Chapter 38 #2
The gesture was small. Insufficient. Meaningless in the face of what surrounded him. But his hand was steady when he did it, and that steadiness cost him more than any spell he’d ever cast.
He stood. Turned away from her. Made himself turn away from her, because if he didn’t move now, he would stop moving entirely, and there were things that needed to happen before he could afford that.
Think.
Where was Luna?
He didn’t see her. Or any hint of her.
Alsen fired the life scan. The spell swept over the city, the surrounding villages, and the fields around them.
He found her signature in the same inn where he’d seen her last time, in bed. With a heavy heart, he walked out of the guild.
Fly.
He flew up, slower this time, more controlled.
The city barely moved, the morning too early even for the merchants.
He flew over the buildings, and landed on the street in front of the inn. He walked inside.
The waitress was just setting the tables. She said something. He couldn’t discern the words.
Alsen walked up to the top floor, and walked into Luna’s room.
She lay in the bed, covered by a blanket.
A clash of emotions washed over him.
On the one hand, Luna lived. Perfectly unharmed, if anything, just turning in the bed, waking up.
On the other hand, she was the most obvious main suspect. A massacre of the local adventurers on such a scale required an overwhelming gap in power. They all had weapons out, most likely cast spells, and clearly died in combat.
He saw no marks of explosions or acids or poisons or any major magical explosions.
So, they died in a somewhat fair fight, just against an overwhelmingly stronger opponent. Someone that could take them on head-on without feeling the risk of losing.
Someone like Luna.
Luna looked up at him with half-open eyes, the blanket pulled to her chin. “Alsen?”
He stood in the doorway of her room. He hadn’t moved since the emotions hit. The relief. The suspicion. Both fighting for dominance behind a face he forced into something that resembled calm. “Hey.”
She frowned. “What happened? You smell of blood and rot.”
“There’s been an… incident at the adventurer’s guild.” His voice broke, eyes watering.
Luna bolted out of the bed, reaching for the clothes. “I’ll be ready in a minute.”
He watched her strap all the sheathed daggers to herself, quick and purposeful in her moves, with zero wasted movement. As he did, he wiped his eyes with his hand, and sent out a focused, detailed scan of the room, looking for blood.
The entire room lit up to his mind, and dimmed, leaving shining marks on his shoes and where he had stepped. No light on Luna or any of her weaponry or her clothes. Not even a droplet of dried blood.
He didn’t smell anything either, likely due to his nose having resigned after being at the guild. “I’ll go ahead and meet you there, all right?”
She started dressing up. “Sure. I’ll be there in a bit.”
Alsen walked to the window, opened it, and cast flight. He flew out. This time, he took his time, thinking.
Absolutely nothing in Luna’s reaction felt suspicious or out of place.
But Luna was the best liar he’d ever met. He couldn’t trust the instincts in her case.
He took the time to think.
Luna was the most obvious suspect. His only realistic suspect, as no one else he knew had the strength to pull something like that off.
But that wasn’t evidence.
And he needed some before he even accused her.
Sure, she’d been absent, alone, unaccounted for during the night. When he found her, she was sleeping peacefully in a room without a speck of evidence.
That she could have done something didn’t mean she had. And he didn’t know how she would have cleaned up. Had she committed the massacre, she would have been covered from head to toe in blood.
She could have washed and scrubbed everything clean, but he couldn’t imagine how that would have left no residue. Even on Earth, with modern equipment and chemicals, perfectly cleaning blood would have been difficult.
Plus, what if it was her?
The entire adventuring community he’d met was dead. She remained as his only, first and last companion in this world. He didn’t want to go to zero.
Especially not over an unproven suspicion.
But if it came to that, he was going to avenge Arleria. It was the least he could do for her.
He descended toward the guild. The guards still stood around, one of them now sitting on a crate, looking like he’d rather be literally anywhere else. Alsen landed in the street, steadier this time, and walked inside.
The smell hit him again. Somehow worse the second time, because this time he expected it.
Another man already stood there.
Garrett towered at the edge of the main hall, looking over the scene. His armor glistened with morning light, his sword at his hip, shield on his back. He stood very still, looking down at Theron’s body across the hall.
Alsen stopped a few paces to his side.
Garrett glanced at him, his face a landscape of controlled devastation. His eyes were red but dry, his jaw set so tightly the muscles jumped, and his posture was held military-straight with obvious effort. “Alsen.”
“Garrett.” He didn’t know what to add. Good morning wasn’t exactly the greeting for this occasion.
A silence followed. Neither of them had words adequate for the situation, and both of them knew it.
“I got here a bit ago,” Garrett finally said. “The guards found me at my inn.”
Alsen nodded. “They found me at Arleria’s place.”
“Oh…”
Another silence. Garrett’s eyes drifted back to Theron. His body was the most damaged, both with the destroyed chest, and the entire form crushed by the impact with the wall.
“He was the best man I ever knew,” Garrett said. The words came out steady, practiced, as if he’d been saying them to himself for the past twenty minutes and had finally gotten the delivery right. “Marena too. She was braver than she thought... unfortunately.”
Alsen didn’t know what to say to that. So he said nothing, which felt more honest than anything he could have offered.
Garrett wiped his face with the back of his gauntlet. The metal scraped across skin.2 “We should look at this properly. This cannot be left to the guards.”
“Yeah.”
They started at the entrance. The wardrobe that usually stood by the door lay toppled on its side, shoved against the wall. Not blocking the door anymore, but clearly displaced.
Alsen scanned it. No blood on the wardrobe itself. The dust pattern on the floor suggested it had been moved twice, once to fall and once to be pushed aside.
“Someone barricaded the door,” Garrett said, crouching beside it. “From the inside.”
“Or something knocked it over during the fight.”
“No. The front of the wardrobe is damaged, as if from falling over. It faced the door, so it was likely toppled to block it, and then moved away for whoever did it to exit. The guild has no other exit. They were trapped in here.”
Alsen filed that. Trapped by the killer, or by themselves.
If the adventurers had gathered here to fight something, they might have barricaded the door to keep it from escaping.
But if the killer barricaded it to prevent them from fleeing, that implied the killer entered first, then sealed the room.
Which implied the killer was already inside.
He looked up at the tall windows. They began well above head height: narrow, arched, and fixed shut in the old church architecture. Most of the glass remained undamaged. No window lacked the glass.
They moved deeper into the hall.
Alsen crouched beside Savnoj. The scarred adventurer lay on his back, his scale armor breached in three places, massive gashes that had torn through the reinforced steel like parchment.
His shield arm was severed at the shoulder.
The cut was rough, jagged, not a blade. Something had ripped through the joint.
“This looks like claws,” Alsen said. “Look at the scoring on the metal. Three parallel gouges. The spacing suggests a hand of human width.”
Garrett crouched beside him. His face was pale under the controlled expression, but his eyes were sharp.
Professional. He’d seen death before Sonja.
He knew how to function inside it. He drew a dagger, and softly pushed it into some of the cuts.
“The claws had to be at least ten inches long. Probably more. Also, the steel isn’t really cut, it’s shredded, so it wasn’t cut by a clean spell. Can you detect any magical residue?”
Alsen focused, and fired a detailed scan. The most detailed he knew. “There’s some on the wall at the scorch marks.” He motioned with his head. “Then residue in vials on the floor and similar in their stomachs.”
Garrett sighed. “They drank whatever potions they had, and died before they could even absorb.” He straightened, heading to Theron.
Alsen stopped in the center of the hall, motioning at a wooden bottle lying open on the floor. “Whatever he drank is here.”
Garrett turned, looking at it. “That was his best potion. Elixir of Draconic Might. It massively enhanced the user’s strength and speed, at the cost of his lifespan. He kept it for the gravest of emergencies. He got it over a year ago.”
“The killer gave them time to prepare. It wasn’t an ambush.”
Garrett nodded.
They moved to Malick, who had been cut in half at the waist. Malick wasn’t a small man. Quite the opposite. “This is a single cut,” Garrett observed. “The claws had to be over a foot long. With enough force and hardness to cut through steel.”
“And enough speed to get a clean cut on someone who was fighting back,” Alsen added.
They found Kern by the eastern wall. His bow lay on the floor, unstrung. His axe and dagger were still in his severed hands. His body had been disemboweled, the wound pattern consistent with the same massive claws.
“He switched to close combat,” Garrett said quietly. “The bow wasn’t working. So he drew his melee weapons.”
Alsen looked over the room at arrows embedded into furniture and walls. “The arrows hit nothing. I don’t see any arrows. He literally couldn’t hit the target.”