Memorial Service

On November 15, Eskil City lay blanketed in silver. This was the third day since order had been restored to the city. The streets no longer showed the scenes of blood and mangled flesh that had been everywhere two days earlier, yet the entire city still felt somewhat grim and desolate. Especially on Eskil City's six main thoroughfares, perhaps because of the bitter cold, there were still very few pedestrians.

The snow on the main roads had been cleared away by the sanitation workers who had returned to their posts, but after the snow was shoveled aside, the granite paving stones that had once been bluish-gray had turned dark brown, as if they had been replaced altogether. Looking at those discolored paving stones, both the sanitation workers cleaning the city and the people once again walking along those six main roads could not help but feel a chill rise in their hearts, along with awe toward Peter Humphreys, the city's new ruler.

The paving stones on those six roads had been stained red by the blood of demonized puppets. The able-bodied young men of Eskil City who had helped clear the six avenues over the previous two days had coined a term for them—the Flesh and Blood Avenue.

It was a scene enough to make people wake screaming from nightmares. Or rather, every nightmare people could imagine seemed almost tender before those six Flesh and Blood Avenues.

"Eskil City's six main thoroughfares were like six enormous sausages, stuffed full of the corpses and flesh of demonized puppets ground into fragments. Shattered bodies and severed heads were everywhere, piled into mountains. In the middle of those six avenues, plastered across the ground, lay a thick layer of sludge where bone and flesh could no longer be told apart—the most nauseating and