Special Story Items

Perhaps, as a certain section chief had said, the situation in this great city had grown dire.

It had one face by day and another by night.

Once natural light faded, the dark places beyond the reach of streetlamps could become haunts for things that no longer obeyed common sense.

Under the circumstances, the police had even canceled nighttime patrols. There was no helping it: sending just two or three officers out at night carried far too much risk.

And this was a major city. There was no telling how bad things had become in smaller, more sparsely populated places.

Whether they were police officers, gangsters, or anyone else, they were hardly different from ordinary citizens in the face of the rising danger.

So when Jin Takayama caught a faint scent of blood on the wind, he interrupted the other two and followed it. Before long, the three of them came upon this scene.

Beside a road where the streetlights had also been damaged, the smell of blood rising from the tangled grass was impossible to miss.

Frowning, Shinji Kaminaga took a portable flashlight from his briefcase and cautiously aimed it at a dim shape half-hidden in the grass.

The sight nearly made Wu Shaoyou jump out of his skin. The other two, however, seemed to have little reaction.

To be precise, most of a person was still lying in the grass.

"Most of a person" in the most literal sense.

The fresh corpse had been gutted and mutilated. It looked like a bag of little cookies whose plastic packaging had been torn open by force, spilling everything inside across the ground.

Sorry, but with a college student's life experience, that was the best comparison he could make.

It barely looked human anymore.

The scene looked as though a large