley—gangs like the Voodoo Crew and the Grey Gloves, notorious for their evil deeds. And in the agents’ scheme, they’d succeeded in decapitating the leadership.

From then on, the alliance completely dissolved. Those with warrants all fled to the safe zones of the common wizards—more were caught than ever before.

The downfall of these criminal elements was both a headache and a relief to the many factions in Blackhorn Alley.

Especially for the Foxes.

The Foxes had deep ties to the Ministry of Magic, specializing in laundering money and handling dirty work for its politicians.

And recently, it was those very criminal elements who had always bullied the Foxes that had fallen—a fact that couldn’t be denied. In Blackhorn Alley, the Foxes were both the richest and the easiest targets, making them the primary victims of the criminals.

Usually, the Foxes had to treat these thugs like lords, even paying protection money. Now that disaster had struck the criminals, the Foxes were universally delighted.

So in the beginning, the Foxes were overjoyed, strutting about and taking advantage of the situation to reap considerable benefits. But as more and more people were arrested, the Foxes realized things were getting out of hand.

Sure enough, a few days later, the real bosses of the Voodoo Crew rushed in from out of town to have a word with Sakura Bell.

They were all insiders. They knew Sakura Bell had connections with the Ministry—the Ministry had annual quotas for arrests, and admittedly, the criminals sometimes went too far, but once the quota was filled, shouldn’t they stop? Did they really have to wipe them out entirely?

So there was a certain sincerity to this conversation.

Of course, the visitors carried great weight.

Miss Sakura Bell, who normally swaggered about Sacred Tree Academy, was so frightened during this meeting that she trembled and confessed everything, swearing that she had nothing to do with it.

The very next day, these people disappeared.

A coincidence?

Today, the true shark hiding in Blackhorn Alley was finally forced out.

He too had a word with Sakura Bell. As for her, she now sat in a palm-sized cage to the left of the magician Harold’s stage, clutching the bars like a Barbie doll, wailing her innocence.

But who would believe her?

Barely an hour earlier, when Harold had visited Sakura Bell, she’d sworn that the Faceless One was her protector, so Harold had better not touch her. Otherwise, the entire Ministry of Magic and the Faceless One himself would come after him with a vengeance.

Yet after Harold kidnapped Sakura Bell and meticulously set his trap, the Faceless One really did come, heedless of all else.

Coincidence?

And she still claimed it had nothing to do with her?

Still playing stubborn?

It was pointless—too late!

Her protector was doomed today.

“Stop looking around, Faceless One—'Archimedes.' The moment you walked in, you were already dead.” Magician Harold calmly wiped his hands with a handkerchief, donned his magician’s gloves and monocle, and announced, “I’ve decided—I’ll turn you into a clown.”

Seeing Harold so serious, Sakura Bell was so desperate she wished she could strangle herself—she never should have thrown around the Faceless One’s name to bluff.

She was finished!

Didn’t she see? Lord Harold actually wiped his hands with a handkerchief!

He wiped his hands!

He never does that!

Well… not exactly never, but hand-wiping was a little habit of his, and legend had it that whenever Lord Harold wiped his hands, it meant he was about to get serious!

This time, unless the god of magic himself intervened, no one could save the Faceless One, and she herself was undoubtedly doomed.

No one could defeat a hand-wiped magician inside the magic box!

What infuriated Sakura Bell even more was that the Faceless One was still inside the box, peering around curiously.

Did this idiot have any idea what was going on? Did he know how terrifying Lord Harold was when he got serious?

The moment the Faceless One entered the box, he was already doomed!

So was she…

…