GOSICK 7

Together with the travelers, Kujo and Victorique enters the village and which everyone was welcome to stay for the upcoming festival. The village elder then fired a shotgun round, warning the others that they should be extra careful due to the presence of wolves. He later rebuts that the people in the village are humans and aren't the wolves that the travelers suspect them to be.



Back in the chief's mansion, the maid Harminia, spots the similarity between Victorique and Cordelia and started to lose her composure as she had witnessed the murder of the previous village elder. A testimony was then given by the current village elder, where he and some others had witnessed Cordelia entering the previous village elder's room at precisely 12am and had knew so after checking the time on his watch at that time. However, one of the travelers had heard of testimonies that differ in the time of the incident.

Following the elder's story, Cordelia let out a scream before running out and the previous elder had been stabbed to his death. At the scene, gold pieces were scattered across the floor and those gold pieces were collected by the previous village elder to prevent villages from using it. After that incident, Cordelia was under high fever and when she recovered, the elder exiled her and she was forced to live in the outside world, a world that she does not know anything about it. All that was given to her was a gold coin and a trunk. And now, Cordelia's child has returned to the very village that exiled her mother. Leaving the mansion, Victorique decided to take a walk and with Kujo, the elder's assistant, Ambrose, took notice of Kujo's weird appearance, most instinctively, his black hair. In return for a thorough examination of Kujo, Victorique exchanged Kujo's "body" for Ambrose to bring them to a place, Cordelia's home. Seems like the place scared off Ambrose, possibly due to the rumour of the curse and Victorique enters the house and notices a hidden compartment in the floor soon after.



With Kujo's help, the compartment revealed a box that had a photo of Cordelia carrying Victorique while she was still a baby. Victorique then concluded that someone had definitely came here and swapped the contents of the box with the photo. Heading to the graveyard next, Victorique started digging into the previous village elder's grave and noticed a carved sentence on the gravestone: "i am innocent. C-".



Victorique teared up after seeing the words her mother left behind and she was certain that her mother was truly innocent and was exiled from the village. Kujo notices strange noises around them and the wolves came into sight. Grabbing Victorique, the duo ran back to the mansion and Kujo was certain that the wolves did have green eyes just like Victorique's. Safely away from the wolves, the duo later meet up with the nun who had went to search for the telephone. Apparently, a sponsor by the name of Brian Roscoe had came to the village 10 years ago and installed the electricity.



Late in the night, while guarding Victorique when she's having a quick bath, the lights went off and a glass of water that had a fake eyeball in it shocked Kujo. Worried about Victorique's safety, Kujo confirms whether Victorique was alright and she feels that someone was trying to drive them away from the village and had resorted to such means.

The following day signaled the start of the festival which included a dramatic battle between men who were grouped with either the Winter Army of the Summer Army and the stage was set where the Summer Army would overwhelm the Winter Army and burn down the carts of Red Turnips that belonged to them, with their leader, the Winter Man in it, which was just a model lying on top of the cart. One of the travelers, Alan, then started to make a fuss out of the festival in the village that sparked rage over some of the villages, including Harminia. Ambrose then leaves Kujo and Victorique behind and went on with the staged battle whilst the duo are pelleted by small fruits that the villagers were throwing. The duo then spots Alan running away in the midst of the festival and then, the battle begins.



However, things started to go wrong when the carts were burning, with a voice being heard inside the model of the Winter Man. The fire was put out too late and the man inside the model, Alan, had lost his life. The village elder however dismissed his death as an accident and continued with the festival. Victorique later leaves Kujo alone which led him frantically searching for Victorique but ended up in the church, asking about his future about Victorique as adviced by Ambrose. It was then said that the two will definitely be apart from each other but their hearts will never be apart. Thinking about what the elder had read for him, he spots Victorique leaving the church in tears after learning that she most possibly couldn't grow taller anymore in the future. In the time where she had left Kujo alone, Victorique had headed to the scene of the crime where she knew that someone else was the criminal as the previous elder was stabbed in a region where a mere child like Cordelia would never be able to reach.

With that, Victorique managed to piece the Chaos together but lacked evidence of the criminal she had in mind. Before she could reveal more, the village chief headed out with the shotgun and together with Ambrose, Kujo and Citorique, the four of them headed to the mountains to chase the wolves away from the village. Spotting movements in a bush, the village elder takes aim but Victorique knew something was amiss and prompted him to stop. But the trigger was still pulled and behind the bush was yet another traveler, shot in the chest.



Now this arc is definitely much more mysterious than the previous cases and a Chaos that Victorique isn't able to piece together easily... With the man, Brian Roscoe, arriving in the village around the same time as Victorique was born, he is definitely suspicious of being the one who had swapped the contents of the box. Adding on to the suspicions of the villages, Harminia seems the most suspicious of them all, with her losing her composure or go into rage that easily, for someone with green eyes as well, a possible wolf existence? And just how Alan managed to get into the model which was left in the stage for everyone to see when he just ran past Victorique and Kujo? Perhaps that was a fake? Brian Roscoe? O_O