Capítulo 1252: Butcher In The Walls

“By the gods, this is sickening…”

“Be careful where you walk! You might contaminate evidence… Anyway, do any of our experts have a clue what the hell happened here?”

“Who knows about the specifics? But it’s pretty damned obvious that an undead is behind this. I have no idea if they got through the barrier somehow, or if they did this remotely, but… This is a fucking carnage, there is no better way to put it”

Several livings had arrived at the now bloodied lighthouse. It had not taken long for someone to notice early in the morning that the lighthouse was still shining through the darkness of the early hours of the day–But instead of a bright, white light, it had been illuminated by a crimson glow.

From there, several people had shown up at the scene of the crime. Minli, since she was the only one with finer knowledge of the human body, and thus, capable of conducting professional autopsies, and the Death Hunters, for their expertise in dealing with victims of the undead.

First of all, however, they had to take in the brutality of what had happened here. The watchers had been taken apart savagely. Their limbs had been ripped off and thrown all over the lighthouse’s interior. The tears in their flesh were clear for all to see, exposed bones were within sight all around.

It almost seemed like they had encountered a rabid bear, but no, there had been no claws or fangs involved in this act of abhorrent rampage, only humanoid hands and feet… All of the watchers were in a similar state to one another, but the way they had died differed nonetheless.

One had drowned in his own blood after having his throat punctured, another’s skull had been stomped down upon, leaving only a mush, and another had been… Dispersed all over the room.

Regardless, their blood had been used to smear the window and glass of the lighthouse. It seemed very intentional. The undead had wanted to create a scene like this. The undead had wanted for the brutal acts to be discovered–It made no doubt, especially when Minli’s gaze landed on the lever that was to be used to sound the alarm… A torn-off hand was still gripping the lever tightly. She did not believe that the limb had been separated from its owner whilst the man was grabbing the lever, the hand had been deliberately placed here to create a sort of… ‘Scenario’.

This undead–For some reason–Seemed to desire to have their work admired. Many would simply assume that this was a result of pure sadism and not look further, but the undeads they were dealing with weren’t the kind like Griar had encountered in that other realm–They were members of the Spearhead caste… These were regular members of the Vanguard, undeads who had been rigorously trained to be as efficient as possible.

It is pretty much impossible for one of them to engage in something like this without a good reason. Once again, many would simply assume that it was an attempt at sowing fear and anxiety. An attempt to make the livings afraid of their own shadow… In short, a mind game. An intimidation tactic.

However, as the Death Hunters looked around the scene of carnage, they felt like something was amiss. It felt… Too perfect. Too polished. It felt like the undead responsible was a perfectionist. The way every corpse was posed. The intentional smearing of the glass. Leaving the lighthouse lit up. Placing the hand upon the alarm lever… It could be a mere attempt at intimidation, but the undead had simply gone way too far with the details for that to be the case.

It had surely taken a while moving everything into place… And they were fairly certain that even the pools of blood on the ground had been moved and arranged in a specific manner…

This was simply too much.

“I am afraid there isn’t much that I can do when it comes to the basic level of carrying out autopsies. These men weren’t killed via the use of anything special. The undead clearly just used their bare hands to do most of the job… All I can tell you is that they are wearing boots with this pattern on the soles–I was able to reconstruct part of it thanks to the man whose skull was stomped into the floor”

The pattern was nothing special.

“What I can tell you by skimming through remnants of energy particles is that the undead emitted an absurd amount of energy while inside this room. I have no idea what they were doing exactly, but whatever it was, they were pouring a lot of force into it. Which is pretty odd, don’t you think? No one in this room should have been able to fight back…”

“…It is impossible to make a proper guess as to what the corpse was up to, though”

The Death Hunter similarly came up empty-handed, but thankfully, Rummy had a strange contraption in her possession–An invention of hers which had been gathering dust for a long while now, but whose function was perfectly suited for the task at hand.

“It is unfortunate that it has to follow such a tragedy, but at least this item should be able to be useful in taking care of this undead”

The gadget of some kind was a handheld device which projected a cone of blue light forward, and with it, Rummy revealed shapes–These were the silhouettes of the watchers and undead… They were easily distinguished because the watchers appeared as bright, and the undead as a bundle of vile darkness.

She was revealing their past movements through an intricate reading of the energy remnants each of those people had left behind, and from the looks of it, the undead had not moved around much during their time within the lighthouse. They had stood still a lot, only making successive motions when it came to killing the watchers, and eventually left with some of the most bizarre body motions the livings had ever seen.

As for the positioning of the bodies and the rest… The corpse had apparently used a whole bunch of tendrils, but their position was hard to track–Those things were definitely summoned, but telling precisely how many, or how long they remained active, was impossible with the device Rummy had.

In any case, it did tell them that the undead had seemingly phased through the floor to get away from the crime scene. It was an ability that needed to be kept in mind.

“So…Any ideas what we are dealing with, here?”

“I am afraid that with all of the castes and weird bunch that arose with the Undead Empire, it isn’t as easy as it used to be to identify what sort of undead is responsible for any given event…”

“Mmh… I suppose we’ll have to fall on detection spells and divination, won’t we?”

“The others are already preparing arrays to support and empower such spells, so yes. Otherwise, we have no idea where the undead went, but at least, it seems like the corpse did, in fact, somehow manage to get on the inside of the barrier…”

The device only showed that the undead had seemingly just popped into existence without a proper explanation. By all means, it looked as though they had just teleported inside, but even this shouldn’t be possible with how the barrier was created.

…Once the investigation had concluded with meagre findings, the bodies were ‘reassembled’ to the best possible capacities by Minli, so that the families of the victims could actually see them and confirm the death of their loved one before a burial was organised.

It had been a long time since members of their community had met death at the hands of an undead. This was an important moment as the weight of the situation fully settled in now that casualties were to be deplored.

Mourning could not fully happen until after the intruding undead was dealt with, however. Until then, the shadow of Death would continue to hang above the heads of many, and this could not be allowed, alas, even with the usage of specialised spells empowered by arrays, the corpse’s location was left undiscovered, all that came up were visions of absolute darkness, implying that the undead was hiding somewhere without any light, but this could mean many things–Such as that the undead had buried themselves…

If this were the case, then finding them would be like searching for a needle in a haystack.

The livings could only stay on their guard upon nightfall–For now, the undeads had not yet made any move to replant fungal trees, so the people of the Peaceful Realm focused on dealing with the threat hiding within their walls.

…Upon nightfall, the wicked trespasser crawled out once more. Walking around without any apparent aim. The undead only stopped once he spotted a habitation with light peering out from its interior.

There. A potential prey had been spotted…

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