Lowbrow Fear (5)
The person lying in the dust with his head covered and face hidden was a real corpse.
As someone with blood on his hands, even after being reduced to an ordinary person, Fu Qian could still easily tell.
He had died recently; his body was still soft.
Although his face was hidden by his prone position, his coat had been arranged so that his nose and mouth weren't covered too tightly. The angle even seemed to leave room for him to breathe.
It looked so much like the first possibility: it was all just a prank aimed at a chuunibyou.
Except the person wasn't alive.
So the question was, how had he died?
Batters had told a story about it. The party's atmosphere had been so good that he'd drunk too much, gotten into a fight with someone, and the other person had been unlucky enough to hit his head and die on the spot.
It was a reasonably plausible sequence of events. The bloodstains beneath the coat and the corpse also helped bring the story to life—until they were proven fake.
After that, they were obviously unnecessary.
So if Batters had been telling the truth, and this really hadn't been a prank, but rather a botched attempt to cover up an accidental death, why go to such excessive lengths?
The person was dead anyway. Maybe he'd just decided to get some use out of him, tricking himself with fake bloodstained clothes to fit the party's theme?
That was beyond what you could call a prankster. It was practically a joke from hell.
As his thoughts raced, there was still no sound from upstairs. Fu Qian silently switched the light to his other hand, then lifted the coat covering the corpse's head.
"Blood" was everywhere, but there