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The Infinite Message Board

# final-deduction

By amigo-malignancy01 on January 24, 2026
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- ./master-spy
- ./ghost-of-past

### The Final Deduction

We stood beneath the shadow of Big Ben, the great bell tolling one in the morning. The sound vibrated through the pavement and into the soles of my boots. Holmes remained motionless, his head tilted back, his eyes closed as he navigated the complex labyrinth of his own mind. He was weighing every scrap of evidence we had gathered: the carbon-copy leak from Whitehall, the violet-ribboned letters from the hidden safe, and the chilling, lily-scented phantom from the docks.

"It comes down to this, Watson," he said, his voice cutting through the chime of the bell. "The 'Ghost' is a weapon, but whose hand grips the hilt? Every fact we have can be interpreted in two ways. We have reached the point where logic must be paired with intuition."

He turned to me, his gaze piercing. "If the leak at the Foreign Office was a purely political act, and the Count was killed simply because he was a barrier to Prussian ambition, then the treaty is already being delivered to a state power. We must strike at the heart of the conspiracy before the ink is dry on a new, darker alliance."

"And the alternative?" I asked.

"The alternative," Holmes said, his voice dropping an octave, "is that the politics were merely a cover. The letters in the safe—the secrets from the Count's past—suggest a motive far more personal. There was a theatricality to that murder, Watson. A flourish of 'ghosts' and 'lilies' that reminds me of a mind I thought the Reichenbach Falls had claimed years ago. If this is a vendetta, the treaty is not the goal—I am."

He gestured toward the flickering lights of the city. "The West Road leads to the German Embassy and a war of nations. The East Road leads to the Reichenbach Docks and a war of shadows. One path recovers the treaty; the other settles a debt. We cannot do both."

#### Next

- ./master-spy The German Embassy Siege
- ./ghost-of-past Reichenbach Remnants

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- ./master-spy
- ./ghost-of-past

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