On the mercenary team's side, one person sniffed around like a hound.
An unusually keen sense of smell?
Two others looked like private detectives, a man and a woman.
The male detective muttered to himself as though talking to someone no one else could see.
He was a medium, trying to communicate with the Forest Spirit.
Geralt activated Spirit Sight and looked around. Much of what he saw had appeared in the information Caitlin had sent him, but seeing it in person was nothing like looking at pictures.
An ordinary camera could not capture the traces left by Weird Monsters.
Through Spirit Sight, faint wisps of black mist drifted in the air.
There were enormous footprints all over the ground.
Their owner would need at least size fifty shoes, and had only three toes. Judging by the ground's hardness and the depth of the prints, the creature weighed around 150 kilograms.
Bigfoot?
Why were the Thorn Snake people so calm about such strange footprints? Did they think the kidnappers had made them to throw everyone off?
On second thought, that seemed quite possible.
Geralt spent nearly an hour walking through the small forest, marking every footprint he found on paper until he had a map of their distribution.
Rubbing his chin, Geralt murmured:
"According to this map, more than one monster kidnapped the students. After catching them, the monsters split up and left in different directions to confuse anyone following them."
"That means the monsters may be intelligent, or someone may be controlling them."
"What's their motive? Is someone targeting the Gates Group? Or did the monsters just want a few high schoolers for a fresh, hot meal?"
The monsters' movements seemed too deliberate.
Geralt leaned toward the first possibility.
If so, Daniel was probably still alive. The others might